Tag: chiasmus

History VII

[Ebal’s Plea, thirteen of thirty-two]

The Czech Institute’s data continued to prove a font of revelation.

From the tomographic scans Stripling’s epigraphers quickly discerned not just letters, but words. These included “Yahweh” and “cursed”, both apparently recalling Joshua’s ceremony of blessings and curses on Mts. Gerizim and Ebal. One epigrapher, Dr. Gershon Galil, of the University of Haifa, additionally decoded a sophisticated parallelism, a chiasmus.

This literary device one finds throughout the Old and New Testaments. Consider for example Luke 4:16b-20 “The Favorable Year of the Lord”. Note below the parallel and inverse wordings with 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.”¹

How could Stripling be anything but gobsmacked?

Nevertheless, as a professional he was certainly aware that a find of this magnitude required cautious, meticulous handling.

He was a renowned archaeologist with decades of Holy Land field experience at preeminent sites.

The profound nature of this find earmarked it. Surely it would cause an immense stir. On multiple levels intense international scrutiny lay on the horizon journalistically, scholarly, and politically.

This needed to be handled right!

But life threw Stripling a curve ball mandating a different approach.

Concurrently, speculation circulated about the tablet photo that Stripling had earlier emailed to an associate. Forwarded recipients began generating noise online. Some pondered the outer tablet’s glyphs. Could they be some sort of script?

Alarmed that others might lay academic claim to the tablet’s message, Stripling deemed it necessary to go public quickly. Otherwise, he risked forfeiting his scholarly stake as the tablet’s lead discovering archaeologist.²

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

• The lead defixio found by his team contained archaic proto-alphabetic script;
• From around forty letters present, the Hebrew name for God appears twice and the word “cursed” ten times;
• The late bronze age dating of the tablet makes it two to four hundred years older than any other known Hebrew text.
• A possible reading relates a chiasmus, a literary form employed extensively 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!

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

Afterwards, public elation and scorn followed.

Why scorn?

This our next post addresses.

Next post: “A Firestorm!”

1. L. J. Hooge, “The Favorable Year of the Lord”, Biblical Chiasmus, Discovering and Exploring Reverse Parallelism in the Bible, https://biblicalchiasmus.wordpress.com/2014/08/03/luke-416b-20-the-favorable-year-of-the-lord/, August 3, 2014, ↩︎
2. Breaking News “Mt. Ebal Curse Tablet Peer Review Complete”, Appian Media, In Roads, youtube.com/watch?v=_15tYO4hqJS, (20:39), May 12, 2023. ↩︎