Summary: The 2nd of a 2-part series. Dr. Stripling continues his response to criticisms of the Mount Ebal curse tablet.
And these shall stand on Mount Ebal for the curse: Reuben, Gad, Asher, Zebulun, Dan, and Naphtali. – Deuteronomy 27:13 (ESV)
More Controversy over the Mount Ebal Tablet
This week, Dr. Scott Stripling finishes his discussion responding to some of the criticisms that have been brought up concerning the Mount Ebal curse tablet. He shines light on some of the legitimate and illegitimate arguments that are out there, and makes some great connections to the Biblical account.
The claims that the artifact was in fact a curse tablet that was inscribed with ancient Hebrew words for “curse” and the God of the Bible “Yahweh” produced strong reactions from the academic community that Stripling thought needed a response.
Is there actually a case to be made that this tablet dates to a much younger age than claimed, and are there even any letters inscribed on the lead at all?
To hear the whole conversation between Tim Mahoney, Scott Stripling and Patterns of Evidence researcher Steve Law, listen to all four episodes at Patterns of Evidence podcasts.
Disputes over the Findings
Dr. Stripling’s team for this ABR (Associates for Biblical Research) discovery published their findings in the May 2023 issue of Heritage Science Journal. In their peer-reviewed article they laid out the details of the find, including images from the interior of the lead tablet, along with their proposed interpretation of an archaic Hebrew inscription folded inside.
Since the discovery, there has been pushback from scholars who debate Stripling’s results and claim that his religious bias affects his interpretation of the finds. The most significant criticisms came from a series of three academic articles that were published in the December 2023 issue of Israel Exploration Journal (IEJ). These articles critiqued the interpretation of the tablet’s function, its dating, and the inscription. Together, the articles represent a concentrated effort to debunk the findings around the “curse tablet.”
“This is not unexpected; people have different opinions. I respect all of these scholars and consider them friends and colleagues. This is an academic disagreement, not personal,” Stripling stressed, when speaking to The Times of Israel from Texas.
As for the accusations of his religious beliefs affecting his interpretation, Stripling readily admits that he is a man of faith but denies the “ridiculous assertion” that his beliefs affect the accuracy of his work as an archaeologist.
“I think everyone has pre-suppositions,” he said. “Agnostic people have a pre-supposition to disprove. I have a PhD in ancient Near East archaeology and use cutting-edge technology. I am every bit of a scientist as someone who is an agnostic. Everyone will have their interpretations but let’s not be overly simplistic.”
In last week’s Thinker Update we covered the charge by Prof. Amihai Mazar that the lead tablet was merely a fishing weight (or sinker) used to weigh down fishing nets. While Stripling respects Mazar as a great archaeologist, he showed that Mazar’s proposal lacked any strong evidence, along with good reasons to reject it. However, this did not stop the authors of the other IEJ articles from integrating the idea that the lead object was a fishing weight into their challenges.
The fact that “Maeir and Rollston buy in – hook, line, and sinker, pardon the pun – to Mazar’s theory, just shows that there’s kind of a desperation to not accept this defixio,” exclaimed Stripling.
Strawman Arguments
The methodology the ABR team used in examining the tablet is critiqued in the article, “The So-Called Mount Ebal Curse Tablet: A Critical Response,” by editor of the academic journal Dr. Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University and Dr. Christopher Rollston of George Washington University. The authors argue that the images “fail to demonstrate any discernible letters,” and express concerns about the “dating of the archaeological material,” saying that conclusions in the paper “lack an empirical basis.”
Maeir does not believe Stripling has provided enough evidence for his conclusions about the curse tablet. “I will be happy to change my mind, but they haven’t provided the evidence, and until they do, we have to base [our opinion] on what is published,” Maeir told The Times of Israel.
Another article in IEJ, “The Source of the Lead of the Mount Ebal ‘Tablet,’” by Prof. Naama Yahalom-Mack of the Hebrew University, says “the source of the lead is inconclusive as a factor in determining the secure date of this artifact.”
