Leaden Defixio

THE MOUNT EBAL LEADEN CURSE TABLET

Brian Edric Colless MA BD PhD ThD

This remarkable little artefact (a mere 2 x 2 centimetres), is believed (by some scholars) to be an imprecatory tablet, technically known as a defixio. It was discovered in December 2019, on Mount Ebal (near modern Nablus, ancient Shekem, on the "West Bank" of the Jordan River) by the Associates for Biblical Research, led by Scott Stripling; it has now appeared officially in a preliminary publication.
"You are Cursed by the God YHW:" an early Hebrew inscription from Mt. Ebal
https://heritagesciencejournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40494-023-00920-9?fbclid=IwAR3G9ih5D98ZCB7t1Wk7fIXfVerZzXAdu2Uiw4yqP8KYDCDEvFbnh3Qs7LM
The story of its discovery and its decipherment is told here:
A Tsunami from Mt. Ebal: Cursed by the God Yahu
https://www.academia.edu/104014709/A_Tsunami_from_Mt_Ebal_BAS_Spring_2023
Scott Stripling, Abigail Leavitt, Pieter Gert van der Veen, Bible and Spade, 36.2 (2023)

My tentative opinion is that the editors have largely succeeded in deciphering the two inscriptions (interior and exterior), discerning that the roots for "die" (MWT) and "curse" ('RR) are multiply present; but my suspicion is that their interpretation may be slightly awry.

Bottom: the folded leaden tablet, unopened.
Top right: the exterior inscription,
"Outer A".
Top left: traces ("bulges") of the "Inner B" text on the outside .
The red spot indicates the broken corner of the object; apparently it should be positioned as the top right corner when reading the Outer A text.
The engraver had written an elaborate "cursary" (my word for a collection of curses, in the sense of invocations of doom upon an offender, incantations of death, involving a deity, and therefore not magic spells but imprecations). Yahwe, the god named in this conjuration, would be the agent of the curses, analogous to ancient treaties, in which the gods involved in the covenant administer the curses and blessings written in the document.
This was the procedure: a small strip of lead was prepared, and on one half of its face the cursary was inscribed with a stylus; the unmarked part of the document was then folded over as an envelope, and the elaborate curse was repeated in tiny writing on the outside; thus the imprecation was recorded in duplicate, and even in triplicate, as the imprint of the first impression was bulging on the rear side to some extent.
How was the concealed inscription read?
Surprisingly, against our preconceptions about the metal lead (plumbum) being impenetrable to X-rays, the results were achieved by employing "X-ray computed tomography and advanced data processing", producing and analysing the photographs of 46 "slices". Say no more.
See the moving picture of the detecting process:
https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1186%2Fs40494-023-00920-9/MediaObjects/40494_2023_920_MOESM1_ESM.gif
As is my custom, I will ponder whether the revealed letters belong to a syllabary, and thus represent syllables (consonant plus vowel), not simply consonants.
By the way, there is a word "leaden" (like "golden") which helps in decoding the multi-purpose 'lead" (liid or led?); I have just seen it in action in a Father Brown story of G. K. Chesterton.

For the interior inscription (Inner B) Gershon Galil has:
[A] You are cursed by the god Yhw, cursed.
[B] You will die, cursed :
[B] cursed, you will surely die.
[A] Cursed you are by Yhw , cursed.
Gershon suspects that the text is chiasmic (A B B A): thus the first two statements are repeated in reverse order, in his interpretation, and this is an elegant proposal.
For my part, I will suggest some other possibilities.
Instead of the indicative mood, I will propose the imperative mood for some of the verbs: "Die!" (MT). "Be accursed!" (H'R or HT`R).
Apparently there is only one instance of LYHW, situated at the centre, and perhaps all the curse participles in the text are relating to it: "cursed by YHW" ('RR LYHW).
Where is the starting point of this jumble of letters?
Galil has numbered the characters that he has detected, 48 in total, and has divided them into three groups or "clusters":
[1] (A=1-17) beginning low down with ' TH, "thou", and meandering to the top.
[2] (BB=18-33) beginning at the top, near the H-sign, with TMT 'RR, "You will die accursed", then running down the opposite side, with "cursed you will surely die".
[3] (A=34-48) beginning at the very bottom with "cursed" and circling around the large H of YHW.
This is an elegant reconstruction, but it may contain flaws.
I have to warn prospective readers of the main text of this essay that it will not be an easy ride or read; it is not written with a broken reed, but with an adamant pen and caustic ink; the metaphors could be tedious, too.
Criticisms against the work of persons named herein are offered regretfully and respectfully. They are my "learnèd friends" in this court of judgement, and my esteemed colleagues in this school of "palaiogrammatology"; we are fellow-labourers in this garden of delights, as we dig up treasured messages from people of the past. However, I feel like Cassandra as she weeps over the folly of the citizens of Ilias, as they erringly venerate their Trojan horse; in our setting there is a parlous paradigm that could cause our downfall. Instead of weeping and wailing like Cassandra, and sinking into deep depression, I have chosen to play the part of Hamlet's "poor Yorick ... a fellow of infinite jest", before my skull (created in 1936) becomes as bereft of brains as his was after exhumation.
In truth, these bruised and broken inscriptions that have come to light are portents from the prophets and preachers of antiquity, to warn this perverse generation of ours that the retribution for our pollution of planet Earth is at hand, in the form of fire and flood. Recently I saw a rainbow in the sky of Aotearoa New Zealand, said to be a reminder of a divine covenant (Genesis 9:11-17) promising no more deluges to destroy life on the land; but the earthlings who have followed Prometheus and worshiped the unclean spirit whose name is Combustion have nullified that compact. There is a passage in Christian Scripture, where the Flood is recalled, and a great destruction by fervent heat and fire is foreshadowed; I have never heard it read aloud in church, but it is written (2 Peter 3:1-13).

