Perhaps the most important Biblical archaeology discovery in years

From Associates for Biblical Research:

Associates for Biblical Research (ABR) announce the discovery of a formulaic curse inscription recovered on a small, folded lead tablet. 

The defixio came to light in December 2019 when Scott Stripling, ABR’s Director of Excavations and the Director of the Archaeological Studies Institute at The Bible Seminary in Katy, Texas, led an ABR team to wet sift the discarded material from Adam Zertal’s excavations (1982–1989) on Mt. Ebal. 

A press conference was held on Thursday, March 24th at the Lanier Theological Library in Houston, Texas to announce the extraordinary discovery. 

The ancient Hebrew inscription consists of 40 letters and is centuries older than any known Hebrew inscription from ancient Israel.  The scientists employed advanced tomographic scans to recover the hidden text [and]...deciphered the proto-alphabetic inscription, which reads as follows:

Cursed, cursed, cursed – cursed by the God YHW.

You will die cursed.

Cursed you will surely die.

Cursed by YHW – cursed, cursed, cursed.

According to Stripling, “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.” 

Almost immediately Galil recognized the formulaic literary structure of the inscription: “From the symmetry, I could tell that it was written as a chiastic parallelism.”

According to Deuteronomy 27 and Joshua 8, Mt. Ebal was the mountain of the curse. Joshua 8:30 indicates that Joshua built an altar on Mt. Ebal. The defixio derived from previously excavated and discarded material from a structure Zertal believed was Joshua’s altar.

It may be a coincidence that a curse be found on a mountain most famous for its curse, but the dating of the tablet to the Late Bronze Age - the 14th to 13th century BCE - is about the accepted time of the Exodus. 

As far as I can tell, this is the earliest mention of the Hebrew God using the tetragrammaton by centuries - the previously earliest find was the Mesha Stele from 840 BCE.

The chiastic structure of the curse (ABCCBA) is clear, and the Hebrew Bible is filled with similar chiastic structures throughout, such as Genesis 9:6: שֹׁפֵךְ֙ דַּ֣ם הָֽאָדָ֔ם בָּֽאָדָ֖ם דָּמ֣וֹ יִשָּׁפֵ֑ךְ, "the spiller of blood of a human, by a human would his blood be spilled." Some chiasms span chapters or entire books.

The researchers are holding back on some of the findings, such as the text on the outside of the tablet that they found.

(h/t Yoel)

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