Ancient Hebrew Curse Reveals True Name of God! - Archaeologist Scott Stripling finds Curse Tablet

0:00 This is John Matarazzo with Charisma News and I am having the privilege today of talking to a real life Indiana Jones. And literally, I'm going to say it here that one archaeologist trash is Scott Stripling's treasure and you're going to explain, you're going to understand what we mean by that and how God has given him the wisdom to find some amazing, amazing things. So I'm not going to waste any time. I'm going to bring Scott on right now. Scott, Dr. Scott Stripling, it's great to have you here. I know you have an amazing discovery, an amazing find that really helps validate what we see in scriptures.

0:45 And so I'm going to let you talk about that. So welcome to be here on Charisma News and it's great to be able to have you here. Hey, John, thanks. It's great to be with you also. And there's a lot of exciting things happening in the field of archaeology. I kind of see this as the golden age of archaeology. We're just less than a century and a half old really as a science and we're in a period now where I think we know what we're doing and our technologies are improving and we've got a really good grasp on the stratigraphy of the ancient world. So lots of exciting stuff taking place. Wonderful. So I led this off by saying that one archaeologist trash is Scott Stripling's treasure.

1:28 And I want you to explain what I mean by that, because as you were explaining this new process to me, that's just kind of how I was able to summarize it. So tell us about what you call wet sifting. Yeah, well, we archaeologists love trash, love garbage. We can talk trash with the best of them. What I have discovered, John, this last 20 years is examining old dump piles at archaeological sites. So after an archaeologist excavates in the square and then dry sifts or sieves the material so the dirt falls through and to make sure they're not missing anything, then they discard the remaining matrix.

2:10 And over time, that forms a huge pile, a dump pile, and they're left behind at the sites. And so virtually every archaeological site that you visit, if you know what to look for, you'll find the dump pile there. And what I discovered was that for every one scarab, which is like a shape of a beetle, has the iconography of a pharaoh on it, very common from that earlier time period, or bula, which is like a seal impression. Well, for every one that the archaeologist in charge of the dig had published, I was finding four in the dump piles. So that means we were throwing away by far the majority of the evidence from the small finds.

2:52 Okay. And what's catastrophic? What sizes are we looking at? Well, they're very small, like the size of a quarter, something like that. But when they're covered with dirt and you're seeing thousands of small rocks and dirt clods as you're working and your volunteers, you know, their minds wander, their eyes are tired, and even a trained archaeologist, I mean, a scarab that's covered in dirt just looks like a rock. And so in a sense, we're lucky when we find those things or when volunteers find them in the squares. So I knew that these old dump piles were full of material. And so in December of 2019, I took a team, my Associates for Biblical Research team, and kind of picked out a Navy SEAL team, if you will, from my group.

3:36 So the best of the best there. Yeah, this is the skill set that I'm looking for. And long story short, we were able to go to Mount Ebal, which is where Joshua 830 says that Joshua built an altar to the Lord there. Adam Zeratall had excavated that site in the 1980s, done a very good job on it. I wanted to check his dump pile there. And then I wanted to check an old dump pile at Shiloh from the 1980s. And then I was going to publish the findings and essentially a boring methodological paper to my colleagues, encouraging them to adopt this new technology, whereby we wash the matrix, we take another step before we get started. And we wash that matrix and remove all the dirt.

4:16 And then lo and behold, you can see things that you never would have imagined before. And so that's what we did in December of 2019. Wow. So in December of 2019, so we're talking three, four years ago now. And so you've been sitting on some of these findings officially for a while. Why can't you just come out and say, hey, everybody, I found this and just take pictures of it and put all over the internet? What's this process and why are things taking so long to announce this? Well, OK, let me explain what happened. Because in December of 2019, we recovered this small lead folded tablet, which I'll talk about more in a moment.

5:00 We left Israel. I had to put the project was over. So I put everything in storage, assuming I would be back in a few months to then. And take the research project through the normal protocols in March of 2020. The world turned upside down. Yes, it did. Yes, it did. And so I was locked out of the country for, you know, so I lost two years in that process. So once I was finally able to get access to the tablet again, I got it to a lab in Prague where I had formed a collaborative partnership there and they have expertise in scanning tomographically through lead. Now that's something I didn't even know you could do. And well, we couldn't do it until very recently.

