King Jehoash Inscription Captivates Archaeological World
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, An ancient stone tablet is displayed at a Jerusalem archeological institute Monday, Jan. 13, 2003. Israeli geologists said Monday that they have examined the stone tablet detailing repair plans for the Jewish Temple of King Solomon that, if authenticated, would be a rare piece of physical evidence confirming biblical narrative. |
Mystery,
politics, Biblical implications, gold—a newly surfaced inscription purporting
to be by King Jehoash has it all. And it may be a forgery! If authentic, it
would be the first royal inscription ever found of an Israelite king.
If
authentic, it may provide evidence for Israel’s claim to the Temple Mount. If a
forgery, some Israeli may be trying to manufacture evidence of Israel’s claim
to the Temple Mount. Or some Palestinian may be trying to plant an obvious
forgery in order to undermine supposed evidence of Israel’s claim to the Temple
Mount.
If
authentic, it would support the historicity of the Book of Kings.
If
authentic, it might even show that the First Temple—Solomon’s Temple—was
decorated with gold.
If
authentic, it would cast doubt on the ability of epigraphers and philologists
and Biblical scholars to detect a forgery. If a forgery, it would cast doubt on
the ability of geologists to detect a forgery.
The
inscription first surfaced—as far as we know at this point—in the summer of
2001, when it was shown to Israel’s leading paleographer, Joseph Naveh, of
Hebrew University. According to a Jerusalem
Post report, Naveh was contacted by an anonymous caller who asked him to
verify the authenticity of the inscription. Naveh agreed to look at it, and a
photograph of the inscription was subsequently sent to him. After examining the
photograph, he asked to see the stone itself. Naveh appeared at a Jerusalem
hotel at the appointed time and was met by an Israeli and a young Arab who did
not speak during the meeting. According to the Israeli, the stone had been
found by Arabs outside the eastern wall of the Temple Mount. Some speculate
that when in recent years the Waqf, the Muslim religious trust that controls
the Temple Mount, illegally excavated a monumental entryway to the underground
area known as Solomon’s Stables, their bulldozer dug up this inscription, which
was then dumped out unknowingly with the rest of the excavation debris into the
Kidron Valley, just east of the Temple Mount. Whatever the truth, Naveh had
ample opportunity to examine the stone.
The 15-line
text is inscribed in pre-Exilic Hebrew letters on a blackish sandstone plaque
almost 11 inches long, a little over 9 inches wide and about 3 inches thick. As
is common for this time, dots serve as word dividers. The top of the
inscription has been broken off. Only part of one as-yet-unidentified letter of
the first line remains. The name of the Judahite king Jehoash (Yehoash in
Hebrew), who ruled from about 835 to 801 B.C.E., does not appear at all. His
identification is clear only from the fact that the name of his father, minus
the first letter (Hazyahu in this inscription; Ahazyah in Kings and Ahaziah in
English), appears quite clearly in the second line. The missing first line
presumably contained the name Yehoash followed by ben (son of) followed by the A of Ahazyah. Hence, the inscription has become known as the
Jehoash Inscription. ancient Hebrew that is similar to the writings found in 2
Kings 12:1-6, 11-17.2 In the inscription, King Joash tells priests to take
"holy money ... to buy quarry stones and timber and copper and labor to
carry out the duty with faith." the last part of the inscription indicates
that if the work is completed well, "the Lord will protect his people with
blessing."
Geologic
studies of the stone and inscription by Israel's Geological Institute,
confirmed that it is authentic. Carbon-14 dating confirmed that the writing was
completed in the 9th century B.C. Studies at the institute found microscopic
flecks of gold that might have been burnt into the stone when the temple
containing both the tablet and gold objects was destroyed by the Babylonians in
586 B.C. According to Amos Bean, director of the institute, "They could be
from gold-plated objects in the home of a very rich man, or a temple. ... It's
hard to believe that anyone would know how to do these things to make it look
real."
The new find
is significant in that it corroborates the existence of the Temple of Solomon
and part of the history of that temple recorded in the book of 2 Kings.
A forger
would never have knowingly taken the plaque for authentication to the most
prominent epigrapher in Israel. Both the Arab and the Jew who brought the
plaque to Naveh at the hotel (and anyone who sent them) must have thought that
the inscription was genuine. If the inscription is a forgery, it was probably
out of the forger’s hands by this time.
In any event,
Naveh concluded from his examination that the inscription was very probably a
forgery (he has since become even more convinced of this).
