“One can no longer argue with a straight face that the biblical text was not written until the Persian period or the Hellenistic period as many higher critics have done, when here we do clearly have the ability to write the entire text at a much, much earlier date,” he said. A big problem with that position was the prevailing idea that, more than 3,000 years ago, the Israelites couldn’t write these stories down – but the discovery of the curse tablet changes that, Stripling explained. Stripling, however, belongs to a third camp: he thinks stories like the book of Exodus are nothing less than first-hand accounts written by those present at the time. Other historians believe the so-called Deuteronomistic Theory, which posits that the biblical books from Deuteronomy to Kings were written all at once at some point between 300 BCE and 600 BCE as a kind of historical handbook for events that happened many centuries beforehand. Currently, the definitive dating artifacts are the Dead Sea Scrolls, written between the third and first century BCE. The age of the Tanakh, or Old Testament, is a subject of fierce debate among biblical scholars and archeologists. The lead tablet appears to show a three-letter version of the word Yahweh, one of the Hebrew names for God. “It is a legal document … similar to other ancient middle eastern legal economic inscriptions,” he said. “Not just a legal warning – is a kind of sentence. It is actually a legal text,” Gershon Galil, a professor of biblical studies from the University of Haifa, told reporters at a press conference about the discovery. That’s rather fitting, as Ebal is known in the biblical books of Joshua and Deuteronomy as “the mountain of curse,” according to a statement seen by IFLScience.

While “curse tablets” like this have been found in other sites, they’ve never been uncovered at the West Bank before – though the team actually discovered the find by “wet-sifting,” or washing sediments with water, material discarded from excavations on the nearby Mount Ebal more than 30 years ago. “We now have the name ‘Yahweh’, the biblical God of Israel, in an inscription dating from (Late Bronze Era II), which is earlier than many skeptics would argue that the Bible existed or that there was even the ability to write down a sacred text,” said Scott Stripling, director of the Archaeological Studies Institute at The Bible Seminary in Katy, Texas, who led the excavation.

Ancient bible discovery