Thousands of Israelis visited an archaeological site on Monday that to the untrained eye looks like nothing more than a mound of stones. It’s hard to put a finger on any one thing that distinguishes it from the many other sites spreading across the West Bank that feature rocks of various sizes and lack any identifying sign or explanation.But anyone taking the trouble to listen to one of the guides there will learn that it is nothing less than “Joshua’s altar on Mount Ebal.”That claim is subject to dispute: Many archaeologists do not believe it is an altar of any kind, certainly not Joshua’s. But that hasn’t stopped the settlers from claiming that Palestinians are doing everything to destroy an important piece of Jewish heritage.
Any significance of this discovery is not just contingent upon the nature of the text within. Interpretation of the text to one side, what we have here is clearly a defixio—an example of a typical sealed/folded thin lead tablet well known in association with curses. It was found, not coincidentally, on the biblical “mount of cursing” associated with Joshua and the early Israelites—Mount Ebal. Further, it was found at the very site identified as Joshua’s altar (among a significant quantity of animal bones—96% of which were from kosher animals, and the remaining being from “snake, tortoise, etc”).Yes, the tablet was not found in situ, in a sealed layer during excavation—it was sifted by Stripling’s team out of the excavation dumps from the structure, left behind by the late Prof. Adam Zertal (who, together with his associate Zvi Koenigsberg, were the first to identify the altar structure, in 1983). Nevertheless, as highlighted in the article, given that 99.75% of the diagnostic pottery sherds from the dumps dated to the Late Bronze ii–Iron i periods (circa 1400–1000 b.c.e.)—and given that the Lavrion mine, from which the tablet’s lead was sourced, was also in operation during the Late Bronze Age—it follows that the tablet most logically dates to within this early, pre-monarchical period: the very time frame associated with Joshua, the conquest of the Promised Land, and the “curse” ritual upon Mount Ebal. (There’s also an additional fascinating link to Job 19:28, a passage which describes the practice of writing “with an iron pen and lead”; note that chronologically, Job is among the earliest books in the Bible.)Particulars regarding the inscription aside (and it is, at the very least, objectively clear that there is something written on/in it), it is surely not an overstatement to say that the above facts stand alone as remarkable parallels, and from such an early period—one comparatively less highlighted in biblical archaeological research and reporting.
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