Jehoash Inscription

A Text That Answers a Question Nobody Could Answer

There is a gap in the epigraphy of ancient Israel and Judah that specialists have long found striking. The kings of Assyria, Babylon, Moab and Aram all left monumental inscriptions boasting of their building works. From the kings of Judah, in their own hands, we have nothing of the sort — no royal building inscription has ever been excavated. So when a slab of grey, fine-grained arkosic sandstone carrying a paleo-Hebrew text appeared in private hands around 2001, describing a king's repairs to the house of Yahweh, it filled precisely the hole in the record that everyone knew was there. Published counts of its lines differ — fifteen in most accounts, sixteen in others — because the top edge is broken away.

The text is conventionally called the Bedek Habayit inscription, after the Hebrew for the repair of the house, and it is read as the words of the Jehoash who took the throne as a child and later ordered the temple put back in order. The account in 2 Kings 12 describes money collected from the people, handed to the workmen, and spent on carpenters, builders, masons and stonecutters. The tablet's lines run alongside that account closely enough that the resemblance was noticed immediately — by its supporters as corroboration, and by its critics as the reason to be careful.

The tablet has no findspot. It surfaced through the antiquities trade and was in the possession of the Tel Aviv collector O. Golan. In 2002, S. Ilani and colleagues at the Geological Survey of Israel published an examination of the stone and its patina which they read as supporting the patina's antiquity; after the police confiscated the tablet it broke in two, accidentally, along a fissure that already ran across it. Two years later, an Israel Antiquities Authority committee reached the opposite conclusion, and in 2004 the state charged Golan with forging both this tablet and the James Ossuary.

Acquitted in Court, Rejected in the Field

The forgery trial that followed ran more than five years in the Jerusalem District Court and ended on 14 March 2012 with the acquittal of O. Golan and the dealer R. Deutsch on every forgery charge. The state then petitioned to keep the tablet anyway, describing it as an antiquity — after a decade spent arguing that it was a modern forgery. In October 2013 a panel of the Supreme Court rejected that argument by two to one, and in May 2014 the tablet went back to its owner along with hundreds of other items, more than a decade after it had been seized.

That is the legal story, and it is not the scholarly one. The epigraphic objections were raised early, in print, by people with nothing to gain. C. Rollston, who catalogued the paleographic problems and testified about this tablet at the trial, treats it as a modern forgery in his published work on epigraphic fakes, and records that F. M. Cross published an argument to the same effect in the Israel Exploration Journal and that J. Naveh told him privately he had reached the same conclusion. The objections are of a kind that recurs with market inscriptions: letter forms that belong to different centuries sitting in the same text, and phrasing that reads like biblical Hebrew as a modern reader knows it rather than like the epigraphic Hebrew of the period.

Against them stand real scientists making a real case. A. Rosenfeld and colleagues, several of whom worked for the Geological Survey of Israel, published archaeometric arguments that the patina in the letter grooves is ancient and could not have been applied recently. A. Lemaire of the Sorbonne has defended the reading. The disagreement is genuine and it is not settled by counting heads — but it is worth reporting honestly that the heads are not evenly divided. Most working epigraphers of Northwest Semitic do not accept this text, and the Israel Antiquities Authority's position has not moved since 2003.

What a Reader Should Do With an Object Like This

The rule that keeps a reader out of trouble here is the same one the courts could not apply: an acquittal is a finding about a person, not about a stone. The trial established that the state failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt that O. Golan forged this tablet. It did not establish that the tablet is ancient, and no honest account of it can use the verdict as if it had.

The second rule is about provenance, and it is the harder one to swallow because it holds even in the best case. This object has no excavation context at all. Suppose a future study vindicated it completely: it would still be a stone with no stratum, no associated pottery, no record of the ground it came out of, and therefore no independent check on anything it says. That is not a technicality. The reason an excavated inscription can carry weight is that a dozen facts about its surroundings can be tested against it, and every one of those facts was destroyed before this object reached its first buyer.

The third is the awkward one for readers who would like the tablet to be real. A text that says back to a reader exactly what Scripture already says, in Scripture's own words, is the text a forger has the strongest reason to make and the clearest guidance for making. That does not prove anything about this object. It does mean that the closeness of fit, which is what makes the tablet exciting, is also what makes specialists cautious — and a reader who understands why they are cautious is better equipped than one who has only been told the verdict. Meanwhile 2 Kings 12 and 2 Chronicles 24 describe the repair of the temple in detail, and have never needed this stone to do it.

Scripture references

• 2 Kings 12:4 — Jehoash orders the temple money collected — the passage the tablet is said to parallel
• 2 Kings 12:11 — The money weighed out and paid to carpenters and builders working on the house
• 2 Chronicles 24:12 — The parallel account: masons, carpenters, and workers in iron and bronze hired to repair the house
• Deuteronomy 4:2 — You shall not add to the word which I command you — the standard by which any added text is judged

Sources

• ScholarshipC. Rollston, "The Israeli Forgery Trial: The Verdict is Given" — Christopher Rollston, George Washington University — who testified about this tablet at the trial · Rollston Epigraphy, 14 March 2012. Records that J. Naveh and F. M. Cross both judged this inscription a modern forgery, and that Cross published his case in the Israel Exploration Journal. Served over plain httpSupports: The epigraphic case against the inscription and the named specialists who made it
• ScholarshipA. Rosenfeld, H. R. Feldman, Y. Kronfeld and W. E. Krumbein, "Implications of the 'Forgery Trial' Verdict on the Authenticity of the James Ossuary" — Amnon Rosenfeld, Geological Survey of Israel, and colleagues · Bible and Interpretation, April 2012. Covers the same trial and states the geological case for authenticity in its advocates' own wordsSupports: The archaeometric argument for the patina, presented by the side that makes it
• Holding institutionA. Rosenfeld, S. Ilani, H. R. Feldman, W. E. Krumbein and Y. Kronfeld, "Archaeometric evidence for the authenticity of the Jehoash Inscription Tablet" — Amnon Rosenfeld and Shimon Ilani of the Geological Survey of Israel, the body that examined the tablet, with colleagues · Bible and Interpretation, November 2008. The examining institution's own account: grey fine-grained arkosic sandstone, two patinas, radiocarbon on carbon particles in the patina, and gold globules read as evidence of a fire. It is a case FOR authenticity and is presented here as suchSupports: The stone's identification, the patina argument, and the fact that the Geological Survey of Israel examined the object and read the patina as ancient
• ReferenceBiblical Archaeology Society, "Israeli Court: Return the Jehoash Inscription" — Biblical Archaeology Society · Reports the October 2013 Supreme Court ruling, decided two to one against the state's confiscation argumentSupports: The October 2013 Supreme Court ruling, the state's petition to keep the tablet as an antiquity, and the accidental breaking of the plaque in police custody
• ReferenceT. Bolen, "Jehoash Tablet Returned to Oded Golan" — Todd Bolen, The Master's University, reporting M. Kalman's account · BiblePlaces Blog, May 2014Supports: The May 2014 date of the tablet's physical return and the owner's stated intention to exhibit it

Further reading

• Biblical Archaeology Society: the court orders the tablet returned

Reflect

The most persuasive forgeries are the ones that tell us what we already believe. What would it take for you to notice that you were being told what you wanted to hear?