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Scott: My goal in the whole project, Nehemia, was not to find curse tablets; my goal was a boring methodological paper. I was going to publish this from two dump piles - Finkelstein’s dump pile at Shiloh in the 1980’s, Zertal’s dump pile at Mount Ebal in the 1980’s, and I was going to publish the findings and juxtapose those with what they had published and say, “Okay, here's what you published; here's what we found.” Not to make them look bad, but just simply to say we have all been missing much of the evidence in the past. We've got to change our methodology. That was my goal. In the process, we uncovered something very interesting.

Nehemia: Shalom and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I'm here today with Dr. Scott Stripling. He's been married for 40 years, he has four children and five grandchildren. He’s excavated at five sites in Israel and Jordan. He's been the director of excavations at Tel Shiloh, that's the ancient Shiloh where the Tabernacle stood for hundreds of years. But he's only been doing it since 2017, not for hundreds of years. He's been a frequent guest on media documentaries, his PhD is from Veritas International University in Sacramento, California. Shalom, Dr. Stripling.

Scott: Shalom, Nehemia. Thanks for having me on.

Nehemia: So, I'm just gonna call you Scott. Scott, I wanted you to come on today to talk about what may be the most important discovery of the 21st century, which is the Mount Ebal lead tablet. Although, just from the outset, I'm required to express my skepticism because I haven't read the academic peer reviewed journal article. And really from my perspective, more importantly, I haven't seen the photos of the tomography, which hopefully you’ll talk about.

So, tell us about this find, why it's important, and what maybe we can expect as far as being revealed to the public in the coming months. Who knows how long it is, right?

Scott: Sure, I'd love to talk about it. First of all, let me say that the reason that I had a press conference in March and discussed this before the academic publication was out, is that I had released photos of the outside of the tablet; it's very small, a two-by-two-centimeters folded lead tablet, not knowing that we had letters on the outside at that point. And so those photos… epigraphers began to see them and began to attempt to decipher the writing on the outside of the tablet. By that point, it was clear to me, and I had formed a collaborative team, that there was indeed writing on the outside. And for that reason, we felt we had to go ahead and sort of stake our claim, if you will, so that someone else didn't steal our publication, what’s known as “academic piracy”.

So having said that, the article is now in peer review. It's finished, it's 50 pages long. We have 48 letters on the inside, so there's a lot to write about. We have to dot every I and cross every T. And Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, which is a highly rated journal, is where I submitted it nine weeks ago, and we are just still in the waiting period.

Nehemia: So, the name of the journal is Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.

Scott: That's correct. And my experience has been that peer review takes one to four months, something like that. We're nine weeks into it right now, so we're just kind of in a waiting pattern. Hopefully we'll be able to reveal more once we get through that process.

Nehemia: I've had peer reviewed articles that took two years!

Scott: Well, there you go.

Nehemia: The peer review itself might have been six months, but then it was like, “Okay, well, there are 40 articles before you, so we're not publishing it this year. You're in a queue now. You're in a list.” Right?

Scott: Sure.

Nehemia: Well, that happened during COVID, so I don't… And we're still at the tail end, as far as the academic world is concerned. They've got a big backlog.

Scott: COVID impacted us too, because we discovered the tablet just before. It was December 2019. I left everything in storage in Israel assuming I'd be back in a few months, and then of course in March the world turned upside down. So, then it was about 18 months before I was able to get back into the country and get the tablet to Prague and begin the process.

Nehemia: I see. So, let’s back up a little bit for our audience who knows nothing about what we're talking about. What is this lead tablet? What is Mount Ebal? And why is this such an important find? Potentially, assuming this checks out which I hope it does. Again, like I said from the outset, I expressed my skepticism because I haven't seen it, and I guess the reason that we haven't been able to see it is because you're going through this process. And like you said, if you publish the images without the journal article then someone will scoop you. Is that pretty much the reason?

Scott: Yeah. That's pretty much it.

Nehemia: Okay, fair enough.

Scott: I'll give you a real succinct version. Abraham cut Covenant with God, Genesis 12, at a place called Elon Moreh, which is at ancient Shechem. And so, the Patriarchs have deep ties to Shechem; Joseph’s bones are buried there, Jacob’s Well is there. And Moses, in Deuteronomy 11 and 27, had told the Israelites when they gained a foothold in the land to go north and put half the tribes on Mount Gerizim and half the tribes on Mount Ebal, and pronounce blessings from Gerizim and curses from Ebal. They do this at the end of Joshua Chapter 8, and verse 30 of Joshua 8 says that Joshua built an altar on Mount Ebal.

