Did Archaeologists Really Discover a Hebrew Curse Tablet from Mount Ebal Bearing the Name YHWH?

At a press conference at the Lanier Theological Library in Houston, Texas, on 24 March 2022, Scott Stripling (the Director of Excavations for the Associates for Biblical Research, a fundamentalist Christian apologetics ministry), Pieter van der Veen (a professor of the Old Testament and Biblical archaeology at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz), and Gershon Galil (a professor of Biblical studies and ancient history at the University of Haifa) announced that they have (supposedly) discovered an inscription written in the Hebrew language using the Proto-Canaanite script inside of a 2 cm x 2 cm folded lead tablet that a team led by Stripling found in December 2019 while wet-sifting through the detritus of an earlier excavation that a team led by the late Israeli archaeologist Adam Zertal conducted at Mount Ebal near the Palestinian city of Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank from 1982 to 1986.

Stripling, van der Veen, and Galil claim that the inscription on the inside of the tablet is not visible to the naked eye and that they were only able to find it by examining thousands of tomographic scans made at the Czech Academy of Sciences. They claim that the inscription dates to between 1400 and 1200 BCE. They say that the text of the inscription reads as follows when translated into English: “Cursed, cursed, cursed – cursed by the God YHW. You will die cursed. Cursed you will surely die. Cursed by YHW – cursed, cursed, cursed.” Despite these claims, they still have not shown any of the scans they allegedly made, instead only showing photographs of the outside of the tablet and one drawing made by Galil of one supposed instance of the divine name.

If all the team’s claims are true, this would be the earliest known attestation of writing in the Hebrew language and the earliest known attestation of the divine name YHWH by hundreds of years. Naturally, dozens of news outlets have reported this supposed inscription as though it really were the most astounding discovery in Biblical archaeology of this century. There are, however, very good reasons to be very suspicious of Stripling, van der Veen, and Galil’s claims and it is highly irresponsible for news outlets to report these claims as though they were settled fact. The reasons I am about to highlight are already well known to scholars, but I thought I would share them here for members of the general public who may have read about the supposed Mount Ebal curse tablet in the news.

The Associates for Biblical Research and their apologetic agenda

One reason why people should be very cautious regarding Stripling, van der Veen, and Galil’s claims is because they have conducted all their research about the tablet on the behalf of the Associates for Biblical Research, which is a fundamentalist Christian apologetics ministry that is specifically dedicated to the task of trying to prove that every statement about the past that is contained in Bible is literally true in the historical sense.

The association describes itself in the tagline on its official website as “A Christian Apologetics Ministry Dedicated to Demonstrating the Historical Reliability of the Bible through Archaeological and Biblical Research.” They have an official “Statement of Faith” on their website, which lays out very clearly what they believe and what their agenda is.

Although the Associates for Biblical Research only describe themselves as “Christian” on their website, the ministry’s overall theological outlook, especially its intense fixation on the supposed inerrancy of the Bible, is generally characteristic specifically of fundamentalist Protestantism, rather than Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, or mainline Protestantism. The ministry is therefore very explicitly trying to use archaeology to advance a specific theological agenda associated with a specific form of Protestant Christianity.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the home page of the official website of the Associates for Biblical Research, showing their tagline

The Associates for Biblical Research also hold views on a wide range of issues that go against the overwhelming consensus of mainstream Biblical scholars (including mainstream Christian and Jewish Biblical scholars). For instance, the overwhelming consensus of Biblical scholars is that the creation stories in the Book of Genesis (which I discuss at much greater length in this post I wrote in September 2020) are not historically true, but rather made-up stories falling in the genre of myth that should be interpreted in the context of other ancient Near Eastern creation myths.

By sharp contrast, the Associates for Biblical Research believe that God literally created the entire universe and all living things in six literal, twenty-four-hour days, that Adam and Eve were real people, that the Garden of Eden was a real place, that Satan in the form of a literal talking snake tempted Eve, and that Adam and Eve literally ate a fruit from a literal tree in the Garden of Eden. Their “Statement of Faith” declares:

“We believe the accounts found in Genesis 1-11 contain factual and real-time, chronology, historical events, places, and persons. This includes the accuracy and real historicity of the persons, ages, and events recorded in the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11, which may or may not be exhaustive. These records incorporate the accounts of those who were eyewitnesses to the events recorded. We find no biblical, hermeneutical, or exegetical basis to interpret them allegorically, non-historically, or mythically. These accounts do not require knowledge of Ancient Near Eastern literature to be interpreted correctly. We deny that God used erroneous worldviews from ANE mythology to inspire the writing of Genesis 1-11.”

