An exhibition of the ossuary was hastily arranged for the following month, November 2002, at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto. Such speed is virtually unheard of in the museum world, where exhibits usually take years of planning before coming to fruition. But, the annual meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature, the American Academy of Religion, and the American Schools of Oriental Research were all scheduled to be held in Toronto in mid-November, and these would bring thousands of biblical experts and archaeologists to the city, which explains the interest of the Royal Ontario Museum.
The exhibit went off as planned, drawing a reported 100,000 visitors in the short time that the ossuary was on display. The only hitch was that the ossuary had been shipped from Israel to Canada in substandard packing—literally in a cardboard box and bubble-wrap—and had arrived in Toronto badly damaged, with large cracks in several places, including one that ran right through the inscription. The conservators at the ROM worked to restore the ossuary in time for the exhibition. This presented an opportunity for the staff to do some more testing of the ossuary and led to additional data and questions concerning the authenticity of the inscription.
After the exhibition, the ossuary was returned to Oded Golan in Israel, much to the relief of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), which had granted an export permit to Golan without realizing the potential importance of the ossuary. Golan eventually handed over the ossuary to the IAA for testing by a panel of fourteen researchers.
In the meantime, Shanks was busy writing a book about the ossuary, which he co-authored with Ben Witherington III, a professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary in Lexington, Kentucky. The book appeared in March 2003, with a foreword by Lemaire. That same month, the panel of experts commissioned by the IAA met for the first time and was given its marching orders—to determine the authenticity of the James Ossuary and its inscription. The fourteen experts were split into two committees. One group of eight scholars was designated as the Writing and Content Committee and instructed to look at the inscription on the ossuary. The other group of six scholars was designated as the Materials and Patina Committee and instructed to look specifically at the material and composition of the ossuary.
The experts announced their findings in a report issued after a final joint meeting in mid-June 2003. Portions of the report were published the following year in the Journal of Archaeological Science. They concluded that while the ossuary was authentic, the inscription on it was not. As Orna Cohen, an experienced archaeological restorer and one of the panel experts, stated, the inscription “cuts through the original patina and is coated with a granular patina that appears to have been produced from chalk dust mixed with water and spread on the inscription.” Another panel expert, Yuval Goren of Tel Aviv University, explained further: “The inscription was inscribed or cleaned in the modern period. Its coating is not a result of nature, and was probably accomplished by crumbling and dissolving chalk (or perhaps the powder falling from the engraving process) in hot water and spilling the suspension on the inscription and surrounding area in order to blur the freshly carved inscription.”
The conclusion was not surprising to many in the world of biblical archaeology. However, there were discussions and disagreements, particularly on websites and interactive forums on the Internet, as to how much of the inscription had been forged. Some suggested that only the final portion “brother of Jesus” had been added by a forger. By that point, only a few people were still actively arguing that both the ossuary and its entire inscription were authentic. Those few who supported the claim of authenticity—principally Shanks, Witherington, and members of the original team who had first authenticated the ossuary and its inscription for its initial publication—contested the committee’s conclusions, arguing that the panel members were biased and the tests and conclusions flawed. A few weeks later, in July 2003, authorities came to Golan’s apartment to seize the ossuary. They found it stored on the seat of a toilet in a bathroom on the roof of his apartment building.
While the debate over the James Ossuary was still ongoing, rumors began to circulate about yet another object on the antiquities market—a black stone tablet with an inscription purportedly concerning King Jehoash’s repairs to the First Temple during the ninth century BCE. Jehoash is known from the Hebrew Bible as a king who ruled over Judah from ca. 836 to 798 BCE. His repairs to the Temple are recounted in the Bible (2 Kings 12:1–21), which means that the stone tablet, if genuine, would immediately validate the historicity of the biblical account. It would also make this tablet the third object with potential links to biblical archaeology to appear on the market in recent decades.
When the world media first announced the existence of the Jehoash Tablet in 2003, excitement once again ran high, and again there were mentions on nightly TV newscasts and in most of the major newspapers and magazines. Professor Gabriel Barkay, discoverer of the tiny Silver Amulet Scrolls in Jerusalem, announced that if the tablet were genuine, it would be the most significant archaeological finding ever made in the Land of Israel.
Now that most of the available information has been published, it turns out that the existence of the Jehoash Tablet had been known to a select few for two years before the first rumors began to circulate in early 2003. However, it was not until Biblical Archaeology Review picked up the story in March of that year and featured the Jehoash Tablet on its cover in May that the story gained momentum, even as the initial hubbub about the James Ossuary finally began to die down.