"You are Cursed by the God YHW:" an early Hebrew inscription from Mt. Ebal
Scott Stripling, Gershon Galil, Pieter Gert van der Veen, Ivana Kumpova, Jaroslav Valach, Daniel Vavrik

The contributors to this publication have worked diligently to complete the laborious task, endeavouring to release their results promptly, for the benefit of other scholars. "Ik kijk enorm uit naar het artikel", someone said on the Peter van der Veen Facebook page, when Pieter had announced some time ago that he was producing an article about the leaden tablet, in collaboration with five others; and this eager expectation was shared by myself. The chief interpreters of the inscriptions were Gershon Galil and Pieter Gert van der Veen, known as Peter on Facebook; his page is where the news was released in May 2023, and where an academic storm raged. I am truly grateful for this preliminary communication, although the work is not quite finished. Only one of the two curse-inscriptions has been published, and surprisingly it is the almost inaccessible "Inner B", the interior "cursary" (-ary as in syllabary and consonantary, two concepts I will discuss here). In any case, it is good to have this communiqué freely accessible on our desktops (literal and electronical). Unfortunately, there seems to be a curse embedded in it, against anyone who dares to make a printed copy of the essay (and likewise in the "Tsunami" article). In my printout, every initial A (countless in number) was replaced by a 7, and had to be corrected with a sharp pencil; and every n unaccountably and uncountably became a colon (:); it is not a pretty sight. These things are sent to test our patience and perseverance, without which we would not achieve success in our decipherment labours.
This leads me to say that something is missing in this admirable essay ("You are cursed by YHW"), which I gladly endorse, but with a few reservations (for example, I am not sure that "You are cursed by YHW" actually occurs in the text): I do not see any mention of the many publications of Brian Edric Colless on the subject of Bronze Age writing systems that were used for recording West Semitic languages. You may not know that name, or you may know it because you have been told not to pay heed to anything he says. I happen to know personally that Colless (who has been grappling with intractable scripts for most of his eighty-seven years) has sighted and examined more West Semitic texts of the Second Millennium BCE than anyone else. People send me their inscriptions with the hope that I might be able to read them. Technically, these are "unprovenanced" and therefore not academically acceptable under current limitations; but it is usually feasible to see where they come from: they hail from such exotic places as Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Texas, Michigan, Scandinavia. In addition, we have at our disposal all the evidence from the Mediterranean world, notably from Lebanon, Sinai, Egypt, Canaan, Italy, Crete (many or most Linear A inscriptions are Semitic). The upshot is that a new paradigm has emerged for categorizing the types of West Semitic scripts and identifying the sounds that the various signs represent. The ruling paradigm is the deplorably deficient table of proto-alphabetic characters, hypothetically devised (in my lifetime) by the great Biblical Archaeologist William Foxwell Albright (revered by myself personally for all other aspects of his legacy). Scholars who continue doggedly along this imperfect path are cited as reliable authorities, notably Gordon Hamilton and Ludwig Morenz, both of whom courteously acknowledge the Colless contribution, but reject it, without attempting to falsify it.
The history of science is replete with "paradigm shifts", and just such a "climate change" is predictably imminent in this epigraphical realm of pseudo-scientific sophistry, conventionally known as Early Alphabet research. Two recent discoveries from the Southern Levant (the tiny curse text and the little lice comb) will be powerful catalysts for this metamorphosis (though not by a chemical reaction or through a mixture of metaphors). These two witnesses both have a recorded voice: the defixio commands in the name of God, and the comb commends its own usefulness; they vocally reveal the inadequacy of the scholarship that has been applied to their messages. I say this with gratitude for what has been vouchsafed to us, but it should be admitted that none of the eminent and efficient scholars who have confronted the defixio (Stripling, Galil, Veen, and the cautionary critics Rollston and Donnelly-Lewis) is pre-eminent and proficient in the discipline of West Semitic epigraphy of the Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age. Furthermore, the two chief sceptics are not in a strong position to attack the leaden tablet, as the powerful mettle-image that each of them exhibits is made of base metal, and its base is crumbling clay.

