Mount Ebal Curse Tablet

The Mount Ebal Curse Tablet is a small folded piece of lead recovered in December 2019 from the spoil of Adam Zertal's excavation at the Mount Ebal Altar Site. In 2023 a team led by Scott Stripling published X-ray scans of the folded lead and read on its inside a curse naming the God of Israel as YHW, which they dated to the Late Bronze Age. Other epigraphers and archaeologists who have published on the object see no letters in the scans, and the reading remains disputed.

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The Find

Zertal excavated the Iron Age I structure on the northeastern slope of Mount Ebal from 1982 to 1989 and discarded the sifted soil in two dumps beside it. In December 2019 Stripling, working with the Associates for Biblical Research, led a project that wet-sifted about 30 percent of that discarded material. According to the published report, about three quarters came from the east dump, which held soil only from the area of the altars. Frankie Snyder, the team's small-finds specialist, recovered the folded lead strip from it.

Folded, the object measures about 0.8 by 0.8 inches (2 by 2 cm) and about 1/8 inch (3 mm) thick, and the lead sheet itself is less than 1/50 inch (0.4 mm) thick. It cannot be unfolded without damaging it. Because it came from a dump rather than an excavated layer, it has no stratified find spot, and its date has to be argued from the site, the script and the metal.

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The 2023 Reading

The full study appeared in May 2023 in the journal Heritage Science under the title "'You are Cursed by the God YHW:' an early Hebrew inscription from Mt. Ebal". Its authors are Stripling, the epigrapher Gershon Galil of the University of Haifa, the Dutch-born epigrapher Pieter Gert van der Veen of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, and Ivana Kumpová, Jaroslav Valach and Daniel Vavřík of the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, which scanned the object by X-ray tomography at its center in Telč. From the scans, the authors identified 48 letters in a proto-alphabetic script on the inner face of the strip and translated them:

"You are cursed by the god YHW, cursed. You will die, cursed—cursed, you will surely die. Cursed you are by YHW—cursed."

The authors note that some letters are faint and not visible on every scan slice. They read the word 'arur ("cursed") six times on the inner face and suggested it may appear six more times on the outside, for twelve in all. They dated the script to the Late Bronze Age II (about 1400-1200 BC), and no later than about 1250 BC, and judged that the object belonged to the earlier, round altar beneath Zertal's larger structure. A note in the paper records that Galil himself placed it at the end of the thirteenth century BC, while the other authors thought it could be older. They called it the oldest Hebrew text found within the borders of ancient Israel, earlier by at least two centuries than any previously known, and held that the divine name shows the text is Hebrew rather than Canaanite.

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The Critiques

Three responses appeared in the Israel Exploration Journal later in 2023. The archaeologist Aren Maeir and the epigrapher Christopher A. Rollston wrote that the published tomographic images "fail to demonstrate any discernible letters", questioned the dating of the material from the site, and concluded that the object "is most reasonably understood as an uninscribed lead fishing-net weight". Amihai Mazar of the Hebrew University compared it with lead net sinkers common across the eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze II and Iron I periods. Naama Yahalom-Mack, who had analyzed the metal for the original study, reported that the lead came from the Lavrion mines in Greece, which were worked "almost continually" from the fourth millennium BC to the Late Roman period, so the source of the lead does not date the object. In 2024 Mark Haughwout published a further rebuttal of the reading in Heritage Science, and Rollston restated his objections in Biblical Archaeology Review.

Stripling and van der Veen published a point-by-point online response to Haughwout in 2024. Van der Veen has distanced himself from Galil's full reading of the inside, but in a 2024 reply to Rollston, published by the Biblical Archaeology Society, he wrote of the net-sinker identification that "this claim is more apparent than real" and held that "some letters and words do exist, including the divine name YHW", and said that he and Stripling plan to publish further evidence. As of 2026 no epigrapher outside the original team has published a confirmation of the letters, and no independent re-examination of the object has appeared.

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Mount Ebal and the Curses

Moses commanded that when Israel crossed the Jordan they were to build an altar of uncut stones on Mount Ebal, write the words of the law on plastered stones, and pronounce curses from Ebal, with the people answering "Amen" to each (Deuteronomy 27:1-26). Joshua carried this out after the conquest of Ai: he built the altar on Mount Ebal, wrote a copy of the law of Moses on stones, and read all the words of the law, the blessings and the curses (Joshua 8:30-35). The authors of the 2023 study suggested that the object may have been used in a curse ceremony of this kind, pointing to the twelve curses of Deuteronomy 27:15-26 and their own possible count of twelve 'arur. That count depends on the uncertain outside readings, and the connection rests on the disputed reading.