Hebrew Voices #150 – The Oldest Hebrew Inscription? Part 1

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Nehemia: But I'm so excited about this! Because if it is real, it proves so many things that have been doubted by many scholars.

Frankie: Right!

Nehemia: Shalom and welcome to Hebrew Voices! I'm here today with Frankie Snyder, who I have dubbed The Temple Floor Lady. She has worked in archaeology for many years and is really a specialist in sifting material. Shalom Frankie.

Frankie: Hello.

Nehemia: Frankie is affiliated with the City of David National Park in Jerusalem and also is an independent researcher. Today we're going to talk about what may be the greatest find of the 21st century to date, which is the Mount Ebal Curse Tablet. Which you actually discovered, meaning, you physically are the one who discovered it.

Frankie: I was the one who physically discovered it on my sifting tray, yes.

Nehemia: So, tell us first - what is a sifting tray? I've actually done the sifting, when you were working with the Temple Mount Sifting Project. So I've done it, and a lot of people have done it, but I think a lot of people in the audience have no idea what that is. How is sifting different than regular archaeological work? And then dry sifting and wet sifting… you're an expert on this, tell us about this.

Frankie: Yes, okay. When a group is in the middle of an archaeological excavation, they need to look through all the dirt that they're digging up. One of the first processes is to dry sift the material. You take a wooden tray that has a wire mesh on the bottom of it. You dump a load of dirt onto it, you shake it all out, and you lose most of the powdery dirt out of the bottom. What is left on the tray are rocks, pieces of pottery, maybe pieces of metal, stone tools, flint blades, anything will be left on the top as long as it's bigger than about this, which is the size of the holes in the tray.

Nehemia: Okay.

Frankie: And then you start looking through the material to see what is in there. That’s called regular sifting or dry sifting. Now, in this particular project at Mount Ebal, or Har Ebal, we used a second process, which is wet sifting. After you go through that material, you take that material, transfer it to a different tray that has smaller holes in it, and you take a good old garden hose, and you spray off all the material. This will wash away all the loose dirt that is clinging to all the pottery and the stones and the pieces of metal that are in there. That gets washed away.

So, the material on the tray now is relatively clean, and you can look through it and see what is there. And you see a lot more than you see with regular dry sifting, because it's still covered with dirt and dust. So, in there you’ll find pieces of pottery, you'll find coins - lots of times you'll be able to see coins on wet sifting trays that are nearly impossible to see on a dry sifting tray.

In this case, I saw a little rectangular piece, only about this big, less than an inch on each side. And at first, it looked like maybe a piece of pottery, or a thin rectangular piece of stone. But when I picked it up, I realized it was very, very, heavy, and I knew it was made of lead. Now I’ve dealt with lead in other projects, and lead objects are so much heavier than a pottery shard of the same size.

So, I picked it up, and I was looking at it and thought, “This is made out of lead.” I looked very carefully, and on the side I could see that it was a piece of lead that was folded over. I could see an upper layer, I could see a lower layer, and I could see that this line went around three sides of the piece of metal, and that it was folded over on four sides, but then I could see that it was two layers. So, I realized that it was made of lead and that it was a tablet. A tablet that had been purposely folded in half. Now, it wasn’t done randomly like, “Oh here, let's just swing it over someplace.” It was done very accurately, so the top piece was directly over the top of the bottom piece. So, it's like, “Okay, we just might have a lead tablet.”

So, I hollered over to Scott Stripling, and I said, “Scott! I’ve got something for you,” and I go and to take it to him. And he says, “What have you got?” I said, “A lead tablet.” Well, about this point… he probably had a heart attack! He was very surprised because here we were on the Mount of Curses and we have a lead tablet, and very often lead tablets are curse tablets.

Nehemia: Wow.

Frankie: Our first thought was, “Oh my gosh! We have a lead curse tablet from the Mount of Curses.” Now, we wouldn't know what was written on the inside of this tablet for about two more years.

Nehemia: So, let me stop you there for a second.

Frankie: Yes.

Nehemia: Tell us - you called it the Mount of Cursing.

Frankie: Right.

Nehemia: So, some of the audience may not be familiar with the biblical story. And it's interesting, it takes place in Joshua, but it's something that's commanded in the Book of Deuteronomy. Tell us a little bit about that.

