038
The stone tablet that purports to have been commissioned by Jehoash, the ninth-century B.C.E. king of Judah, raised questions from the start. The first line of the inscription is missing, including the name Jehoash; the top of the plaque is broken off. The first letter of Ahaziah (Ahazyahu in Hebrew) with which the inscription now begins is also missing. Since Ahaziah was the father of Jehoash, however, this is enough for scholars to reconstruct the missing first line of the inscription to read “I am Jehoash son of A-.” And therefore the plaque has become known as the Jehoash inscription. (For a full text of the inscription, see “Jehoash Inscription,” BAR 29:03)
The inscription records the collection of money for repairs to the Temple during the reign of Jehoash, closely paralleling descriptions of repairs to the Temple by 039King Jehoash recorded in 2 Kings 12:5–15 and 2 Chronicles 24:4–14.
Many leading paleographers and linguists have declared the inscription a modern forgery, as previously reported in these pages.a And now an Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) committee has also condemned the inscription as a fake. This is the conclusion of both the Writing and Content subcommittee (on paleographical and linguistic grounds) and the Materials Committee (on geological grounds).
On the other hand, a number of linguists and paleographers are not so sure.b No one has come out and argued that the inscription is certainly authentic, only that it may well be. And the fact is the fence-sitters have become more reticent since so many important inscriptions are under a cloud as a result of the IAA investigation (see “Is Oded Golan a Forger?” earlier in this section).
The fence-sitters’ belief that the inscription may be authentic centers on the fact that we have so very few examples from this early period to compare the Jehoash inscription to. We really cannot be sure how ninth-century B.C.E. Hebrew was spoken and written. As I was repeatedly told by fence-sitters, if some of the well-known inscriptions like the Mesha Stele and the Siloam inscription came on the market today, they would be declared forgeries.
To understand the position of the fence-sitters, we may focus on the word bdq (pronounced bedeq) in line 10, which is used to mean “repair” in the inscription and in modern Hebrew. But in the Bible it refers to something damaged or broken or cracked, possibly a fissure. Frank Cross of Harvard, Kyle McCarter of Johns Hopkins, Edward Greenstein of Tel Aviv University (as reported in these pages), as well as Shmuel Ahituv of Tel Aviv University and Victor Avigdor Hurowitz of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (members of the IAA committee), all find the use of this word in the inscription to mean “repair” a fatal error. For in the inscription, bedeq is used in the sense it conveys in modern Hebrew, not biblical Hebrew. Hurowitz regards the sentence in which bedeq appears as “the most suspect in the entire inscription, and is sufficient to falsify the entire text.” Cross calls this error in the inscription a “howler.”
Chaim Cohen is a highly respected Semitic linguist from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheva, Israel. He is a fence-sitter. He is presently writing a paper defending his position. Professor Cohen notes that in Akkadian (which, like Hebrew, is a West Semitic language, but written in cuneiform) the cognate of bedeq can indeed be interpreted to mean “repair.” And Cohen’s colleague Professor Hurowitz agrees that this is true! Yet Hurowitz vociferously argues that the use of bedeq in this sense is not justified in the inscription because we do not find in the Bible the usages that Cohen relies on.
The debate is likely to go on at this level.
The fence-sitters also note that it is very unlikely that a forger or even a group of forgers would have the knowledge and skill to manufacture this inscription. To do so requires an in-depth knowledge of the Bible, of ancient Hebrew, of ninth century B.C.E. script and spelling and linguistic conventions (even with all the alleged errors) and of engraving techniques, as well as the ability to fake an extremely complicated patina containing ancient charcoal and even globules of pure gold.
Before the IAA appointed its committee to study the Jehoash inscription, it was examined by a team from the Israel Geological Survey. The Geological Survey found it authentic.
For the fence-sitters, the Geological Survey’s conclusion supports their position. For those who condemn the Jehoash inscription as a forgery, the Geological Survey’s conclusion concerning the Jehoash inscription (from the same team that found the James ossuary inscription authentic) simply undermines any support that the Geological Survey’s conclusion might have provided for the authenticity of the James ossuary inscription.
083
We have no competence to enter into this debate. We can only report the views of experts, noting that the weight of authority has condemned the Jehoash inscription as a modern forgery. But we do have a question that perhaps our readers or some expert can help us answer.
The Jehoash plaque had a crack in it. Some letters of the inscription ran through the crack. There are only two possibilities: (1) Either the letters were inscribed before the crack or (2) the letters were inscribed after the crack. Let us consider the first alternative.
If the letters were inscribed before the crack, then (a) the inscription could be authentically ancient; or (b) the forger could, at least theoretically, have created the crack after he inscribed the plaque.
In the second alternative (the letters were incised after the crack), the forger could have incised part of the letter up to the crack and then continued the remainder of the letter on the other side of the crack.
Alternatives 1(b) and 2 would be the case if the inscription were a forgery. If 1(a) applied, the inscription would be authentic.
On the face of things, 1(b) and 2 are impossible, leaving only alternative 1(a)—that the inscription is authentic. That is, a forger could neither create the crack (after he carved the letters), nor engrave letters on two sides of an existing crack. The reason is that this stone plaque is so fragile that in either case it would have broken in two. And we have proof of this.
The plaque did break—after the police confiscated it from Oded Golan. It simply broke in two. Under what conditions it broke is not known. It could have been dropped, requiring quite a blow. But I recently learned how in fact it did break. Amir Ganor, the IAA’s chief investigator, was there when it broke, and he told me. It wasn’t dropped. It was simply picked up and placed down—lightly—on the table.
If it broke in these circumstances, it would certainly have broken if a forger had tried to engrave letters on either side of the crack. And it would have been impossible to create a crack after the forger had engraved the letters without breaking the plaque.
Or am I wrong? Perhaps our readers, or some expert, can tell us how the forger might have created the crack after he engraved the letters without breaking the plaque, or how, with perhaps a very high-speed instrument, the forger could engrave on either side of the crack without breaking it.
The stone tablet that purports to have been commissioned by Jehoash, the ninth-century B.C.E. king of Judah, raised questions from the start. The first line of the inscription is missing, including the name Jehoash; the top of the plaque is broken off. The first letter of Ahaziah (Ahazyahu in Hebrew) with which the inscription now begins is also missing. Since Ahaziah was the father of Jehoash, however, this is enough for scholars to reconstruct the missing first line of the inscription to read “I am Jehoash son of A-.” And therefore the plaque has become known as the Jehoash […]
You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.
Already a library member? Log in here.
Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username
Footnotes
See “Assessing the Jehoash Inscription,” BAR 29:03.