There are a few topics in biblical archaeology that I follow closely, including the excavations at Shiloh (have they found the tabernacle platform?) and el-Araj (have they found the lost city of Bethsaida?), as well as any publication by Lorenzo Nigro and his Italian-Palestinian team from Jericho (there are frustratingly few!). Another artifact that I’m following is the lead tablet from Mt. Ebal, which was in the news again this past week, as the most recent issue of the Israel Exploration Journal contained three articles about it.
The Lead Tablet: A Review
As background, in the 1980’s, Israeli archaeologist Adam Zertal excavated a rectangular, nearly square alter on Mt. Ebal which was constructed of large, unhewn field stones and which dated to the 13th century BC.1 It bore traces of ash and the bones of Levitical sacrificial animals. Beneath this rectangular altar, was an earlier, circular alter, which also contained ash and animal bones. Late Bronze Age pottery and a scarab from Thutmose III (ca. 1506-1452 BC) were also discovered near the altar.2 Some scholars believe that the round circular altar may be Joshua’s altar, mentioned in Joshua 8:30.
In 2019, a team led by Dr. Scott Stripling of the Associates for Biblical Research, was granted permission by the appropriate authorities to resift and wet-sift the dump piles of material from Adam Zertal’s excavations. This led to the discovery of a small, folded lead tablet approximately the size of a folded business card, which they identified as a defixio (curse tablet). A team of scientists from the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in Telč, Czech Republic used X-ray tomographic scans and found text inscribed on the inside. This discovery was announced publicly in 2022, and a peer-reviewed article followed in 2023. In it, epigraphers translated the proto-alphabetic inscription, which read:
You are cursed by the god yhw, cursed.
You will die, cursed—cursed, you will surely die.
Cursed you are by yhw—cursed.3
New Articles about the Lead Tablet
Recently, a number of scholars have pushed back on the identification of the lead tablet as a defixio and questioned whether it even contains an inscription. The following articles were published in the most-recent issue of the Israel Exploration Journal (Vol. 73, No. 2)4:
- “The Lead Object from Mount Ebal as a Fishing-Net Sinker,” by Amihai Mazar
- “The So-Called Mount Ebal Curse Tablet: A Critical Response” by Aren M. Maeir and Christopher Rollston
- “The Source of the Lead of the Mount Ebal ‘Tablet,’”by Naama Yahalom-Mack
Having read these articles, I thought I would offer a few preliminary thoughts.
First, I have a great respect for the authors of the original study, including Peter Van Der Veen and Scott Stripling, as well as the authors of the recent articles, including Amihai Mazar, Aren Maeir and Christopher Rollston (I confess I know little about Naama Yahalom-Mack). Indeed, I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing both Scott Stripling and Aren Maeir here at the Bible Archaeology Report.
Secondly, I am not surprised that there is dissenting opinion from other respected scholars. As I stated back in 2022, important artifacts and inscriptions are frequently contested: “There are still scholars who believe the famous Tell Dan Stele does not say ‘House of David,’ but rather ‘House of Beloved,’ ‘House of Uncle,’ or ‘House of Kettle.’ There will always be critics who interpret things differently, no matter how much of a consensus there is around an inscription.”5 This is a healthy part of academic debate and the reason peer-reviewed articles are important. I anticipate that there will be further articles published pushing back against the articles recently published in the Israel Exploration Journal as well.
Thirdly, I’ve looked at the scans, and in all honestly, I cannot make out all of the letters/words that the authors of the initial peer-reviewed article claim to see. That said, I’m not an expert, nor an epigrapher. What does, however, seem clear to me, is that the divine name, YHW, has been inscribed on the inside of the lead tablet. As I recently stated: “Regardless of whether the inscription has the number of words the authors of the peer-reviewed article claim, and regardless of whether or not it is in chiastic structure, it is clear this inscription was intentionally inscribed with the name of the Hebrew God, YHW (YHWH), the name by which God revealed Himself to Moses (Ex. 3:14). Inscriptions from ancient Israel are rare. If this artifact does indeed date to the Late Bronze Age, it makes it the oldest inscription containing the divine name YHW yet discovered in Israel.”6
My Response to the New Articles
With regards to the specific articles themselves, I would note the following.