Frankie: In the Book of Deuteronomy, chapter 27 and chapter 28, we have the story of Moses speaking to the people Israel, and he's telling them, “You’re going to cross over the river; you're going to go into the land. Now here's what you do when you get there. You're going to go up towards the northern part of the country, and there are two mountains there. There is Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal. And what you're going to do, six of the tribes are going to stand upon Mount Gerizim and six are going to stand on Mount Ebal. The six on Mount Gerizim are going to say, ‘And God is going to bless us if we do such and such and so and so.’ And everybody on Ebal will say ‘amen’. And then the people on Mount Ebal will say, ‘And if we do such and such and so and so, God is going to curse us.’ The people on Gerizim are going to say, ‘amen’.”

So, they were agreeing to the covenant; they were ratifying the covenant that they had made 40 years before back on Mount Sinai. And now, God is telling them, “When you get into the country, you're going to ratify this covenant; you're going to repeat the covenant now that you're in the land. And you’re going to say, ‘This covenant has blessings, this covenant has curses.’ And you’re going to be agreeing to these two.”

And then, in the Book of Joshua, in Joshua chapter 8, there's a whole section there that says, “And when the people got into the land, they went up to the northern part of the country and six of the tribes went up on Mount Gerizim, and six of them went up on Mount Ebal, and they did the blessings and curses repeat, where, ‘Here’s our blessings,’ ‘amen’, and ‘Here’s our curses,’ ‘amen’.”

And then it says, “And Joshua built there, on Mount Ebal, an altar.” And so, a prominent archaeologist named Adam Zertal, back in the 1980s, went searching around on Mount Ebal and he found there an altar. Actually, he found two altars. The first altar that he found was a rectangular altar that was underneath a big pile of stones; they removed all the stone and found this rectangular altar. And then, as they started digging down into the central part of the altar, by taking out all the loose stones and leaving the outside wall there, they found buried underneath a smaller, older, round altar, and this is the one that Adam Zertal thought was the altar that was mentioned in Joshua chapter 8, Joshua’s altar.

Nehemia: So, this is actually kind of important, and in some ways controversial. So, one of the most ancient surviving splits within the Jewish people, or, I should say, within the people of Israel, is between the Jews and the Samaritans.

Frankie: Yes.

Nehemia: And the Samaritans, they don't have the Book of Joshua in their Bible. They just have the Five Books of the Torah, and their version is slightly different. In their version it says that the altar is to be built on Mount Gerizim, not on Mount Ebal.

Frankie: Ah! That would be a… difference between the two.

Nehemia: Right. Well, and to this day they have sacrifices that they bring, particularly the Passover sacrifice on Mount Gerizim. And so, finding the altar on Mount Ebal by Adam Zertal, in a sense, decided the debate. In other words…

Frankie: It’s one point, one of many points of debate we have going on.

Nehemia: Right. Well, it established, yes, there was an altar on Mount Ebal. And this created somewhat of a backlash, “Oh, maybe it's not really an altar. Even though you found all this ash of these different bones.” And I think they count thousands of bones of thousands of animals that have been sacrificed. And none of them were pigs, and I think one was a wild animal that couldn't be brought to the sacrifice, and the theory is maybe it jumped in there and died.

Frankie: Most of them were qualified as sacrifices.

Nehemia: Alright. I think there was one exception, from what I remember…

Frankie: Yeah, like one…

Nehemia: … 30 years ago studying archaeology, so take it with a grain of salt! What I do remember is the reason Adam Zertal did this excavation. What I was told is that they saw that some sort of an agreement with the Palestinians was imminent, and they wanted to do archaeological excavations before the Palestinians came in. And this might have been handed over to them, and once it was handed over to them, they might just trash everything or just let it languish.

And there was a similar thing that happened in Sinai. Before Israel turned the Sinai back over - in that case it really was “back” - over to the Egyptians, they went and did a very thorough archaeological survey, and then when they found interesting things, they would excavate on those spots, that's how they found the Kuntillet Ajrud inscription, which is important, and it’s related to this. I don't know if we'll get to it. It's important because it was, up until now, the oldest Israelite inscription that mentioned the name of God.

Frankie: Right.

Nehemia: And then this inscription may be the oldest. I say maybe because…

Frankie: It’s the oldest one that has been found in Israel that has God's name that was used by the Ancient Israelites, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey.

Nehemia: Well, I’d say that’s in Hebrew, because there's supposedly one in Egypt that's not in Hebrew.

Frankie: There is something down there, but it was not found in Israel, it was found down there. So, this is the oldest.

