In Isaiah 22 the prophet rails in God’s name against the excesses of the officials in King Hezekiah’s palace. Among those he singles out is Shebna, the steward who is “in charge of the house [palace]” (Isaiah 22:15):

In 1870 the famous French diplomat, scholar and archaeologist Charles Clermont-Ganneau excavated a partially destroyed tomb high up on the cliff overlooking the Kidron Valley and the City of David in Jerusalem. Over the entrance to the rock-cut burial chamber was an inscription that, unfortunately, he was unable to decipher.¹

He cut the inscription out of the rock and sent it to the British Museum, where it is still on display.

In 1953 the great Israeli epigraphist Nahman Avigad managed to decipher the indistinct letters: “This is [the sepulcher of ...] -yahu who is over the house. There is no silver and gold here but [his bones] and the bones of his slave-wife with him. Cursed be the man who will open this.”²

Was this the tomb of Shebna the high court official mentioned in Isaiah who is, literally, “over the house” or in charge of the palace (often identified as the treasurer) and who was castigated by the prophet for building himself such an elaborate tomb on the cliff?

To answer the question, you must know that the name Shebna was quite common. It had several different forms—by the addition of the theophoric -yahu (Shebnayahu; 1 Chronicles 15:24) or -ya (Shebnaya; Nehemiah 9:4), both of which refer to Yahweh, the Israelite God—in addition to Shebna (Isaiah 22:15). They are all the same name. And besides the Shebna, Shebnayahu and Shebnaya mentioned in the Bible, we know of several others whose names have appeared on seals and bullae (clay seal impressions), ostraca and even on handles of storage jars. The name means “Pray, God (Yahweh) return.”

Avigad’s brilliant 1953 article argued (based on a suggestion of Yigael Yadin) that this tomb was the tomb of Shebna/Shebnayahu mentioned in Isaiah, even though the first part of the name is missing and only -yahu is preserved. He was able to date the inscription to the time of King Hezekiah (716–686 B.C.E.) by comparing the letters to those in the Siloam Inscription discovered in Hezekiah’s Tunnel. Almost all scholars have accepted Avigad’s argument.

In 1966–1968 Israeli archaeologist Yohanan Aharoni, then of the Hebrew University (and later of Tel Aviv University), renewed excavations at the famous site of Lachish.³ Located in the Judean foothills (the Shephelah) about 25 miles north of Beer-Sheba, Lachish was the most important city in Judah after Jerusalem during Hezekiah’s reign. It was destroyed in 701 B.C.E. by the Assyrian monarch Sennacherib on his way to laying siege to Jerusalem. Sennacherib was so proud of his victory at Lachish that he decorated the throne room of his palace in Nineveh with huge reliefs depicting his victory and Judahites being led away to exile.

Because it was so important, the 30-acre tell of Lachish has been frequently excavated, first in 1932–1938 by the British archaeologist J.L. Starkey with the assistance of G. Lancester Harding and Olga Tufnell.⁴ The excavations came to a sudden end in 1938 when Arab marauders murdered Starkey on his way to the dedication of the Palestine Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem, now the Rockefeller Museum. Then came Aharoni’s excavation mentioned above. After more than a decade, the trowel was taken up again by David Ussishkin of Tel Aviv University, who supervised a major excavation of the site between 1973 and 1994, solving some of the major questions about the site.⁵

The find of special interest here was made by Aharoni’s expedition. A young area supervisor named Volkmar Fritz, who later became a prominent archaeologist and Biblical scholar (he has written for this magazine and passed away in 2007 at the age of 69), was excavating in a Lachish storeroom when he struck gold, so to speak. On the floor of the storeroom, Fritz found six inscribed shekel weights (weighing four and eight shekels), an ostracon (a kind of ancient notepaper with writing on a piece of broken pottery) and a rich hoard of pottery. Aharoni speculated that the pottery had been stored on shelves that collapsed in antiquity. After a juglet had been photographed in situ, Fritz lifted it for registration and packing. When he emptied it of the dirt inside, he felt some small clay lumps. When the 17 lumps were cleaned and examined, they turned out to be bullae that had been used to seal documents. For some reason they had been collected and placed in the small cylindrical juglet. On the back of the bullae were impressions of the papyrus documents they had once sealed—even impressions of the string that tied the documents, over which the seal was impressed into a clay lump. On the front of some of the bullae were Hebrew inscriptions.⁶