THE PROTOALPHABET QUADRINITY
Once again, a new West Semitic document from the 2nd Millennium BCE has been handed over to experts in the epigraphy of the First Millennium BCE, who think that their expertise in reading the Gezer Calendar, the Byblos Phoenician inscriptions, the Moabite Stone, the Lachish Letters, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, gives them license to publish the Qeiyafa Ostracon, the Ophel Pithos, and the new inscriptions from Lachish, notably the Lice Comb. They stride boldly into this territory (which for them is uncharted) innocently unaware of its pitfalls. For example, they have no knowledge of the early evolution of the alphabet, whereby each new species has a new characteristic, but retains features of its ancestors, so that each sign can still function as a pictogram; thus the house phonogram can represent syllabic ba and subsequently consonantal b, but also act as a logogram, saying bayt, "house"; and the sounds of a sign can act as a rebogram (employing the rebus principle that created writing systems in the beginning) and represent a word that has the same sounds, or as a morphogram and be part of another word; this was in line with the model of the ancient Egyptian system, which was a logo-morpho-consonantary, and which influenced the invention of the West Semitic syllabary and consonantary, in the Bronze Age. I am sorry if I am blinding you with unfamiliar signs-science.
According to the claim of its publisher (Springer Open, Heritage Science), this curse article would have undergone "rigorous peer review" (p. 24), but in reality it has not been properly peer-reviewed, because no scholar in the consensus-establishment has expertise in this area. There is no predominant genius who has explored all corners of this field. In this respect, it is my contention that this domain does indeed have four parts, one in each corner, and they are a "quadrinity", four squares in one square (roughly [+] and you can supply the missing lines mentally). . The established pandits, who publish in prestigious journals and receive uncritical acclaim from their peers, refer to it as the Early Alphabet, ignoring the four sectors containing four separate but closely related types of script that combine to form a single square, the West Semitic Protoalphabet Quadrinity. If I can not produce an elegant scientific equation for this four-faceted phenomenon, I must at least invent an adequate name for my theory (in lieu of an exquisite appellation), which will reflect its quadrilateral shape and also its four decades of gestation. The epigraphical cabalists can only see the sacred grove of their Early Alphabet, failing to distinguish the four trees that constitute the Holy Quadrinity, as a united entity.
Four categories are recognizable in the mass of epigraphic evidence from near and far (from "Mediterrania" and "Atlantica", that is to say, not only West Asia and North Africa, but also America and Europe), and they constitute an evolutionary sequence in the Bronze Age:
(1) Proto-syllabary > (2) Proto-consonantary > (3) Neo-consonantary > (4) Neo-syllabary.
Thus, the so-called Early Alphabet organism is actually a conglomeration, which begins with a short syllabary (Proto-syllabary) and ends with a short syllabary (Neo-syllabary), and includes a long consonantary (Proto-consonantary) and a short consonantary (Neo-consonantary).
Imagine the all-embracing quadrate square with its four compartments:
(1) Top left corner, the Prot0-syllabary (the logosyllabary of Byblos and beyond), as the Great Ancestor of the other three, with 22 consonants represented, and 3 vowels (u, a, i). Note that it also belongs to a previous evolutionary chain in Mesopotania; it was not created out of nothing.
(2) Top right corner, the Proto-consonantary, engendered in Egypt, with the birthing assisted by a Semite who understood the complex Egyptian logoconsonantary as well as his own West Semitic syllabic system; and so the syllabary was reduced to a simple consonantary, though it represented more consonants than the Proto-syllabary, 26 versus 22, presumably influenced by the Egyptian system in all respects.
(3) Bottom right corner, the Neo-consonantary, a simplification of its predecessor, the long alphabet, reverting to the 22 consonants of the Proto-syllabary, as a short alphabet.
(4) Bottom left corner, the Neo-syllabary, an adaptation of its predecessor, by changing the shape or stance of the consonantograms to add the three vowels (again u, a, i, as in the Proto-syllabary); thus [1] vertical A was also [2] inverted (its original form, an ox-head) and [3] lying horizontally.
(1a 2a 3a 4a) The Cuneo-consonantary, the cuneiform proto-alphabet, known from Ugarit and elsewhere , threatens to turn our quadratic tetragon into an untidy pentagon, with internal triangles instead of rectangles, or else a Pythagorean Pentagram or Pentacle; but it is to be classified as a subset of this scheme, fitting into Square 2 as a cuneiform version of the Proto-consonantary, with its multiple letters represented by combinations of wedges; also inhabiting Square 3, on account of its various short alphabets; and it slips into Square 1 and Square 4 by its three syllabic phonograms for 'Alep.
This grand unifying theory is adumbrated and foreshadowed in my freely available essays:
"The Origin of the Alphabet" ( https://www.academia.edu/12894458/The_origin_of_the_alphabet)
"The Lost Link" ( https://www.academia.edu/42283185/The_Lost_Link_The_Alphabet_in_the_Hands_of_the_Early_Israelites)
"The Mediterranean Diet" ( https://www.academia.edu/36973107/The_Mediterranean_Diet_in_Ancient_West_Semitic_Inscriptions_Damqatum_12_2016_3_20_Damqatum_The_CEHAO_newsletter_N12_2c_2016_pdf)

The model is elaborated and illustrated in a series of studies on recently published inscriptions, collected here:
( https://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2021/04/another-lakish-inscription.html)

