Ancient Tablet Seems to Corroborate Biblical Narrative

Accord­ing to the Asso­ci­at­ed Press, archael­o­gists have found a very spe­cial tablet.

Israeli geol­o­gists said Mon­day they have exam­ined a stone tablet detail­ing repair plans for the Jew­ish Tem­ple of King Solomon that, if authen­ti­cat­ed, would be a rare piece of phys­i­cal evi­dence con­firm­ing bib­li­cal nar­ra­tive.

The find — whose ori­gin is murky — is about the size of a legal pad, with a 15-line inscrip­tion in ancient Hebrew that strong­ly resem­bles descrip­tions in the Bible’s Book of Kings. It could also strength­en Jew­ish claims to a dis­put­ed holy site in Jerusalem’s Old City that is now home to two major mosques.

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The sand­stone tablet has a 15-line inscrip­tion in ancient Hebrew that resem­bles descrip­tions in Kings II, 12:1–6, 11–17, said Israel’s Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey, which exam­ined the arti­fact. The words refer to King Joash, who ruled the area 2,800 years ago.

In it, the king tells priests to take “holy mon­ey … to buy quar­ry stones and tim­ber and cop­per and labor to car­ry out the duty with faith.” If the work is com­plet­ed well, “the Lord will pro­tect his peo­ple with bless­ing,” reads the last sen­tence of the inscrip­tion.

It’s inter­est­ing, but I should note that there seems to be much more con­fu­sion over this tablet’s authen­tic­i­ty than over the James ossuary.