Nehemia: Well, it's also not in Hebrew, the one in Egypt, and it's not clear that that’s actually referring to the name of the God of Israel, whereas it’s indisputable in Kuntillet Ajrud that it's Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey. We'll get to that maybe in a little bit.

So, he went around and did this survey throughout all of Samaria…

Frankie: Adam Zertal was part of a crew that was sent by the Antiquities Authority for Judea and Samaria to look at and do a general survey of that part of the country looking for anything, anywhere, that showed some kind of a settlement, some type of human activity. So, it was a general archaeological surface survey that was going on, but it included Mount Ebal.

Nehemia: So, it wasn't that they were looking specifically for Mount Ebal. When they found interesting things, they're like, “Oh, this is an interesting spot, let's excavate here. Here's another one.” Other places, they just picked up pottery off the ground. So, he excavates at Mount Ebal, and he finds this altar which seemingly proves the Jewish side of the argument that it was Mount Ebal. Although the Samaritans will say, “Alright, maybe some illicit altar was built there.”

Frankie: There will always be naysayers.

Nehemia: Right. But in any event… And the other issue there is that the Mount Ebal altar doesn't face the mountain that the Samaritans claim is Mount Gerizim; it faces a different mountain.

Frankie: Right… a different mountain.

Nehemia: So, they might not even be correct in what they identify as Mount Gerizim, but that's beyond the scope here.

Frankie: That’s a whole other discussion.

Nehemia: It really is. So, Mount Ebal is the mountain that nobody disputes is where the curses were proclaimed from.

Frankie: Yes.

Nehemia: I've had people say, “Oh well, the Samaritans are right, because the curse was proclaimed from Mount Ebal. Why would they build the altar on the Mountain of the Curse?” That doesn't even make sense. They were standing on Mount Ebal and proclaiming the curses, and on the other mount, Mount Gerizim, they were proclaiming the blessing.

Frankie: Ah, but it’s the agreement, that if they break the covenant, they will be cursed. And here they have taken this tablet then, and putting it right on the altar saying, “We are agreeing.”

Nehemia: I do want to say one caveat here, one warning to the audience. I have not yet seen photos of this tablet that are legible, let's put it that way.

Frankie: Hey! They’re not out yet.

Nehemia: Nobody has. Outside of a small team of people. They did tomo-, tom-, they did some kind of high technology…

Frankie: They did tomographic scanning.

Nehemia: Tomographic! That's the word I can't pronounce.

Frankie: Tomographic scanning.

Nehemia: Tomographic scanning in order to read this tablet, but they haven't published the results of that scanning.

Frankie: They're just in the middle of peer review right now. The paper is ready, but it's in peer review, and it's been in peer review for close to two months.

Nehemia: Okay. And two months is not a long time; I wrote a paper that took two years to be published!

Frankie: Right. It’s not a long time and Scott Stripling will have more information for you about when he thinks it will finally be out and be published.

Nehemia: Yes. So, I published an article where I think the first year it was in peer review, and the second year it's, “Okay, now it's on the publication queue. When we have a slot open, because there's 50 papers in front of you that were accepted before yours, it's first come, first serve.”

Frankie: Right.

Nehemia: And eventually it was published. So that in itself isn't so unusual, I have no critique of that. I do want to warn the people, I don't know how this interview is going to age. It might be a year from now, or two years from now, or three months from now, we all watch this interview, this discussion that we’re having, and say, “Oh, it turned out it wasn't actually a curse tablet,” or it turned out it was a curse tablet and it's the most important find of the 21st century.

I want to be very careful here. I have a quote here, and I love this quote, I've quoted it many times. It's a letter written by the ambassador to Venice in 1610, to the King of England, King James the First of England, and he's talking about Galileo’s discovery using a telescope. And basically, it overturned everything they knew about science up until that point. It proved definitively that the… let’s see if I get this right.

Frankie: The sun is in the center of the universe, not the Earth.

Nehemia: Well, the sun’s not the center of the universe, it's the center of the solar system.

Frankie: Solar system...

Nehemia: They proved that the Earth goes around the sun, and not that the sun goes around the Earth.

Frankie: Yes.

Nehemia: And more specifically, more precisely, what it proved is that there were moons that went around Jupiter. And up until then, the belief was - it was a fact, it was common knowledge - that everything went around the Earth. And so, if there's moons going around Jupiter, “Wait a minute, maybe Copernicus was right.”

