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Astonishing headlines about
the retrieval of a “curse tablet” from a
pile of earth turned over by excavators at
Mount Ebal, the “mount of curses,” sent me
scurrying back 22 years down memory lane to
a day spent with the chief archeologist of
the site, Adam Zertal. Here’s what I
wrote at the beginning of the turn of the
millennium: |
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Tour guiding is an exciting
profession, and one of its greatest thrills
is getting an exclusive scoop on Israel's
archeological discoveries. Best of
all, we usually get them straight from the
source, right on the sites where researchers
are digging out the stories from the ancient
stones. |
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Last fall [September 22, 1999] I
followed archeologist Adam Zertal to Mount
Ebal (towering 3100 feet over biblical
Shechem, modern-day Nablus) to see the
newly-discovered altar built by the
Israelites under Joshua's supervision.
It was a wonderful opportunity to ask what
every tour guide wants to know: Why did Adam
choose to work at this precise location?
What were the theories that led him here --
the first ones, the revisionist ones, the
wildest ones? What did he want to find
-- and did he? |
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He was by no means the first dedicated
digger here on Mount Ebal. Since the
19th century, scholars have been trying to
locate the altar cited in Joshua 8:30-31:
"Then Joshua built an altar to the Lord, God
of Israel on Mount Ebal, as Moses, the
Lord's servant, had commanded the children
of Israel, as is written in the Book of the
Law of Moses, 'an altar of uncut stones that
no iron tool has ever worked.' On this they
offered burnt-offerings to the Lord and
sacrificed peace-offerings." |
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Four 19th-century expeditions set out to
search for the altar of Joshua 8, each
choosing a different spot on the mountain.
None of them found anything resembling an
altar. In the 20th century, the
ideology changed. Scholars lost their
belief in the "literal truth" of the Bible,
so they simply stopped looking for the lost
altar. |
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Photo:
Gila Yudkin |
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Mount Ebal as seen from
Mount Gerizim, September 2016 |
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When Adam Zertal arrived at Mount Ebal in
the 1980s, the whole area was virtually
terra incognita, as he put it,
completely unknown.
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Courtesy of
Wikipedia commons |
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Looking northwards, Mount
Gerizim is on the left, Mount Ebal on the
right |
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But he didn't actually come looking for an
altar. On the contrary. He was
participating in an archeological survey,
walking the land in order to map out the
territory that had belonged to the tribe of
Menashe. |
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At Mount Ebal (Jebbel Ibal in
Arabic), Adam Zertal and his fellow
surveyors came upon a non-distinguished heap
of stones nine feet high. What made
this particular heap of stones different
from the innumerable heaps of stones
everywhere else were the early Iron Age
pottery sherds scattered on its surface.
Digging beneath the stones, the
archeologists found lots of ash and bones.
They had no idea what they were looking at
-- but clearly it was "something." |
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They looked for parallels in Egypt, Greece,
Turkey, within Israel, anywhere but the
Bible. After all, Zertal was one of
those 20th-century archeologists who
believed that the Bible was passé -- at
least for archeologists. |
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Finally, though, he had no choice. As
the facts stared him in the face, Zertal
came to the conclusion that there were at
least six good reasons to believe that this
was the location where the Inaugural
Ceremony of the Nation of Israel was held.
The equivalent, you could say, of
Philadelphia and the Constitutional
Convention of the USA. |
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But with one major difference: rather than
just the Founding Fathers, the entire nation
of Israel was present. Half of the
tribes were standing in front of Mount
Gerizim, the other half in front of Mount
Ebal. The ones at Ebal, by the way,
were having more fun -- they got to shout
"Amen!" to the juiciest curses imaginable!
(Check out Deut. 27.) |
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Zertal shared with us an astounding
discovery: 93% of the bones had belonged to
sheep, goats, bulls or fallow deer (all
kosher animals). They found no remains
of dogs, donkeys, gazelles, foxes, pigs.
All the bones were from young males.
According to the Torah, sacrificial animals
such as sheep, goats and bulls have to be
under a year old, male and unblemished --
and that's exactly what they found! |
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Most of the bones were scorched, sure signs
of sacrifice. With no dwellings
nearby, 3,000 animal bones found on Mount
Ebal are a very strong argument in favor of
the site being the sacrificial altar of
Joshua 8. (Zertal told us he thought
that the Israelites first carried out the
ceremony of dedication, with animal
sacrifices on stone. Then they
gathered the ash and buried it. Then in the
third stage, they built an altar.) |
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But there's more. We can actually see
the outer perimeter where the "elders,
officers and judges" (zekanim,
shotrim, shoftim) (Joshua 8:33)
stood facing the Levitical priests who
carried the Ark of the Covenant. Also
still intact is the ramp where the high
priest would have ascended to make the
sacrifice on the altar. We can even
see the "ledge" (see Exodus 27:5) along
which the high priest would walk while
sprinkling blood over the altar. |
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This undistinguished "heap of stones" on
Mount Ebal turned out to be the earliest,
most complete Israelite ritual center ever
discovered, the site of the altar which
generations of archeologists sought.
