Proto-Hebrew script found on 13th (B.C.) century lead tablet

[David Waltz]

A peer reviewed academic paper published on May 12, 2023 reveals that a lead tablet discovered at Mt. Ebal contains a proto-Hebrew script dated to the 13^th century (B.C.).

[Link to paper]

The inscription contains a curse that invokes the God yhw—a shortened form of the Tetragrammaton-YHWH.

The following is a translation of the “Inner B" inscription:

>>You are cursed by the god yhw, cursed.

You will die, cursed—cursed, you will surely die.

Cursed you are by yhw—cursed.>>

Concerning their palaeographic analysis of the tablet, the authors of the paper wrote:

>>The palaeographic analysis suggests that the inscription belongs to the earliest possible stratum at the site, that of Late Bronze Age II. This would mean that the lead strip pertains to the more primitive (round) altar rather than to the larger later structure with the ramp that dates to early Iron Age I. It is possible that the tablet was purposely left at the site, and if so, this would certainly be significant. It may have originally been utilized near the altar during a curse ceremony (cf. Deut 27 and Josh 8 and later deposited on the altar by priests.>>

I suspect that this extraordinary paper will cause grave concerns for those Bible skeptics who have embraced the so-called Deuteronomistic History theory.

 

Grace and peace,

David

Edited May 23, 2023 by David Waltz
typo

[Eschaton]

Dan McClellan weighs in:

 

 

 

[CA Steve]

My Hebrew is pretty bad. All I could make out on that tablet was "Levi was here".

 

Edited May 23, 2023 by CA Steve

[David Waltz]

Nathan Steinmeyer of the Biblical Archaeology Society weighs in - LINK.

[jkwilliams]

5 minutes ago, David Waltz said:

Nathan Steinmeyer of the Biblical Archaeology Society weighs in - LINK.

So, yeah, I wouldn't be celebrating the end of the DH just yet. Dan raises a good point: why would they publish in a journal that is not specialized in the proper field? 

[Hamilton Porter]

Fascinating.

[Hamilton Porter]

It can't be from the 13th century BC, because the earth is only 10,000 years old.

[The Nehor]

22 minutes ago, Hamilton Porter said:

It can't be from the 13th century BC, because the earth is only 10,000 years old.

?????

[jkwilliams]

3 minutes ago, The Nehor said:

?????

Yeah, everyone knows it's only 6,000 years old. 

[Hamilton Porter]

3 minutes ago, jkwilliams said:

Yeah, everyone knows it's only 6,000 years old. 

Don't argue with me, I got my degree from the creation museum in Kentucky. There's a gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2.

[blackstrap]

32 minutes ago, Hamilton Porter said:

It can't be from the 13th century BC, because the earth is only 10,000 years old.

change century to millenium and it at least makes some sense

[blackstrap]

Maybe the Mayans were right when they say that we are living in the Fourth Creation of the world which started around 3114 BCE. 

[InCognitus]

2 hours ago, David Waltz said:

The following is a translation of the “Inner B" inscription:

>>You are cursed by the god yhw, cursed.

You will die, cursed—cursed, you will surely die.

Cursed you are by yhw—cursed.>>

I'm disappointed by the lack of creativity in the writing of this curse.  It sounds like a frustrated kid on a grade school playground.

Deuteronomy 28:15-68 is much more creative (like that part about being smitten with the boils of Egypt and with tumors and a festering rash and scabies with the itch that cannot be healed  - verse 27).

[Calm]

2 hours ago, jkwilliams said:

So, yeah, I wouldn't be celebrating the end of the DH just yet. Dan raises a good point: why would they publish in a journal that is not specialized in the proper field? 

Quicker turnover time?  Though unless someone really needed to publish immediately for some reason, going for a better fit in perhaps a higher tier journal tends to yield a greater benefit for professors…assuming that the researchers are such. 

Edited May 23, 2023 by Calm

[jkwilliams]

12 minutes ago, Calm said:

Quicker turnover time?  Though unless someone really needed to publish immediately for some reason, going for a better fit in perhaps a higher tier journal tends to yield a greater benefit for professors…assuming that the researchers are such. 