5:42 But you can now scan through lead and we were able to recover writing from the inside of the tablet and see something that was about three thousand four hundred years old. The world's Hebrew writing that had ever been found in a proto alphabetic script. So that predates biblical Hebrew or paleo Hebrew, which is what we think of from the first temple period, those earliest writings that we have. This is the ancestor of that, the very first morphing of Egyptian hieroglyphs into an alphabetic system. And it had, you know, these inscriptions have been found before in the Sinai and so forth. But people called them proto-Sinaitic or proto-Canaanite.

6:22 Nobody had the guts or proof, I guess, to call it Hebrew. Well, in this inscription, we actually have the covenant name of God twice. Wow. Wow. So there was no doubt that it was Hebrew because there's only one group of people in the ancient world worshiping Yahweh. And that's the Israelites. So that's amazing. That's why this is so phenomenal. So how big was this? How big was this? This this tablet that you found? Because I'm thinking, you know, Ten Commandments tablets, you know, like something that Moses would carry down. But you're saying you found this wet sifting. So it couldn't very it couldn't be very big. Right. About the size of a business card folded in half. So it's a small lead strip.

7:04 And what they did in antiquity, think about the Book of Job, for example, probably the oldest book in the Bible. And listen to what Job said. Job 1924. Oh, that my words were written on a lead tablet with an iron pen. You see, it's very ancient way of thinking when you write it on lead and you seal it, those words become binding in their minds. And so hundreds of these have been found in Israel. We call them defixios or curse tablets. And usually they're very petty, stupid sorts of curses like she stole my boyfriend, made her hair fall out or something like that. But that in this case, this was a very serious thing. Is that a real one that you found?

7:45 No, I'm just giving you an example. Okay. I was going to say that's that's pretty amazing. If that's the case. No, it's great. They're usually very petty sorts of things. Gotcha. Okay. More like amulets. But in this case, this is a judicial type of a curse and it's self imprecatory. They are bringing a curse upon themselves, which is exactly what they did at the end of Deuteronomy. They pronounce blessings from Mount Gerizim and self imprecatory curses from Mount Ebal. And here what do we find on Mount Ebal in the altar, by the way, on Mount Ebal, the one that Joshua built, we find a tablet with a curse inscription on it. Wow. And so you in this area that we read about in the Bible, this is where it's still called that today.

8:30 And you are literally going through other people's trash and you find this ancient inscription that's 3400 years old. That's what we think. So I on my collaborative team, John, we have the the scientists from Prague who did the tomography and then two epigraphers, Peter van der Veen from University of Mines, Johannes Gutenberg University in Mines, Germany, and then Gershwin Galil from University of Haifa. So two experienced epigraphers. I wanted two people to independently verify what they were seeing before I stuck my neck out on this. And so I was leading the consortium. And think about the new technologies, wet sifting, tomographic scanning.

9:14 Without those two things, we would not have this inscription. Because had Adams or tall recovered this tablet, he wouldn't. Well, had he had he found it, he wouldn't have been able to do anything with it back in the. Oh, wow. So you from what something that you said earlier was the inscription on the inside of this folded tablet. Yeah, that's the point is to seal it. Once they say, OK, it becomes binding. OK, now, would you like to know what it said? Absolutely, I do. But first, I want to know, like, how did you know that there was something inside it? Did you open it up or explain this? Explain what happened? No, you can't open them. That's the thing.

9:54 The lead is brittle. It's madly right on it. But then over time, it becomes brittle. And that was the point. That's what they wanted. It's sealed. It's forever. It can't be undone. OK. And I knew that it couldn't be open. We tried in our lab in Jerusalem just to put a tiny bit of pressure and the tiny bit of the corner broke off. And so it's not worth it. We stopped. But we took that little piece that broke off and we tested it in our labs at Hebrew University. And we were able to determine where the lead came from, which was Lavrion, Greece. So it was actually exported from Greece into Israel, Canaan, Israel at the time.

