Don’t Rush to Judgment

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BAR’s reports on the so-called Jehoash inscription—which describes repairs to the Solomonic Temple by King Jehoash in the ninth century B.C.E.—are unhesitatingly condemnatory: It is a fake. A piece by the BAR editor on the 15-line inscription is headed “Demonstrably a Forgery.”^a My long-time friend Frank Cross (we wrote two joint doctoral dissertations in 1947–48 under William Foxwell Albright), now retired from Harvard, is quoted as saying that the inscription “leaves little doubt that we are dealing with a forgery, and that, fortunately, it is a rather poor forgery.” The statement was later repeated by Cross in the Israel Exploration Journal.¹ Some of the forger’s linguistic errors Cross finds “astonishing.” One mistake, he says, was “a howler.”

Another report in the same issue of BAR, by Edward Greenstein of Tel Aviv University, tells its story in the title: “Hebrew Philology Spells Fake.” “Clearly,” Greenstein tells BAR readers, “it is not a genuine artifact.” He has “no difficulty” in reaching this conclusion: “I have not the slightest doubt that this inscription is a phony.”

One of Israel’s leading experts, Joseph Naveh, is also convinced that the inscription is a forgery. Cross’s distinguished student, Kyle McCarter, now the William Foxwell Albright professor at the Johns Hopkins University, has come to a similar judgment: “I thought the bad guys had become a lot more sophisticated,” he said. Several other scholars have made similar statements.^b

In these circumstances, scholars are naturally reluctant, if not fearful, to conclude otherwise. Nevertheless, a number of scholars have indicated they are not convinced that the inscription is a forgery. According to the BAR article just cited, these include André Lemaire of the Sorbonne; Ada Yardeni, a leading Israeli paleographer; and Gabriel Barkay, of Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv.

At the meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion held in Atlanta this past November, BAR sponsored a panel of experts that considered the Jehoash inscription (as well as the famous “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus” inscription on a first-century bone box). Professor Greenstein flew in from Tel Aviv to serve as prosecutor. It would take a brave scholar to appear for the defense. Chaim Cohen, of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, however, stepped into the lion’s den and argued that the case against the inscription had not been proved.

I believe Professor Cohen effectively demonstrated that there is nothing in the language of the Jehoash inscription that requires us to label the writing a fake.

Those who argue that the Jehoash inscription is a fake raise serious linguistic issues. Citing a number of instances, they argue that an incompetent forger tried to imitate the language of the Hebrew Bible, but inadvertently introduced expressions and constructions deriving from much later Hebrew.

Their case assumes, however, that we know the Hebrew of the ninth and eighth centuries B.C.E. well enough to make such a judgment.

But what do we really know about the Hebrew of official royal inscriptions of Judah in the ninth to eighth centuries B.C.E.? The answer is rather simple: not much.

To say, therefore, that the language of the Jehoash inscription is inconsistent with what we would expect of such a royal inscription from the time of Jehoash is to assert an authority that is not merely audacious, but imaginative.

Authenticated inscriptions frequently challenge our knowledge of Biblical Hebrew, containing syntax, vocabulary and orthography (spelling) that differ from Biblical usage. Of the very few inscriptions of any kind from this period, including those of neighboring nations, every one provides something novel and sometimes disturbingly surprising about a language we may think we know but don’t always fully grasp. And the surer we are, the more surprised we are likely to be by what comes out of the ground.

In other words, if anomalies exist both in authentic inscriptions and (presumably) in the fakes, at what point in the evaluation do we know how to tip the scale? How many anomalies are required to prove that an inscription is a fake?

While the vocabulary and tone of the Jehoash inscription appear to be quite Biblical, there are problems, to be sure. Take, for example, the word for “testimony” (line 14 in the) in the phrase, “May this day become a testimony.” The word for testimony is ‘ēdût, spelled ‘ayin, dalet, waw and tov. The usual word for describing a commemorative day in Biblical Hebrew is ‘ēd, spelled simply with ‘ayin and dalet. The word ‘ēdût is most often used to mean “testimony” when referring to the Ark of the Testimony (Exodus 25:22; 26:33–34, etc.), and once in the context of Joash’s coronation ceremony (2 Kings 11:12, paralleled in 2 Chronicles 23:11), 050where it may refer to a royal convenant document. Otherwise the word ‘ēdût appears only in the Psalms and refers there to decrees issued by Yahweh. There is no Biblical parallel for the inscription’s use of ‘ēdût.

Does this mean that the forger made a mistake? Or was this use of ‘ēdût perfectly acceptable at the time? Or did the ancient inscriber simply make a mistake?

In the accompanying box, my colleagues, Shawna Dolansky Overton and David Miano, and I discuss a number of other alleged anomalies in the Jehoash inscription, as well as our reading of the inscription. The details will be of interest mostly to scholars, but these details do illustrate the nature of the debate.

I suspect that scholars as well as laypeople are likely to come away with the same opinion regarding the inscription’s authenticity that they bring to the table in the first place. Those who are predisposed to see the inscription as genuine will interpret the evidence in a way to support that conclusion. Those who wish to see it as a forgery will find it easy to make this judgment.

One can argue that the Jehoash inscription is a fake either because it contains so many deviations from standard monarchic Hebrew that it must be a fake or that the inscription conforms so well to Biblical Hebrew that is must have been borrowed directly from the Biblical text. In either case, you can conclude it is a fake: Too many anomalies prove it is a fake, and too few anomalies prove it is a fake whose creator simply copied the Bible.

Perhaps at some time in the future further testing will give us a more reliable answer. (At the moment geologists on the committee of the Israel Antiquities Authority have declared it to be a fake; a previous study by geologists from the Geological Survey of Israel declared it to be authentic. And the GSI geologists continue to maintain that they are right.) But, for the moment, we must conclude with a Scottish verdict: not proven. The verdict at this time is in effect a non-verdict. We simply don’t know with any reasonable certainty whether it is a fake or authentic. But we can thank either the ancient scribe or the modern forger for providing all of us, not merely with some entertaining instruction, but also with the opportunity to re-examine our own presuppositions as we seek the truth in this matter.

BAR’s reports on the so-called Jehoash inscription—which describes repairs to the Solomonic Temple by King Jehoash in the ninth century B.C.E.—are unhesitatingly condemnatory: It is a fake. A piece by the BAR editor on the 15-line inscription is headed “Demonstrably a Forgery.”a My long-time friend Frank Cross (we wrote two joint doctoral dissertations in 1947–48 under William Foxwell Albright), now retired from Harvard, is quoted as saying that the inscription “leaves little doubt that we are dealing with a forgery, and that, fortunately, it is a rather poor forgery.” The statement was later repeated by Cross in the […]