Archaeologists recently discovered the first artifact constituting tangible evidence of the existence of the ancient city of Bethlehem, which is mentioned in the Torah, according to an Israel Antiquities Authority statement released Wednesday.

The artifact, a bulla, or piece of clay for sealing a document or object, may prove the existence of Bethlehem dating back to the First Temple Period.

The dramatic discovery was made while sifting soil from archaeological excavations the Israel Antiquities Authority is conducting in the City of David, in the “Walls around Jerusalem National Park.”

The bulla, measuring 1.5 cm, was discovered bearing the name of the city, written in ancient Hebrew script. The dig is underwritten by the Ir David Foundation.

A bulla would be impressed with the seal of the person who sent the document or object, and its integrity was evidence that no one had viewed or opened the document who unless authorized.

Three lines of ancient Hebrew script appear on the bulla, including the words: Bishv’at, Bet Lechem and [Lemel]ekh.

Eli Shukron, director of the excavation on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, stated that the discovery appears to show that “in the seventh year of the reign of a king (it is unclear if the king referred to here is Hezekiah, Manasseh or Josiah), a shipment was dispatched from Bethlehem to the king in Jerusalem.”

Shukron dated the bulla to the seventh or eighth centuries BCE during a period in which bullae were used for taxation of shipments in the Kingdom of Judah.

He emphasized the bulla’s significance as, “this is the first time the name Bethlehem appears outside the Bible, in an inscription from the First Temple period, which proves that Bethlehem was indeed a city in the Kingdom of Judah, and possibly also in earlier periods.”

In the Torah, Bethlehem is first mentioned in the verse “in Ephrath, which is Bethlehem”, it was on the way to Bethlehem that Rachel died and it is the site where she was buried (Genesis 35:19; 48:7). The descendants of Judah settled there, among them the family of Boaz (Book of Ruth).

Bethlehem became a more central biblical city with the anointing of David, son of Jesse, as king (1 Samuel 16).

For the first time, the Bible and New Testament have been translated to an Inuit language. A group of Inuit Christians in the Canadian territory Nunavut have completed the 34-year translation project this week, translating the holy religious texts into the local Inuktitut.

The task wasn’t easy necessitating creative linguistic gymnastics to bridge the 2,000-year temporal divide in addition to the vast distance separating the Arctic peoples and the Middle Easterners, who wrote the holy books.

One of the main difficulties the translators faced was the translation of objects that aren’t found in the Arctic such as certain trees that don’t grow in the treeless Arctic.

Another example is the translation of shepherd, which appears in the Bible often. In Inuktitut a shepherd tends to children of dogs, not goats and sheep, which aren’t found in Nunavut. Plant and animal names were the biggest difficulty and in many cases general terms such as ‘tree’ were used. In other cases English lone words were used such as in the case of ‘camel.’

“It’s just like you have one word for snow but we have many words for snow,” explained a clergyman who was a member of the translating team.

A surprising difficulty the translators faced was the complete absence of a term for ‘peace’ in Inuktitut. In order to circumvent this language gap, the translators had to use complete sentences to the get equivalent ideas across.

The translation is not simply an intellectual exercise for an elite few. Some 90 percent of the citizens of Nunavut are Christians and the territory boasts the highest church per capita rate in Canada.

The translation project was funded by the Canadian Bible Society and the Anglican Church costing $ 1.7 million. The translation will be launched in a ceremony at the igloo-shaped St. Jude’s Anglican Cathedral in Iqaluit, Nunavut’s capital on June 3.