Reasons that are given for the neglect or disregard of this canon (beware, it is a loose one, and might give an explosive response): "You have not proved your case"; "I have so much work to do" (this was Israel Finkelstein's response to my telling him more than once that the Megiddo signet ring inscription is syllabic not consonantal); "There is not enough material to permit the decipherment of the undeciphered Byblos pseudo-hieroglyphic script, the Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Canaanite inscriptions, the Cretan Linear A texts, etc". However, I can see that all those epigraphica in that list have to do with West Semitic languages, and away we go on an exciting expedition of exploration and explanation. The results of the rival teams, racing across the melting ice of the climate change to reach the poles first, are chilling.
It should be noted that Linear A and all the members of the Creto-Cyprian family of scripts have a limited number of consonants in their repertoire, lacking syllabograms for gutturals, and S has to encompass a whole handful of Semitic sibilants, so that when West Semitic speech is recorded in the Cretan Linear A script decoding is difficult for the decipherer, and the results are considered unconvincing by the onlookers.
(See "The Mediterranean Diet", and http://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2016/09/semitic-crete.html)
On the other hand, in the time-honoured hallowed-be-thy-name paradigm for West Semitic proto-alphabetic writing, the particular sign for each of the hissing consonants is wrongly identified. Refer to Gordon Hamilton's purportedly "bench-mark" handbook, giving a mass of mistaken identifications for the letters of the Early Alphabet (The Origins of the West Semitic Alphabet, and my critique, http://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2007/10/gordon-hamiltons-early-alphabet-thesis.html; note that Ludwig Morenz has rejected my rejection of Hamilton's emissions and omissions. In what follows, my identifications will be stated first.
S is to be acrophonically derived from samk, "fish", and the fish-sign is not to be associated with dag, "fish"; the door, dalt, is for D. Apparently the fish does not feature in the Proto-syllabary, but samk is there as a spinal-column, the Egyptian djed-glyph (-|-|-|), and this is an alternative sign for S in the consonantary; the fish disappears from the Phoenician alphabet, and the column survives; the fish functions as SU and SA in the Neo-syllabary.
S. (S.adey, emphatic /s/ or /ts/) is represented by a tied bag (s.rr), depicted as 8 or o< and variations that confuse the uninitiated; the firmly (though shakily) established opinion is that this sign is Q, from Qop, meaning "monkey". The true Q is a cord wound on a stick (qaw a line), known as an Egyptian hieroglyph. Please pay close attention: this matter can be settled quickly and easily, by referring to the tables of Arabian scripts, where Q is --o- and S. is o<. That is two more mistakes, making four errors out of the 26 or so correct signs and sound values.
Z. (z.il shade -|)) and Gh (ghinab grape, a vine-stand) are not correctly identified. Total 6 errors.
T. (Tet) is not recognized as +o, from t.ab "good", corresponding to the Egyptian nfr hieroglyph. Total 7 black marks.
Th (tad breast \/\/) was already in the syllabary as SHA. Unfortunately this looks very much like the preferred Sh-sign in the Sinai inscriptions roughly (/\), and Albright's view was that they represented "a composite bow" for shooting arrows, and he offered *tann as a word to go with it. Two fatal mistakes. Total 9.
Sh (SHI in the syllabary) is represented authentically by various Egyptian symbols for the sun, WS shimsh, not by one anomalously unique character (a triangular Dalt) interpreted as a thorn, *shawt (?). The sun was symbolized by a simple circle, or a dotted circle, or a sun-disc with one or two uraeus serpents, or the disc could be omitted leaving only the snakes. When the two Wadi el-H.ol proto-alphabetic inscriptions were rediscovered by John Darnell, the vertical one had a sun-symbol as its second letter (roughly O--o), and this was not recognized, even by Darnell and other Egyptologists; the value Sh was not discerned by the inexperienced experts, but I saw immediately that the first word was MShT, followed by R (a human head), and H (jubilation); there is no problem with identifying M (water), T (cross), R (head), and H (>-E). MShT would be from the root ShTY, "drink", and would mean "drinking-place" or "symposium"; significantly, the first words on the horizontal inscription are RB WN, "plenty of wine"; and when the context of the two-part inscription was revealed, the Egyptian epigraphic evidence showed that this was a place where the goddess Hathor was celebrated, with drinking; furthermore, the vertical (or oblique) alphabetic inscription has the West Semitic goddess `Anat (equivalent to Hathor) depicted and named: ` (eye) N (snake) T cross. The sequence RH is puzzling, but if the two characters are interpreted as logograms, then hillul is "celebration", and ra'sh is "top"; the writer wants us to know that this is where the banquet of the grand celebration for `Anat takes place. For the full story, you are personally invited to the party (at this point the number of visitors is 8159):
https://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2009/12/wadi-el-hol-proto-alphabetic.html
The reputedly stellar Albright system is not at all bright. It also has P (mouth) as "corner", and steals all the boomerang signs to justify it, even though it wants gaml (throwstick) to be G. This means that he and all who follow him have failed to see the pivotal word GN (garden) in the Sinai texts. The signs for H. (a mansion with a courtyard) are classified under B (house), and door-signs are requisitioned to fill the H.et-gap on the table of signs. Some of the K-variants are repurposed as S.adey, or T; this causes the key word KBShN (furnace) to be overlooked, in the presence of archaeological evidence to validate its authenticity. I have not exhausted the number of deficiencies, but I have lost count of them.
The hapless consensus-practitioners struggle vainly to apply this broken reed or canon to the Early Alphabet texts, including the syllabic inscriptions, and they do not even have paradigm-tables for the Proto-syllabary and the Neo-syllabary. Success is never in sight for them, but encouragement from their pilgrim-peers. is never lacking on this road to NOWHERE, but they will never be able to say "We are NOW HERE".

Bah, humbug! The consensus law is an ass!

Wondrous to tell, the editors of the leaden tablet have been spared all this grief. Miraculously the curses of the "cursary" have coursed past them, as a matter of course, of course. The reason is that the text of the tablet only has eight different letters in its repertoire, according to their reading of it, which I accept: "Alep, H, W, Y, L, M, R, T, and none of these is problematic, as they are all correctly identified on the Albright table. However, their general remarks about the subject of the Early Alphabet need to be scrutinized.