And so, he writes in this letter - I won't read the whole letter - but at the end of the letter he sends to the king, he says, “So as upon the whole subject, Galileo has first overthrown all former astronomy. Galileo runneth the fortune to be either exceeding famous or exceeding ridiculous.”

And I don't know! I honestly don't know if Scott Stripling and the whole team are going to be proven exceedingly famous, or exceeding ridiculous, so I want to be really careful here, because I haven't seen the evidence. But I'm so excited about this! Because if it is real, it proves so many things that have been doubted by many scholars.

Frankie: Right!

Nehemia: Number one, it proves that they were writing Hebrew.

Frankie: Hebrew had a written script, and words could be written in Hebrew, and a text could be written in Hebrew back at that point in time, yeah.

Nehemia: In a time when most scholars, secular scholars, skeptical scholars, are saying, “No. The Torah couldn't have been written by Moses, because there was no writing material, there was no writing form, they didn’t have the letter…” Literally, this was in a curriculum somebody showed me at a university level, where it said, “Moses couldn't have written the Torah because there wasn't enough parchment available.” That's such a ridiculous thing to say!

Frankie: Well, part of it has to do with if they were using a pictographic language, like the earlier hieroglyphics, then it would have taken so much paper to write this.

Nehemia: It wasn’t paper; it would have been leather of some sort.

Frankie: But here, we’re going, “This has moved into a phonetic language.” From this tablet, it looks like it has moved to a phonetic language, which takes a lot less paper to write.

Nehemia: So, if it was written in the Hebrew language, let's put it that way, presumably it would have been written in our 22-letter alphabet. And I say presumably because…

Frankie: Well, it’s not necessarily the 22-letter alphabet that we use today.

Nehemia: Well, it is, it’s just a different font.

Frankie: Yeah, it's a different font.

Nehemia: In other words, there's a Shin, the Shin doesn't look like our Shin. The Alef doesn't look like our Alef, but it's still an Alef.

Frankie: Right.

Nehemia: And the reason I say that is because there's another Semitic language, it's a dialect of Canaanite, which is Ugaritic.

Frankie: Yes.

Nehemia: And Ugaritic has 29 characters, and their cuneiform, and so they're not the same… I believe it’s 29.

Frankie: I don’t know.

Nehemia: Somewhere thereabout. And it's not the same characters as we have, it's not the same 22 letters. And by the way, even our 22 letters, like Shin and Sin, are linguistically two different what we call phonemes, they’re two different letters really.

Frankie: Right.

Nehemia: But graphically they’re the same letter.

Frankie: They’re the same. Yeah.

Nehemia: So, the point is that even though the symbols might have different shapes, it’s…

Frankie: It’s phonetic, not pictorial.

Nehemia: I mean… okay. It’s pictures that represent sounds, let’s put it that way.

Frankie: Right.

Nehemia: So, what it proves, if this is true, is that they had Hebrew writing in this period, number one; number two, somebody was already worshipping the God of Israel.

Frankie: Somebody already knew the God of Israel and knew the God of Israel’s name…

Nehemia: By name.

Frankie: … and wrote it down!

Nehemia: Yeah. And I'm going to talk more about that maybe with Scott, maybe we'll talk about it a little bit more. But I want to establish here - you found this tablet, you almost immediately knew it was probably a curse table, is that right?

Frankie: I knew it was a tablet; I knew it was made out of lead. I was hoping it was a lead tablet because I knew that many tablets made of lead were curse tablets.

Nehemia: So, tell us about that.

Frankie: It would be another two years once we finally could see the writing or the tomographic images of the writing to know that it seems to be a curse tablet.

Nehemia: So, what are some other curse tablets that have been found from the ancient world?

Frankie: Okay. The majority of curse tablets come from a little bit later period, usually the Hasmonean and the Early Roman Period. I know that there were a number of them found at Caesarea, that’s because I’m working with the project there. In the middle of what is Herod’s Promontory Palace, there was this well, and down in the well there were a whole bunch of curse tablets.

Nehemia: Oh, that’s interesting!

Frankie: They’re from a much later time, but these were the kind of curse tablets that you would write if you were angry at a neighbor because he stole your sheep. And so, you’d take a lead tablet, and you’d write on it, “I want to curse my neighbor over there because he stole my sheep.” You’d take your tablet and you’d write that curse on it, then you would usually throw it down a well. That was a popular place to throw it, in order to curse your neighbor.

Nehemia: Why would they throw it in the well?

Frankie: I’m not sure why, other than it's going deep down, somehow.

Nehemia: Here I'm going to draw a parallel to where people throw coins into wells today, or into fountains.

