Biblical Find At The British Museum

Anthony Martin — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 23:06:00 -0700

You never know what might turn up when you’re digging around the British Museum. July 2007, Professor Michael Jursa found a cuneiform receipt from a person named in Jeremiah 39, as the Telegraph reports:

Searching for Babylonian financial accounts among the cuneiform tablets, Prof Jursa suddenly came across a name he half remembered – Nabu-sharrussu-ukin, described there in a hand 2,500 years old, as “the chief eunuch” of Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon.

Prof Jursa, an Assyriologist, checked the Old Testament and there in chapter 39 of the Book of Jeremiah, he found, spelled differently, the same name – Nebo-Sarsekim.

Nebo-Sarsekim, according to Jeremiah, was Nebuchadnezzar II’s “chief officer” and was with him at the siege of Jerusalem in 587 BC, when the Babylonians overran the city.

The small tablet, the size of “a packet of 10 cigarettes” according to Irving Finkel, a British Museum expert, is a bill of receipt acknowledging Nabu-sharrussu-ukin’s payment of 0.75 kg of gold to a temple in Babylon.

The tablet is dated to the 10th year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, 595BC, 12 years before the siege of Jerusalem.

Vagabond Loafers: Biblical Find At The British Museum

Biblical Find At The British Museum