Posted on Tuesday 6 May 2003

Jehoash: definitely a fake

A Major Exciting Event on the Temple Mount An Ancient Hebrew Inscription is Found Dating from the Ninth Century BCE Describing Temple Repairs by King Jehoash of Judah

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The way in which the Arabs on the Temple Mount handled the discovery of the [Jehoash] inscription was also terrible, with no respect given to it and its holiness. They merely sold it to a collector of antiquities in Israel. It was a godly miracle that it was not sold by them to Arabs or other collectors outside Israel. In this way the inscription remained in Israel and its story could be shared with all the people of Israel and the world. It was only G-d Who closed an historical circle between one of the righteous kings of Judah and his people, Israel, in our endtime generation. It is no accident that this dramatic discovery was made at this time so close to the climax of the godly redemptional process of Israel when the Third Temple is soon to be built. This is a message from the G-d of Israel to the people of Israel to do what King Jehoash did and to repair and rebuild the Temple. This is the most important and exciting point of this discovery. We pray and will do everything possible to ensure that the Israeli Government and people will understand and accept this godly message and will do what G-d expects — immediately build the Third Temple.

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On Relics, Forgeries, and Biblical Archaeology [The Jehoash Inscription] has become a stone of contention in the bitter contemporary battle for the spiritual and physical possession of Jerusalem's Temple Mount, where, according to some sketchy and unsubstantiated reports, it was originally found. The militant Israeli group "The Temple Mount Faithful" posted photographs and detailed descriptions of the Jehoash Inscription on their website, declaring it "completely authentic," and noting that "people feel that the timing is no accident and that it is a clear message from the G-d of Israel Himself that time is short, the Temple should immediately be rebuilt..." A few days later, Abdullah Kan'an, secretary-general of Jordan's Royal Committee for Jerusalem Affairs, issued a press release asserting that extremist factions in Israel were using the claims of the discovered tablet to support their bid to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and rebuild the Temple, and further warned that "If that happened, God forbid, a holy religious war will definitely inflame the whole region."

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Hold that Holy War! The Jehoash Inscription is a forgery and contrary to the findings of the Geological Survey of Israel, not a terribly good one at that. Even Hershel Shanks and Biblical Archaeology Review have despite some reluctance now accepted the inevitable.

While this should not come as much of a surprise to regular readers of Laputan Logic, for the sake of completeness please excuse me while I flog this rotting carcass one more time...

Assessing the Jehoash Inscription

The Paleographer: Demonstrably a Forgery

by Hershel Shanks

Was it too good to be true? In recent months, the world learned of an inscribed tablet apparently written by Jehoash, the ninth-century B.C.E. king of Judah. But almost immediately, questions were raised about its authenticity.

After examining the text of the Jehoash Inscription, Frank Moore Cross, professor emeritus at Harvard and America’s leading expert in ancient Semitic inscriptions, to cite one notable example, has concluded that the inscription itself “leaves little doubt that we are dealing with a forgery, and that, fortunately, it is a rather poor forgery”

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The Linguist: Hebrew Philology Spells Fake

by Edward L. Greenstein. Department of Bible, Tel Aviv University

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 of 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.

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