Is It or Isn’t It?

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Mystery, politics, Biblical implications, gold—a newly surfaced inscription purporting to be by King Jehoash has it all. And it may be a forgery!

If authentic, it would be the first royal inscription ever found of an Israelite king.

If authentic, it may provide evidence for Israel’s claim to the Temple Mount. If a forgery, some Israeli may be trying to manufacture evidence of Israel’s claim to the Temple Mount. Or some Palestinian may be trying to plant an obvious forgery in order to undermine supposed evidence of Israel’s claim to the Temple Mount.

If authentic, it would support the historicity of the Book of Kings.

If authentic, it might even show that the First Temple—Solomon’s Temple—was decorated with gold.

If authentic, it would cast doubt on the ability of epigraphers and philologists and Biblical scholars to detect a forgery. If a forgery, it would cast doubt on the ability of geologists to detect a forgery.

The inscription first surfaced—as far as we know at this point—in the summer of 2001, when it was shown to Israel’s leading paleographer, Joseph Naveh, of Hebrew University. According to a Jerusalem Post report, Naveh was contacted by an anonymous caller who asked him to verify the authenticity of the inscription. Naveh agreed to look at it, and a photograph of the inscription was subsequently sent to him. After examining the photograph, he asked to see the stone itself. Naveh appeared at a Jerusalem hotel at the appointed time and was met by an Israeli and a young Arab who did not speak during the meeting. According to the Israeli, the stone had been found by Arabs outside the eastern wall of the Temple Mount. Some speculate that when in recent years the Waqf, the Muslim religious trust that controls the Temple Mount, illegally excavated a monumental entryway to the underground area known as Solomon’s Stables, their bulldozer dug up this inscription, which was then dumped out unknowingly with the rest of the excavation debris into the Kidron Valley, just east of the Temple Mount. Whatever the truth, Naveh had ample opportunity to examine the stone.

The 15-line text is inscribed in pre-Exilic Hebrew letters on a blackish sandstone plaque almost 11 inches long, a little over 9 inches wide and about 3 inches thick. As is common for this time, dots serve as word dividers. The top of the inscription has been broken off. Only part of one as-yet-unidentified letter of the first line remains. The name of the Judahite king Jehoash (Yehoash in Hebrew), who ruled from about 835 to 801 B.C.E., does not appear at all. His identification is clear only from the fact that the name of his father, minus the first letter (Hazyahu in this inscription; Ahazyah in Kings and Ahaziah in English), appears quite clearly in the second line. The missing first line presumably contained the name Yehoash followed by ben (son of) followed by the A of Ahazyah. Hence, the inscription has become known as The Jehoash Inscription.

A forger would never have knowingly taken the plaque for authentication to the most prominent epigrapher in Israel. Both the Arab and the Jew who brought the plaque to Naveh at the hotel (and anyone who sent them) must have thought that the inscription was genuine. If the inscription is a forgery, it was probably out of the forger’s hands by this time.

In any event, Naveh concluded from his examination that the inscription was very probably a forgery (he has since become even more convinced of this).

That fall the plaque was taken for authentication to the Geological Survey of Israel (GSI). At some point, the owner came to be represented by one of the most prominent law firms in Israel, Herzog, Fox and Neeman. The Herzog is Issac Herzog, a member of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) and an adviser to former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. The lawyers will not disclose the name of their client, however, or anything else concerning the finding or present ownership of the plaque.

The GSI made a thorough study of the plaque, its inscription and the patina (the film or crust that, after many centuries, forms over an ancient object) in both cracks in the stone and in the inscription, and declared the inscription authentic.

The geologists at the GSI—Shimon Ilani, Amnon Rosenfeld and Michael Dvorachek—decided to publish their report in the GSI journal. It is very difficult to keep a secret in Israel, and the existence of the inscription soon became known.

Thus began a debate among scholars and scientists as heated as any in recent memory.

