Hebrew Voices #152 – The Mount Ebal Curse Tablet: Part 1

Transcript

Hebrew Voices #152 – The Mount Ebal Curse Tablet: Part 1

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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.