Ancient tablet found on Mount Ebal predates known Hebrew inscriptions
An early Hebrew inscription from Mount Ebal near Nablus that was found on a folded lead tablet during an excavation in the 1980s recently underwent x-ray tomographic measurements to reveal hidden text.
Epigraphic analysis of the data revealed a formulaic curse written in a proto-alphabetic script likely dating to Late Bronze Age that predates any previously known Hebrew inscription in Israel by at least 200 years.
The finding has just been published in the journal Heritage Science by Prof. Gershon Galil, a researcher at in Jewish history and biblical studies at the University of Haifa; Scott Stripling of the Archaeological Studies Institute in Katy, Texas; Ivana Kumpova, Daniel Vavrik and Jaroslav Valach of the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics the Czech Academy of Sciences; and Pieter Gert van der Veen at the Department of Old Testament and Biblical Archaeology at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany.
The inscription was: “You are cursed by the God YHW.”
(L-R) XCT reconstruction of the tablet. Optical reconstruction by digital photogrammetry. (credit: DANIEL VAVRIK, JAROSLAV VALACH)In December 2019, an expedition on Mount Ebal to wet sift the discarded material from excavations led by Adam Zertal – a prominent but controversial University of Haifa archaeologist who died at the age of 79 in 2015 – from decades earlier, yielded a small, folded lead tablet.
The east dump pile from which the object emerged contained the discarded matrix from two structures that he interpreted as altars dated to the Late Bronze Age II and Iron Age I. The earlier and smaller round altar lay underneath the geometric center of the later and larger rectangular altar.
How the team found a hidden Hebrew inscription
The tablet could not be opened without damaging it. But now, the Israeli-European team of scientists performed X-ray tomographic measurements with different scanning parameters to reveal the hidden text, and they found the Hebrew inscription.
The biblical tradition (Joshua 8:30) notes that Joshua, the leader of the Israelites who was appointed to take over from Moses, built an altar on Mount Ebal as part of a ceremony to renew the covenant soon after they returned from Egypt to Canaan. Thus, said the research team, “it is possible that Zertal’s findings relate to this verse.
“The folded lead defixio, the subject of this paper, probably derived from the fill of the altars,” they wrote.
In Deuteronomy (11:26,29), Moses tells the nation that when they finally enter the Land of Israel, they should recite blessings at the flowering Mount Gerizim and curses at the opposite mountain, the barren Mount Ebal.
The priests and the Levites were told to stand in the valley between the mountains, with half of the tribes on one of the mountains and the second half on the other and to say “amen” after each statement.
Like almost all excavations, Zertal left behind piles of excavated soil after examining it. After the first season in 1982, which he devoted to removing a mantle of stones that purposely covered and protected the altars, his team sieved all excavated soil. In December 2019, Stripling wet-sifted a third of Zertal’s discarded material. The lead object, the focus of this article, came from the east dump and therefore almost certainly derived from one of the altars, they said.
In addition to recovering important floral and faunal remains, the project yielded 268 diagnostic pottery shards (95% Iron Age I, 4.75% Late Bronze Age, and 0.25% Early Roman), 75 diagnostic flints, and 79 small objects. Among the objects was the folded lead tablet. It measured 2x2 cm., and when folded it was 0.3 cm. thick, while the thickness of the single lead strip itself merely measures 0.4 mm. Indentations pocked the outside of the tablet. The Czech Republic’s lab of X-ray tomography performed several reconstructions of the tablet, revealing that writing exists on the tablet’s exterior and interior.
Galil said he believes that all 48 letters are clear on the scans and that the inscription dates to the end of the 13th century BCE, but the other authors believe it could be older.
Next: From Times of Israel
In March 2022, a team of archaeologists made an astonishing announcement: they had discovered a tiny 3,200-year-old folded-lead tablet inscribed with what could be the oldest known Hebrew writing ever found in Israel, while sifting through decades-old debris from an excavation near Nablus.