That fall
the plaque was taken for authentication to the Geological Survey of Israel
(GSI). At some point, the owner came to be represented by one of the most
prominent law firms in Israel, Herzog, Fox and Neeman. The Herzog is Issac
Herzog, a member of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) and an adviser to former
Prime Minister Ehud Barak. The lawyers will not disclose the name of their
client, however, or anything else concerning the finding or present ownership
of the plaque.
The GSI made
a thorough study of the plaque, its inscription and the patina (the film or
crust that, after many centuries, forms over an ancient object) in both cracks
in the stone and in the inscription, and declared the inscription authentic.
The geologists at the GSI—Shimon Ilani, Amnon Rosenfeld and Michael
Dvorachek—decided to publish their report in the GSI journal. It is very
difficult to keep a secret in Israel, and the existence of the inscription soon
became known.
Thus began a debate among scholars
and scientists as heated as any in recent memory.
Harvard’s
Frank Moore Cross finds that orthographically (in terms of spelling) the forger
“errs catastrophically in at least two cases.” Spelling in ancient Hebrew
gradually changed. To know when this happened requires expert knowledge. The
watershed is the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. For example,
Biblical texts composed before the destruction spell David as DVD; after the destruction, it was
spelled DVYD. The spelling
errors that Cross found in the inscription are much more complicated than that
example and require much more expertise to detect. But Johns Hopkins professor
Kyle McCarter calls one of the errors Cross detected “a real howler.” McCarter
added, “I thought the bad guys had become a lot more sophisticated.” Naveh is
now quoted as saying, “It is not just that I have serious doubts about its
authenticity, but I believe it is a fake.” Naveh notes that “numerous details
do not coincide with [supposed] dates [of the letters].” Robert Deutsch of
Haifa University (a paleographer and an antiquities dealer) finds it “a very
poor forgery,” “a hybrid chimera,” combining Moabite, Phoenician and Hebrew
letters. Christopher Rollston, of Emmanuel School of Religion and editor of the
scholarly journal Maarav, also
finds the inscription “not difficult to expose as a forgery because it wasn’t
particularly well done ... The script of the Jehoash inscription deviates so
substantially from all provenanced Iron Age Hebrew inscriptions (in terms of
mixtures of forms from different periods and languages) that it cannot, in my
opinion, be seriously considered ancient.”
Other
scholars, however, express themselves more cautiously: It may be a fake. Or it
may be authentic. According to an article in Ha’aretz, these fence-sitters include Gabriel Barkay of Bar-Ilan
University, Shmuel Safrai of Hebrew University, Chaim Cohen of Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev, Ada Yardeni, a leading Israeli paleographer, and André
Lemaire of the Sorbonne. We have so little material from early Iron Age II,
when this inscription purports to have been written, that the seeming errors
may be authentic variations that we don’t yet know about—and indeed would prove
the authenticity of the inscription.
The royal
inscription apparently speaks in King Jehoash’s name of “men in the land and in
the desert and in all the cities of Judah” who gave much “consecrated silver”
to the Temple, to buy “quarry stone and juniper wood and Edomite copper.” The
money was also used to pay the workmen. Thus were repaired “the Temple [House],
and the encircling walls, and the storied structure, and the lattice works, and
the spiral staircases and the recesses and the doors.” The plaque would be a
testimony to the workers’ craftsmanship. The inscription ends with an awkwardly
phrased (according to Cross) divine invocation: “May Yahweh ordain his people
with blessing.” Yahweh is the personal name of the Israelite God.
This text
closely parallels a passage in 2 Kings 12. Jehoash tells the priests to collect
sacred money to repair the Temple (2 Kings 12:5-6). In the Biblical text, the
priests apparently failed to make the repairs. But then they collected money
that was used to repair the House (Temple), specifically “to pay the carpenters
and the laborers who worked on the House of Yahweh, and the masons and the
stone—cutters. They also paid for wood and for quarried stone with which to
make the repairs on the House of Yahweh, and for every other expenditure that
had to be made in repairing the House” (2 Kings 12:12-13).
If the
inscription is authentic, it is a remarkable confirmation of the Biblical text.
Neither the inscription nor the Biblical text seems to read easily. Both have
an archaic feel. Nadav Na’aman, of Tel Aviv University, analyzed this Biblical
passage in a Dutch journal in 1998. Although Kings is part of the Deuteronomic
History compiled in the late seventh century B.C.E., the compiler had earlier
sources that he incorporated into the text. Na’aman speculated in his article
that the source of this Biblical account was a royal inscription. When Na’aman
later saw the text of the Jehoash inscription, he exclaimed, “Either I hit the
nail on the head, and my theory is confirmed, or the forger read my theory and
decided to confirm it.”
So which is
it?