Frankie: For good luck!

Nehemia: And I have to wonder if they believed there was - and I don't know the answer to this - did they believe maybe there was some kind of spirit that lived in the well?

Frankie: I have no idea.

Nehemia: And maybe it was something that was irretrievable, so once you throw it in the well, I can't get it back in order to… like, if I grind it into powder maybe I undo the curse, I don't know. I'm speculating, I really don't know.

Frankie: But there was another type of tablet, and it’s one that was a legal document. And it seems like this one we found is like that kind, a legal document where you write the terms of the covenant, then you fold it over, you seal it, and you place it there on the altar saying that you agree to the terms of the covenant. Even though it contains both blesses and curses. It was that kind of a curse tablet, and it appears that this one is the legal document type.

Nehemia: And you don't just mean in Israel, in other cultures around Israel.

Frankie: Right. In other cultures, there was this Hittite Suzerainty Treaty, or something. You’ve got five points to the treaty, and number four is you're going to write it down, you're going to sign it and seal it.

Nehemia: And this is an important point - when people made a covenant, there was a blessing that could come with the covenant, and a curse if you don't keep it.

Frankie: Right.

Nehemia: Okay. So, this is a curse. I want to read a passage here from Deuteronomy. It is Deuteronomy chapter 27, and it's just a series of… it’s what you were describing, that half the nation stood on Mount Ebal and there was a series of statements, and each one of them begins with the word arur, Alef-Reish-Vav-Reish, arur.

Frankie: Cursed.

Nehemia: “Cursed be anyone who makes a sculpture or molten image abhorred by,” this is the JPS, “the LORD, a craftsman’s handiwork, and sets it up in secret. And all the people shall respond ‘amen’. Cursed be he who insults his father or mother. And all the people shall say ‘amen’.”

Frankie: Amen.

Nehemia: “Cursed be he who moves his fellow countryman’s landmark. And all the people shall say ‘amen’.”

Frankie: Amen.

Nehemia: Et cetera. And it's a series of, interestingly, eleven statements where it says arur. And then there's a twelfth one, which is a general statement, that ties it all together in verse 26. It says, “Cursed be he who does not uphold the terms of this Torah and observe them. And all the people shall say ‘amen’.”

So you have eleven specific curses, and they’re things like… some of them are kind of… take bribes and he smites his fellow in secret, there is elicit sexual unions, all kinds of things like that, corrupting judgment…

Frankie: All the different terms of the covenant. Right.

Nehemia: Right. And these aren’t all the terms, but there are a number of terms that are kind of central, or they're important things, and then there's a general statement, “Anybody who doesn't keep any of these things and uphold all of these, he'll be cursed.”

And so, it's interesting. I don't know if this is in any way related or important, but I noticed that on this curse tablet, it had the word “curse” eleven times.

Frankie: No, it has “curse” ten times, it shows up.

Nehemia: Is it ten times?

Frankie: It shows up ten times. And God’s name appears twice.

Nehemia: Okay, so I was looking at the one in… what’s that?

Frankie: And God’s name, the Yud-Hey-Vav, appears twice.

Nehemia: Okay. So, I had counted from… and look, I looked at the… and here I'm kind of in an awkward situation. I'm watching Scott Stripling's press conference, and he's giving me the English translation, so I don't know what it says in the Hebrew. I found a Hebrew version somewhere, but I don't know if that was somebody back translating the English or not.

So, I don't know even what it says. And I'm seeing these things out of context, so again, I want to be really careful. It might turn out that this whole thing will turn out to be exceedingly ridiculous or exceedingly famous.

Frankie: Well, what is very interesting is that not too long after we released that information about this curse tablet…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Frankie: … that Eli Shukron announced that there was a stone found in the City of David that had a similar inscription on it. Again, it was in this same type of writing. There were lots of arur’s on there, lots of “curse”, and there were lots of “you will die”, with the Mot, it’s a Mem and a Tav on it. That was found in the City of David back in 2010.

And once they started comparing the two, I know that that document was seen by Gershon Galil, who was our epigrapher that we use from… or one of our epigraphers who’s from Haifa University. He saw the one from the City of David, he's going, “Yeah, it’s the same kind of thing. Look, here's your ‘arur, arur, arur’ and here’s your ‘death, death, death’.” And that particular one had sombody’s name; they were cursing a particular person in it, and it did not have God’s name in it.

