Discovery of an ancient tablet with the name Jehovah in Hebrew

An ancient tablet discovered near the Palestinian city of Nablus may contain the earliest known mention of God’s name in proto-alphabetic Hebrew

The curse tablet was discovered near Mount Ebal, also called the Mount of the Curse in the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua. Stripling found it in a dump site, part of the structure Zertal identified as Joshua’s altar. Stripling said the finding was a confirmation of the biblical account.

Professor Gershon Galil of the University of Haifa said this type of discovery is made only once a millennium.

The Mount Ebal tablet’s text provides context outside the biblical canon but sheds light on the historical context six centuries earlier.

The artifact, less than 1 inch in length and width and known as a curse tablet, also recalls the account of Joshua building an altar nearby, which Israeli archaeologist Adam Zertal excavated in the 1980s.

Galil deciphered the hidden internal text with another paleographer, Pieter Gert van der Veen of the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. A release from the Associates for Biblical Research press said they employed advanced tomographic scans to recover the hidden text.

The inscription reads: “Cursed, cursed, cursed — cursed by the God YHWA. You will die cursed. Cursed you will surely die. Cursed by YHWA – cursed, cursed, cursed.”

 

_{Source and Credit: CP, CT.}