Summary: UPDATE – The ancient lead amulet recently found by the ABR team on Mount Ebal has been deciphered, revealing a Hebrew curse mentioning YHWH twice!
And when the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, you shall set the blessing on Mount Gerizim and the curse on Mount Ebal. – Deuteronomy 11:29 (ESV)
One of the Greatest Biblical Discoveries Ever Made
In a spectacular update to our recent story on the Hebrew curse tablet found at the ancient altar on Mount Ebal, the team assembled by ABR (Associates for Biblical Research) has announced that they have now deciphered the message found on the interior of the tablet.
The results promise to make this one of the greatest discoveries to ever come out of the Holy Land. The ramifications will shake debates over when the Bible was first written, literacy in early Israel, and the authenticity of the Conquest narrative.
Multinational Team Deciphers the Mount Ebal Amulet
The tablet was found at the end of 2019 when searching the remains of a dump from an archaeological excavation of a site near the city of ancient Shechem (modern Nablus) by Adam Zertal in the 1980s. A skeptic of early biblical history, Zertal changed his mind when he uncovered the remains of what appeared to be an altar on Mount Ebal that appeared to match the descriptions in Joshua 8:30 of an altar built by Joshua during the Israelites’ conquest of the Promised land. More details about the discovery of the tablet at Joshua’s altar can be found in our first story on the topic.
After months of research on the 2 x 2 centimeters folded lead tablet, the findings were announced last week by the ABR team headed by Scott Stripling of The Bible Seminary in Katy, Texas in a press conference from the Lanier Theological Library in Houston, Texas. The team included four scientists from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic who did the advanced imaging (tomographic scans) of the tablet to recover the hidden text. Two epigraphers (specialists in deciphering ancient texts) were also involved: Pieter Gert van der Veen of Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz and Gershon Galil of the University of Haifa.
What was revealed was astounding; an ancient Hebrew curse inscription consisting of 40 proto-alphabetic (equivalent to proto-Sinaitic) letters that mentions the Hebrew word for “cursed” (arur) ten times and Israel’s God YHWH twice! The deciphered message reads as follows:
Cursed, cursed, cursed – cursed by the God YHW.
You will die cursed.
Cursed you will surely die.
Cursed by YHW – cursed, cursed, cursed.
The term “YHW” is one of the short forms for the name of Israel’s God YHWH that are seen in the Bible and other inscriptions from later periods.
By the end of summer, the team expects to publish a peer-reviewed paper with the full results and images of the message, which will also include more information on wording on the exterior of the tablet that are more damaged with work on deciphering still underway. The team felt compelled to release their preliminary findings due to the groundbreaking nature of the discovery, misinformation about the find that was surfacing in some articles, and because of the threat of academic piracy – where competing personalities attempt to steal and publish the information from others.
Reaction to the Findings
Amulets pronouncing curses are commonly found from the ancient world, but not from such old periods. According to Stripling, “These types of amulets are well known in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, but Zertal’s excavated pottery dated to the Iron Age I and Late Bronze Age, so logically the tablet derived from one of these earlier periods. Even so, our discovery of a Late Bronze Age inscription stunned me.”
While rare, inscribed lead strips are known from older periods. According to van der Veen, the oldest known example comes from the Hittite Empire from the 14th or 13th century BC.
Thousands of scans were done on the tablet on two different settings. When examined, the scans showed that the 40 letters all came from the same layer within the enfolded lead, verifying that this was the hidden message they had been looking for.
When he saw the scans, Galil almost immediately recognized the formulaic literary structure of the inscription: “From the symmetry, I could tell that it was written as a chiastic parallelism.” Reading the concealed letters proved tedious, according to van der Veen, “but each day we recovered new letters and words written in a very ancient script.” Daniel Vavrik and his colleagues from Prague ensured the accuracy of the raw data which the team interpreted.
Stripling pointed out that according to Deuteronomy 27 and Joshua 8, Mount Ebal was the mountain of the curse, where Israel renewed the Sinai covenant after entering the Promised Land during the conquest of Canaan. As part of that ceremony, the Israelites stood on the two mountains above Shechem proclaiming the blessings that would come from keeping the covenant and the curses that would result from breaking it. “And here we have a curse tablet on the mountain of curse, Mount Ebal,” Stripling stated.
The team suggests that the message is either a personal statement or is from a representative of the people accepting the stipulations of the covenant.
Galil noted that this is not just a curse, but a legal document in a form commonly seen in the ancient Near East and the Bible. It was written (and probably spoken), then sealed in an envelope from the time and place this covenant renewal is said to have taken place. This would bind those participating to the agreement in a formal way. Israel’s God is also mentioned in Hebrew in the message, hundreds of years earlier than any other such inscriptions that are known. “The Ebal inscription is absolutely the most important inscription ever found in Israel,” he pronounced.
While Stripling was careful not to speculate about the potential identity of the author of the message, it is hard not to wonder about the possibilities that even Joshua himself could be the one. Galil went a bit farther down that road. “It is clear that the person who wrote it was a genius,” he said. “He was a real genius. And when you see the final article, you will understand what I mean by ‘genius.’ He was not only a scribe, he was a theologian, he was a leader.”
