Shapira Scroll

1883, and How Quickly It Ended

M. W. Shapira kept an antiquities shop in Jerusalem and had a history. In the 1870s, after the Moabite Stone made Moabite material valuable, he had sold the Prussian government a quantity of inscribed Moabite pottery for 20,000 thaler; C. Clermont-Ganneau and others showed it to be modern work produced by one of Shapira's own suppliers. He was not shown to have made the pottery himself, but the affair sat behind everything that followed.

In 1883 he brought to London a set of narrow strips of darkened leather, written in a paleo-Hebrew script, carrying a version of the words of Moses that differed in many particulars from the book of Deuteronomy. He asked, it was reported, a million pounds. The British Museum put part of the set on public exhibition and crowds came to look. C. D. Ginsburg examined them and published translations in The Times across August. The French government sent Clermont-Ganneau to look; the museum would not give him access to the whole set, but he satisfied himself from the exhibited strips that the collection was forged, and Ginsburg's report to the museum said the same. It had taken a few weeks.

What happened next is the part to handle carefully rather than dramatically. Shapira was ruined. He left England, and in March 1884 he took his own life in Rotterdam; the standard reference accounts give the date as the 11th, others as the 9th. He was never shown to have forged anything. The strips passed out of the museum's hands, changed owners, and disappeared. Nobody has seen them since, and every argument about them since has had to be conducted from nineteenth-century transcriptions, drawings and photographs.

The Case Reopened

For most of a century the verdict held without much examination, and then two things happened. The Judean Desert manuscripts came out of the caves from 1947, and it became clear that leather scrolls of biblical text surviving from antiquity in that region were not the impossibility the Victorian world had assumed. Isolated scholars raised the Shapira question again from the 1950s onward, and were mostly ignored.

The serious reopening came in 2021, when I. Dershowitz, who holds the chair of Hebrew Bible and its exegesis at the University of Potsdam, published a full critical edition and philological study with Mohr Siebeck. His argument is not that the strips were probably genuine and should be given the benefit of the doubt. It is that the text they carry is not a version of Deuteronomy at all, but an earlier work standing behind it — one that lacks the Deuteronomic law code entirely, and whose language, in an excursus written with N. Pat-El, he argues fits Iron Age epigraphic Hebrew. He also published archival material bearing on the affair that had not been used before.

The response was immediate and it was not agreement. In the Winter 2021 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review the two cases ran side by side: Dershowitz with J. Tabor of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for authenticity, and R. Hendel of the University of California, Berkeley with M. Richelle of the Université Catholique de Louvain for forgery. The case for forgery rests on the letters and the spelling — differences of letterform, stance and cursive combination, and features of spelling and grammar, which Hendel and Richelle read as the marks of a nineteenth-century hand that knew Deuteronomy in its finished form. Most specialists remain unpersuaded by Dershowitz. That is not the same as saying the question is closed, and the people arguing on both sides are serious.

An Argument Nobody Can Finish

The honest description of the present state is that the Shapira strips were declared forged in 1883 on evidence that would not now be accepted as sufficient, that the great majority of specialists still think the verdict was right, and that the object which could settle it is gone. That last fact is decisive in a way readers often skip past. There is no leather to date, no ink to analyse, no material to put under a microscope. Every technique that has resolved other cases in this section — the patina work on the pomegranate, the elemental analysis of the museum fragments — is simply unavailable here. What remains is philology and paleography argued over photographs.

That makes the Shapira affair a strange kind of case, and an instructive one. It is the only item in this section where the reopening is being done by scholars pressing an argument in the peer-reviewed literature rather than by an owner defending an asset. Dershowitz has nothing to sell. The manuscripts are lost, so no one profits whichever way it goes. Whatever the answer turns out to be, that is what a genuine reopening looks like, and it is worth being able to tell it apart from the other kind.

It is also worth saying plainly what would follow if Dershowitz were right, because it is not what a reader might expect. A proto-Deuteronomy would not confirm the Bible; it would complicate it, supplying an earlier and different version of a book Christians read as it stands. Evangelical readers can hold that possibility without alarm — the text of Deuteronomy as the church received it is not in question here, and the history of how biblical books came together has never been a simple one. The reason to want the truth about the Shapira strips is that it is the truth, not that it would be convenient.

Scripture references

• Deuteronomy 5:6 — The opening of the Decalogue as Deuteronomy gives it — the section the strips are said to carry in a different form
• Deuteronomy 6:4 — Hear, Israel: Yahweh is our God. Yahweh is one
• Deuteronomy 34:5 — So Moses died there in the land of Moab — the ending of the work the strips were said to preserve
• Deuteronomy 4:2 — You shall not add to the word which I command you, neither shall you take away from it

Sources

• Primary text"Shapira, M. W.", Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition (1911) — Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1911, public domain, hosted at Wikisource · The Victorian verdict in its own words, and the source for the Moabite pottery affair, the 1883 exhibition, Ginsburg's translations in The Times of 4, 17 and 22 August 1883, Clermont-Ganneau's investigation, and the death in Rotterdam on 11 March 1884Supports: The 1883 sequence of events and the nineteenth-century judgement, stated by that century itself
• ScholarshipI. Dershowitz, The Valediction of Moses: A Proto-Biblical Book — Idan Dershowitz, Chair of Hebrew Bible and Its Exegesis, University of Potsdam · Forschungen zum Alten Testament, Mohr Siebeck, 2021, 216 pages. Includes a full critical edition and English translation, and a linguistic excursus written with N. Pat-ElSupports: The 2021 case for authenticity and for the text being a proto-biblical work rather than a version of Deuteronomy
• ScholarshipR. Hendel and M. Richelle, "The Shapira Scrolls: The Case for Forgery"; I. Dershowitz and J. Tabor, "The Shapira Scrolls: The Case for Authenticity" — Ronald Hendel (University of California, Berkeley), Matthieu Richelle (Universite Catholique de Louvain), Idan Dershowitz (University of Potsdam), James Tabor (University of North Carolina at Charlotte) · Biblical Archaeology Review, Winter 2021 - the two cases published back to back in the same issueSupports: The shape of the present dispute and the named scholars on each side
• Holding institutionBiblical Archaeology Society, "Scholars Debate the Authenticity of the Shapira Scrolls" — Biblical Archaeology Society, 8 December 2021 - the publisher that commissioned both sides · The announcement of the paired articles, naming the four scholars, their institutions and their positionsSupports: The 2021 framing of the debate and the institutional affiliations given here

Further reading

• 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica on M. W. Shapira, at Wikisource

Reflect

A man was ruined in a few weeks by a verdict that may not have been safe, and the thing that could settle it is lost. What do you owe someone whose case you cannot now hear?