Discovered Dead Sea Tablet

Via James Tabor I see the New York Times article about a stone tablet discovered near the Dead Sea in Jordan. The tablet apparently dates from the first century BCE. It has been examined by Ada Yardeni, who is an expert on Hebrew script from the period and it has undergone a chemical analysis by Yuval Goren, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University who specializes in the verification of ancient artifacts. They are vouching for its authenticity.

The text has an an interesting inscription, which bolsters a theory set forth by Israel Knohl, a professor of Bible studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in a book published in 2000 where he suggested that the idea of a suffering messiah predates Jesus:

Mr. Knohl is part of a larger scholarly movement that focuses on the political atmosphere in Jesus’ day as an important explanation of that era’s messianic spirit. As he notes, after the death of Herod, Jewish rebels sought to throw off the yoke of the Rome-supported monarchy, so the rise of a major Jewish independence fighter could take on messianic overtones.

In Mr. Knohl’s interpretation, the specific messianic figure embodied on the stone could be a man named Simon who was slain by a commander in the Herodian army, according to the first-century historian Josephus. The writers of the stone’s passages were probably Simon’s followers, Mr. Knohl contends.

The slaying of Simon, or any case of the suffering messiah, is seen as a necessary step toward national salvation, he says, pointing to lines 19 through 21 of the tablet — “In three days you will know that evil will be defeated by justice” — and other lines that speak of blood and slaughter as pathways to justice.

To make his case about the importance of the stone, Mr. Knohl focuses especially on line 80, which begins clearly with the words “L’shloshet yamin,” meaning “in three days.” The next word of the line was deemed partially illegible by Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur, but Mr. Knohl, who is an expert on the language of the Bible and Talmud, says the word is “hayeh,” or “live” in the imperative. It has an unusual spelling, but it is one in keeping with the era.

Two more hard-to-read words come later, and Mr. Knohl said he believed that he had deciphered them as well, so that the line reads, “In three days you shall live, I, Gabriel, command you.”

To whom is the archangel speaking? The next line says “Sar hasarin,” or prince of princes. Since the Book of Daniel, one of the primary sources for the Gabriel text, speaks of Gabriel and of “a prince of princes,” Mr. Knohl contends that the stone’s writings are about the death of a leader of the Jews who will be resurrected in three days.

He says further that such a suffering messiah is very different from the traditional Jewish image of the messiah as a triumphal, powerful descendant of King David.

“This should shake our basic view of Christianity,” he said as he sat in his office of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where he is a senior fellow in addition to being the Yehezkel Kaufman Professor of Biblical Studies at Hebrew University. “Resurrection after three days becomes a motif developed before Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly all scholarship. What happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story.”

As the article points out Knohl's theory is not without controversy because some of the inscription isn't clear. But it wouldn't shock me to learn that Jesus picked up on an extant but somewhat novel interpretation of the messiah and made it his own - if indeed he did see himself as a messiah. Or that his followers or the gospel writers did the same.

More than anything this discovery reminds us that there is still a lot of history buried beneath the edifice of modern Israel. Who knows what we have yet to learn about Jesus and his times.