Unearthed and decoded, it offers us an
extraordinary glimpse into the practices of
ancient Israel in the days of Joshua. |
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Courtesy of
Wikipedia commons |
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The walls of Joshua's
altar were intact up to six feet (2 meters)
in height |
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Mount Ebal awaits us -- let me bring you and
your group to the mount of the curses on
your next pilgrimage. We'll take out
our Bibles, listen to each curse of
Deuteronomy 27 and shout AMEN before
inspecting Joshua’s altar for ourselves. |
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Copyright March 2000 Gila Yudkin. Permission
needed for any reuse. |
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Postscript March 2022 |
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With the announcement on March 18, 2022 of
the sensational identification of a 3,000
“curse tablet” by means of wet sifting
debris from Adam Zertal’s dig at Mount Ebal,
I excavated my notes of a full-day seminar
for guides with Adam Zertal in September
1999. The following is a summary of
Adam Zertal’s arguments in favor of the heap
of stones he showed us as being Joshua’s
altar as described in the Book of Joshua
chapter eight. |
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A. Pottery. The pottery found was from one
period only. Early Iron Age 1240 to
1200 BC. Most of it was found inside
the altar site, and some along the way to
the mini-amphitheater below it. Inside
the structure were found two scarabs from
the last 20 years of the reign of Ramses II
(1245 to 1220 BC) |
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B. Bones. 93% of the bones belonged to
sheep, goats, bulls and fallow deer.
(The first three are specified as
sacrificial animals). Higher than
usual percentage of the bones were scorched,
a sure sign of sacrifice. Ancient
Middle-Easterners didn’t eat a lot of red
meat. Only at feast time when a lot of
people sat around together to eat the meat.
(This is obviously before the days of
refrigeration.) |
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C. Plaster. In Joshua 8 Joshua was
commanded to write upon the stones a copy of
the law of Moses. They would have
needed plaster to write down the words.
Zertal and his team found signs of plaster. |
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D. Temenos wall. Temenos
is a Greek word meaning “an enclosed sacred
space”. There were no structures (no houses,
nor temples) inside the wall enclosing the
site. |
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In this photo taken by tour leader Tom
Brewer in early September 2000 (just a
couple of weeks before the second
intifada broke out), the tenemos
wall is right behind my orange hat and the
altar is at the top of the photo. I am
holding a reconstruction of what the ramp
might have looked like. |
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E. The ramp. The ramp on the
Mount Ebal altar indicates a strict
adherence to the law in Exodus 20:26
requiring a ramp rather than steps.
There were no steps so that the priest would
not reveal his nakedness. There was no
exit or entrance. The construction is
similar to a description of the altar by the
rabbis in the Mishna (tractate Middot).
We walked around the altar to the ramp side,
facing the altar with our backs to Mount
Ebal). We were outside the porch, the
lower level, where the high priest would
stand. It was like a ledge. |
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F. The “ledge”. Exodus 27:5 speaks of
the altar of the Tabernacle having a ledge
where the priest would walk as he dabbled in
the flood of the sacrifice and sprinkled it
on the altar. It’s a kind of balcony.
Leviticus 7:2 says the blood of the
guilt-offering should be dashed against the
altar “round-about.” |
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When approaching and visiting the site
several times after the guide seminar, I
noticed further evidence for the
authenticity of the altar. Sitting or
standing on the opposite hill, all Israel
could see what was happening by the altar.
Joshua 8:32, “And he wrote there upon the
stones a copy of the law of Moses, which
he wrote before the children of Israel.” |
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Now to the “curse tablet”: |
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In 2019 the debris from a dump pile formed
during the 1980s excavation of Mount Ebal by
the late Adam Zertal and his team was
re-examined by the technique of wet sifting.
A tiny 2 by 2 cm lead artifact had been
missed by Zertal’s team. |
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Contemporary scholars just announced (in
March 2022) the deciphering of an
inscription of 40 letters in a
proto-Canaanite script dating to the Late
Bronze Age. |
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According to high-tech scans done in Prague
by the Academy of Sciences of the Czech
Republic and deciphered by Professor Gershon
Galil of the Haifa University, among others,
the tiny lead tablet reads in translation
“Cursed, cursed, cursed by the God YHW / You
will die cursed. / Cursed you will surely
die. / Cursed by YWH – cursed, cursed,
cursed.” Arur is cursed in
Hebrew. And the scholars making the
announcement claim that the tetragrammaton
(Hebrew name of God transliterated in four
letters as YHVH ) is visible as well. |
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Courtesy of
IAE |
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Enlargement of the "Curse
Tablet" -- Can you read it??? |
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Courtesy of
Wikipedia Commons |
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The tetragrammaton in
proto-Canaanite script (yod/hey/vav/hey)
from right to left |
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This “curse tablet” and its translation has
yet to be analyzed, debated and
authenticated by scholars from around the
world. Stay tuned and we shall see!!! |
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Copyright March 2022 Gila Yudkin. Permission
needed for any reuse. |
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Gila Yudkin, a Connecticut-born Yankee
living in King David’s Court, has been
guiding holy land pilgrims for forty years.
(“Forty” in the language of the Bible means
a very, very long time!) So much has
changed in our perceptions of biblical
archeology since those early days. But
one thing has remained constant:
archeologists find the stones, and Gila
takes on the challenge "of making the stones
speak." |
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Gila craves sharing her passion for
adventure in the Holy Land with like-minded
pastors, teachers and students of the bible.
Come join her!
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Read about other biblical adventurers like
Connecticut Yankee Edward
Robinson or British
Captain Charles Warren. |
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Many tour leaders believe the determining
factor for success
of any Holy Land pilgrimage is the quality
of your guide.
Read what they say about a
successful holy land tour. |
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