Staking a Claim

The Mt. Ebal Curse Tablet

Facts

History VII

[Post thirteen of thirty-three]

The Czech Institute’s data proved revelatory.

From the tomographic scans, Stripling’s epigraphers discerned words.

These included “Yahweh” and “cursed”. Both recall Joshua’s ceremony of blessings and curses on Mt. Gerizim and Mt. Ebal.

Dr. Gershon Galil of the University of Haifa added further. He decoded a sophisticated parallelism, a chiasmus. ¹

You will find this literary device throughout the Old and New Testaments. Consider, for example, Luke 4:16b-20, “The Favorable Year of the Lord”. ²

The colors highlight the parallels; the large font is a central focus:

14 And Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about Him spread through all the surrounding district. 15 And He began teaching in their synagogues and was praised by all. 16 And He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up, and as was His custom,

He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath,

and stood up to read,

17 And the book of the prophet

Isaiah was handed to Him,

And He opened the book and

found the place

where it was written,

18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me

Because He anointed Me to

preach the gospel to the poor.

He has sent Me to proclaim

release / to the captives,

And recovery of sight to the blind,

To set free / those who

are oppressed,

19 To proclaim the

favorable year of the Lord”

20 And He closed the book,

gave it back to the attendant

and sat down

and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on Him.

21 And He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

How could Stripling not be gobsmacked?

As a professional, he knew that this required cautious handling.

He was a renowned archaeologist. He had decades of field experience at prestigious sites.

The nature of this find marked it. It would cause a stir. Intense international scrutiny lay ahead.

He needed to be careful! ³

But life threw Stripling a curveball, mandating a different approach. ⁴

Speculation circulated about the photo that Stripling had emailed earlier. ⁵ The associate had forwarded it. Recipients began generating noise online. Some pondered the tablet’s glyphs. Could they be a script?

This alarmed Stripling. Others might lay academic claim to the tablet’s message, he thought. ⁶ He thus deemed it necessary to go public. Otherwise, he risked forfeiting his claim as the head archaeologist of the discovering team. ⁷

A press conference ensued in March 2022. At it, Stripling and his team announced the following: ⁸

• The lead defixio found by his team contained archaic proto-alphabetic script;
• From forty letters, the Hebrew name for God appears twice and the word “cursed” ten times;
• The tablet dates to the late Bronze Age, making it two to four hundred years older than any other known Hebrew text.
• A reading may be a chiasmus, a literary form employed in both the Old and New Testaments.
• That proposed reading was:

Cursed, cursed, cursed-cursed by the God YHW
You will die cursed.
Cursed you will surely die.
Cursed by YHW-cursed, cursed, cursed! ⁹

(Mt. Ebal “Curse Tablet” Full Press Conference, YouTube, Appian Media, March 29, 2022)

Afterwards, public elation and scorn followed.

Why scorn?

In our next post, entitled “A Firestorm”, I address this.

I look forward to continuing with you there.

Now, here is a question. What is your favorite chiasmus, scriptural or otherwise? (See examples here.)

Respond in the comment section below.

Next post: “A Firestorm!”

To view the memorandum from the beginning, click here.

For the composite footnotes, click here.

1. Sean McDowell, Oldest Hebrew Writing? Mt. Ebal Curse Tablet (Revisited) m.youtube.com>watch, (17:08), 11 May 2023. ↩︎
2. L. J. Hooge, “The Favorable Year of the Lord”, Biblical Chiasmus, Discovering and Exploring Reverse Parallelism in the Bible, https://biblicalchiasmus.wordpress.com/, August 3, 2014. ↩︎
3. Sean McDowell, Oldest Hebrew Writing? Mt. Ebal Curse Tablet (Revisited) m.youtube.com>watch, (25:00), 11 May 2023.  ↩︎
4. Id. at (42:24)  ↩︎
5. Id. at (42:52) ↩︎
6. Id. at (43:00) ↩︎
7. Id. at (43:08) ↩︎
8. Associates for Biblical Research, “ABR Researchers Discover the Oldest Known Proto-Hebrew Inscription Ever Found”, biblicarchaeology.org/current-events-list/, YouTube, March 24, 2022. ↩︎
9. Id. at (18:08) ↩︎