This is a position that no mainstream scholar of the Hebrew Bible would endorse. It is true that most Jewish and Christian Biblical scholars would maintain that the creation stories in the Book of Genesis are divinely inspired in some sense and that they hold enduring religious significance, but they would still acknowledge that these stories did not actually take place in the form of historical events.

Of course, the fact that the Associates for Biblical Research are an apologetics organization that holds some very fringe ideological stances does not necessarily mean that the inscription their researchers claim to have discovered is not real. It does, however, mean that they have a very strong ideological motivation to construe any evidence they may have found in a way that, from their perspective, most directly supports the historicity of the supposed “Biblical narrative,” even if doing so requires them to make massive leaps of interpretation in order to support their agenda.

Even if you personally agree with the Associates for Biblical Research’s ideological stance, you have to acknowledge that, if an organization’s whole purpose for existing is to prove that every statement in the Bible is historically accurate, that is inevitably going to shape how they describe and interpret evidence.

ABOVE: The Fall of Man, painted between 1628 and 1629 by the Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens

Why the alleged circumstances of this announcement are suspicious

The circumstances of the announcement of the inscription are also highly suspicious. The researchers made the first public announcement about their supposed discovery at a press conference without having published anything about it in any kind of scholarly or peer-reviewed journal. This means that the wider community of Biblical scholars and archaeologists did not have any chance to review the researchers’ claims about the alleged discovery before those claims became published as news.

The researchers have also for some reason chosen not to show any of the actual tomographic scans that they supposedly used to draw their conclusion about the existence of the inscription. This means that they have presented absolutely no hard evidence to support any of their claims about the inscription. The only evidence that is currently public is what the researchers themselves have asserted.

While I would very much like to avoid drawing cynical conclusions, these two facts that I have just mentioned make it really seem like Stripling, van der Veen, and Galil already know that their evidence will not hold up to academic scrutiny and they are therefore intentionally trying to generate as much news coverage of their claims as possible before their claims are ultimately debunked, so that more people will read and remember their claims than will read and remember the debunking of them.

As of right now, there is no clear, publicly available evidence that the tablet even contains any inscription at all, let alone one that says what the researchers claim it says. It is entirely possible that the “inscription” may be nothing more than the pareidolic perception of researchers overzealously committed to finding supposed “proof” that the Bible is historically accurate anywhere they can.

Even if there really is an inscription and the inscription really says what the researchers claim it says, its date is also very much in doubt, especially considering that the researchers’ ideological agenda gives them incentive to claim an earlier date for the tablet than the evidence might justify and that the tablet was found while Stripling’s team was sifting discarded material from an earlier excavation without stratigraphic context.

Christopher Rollston’s blog post

Christopher Rollston, who is a professor of Northwest Semitic Languages and Literatures and the current chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at George Washington University, as well as one of the foremost scholars on Northwest Semitic epigraphy and paleography currently alive, has written a post on his blog Rollston Epigraphy, which I highly recommend reading for anyone who is interested in this topic.

I am told that Rollston has a reputation as an extremely kind person who is known for always giving people the benefit of the doubt if there is any doubt of which he can give them the benefit. He is also actually rather conservative in his views regarding the historicity of the events described in the Hebrew Bible.

He mentions in his post that he believes that there was most likely “some sort of Exodus, and that there was also some sort of entrance into the land of Canaan for at least some of the Proto-Israelites, and that there were at least some battles as part of that.” Rollston certainly does not believe that the account found in the Book of Exodus is historically accurate, but the fact that he believes that there was a historical Exodus of any kind at all puts him solidly in the conservative camp.

Despite all of this, Rollston voices strong skepticism regarding Stripling, van der Veen, and Galil’s assertions. He writes:

“There are some rather striking claims in the press conference about this lead inscription and about its implications. First and foremost, I would emphasize that reading and deciphering Early Alphabetic inscriptions is difficult. Thus, is hard for me to believe that all of the readings of Stripling, Galil, and van der Veen will stand the test of time. In fact, I would predict that almost all of the readings posited in the press conference will be vigorously contested, once scholars in the field of epigraphy are allowed to see the images of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. Furthermore, I am certain that the translations of the readings will also be contested.”

“And it should also be emphasized that at the press conference *no* images from the Academy of Sciences of the Czeck Republic were shown. Thus, claims were made, but the real evidence was not shown! Normally, even during a press conference about a new inscription, a good image or two of the inscription is shown. But in this case, None! Also of import: it is striking that the only drawing presented at the press conference was a single drawing of a single putative occurrence of the divine name Yhw. And I would emphasize that this drawing struck me as particularly schematic in nature. As a result of all of these sorts of things, my hermeneutic of suspicion is, therefore, quite heightened.”

Like Rollston, I personally suspect that whatever the evidence really shows will turn out to be far less extraordinary than what Stripling, van der Veen, and Galil have claimed.