Dating and Interpretations of the Mount Ebal Tablet
There are two main approaches involved in attempting to date the amulet – archaeological context and its epigraphic nature (the style of writing). The tablet was not found in a securely defined archaeological level, but rather from previously excavated and discarded material in the East Dump (see image below) that Zertal’s dig reports said came from the circular altar underneath what he believed was Joshua’s altar. Joshua 8:30 indicates that Joshua built an altar on Mt. Ebal. So far, the team’s wet sifting efforts have focused on material from this dump.
As covered in our previous article, there was an older altar-like site located directly under the center of the larger rectangular structure. Pottery recovered from Zertal’s excavation dated from the second half of the Late Bronze Age down to the early part of the Iron Age. According to Stripling, the second altar was abandoned sometime in the late 12th century BC, which would put its range of activity (under conventional dating) at about 1250-1150 BC. However, he believes the tablet comes from the earlier circular altar based on Zertal’s notes for the East Dump.
Bits of lead from the amulet were also tested and linked to lead mines in Greece that were known to supply high quantities of lead in the Late Bronze and Iron ages.
It is commendable that Stripling included members on his team that do not agree with all of his presuppositions regarding biblical history. For example, Gershon Galil apparently favors an Exodus date in the 13th century BC around the time of Pharaoh Ramesses II. Scott Stripling sees the Exodus happening at a standard 1446 BC date, with the conquest of Canaan (and the covenant renewal ceremony at Shechem) beginning 40 years later in 1406 BC. Pieter van der Veen thinks these events occurred at the end of the Middle Bronze Age.
Normally, the final stage of the Middle Bronze Age is dated to about 1650-1550 BC. However, van der Veen has been a proponent of chronological revisionism that shifts the dates assigned to these archaeological periods forward by centuries. This would allow the end of the Middle Bronze to line up with a biblical Exodus date in the 15th century BC (similar, but not as large of a shift as David Rohl’s ideas seen in the Patterns of Evidence films).
When looking at the style of the lettering seen in the inscription, the two epigraphy experts agreed that the most likely date is from sometime in the Late Bronze Age (1550-1200 BC). Van der Veen said, “All the letter types appear to very clearly be restricted to anything that we have before the early Iron Age – in Late Bronze Age and also Middle Bronze Age inscriptions.”
Van der Veen has been closely studying the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions from the mines in the Sinai Peninsula that were featured in the film The Moses Controversy. The stylistic development of that script became more simplified over time; going from artistic forms to mere strokes. However, he believes there are too few inscriptions during this era – especially after it begins to be seen in Canaan – to be very specific or certain about the date.
Galil believes the inscription dates to the mid-13th century BC, though he agrees the style could possibly work for an older date. Since the oldest pottery at the site appears to date around the horizon between Late Bronze I and Late Bronze II (and not earlier than Late Bronze I B), Stripling gives the range for the tablet at about 1400-1250 BC and believes it could have coincided with the covenant renewal ceremony described in the Bible. Van der Veen also favors a date in LB II, though possibly as early as LB I, which would still not quite put the tablet as early as his Conquest date at the Middle to Late Bronze Age transition.
It would seem that to entertain the idea that the inscription does pertain to the covenant renewal ceremony, and at the same time at a date near the end of the Middle Bronze Age (the revisionist date for the conquest), one would need to consider whether the earliest pottery at the site really comes from the moment the altar was originally built or some time afterward.
Evidence that the script traveled from the Sinai mines to Canaan can also be seen at the Israelite city of Lachish, where artifacts bearing proto-alphabetic inscriptions have been dated to the end of the Middle Bronze Age as well as the Late Bronze, though most scholars have termed these “proto-Canaanite.” It remains to be seen how these different finds may be tied together by further examinations.
These results along with artifacts such as the Berlin Pedestal and the “Shasu of YHWH” inscription (from Soleb, Egypt) continue to put pressure against the commonly held view of the Exodus happening at the time of Ramesses II and the conquest 40 years later (in about 1200 BC). The Israelites appear to already have been in Canaan long beforehand.
Ramifications for the Writing of the Bible
One of the primary issues related to this find are the implications it has for when the Bible may first have been written. Most scholars believe the Bible didn’t begin to be written until many centuries after the time of Moses. This contradicts the claims of the Bible for Moses writing the early books. Jesus himself endorses Moses’ role in passages such as John 5:46.
As proposed in The Moses Controversy, there is mounting evidence that there were early Israelites who were literate and fully capable of writing the Bible’s first books. At the press conference, Professor Galil stated, “The scribe who wrote this important text, believe me, he could write every chapter in the Bible…they were able to write it very, very early.”
The new discovery of the Mount Ebal curse tablet helps fill the gap between the earliest alphabetic writing in Egypt and the Sinai, and the later inscriptions that are already accepted as Hebrew from 1st Millennium BC in the land of Israel. Look forward to exciting new announcements from this site and others as we continue to piece together evidence supporting the Bible and prompting us to keep thinking.
TOP PHOTO: The divine name of Israel’s God YHW in proto-alphabetic letters found on the lead curse tablet from the “Joshua Altar” sit on Mount Ebal. (drawing by Gershon Galil)