As the story has been reported, the tablet was first shown to Joseph Naveh of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem during the summer of 2001. Naveh is considered to be one of the leading paleographers in Israel, an expert in the study of ancient writing. He received an anonymous phone call and then a photograph of the tablet before he agreed to examine the inscription itself. The meeting took place at a Jerusalem hotel. Naveh was shown the tablet by two men and was told that it had been found in the Kidron Valley east of the Temple Mount. Later reports said that the tablet had been originally uncovered in 1999 during illegal excavations on the Temple Mount by the Islamic Waqf, when the Marwani mosque was being built in the southeastern corner of the Mount, and that it had been dumped in the Kidron Valley along with all of the other dirt and artifacts that had been unearthed.
The tablet, made of black stone three inches thick and measuring almost a foot in length and nine inches in width, contains fifteen lines of text written in paleo-Hebrew letters, the script used before the Babylonian Exile. The inscription reads:
[I am Yeho’ash son of A]haziah k[ing of... Ju]dah and I did [the work] just as the will[ing]ness of the heart of each man in the land and in the desert and in all the cities of Judah was complete to give the silver of the holy things amply, to acquire hewn stone and cypresses and copper of Edom, to do the work in faithfulness. And I performed the repair of the House and the walls round about and the ledge and the lattices and the staircases and the recesses and the doors. And may this day become an observance that the work may be successful. May Yahweh ordain his people with a blessing.
The first line, which would have contained the name Jehoash, is broken off and is therefore almost totally reconstructed by the scholars, based upon the name Ahaziah, his father.
The tablet was next brought for analysis and authentication to the Geological Survey of Israel (GSI), where it was discovered that carbon particles and minute globules of pure gold were embedded within the patina on the face of the tablet and in the incised letters. Did the carbon pieces and gold globules come from burnt wood and melted gold when the Temple was destroyed by fire in 586 BC? The geologists who examined the tablet were convinced of this scenario.
They published their preliminary analysis and conclusions in 2003, in the journal Geological Survey of Israel Current Research, concluding that “An event took place, in which pure gold was heated to a temperature of more than 1000 °C and melted, so that gold globules were formed.” They stated that “A thin bro
wn patina developed. . . . Gold globules and carbon fragments were entrapped within the patina” and that “There is no evidence that the patina was artificially added to the stone.” They then went beyond the standard analysis and authentication process and, quite unusually, included a “Hypothetical Scenario” in their GSI publication, suggesting
The tablet could have been originally emplaced in Jerusalem about 2800 years B.P. (Before Present) and remained there for about 200 years. . . . Then, when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem about 2600 B.P. (586 B.C.E.), the tablet was broken and was subsequently buried in the rubble. Upon burial, the patina started to develop on the tablet. . . . The source of gold may have been gold artifacts or gold-gilded items that existed in Jerusalem at that time. As Jerusalem was set on fire (Kings II 25, 9), some of this gold could have melted in the conflagration, injected to the air and re-solidified there, to settle later as minute globules on the ground. These were later incorporated within the patina that developed on the buried tablet.
In the meantime, however, the tablet was reanalyzed by the same committee of experts that had been set up by the Israel Antiquities Authority to examine the James Ossuary. As with the James Ossuary, they were asked to determine the authenticity of the Jehoash Tablet. The committees’ findings concerning the tablet were contained in the same report as those concerning the ossuary, issued after the final joint meeting in mid-June 2003. Again portions were published the following year, this time in the journal Tel Aviv.
Goren and his colleagues on the Materials and Patina Committee said specifically that the micromorphologic, petrographic, and oxygen isotopic composition of the patina covering the letters and the surface of the inscription clearly indicate that it was artificially created in recent times and that the tablet is therefore a modern forgery. They were led to this conclusion in part by noticing that there were two different types of patina on the surface of the tablet. One type was strongly attached to the surface, but was found only on the uninscribed reverse side of the tablet. The other was “an artificial mixture of elements” including calcite, clay, charcoal, and gold.
Goren and his co-authors said that this second type of patina, which covered the letters of the inscription, “could not have been formed under the natural conditions that have prevailed in the Judean Hills over the last 3500 years” and was most likely a “fake patina.” This, in turn, suggests that it was “artificially prepared . . . with hot water, and deposited onto the surface (and inscription) of the tablet. Heated water was used to harden and ensure good adhesion of the patina.”
Moreover, they found that the tablet was not made of arkosic sandstone, originating in southern Israel or Jordan, as the original Geological Survey of Israel geologists had concluded, but rather was made of metamorphic greywacke, which is not naturally found in Israel but is in Cyprus and areas farther west. Goren noted that such stones are sometimes found in Israel, where they were used in the construction of Crusader castles, having originally served as ballast on board ships coming from Cyprus. There is one such castle at Apollonia, not far from Tel Aviv. In any event, the Materials and Patina Committee reached the conclusion that the Jehoash Tablet is a modern forgery.
The Writing and Content Committee reached a similar conclusion regarding the inscription on the tablet. One member, Shmuel Ahituv of Ben Gurion University, concluded that the inscription was written by a speaker of modern Hebrew who composed a text that seemed biblical to him or her, but which was not grammatically correct. Another member, Avigdor Horowitz of Ben Gurion University, stated that the inscription attests to a lack of understanding of ninth century BCE Hebrew and that all of the various grammatical elements together “clearly prove that the text is a forgery.”
