Article of Faith?
A stone tablet could be a relic of King Solomon's temple-- or a clever forgery
The GSI, whose main business is mapping mineral and water resources, ventured into this contentious ground in September 2001, after it was approached by representatives of a private collector. Intrigued, GSI scientists performed a battery of chemical and mineralogical tests on the stone and its "patina," the thin coating that forms on stone, ceramic, or metal over centuries. They found that the letters had microscopic defects along their edges, suggesting weathering over time. The team also found that the patina was free of any adhesives that might have been used to apply a fake coating.
The most startling discovery, though, was that the patina contained tiny globules of pure gold. The researchers speculated that when the First Temple was set ablaze by the Babylonians in 587 B.C., as the biblical account holds, the gilding on the walls melted and settled on the ground as tiny particles, which later became embedded in the tablet. The GSI team didn't state definitively that the tablet was authentic, but Shimon Ilani, one of the researchers, told the Jerusalem Post, "If this is the work of a forger, I would have to shake his hand."
The owner's representatives also showed the tablet to Joseph Naveh, an epigrapher at Hebrew University, who had a different reaction: "It is not just that I have serious doubts about its authenticity, but I believe it is a fake." He noted, among other flaws, that some of the letter shapes were more typical of the seventh century B.C. Aramaic and Phoenician scripts than of Hebrew in the ninth century B.C., when the tablet would have been carved.
Other experts in ancient Semitic inscriptions have jumped in, pointing out what they see as damning errors in the usage of certain words. In an upcoming issue of Israel Exploration Journal, epigrapher Frank Moore Cross argues that the forgers reveal themselves by mistakenly using the Hebrew verbal noun bdq, which today means "the repair of." The forgers, he says, apparently did not know that in ancient times, the word had almost the opposite meaning--a "fissure." Thus, line 10 of the inscription refers to creating fissures--a suspect usage in an inscription that's all about repair work.
Some scholars have countered that there aren't enough surviving texts from the First Temple period to say for sure which usages would have been current in Judea in the ninth century B.C. But while that's true, says Greenstein, the inscription has too many "anomalies" to be authentic. The text appears to be a "mishmash" of usages and words lifted from several of these ancient texts, in addition to the Bible. He speculates that the forgers drew from several sources to cover their tracks. The effort took a certain skill, Greenstein concedes. He estimates that only a few hundred people worldwide are knowledgeable enough about Hebraic scripts to have dreamed up the inscription--if, in fact, it's a fake.
Because so few comparable texts survive, the definitive verdict may well come from the geologists, says Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, which has a series of articles on the tablet in its current issue. The tablet is now in the hands of the Israel Antiquities Authority, after the police, concerned that its purchase might have violated Israel's antiquities laws, mounted a search earlier this year. Saying he was acting on behalf of the owner, Tel Aviv antiquities collector Oded Golan turned over the tablet in March, and the Antiquities Authority has appointed a committee of experts to help determine its authenticity. One of them, Yuval Goren, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University, has been an outspoken critic of the GSI's initial evaluation of the tablet.
advertisement
