“Does it have political significance?” I was asked a month ago by the editors of The New York Sun when they ran an English scoop, picked up from an Israeli newspaper, about the discovery in archeological excavations in Jerusalem of a bulla or clay seal. The ancient equivalent of a contemporary signature, it bore the name of a royal official, one Yehokal ben Shelemyahu, mentioned in the biblical book of Jeremiah.

“Not as much as disengagement does,” I answered, declining their suggestion that I write a column on the subject on the eve of the withdrawal from Gaza. Now, however, with the withdrawal completed, I’ll take them up on it.

Why indeed should an ancient clay seal found in Jerusalem have contemporary political significance? Actually, it shouldn’t. The fact that it nevertheless can be construed as having it is attributable to an unfortunate alliance between the questionable reasoning of some good biblical archeologists; the unquestionable prejudice of some bad biblical historians; and the out-and-out mendacity of Palestinian propaganda.

The archeologists came first. Perhaps they were bound to, because archeology, like many other sciences and academic disciplines, tends to develop by thesis and antithesis – that is, by the formation of schools of conventional wisdom, their eventual overthrow, and the ultimate overthrowing of their overthrowers, who by now have become the latest school of conventional wisdom themselves.

For most of the 20th century, the conventional archeological wisdom about the Bible was that, as opposed to its clearly mythical parts – its stories of the Creation, of the early generations of humanity, and of the Patriarchs – its historical sections, starting with the exodus from Egypt and the Israelite conquest of Canaan, were essentially accurate. Although they might be exaggerated or dramatized for religious or literary purposes, they were in the main, it was held, borne out by the archeological record.

Beginning with the 1970s, the pendulum began to swing the other way. A new school of Israeli archeologists, led by the influential Tel Aviv professor Israel Finkelstein, asserted that the archeological record had been read wrong. Not only was there no evidence, it now was argued, for the exodus from Egypt and the conquest of Canaan, there was none for later periods of biblical “history,” either. Even the figures of David and Solomon, together with the story of their short-lived but powerful 10th-century B.C.E. “united monarchy” with its capital in Jerusalem, were unsubstantiated. Not a single archeological excavation had turned up the monumental 10th-century buildings and fortifications that such a capital would have had to have.

Professor Finkelstein and other Israeli archeologists who supported him never took this to mean that there was not an Israelite people in ancient Palestine or Jerusalem. Their argument was simply that this people did not become politically consolidated until well after the Bible says it did, with the rise in the ninth-to-seventh centuries of the two separate mini-states of Israel and Judah – for which, indeed, the archeological evidence is abundant.

Yet it was not long before certain “revisionist” historians, academic figures like Thomas Thompson, Philip Davies, and Keith Whitelam, were seizing upon the archeologists’ purported findings to propose that the entire biblical account of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah was a historically late fabrication – or, as Thompson put it, that “no ethnically coherent ‘Israelite’ nation ever existed at all” until the fifth or fourth century B.C.E. The real occupants of “biblical” Palestine were not Israelites but a people referable to as “Palestinians” – who, in Whitelam’s words, had been “dispossessed” by the Jews and their Bible, not only of their present-day land, but of their entire past.

From here it was a short step to the widely circulated Palestinian propaganda claim that the so-called Jewish “return” to Palestine and Jerusalem known as Zionism was based on a huge hoax. Jews could not “return” to a place they had never been in, Palestinians have been telling the world, culminating in the notorious declaration several years ago by Yasser Arafat that the Temple on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, the Moslem Haram esh-Sharif, was a historical fiction.

Archeologically and historically speaking, the discovery of the Yehokal bulla is important for two reasons. The first is that, like many other archeological findings, it confirms what Israeli archeologists like Israel Finkelstein have never denied – namely, that once we get to the time of Jeremiah, who lived in the late First Temple period, in the late seventh and early sixth century B.C.E., the biblical account, far from being a fabrication, is fairly trustworthy.

The second reason is that the bulla was found in an excavation being conducted in the Ophel, or “David’s city,” as it is sometimes called, an area directly south of the Old City of Jerusalem’s southeastern wall in which many Israeli archeologists who disagree with the Finkelstein thesis have long suspected that remnants of a Davidic capital are to be looked for. The discovery of a royal bulla in the Ophel makes it likely that we are indeed talking about a royal Judaic compound whose history may yet prove to extend much further back in time – perhaps to the age in which David is said by the Bible to have lived.

Would such proof be historically significant? By all means. Is it “politically significant”? Not really – not, that is, unless one thinks that the ravings of an Arafat, or even the pseudo-histories of a Thompson or a Whitelam, are serious factors in the Palestinian-Israeli political equation. But they are not. Whether the kingdom of David did or did not exist (and there are signs that it did and that once again conventional archeological wisdom is about to change),no responsible biblical historian or archeologist would deny that the Jewish people’s link to Palestine is old and continuous. The Yehokal bulla wasn’t needed to prove that.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.