According to
the geologists, science proves the authenticity of the inscription. They paid
particular attention to the patina. They found brown ocherous patina both in
the incisions of the inscription and in a central crack in the stone. The
patina also formed on the broken upper edge of the plaque. The crack descends
diagonally from the right margin near the eighth line to the last letter in the
eleventh line. It crosses ten letters in four lines. “Clearly,” say the
geologists, “the crack developed after the engraving and before the formation
of the patina.” Moroever, “It would be virtually impossible to engrave a large
number of [the] letters ... after the formation of the crack [which contains
the patina] without causing breakage to the plate.”
As for the
patina, “It contains about the same silica content as the rock itself, and
supports the conclusion that the patina formed naturally on the plate. The
patina is enriched in the elements Ca [calcium] and Fe [iron] and diluted in K
[potassium] and Al [aluminum], relative to the rock. Accordingly, the chemical
composition of the patina was influenced not only by the composition of the
rock itself, but was also affected by the burial setting. It is suggested that
the tablet was buried within a wet soil, rich in lime and iron.”
No adhesive
materials or any other artificial substances were found in the patina (these
were looked for just in case the forgers might have taken patina from a
different stone and applied it to the inscription and the plaque).
Particles of
carbon were detected in the patina (perhaps a result of burning wood from a
fire in which the plaque burned). A carbon-14 test was conducted on the carbon
particles in the patina by a laboratory in Florida. The result: a date of about
400 to 200 B.C.E. with a 95 percent chance of accuracy.
Most
intriguingly, the patina also contains tiny globules of pure gold that can be
formed by intense burning. It is difficult not to wonder whether the plaque was
in the Temple with its gold and was burned in 586 B.C.E., when the Babylonians
destroyed Jerusalem. The carbon particles in the patina may also have come from
the fire, say the geologists.
How smart
could the forger be? Did he plant the microscopic globules of pure gold in the
patina just to fool us? Did he consciously add the gold to lead us into
thinking that this dark stone plaque once hung in the Temple on a white
limestone wall decorated with gold, as the Bible says? Did he purposely add the
carbon molecules to the mix, using some ancient burnt wood? Was he also able to
fake patina in a way that would fool the geologists?
Or are the
script scholars wrong?
Or is there
some third possibility that we haven’t thought of?
For Victor
(Avigdor) Hurowitz of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the answer is clear:
“If the epigraphers—the specialists in the writing itself or the philologists
who are experts in the text—say that the inscription is bogus, this means that
the geologists have been duped and that the forgers have invented methods of
bypassing them.”
For other
equally distinguished observers, it’s the other way around. “Salvation will not
come from archaeologists or epigraphers,” says Na’aman. “There is no difficulty
today in creating an inscription with writing appropriate to the period, such
as the writing on what is called the King Jehoash inscription. This is
especially true since archaeologists and epigraphers have no precedent for this
kind of inscription, such an ancient Judahite royal inscription.” Therefore the
deciding factor in the debate will be the scientific one, rendered by the
geologists. Avi Hurvitz, of Hebrew University, agrees: The geologists “are
outside the debate of stylistic, linguistic, Biblical and historical
similarities. They are entirely objective.” About the geologists who performed
the tests on the inscription, Hurvitz says, “They are first-rate. I have heard
good things about them.”
Nevertheless,
both Hurvitz and Na’aman would like to see the scientific tests replicated by
others. Just as the forgers are apparently getting so sophisticated that they
can produce a text that will fool the philologists and paleographers, they may
also be so scientifically sophisticated that they can fool the geologists.
What should
we make of all this? Some would conclude that we must simply ignore all
unprovenanced finds. For me, this is an entirely unjustified conclusion. It is
certainly true that unprovenanced finds always come to us with the suspicion of
forgery. We are properly skeptical. Sometimes, however, our investigation leads
us to conclude that the find is almost certainly authentic. In other cases, we
are convinced that a find is almost certainly a forgery. And sometimes the conclusion
is uncertain, as it seems to be in this case—at least for the moment.
Uncertainty
is by no means an unusual characteristic in the study of ancient history or in
archaeology. Dates are sometimes uncertain because of varying understandings of
stratigraphy or the dates of parallels. Interpretations of the evidence also
often widely differ, as do reconstructions of inscriptions, buildings and other
artifacts. And in some cases the issue of authenticity of unprovenanced objects
will add another element of uncertainty.
What the
profession should do is hone its skills in detecting forgeries. A major program
is needed to determine whether and how patina can be faked. Are there other
tests for detecting a forgery of various kinds of artifacts and inscriptions?
What should be the protocol for testing for forgery? The profession should be
at least as smart as the forgers—and certainly better organized.