Stripling responded to Maeir during the Patterns of Evidence podcast: “They have a number of strawman arguments saying that I said things that I didn’t say. For example, the word el and the word maat, that these words are only found in Hebrew. We never said that in the article. We were very careful. The only word we said that was uniquely Hebrew was YHW. So, by saying that I said something ridiculous, hurts my credibility then with the readers. And there are a number of places like that where there are strawman arguments that are made.”
The proposed date for the tablet is also a matter of dispute. “About the archaeological context, they are saying that we said things that we didn’t say, that the lead proves the date is LB2 [Late Bronze 2]. All I ever said about the lead is that it suggests the plausibility that it could be [LB2], and taken along with the other two factors, the paleography and the archeological context, that it suggests the plausibility of that [date],” continued Stripling.
“The other area of argumentation, is what I would call, ‘it is so because I say it is so.’ So, on pottery for example, I present pottery plates, I give parallels and citations of those. I am a ceramicist and so is Aren Maeir, certainly a great archaeologist. I say these exist early and not later. These forms don’t continue on into the Iron Age and then I put my citations, as you should, in a peer-reviewed paper,” explained Stripling. “When [Maeir] refutes this, he just says, ‘these forms continue on to the Iron Age’ with no citations, no references. [He says], ‘it is just so because I say it is so.’ And that’s not very good science.”
“One of the problems with this…is that Aren is one of the editors of IEJ. So, I find it curious that they published this in his own journal. That is a little biased. So that would be difficult for us, Peter and me, to publish a response in IEJ when he is one of the editors,” said Stripling. “I would have much rather seen their criticism in a neutral journal.”
The articles contain other cavalier dismissals without proper citations or references and Stripling expects push back from other scholars concerning this. “I was hoping for a more substantive interaction with these scholars who are clearly great scholars, but in this case, I think the scholarship was a bit shoddy,” explained Stripling.
Dating the Mount Ebal Tablet – Pottery
The two main approaches involved in determining the date of the amulet were archaeological context and the style of writing. The origin of the lead was also a consideration.
During Adam Zertal’s original excavation on Mount Ebal in the 1980s, he recorded three separate dump piles of discarded material. The curse tablet was found in the East Dump (at the top of the drawing above) which consists of material dug from underneath a smaller circular altar at the center of the complex.
Stripling explained that as Zertal dug down further under the large rectangular altar, “he discovered an earlier round altar at the perfect geometric center, as if the later altar had been built to venerate and to protect the actual older altar.” The older circular stone altar was about six feet in diameter.
“I think the round altar is actually Joshua’s altar,” said Stripling. “The rectangular one, is a memorial altar that is protecting the real valuable one that is beneath it.” Of the pottery that was found there, 97% was from the Iron Age I and 3% was Late Bronze Age. “I have determined that the earlier pottery is from what we would call Late Bronze 1B – Late Bronze 2A horizon, around 1,400 BC, which of course fits very nicely with the Biblical data.”
Since all the pottery remains (as well as scarabs that were found) at the site date from the Late Bronze to the Iron Age I period, it makes most sense to date the tablet within these periods – even if it is within the realm of possibility that the tablet was foreign material that “contaminated” the earlier material in the dump.
Dating the Mount Ebal Tablet – Paleography
The second main approach to dating the tablet is the paleography or style of letters on the inscription. The two epigraphy experts on the ABR team agreed that the most likely date for this style is from sometime in the Late Bronze Age (1550-1200 BC). “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,” said van der Veen.
Van der Veen has been closely studying the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions from the mines in the Sinai Peninsula and elsewhere. He notes that the stylistic development of the script became more simplified over time, going from artistic form to mere strokes.
Evidence that the script traveled from the Sinai mines to Canaan can also be seen in 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 Age. Most scholars have termed these “proto-Canaanite,” even though they have been found in areas that match where the early Israelites were known to live.