Looking around their website, I can see they have a definite agenda. Perhaps they were concerned that journal in this field would reject them for ideological reasons. Either way, this doesn’t seem like a solid find to me. But time will tell. 

[Hamilton Porter]

5 minutes ago, jkwilliams said:

Looking around their website, I can see they have a definite agenda. Perhaps they were concerned that journal in this field would reject them for ideological reasons. Either way, this doesn’t seem like a solid find to me. But time will tell. 

Or the journal already rejected them. 

[jkwilliams]

15 minutes ago, Hamilton Porter said:

Or the journal already rejected them. 

That too. 

[David Waltz]

59 minutes ago, Hamilton Porter said:

Or the journal already rejected them

What is "the journal" you have in mind?

[Calm]

1 hour ago, Hamilton Porter said:

Or the journal already rejected them. 

It was found in late 2019, so I don’t think one can draw any conclusions due to Covid slowing everything down so much.  Still would be interesting to find out the usual time lag between find and publication in this area.

Edited May 23, 2023 by Calm

[Benjamin McGuire]

5 hours ago, David Waltz said:

I suspect that this extraordinary paper will cause grave concerns for those Bible skeptics who have embraced the so-called Deuteronomistic History theory.

It won't. Even if the text is actually there, and even if the text says what they suggest it says, and even if it is dated accurately, it does not interact with the Deuteronomistic history at all. The only way to make it have an impact is if (as the author's of the paper note) we add several additional theoretical propositions -

Quote

The recovery of this formulaic curse from an altar on Mt. Ebal synchronizes with Joshua 8, which mentions the construction of an altar (vss. 30–31), writing (vs. 32), and pronouncement of curses (vss. 33–34)

Joshua 8 is especially problematic for a claim like this (whether or not we accept the idea of a DtrH). First, the text of Joshua 8:30-34:

Quote

Then Joshua built an altar unto the Lord God of Israel in mount Ebal, As Moses the servant of the Lord commanded the children of Israel, as it is written in the book of the law of Moses, an altar of whole stones, over which no man hath lift up any iron: and they offered thereon burnt offerings unto the Lord, and sacrificed peace offerings. And he wrote there upon the stones a copy of the law of Moses, which he wrote in the presence of the children of Israel. And all Israel, and their elders, and officers, and their judges, stood on this side the ark and on that side before the priests the Levites, which bare the ark of the covenant of the Lord, as well the stranger, as he that was born among them; half of them over against mount Gerizim, and half of them over against mount Ebal; as Moses the servant of the Lord had commanded before, that they should bless the people of Israel. And afterward he read all the words of the law, the blessings and cursings, according to all that is written in the book of the law.

The only connection between the two texts is that word 'curse'. But cursings don't first occur in Israelite religion with the building of the altar at Ebal - they have a long history in the ANE. And if they are connected, it could easily be explained that the DtrH was simply incorporating an older tradition. But, there is a string of suggestions throughout the article that lead me to think that there is an unspoken agenda beyond what is explicitly noted. Among other things, it is well known that Joshua 8:30-34 is a highly problematic text (even by DtrH standards). In the LXX, these verses (30-34) are in a different location, coming after Joshua 9:2, and the events described occur in a completely different place. In 4QJoshuaA (from Qumran), the first altar that Joshua builds isn't at Mt. Ebal either. And in that text, verses 34-35 occur right after Joshua 5:2, and the text about the blessings and the curses mentioned in this article describes an event at an altar in Gilgal. And that aside, the text of Joshua 8:1-29 deals with the conquering of the city of Ai. This is a fascinating issue, because, of course, the Hebrew name 'Ai' translates literally to 'ruins'. Joshua conquers the ruins - and the traditional location of Ai was more or less unoccupied during the conquest under Joshua. Destruction levels occur significantly before, and after the conquest - but during the conquest it is unoccupied. The same group that claims to have found this lead amulet has been searching for 'the Biblical Ai' for a long time now - with no success. Their goal isn't to explain the Bible using history, but to define history using the Bible. Even if we connect the curse text along with an altar at Ebal as described Joshua 8, we still have the problem that Joshua 8:1-29 could not be written contemporaneous to the events described. And this means that the discovery does absolutely nothing to impact the DtrH theory. So, while there are a lot of epigraphic questions about the reconstruction of the text here, I have serious reservations about the assumptions that are used to try and frame the meaning of the text. We may settle for the questions about the epigraphy, since ultimately, that is where we can get perhaps the most objective answers to our questions. But the researchers who wrote this paper don't really start there because in their view, the only value of the text is as its evidence for an early date for the Book of Joshua.

