The Jehoash Inscription: Genuine or Forged?

A March 2003 Maariv article reported a court had issued a search warrant for a collector's apartment, office and warehouse. Police reportedly found photographs of him beside a stone tablet.

Scripture: let the priests take it to them, each man from his donor; and they shall repair the damage to the house, wherever any damage is found.

Second Kings twelve sets the scene. By the king's twenty-third year, the priests still hadn't made the repairs to the house of Yahweh. The king confronted them, and Jehoiada then set a chest beside the altar.

The tablet was claimed to come from a Muslim cemetery near Jerusalem's Temple Mount, in the 1990s. The sources name no finder. A dealer, Hassan Aqilan, sold it to a well-known Israeli collector.

The text describes repairs to a public building, possibly a temple: a portico, meaning a covered porch, windows and spiral staircases, funded by donations.

This echoes the account in Second Kings twelve. But the tablet names neither King Jehoash nor the Temple. The title is a label people gave it.

In June 2003, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced it considered the tablet a modern forgery. Patina, the film that forms on old stone, was one of the points debated.

A seven-year trial followed. About seventy scholars testified, from paleography, the study of ancient handwriting, to geology.

Scripture: In 2005, an external expert report by Wolfgang Krumbein found the patina continuous in many places on the tablet, including the letter grooves. It said authenticity couldn't be proven, but forgery hadn't been proven either.

The court acquitted the owner: the state had not proven forgery. But the verdict did not rule on whether the tablet is authentic.

The state asked to confiscate it, but the Supreme Court ordered it returned to its owner. The sources don't say where it is today.

Scholars differ. One analysis argued a replica could be made that would give the same lab results. Chaim Cohen says he doesn't know if it's genuine, only that language alone can't prove forgery.

So the question stays open. In your own community, who notices first when a shared building needs mending? Follow Bible Evidence, and may the Lord Jesus Christ be with you today.