Adam Zertal, an archaeologist from Haifa University, in 1980, in his survey of the Manasseh Hill Country, found that location. He did not have any idea what it was. He wasn't really even aware of the biblical literature; he was a total secularist. He began to uncover the mantle of stones, as he called them, and found a structure. Somebody showed him Joshua 8. He inquired further, and to his shock and dismay he came to believe that, indeed, this was Joshua's altar.

He had two stratum, an Iron Age 1 stratum and an LB2 stratum. And so that's it, there's only two choices. So, when we start talking about, how do you date the tablet? I've heard people say ridiculous things, “Oh, they don't know. It was out of context where they got it.” That's true, it was out of context. So, your two choices are Iron 1 and LB2, and either way, the writing that is on it is older than any Hebrew that we have. If, indeed, we're right, that it is ancient Hebrew.

Nehemia: So, explain to the audience what LB2, Late Bronze 2, and Iron Age 1 are. What is the significance? I know because I did my undergraduate in archaeology, but let's say the average person doesn't know the connect… How does that tie into the biblical timeline?

Scott: Right. So, we have a raging debate about the chronology of the Exodus and the conquest, the emergence of the Israelite nation. I was a co-author of a Zondervan text last year called Five Views on the Exodus. And in chapter 1 I wrote on the early date of the Exodus, and so people can get all my reasoning there. But in a nutshell, I believe that the Exodus from Egypt occurred around 1446 BC, mid- 15th century, 18th dynasty, which means that the conquest began around 1406 BC.

Others believe that it was in the 13th century BC, others in the 12th century BC, others it was just a cultural memory. And there's all kinds of views, of course, that are out there. But my view is the early day. So, the question is, do we… when we start talking about Late Bronze 2, it's a period from about 1400 to about 1200, and so what we're comfortable in saying right now is that this is an LB2 inscription. One of the members of our collaborative team believes that it's at the end of LB2. The rest of us believe that it's earlier, at the beginning of LB2, which would then indeed synchronize with Joshua.

Nehemia: And just to put that in perspective, if you believe what it says in 1 Kings, that Solomon completed the Temple about… I want to say, it says 486 years after the Exodus or something like that.

Scott: In the 480th year.

Nehemia: 480th year.

Scott: So, it was after 479 years.

Nehemia: Okay. So, if you put Solomon, give or take 950, let's call it, somewhere around there, 975, wherever he is, then you get back to sometime in the 1400’s BCE. Whereas most scholars - and I guess I have to be careful about saying ‘most scholars’ because you have a book about Five Views on the Exodus. What I was taught at Hebrew University in the 90s, let's be more precise there, is that, “The Israelites actually didn't come into the Land of Israel, or didn't even show up,” they didn’t, say, come into the land of Israel. The claim was that the Israelites were these rejects from the Canaanite cities, the Israel Finkelstein story, and it was kind of like this socialist upheaval, right? It was a class struggle. And they took over these Canaanite cities. But we can't really speak about Israelites as a people until about 1200 BCE, which is when you have the Merneptah, I believe it's the Merneptah Inscription - it's been a while since I've studied this - and it's one of those kinds of things we say in Hebrew, “ba’al korchachah”, “against your will”. They don't even want to admit there ever was an Israel. But once you have an inscription from Egypt, you're kind of stuck with it. Although I think there have been some revisionists who said, “No, it doesn't say ‘Israel’, it says ‘Yisrael’.” Jezre’el.

Scott: Yeah, nobody's buying that.

Nehemia: No. I don't think even in the 90’s anybody bought that. So, by 1200 they have to admit there's such a thing as Israel, or the people of Israel, or tribes, a tribe of Israel. But you're saying there's actually an earlier chronology that could put it back as early as maybe even 1400 BCE. And this inscription you have is either Late Bronze 2 or Iron Age 1, which would put it between 1400 and 1000 I guess. So, you didn't excavate at Mount Ebal; Adam Zertal did. Let me jump in with this and tell me if this is correct because I haven’t studied this in a while.

So, you have the site of Mount Gerizim that's identified by the Samaritans… and I think one of the issues Zertal had was that the altar site that you're talking about doesn't face the Samaritan Mount Gerizim, it faces a different mountain. And so one of the possibilities that Zertal suggested - again, if I remember correctly from a long time ago - is that the Mount Gerizim of Joshua is actually the opposite mountain over there. I forget what it's called, but today it's the modern Jewish town of Elon Moreh, if I’m not mistaken. Or there’s a yeshiva there or something? Help me out here with the geography, it's been a while.