Finally, it is worth noting that the amulet itself was found by sifting through a debris pile of an excavation that took place more than 40 years earlier - it was not found in situ. There are real legitimate questions about it's actual age and even perhaps about where it is from.

So, given all of this, I agree with the skepticism that is being displayed.

On the publication, I have less concern - only to point out that it was probably peer reviewed more for its details about tomography than for its interpretation of the artifact with respect to current academic biblical scholarship.

[David Waltz]

1 hour ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

The only way to make it have an impact is if (as the author's of the paper note) we add several additional theoretical propositions -

But the DtrH theory (with competing theories within the general theory) itself contains "theoretical propositions"...

[Hamilton Porter]

If the Documentary Hypothesis were disproved, hundreds of Latter-day Saints would be heartbroken because then they won't have any more Margaret Barker.

[sunstoned]

9 hours ago, jkwilliams said:

So, yeah, I wouldn't be celebrating the end of the DH just yet. Dan raises a good point: why would they publish in a journal that is not specialized in the proper field? 

From the linked article:

Quote

“I wish this were a 13th-century Hebrew inscription, but it is not,” said Christopher Rollston, a noted epigrapher from George Washington University.2 “Facts are facts, and this article is very short on facts and very long on boundless speculation.

 

[mfbukowski]

8 hours ago, Calm said:

Quicker turnover time?  Though unless someone really needed to publish immediately for some reason, going for a better fit in perhaps a higher tier journal tends to yield a greater benefit for professors…assuming that the researchers are such. 

Good point! Quality peer reviewing takes time- we are all so busy these days. 

[Benjamin McGuire]

10 hours ago, David Waltz said:

But the DtrH theory (with competing theories within the general theory) itself contains "theoretical propositions"...

This isn't particularly relevant to your observations though. Those that use the DtrH recognize its limitations and its theoretical nature - and it adapts when new information is provided. ABR doesn't recognize the limitations and theoretical nature of its propositions.

We would be having an entirely different discussion if the text they discovered duplicated text from Joshua 8.

To put it a bit differently, what makes theory work well is when it is predictive and those predictions are reflected in the historical record. DtrH doesn't use principles of textual analysis that are exclusive to the biblical text, they use tools that are broadly applicable to all texts everywhere. And we can find evidence that helps us establish that these kinds of things happen with texts - and this reflects back on the likelihood of the process. I provided examples of this in my comments - how what we see tends to cause us to ask certain questions of the text. ABR, on the other hand, uses as a guideline a process that is unique to the biblical text. That is, they take the biblical text as absolute truth (it is a text, and so while they claim to be guided by the biblical text, they are really being guided by their own idiosyncratic interpretation of the text). But they don't make it predictive (as they should - to test a premise or theory). Using my example above of Ai, rather than seeing the rediscovery of Ai and its archaeological evidence as a problem for their claims about the biblical text, they assume that in fact something is wrong about the evidence - it is either from the wrong place, or there is something wrong about the time. If we were to apply this same thinking in the other direction about this discovery of the lead tablet, the first assumptions would be that it is not from the time they think it is. It would be far less novel. Taking the most accommodating approach to their claims, they have found something that conforms to their interpretation and the default position they take is that as long as it appears to support their interpretation, their assumptions must be accurate. Taking a less accommodating view, I would suggest that they are more than willing to move towards unlikely extremes if it will support their position. They cannot ask the questions that the text encourages us to ask because their interpretive model has already excluded these questions from possibility.

This is a big difference - and it means that they hold their own claims about evidence to a different standard than others do. And for me, that means that their having theoretical propositions is quite different than the circumstances of those who believe in some form of the DtrH which also includes theoretical propositions.