THE EARLY ALPHABET FALLACY
Henceforth, any epigrapher who publishes interpretations of West Semitic inscriptions from the Bronze Age, and does not refer to the Quadrinity paradigm, will be in error. I am trying to be humble about this, though it certainly sounds like hubris; but the consequential tragedy and ruination is on their part, not mine. The fact of the matter is that the Albrightian paradigm has failed to deliver the right results for them. They publish their supposed achievements in prestigious journals, and they receive uncritical acclaim from their benighted peers. The votaries of the Early Alphabet misconstruction have confused the elements and ignored the evolution of the four species; consequently they are engulfed in a sticky mess, and a mixture-metaphor illustrates the "jam" they are in: the refined white sugar of the Neosyllabary, the brown sugar of the Neoconsonantary, the golden syrup of the Protoconsonantary, and the black molasses of the Protosyllabary are jumbled into a viscous mishmash, in which its adherents wade around in their jackboots, oblivious to the atrocities they are committing. They are earnestly but vainly endeavoring to manipulate the impossible set of crippled characters on their table of signs and sounds, and applying them to texts that belong to the syllabic categories, not to the protoalphabetic consonantaries. Chaos and darkness reign supreme in this unenlightened realm.
Unfortunately, these strictures are applicable to the publication of the Mount Ebal defixio; but it may turn out that this criticism is irrelevant, if the true interpretation is simply neoconsonantal, not neosyllabic; and, as already noted, the eight letters employed in it are not controversial as regards their consonantal values, but the objects they originally represented might be misidentified in some cases by the epigraphers. Nevertheless, it still needs to be determined whether this particular inscription is syllabic or consonantal.
Christopher A. Rollston never distinguishes the four categories, and always neglects the essential question, though he knows it is there, because he has seen my article on the Neosyllabary (The Lost Link) and has stated his negative reaction to it. However, in his Early-Alphabet publications he has conveniently provided a quartet string of wrong notes, forming a discordant divertimento, in four movements, which suits our quadrinity purposes admirably.
(1) Defixion-fiction fixation. With his customary caution, Rollston has greeted and treated the leaden artefact with extreme scepticism: even if any of the scratch marks on the soft metal are inscribed letters, there is no reason to believe that this is a Hebrew inscription, even if the divine name Yhw is there. He has said so in an internet interview, and he will publish an article about it in Biblical Archaeology Review, which we hope will be more positive, after he has examined the available evidence. Incidentally, he has taken the same position regarding the Qeiyafa Ostracon inscription, that it could be Moabite or Phoenician or any West Semitic dialect; but it is clearly neosyllabic, and does have YAHU at the end of line 2, as well as DAWID in line 3, and so its language is the tongue of ancient Israel.
https://sites.google.com/view/collesseum/qeiyafa-ostracon-2
(2) Caribbean bumbling rumba. A large collection of inscribed artefacts exists in Puerto Rico, and Rollston was asked to scrutinize them; his opinion was delivered in writing, and he thought that it really was a writing system, but it had no connection with scripts of the Mediterranean world. In my authoritative evidence-hased opinion (versus the unfounded tacit denials of the establishment) the West Semitic Protosyllabary and Protoconsanantary are both represented in this corpus, notably on a figurine inscribed with nine syllabograms of the Byblos script (the Protosyllabary), showing the three syllabic characters for each of three consonants (H ` T) that Mendenhall and myself had identified ; and (not seen by Rollston) a plaque with all the letters of the Protoconsonantary listed on it. This evidence provides confirmation (together with similar discoveries from Norway, Michigan, Texas, and Jamaica) that ships crossed the Atlantic Ocean in search of gold, silver, copper, and tin three thousand years before Columbus sailed over that blue expanse of water.
https://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2019/10/phoenicians-in-puerto-rico.html

(3) Tuba tubular talismans (small cylindrical pieces bearing inscriptions, from Umm