Scott: Zertal believed that Mount Gerizim was Mount Kabir.

Nehemia: Right. Okay.

Scott: And I was actually on Mount Kabir less than two months ago helping Shai Bar from Haifa University, who succeeded Zertal and is finishing his work, helping him survey on Mount Kabir.

Nehemia: So, Mount Kabir is to the east of Mount Ebal, whereas Mount Gerizim of the Samaritans is to the south of Mount Ebal.

Scott: Southwest, yeah.

Nehemia: Yeah, okay, southwest. So, based on the geography, assuming the Samaritans are right of where they say Gerizim is, then the altar shouldn't be where Zertal identified it as. Does that sound about right?

Scott: Not to me it doesn't, no.

Nehemia: Oh, so explain that to me. In other words, if the Samaritans are right about Mount Gerizim, how can you have the altar where Zertal identified it? Because it's kind of facing the wrong direction, isn't it? Like, half the people need to be facing the altar from Gerizim, wherever Gerizim is.

Scott: Yeah, nobody agrees with Adam on the identification of Mount Kabir, he may have just been… we entertain a lot of theories when we're trying to understand relationships.

Nehemia: Okay. Fair enough.

Scott: I'm not aware of any scholar who has embraced his identification. There probably are, I'm just saying I'm not aware of any.

Nehemia: Okay.

Scott: The fact that it's actually at a site called el-Burnat A, which is on the second step on the back side of Mount Ebal, is no problem for me, nor for most people. The altar doesn't have to be exactly where the people are lined up pronouncing curses, and in fact, it would be kind of weird if you had this open fire in the midst of all these people while they're doing this ceremony. So, why he chose that exact spot? It's hard to say. We get so many mysteries and anomalies in archaeology.

We excavated for 21 years at Khirbet el-Maqatir, which I believe is biblical Ai, and we had all the great explorers, Robinson and all these guys came along, Conder and Kitchener and others, came to Khirbet el-Maqatir and they saw the church on the summit, and they said, “Well, the locals say that this is where Ai is, but they must be totally mistaken. There’s nothing here but a church.” Because they never thought it would be down in the saddle, down lower, because you would expect the fortress to be on the hill. It wasn’t. For some reason, they put it down in the saddle. Sometimes things just happen in antiquity, and we don't know why they put something exactly where they put it.

Nehemia: Okay, so you accept the Samaritan identification of Gerizim as Gerizim?

Scott: Yeah, along with everybody else. I don't know anyone who doesn’t.

Nehemia: Okay, well, okay, anyway…

Scott: But also, think about the prepositions in Hebrew, go back and look at them. One of my graduate students did her thesis on Mount Ebal, Abigail Leavitt, she was my assistant director on this project. And she wrote an excellent thesis that is now published, and she does a really good section on the Hebrew prepositions, that you're actually in Mount Ebal, not on Mount Ebal.

Nehemia: Okay.

Scott: So, you can easily get a copy of her thesis.

Nehemia: Well yeah, that sounds really interesting. What is her name again?

Scott: Abigail Leavitt, L-E-A-V-I-T-T.

Nehemia: I will follow up on that.

Scott: She’s now doing her PhD at Ariel University.

Nehemia: Okay. Very interesting. Alright, so you didn't excavate at Mount Ebal, Zertal did. How is it that you found this tablet decades later? That's part of the exciting story to me.

Scott: Well, it’s super exciting. So, I had worked for two years as a supervisor on the Temple Mount Sifting Project in Jerusalem and was a big believer in the potential of wet sifting. I'd made up my mind that when I excavated a site that had water, that we were going to wet sift in situ because no one was doing that. What little wet sifting was being done, which was revolutionary, was all out of context material. So, what I developed is, I took that methodology… actually, that Starkey had first started working with in the 1930s and that Barkay and Devir developed in more recent times. What I did is I added to that protocols where we could use it in the field, in situ, so that we can preserve the stratigraphy and know exactly where things came from. And we wet sifted 100% of the material at Shiloh.

Nehemia: Can you explain for the audience what that means, “in situ”? And what is wet sifting, versus dry sifting, versus no sifting? Maybe just give a little brief explanation of that, because that's how you ended up finding this thing. It's also how Barkay found the silver scrolls, the famous silver scrolls that have the Priestly Blessing, as he was doing some sort of a sifting back in the 80’s. I don't know if it was wet sifting per se. So, tell us about that.

Scott: Well, first I'd like to finish my thought, which I've now lost.

Nehemia: You were talking about how you were doing wet sifting in situ, and you did that for everything as you were excavating.

