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A Folded Piece of Lead, and a Reading Most Specialists Do Not Accept

Mount Ebal Lead Object

Also called The Mount Ebal 'curse tablet' No excavation context

A folded square of lead about two centimetres across, recovered in 2019 by wet-sifting spoil left over from an excavation of the 1980s. Its finders published tomographic scans in 2023 and read a curse formula of forty-eight letters inside it, including a divine name. Specialists outside the team say the scans do not demonstrate any letters at all — and one of the two epigraphers on the team has since rejected most of the reading himself.

Object
A folded square of lead about 2 cm across, still folded; the claim of writing inside it rests on X-ray tomography
Found at
Mount Ebal, above Shechem — recovered from the east dump pile of a previous excavation, not from a stratified context
Found in
December 2019
Found by
A wet-sifting team led by S. Stripling for the Associates for Biblical Research, working through spoil discarded by A. Zertal's excavations of 1982-1989
Dates from
Claimed Late Bronze Age II by its publishers. There is no stratigraphic basis for any date, and the identification as an uninscribed fishing weight would place it anywhere Disputed dating
Now held at
Held by the excavation team; the object has never been unfolded

Not Excavated: Sifted From a Spoil Heap

The provenance of this object needs stating before anything else, because almost every account of it skips past the detail that matters. It was not dug up. A. Zertal excavated on Mount Ebal between 1982 and 1989, and found there a structure he interpreted as an altar, which he connected with the altar Joshua is said to have built. The material he removed and discarded sat in dump piles on the mountain. In December 2019 a team led by S. Stripling, director of the Archaeological Studies Institute at The Bible Seminary in Katy, Texas, working with the Associates for Biblical Research, put material from the east dump pile through a wet-sifting process, and a small folded piece of lead came out of it.

Wet sifting is a genuinely valuable technique and it recovers small objects that dry sifting misses. What it cannot recover is stratigraphy. An object that comes out of a spoil heap has no layer, no associated pottery, no floor level and no sealed context — nothing that would allow anyone to date it independently of the object itself. Everything asserted about this piece of lead's age rests on where the dirt it was sitting in is thought to have come from, and on the reading of what is said to be written inside it.

The team announced the find at a press conference at the Lanier Theological Library in Houston on 24 March 2022, before any scholarly publication. Their claim was that the object carried a Late Bronze Age curse formula in Hebrew, that it was centuries older than any known Hebrew inscription, and — in S. Stripling's own words at the conference — that "One can no longer argue with a straight face that the biblical text was not written until the Persian period or the Hellenistic period, as many higher critics have done, when we clearly do have the ability to write the entire text [of the Bible] at a much, much earlier date." G. Galil made the same point his own way: "The scribe that wrote this ancient text, believe me, he could write every chapter in the Bible." No images from the scans were shown.

What Was Published, and What Was Said Back

The scholarly article appeared on 12 May 2023 in Heritage Science, by S. Stripling, G. Galil, I. Kumpova, J. Valach, P. G. van der Veen and D. Vavrik. The lead object is still folded and cannot be opened without destroying it, so the team used X-ray tomography at the Czech Academy of Sciences and processed the reconstructed data to look for writing on the interior surfaces. Their epigraphic reading, by G. Galil of the University of Haifa and P. G. van der Veen of Mainz, is a formulaic curse invoking the divine name, arranged as a chiasm and dated to Late Bronze Age II.

The response was concentrated and it was not about theology. In December 2023 the Israel Exploration Journal ran three articles on the object. A. M. Maeir of Bar-Ilan University and C. Rollston of George Washington University concluded that the tomographic images fail to demonstrate any discernible letters, and that the object is most reasonably understood as an uninscribed lead fishing-net weight. A. Mazar argued the same identification independently. N. Yahalom-Mack examined the source of the lead itself. A further refutation by M. S. Haughwout appeared in February 2024 in the same journal that had published the original article, concluding that there is at present insufficient epigraphic evidence to conclude that any writing exists on the object at all.

The specific complaints are worth knowing because they are checkable. The published drawings do not match the published images, so the reading is not anchored to the data a reader can see. The lead surface shows random scratches, striations, pitting and indentations of the kind lead develops as it corrodes. Rollston had already noted, when the claim was first made, that the words involved — god, cursed, die — are Common Semitic and occur across several ancient languages, so even if they were there they would not establish that the language is Hebrew. And he pointed out the leap from four root words to a claim about who could write the Bible.

The team did not stay behind the reading either, and that is the part of this story most accounts leave out. Two epigraphers worked on it: G. Galil of the University of Haifa, who deciphered most of the letters and arrived at forty-eight of them, and P. G. van der Veen of Mainz. In June 2023, a month after publication, S. Stripling made public that Galil had been removed from the project, and Stripling has since spoken of forty letters rather than forty-eight. Van der Veen went further. In an email of July 2023, quoted in the published refutation, he wrote that he doubts Galil's forty-eight and would be happy with a maximum of ten to fifteen on the inside, that there may be fewer still because the scans do not always yield the evidence one wishes to see, and — flatly — that Galil's interpretation is not acceptable. He has not abandoned the object: he still holds that there is writing on it, and in December 2023 he sent A. M. Maeir an account of what he believes can be made out on the outside, in Proto-Canaanite letters. Commenting under Maeir's posting of it, he set his own reading against his co-author's in his own words: "the reading of the outside will be much more sobering than Galil's fantasy reading of the inside, where many of his letters appear in the central fold created by something hard that hit the object". Maeir published his letter and his photograph in full on his own site, answered that what he sees is incisions rather than letters, and said he would change his mind for clear evidence. Galil, for his part, published a book-length defence of the original reading in 2024.

Three Things This Is Not

It is not a forgery, and nobody serious has said it is. That accusation has not been made by the scholars who reject the reading, and this app does not make it. The object is a real piece of old lead that really came off Mount Ebal, and the people who found it published their data and submitted their work to peer review, which is what they were asked to do.

It is also not an accepted find. Those are different things, and the difference is the whole article. A claim can be honestly made, properly published, and still not accepted — and the two epigraphic responses published from outside the team both stop at the same place. A. M. Maeir and C. Rollston conclude that the tomographic images fail to demonstrate any discernible letters; M. S. Haughwout concludes that there is at present insufficient evidence to conclude that writing exists on the object at all. Neither says the letters are definitely absent, and the difference matters: what has failed is the demonstration, which is why this is a claim not accepted rather than a claim disproved. That is where the matter stands, and an article that reported the announcement without the response would be reporting a press conference rather than a result.

And it is not, either way, the thing it was announced as. Even granting the reading in full, the argument that it settles when the Pentateuch was written does not follow. Nobody in the field holds that the alphabet did not exist in the late second millennium — the Ugaritic archives alone would refute that — and the ability to write a curse formula of a few dozen letters is not the ability to compose Deuteronomy. Evangelical scholars themselves differ, honestly and publicly, about when the exodus happened and when Israel's texts were first written down; those are real debates, and they will not be resolved by a two-centimetre object with no stratigraphy. Deuteronomy 11 and 27 put the curse on Mount Ebal and Joshua 8 puts an altar there, and those texts are read the same way today as they were before December 2019.

Scripture references

Sources

Further reading

Reflect

The people who found this object wanted it to say something true about Scripture. Wanting that is not a fault. What would it cost you to want the answer more than the outcome?

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