You gotta love Israel. I sure do. And what’s the latest from the Holy Land?
It could be the biggest bombshell for biblical archaeologists since the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered in 1949 in Qumran. I’m not exaggerating.
It’s the earliest original Hebrew writing found by Israelis outside of the Bible – a 3,200-year-old amulet, a “curse tablet,” on folded-lead carrying the name of “Yahweh,” or the divine name of God. It seems unbelievable – too good to be true. This thing is original – not a copy.
It was found originally – like a needle in a haystack – in 2019 on Mount Ebal near the biblical Shechem in a pile of discarded dirt and debris from previous digs. Mount Ebal is known from Deuteronomy 11:29 as a place of curses, and the debris pile was from an area believed by some archaeologists to be an altar. Joshua built an altar as commanded in Deuteronomy 27. It is described in Joshua 8:31 as “an altar of whole stones, over which no man hath lift up any iron.”
In Deuteronomy (11:26, 29), Moses tells the nation that when they finally enter the land of Israel, they should recite blessings at the flowering Mount Gerizim and curses at the opposite mountain, the barren Mount Ebal. The priests and the Levites were told to stand in the valley between the mountains, with half of the tribes on one of the mountains and the second half on the other and to say “amen” after each statement.
More than a year after the team hailed discovery of oldest Hebrew writing in Israel, details of the find hit a peer-reviewed journal, the journal Heritage Science.
As reported in the Times of Israel, the archaeologists, led by Dr. Scott Stripling of the Bible Seminary in Texas, believe the 2 x 2 centimeter (.8 x .8 inch) tablet proves that Israelites were literate when they entered the Holy Land and therefore could have written the Bible as some of the events took place.
But the find has not been without controversy.
“I had released photos of the outside of the tablet not knowing there was writing on the inside as well,” said Stripling, who showed them to friends and published photos on his social media accounts. “It was my fault. Once those photos were out, people started to decipher letters on the outside. So because of that, we had the press conference because we had to stake out that this is our inscription, academically.”
He pledged not to make the same mistake.
“I would definitely wait until we have the academic publication out,” he said. “This was an exception because I released those photos on the outside not knowing there was writing on the inside.”
As to the lead, it was too brittle to unfold, so experts used tomographical scanning to photograph the inside of the tablet by using X-ray waves to create a series of images that show different layers of the object. The technique is also used in medicine to take images of the body, in a process called computational tomography, or a CT scan.
“This is a text you find only every 1,000 years,” Haifa University professor Gershon Galil said. Galil helped decipher the hidden internal text of the folded lead tablet based on scans carried out in Prague at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
Stripling and Galil believe the tablet is inscribed with the phrase: “Cursed, cursed, cursed – cursed by the God YHW./ You will die cursed./ Cursed you will surely die./ Cursed by YHW – cursed, cursed, cursed.”
The epigraphical experts who worked on the tablet – Galil and Pieter Gert van der Veen, an associate professor of Levantine Archaeology at the Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz, Germany – date the tablet to the Late Bronze Age (circa 1200 B.C.) based on the style of the lettering. They identified 40 different letters on the tablet.
If correct, this would make the tablet the first use of the name of God in the land of Israel and would prove that Israelites were literate hundreds of years earlier than previously believed.
“It’s potentially a huge breakthrough for us on several levels, historically, archaeologically, epigraphically and theologically,” Stripling said. “Do we have evidence of a much earlier presence of Israel than we’ve had proof of in the past? Many of us believe that Israel was already there at the end of the Late Bronze Age, but we haven’t had absolute proof. So if we’re correct with the reading, then the ramifications are really large.”
If the tablet’s inscription is verified, it would make the text centuries older than the previous record-holder for the oldest Hebrew text in Israel and 500 years older than the previously attested use of the tetragrammaton YHWH, according to Galil.
Said Galil in the announcement of the tablet’s discovery last year: “We know that from the moment they came to Israel, the Israelites knew how to write, including the name of God, clearly. It’s not too surprising; people already knew how to write in other places.”
The majority Hebrew-language text, Galil posited, was written by Israelites as an internal legal document, a form of social contract, warning the person under contract what would happen if he did not fulfill his obligations.
“The person who wrote this text had the ability to write every text in the Bible,” Galil stated.
Like Moses or Joshua – the leader of the Exodus from Egypt and his second in command.
How about that? Is the Restitution of all things near? Biblical archeology is making believers out of skeptics in Israel. Or more likely, God is.
“The Gospel in Every Book of the Old Testament” by Joseph Farah is available in both hardcover and e-book versions.
ALSO: Get Joseph Farah’s book “The Restitution of All Things: Israel, Christians, and the End of the Age,” and learn about the Hebrew roots of the Christian faith and your future in God’s Kingdom. Also available as an e-book.
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