Summary: Archaeologist Dr. Scott Stripling responds to recent criticisms of the Mount Ebal curse tablet discovered at the site known as Joshua’s Altar. The first of a 2-part series.
At that time Joshua built an altar to the LORD, the God of Israel, on Mount Ebal, – Joshua 8:30 (ESV)
Why the Controversy over the Mount Ebal Tablet?
Since the announcement in 2022 of the unprecedented archaeological discovery of a Hebrew curse tablet on Mount Ebal, Dr. Scott Stripling has been under intense scrutiny – and understandably so. If the conclusions of Stripling and his ABR (Associates for Biblical Research) team are correct, the curse tablet promises to be one of the greatest discoveries to ever come out of the Holy Land.
The claims of the team are that this unique object contains Hebrew writing from Israel’s early history and mentions curses along with the God of the Bible, YHWH. This would directly impact critical debates over when the Bible was first written, literacy in early Israel, and perhaps even the authenticity of the Conquest narrative. The implications of this historic find are profound, and many aren’t ready to accept them. Now Dr. Stripling is addressing each of the criticisms while clearing up some of the misconceptions.
At first, the emphasis of the critiques was that the announcement was rushed, and normally finds of such importance are not given publicity until details and claims about the discovery are published in a peer-reviewed journal. Without the details available for all to examine, the charge was made that most of the ABR team’s claims were unsubstantiated at best. However, as explained in a past Thinker article on the announcement, Stripling had good reasons for the early announcement. Some speculated that a peer-reviewed article might never happen.
These challenges were answered when Stripling and his team published their peer- reviewed paper called “”You are Cursed by the God YHW:’ an early Hebrew inscription from Mt. Ebal” in the Heritage Science Journal in May of 2023.
The focus of the article was on reading the interior of the 2 cm x 2 cm (slightly smaller than a matchbook) tablet made of lead, which had been folded over to lock the inscription inside. Since the team could not open the tablet without destroying it, they relied on high-tech imaging to see inside the tablet to gain their proposed reading. The team included two lead epigraphers (specialists in deciphering ancient texts): Peter (Pieter) Gert van der Veen of Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz and Gershon Galil of the University of Haifa.
However, a series of articles in the Israel Exploration Journal (IEJ) that came out at the beginning of this year leveled a whole new set of criticisms and inflamed the ongoing debate. Recently, Scott Stripling agreed to be interviewed about the controversy by Tim Mahoney. Patterns of Evidence researcher Steve Law also joined the conversation where Stripling discussed this historical discovery and his response to the critics who have attempted to cast doubt on the authenticity of the curse tablet. This is the first of a 2-part article series on that discussion. To hear the whole conversation between Mahoney, Stripling, and Law, listen to all four episodes at Patterns of Evidence Podcasts or on your favorite Podcast platform.
The Controversial Discovery of the Tablet
The tiny, folded tablet was found in December of 2019, during an examination of discarded material from Adam Zertal’s 1980s excavation on Mount Ebal which is located near the valley of Shechem and the modern town of Nablus. Zertal discovered a large altar site on the mountain along with thousands of potsherds that dated to the Iron Age I period, around 1,200 BC. He came to believe that this matched the altar said to have been built by Joshua during the Israelites conquest of Canaan in Joshua 8:30-31.
Zertal had sifted through tons of material in unearthing the altar. Stripling had the idea of resifting the dumps that had been left by Zertal’s excavation. Stripling is the Director of Excavations for ABR at Shiloh, Israel and also serves as the provost at the Bible Seminary in Katy, Texas. His experience in the effectiveness of wet sifting at the Temple Mount Sifting Project convinced him that there were archaeological remains in the dumps from the Mount Ebal altar that had gone undetected in the initial excavation. More details of the context of the site can be found in an earlier Thinker Update.
However, further excavation at the site became politically difficult after the Oslo Accords (Israeli-Palestinian agreements) drew a boundary line just outside the altar site putting it into Area B, which designated it as joint Israeli and Palestinian controlled territory.
Since excavation is no longer allowed, Stripling requested permission to remove material from the dumps to a nearby site where they could be examined using wet sifting. This is when the spectacular discovery was made.
However, criticism was not far behind. Within a week of the announcement, opposing voices were raised claiming that the endeavor sacrificed archaeological standards in order to serve a religious and political agenda. Some sources even claimed that the activity was done in violation of international law – nothing more than an evangelical pirate dig.
These allegations have been strongly denied by Stripling, who notes that these kinds of activities are regulated by the Israeli military and all appropriate permits were acquired.
The Unparalleled Method of Wet Sifting
The wet-sifting technique was invented in the 1920s but fell out of favor because of its higher cost. Using water to sift has now experienced something of a resurgence, because as Stripling explained, it is an unparalleled method of finding smaller artifacts that can easily be missed with dry sifting, especially when working with debris and dump piles.
After being sifted through different sized mesh screens, soaked in buckets of water, and washed with a spray, material is then examined by hand and eye to detect items that differ from mere common stones and pebbles.