Amihai Mazar suggests the lead tablet from Mt. Ebal is a lead fishing-net sinker of a particular type (Type L2.3b) which is rare in the Levant but common in the regions of Crete and Attica. He concludes, “Of course, one has to ask how and why a fishing-net sinker made of lead from Greece found its way to the inland, mountainous site of Mt. Ebal, where almost no other imported objects except a few Egyptian scarabs and two small Mycenean sherds were found. This question remains to be answered.”7 While the Mt. Ebal tablet does bear some similarity to fishing-net sinkers from Crete, those are much cruder, thicker, and heavier than the Mt. Ebal tablet, and they contain grooves that a rope from the fishing net impressed in the lead, which the Mt. Ebal tablet does not.8 Moreover, as Mazar notes, this type of fishing-net sinker is rare. How rare? Of the 333 Type L2.3 fishing weights found in the Levant, only two are allegedly Type L2.3b, which Mazar classifies the Mt Ebal tablet as. These two were discovered in a tomb at a coastal site near Gaza and published by Petrie.9 I would be interested to see a closer examination of these two artifacts to determine whether they are actually defixiones, which are commonly found in tombs. Furthermore, I would have hoped that, if Mazar is going to make the claim that the lead tablet is a fishing-net sinker, he would provide some sort of plausible explanation of how it arrived inland, on Mt. Ebal rather than simply saying, “This question remains to be answered.” I found this lacking and highly disappointing. The suggestion that the lead tablet it a fishing net-sinker stretches credulity.
In their article, Maeir and Rollston take issue with the photographs of the tomographic scans presented in the original article by Stripling, Van Der Veen et al, and maintain that the “putative 48 letters are simply not present” and that the six images of the tomographic scans, “do not enable us to read any of the supposed letters suggested by the authors.” They go on to state, “We are not necessarily stating that no letters are present (although we are very doubtful). We are suggesting that there is no proof that they are.”10 In fairness, the article also questions the dating of the object from the initial article by Stripling, Van der Veen et al. and accuses them of anachronistic orthography of the word “accursed” in the inscription. However, for the purpose of this brief review, I’m going to simply deal with their argument that the inscription is merely “striations, scratches, pitting, and indentations in the soft lead.”11 Peter Van der Veen has noted that one of the Czech scholars involved with the tomographic scans is an epigrapher, although her specialty is Roman period. She instantly recognized three letters, which the other epigraphers interpreted for her.12 Furthermore, corresponding bulges on the exterior match the inscribed letters/symbols on the interior and will be the subject of a future peer-reviewed article. If this is indeed the case, I would doubt the symbols/letters in the interior are merely naturally occuring striations or pitting. Finally, I would highlight the GIF above of the YWH inscription above, which I believe clearly shows at least one legible word of three letters.
In her article on the source of the lead from which the Mt. Ebal tablet was made, Naama Yahalom-Mack conducted Lead Isotope Analysis (LIA) on the artifact and concluded that the most likely source of the metal was the mines of Lavrion in Greece, which operated almost continually from the fourth millennium BCE until the Late Roman period, and was one of the two primary sources of lead in the Levant during the Late Bronze Age.13 She also notes that, “Even if we could unequivocally prove that the lead of the “tablet” is from Lavrion, this data cannot be used to date the object, as this ore source was exploited in multiple periods. The data presented above for the use of lead and silver from Lavrion in the southern Levant during the LB II, LB III, and late Iron I cannot be used to support or to rule out the dating of the Ebal “tablet” to this (LB II–Iron I) time range.”14 I would agree with this, and would note that Striping, Van der Veen, et all did not use this information to date the lead tablet; they dated the artifact on the basis of the pottery found in the accompanying dump pile as well as the paleography of the letters in the inscription. Finally, Yahalom-Mack states, “The suggestion of A. Mazar (2023) that the alleged inscribed ‘tablet’ is, in fact, a fishing-net weight (sinker) is supported by the results presented here, as additional net sinkers are isotopically consistent with the Mt. Ebal artifact and were likely made of lead from the same source.” This is true, although LB ingots traced to the mines of Lavrion have also been discovered in the Levant, and these ingots were presumably not used solely for lead fishing net-sinkers but for other artifacts as well. So it is possible this lead could have been used to make a curse tablet in the LB.