Harvard’s Frank Moore Cross finds that orthographically (in terms of spelling) the forger “errs catastrophically in at least two cases.” Spelling in ancient Hebrew gradually changed. To know when this happened requires expert knowledge. The watershed is the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. For example, Biblical texts composed before the destruction spell David as DVD; after the destruction, it was spelled DVYD. The spelling errors that Cross found in the inscription are much more complicated than that example and require much more expertise to detect. But Johns Hopkins professor Kyle McCarter calls one of the errors Cross detected “a real howler.” McCarter added, “I thought the bad guys had become a lot more sophisticated.” Naveh is now quoted as saying, “It is not 023just that I have serious doubts about its authenticity, but I believe it is a fake.” Naveh notes that “numerous details do not coincide with [supposed] dates [of the letters].” Robert Deutsch of Haifa University (a paleographer and an antiquities dealer) finds it “a very poor forgery,” “a hybrid chimera,” combining Moabite, Phoenician and Hebrew letters. Christopher Rollston, of Emmanuel School of Religion and editor of the scholarly journal Maarav, also finds the inscription “not difficult to expose as a forgery because it wasn’t particularly well done… The script of The Jehoash Inscription deviates so substantially from all provenanced Iron Age Hebrew inscriptions (in terms of mixtures of forms from different periods and languages) that it cannot, in my opinion, be seriously considered ancient.”

Other scholars, however, express themselves more cautiously: It may be a fake. Or it may be authentic. According to an article in Ha’aretz, these fence-sitters include Gabriel Barkay of Bar-Ilan University, Shmuel Safrai of Hebrew University, Chaim Cohen of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Ada Yardeni, a leading Israeli paleographer, and André Lemaire of the Sorbonne. We have so little material from early Iron Age II, when this inscription purports to have been written, that the seeming errors may be authentic variations that we don’t yet know about—and indeed would prove the authenticity of the inscription.

The royal inscription apparently speaks in King Jehoash’s name of “men in the land and in the desert and in all the cities of Judah” who gave much “consecrated silver” to the Temple, to buy “quarry stone and juniper wood and Edomite copper.” The money was also used to pay the workmen. Thus were repaired “the Temple [House], and the encircling walls, and the storied structure, and the lattice works, and the spiral staircases and the recesses and the doors.” The plaque would be a testimony to the workers’ craftsmanship. The inscription ends with an awkwardly phrased (according to Cross) divine invocation: “May Yahweh ordain his people with blessing.” Yahweh is the personal name of the Israelite God.

This text closely parallels a passage in 2 Kings 12. Jehoash tells the priests to collect sacred money to repair the Temple (2 Kings 12:5–6). In the Biblical text, the priests apparently failed to make the repairs. But then they collected money that was used to repair the House (Temple), specifically “to pay the carpenters and the laborers who worked on the House of Yahweh, and the masons and the stone—cutters. They also paid for wood and for quarried stone with which to make the repairs on the House of Yahweh, and for every other expenditure that had to be made in repairing the House” (2 Kings 12:12–13).

If the inscription is authentic, it is a remarkable confirmation of the Biblical text. Neither the inscription nor the Biblical text seems to read easily. Both have an archaic feel. Nadav Na’aman, of Tel Aviv University, analyzed this Biblical passage in a Dutch journal in 1998. Although Kings is part of the Deuteronomic History compiled in the late seventh century B.C.E., the compiler had earlier sources that he incorporated into the text. Na’aman speculated in his article that the source of this Biblical account was a royal inscription. When Na’aman later saw the text of The Jehoash Inscription, he exclaimed, “Either I hit the nail on the head, and my theory is confirmed, or the forger read my theory and decided to confirm it.”

So which is it?

According to the geologists, science proves the authenticity of the inscription. They paid particular attention to the patina. They found brown ocherous patina both in the incisions of the inscription and in a central crack in the stone. The patina also formed on the broken upper edge of the plaque. The crack descends diagonally from the right margin near the eighth line to the last letter in the eleventh line. It crosses ten letters in four lines. “Clearly,” 069say the geologists, “the crack developed after the engraving and before the formation of the patina.” Moroever, “It would be virtually impossible to engrave a large number of [the] letters… after the formation of the crack [which contains the patina] without causing breakage to the plate.”

As for the patina, “It contains about the same silica content as the rock itself, and supports the conclusion that the patina formed naturally on the plate. The patina is enriched in the elements Ca [calcium] and Fe [iron] and diluted in K [potassium] and Al [aluminum], relative to the rock. Accordingly, the chemical composition of the patina was influenced not only by the composition of the rock itself, but was also affected by the burial setting. It is suggested that the tablet was buried within a wet soil, rich in lime and iron.”