Scott: Yes, okay. I remember; I have it back now. What I was going to say is that for every one scarab that we used to find, we now find five.

Nehemia: Wow.

Scott: For every one bulla that we used to find, we now find five. For every one coin we used to find, we now find ten. So, this is just shocking. And so, I had probes from old dump piles. You may remember Hershel Shanks beating his drum and bar years ago, “Wet sift the dump piles of Megiddo” and stuff like that. And so, I probed some dump piles, and I was blown away by what was in them.

And so, my idea was, because of the Oslo Accords and the divisions and so forth, Mount Ebal fell within Area B. You had divided jurisdiction, and is it grandfathered because it was pre-1993? Just a lot of gray areas there, so we clearly could not excavate. But what we did is we removed part of the dump pile, about 30%, from his east dump, which is the material from the altar according to his notes. And we removed it to a nearby site called Shavei Shomron, and at Shavei Shomron we erected a portable wet sifting station there. And I'll define those terms. And so, we re-sifted again. We dry sifted once again the material that they had already dry sifted, just so we could get the soil out of it so we could see things.

We did recover quite a bit, and then we took it through the additional protocol of washing it. So, the way that works is, we have power hoses, and we wash the tray of material, and when we do, all the dirt comes off. You move it around, give it another rinse, and now we can see what looked to be a little rock may actually be a scarab. So, this is why it's so revolutionary, because if you're only dry sifting or sieving the material… and think of a volunteer. They're doing this all day long and they're seeing thousands and thousands of little stones and pebbles, and the mind sort of gets into a loop. But when we wash the material, the colors pop. We can now see lines that we couldn't see before. So, for us, it's been revolutionary.

My goal in the whole project, Nehemia, was not to find curse tablets; my goal was a boring methodological paper. I was going to publish this from two dump piles - Finkelstein’s dump pile at Shiloh in the 1980’s; Zertal’s dump pile at Mount Ebal in the 1980’s, and I was going to publish the findings and juxtapose those with what they had published, and say, “Okay, here's what you published; here's what we found.” Not to make them look bad, but just simply to say we have all been missing much of the evidence in the past. We've got to change our methodology. That was my goal. In the process, we uncovered something very interesting.

Nehemia: Okay, so I want to just help the audience here understand some of these concepts. Look, I did an excavation in 1990-something, while I was studying at Hebrew University, and I spent an entire summer cleaning dirt off of a dirt floor from the Persian period. And it was really this painstaking, meticulous work, where at some point you're using like a paint brush, just to dust off dust, but then when you find interesting things you put them in this bucket, and then maybe they sift the bucket, maybe they just focus on what you identified, and then everything else gets put in a dump pile.

And so, you end up with, literally… you're removing material from the archaeological sites and you're dumping it into a dump pile. And what you did is you went back and not only dry sifted, which I think maybe is self-explanatory of the dump pile, but then you wet sifted. You washed it down to see, “Okay, what is there?” And we've spoken to Zachi Dvira in the past on this program, and Frankie Snyder, so if my audience goes back, they can see information about this wet sifting for the Temple Mount material. In that situation, the Waqf, the Islamic religious authorities, had removed 400 dump trucks full of dirt from the Temple Mount. Who knew what was in there? Zachi Dvira followed the dump trucks and eventually did this project, and maybe is still doing the project, I think, of wet sifting it.

So, you now were applying this to places that have been intentionally excavated by actual archaeologists, not by people with backhoes who were pillaging a site in order to build something, and you find things. And so that actually is a really important development, because this method had been applied in a very specific situation where, “Okay, we have dump trucks full of stuff that wasn’t properly excavated. Who even knows what's there?” You're talking about stuff that was properly excavated, but still, they weren't using this methodology.

Scott: Yes. And then what I'm saying is that at Shiloh, we took it a step further even. We are now using it in situ; the material, as we excavate in the square, we then wash it there.

Nehemia: Oh, wow. Okay.

Scott: So that we know exactly where it came from. So, when we're finding these items, we can then… simply, we know exactly what stratum it comes from. And that's why it's so important, because it can help us identify our stratigraphy correctly.

Nehemia: Right. And then, just to give the audience an idea of how important that is, it used to be - I don't know if that's still the case - but you could go and volunteer for a day on the Temple Mount Sifting Project. I did that a number of times; I would take groups of people there. And what you would have is, you’d pull out pieces of modern soda bottles alongside coins from the Middle Ages and pieces of floor tiles from the Second Temple, and all of those would be in the same tray because it's just this hodgepodge and this mix of stuff. It may have started out as what's called fill, meaning, even when it was on the site, it could have been all mixed together. But certainly, after it's taken out by the dump trucks haphazardly, it's all mixed together.

