UPDATE:
The paper itself, “You are Cursed by the God YHW:” an early Hebrew inscription from Mt. Ebal can be read by clicking the hyperlink, although I posted the abstract from it below:
And now, OTOH...
A couple more images
The paper itself, “You are Cursed by the God YHW:” an early Hebrew inscription from Mt. Ebal can be read by clicking the hyperlink, although I posted the abstract from it below:
Abstract
In December 2019, an expedition on Mt. Ebal to examine the discarded material from Adam Zertal’s 1982–1989 excavation yielded a small, folded lead tablet. The east dump pile, from which the object emerged, contained the discarded matrix from two structures that he interpreted as altars dated to the Late Bronze Age II and Iron Age I. The earlier and smaller round altar lay underneath the geometric center of the later and larger rectangular altar. The tablet could not be opened without damaging it. A team of scientists performed X-ray tomographic measurements with different scanning parameters. The tomographically reconstructed data were subjected to advanced processing to reveal the hidden text. Epigraphic analysis of the tomographic data revealed a formulaic curse written in a proto-alphabetic script likely dating to Late Bronze Age II. The inscription falls within the literary genre of Chiastic Parallelism and predates any previously known Hebrew inscription in Israel by at least 200 years.
In December 2019, an expedition on Mt. Ebal to examine the discarded material from Adam Zertal’s 1982–1989 excavation yielded a small, folded lead tablet. The east dump pile, from which the object emerged, contained the discarded matrix from two structures that he interpreted as altars dated to the Late Bronze Age II and Iron Age I. The earlier and smaller round altar lay underneath the geometric center of the later and larger rectangular altar. The tablet could not be opened without damaging it. A team of scientists performed X-ray tomographic measurements with different scanning parameters. The tomographically reconstructed data were subjected to advanced processing to reveal the hidden text. Epigraphic analysis of the tomographic data revealed a formulaic curse written in a proto-alphabetic script likely dating to Late Bronze Age II. The inscription falls within the literary genre of Chiastic Parallelism and predates any previously known Hebrew inscription in Israel by at least 200 years.
And now, OTOH...
A couple more images
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Closeup of the outside of the arguably Late Bronze Age lead curse tablet discovered on Mount Ebal in 2019.
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Closeup of the outside of the arguably Late Bronze Age lead curse tablet discovered on Mount Ebal in 2019.
d0a877da-6505-4dfa-952d-db11a331f58c.jpg
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