10:35 And that's another interesting piece of evidence because we know that mine, Lavrion, was in use at the time. The lead from that mine has a chemical signature that is unique, as all mines do. So the mines were in use during the Late Bronze Age. And then everyone who's in the field of archaeology knows that around the year 1200, exports from that part of the world into Israel, Canaan, ceased with the collapse of the Late Bronze Age civilization. So again, suggesting a date pre 1200 BC, making it far older than any Hebrew inscription that we have. So what was the oldest Hebrew inscription that we had before this find?

11:20 That's agreed on by all would be the Kermit, Caiapha, Ostracon. And that's about 1000 BC. That's a site down in the Elah Valley where David and Goliath fought. There are some recent inscriptions that have been found, but they haven't been studied. They've gone through peer review yet. So we can be certain that this is several hundred years older than the earliest version that we have. And it includes the name of God. Wow. So this thing that includes the name of God, what does it actually say? We talked about that earlier and I cut you off. I want to hear what you actually are able to read in this inscription.

12:01 Well, all my life, John, I wanted to be known as a blessing. But turns out what we found was a curse. And the curse, as you'll see, is actually a blessing in disguise. So let me kind of talk you through it. It says essentially there's 48 very small letters and the curse reads like this. Cursed, cursed, cursed, cursed are you by the God Yahweh or Yahud, the three letter spelling of the name of God. Cursed you will surely die. Cursed you are by Yahweh. Cursed, cursed, cursed. Essentially what it says. So it has a literary structure to it. It's what we call a chiasm.

12:41 Some of the Psalms are written this way. You say it one way and then you invert it and say it a different way. Same thing a different way. So that's the reading. It is a self-imprecatory curse that the Israelites, just like Deuteronomy says, were bringing upon themselves. May this happen to us if we don't keep the terms of God's covenant. Now what your listener may find very interesting is that the Abrahamic covenant was cut just a stone's throw from there. So El Amore, where Abraham cut covenant with God, is a stone's throw from Mount Ebal. And I think that's why Moses told the Israelites to go back to that place because they're going to reaffirm the Abrahamic covenant, this land pact that they had made.

13:25 And there's blessings associated with it and there are curses associated with it. Now we found the tablet from the matrix of the altar itself. To make a long story short. And so imagine what happened. And Joshua and Moses are literate, incidentally. Did you know most scholars in places of higher criticism and higher learning, they deny the literacy of Moses and Joshua. The Bible couldn't have been written until a thousand years later. There was no alphabet with which they could write. Well, now we know there was. They were illiterate. The Israelites were illiterate. Well, then why is God telling them to write? Why is he telling the people to read? Yeah, yeah. You don't write things down if nobody can read it.

14:06 So there's this assumption of literacy and now we have proof of it. So the tablet is written. It's then laid on the altar. What happens next? An innocent animal is slaughtered. And the blood of the innocent covers the curse. So this starts way back in Genesis. The shedding of innocent blood to cover the guilty. Wow. And so this blood covers the tablet. And now the man who will come to the altar, in other words, repent, accept responsibility for his actions. Those curses are not going to come to him. It's only the man who will not repent, who will have those curses in order to him.

14:50 And the curse is a big problem, John, because it doesn't say cursed you are by Satan. We could deal with that. This is cursed you are by Yahweh. That's checkmate. OK, there's no getting out of this curse. Exactly. Except through the blood. So Leviticus 17 11 says that the shedding of blood, there is forgiveness of sin. Yeah. So you found this piece by the altar. And so this you know that this would have been placed on the altar and would have had actually this innocent animal's blood on it. Like you just described. This piece is that old that this would have happened during the time that we have what we read in right in Joshua.

15:32 So think of what an epigraph is a handwriting expert. So I was recently in Washington, D.C. just 10 days ago. And so looking at our founding documents, Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, we don't write that way anymore. Our handwriting style has changed. A lot of our syntax has changed as well. I wish we did still write that way or speak that way to a large degree. My point is that an expert in epigraphy can tell you whether the handwriting, the style of making the letters is from a certain time period. This is why I have the two epigraphers. So this style of writing no longer exists after the year 1200.