Through wet sifting, thousands of seeds were recovered providing new biodata that Zertal hadn’t found. Over three hundred pieces of diagnostic pottery were discovered as well, along with diagnostic flints, bone remains, styli and a number of other objects. Of all the artifacts Zertal has missed, the small, approximately 2 x 2 cm (1 square inch) lead tablet was of greatest significance.
“As soon as I saw it, I knew what I was looking at,” said Stripling. “We call this a ‘defixio’ or a curse tablet. It’s a type of amulet. 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.”
Amulets with curses are commonly found from the ancient world, especially Egypt, but not from such early periods. “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,” admitted Stripling.
Previously, the oldest known example of inscribed lead strips came from the Hittite Empire, dated between the 14th – 13th century BC, according to van der Veen. This is similar to the age the team assigned to the Mount Ebal curse tablet, however the Hittite artifacts are strips and not the folded tablet style that became more popular in later periods. This is a point of contention with some skeptics, but Stripling notes that there are multiple examples of archaeological finds that have pushed back the accepted period of use of different kinds of objects to earlier eras than previously thought.
“Hundreds of [curse tablets] have been found in Israel from various time periods,” explained Stripling. Many have been found in wells or buried in graves. People put them in the ground believing they would enter the spiritual underworld. The written curse could be “from one individual to another…as petty as, she stole my boyfriend, may her hair fall out to … very serious sorts of curses,” said Stripling. “We call them defixio or plural defixionis.”
Between 70 to 80 curse tablets were found in wells on the coast of Caesarea Maritima by Barbara Burrel, field director of Hebrew University/University of Pennsylvania excavations at Maritima since 1990. Ironically, she was told immediately that they were fishing weights and that she had it wrong, added Stripling. Burrel pushed past criticism and published her findings as defixionis.
Just a Fishing Weight?
Of the criticisms published in the IEJ against the conclusion that this is a curse tablet, the one that has created the most stir comes from Prof. Amihai Mazar of the Hebrew University. His idea is that this lead object was merely a fishing weight in his article, “The Lead Object from Mount Ebal as a Fishing-Net Sinker.” He denies there are clear Hebrew letters on the tablet. Nevertheless, he admits he had no idea why a fishing weight would be found on top of a mountain and far from fishable waters.
“[Mazar] is out of his lane” with such comments, said Stripling to Mahoney. There are many problems with Mazar’s fishing weight hypothesis, Stripling pointed out. Mazar may be an expert of the Iron Age, but he only just started researching fishing weights because he assumes the Mount Ebal find couldn’t possibly be a curse tablet.
Fishing weights were typically thin pieces of lead that were folded over nets to weigh them down in water. So far there have been 333 fishing weights (called L.R.3 by archaeologists) found in Israel from the southern Levant. They characteristically have a groove on one side from where they were folded over a fishing net, explained Stripling. In contrast, the Ebal tablet is folded flat, locking the inscription inside with no sign of the distinctive curved groove that shows where weights were folded over the edge of a net.
All of these weights have previously been found along the coast. Two of the weights were discovered in a tomb on the coast near Gaza. Mazar divides the fishing weights into two categories, a and b, labeling the two weights found in the tomb with the letter b. He claims that the lead tablet found on Mt. Ebal is like the tomb fishing weights, the L.R.3b variety that he invented.
Stripling contested that there is nothing different about the two weights Mazar calls category “b,” other than they were found in the tomb, albeit a tomb that was also near the coast. Fishing weights from all time periods have been discovered and none of them have ever been found inland, said Stripling. The nearest body of water to the top of the highlands at Ebal is the Jordan River nearly 20 miles away.
“What [Mazar] says he thinks this is, cannot possibly be,” said Stripling. The Mount Ebal lead tablet has no parallel. It has no groove like all other fishing weights and there is no rationale for it being on Mount Ebal. Plus, “on the outside of the tablet there are clearly carved oxheads,” which translate as the Hebrew aleph (or letter A), and other obvious letters.
While fishing weights may have a similar appearance to the Ebal tablet (other than the missing distinctive groove) all other factors in the context of the find from this altar site argue against that idea. The way the other skeptics buy into Mazar’s fishing weight theory “shows there is a kind of desperation to not accept this defixio,” said Stripling to Mahoney.
Conclusion
Stripling has hopes that in the future either the lines will be redrawn on Mount Ebal to bring the Ebal altar site inside Area C (Israeli administered 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.
Tim asked Scott what, as a man of science and a man of faith, his personal takeaway of this discovery was. “For me, I never needed confirmation. I did not have a faith crisis,” Scott explained. But dealing with artifacts that directly synchronize with the Biblical text are “very meaningful to me and very fulfilling to me.” He said he finds great satisfaction in being able to expose others to the way science and faith interface.
In next week’s Part 2 of this discussion, more criticisms dealing with dating and interpretations of the inscription itself will be addressed. Insights into what may be legitimate challenges versus poor critical thinking will be explored. Until then – Keep Thinking.
TOP PHOTO: Curse Tablet outer structure. (credit: Jaroclav Valach)
