Mount Ebal curse tablet

The Mount Ebal curse tablet is a supposedly inscribed folded lead sheet reportedly found on Mount Ebal in the West Bank, near Nablus, in December 2019. The artifact, discovered by a team of archaeologists led by Scott Stripling, was found by wet-sifting the discarded material from Adam Zertal's 1982–1989 archaeological excavation.

Mount Ebal curse tablet
Type	Defixio
Material	Lead sheet
Size	2 cm × 2 cm (0.79 in × 0.79 in)
Writing	Paleo-Hebrew alphabet
Created	c. 1200 BC
Period/culture	Late Bronze Age or Early Iron Age
Discovered	December 2019 Mount Ebal, West Bank 32°14′7″N 35°16′9″E
Language	Ancient Hebrew

According to a team from the United States, Israel, Czech Republic, and Germany, it is the oldest known Hebrew inscription, preceding the Khirbet Qeiyafa ostracon by at least two centuries, with the curse tablet dated to around 1200 BC. The use of the term YHWH (which, if proven to be inscribed on the tablet, would be the oldest example of its use by centuries outside of previous Egyptian references) as the Hebrew word for God, would define the inscription as early Hebrew and not Canaanite.

The tablet has been the subject of scholarly skepticism and controversy since the announcement of its discovery, as the team made sensationalist claims about its contents before the find had undergone the peer review process, and presented little to no evidence for their findings, outside of a single photograph taken of the folded tablet which was unveiled during the initial announcement.

The editio princeps of the inscription was published in May 2023. The findings were rejected by some scholarly commentators.

Biblical account

In advance of the Israelites' entry to the Promised Land, Deuteronomy 11:29 records Moses' direction that "when the Lord your God has brought you into the land which you go to possess, that you shall put the blessing on Mount Gerizim and the curse on Mount Ebal".

Discovery

The folded lead object was discovered at Mount Ebal in January 2019 through a process called wet sifting, where ancient stones covered in dirt are hand-washed. The tablet had nearly been mistaken for a stone, but had "popped out" once rinsed under water.

Inscription

Since the folded piece of lead could not be opened, Stripling et al. used x-ray tomography to scan the inside. After viewing the scans, team member Gershon Galil claimed to find an inscription made up of 48 separate glyphs and claimed those proposed letters resulted in the following text:

[You are] cursed by the god yhw, cursed.

[You will die], cursed – cursed, [you will surely die].

Cursed [you are] by yhw – cursed.

— Stripling, Gershon et. al., "You are Cursed by the God YHW:" an early Hebrew inscription from Mt. Ebal, 2023

Though the decipherment was by team member Gershon Galil, all the authors of the published article consented to his decipherment, as mentioned in the Heritage Science article. Gershon Galil has since been removed from the project as of June 2023.

Analysis

The lead was analyzed at Hebrew University by Naama Yahalom-Mack, using bits of the tablet that had broken off during a failed malleability test. The lead is consistent with ore from Lavrion, Greece.

X-ray tomography was undertaken in collaboration with scientists from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic including: Ivana Kumpova, Jaroslav Valach, and Daniel Vavrik. Two epigraphers were enlisted to examine the scans for discernible letters: Pieter Gert van der Veen of Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz and Gershon Galil of Haifa University. As of June 2023 Gershon Galil has been removed from the team.

Galil announced in a Facebook post in late 2023 that he is planning on publishing a book through his new publishing company, Megillat Sefer, on his analysis of the inscription later in 2024.

Controversy

Photos of the outside of the curse tablet were published on social media and subsequently in mass media before the peer review process. This type of behavior has been criticized by Israeli archaeologists and historians in an open letter.

After the peer review article was published, The Times of Israel asked multiple archaeologists and epigraphical experts for comment, but the only two who agreed to give their opinion stated that they did not believe the article was convincing. Christopher Rollston wrote: "This article is basically a text-book case of the Rorschach Test, and the authors of this article have projected upon a piece of lead the things they want it to say." Aren Maeir only said: "I don't accept all the interpretations that were suggested in the article, and I plan to publish a different opinion in an academic journal".

Much skepticism and support of the discovery has been exacerbated by Biblical connections to Mount Ebal, which was the site of a supposed altar built by Joshua around the same time that the artifact has been dated to.

Three articles published in Israel Exploration Journal in late 2023 attacked the claims of the original researchers. Christopher Rollston and Aren Maeir argued that there was no writing on the artifact at all but just random bumps and scratches, arranged in a haphazard fashion that didn't match the published drawings. Amihai Mazar identified the object as a sinker used in fishing nets. Naama Yahalom-Mack, though agreeing with the Greek origin of the lead, noted that the mine was also in operation much later than the alleged date.

Around the same time, Raz Kletter also published a paper which criticized both Galil for purportedly inventing the inscription, and Maeir for misguided criticism of Galil's character, rather than the contents of his publications.

In early 2024 Mark Haughwout proposed that if the artifact wasn't simply an old piece of lead, it was more likely to be from the Roman period, perhaps an ancient theater ticket (which were often made of lead and folded after admission). Scott Stripling and Peter van der Veen published an online point-by-point response to Haughwout's article.