(4) Judge Jerubbaal misjudgement. Three pieces of a ceramic vessel with writing on them have been excavated at Khirbet ar-Ra`i, which could well be Ziklag (Kyle H. Keimer, PEQ, 155, 2023, 115-134), the town David had as his base when he was a freedom-fighter being pursued by King Saul, and serving the King of Gath, deceitfully (1 Samuel 27), but not Opra (near Shekem) where Judge Yerubba`al Gid`on dwelt in the time of the Judges, when there was no king in Israel (Judges 6-7). The three sherds apparently bore that name YRB`L, and they were entrusted into the supposedly safe hands of Christopher Rollston, rated by the archaeologist Yossi Garfinkel as "the leading epigrapher in this field", and considered to have keen eyes for spotting forgeries, though he rarely produces a translation of genuine inscriptions. In this case he could see the name, but he did not realize that the third detached piece joins neatly with the others, on the far right, providing the preposition L (for, to) and the arm part of the Yod to reunite with the hand, producing consonantally LYRBB`L, and, I would add, followed by G (boomerang) and D (triangle door), or syllabically LA-YURUBBA`ALA GIDI [..], or LI-YURUBBA`ALI GIDI ... ( For Yerubba`al Gidi[`un]). If this reading is accepted, there can be no doubt about this inscription referring to the Gideon of the Bible (Judges 7:1, where both names are found together). Note that the doubling of the B was achieved by placing a dot inside the character.
https://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2021/09/khirbet-ar-rai-inscription-lyrbl.html
On his website, Rollston had immediately rejected my idea of a syllabic alphabet (after it was published as "The Lost Link" on the ASOR site); this was not what the grand masters of the game had taught him, or words to that effect; he declared that the different stances of particular letters are to be explained by their non-standardisation at that time (though my point was that the use of three different forms or stances for each letter in a single text seems to indicate significance not eccentricity or whimsy). In that assertion Rollston named Joseph Naveh, and there is indeed no hint of the early alphabet having syllabaries as its relatives in Naveh's Early History of the Alphabet: An Introduction to West Semitic Epigraphy and Palaeography (1987).
Runaway from curses excursus. It is necessary to digress briefly and take note of the definitions of these two technical terms, according to Naveh, and also Rollston. Naveh first outlines the view of Classicists: Epigraphy examines texts engraved on hard material (inscriptions), and Palaeography looks at texts written with ink (manuscripts); by this rule our leaden document might be invalid, since it is engraved on soft material, and the hard shards with ink-inscriptions, such as ar-Ra`i (Yerubba`al) and Qeiyafa (Dawid) likewise slip through the net; for Naveh (5-6) West Semitic palaeography studies ancient scripts, and traces the development of letter forms so that documents can be read correctly, and dated; epigraphy studies written sources brought to light by archaeology, and thus epigraphy-paleography is a single discipline, closely related to linguistics and philology, because its practitioners must know the languages of the documents. Rollston has produced a helpful "Prolegomenon to the Study of Northwest Semitic Paleography and Epigraphy", as the first contribution to the Festschrift for Frank Moore Cross, a collection of "Epigraphic Essays" (they are actually Paleographic Surveys, since documents are not transcribed and translated), titled evocatively and enigmatically "An Eye for Form" (2014); this wonderful book reminds me of the similar tome that Albright's students put together for him, The Bible and the Ancient Near East (1961), which I bought when it came out, and I still treasure it; included is a contribution by Cross ("The Development of the Hebrew Scripts"); remarkably, Albright himself revised his important essay on Canaanites for inclusion as an appendix. Hold, enough! I am raising up a whole family-tree of digresssions.
What does Chris Rollston say about "Northwest Semitic Paleography and Epigraphy"? Notice first the change from Naveh's "West Semitic" to "Northwest Semitic". My preference is for "West Semitic" (applied to languages and scripts) to cover Syria-Palestine (the Levant) and also Arabia, where the proto-alphabet was employed; but Naveh has "South Semitic" alongside his "West Semitic"; I would call on the term "Southwest Semitic" if I needed to distinguish it from "Northwest Semitic" and "East Semitic". Furthermore, if palaeography-epigraphy, is a single discipline, I am inclined to reduce its name to West Semitic palaiography, with Greek palaios freed from its illegitimate romanised form, and showing that this is the study of ancient writing, in the West Semitic field of research.
Rollston starts from the premise "development" in his definition of "paleography", described as a typological science: things created by humans are subject to development, evolving or devolving in time; this process can be observed empirically and described in typologies, for writing systems and for the languages that are written in the epigraphs; and pottery sequences provide another example from archaeology. He offers three pages of details relevant to the subject, but does not mention the possibility that some characters in a series might be given incorrect sound values by palaiographers (my new word) and leading them along false trails, as the paradigm of Albright, Cross, and Hamilton has done, producing catastrophic results in their readings of ancient West Semitic documents. The variants and developments of protoalphabetic letters have been studied with purported paleographical precision, but the outcome is bunkum. The case of S. and Q is the fundamental error, followed by Sh and Th, S and D, and all the other miscalculations itemised in the previous section, on the Quadrinity. Never in the annals of human history has so much sophistic nonsense been promulgated as sophisticated science. The draughthorses who are trained to work in this field are fitted with blinkers and are attached to a cart full of refuse (refyuus not rifyuuz), and are directed along a straight path with no deviation permitted, and no real progress made.
We are still in section 3 on the Khirbet ar-Ra`i triptych of three sherds, as handled by Christopher Rollston, though his hands are not a safe pair, and his eyes are as keen as custard rather than mustard, if judged by the evidence presented here, though his workmanship on the Ophel pithos has been reasonably admirable, as we shall see. At this point the work of Gershon Galil will be brought into the picture; he is, of course, an important contributor to the deciphering of the Mount Ebal defixio; and he was one of the first scholars to publish a reading of the Qeiyafa Ostracon, though his attempt has proved to be misjudged; certainly, he recognized the root ShPT. ("judge") occurring twice in line 2, and his drawing shows that each letter has different stances; and he has noticed the three stances of 'Alep in the text; but he does not suspect an intended indication of different vowels, and therefore recognize that it is syllabic writing; he interprets both of them as imperative mood, "Judge!", whereas I read them as SHAPAT.A (3rd person masculine indicative mood) and SHIPIT.I (plural noun); strangely, in the "cursary", I may be changing his indicative-mood statement "You are cursed" to an imperative-mood command "Be cursed" . As regards the Qeiyafa ostracon and its "David and Goliath" inscription, I think I have identified (on lines 1 - 5) nearly all the letters and their syllabic values, but I am holding back from publishing it in permanent print, hoping for some new technique that will allow us to see the line or lines (6 - 7?) at the bottom, as there is a clear white B in the left-side corner, and it might even lead into BT`BDY ("the house of my servant"), but if these lines are never recovered, what we see in the remaining text is fabulous, but this suggests that my interpretation, like all the others, is a fictitious fable. Rollston did not attempt to read it, but laid down his characteristic caveat about leaping unwisely to the conclusion that the language was Hebraic.
Consider now the case of Brian Donnelly-Lewis (one praenomen bespeaks insufficiency, two surnames bespeak superfluity, so spake Brian Edric Colless): this graduate student from California is another epigrapher who rejects the idea that there is writing on the leaden tablet, or rather "this small, decaying piece of lead": "The 'inscription' is not an inscription, not even a little bit. Here are my final thoughts." Final? Yes, this is not his first utterance on the subject, but is he closing his mind to the possibility that a tiny text is inscribed on the metal? It would be worth the reader's while to consider the details of his vehement outburst, which is meant to scare us into accepting his denials. He has a useful reproduction of Gershon Galil's drawing of the presumed text, in which coloured lines have been added, joining the supposed letters of the proposed sentences (I am not able to reproduce it here); of course, it is of no use to himself, though he wants to show us the impossibility of this chaotic collection of marks being a viable text; but we could perhaps profit from it.
Fig. 1: The Chaotograde Writing Direction of the Mt. Ebal Piece of Lead
https://www.academia.edu/101971691/Final_Thoughts_on_the_Piece_of_Lead_from_Mt_Ebal_Supposed_to_be_an_Inscription