No adhesive materials or any other artificial substances were found in the patina (these were looked for just in case the forgers might have taken patina from a different stone and applied it to the inscription and the plaque).

Particles of carbon were detected in the patina (perhaps a result of burning wood from a fire in which the plaque burned). A carbon-14 test was conducted on the carbon particles in the patina by a laboratory in Florida. The result: a date of about 400 to 200 B.C.E. with a 95 percent chance of accuracy.

Most intriguingly, the patina also contains tiny globules of pure gold that can be formed by intense burning. It is difficult not to wonder whether the plaque was in the Temple with its gold and was burned in 586 B.C.E., when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem. The carbon particles in the patina may also have come from the fire, say the geologists.

How smart could the forger be? Did he plant the microscopic globules of pure gold in the patina just to fool us? Did he consciously add the gold to lead us into thinking that this dark stone plaque once hung in the Temple on a white limestone wall decorated with gold, as the Bible says? Did he purposely add the carbon molecules to the mix, using some ancient burnt wood? Was he also able to fake patina in a way that would fool the geologists?

Or are the script scholars wrong?

Or is there some third possibility that we haven’t thought of?

For Victor (Avigdor) Hurowitz of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the answer is clear: “If the epigraphers—the specialists in the writing itself or the philologists who are experts in the text—say that the inscription is bogus, this means that the geologists have been duped and that the forgers have invented methods of bypassing them.”

For other equally distinguished observers, it’s the other way around. “Salvation will not come from archaeologists or epigraphers,” says Na’aman. “There is no difficulty today in creating an inscription with writing appropriate to the period, such as the writing on what is called the King Jehoash inscription. This is especially true since archaeologists and epigraphers have no precedent for this kind of inscription, such an ancient Judahite royal inscription.” Therefore the deciding factor in the debate will be the scientific one, rendered by the geologists.

Avi Hurvitz, of Hebrew University, agrees: The geologists “are outside the debate of stylistic, linguistic, Biblical and historical similarities. They are entirely objective.” About the geologists who performed the tests on the inscription, Hurvitz says, “They are first-rate. I have heard good things about them.”

Nevertheless, both Hurvitz and Na’aman would like to see the scientific tests replicated by others. Just as the forgers are apparently getting so sophisticated that they can produce a text that will fool the philologists and paleographers, they may also be so scientifically sophisticated that they can fool the geologists.

What should we make of all this? Some would conclude that we must simply ignore all unprovenanced finds. For me, this is an entirely unjustified conclusion. It is certainly true that unprovenanced finds always come to us with the suspicion of forgery. We are properly skeptical. Sometimes, however, our investigation leads us to conclude that the find is almost certainly authentic. In other cases, we are convinced that a find is almost certainly a forgery. And sometimes the conclusion is uncertain, as it seems to be in this case—at least for the moment.

Uncertainty is by no means an unusual characteristic in the study of ancient history or in archaeology. Dates are sometimes uncertain because of varying understandings of stratigraphy or the dates of parallels. Interpretations of the evidence also often widely differ, as do reconstructions of inscriptions, buildings and other artifacts. And in some cases the issue of authenticity of unprovenanced objects will add another element of uncertainty.

What the profession should do is hone its skills in detecting forgeries. A major program is needed to determine whether and how patina can be faked. Are there other tests for detecting a forgery of various kinds of artifacts and inscriptions? What should be the protocol for testing for forgery? The profession should be at least as smart as the forgers—and certainly better organized.

Because there is likely to be a large response to this article, we will try to print some of the early letters in our next issue, instead of our usual practice of waiting until the second issue to publish replies. We will also publish in that issue Professor Cross’s analysis of the inscription.

Mystery, politics, Biblical implications, gold—a newly surfaced inscription purporting to be by King Jehoash has it all. And it may be a forgery! If authentic, it would be the first royal inscription ever found of an Israelite king. If authentic, it may provide evidence for Israel’s claim to the Temple Mount. If a forgery, some Israeli may be trying to manufacture evidence of Israel’s claim to the Temple Mount. Or some Palestinian may be trying to plant an obvious forgery in order to undermine supposed evidence of Israel’s claim to the Temple Mount. If authentic, it would support the […]