Indeed, this meshed well with the conclusion that Naveh had already reached the first time that he saw the tablet, back in 2001. Even in that first meeting, Naveh was convinced that he was looking at a forgery, mainly because of problems with the inscription. Many other paleographers and epigraphers have since agreed, including Frank Cross of Harvard University and P. Kyle McCarter of Johns Hopkins University, who have documented rudimentary misspellings and grammatical mistakes in the inscription, which should not be present if it were authentically ancient. Cross concluded that there is “little doubt that we are dealing with a forgery... fortunately, it is a rather poor forgery.” Christopher Rollston, of the Emmanuel School of Religion, acquiesced; he wrote, “The script of the Jehoash Inscription deviates so substantially from all provenanced Iron Age Hebrew inscriptions that it cannot, in my opinion, be seriously considered ancient.”
In the interim, it became clear that Oded Golan was involved with the Jehoash Tablet, just as he was previously linked to the James Ossuary. The two individuals who originally showed the tablet to Joseph Naveh were apparently hired representatives who knew nothing about the tablet and had simply been paid to bring the tablet to the meeting set up in the Jerusalem hotel. Eventually, after some good detective work on the part of the IAA’s Theft Prevention Unit, the truth of the situation emerged.
The tablet was in the possession of Golan, although he claimed that he was simply a middleman in the deal. He said that the tablet was actually owned by a now-deceased antiquities dealer named Abu-Yasser Awada, who had come into possession of the tablet and had asked Golan to help him sell it. Golan had agreed and had apparently enlisted a large and established law firm to work on his behalf, while he remained anonymously in the background. Rumor even had it that the tablet was offered to the Israel Museum for more than four million dollars. However, the museum’s director says that the tablet was brought to the museum only for authentication in 2001 or 2002, before the investigations by the IAA had begun, and that no price was ever discussed.
Although their numbers are few, there are still those who argue for the authenticity—or possible authenticity—of the Jehoash Tablet and its inscription. Their arguments can be found primarily in the pages of the Biblical Archaeology Review. Although the GSI issued an official statement in June 2003, agreeing with the conclusions of the IAA committee, the original GSI geologists continue to maintain that their conclusions and hypothetical scenario regarding the tablet are correct. They presented their position again at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in 2005 and published an article in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 2008.
In March 2008, however, the American television news magazine 60 Minutes broadcast an undercover video interview with an Egyptian craftsman in Cairo named Marco Samah Shoukri Ghatas (identified as Marko Sammech by 60 Minutes), who stated that he did work for Golan over a period of fifteen years. When shown a photograph of the Jehoash Tablet, Ghatas said—on camera—that he had “inscribed several stone slabs that were just like this for [Oded] Golan . . . Golan brought me the text and I carved it onto the tablet.”
According to a follow-up story in Ha’aretz in April 2008, Ghatas confessed—both to Egyptian authorities and to Amir Ganor, head of the IAA’s Theft Prevention Unit—that he had “personally forged the Jehoash inscription, on the basis of the sketches brought to him by Oded Golan” and had manufactured numerous other items “according to specifications received from Golan.” According to Ganor’s testimony, Ghatas also admitted to “rinsing and smearing” the James Ossuary, apparently with an artificial patina.
When the police raided Golan’s apartment, office, and a rented storage compartment in July 2003, they seized both the James Ossuary and the Jehoash Tablet. They also found soil in labeled bags from numerous excavation sites, tools and engraving equipment, half-finished royal seals, other inscriptions in various stages of production, epigraphic handbooks, a blank stone similar in size to the Jehoash Tablet, and other objects. In addition, they found photographs of a quartz bowl with an inscription in Egyptian hieroglyphs recording the fact that the commander of Egyptian Pharaoh Shishak’s army had conquered the ancient city of Megiddo. The bowl had apparently been destroyed by Golan, but he had kept the photographs.
One thing that all three of the original objects—the pomegranate, ossuary, and tablet—had in common, apart from the fact that they may all be forgeries, is that they first surfaced on the art market and were of unknown provenance; that is, they had not been found in proper archaeological excavations. Had they been discovered during the course of controlled excavations by professional archaeologists, as were the Tel Dan Stele, the Tel Miqne/Ekron Inscription, and the Silver Amulet scrolls, they would have immediately assumed a place among the most important biblical artifacts ever found. As it is, the three objects serve as reminders for why most professional biblical archaeologists and professional journals refuse to publish or discuss objects from the art market that do not have a proper provenance or documented context.
Epilogue
Having overcome the sabotaging nihilism of the 1990s and the early part of the new millennium, and notwithstanding the ongoing debates regarding David and Solomon as well as the question of possible forgeries, biblical archaeology continues to benefit from new discoveries, especially ancient writing.
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