In addition to the articles in the Israel Exploration Journal, I should note that Ariel David recently published an article in Haaretz15 that contained numerous inaccuracies. I’m going to finish this blog by allowing Peter Peter Van der Veen and Scott Stripling to offer their responses to specific quotes from that article, which I publish with their permission.
It is my hope that this blog contributes to the discussion and debate surrounding the lead tablet from Mt. Ebal.
Bonus Content
UPDATE: Scott Stripling was recently interviewed by Sean McDowell about the articles in the Israel Exploration Journal.
BONUS: Response from Scott Stripling and Peter van der Veen to Ariel David’s article in Haaretz:
AD – The long version is a complex story involving a controversial excavation in a volatile conflict zone and sensational claims about what a single find there could tell us about the historicity of the Bible and the birth of the Hebrew language, all on the background of the political and religious strife engendered by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
SS/PV – We did not draw conclusions based on a single find.
AD – Now, an upcoming series of scientific studies is demolishing the initial astounding conclusions by the discoverers of the purported inscription.
SS/PV – As we understand it, only the lead analysis article is a scientific study.
AD – Its discovery confirmed that the structure was indeed that very biblical altar, Stripling and colleagues claimed.
SS/PV – We carefully avoided such language in the Heritage Science article. We did explore that possibility since only the Bible discusses Mt. Ebal.
AD – Rather, they collected piles of waste from Zertal’s excavation and sifted it at a nearby settlement, which makes it nearly impossible to confirm the date of the artifact.
SS/PV – There were only two choices based on Zertal’s excavation strata: LB2 and IA I. Either option is older than previously known Hebrew writing.
AD – The letters drawn by Stripling and colleagues don’t match the bumps and indentations visible in the photos they published, according to the two researchers.
SS/PV – They are incorrect. Bulges on the exterior match discernable letters on the inside.
AD – The lead surface displays “random scratches, striations, pitting, and indentions,” which are consistent with the nature of lead and the processes or erosion and weathering the artifact may have undergone over the centuries, they add.
SS/PV – We agree, but we did not identify these marks as letters.
AD – For the sake of argument, Maeir and Rollston go into a long exposition to show that even if there were letters there (not that they can see any), their reading by Stripling’s team is questionable.
SS/PV – We agree and do not insist that our proposed reading is correct. We merely presented to the best of our ability what we thought it said.
AD – The proposed text also contains letters that were not used in Late Bronze or Early Iron Age Canaanite inscriptions and only appear in texts centuries later, meaning that the original reading, if accurate, is quite anachronistic.
SS/PV – This is not accurate as we demonstrate in the Heritage Science article.
AD – The only properly Hebrew word in the text would be the divine name of Yahweh, but even then, it should be noted that the biblical God is also mentioned in non-Hebrew texts. In fact, Yahweh’s oldest known extrabiblical mention, aside of course from the contested Mt. Ebal tablet, is found in the ninth century B.C.E. Mesha stele, which is in Moabite.
SS/PV – This is not accurate. Yahweh appears on the Soleb Heiroglyph in the 14thcentury B.C.E.
AD – In the Late Bronze Age, but also in later periods, these weights were commonly made by folding a thin lead sheet around the netting, which obviously has decomposed with time, leaving archaeologists with these tiny metal sandwiches, Mazar notes.
SS/PV – If this were accurate, the weights would have ended up at the bottom of the lake or sea once the nets decomposed. Ancient fishermen would have drilled holes so that the weights could have been reused.
AD – In any case, he agrees that no letters are visible, and cites two other eminent epigraphers, Prof. Benjamin Sass of Tel Aviv University and Dr. Anat Mendel-Geberovich of the Hebrew University, as agreeing that no symbols are discernible.
SS/PV – Our three epigraphers detected letters. It is no surprise that this is perceived in a variety of ways.
AD – While the isotope analysis confirms the metal came from the Lavrion mine in mainland Greece, which is known to have operated in the Late Bronze, this cannot be used to date the artifact as Stripling and colleagues do, because that location was also active in later periods, Yahalom-Mack says.
SS/PV – We did not make this case. We noted that the mine was in use in the Late Bronze Age II and that exports from Greece to Canaan ceased ca. 1200 B.C.E. This suggests a plausible LB date for the artifact, nothing more.
