Flip-side News: Proof of Older Bible Timeline? [Theology Myths]

^{Originally posted Saturday, March 26, 5:47 PM. Updated.}

MOUNT EBAL, ISRAEL. The oldest occurrence of the name of God, in the letters YHWH, appears to have been found that may force archaeologists to accept the existence of the cult of YHWH possibly as far back as less than a century after the Exodus, some time after 1500 B.C.E., nearly 800 years prior to their previous estimates.

The 2 cm x 2 cm folded-lead “curse tablet” (or defixio) amulet was found by Dr. Scott Stripling and his team at Joshua's altar on Mount Ebal in a mound of archaeological debris that was originally dry-sifted between 1983-1989. This find confirms Deuteronomy 11:29 which indicates that Mount Ebal is a place of curses.

A Times of Israel article by Amanda Borschel-Dan says that Haifa University Prof. Gershon Galil assisted [with Stripling] in deciphering the hidden internal text of the folded lead tablet using [multi-spectral] scans carried out in Prague at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The article reported that it shows "that the Israelites were literate when they entered the Holy Land, and therefore could have written the Bible as some of the events it documents took place. ... Galil told The Times of Israel that the text is largely written in an archaic proto-Canaanite script, with some letters coming from hieroglyphs." Galil stated: "No longer should the conversation be about whether the Israelites were literate during the time of King David, The person who wrote this text had the ability to write every text in the Bible."

According to a Jerusalem Post article by Judith Sudilovsky, the tablet was "3,000-year-old." However, in a Houston Chronicle article, Claire Goodman reported that "the tablet discovered by Stripling’s team was written about 1500 B.C.," some 500 years earlier. The Times of Israel article reported that it was from before "1,200 BCE" (13th century BCE) according to Stripling, but "11th century BCE" according to Prof. Israel Finkelstein, and "12th century BCE" according to Galil.

Sudilovsky reported that it "came to light in December 2019 when Scott Stripling, ABR’s director of excavations and the director of the Archaeological Studies Institute at the Bible Seminary in Katy, Texas, led an ABR team to wet sift the discarded material from excavations conducted in 1982-1989 by the late University of Haifa archaeology Prof. Adam Zertal, a former head of the university's Archaeology Department, who discovered what has been called the Altar of Joshua on Mount Ebal in Samaria."

This find once again gives credence to the Biblical narrative. The Bible has never been proved wrong, but archaeologists who deny its historicity have been proved wrong time and again since the earliest days of archaeological exploration. Archaeologists are not only slow to adopt the Bible's history, they are outright resistant to it. They do not care about accuracy. They only care about proving the Bible wrong.

That said, this was reported by a Bible Seminary. Religious sources of such information have, on more than a few occasions, proved exaggerated, misrepresented or downright fraudulent. So take this news with a wait-and-see attitude and cautious optimism.

Whether 3,000 years old or 3,500 years old, this would be a major coup for Judeo-Christian history, if confirmed, and provide a major shift in the historical narrative of the Bible's detractors and false friends as they uncofortably move to spin a new collection of false stories to account for this inconvenient evidence.

This post will be revised and expanded when Dr. Stripling's paper is released and as more information becomes available.

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