16:13 OK, it would be like looking at old English, say, Cade Montelm or then Beowulf, Middle English, like Chaucer's English of the Canterbury Tales and then modern English. So they're very distinct. So this script is from that earliest time period. And it's at the site where the Bible says that they were writing and that they were pronouncing curses. Wow. Wow. So what did it feel like whenever you found this and you realized what this was? Well, it was a little surreal. I have to tell you, when I was sitting there at the altar site, I did have a sense as a Christian, I've never felt the need to bifurcate my faith or to try to hide what it means to me.

16:56 I mean, I'm a very scientific archaeologist. But as far as a human being, it was very profound for me to sit there and realize that Joshua Ben Nun was at this site. The ark was here. God was here. And something important happened here. And I had a sense that we were destined to find something important. And lo and behold, we did. When I first saw the tablet, Frankie Snyder was the one who found it. It was in her tray. And she was our most experienced wet sifter. She'd worked for over a decade on the Temple Mount Sifting Project in Jerusalem and is our small finds expert. So providentially, it was in her tray. Frankie recognized it. She called me over and said, Scott, you better come see this.

17:39 And when I saw it, I thought my heart was going to jump out of my chest because I knew what it was. So I looked at her and that called Abigail over, who is our assistant director. And the three of us just sat there staring at each other going, you got to be kidding me, a curse tablet from the mountain of the curse. At that point, I had no idea that we were going to be able to recover the text from the inside. But fortunately, we were. That's so cool. That's so cool. So there was a mountain of curse. There's also a mountain of blessing. Did they do something similar that you could maybe find blessing tablets? We have never found a blessing tablet. There's over 300 curse tablets that have been found, usually from later time periods like second pit bull period.

18:26 Never have we found a blessing tablet. So it's very interesting. The closest corollary would be the silver scrolls from Jerusalem, where you have the number six priestly blessing. Right. We have the silver scroll, which is a blessing dating to say the seventh century BC, sixth seventh century BC. And then we have the curse tablet from Mount Ebal. And I think if you juxtapose those two, it's a really powerful image, isn't it? Yeah. And notice that it's the metals that are surviving. Paper, vellum, animal skin, things that are written on that, which they did write commonly on those things. They don't survive the ravages of time unless they're in an extremely dry climate, like down by the sea or down in Egypt.

19:10 But in the wet hill country where we are, those things decompose. So it's only the metal or pottery. Sometimes we do get inscriptions that survive there. Wow. So you've been able to find and discover a lot of very unique things. And I know you also were the director of excavation at Shiloh. Am I saying that correctly? Yes. In fact, I still am the director of excavations at Shiloh. That's our main project. This was a side project we were doing that turned out to be extremely interesting. Wow. Okay. So I want to hear what you have found at Shiloh. I mean, that's stuff that we've talked about before, but I know that some of those finds there have been just absolutely incredible.

19:57 So I just want to take a little bit of time and hear you say what are these things that you've found in Shiloh and what's the importance of that for somebody that doesn't quite remember their Bible history that way. Yeah. Well, both sites are part of the conquest. Let me just say that. So Joshua's conquest begins with Jericho and then I, and of course we excavated I, spent 21 years there. And then the next place they went was Mount Ebal. And then at the end of the conquest, Joshua 18 once says Joshua erected the tabernacle at Shiloh. So that's my area of research focus of these conquest sites. So what we have uncovered so far, we started excavating in 2017.

20:39 I'm about to leave for another season of excavation. We are uncovering a monumental building from the period of the tabernacle that appears to match the dimensions given in the Bible and it's east-west. And the text itself suggests that they did build a permanent structure at Shiloh that at some point it was more than a tent that was there. And we have a massive bone deposit, what we call a fabisa due east of this building with tens of thousands of animal bones, clean bones, kosher bones, and mixed in with pottery from the late Bronze Age going to the time of Joshua.