AD – The drawings he and his team published in the Heritage Science article “come close to capturing what the tomographic scans revealed,” Stripling stresses in an email to Haaretz.
SS/PV – What I (SS) actually wrote was the following: Thanks for your email. I (SS) have not read the two articles to which you refer, so it is difficult for me to respond with specifics. At this point, I (SS) can only say the following:
I am confident that there is writing on the tablet and that the script strongly suggests that it dates the Late Bronze Age II, which according to Adam Zertal, the excavator of the Mt. Ebal Altar, was when the earliest altar there was constructed. In our article we presented Professor Gershon Galil’s schematic drawings and more conservative drawings by Professor Pieter van der Veen and me. I believe that the latter drawings come close to capturing what the tomographic scans revealed. It is natural for other scholars to reach divergent views, and I look forward to reading the forthcoming articles in IEJ. I have the highest regard for Professor Mazar, but I find it difficult to imagine that lead fishing weights were inscribed with proto-alphabetic letters.
Notice the importance of the bold sentences for understanding my statement correctly.
AD – Galil, the epigraphist in Stripling’s team, did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment as of press time.
SS/PV – There were three epigraphers: van der Veen, Galil, and Urbanova.
AD – But no one is claiming that fishing weights were decorated with letters. The problem is that we might be very well dealing with a case of pareidolia, in which scholars with faith saw patterns that they wanted to see but are not actually there – just like when people see the face of Jesus in the burnt bits of their grilled cheese sandwich.
SS/PV – What a ridiculous statement.
Full Disclosure: I’m honored to be a staff researcher and writer for the Associates for Biblical Research. I consider Dr. Stripling to be not only an excellent archaeologist, but also a colleague, and a friend. Despite my obvious bias, I’m trying to remain balanced as I analyze the evidence and the publications related to the lead tablet from Mt. Ebal.
Endnotes:
1 Adam Zertal, “Has Joshua’s Altar Been Found on Mt. Ebal?.” Biblical Archaeology Review. 11.1 (January/February, 1985), 30.
2 Associates for Biblical Research. “Has Joshua’s Altar Been Found on Mt. Ebal?: Digging for Truth Episode 23.” YouTube video, 9:20. Aug. 19, 2018. https://youtu.be/VE68FOCLACo
3 Stripling, S., Galil, G., Kumpova, I. et al. “You are Cursed by the God YHW:” an early Hebrew inscription from Mt. Ebal. Herit Sci 11, 105 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40494-023-00920-9
4 https://www.israelexplorationsociety.com/israel-exploration-journal
5 Bryan Windle, “Ten Thoughts on the Lead Tablet.” Bible Archaeology Report. https://biblearchaeologyreport.com/2022/04/26/ten-thoughts-on-the-lead-tablet/
6 Bryan Windle, “Top Ten Discoveries Related to Joshua and the Conquest.” Bible Archaeology Report. https://biblearchaeologyreport.com/2021/11/12/top-ten-discoveries-related-to-joshua-and-the-conquest/
7 Amihai Mazar, “The Lead Object from Mount Ebal as a Fishing-Net Sinker.” Israel Exploration Journal, vol. 73, no. 2, 2023, p. 150.
8 Scott Stripling, personal communication, Dec. 7, 2023.
9 Scott Stripling, personal communication, Dec. 7, 2023.
10 Aren M. Maeir and Christopher Rollston, “The So-Called Mount Ebal Curse Tablet: A Critical Response.” Israel Exploration Journal, vol. 73, no. 2, 2023, p. 132-140.
11 Maeir and Rollston, p. 140.
12 Peter Van der Veen, personal communication, Dec. 9, 2023.
13 Naama Yahalom-Mack , “The Source of the Lead of the Mount Ebal ‘Tablet.’” Israel Exploration Journal, vol. 73, no. 2, 2023, p. 153-154.
14 Yahalom-Mack, p. 158.
15 Ariel David, “New Studies Debunk Controversial Biblical Curse Tablet from Mt. Ebal.” Haaretz. Nov. 30, 2023. https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2023-11-30/ty-article/new-studies-debunk-controversial-biblical-curse-tablet-from-mt-ebal/0000018c-20b6-d21c-abae-76bee75f0000
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