The same author has published his attempt at interpreting the faded inscription on the Qeiyafa Ostracon:
Brian Donnelly-Lewis. "The Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon: A New Collation Based on the Multispectral Images, with Translation and Commentary", Bulletin of ASOR 388 (2022), 181-210
This BASOR is called a "bulletin", and it does not have volume numbers, but it is nonetheless held in high esteem as a scholarly journal, for its long association with Albright. We who subscribe to it as members of the American Schools of Oriental Research were recently asked to find a replacement for "Oriental", and the word "Overseas" was chosen; my preference was for a word with "lands" in it, rather than "seas", and so "outlandish" (foreign) would have been eminently suitable, but English words have an uncouth habit of changing their meaning.
The first line of the Qeiyafa ostracon inscription runs (showing consonants, not syllables):
' L T ` N Q B ` B D ' L H M
[1] You have cursed ('lt), Anak (`nq), against (b) the servant of God (`bd 'lhm);
is universally misread, beginning
Brian Donnelly-Lewis. "The Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon: A New Collation Based on the Multispectral Images, with Translation and Commentary", Bulletin of ASOR 388 (2022), 181-210

However, the Ophel pithos from Jerusalem has an incomplete inscription, with only two surviving pieces, and all three of us (CR, GG, BC) have attempted to reconstruct its text and interpret it. Shmuel Ahituv published it as dextrograde, running from left to right: ] m p q h. n l? n [, and he decided it makes no sense. My first attempt was also dextrograde: ] m r p q h. n [s]. n [n] [ , "nice cool clear water", and this suggested that the vessel contained liquid for drinking, but identification of most of the letters was problematic. Rollston's reading was very different but quite plausible: ] m q l h. n r? n [, and he singled out qlh. as a word for "pot", but it would need to be qlh.t in Hebrew. Galil, followed by Petrovich, and myself, focused on a sinistrograde (right to left) reading of the word as h.lq, preceded by hypothetical [yy]n ("wine"), and he invoked an occurrence of the expression in a document from Ugarit, as meaning 'not-good wine"; Galil and Petrovich reasonably expected that the full text would have given the source and the date of the wine; in my view this was sour wine mixed with water, for the workers at the building site (like the cider vinegar and water that I drink every day); the vessel has an open top, so there was no concern about the wine going "off"! However, nobody asked the question: consonantal, as everybody assumed, or syllabic, as I suspected. If the incomplete letter at the end, on the right, is N, then it is not the same as the other N; if it is M, it is different from the M at the other end; either way, this looks like syllabic writing; and indeed the unusual form of H. (like #) with no central crossbar is found representing H.U in other inscriptions employing the Neosyllabary; I think the Q (not R, not W) could be QU, and the L could be LU, and the unique N would be NU, yielding YAYNU H.ULUQU; as for the final M (on the left), it is either a logogram or the first part of M[M], in either case meaning "water", and the copula "and" is u, which is impossible to represent in early West Semitic scripts, and it has to be "understood" as being there (a frequent but unnoticed occurrence in the ancient inscriptions); but in this case the final u of h.uluqu might have a double function, as marker of the nominative case -u, and as u- "and".
(4) The Tuba tubes (small cylindrical pieces bearing inscriptions, from Umm

https://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2021/09/khirbet-ar-rai-inscription-lyrbl.html

https://sites.google.com/view/collesseum/classifying-inscriptions

The research findings of Dr Colless deviate sharply from academic orthodoxy, and marginalisation is appropriately applied.
Peer review for prestigious academic periodicals is a process of constrictive criticism, whereby the scrutinizer will peer at an article with a hypercritical eye, and proclaim imperiously (in the manner of a peer of the imperial realm): This person does not appear to be affirming the doctrines my peerless pedagogue taught me. In my experience this new and original proposition has never occurred to my mind, and so it can not be right; it is simply bizarre. If I approve this paper, my peer group will ostracize me. The established consensus is in a parlous state; it is perilously close to disintegration; it must be propped up with relentless persistence. Accordingly I must hurl this heresy off the pier into the deep sea, and make it disappear. After all, this pernicious paradigm has not been objectively subjected to empirical verification or falsification, therefore it is totally absurd.

This remarkable little artefact (a mere 2 x 2 centimetres), an imprecatory tablet, technically known as a defixio, was discovered on Mount Ebal in Israel in December 2019, by the Associates for Biblical Research, led by Scott Stripling; it has now appeared in a preliminary publication.
https://heritagesciencejournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40494-023-00920-9?fbclid=IwAR3G9ih5D98ZCB7t1Wk7fIXfVerZzXAdu2Uiw4yqP8KYDCDEvFbnh3Qs7LM
"You are Cursed by the God YHW:" an early Hebrew inscription from Mt. Ebal

THE MOUNT EBAL LEADEN CURSE TABLET

AND THE CRISIS IN ALPHABET RESEARCH

Brian Edric Colless MA BD PhD ThD

This remarkable little artefact (a mere 2 x 2 centimetres), resting on the hand of the archaeologist Scott Stripling, is believed (by Stripling and some other scholars) to be an imprecatory tablet, technically known as a defixio. It was discovered in December 2019, on Mount Ebal (near modern Nablus, ancient Shekem, on the "West Bank" of the Jordan River), in the course of an expedition of the Associates for Biblical Research, led by Scott Stripling. It has now appeared officially in a preliminary publication:

"You are Cursed by the God YHW:" an early Hebrew inscription from Mt. Ebal
https://heritagesciencejournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40494-023-00920-9?fbclid=IwAR3G9ih5D98ZCB7t1Wk7fIXfVerZzXAdu2Uiw4yqP8KYDCDEvFbnh3Qs7LM

