Summary: An amulet made of lead has been discovered recently at the site known as Joshua’s Altar on Mount Ebal in Israel. Amazingly, ancient Hebrew writing appears to have been inscribed on it.
At that time Joshua built an altar to the LORD, the God of Israel, on Mount Ebal, – Joshua 8:30 (ESV)
An Amulet Related to Israel’s Covenant Renewal at Shechem?
It is one of the most striking scenes in the history of Israel. After initial victories in the conquest of Canaan, Joshua gathers all the people of Israel to the site of Shechem, the place where God had first repeated his promises to Abram when he was newly-arrived in the land. The covenant renewal ceremony that Joshua conducts had been commanded by Moses in Deuteronomy 27 and 28. Six of Israel’s tribes stand on the slopes of Mount Gerizim while six tribes stand on the slopes of Mount Ebal that rose above the valley where Shechem rests. The Levites declare with a loud voice each of the blessings Moses had spelled out that would come as a result of following the covenant, and the curses that would come for not doing so. After each, the people all respond with, “Amen.”
The mountain of curse in that ceremony was Mount Ebal, where the biblical text says Joshua built an altar. Not only might that altar have been found, but now reports have come out that a tiny amulet has been uncovered at the site which matches a category of finds known to archeology as “curse tablets.” Most exciting is the breaking news that it appears Hebrew writing, in one of its most ancient styles, is inscribed on the tablet.
The Discovery of Joshua’s altar on Mount Ebal
In the 1980s, Israeli archaeologist Adam Zertal of Haifa University discovered the controversial site that became popularly known as “Joshua’s Altar.” What was initially found was a large pile of stones with a series of stone walls jutting out from the edges of the pile. Thousands of potsherds at the site dated it to the Iron I period (around 1200 BC), which would be in line with the Israelite Conquest when using the predominant date for the Exodus at the time of Pharaoh Ramesses II.
After more than a year of work to remove the stone pile covering the site, a large rectangular structure appeared that had a ramp leading up to a sacrificial altar, where many remains of burnt bones were found. The entire structure was about 30 feet wide, with walls five feet thick. After a member of his team showed him a drawing of the bronze altar from the Temple in Jerusalem recorded in the Jewish Mishnah (written around AD 200), Zertal was stunned by the similarity and concluded that this must have been Joshua’s altar. His discovery would change him and cause friction with his colleagues, who were skeptical about the validity of biblical history for this early time period.
“Zertal was a secularist, he was agnostic, but what he found there convinced him that the Bible was a reliable historical document,” Dr. Scott Stripling, of Associates for Biblical Research (ABR) told me in an online conversation about the new discovery. Stripling has directed excavations at Shiloh in recent years and it was his team that discovered the amulet from the altar site at Ebal.
“And this was quite a crisis in academia because now Adam had gone off the reservation and was talking like these crazy people,” continued Stripling.
While it was the large rectangular altar that garnered most of the attention, it was a less talked about structure at the site that interested Stripling most. Beneath the exact center of the rectangular altar were the remains of an older circular stone altar that was about six feet in diameter. Zertal dated it to one generation previous to the rectangular altar. However, Stripling, who favors the Exodus occurring at a standard 1446 BC date, believes the more recent altar belongs to the middle of the Judges Period and the circular altar should be dated much earlier.
“I think the round altar is actually Joshua’s altar,” said Stripling. “The rectangular one, which everybody in love with, is a memorial altar that is protecting the real valuable one that is beneath it. So, 97% of the pottery is Iron Age 1 or the period of the Judges. And then about 3% of his Pottery was Late Bronze Age. Which makes sense because the Bible doesn’t suggest that there was ongoing ceremony on Mount Ebal, just that the altar was built for that ceremony. I have determined that the earlier pottery is from what we would call Late Bronze 1B – Late Bronze 2A horizon, so around 1,400 BC, which of course fits very nicely with the biblical date.”
The Renewed Search for Artifacts
The site had not been studied since the 1980s and further excavation became politically difficult after the Oslo Accords drew a boundary line just outside the altar site putting it into Area B, which is Palestinian controlled territory.
Dr. Stripling with his experience at the Conquest and Judges era sites of Shiloh and Ai in the highlands of Israel knew that this site could add greatly to a region-wide understanding of that era. In true archaeologist fashion he asked, “Would you give us the garbage?” The idea was to sift the remains of discarded material from Zertal’s excavation to see if anything had been missed.
A group relocated a portion of the altar dump material to a nearby site where Stripling’s team had water and a platform where they could work. The wet sifting method developed at Shiloh, which is more effective at finding artifacts among the rubble, was implemented at the site thanks to the efforts of Steve Rudd who appeared in our recent Patterns of Evidence Red Sea Miracle films.
Work of dry sifting and at the wet sifting stations began in December 2019. “We dry sifted about 30% of Zertal’s dump,” said Stripling. “We dry sifted again and then wet sifted the remains. And we recovered thousands of seeds. And Zertal didn’t have any data like biodata on seeds, so that’s going to be brand new data. We got over three hundred pieces of diagnostic pottery, which is further ceramics to analyze. Diagnostic flints, bone remains and a number of objects. MEDS is the name of the project. M.E.D.S stands for Mount Ebal Dump Salvage.”
The Finding of the Lead Curse Amulet
Among the objects that were recovered was a small approximately 2 x 2 cm (1 square inch) folded lead tablet that Stripling believes has the potential to shake up the world of biblical archaeology. He related the story to me.