The archaeologists, led by Dr. Scott Stripling of the Bible Seminary in Texas, believe the 2 x 2 centimeter (.8 x .8 inch) tablet proves that Israelites were literate when they entered the Holy Land and therefore could have written the Bible as some of the events took place. They also claim the tablet holds the earliest known writing of “Yahweh,” or the divine name of God.
More than a year after the finding was first announced through popular media, archaeologists published an academic article about the controversial “curse tablet” in the peer-reviewed journal Heritage Science.
The small, folded tablet was discovered in 2019 on Mount Ebal near biblical Shechem, in a pile of discarded dirt and debris from excavations carried out in the 1980s. Mount Ebal is known from Deuteronomy 11:29 as a place of curses, and the debris pile was from an area believed by some archaeologists to be an altar.
Cursed, cursed, cursed
At the center of the controversy is a small, folded piece of lead, which, based on a reading by epigrapher Galil, Stripling claims is inscribed with at least 40 proto-alphabetic letters, the ancestor of the earliest forms of written Hebrew. The lead itself is too brittle to unfold, so experts used tomographical scanning to photograph the inside of the tablet by using X-ray waves to create a series of images that show different layers of the object. The technique is also used in medicine to take images of the body, in a process called computational tomography, or a CT scan.
Stripling and Galil worked with researchers at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic to scan the tablet. They believe the tablet is inscribed with the phrase: “Cursed, cursed, cursed – cursed by the God YHW./ You will die cursed./ Cursed you will surely die./ Cursed by YHW – cursed, cursed, cursed.”
The epigraphical experts who worked on the tablet — Galil and Pieter Gert van der Veen, an associate professor of Levantine Archaeology at the Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz, Germany — date the tablet to the Late Bronze Age (circa 1200 BCE) based on the style of the lettering. They identified 40 different letters on the tablet.
If correct, this would make the tablet the first use of the name of God in the Land of Israel and would prove that Israelites were literate hundreds of years earlier than previously believed.
“It’s potentially a huge breakthrough for us on several levels, historically, archaeologically, epigraphically, and theologically,” Stripling said. “Do we have evidence of a much earlier presence of Israel than we’ve had proof of in the past? Many of us believe that Israel was already there at the end of the Late Bronze Age, but we haven’t had absolute proof. So if we’re correct with the reading, then the ramifications are really large.”
Stripling said that analysis of the lead in the tablet matched with a lead mine in Greece that was used in the Late Bronze Age, and that a separate article with a more in-depth lead analysis will be published at a later date
Because the Mount Ebal tablet is folded and too brittle to open, it’s impossible to examine other aspects that could further authenticate the inscription.
A curse tablet from the mount of curses
The curse tablet was discovered in earth and debris originally removed from a cultic site at Mount Ebal, near biblical Shechem and today’s Nablus. Mount Ebal appears in Deuteronomy 11:29 as a place of “curses” and is revered by some Christians and Jews as the place where the biblical Joshua built an altar as commanded in Deuteronomy 27. It is described in Joshua 8:31 as “an altar of unhewn stones, upon which no man had lifted up any iron.”
The site known is known by locals as “Al-Burnat,” or “top hat” in Arabic, and is regarded by archaeologists as an exceedingly rare and significant illustration of early Israelite settlement. It is the only one of its type in the area. A consensus of archaeologists date the clearly cultic site to the early Iron Age, somewhere around the 11th century BCE, or when the Israelites evidently began to settle the land of Canaan. Other archaeologists push that date back to the 12th century or Late Bronze Age.
The late University of Haifa professor Adam Zertal excavated the site in the 1980s, including what he identified as a large rectangular altar that was apparently constructed over an earlier round altar. Stripling said the tablet came from earth originally excavated from this round altar.
If the tablet’s inscription is verified, it would make the text centuries older than the previous record-holder for the oldest Hebrew text in Israel and 500 years older than the previously attested use of the tetragrammaton YHWH, according to Galil. Writing in a similar alphabet was discovered in the Sinai Peninsula dating to the beginning of the 16th century BCE.
“This is a text you find only every 1,000 years,” Galil said in the announcement of the tablet’s discovery last year.
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