21:20 And it's very beautiful pottery and there's all like gold offerings, gold stars, and other things that are mixed in there. So there's no doubt that it's cultic, that it's a fabisa. Around our monumental building, we're finding things like ceramic palm granites, tiny palm granites, which the Bible says that on the hem of the priest's garments, they have bells and palm granites there. So it's a motif of the tabernacle. We are finding a demolished altar. We have three horns so far of a four-horned altar that we have gathered. And we have storage rooms immediately to the north, which is where tithes would be stored, for example. So to make a long story short, we haven't reached floor level yet in this building.

22:02 Hopefully this summer we will. So I haven't made an official announcement, but people have heard me talk about it, but I haven't published it yet because I just want to check some things before we do. But if you were to ask me right now, it appears that we have found the place of God's dwelling, where literally we're working in the Holy of Holies right now. And for me, that's pretty phenomenal. You get busy working during the day and you kind of forget what you're doing. It's a pretty special place. Wow. So you found three horns of the four-horned altar that the Bible talks about. We assume it's that altar.

22:42 Yeah, I mean, it's pretty remarkable. And I've seen pictures of that, and it is a very unique stone shape, and it definitely stands out. So it's not something that would get overlooked necessarily. But that's amazing that you're able to say that you're probably working in the area of the Holy of Holies, before the Solomon's temple. Right. I mean, you have to remember, for 300 years, Shiloh was the capital of Israel. Jerusalem was still a pagan city. And if people wanted to connect with God, they went to Shiloh. Yeah, and that's remarkable. So I got to ask, these things that you're finding, what happens with them?

23:26 Where do they go? Where are they kept after you've found them and it's been categorized, you've talked about it, you've written about it? Are people able to go see these in a museum somewhere? How can people find out more about the work that you're doing too? Well, thanks for asking. Everything we excavate belongs to the state of Israel. So the antiquities authority licenses me, and I excavate. I'm able to take things out of the country with an export permit to study them, publish them, even display them at times. But ultimately, everything returns to Israel. Now, what makes it into a museum, say the Israel Museum in Jerusalem?

24:08 It's got to be huge because they have so many things that have been excavated that it's really got to be big time to end up there. This tablet may be one of those things or these palm granites may be one of those things. It's a slow process. Wow. So how can people find out more about your work? Of digshiloh.org is where they can follow along with the excavation and I'll be in Israel from May 17th to the end of June, I have a large team. So pray for us and follow us at digshiloh.org. If they want to donate to help, they can also do that there. My personal website is scotstripling.net and people can follow me there.

24:53 And then my school is the Bible Seminary, thebibleseminary.edu. If someone wants to study archaeology, they can study Bible and archaeology together with my students here under my guidance at the Bible Seminary. That's very cool. Very cool. So I got to ask one more time, one more thing. We talked about how you had these big discoveries right before the pandemic. Then obviously you couldn't go back to Israel for a while. What was it like after having to take a break and not being able to dig in the dirt again and sift through other people's trash? What was it like feeling or what did it feel like to get back there again and get back to work?

25:36 It was brutal to be not able to dig because so much of our lives and our routine revolves around that. But we used the time to work on publications. I finished the Kerb et al. McArthur publications and other articles that we cranked out during that period of time. All this stuff we're finding has to be researched and thought through, digested, put into a matrix until it ultimately comes through in publication. So that's what I used the time for, but I wasn't happy about it. But that was kind of an upside of it. We were thrilled to be back in the field last summer and to again be going back this year.

26:16 And listen, none of us have a guarantee. Political situations can change and we could lose access to these sites. Pandemic, something we never thought about. For two years we lost access. So we're grateful for the access that we do have and we want to take full advantage of it. That's really cool. Well, Dr. Scott Stripling, it's great to be able to talk with you and to hear about the things that God has enabled you to uncover. As we've been digging in the scriptures, you're digging in the dirt, but using the scriptures as your source and finding these real life things that confirm what the Bible was talking about and confirm that our faith is true and our faith in God.

26:57 And that's just an amazing, amazing discovery. So thank you so much for sharing that. And check out the links in the description below so that you can follow Dr. Scott Stripling and all the things that he's been mentioning about and read his peer reviewed article. And so definitely recommend all of those things. So Dr. Scott, it's great to have you here on Charisma News. Thank you. I'm with you, John.