So these early alphabetic inscriptions are certainly Canaanite in terms of being from the land of Canaan, but the problem is that the term “Canaanite” often conveys the idea of ethnic groups that are different from Israelites. But the ethnic group behind these inscriptions either can’t be determined or evidence actually points to the Israelites, such as references to Israel’s God Yahweh.
The main reason for the resistance to linking them with the Israelites is that the standard view holds that the Exodus and Conquest of Canaan happened during and after the reign of Ramesses II in Egypt (conventionally dated to the 1200s BC), which would make these early alphabetic inscriptions too old to be Israelite in their minds (since the Israelites would have still been in Egypt at the time).
Lead from the amulet was also tested and linked to mines from Greece that were known to supply high quantities of lead in many periods. However, while exports to the Levant (Canaan region) were known to be very common in the Late Bronze Age, exports almost came to a complete stop in the Iron Age.
So the dump that the tablet was found in produced pottery that only comes from the Late Bronze ll and Iron l periods. The letter style best fits Late Bronze l and II. And the Greek mine that the lead for the tablet came from had a steep drop in exports between the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. So taken together, the evidence combines to strongly point to a Late Bronze date for the tablet. This seems completely reasonable.
We dated the tablet to the LB II period, which spans 200 years (1400–1200 BC), but not later than 1250 BC,” stated Stripling.
Dispute Over the Tablet’s Deciphered Message
The team’s proposed interpretation of the inscription has taken the brunt of the criticism, because it lies at the heart of the matter.
The Mount Ebal tablet is a thin sheet of lead that was inscribed, folded, and then sealed, like others of the same style that have been found. Unfolded, it would measure 2 x 4 cm (1 x 2 inches). Stripling pointed out that this tablet fits with ancient context. One of the oldest Biblical books mentions writing on lead with an iron pen.
Oh that my words were written! Oh that they were inscribed in a book!
Oh that with an iron pen and lead they were engraved in the rock forever!– Job 19:23-24 (ESV)
Among the numerous discoveries wet sifted from the dump’s material, two fine-pointed styluses were also found.
The ancient tablet could not be opened without damaging it, so a team of scientists used advanced CT scanning to reveal the hidden text. Thousands of tomographic scans with different settings were done on the tablet by a team of four scientists from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. They penetrated the lead with this series of slices to produce the images. Two epigraphers (specialists in deciphering ancient inscriptions), Peter (Pieter) Gert van der Veen and Dr. Gershon Galil from the University of Haifa were responsible for interpreting the text.
The team’s journal article put forward Galil’s conclusion that the tablet’s interior contained an inscription consisting of 48 early-alphabetic letters that were translated as a formulaic curse. The Hebrew word for “cursed” (‘arar) is mentioned multiple times and a form of Israel’s God Yahweh twice. This early style of Hebrew can be seen in the film that explores its creation in The Moses Controversy.
The inside text was deciphered as:
- 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 “YHWH” that are seen in the Bible and other inscriptions from later periods.
When examining the scans of the inscription published in the journal, many scholars were quick to criticize the interpretation. Stripling commented, “There was an immediate reaction from some people saying, ‘We told you that it couldn’t be, and they’re making this up.’ Even some going so far as to say there aren’t even any letters on there at all – that these are just natural cracks and they’re they’re seeing what they want to see because they’re religious fanatics, although it was published in a very secular journal – Heritage Science.”
“Others were saying that ‘Yes, there is writing, but we doubt that it says what they think it says.’ And now we’ve had scholars beginning to come out publicly, secular scholars saying, ‘Wait a minute, we agree with Stripling and the team on what they wrote. That’s plausible and we see the letters and we don’t see a problem with it.’ So we’re sort of all over the map.”
The different size and orientation of the proposed letters and especially the meandering course taken to to piece the proposed letters together were objects of many of the critiques. But Stripling notes that this is not unusual for the world’s earliest alphabetic inscriptions.
