Let’s be Serious About the Bat Creek Stone

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Let me see if I have this straight. Some 19 centuries ago there was a group of Jews, citizens of one of the Judean port cities like Caesarea or Joppa, who fled their homes to escape the violence and confusion of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome and, reluctantly forsaking their native land, embarked on a life at sea. They probably turned to piracy for a while, preying on commercial vessels in the shipping lanes of the eastern Mediterranean, like the refugees from Joppa whose shipwreck is reported by Josephus in The Jewish War.1 Eventually, though, they left everything […]

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Footnotes

The omission of the yod cannot be considered an orthographic option, as if it were an anachronistic “defective spelling,” reverting to practices in use over half a millennium earlier; after all, this “scribe,” when writing yeáhudim, indicated the u by waw (letter 6); he did not omit this mater lectionis. Therefore, he would not have failed to indicate the i by yod.

The same considerations seem also to rule out a coincidental similarity to paleo-Hebrew if these signs were written in Cherokee syllabic-a system about which I would presume to say nothing except to point out that, as I understand it, it was devised by Sequoyah in the 1820s and would therefore be as out of place as paleo-Hebrew in a Woodland mound.

Endnotes

Josephus, The Jewish War 3.41 S-416, 422–427.

J. Huston McColloch, Unpublished MS, Ohio State University, January, 1993, pp. 4–7 (publication forthcoming in Tennessee Anthropologist). Cross’s comments are cited from an article by Robert C. Mainfort, Jr., and Mary L. Kwas entitled “The Bat Creek Stone: Judeans in Tennessee?” Tennessee Anthropologist 16 (1991) pp. 5–7. Mainfort is regional archaeologist for West Tennessee with the Tennessee Division of Archaeology and Kwas is curator of education at the C.H. Nash Museum of Memphis State University.

See the story by Larry Lee in The Knoxville News Sentinel, February 18, 1991.

Mainfort and Kwas, “The Bat Creek Stone,” pp. 12–13.

Mainfort and Kwas (“The Bat Creek Stone,” p. 12) cite references in contemporary correspondence to the effect that Emmert’s drinking “renders his work uncertain” and at least once led to his dismissal.

This is the conclusion of Mainfort and Kwas, “The Bat Creek Stone.”