The Linguist: Hebrew Philology Spells Fake

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The language of The Jehoash Inscription is fake. It is not idiomatic ancient Hebrew but rather a perversion of it. If authentic, it would be a phenomenal find. But clearly it is not a genuine artifact.

To be declared authentic, any inscription that has not been excavated under controlled conditions by professional archaeologists must pass three basic tests. One is physical: The stone, the patina and any markings must all be judged to be ancient by an archaeological laboratory.

Second, the shape and form of the letters must be appropriate to the time and place that the inscription is believed to hail from. This is the paleographical test.

Third, the language, rhetoric and form of the inscription must be those common to monumental royal inscriptions of the First Temple period (tenth through early sixth centuries B.C.E.). This is the philological test, the area of my expertise. Paleographers have already declared the inscription a forgery. Geologists are apparently divided. As an expert in the language 029of the Hebrew Bible, I have no difficulty in declaring The Jehoash Inscription a fake. Colleagues with whom I have discussed the matter agree.

I will discuss several examples here [some of which are also referred to in the discussion of Frank Moore Cross’s analysis; we include Cross’s examples because Greenstein comes at the subject from a slightly different angle—Ed.] One might argue that one or two of them are not enough to prove that The Jehoash Inscription is a fake, but one can hardly ignore the cumulative weight of all.

1. The Jehoash Inscription uses the expression “to make repairs to the house (temple),” wa’àas ‘et bedeq habbayit. This is fine in modern Hebrew. But in Biblical Hebrew, as is clear from 2 Kings 12, where the story of Jehoash’s effort is related, bedeq habbayit does not mean “repair” the “house” (the Jerusalem Temple), but it refers to the fissures in the house that require repair!¹ The verb in Biblical Hebrew that does mean “repair” is hizzeq, “to fortify”—one repairs the fissures in the foundations and walls by “fortifying” them.

In later Hebrew (apparently beginning with the Mishnah, the code of Jewish law that was written down in the early third century C.E.), the term bedeq bayit came to be used in the sense of “(setting) the house in order.” Whoever wrote the inscription did not understand the Biblical usage and replaced the ancient locution with a much later one.

2. The inscription expresses the hope that “the work will succeed” (ki titslah hammelakhah). In early Biblical Hebrew a person succeeds (literally, “makes one’s path smooth”) in one’s work. The “work” itself does not succeed. Only in later Hebrew (compare, for example, the post-Exilic Psalm 1:3) can a person’s action “succeed.”

3. The inscription says that “this day will be a testimony (‘edut) (to the success of the project).” In First Temple Hebrew the word ‘edut does not mean “testimony,” but rather “covenant.”

The term “Ark of the Covenant” is expressed using either the common word for “covenant”—berit—or the more restricted, “priestly” word, ‘edut. The way one says “to be [or serve as] testimony” in early Hebrew is “to be a witness”—consistently using the term ‘ed and never ‘edut—as one can see in Genesis 31:44; Deuteronomy 31:19, 21, 26; and Isaiah 19:20.

4. The word used in the inscription with the supposed 030meaning of “spiral staircases” has been assumed by the forger to be (in the singular) lul. The word occurs only once in the Bible, in the form belulim (1 Kings 6:8). The forger took the first syllable, be-, to be a preposition and not part of the root. However, the Hebrew linguist Elisha Qimron made a cogent case, long before the announcement of this inscription, that the initial b is part of the word’s root, which is b-l-l, meaning “to mix, stir.” The inscription’s lul is thus a ghost word. And even if it were not, its spelling with a vav in the middle to indicate the long vowel is a deviation from ancient scribal practice that, by itself, raises the most serious suspicions.

5. The inscription concludes with the invocation of a divine blessing for the people. In the hundreds of royal inscriptions that have come down to us from the ancient Near East, however, there are no parallels to the language of the inscription’s invocation. The forger based the inscription’s final blessing on a similar formula found in Leviticus 25:21 and Deuteronomy 28:8. However, there is a telltale difference in syntax between the version in the inscription and the instances in the Bible. In the Bible, God is asked to “command a blessing for you,” while in the inscription God is to “command the people with a blessing,” which is both a deviation from the Biblical idiom and nonsensical.

Repeatedly one finds in the inscription not new Hebrew forms that are simply not attested in the Bible or in ancient Hebrew inscriptions but naïve distortions of known Biblical expressions, as well as the apparent use of a word that never even existed!

There is a simple explanation for all of these philological anomalies. Someone who reads Biblical Hebrew as though it were modern Hebrew has turned authentic ancient expressions into later locutions and corrupted genuine idioms thanks to an ignorance of the finer points of the classical language. The words may be the words of the Bible, but their usage is that of a fraud.

If the text has been forged, you may ask, why would someone invest so much into producing an object that seems authentic physically but not linguistically?

There are at least two possible answers: (1) The forger does not realize how poorly he (or she) understands Biblical Hebrew. He or she possesses certain technical skills, but not of the linguistic kind. The chutzpah of the forger is evident in the length and full legibility of the inscription that he or she has tried to put over on us. (2) The forger may also be relying on the public’s trust of the so-called hard sciences and distrust of philology, which belongs to the humanities. If the geologists can’t find anything wrong with the inscription, many people might wonder, how can the philologists be so sure it’s a fake?

Sometimes we do not have an adequate basis for making determinations; but sometimes, as in the present case, we do. I have not the slightest doubt that this inscription is a phony. It was not written in ancient times.

The language of The Jehoash Inscription is fake. It is not idiomatic ancient Hebrew but rather a perversion of it. If authentic, it would be a phenomenal find. But clearly it is not a genuine artifact. To be declared authentic, any inscription that has not been excavated under controlled conditions by professional archaeologists must pass three basic tests. One is physical: The stone, the patina and any markings must all be judged to be ancient by an archaeological laboratory. Second, the shape and form of the letters must be appropriate to the time and place that the inscription is […]