“You are Cursed by the God YHW:” an early Hebrew inscription from Mt. Ebal

0572191 - ÚTAM 2024 RIV DE eng J - Journal Article
Stripling, S. - Galil, G. - Kumpová, Ivana - Valach, Jaroslav - van der Veen, P. G. - Vavřík, Daniel
“You are Cursed by the God YHW:” an early Hebrew inscription from Mt. Ebal.
Heritage Science. Roč. 11, May (2023), č. článku 105. ISSN 2050-7445. E-ISSN 2050-7445
R&D Projects: GA MŠMT(CZ) EF16_019/0000766
Institutional support: RVO:68378297
Keywords : computed tomography * defixio * proto-alphabetic writing * Mt. Ebal * wet sifting * Late Bronze Age
OECD category: Nuclear related engineering
Impact factor: 2.5, year: 2022
Method of publishing: Open access
https://doi.org/10.1186/s40494-023-00920-9

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 protoalphabetic 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.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0343002