But when I saw that picture, it's like, “Yeah, here it is. Here is the Alef-Reish-Reish and the Mem-Tav for the ‘death’ word in there written all over that stone.” And right now, they're dating that stone, it might even be a couple 100 years older than our tablet.

Nehemia: Wow.

Frankie: But it's the same kind of idea, with cursed, and with curses comes death. But it's the same kind of lettering again.

Nehemia: I was talking to one scholar who, I won't mention his name, but he was saying “It seems suspicious that all of these tablets that are full of the word ‘curse’ end up in the hands of this one group of scholars.” But I don't think it's actually that strange, because once you find one, people say, “Oh, I’ve got one just like that, you have a look at it.” Right?

Frankie: … this was like that, Eli Shukron realized that his was similar to ours. It has a lot of characteristics that are similar, and so they asked the epigrapher there at Haifa to give him a general idea of how similar or how different. What is this saying? And Gershon Galil was saying, “Yeah. You see a lot of the same words in them.”

Nehemia: So, the beauty of scholarship is, it's kind of a snapshot of what we know at this moment.

Frankie: Yes.

Nehemia: And next week or tomorrow it could change. Once this article is published - may it be soon - maybe it'll be published before this interview gets published! But once it's published, anybody can go and look at it and decide for themselves and look at the evidence. And one thing I have to say that really concerns me, is they said, “Well, that's the writing on the inside. There's also writing on the outside,” or vice versa, “that we’re not telling you about.”

Frankie: There is also writing on the outside. You can see on the outside in one of the pictures, you can see a kind of little squiggle on it that looks like something.

Nehemia: Yeah, but you can't really make anything out.

Frankie: And it turns out that once they scanned it, it appears there is writing on the outside also, and they’re in the middle of working on that part now.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Frankie: The post processing of the tomographic scans to try to figure out what's on the outside as well as what is on the inside. The inside is the first paper that’s coming out, and then later on, another paper will come out with what has been deciphered from the outside.

Nehemia: Yeah. My concern is that when we get the reading of the outside it'll say, “This was a replica made in Taiwan.” I hope not! But we don't know, we really don't. So, I want to be, again, very careful. I'm excited, but I have to temper my excitement.

Frankie: Yeah. We have to temper it. Now, in a special video broadcast that was done for the people who worked on the site, we were given a look into two letters on the inside.

Nehemia: Wait! So, you have inside – literally, no pun intended - inside information?

Frankie: I saw three separate letters on the inside, and I was able, based on the alphabet that they were showing us, “Here's the kind of Hebrew alphabet that was used,” I could identify those three letters. Now, I can't tell you which ones I saw, but I did see three letters. And they were just showing us, “Watch, now as we bring this into focus, there's a letter.” And you’re going, “Woah, there it is! And it’s this letter.” Watch this spot over here, we bring the focus…

Nehemia: So, I know you can't tell us anything about specifically what you saw, but you can rub your nose if it was the letters Yud-Hey-Vav.

Frankie: I can’t even do that for you.

Nehemia: Fair enough.

Frankie: All I can tell you is, there were like a couple of letters, it was like, “Woah! That was really neat!” But we did not see the full picture, whereas I have seen the full picture of the stone inscription from the City of David. That one has been put out, and you can look at it and you can see the Alef-Reish-Reish in several different places around it. You can sit there and go, “Oh, look, here’s the word ‘arur’. There’s the word ‘curse.’” You can do that for yourself on it.

And so, I'm very anxious to see the inside of this tablet that I found, to see what is actually in there, once they have rendered a picture of the tomographic scanning to show us. It will be a drawing of each of those little letters that are written all the way through the text…

Nehemia: Well, I need to see more than the drawing, because anyone can make a drawing. There is a famous inscription from, I believe it was Khirbet el-Qom in Southern Israel, in Judea, and in that case, it was on chalkstone, where you could literally scratch with your nail, even, I don’t have nails.

Frankie: Oh yeah, you can scratch with your fingernail on chalk, yeah.

Nehemia: So, it wasn't clear what were the actual letters and what was scratched. And so different scholars, and I mean serious scholars, had different drawings of what they believed they saw that changed the inscription completely. Not the most important part.

Frankie: Yeah, I know what you mean - how different people tend to interpret in different ways…

Nehemia: Right.

Frankie: But one of the interesting things is, do you have a Bible in front of you? I do not have one in front of me.

Nehemia: I have on my computer, yes. What do you need?

Frankie: Okay. I want you to look at Job 19:24.

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