A member of my staff happens to be a very well trained and skilled wet sifter. In fact, she worked for a decade at the Temple Mount sifting project, so she has a decade of wet sifting experience and she’s a small finds expert – Frankie Snyder. When it was in her tray, she immediately identified it. Because until it’s washed, it just looks like a stone chip, you know, a small stone chip. And you see a thousand of them. But fortunately, Frankie recognized it and she called me over, and then I had to grab my heart and go, ‘Oh my goodness,’ and she knew what it was too, and we knew we had something very important.
As soon as I saw it, I knew what I was looking at. We call this a “defixio” or a curse tablet. It’s a type of amulet. So, we know these in the archaeological record. And of course, I’m very aware that we are on the mountain of the curse – Mount Ebal – and we now have a curse tablet in our hands. I’m sort of in shock.
According to Dr. Stripling, these types of tablets typically had some sort of curse inscribed by a hard pen on a thin sheet of lead that was then folded over to form the amulet. This kind of writing may be referred to in one of the Bible’s oldest books – the book of Job.
Oh that with an iron pen and lead they were engraved in the rock forever! – Job 19:24
Ancient Hebrew Writing on the Amulet from Mount Ebal
Of greatest interest is the writing that may be found on the amulet, both for dating it and learning what it says. The investigators could barely make out some glyptic things on the outside, including what appeared to be a lotus flower. However, the main message was likely to be folded onto the inside. The team’s conservationists were unable to open it without breaking it, so a search for a lab that had the scanning technology to penetrate lead was begun.
“My first thought was sort of like Superman – we can’t penetrate lead,” related Stripling. “But you know, it can be done with modern technology. Unfortunately, this thing called COVID-19 came along right after this and I was locked out of Israel. And so I had the tablet in my private storage in Israel, and I could not get it.”
Finally, a lab in Prague was located that had the necessary technology. A few months ago, Stripling was able to get into Israel on a journalist visa to do some filming with TBN. While there, he got the amulet out of storage and an Israeli team member was able to fly it to Prague for testing where it underwent thousands of scans, with the results just starting to come back now.
The preliminary finding is that the writing on the Amulet may be ancient Hebrew, perhaps in two lines. The first letter looks like an ox head, which would be a Hebrew aleph (or letter A). Intriguingly, the Hebrew word for curse is “arur,” which begins with an aleph. This early style of Hebrew as seen in the film The Moses Controversy would help date it to a very old period of Israel’s history.
Although it is possible that it was put at the site in a later period, according to Stripling, “We should be anticipating either Iron Age or Bronze Age which is very, very early. So, it’s going to be super exciting. And if it’s a portion of Scripture from that early on, all the more so. In my perfect world it has one of the curses from Deuteronomy 28 on it, you know, ‘cursed is the man who doesn’t honor his father and mother’ or something like that.”
Every Place the Sole of Your Foot Treads
One question about the altar is its location on a secondary ridge on the back of Mount Ebal, out of sight of Shechem, where the main covenant renewal ceremony seemingly took place. Could this have been another altar?
One factor indicating the altar’s importance and possible connection with the Israelites’ Conquest of the land is that it is positioned in the middle of a huge foot-shaped enclosure made of stones that is more than the length of a football field. These enormous footprint structures have been found in Israel all the way from their first camp at Gilgal up the Jordan valley to this site at Shechem. They may be connected to God’s promise related to giving them all the land where their feet would walk.
Every place on which the sole of your foot treads shall be yours. Your territory shall be from the wilderness to the Lebanon and from the River, the river Euphrates, to the western sea. – Deuteronomy 11:23-24
Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given to you, just as I promised to Moses. – Joshua 1:3
Stripling commented, “The Oaks of Moreh are just a stone’s throw away, where God gave Abraham that promise. So, you’ve got the altar there inside a foot-shaped enclosure.” (Gen. 12:6, 13:17)
Plaster Slabs and the Law
During the original excavations, Zertal also recovered plaster from the altar that was stored. “It needs to be analyzed,” remarked Stripling. “It has never been exposed to infrared or ultraviolet lighting for testing to see what’s on there. And the Bible does say that they plastered over and wrote the words of the law.
And on the day you cross over the Jordan to the land that the LORD your God is giving you, you shall set up large stones and plaster them with plaster. And you shall write on them all the words of this law, … you shall set up these stones, concerning which I command you today, on Mount Ebal, and you shall plaster them with plaster. And there you shall build an altar to the LORD your God, an altar of stones. You shall wield no iron tool on them; – Deuteronomy 27:2-5
Another option for the location of the plastered stones with the law written on them is at the temple of Baal-berith on the valley floor at Shechem. A reconstruction of this site was depicted in Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus film and it may have more secrets to reveal in future excavations.
The MEDS team has also uncovered plaster from a newly discovered cistern near the altar, which is now being tested at Oxford. Lead fragments from the tablet will also be tested chemically at Hebrew University, to discover where the lead came from. “And so even though we’re not excavating we’re extracting quite a bit of data that may shed light on the biblical text,” said Stripling.
Conclusion
Stripling has hopes that in the future either the lines will be redrawn to bring the site inside Area C (the disputed area) or the political situation will change allowing for excavation. Zertal left a portion of the round altar unexcavated for future generations and Stripling dreams of finishing the project, including restoring the altar and making it a tourist destination. In the meantime, he along with collaborative partners hope to have a peer-reviewed publication ready in about six months to share the details with the world.
ABR also plans to resume excavations at Shiloh this May and June with a large team of international volunteers. We look forward to this work continuing to shed light on what life was like at that critical early point in the development of the Israelite nation, and to help us all keep thinking.
TOP PHOTO: The Hebrew curse amulet was made of lead. (credit – Michael Luddeni)