But you're actually doing it where you can say, “Hey, this is from this specific layer and this is a clean, pure layer, it's not a mixed layer,” which happens too, in archaeology, and you could say, “Okay, here's what we found in this layer.” That's really important. So, you said Starkey was doing that back about 100 years ago. Could you tell us about that a little bit?

Scott: Well, Starkey was a genius, and unfortunately, he was murdered at the Damascus Gate.

Nehemia: Oh, really?

Scott: Very tragically and brought his excavation at Lachish to a close. We have photos of him using the locals to wash material through wicker baskets, and he was such a genius. And you would think his students and his proteges would have kept that methodology, but they didn't, because it's slow and it's expensive - two words archaeologists don't like.

Nehemia: Right.

Scott: So, while I have had a number of colleagues who have embraced the new methodology that I'm trying to get everybody to embrace, I've also had a lot of resistance, because it's slow and it costs money. And it's frustrating to me, because this is not a race. And as archaeologists, we are destroying the evidence in the process of excavating. And so, once we've taken something out of context, we've made it inaccessible to others. So, that's kind of an ongoing challenge that we're dealing with.

Nehemia: So, Adam Zertal goes, and he excavates Mount Ebal, and he has these dump piles. And you go and you want to test those dump piles, and you find this lead tablet. Tell us about the lead tablet.

Scott: Well, you mentioned Frankie Snyder’s name earlier. Frankie is a member of my staff, and so it was in her tray that it was found. So providentially, our most experienced wet sifting volunteer is the one whose tray it ended up in. She recognized it, and… There's no question, Nehemia, whether it's a curse tablet – it is a curse tablet.

Nehemia: Okay.

Scott: We knew that from the moment that we saw it. Frankie saw it. She called me over; I looked at it and I thought my heart was going to leap out of my chest. I showed it to Abigail. She immediately knew what it was. It'd be like, “Is that a jawbone?” We've seen hundreds of these; we know what curse tablets are. The reason this was exciting is because it was from the mountain of the curse, from what we thought was an altar. We were agreeing with Zertal that it was an altar.

So, hundreds of these have been found in Israel. They’re always on lead, they’re folded, they’re considered to become binding once they’re folded. And, to your skepticism, the very first words out of my mouth to Frankie and Abigail and anyone else who gathered around was, “Guys, don't get your hopes up. We can't prove this is from the late Bronze Age. We know that it's a curse tablet. These are more common in the Hellenistic and Roman period. It could be that a pilgrim from that time knew this was Joshua's altar and they came up.” Which still would be very significant, but “Just be careful; let's not get our hopes up too high.” But while I'm saying that, of course, I'm thinking in my head that I'm contradicting logic, because all Zertal excavated was Late Bronze 2 and Iron 1.

Nehemia: Okay.

Scott: So, as it turned out, once we were able to do the tomographic scans, I was blown away. Because the very first letter that I saw was an ox head that was morphing into an Aleph, and we know what that script is. It’s… what we have called up to this point a Proto-Canaanite, Proto-Sinaitic script. We have the mines at Serabit el-Khadim and these scripts are known. You have one recently from Lachish. So, it's not that it's not a known script, it's that scholars have called it Proto-Canaanite, when many of us… Because the presupposition has been that the Hebrews were illiterate. Moses could not have written, Joshua could not have written, and therefore the Bible is from a much later time period. And there were no eyewitnesses, and you can't trust the reliability. That's the narrative.

And really the only way that you could tell the difference between Canaanite and Hebrew - because they're using the same alphabet. Like, I have Islamic neighbors. They speak English, we're using the same alphabet when we’re communicating, is do you have words that are uniquely Hebrew or words that are uniquely Canaanite? And you do have some in the religious vernacular. And low and behold, if we're right, that's what makes this unique. We have the name Yahweh, or Yahu, twice in the inscription. And there's only one group of people in the ancient world worshiping Yahweh, and those are Israelites. And the three-letter spelling, we already have that down in Egypt on the Soleb Hieroglyph. That's 14th century, the land of the Shasu of Yahu on the Soleb Hieroglyph. So, you've already, by the 14th century, got this God, and the earlier spelling is not what we typically think of as the Tetragrammaton. So, when we saw that there was script, it was tiny, written with a tiny stylus on the inside; it was folded over. We recovered that through tomography and we began to attempt to decipher it.

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