Immer Priestly-Family Bulla from the Temple Mount
A late Iron Age Hebrew clay sealing recovered from sifted Temple Mount soil preserves the family name Immer and a woven-textile impression, while its displaced context limits claims about its original office.
- Artifact date
- Iron Age IIC, late First Temple period
- Discovered
- 2005
- Findspot
- Sifted soil removed from the southeastern Temple Mount, Jerusalem
What archaeologists can actually examine
Project item 3739 is a small clay sealing inscribed in ancient Hebrew with the surviving formula '...lyhw son of ʾmr'—a damaged personal name followed by Immer. Its reverse bears a fabric impression. Zachi Dvira and Gabriel Barkay date it to Iron Age IIC and argue, from its Temple Mount origin, the biblical priestly family name, and comparative treasury sealings attached to textile containers, that it probably served a temple treasury administration. The inscription and textile imprint are observable data; priestly identity, relationship to Pashhur, and precise treasury function are reasoned proposals rather than statements written on the bulla.
A damaged but legible patronymic
The sealing preserves the end of a personal name followed by 'son of Immer' in ancient Hebrew script.
Textile on the reverse
A woven impression indicates attachment to cloth, a bag, or a textile-covered closure rather than proving a document seal.
Recovered by wet sifting
The 2005 find came from soil removed from the Temple Mount in 1999, preserving broad provenance but destroying its precise locus.
Treasury use is cumulative inference
Family name, origin, date, and comparative fabric-backed sealings make the proposal plausible without making it certain.
No secure Pashhur identification
Immer names a family, while the bulla's personal name is incomplete and cannot be equated with Jeremiah's temple official.
Follow the evidence from discovery to debate
Move through the find in a deliberate order: establish its provenance, examine the surviving object, place it in time, and then weigh the scholarly interpretation.
How the find came to light
In November 1999 roughly four hundred truckloads of earth were removed without archaeological supervision from near the southeastern corner of the Temple Mount and dumped in the Kidron Valley. The Temple Mount Sifting Project began recovering small finds from that displaced soil in 2004. Uri Seri-Levi found this bulla by wet sifting on September 27, 2005. The method captured objects missed by ordinary dry screening, but it could not restore the destroyed stratigraphy. The publishers can trace the soil to the Temple Mount in a general sense; they cannot return the sealing to a room, floor, container, or archive. That difference governs every responsible historical conclusion.
What you are looking at
The bulla's face was impressed with a seal carrying two lines of Hebrew text. Damage removes the beginning of the personal name, leaving a form ending -lyahu, followed by 'son of Immer.' The reverse preserves the texture of woven cloth rather than papyrus fibers or a simple cord channel. Such fabric-impressed reverse sealings could close sacks or textile-covered vessel mouths and also function in accounting systems when goods entered or left controlled storage. The artifact belongs to a larger Temple Mount sifted assemblage that included thirty-one Iron Age II clay sealings by the publishers' 2021 count, six stone or bone seals, and an unusually high proportion of textile-backed examples.
Where it belongs in history
Letter forms and comparison with securely dated Judean sealings place the object in Iron Age IIC, toward the end of the First Temple period. That context is compatible with the late monarchic administration described in Jeremiah, but the mixed dumped soil cannot provide a sealed destruction horizon. Dvira and Barkay compare textile-backed sealings from treasuries across the ancient Near East and note that twenty-two percent of the relevant Temple Mount examples and forty percent near the Ophel 'Royal Building' carried fabric impressions, versus roughly seven percent elsewhere in Jerusalem. These patterns strengthen a storage or treasury interpretation, yet statistical association does not identify the bulla's exact ancient room or contents.
Consensus, questions, and debate
The main scholarly argument proceeds cumulatively: Hebrew palaeography supplies the date; the Temple Mount soil supplies a broad origin; 'Immer' supplies a priestly-family parallel; and the textile reverse fits treasury sealing practices. The authors even suggest that the seal owner may have been a sibling of Pashhur, but this is explicitly inferential. The strongest objection is contextual: soil removal destroyed the locus and mixed periods, so the original architectural association is unrecoverable. The publishers answer that imported soil is unlikely to explain the assemblage and that sealings are often found secondarily even in controlled excavations. Readers should retain both facts—the general provenance is meaningful, and the precise provenance is lost.
The biblical record beside the artifact
First Chronicles 24:14 lists Immer as the head of the sixteenth priestly division, and Jeremiah 20:1-2 names Pashhur son of Immer as a priest and official in the house of the Lord who struck Jeremiah and put him in stocks. Jeremiah 29:24-32 names another Shemaiah connected with Nehelam, not this sealing, so names must not be conflated. The bulla's patronymic provides a genuine match with a family name associated in Scripture with temple service. Because the first name is incomplete and Immer was a lineage rather than a unique individual, it cannot be assigned to Pashhur or used to prove a specific biblical episode.
Jeremiah 20:1–2
1Now Pashur the son of Immer the priest, who [was] also chief governor in the house of the LORD, heard that Jeremiah prophesied these things.
2Then Pashur smote Jeremiah the prophet, and put him in the stocks that [were] in the high gate of Benjamin, which [was] by the house of the LORD.
A responsible historical conclusion
Direct epigraphic evidence from the Temple Mount's First Temple period is exceptionally scarce because systematic excavation on the platform has not occurred. This sealing therefore offers a rare convergence of writing, administration, and a biblical family name at Jerusalem's cultic center. Its reverse also shifts attention from famous names to institutional practice: cloth-covered stores could be sealed, monitored, received, and distributed through small clay controls. The artifact makes the economic work behind a sanctuary tangible without pretending that one bulla maps the whole temple bureaucracy. Its historical value is greatest when the lost locus is stated plainly and the treasury conclusion remains probable rather than certain.
Authoritative sources
Institutional catalogs, excavation reports, and academic publications let you examine the evidence beyond this summary.
Clay Sealings from the Temple Mount and Their Use in the Temple and Royal Treasuries
Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology, Hebrew University of JerusalemPrimary full publication of the inscription, textile impression, recovery history, comparative dataset, treasury argument, and stated contextual limits.
Clay Sealings from the Temple Mount and Their Use in the Temple and Royal Treasuries
Bar-Ilan University Research PortalConfirms authorship, peer-review status, journal details, DOI, and the calibrated 'high probability' wording of the treasury conclusion.
Jerusalem, the Temple Mount Sifting Project
Israel Antiquities Authority, Hadashot ArkheologiyotIndependently documents the unsupervised soil removal, dumped-soil recovery, project method, and limitations of the sifting context.