The story of its discovery and its decipherment is told here:
A Tsunami from Mt. Ebal: Cursed by the God Yahu
https://www.academia.edu/104014709/A_Tsunami_from_Mt_Ebal_BAS_Spring_2023
Scott Stripling, Abigail Leavitt, Pieter Gert van der Veen, Bible and Spade, 36.2 (2023)

My tentative opinion is that the editors have largely succeeded in deciphering the two inscriptions (interior and exterior), clearly discerning the presence of the roots for "die" (MWT) and "curse" ('RR); but some of their interpretations may be slightly awry. Certainly, the diminutive letters are a handicap to attaining certainty with regard to the intended meaning of the texts, but the microscopic inscription on the tiny lice comb from Lakish has been successfully read, according to my interpretation. Some of the inscriptions that are coming to light from early Israel show that a syllabic form of the proto-alphabet was being employed in the period of the Judges, and this may also be the case in this defixio.
For my part, instead of the indicative mood, I will propose the imperative mood for some of the verbs: "Die!" (MT), "Be cursed!" (HT`R).

"You are Cursed by the God YHW:"
an early Hebrew inscription from Mt. Ebal
Scott Stripling, Gershon Galil, Pieter Gert van der Veen,
Ivana Kumpova, Jaroslav Valach, Daniel Vavrik

Bottom: the folded leaden tablet, unopened.
Top right: the exterior inscription,"Outer A".
Top left: traces ("bulges") of the "Inner B" text on the outside .
The red spot indicates the broken corner of the object; apparently it should be positioned as the top right corner when reading the Outer A text.
The engraver had written an elaborate "cursary" (my word for a collection of curses, in the sense of invocations of doom upon an offender, incantations of death, involving a deity, and therefore not magic spells but imprecations). Yahwe (rather than Yahu), the god named in this conjuration, would be the agent of the curses, analogous to ancient treaties, in which the gods named in the covenant administer the curses and blessings written in the document.
  This was the procedure: a small strip of lead was prepared, and on one half of its face the cursary was inscribed with a stylus; the unmarked part of the document was then folded over as an envelope, and the elaborate curse was repeated in tiny writing on the outside; thus the imprecation was recorded in duplicate, and even in triplicate, as the imprint of the first impression was bulging on the rear side.
How was the concealed inscription read? Surprisingly, nay astonishingly, against our preconceptions about the metal lead (plumbum) being impenetrable to X-rays, the results were achieved by employing "X-ray computed tomography and advanced data processing", producing and analysing the photographs of 46 "slices". Say no more. See the moving picture of the detecting process:
https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1186%2Fs40494-023-00920-9/MediaObjects/40494_2023_920_MOESM1_ESM.gif
    As is my custom, I will ponder whether the revealed letters belong to a syllabary, and thus represent syllables (consonant plus vowel, syllabograms), not simply consonants (consonantograms).
    By the way, there is a word "leaden" (like "golden") which helps in decoding the multi-purpose 'lead" (liid or led?); I have just seen it in action in a Father Brown story of G. K. Chesterton.

Sketch of the interior text ("Inner B"), after Pieter van der Veen: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10161143436379948&set=a.10153844636149948
This drawing is based on his painstaking examination of the photographs, and it agrees substantially with the published drawing of Gershon Galil (reproduced further below).
Notice the divine name, with letters highlighted and annotated by myself: LYHW ("by Yahweh"), and around it various occurrences of the passive participle 'RR ("cursed"), not `RWR (the reading proposed by Galil).
Tentatively, we can affirm that there are two large stick figures of a jubilating person, one above the other, representing the consonant /h/ or a syllable (h with a vowel). The same pattern is observable on the exterior text,(Outer A). Gershon interprets each figure as YHW.
Gershon and Pieter also detect two smaller versions of this letter H, next to the highlighted L of LYHW (H40 and H3).
A reproduction of Galil’s drawing, with the letters numbered (adapted by Brian Donnelly-Lewis) is viewable below.
For the interior inscription (Inner B) Gershon Galil has:
[A] You are cursed by the god Yhw, cursed.
[B] You will die, cursed :
[B] cursed, you will surely die.
[A] Cursed you are by Yhw , cursed.
Gershon suspects that the text is chiasmic (A B B A): thus the first two statements are repeated in reverse order, in his interpretation, and this is an elegant proposal.
Where is the starting point of this jumble of letters?
Galil has numbered the characters that he has detected, 48 in total, and has divided them into three groups or "clusters":
[1] (A=1-17) beginning low down with ' TH, "thou", and meandering to the top.
[2] (BB=18-33) beginning at the top, near the H-sign, with TMT 'RR, "You will die accursed", then running down the opposite side, with "cursed you will surely die".
[3] (A=34-48) beginning at the bottom with "cursed" and circling around the large H of YHW.
This is an elegant reconstruction, but it may contain flaws.

Gershon Galil’s drawing of the interior inscription with the characters numbered, and with coloured lines added by Brian Donnelly-Lewis. This is a mirror-image of the other drawing reproduced above.

At this point I will outline my case for reading the hidden inscription, on the assumption that Gershon and Pieter have correctly identified the characters in the recovered text, though I will offer alternative interpretations for a few of them. My basic principle in such endeavours is to recognize that the person who inscribed these marks on the leaden tablet knew what the intended meaning is, but it will probably be difficult for us to decipher the significance of the signs. Here is my tentative transcription and translation (which certainly needs adjustments), employing the numbers assigned to the characters by Gershon Galil, but not clinging to the connecting lines (beginning with his yellow 1 and 2):

1 2 3 39 38 37 41 40 42 43 16 4 5 6

’ T H T ’ R L

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