“It can go from top to bottom, bottom to top, it moves around, so it’s nothing like we would think of [in today’s writing]. For this reason it is very subject to interpretation, because if you read it this way it could say this, if you read it another way it could say that. We studied it for 18 months and we published and said to the best of our ability we think it says something similar to this.
Peter van der Veen on his Facebook page has distanced himself from Galil’s initial maximalist reading of the inscription, but remains confident in the team’s primary assertions – as does Stripling.
“From the initial press conference,” he said, “to my statements in between, and even in the Heritage Science article, I said many times, ‘I’m not dogmatic about this.’ I’m dogmatic that it has the name “Yahweh” in it, and that the word “curse” [‘arar”] is in it, but … I expect there to be many other readings – like the Khirbet Qeiyafa ostracon has had 14 or 15 alternate readings that have been published by scholars. So I expected that, and I think that’s what we’re going to get.”
“I didn’t want to stick my neck out because I knew there would be a lot of people ready to chop it off when we suggested a connection with a Biblical text and a Biblical site. But the process went through peer review at a very highly-rated peer-reviewed journal and passed. There were three peer reviewers. So there were my three epigraphers, plus the three peer reviewers, plus lots of other people behind the scenes who approved this in advance. When it went public, I expected an outcry, but it even exceeded my expectations.”
Reading the concealed letters proved to be 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. Images of some of the letters are in the table below.
Stripling summed up, “To their [Maeir and Rollston’s] credit, they did say “We’re not insisting that there isn’t writing present, we just think they haven’t proven it adequately” – their word is “fuzzy,” the scans are fuzzy. That’s what tomography is. We are not seeing it with the naked eye and some of the letters are very clear and others are a bit fuzzy.”
The tablet was folded over, and the tiny space to write on also contributed to overlapping letters. This is also seen in other such small artifacts from other sites. There is also the point that, like other curse tablets, this inscription was never intended to be read. It was part of the binding curse that was sealed and placed on the altar, covered in the blood of a sacrifice, and then buried in the earth.
Stripling made the connection to the Christian gospel; that Christ performed this same role as the ultimate sacrifice who became a curse for sinners (Galatians 3:13), and as a perfect sacrifice took on their guilt, died a bloody death, was buried in the earth, and then rose again to overcome the curse of sin, death and the devil. And the one who comes to the altar and acknowledges their sin in faith, will no longer be accountable to these curses.
Stripling acknowledges that there is a place for legitimate disagreement and welcomes other interpretation proposals and differences of opinion. However, he strongly challenges some of the invalid and ungrounded forms of argument.
The stakes are high. If this is a curse tablet from the Late Bronze Age it could be the oldest Hebrew writing ever found in Canaan. It would also suggest that there was writing available and literacy at the time Moses was writing the Torah and Joshua was writing the book of Joshua. This would put down some major pillars of Academia in their negative attitudes toward the Bible.
It could even be first-hand archaeological evidence related to the altar that Joshua is said to have built on Mount Ebal, the mountain of curse.
Conclusion
The debate over the tablet will go on, and Stripling, along with his partners, hopes to have another peer-reviewed publication ready soon to share more details about the outside text of the tablet and the full findings of the wet sifting project.
This find highlights the value of the technique of wet sifting on present digs, as well as going through old dump piles to make amazing discoveries. He also hopes that in the future either the lines will be redrawn on Mount Ebal to bring Joshua’s altar site inside Area C (Israeli controlled) 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 Dr. Stripling 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,” Stripling 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.
If you want to take classes from Scott Stripling or participate in an archaeological dig, check out the links below. And as always, Keep Thinking!
- The Bible Seminary https://www.thebibleseminary.edu/
- The Shiloh Excavations https://biblearchaeology.org/shiloh-excavations
- Scott Stripling website https://www.scottstripling.net/
TOP PHOTO: Pottery from the East Dump of Zertal’s excavation at Mount Ebal. (credit: Scott Stripling)
