From the Jerusalem Post:

A Jerusalem judge will announce on Wednesday whether he has decided to order the destruction of a burial box that could have held the bones of the brother of Jesus and an inscribed tablet that could have come from the First Temple.
At a Jerusalem District Court hearing in April, Judge Aharon Farkash said he might exercise “the judgement of Solomon” and order both items to be destroyed.

It’s hard to believe that the judge was being serious, especially since he has concluded that the artifacts may be authentic. Advocates on both sides of the forgery debate are against destruction of the objects.

Andre Lemaire, the Sorbonne scholar who published the first analysis of the ossuary in 2002 and has stood by its authenticity, said its destruction would be “scandalous” and “a manipulation of historical evidence.”
“It would be necessary from a scientific point of view to start a new suit, on a real basis this time, for voluntary destruction of historical evidence and tentative manipulation of history,” Professor Lemaire told The Jerusalem Post.
Christopher Rollston, professor of Old Testament and Semitic Languages at Emmanuel Christian Seminary who appeared as a prosecution witness, said “it is never prudent to destroy antiquities, regardless of the controversy surrounding them.”
“I would certainly not wish to see the Ya’akov (“James”) Ossuary destroyed. Indeed, to destroy the ossuary would only fuel the controversy, effectively turning this ossuary into an archaeological martyr of sorts. I wish to see it returned to its legal owner,” he said.

The full article is here.

HT: Joseph Lauer

Five geologists have written a new article in light of the judge’s acquittal of Oded Golan on charges that he forged the Jehoash Inscription. The geologists believe that the inscription is genuine and make their case in a 30-page document recently published by The Bible and Interpretation. The abstract:

The carbon particles in the patina yield a radiocarbon age of approximately 2250 years BP (third century BCE). The presence of micro-colonial fungi and associated pitting indicates slow growth over many years. No modern elements related to the use of modern tools were found. All evidence indicates that the production of the tablet and the carving of its inscription occurred at essentially the same time….. We would like to emphasize that we found nothing suspicious to indicate that the JI [Jehoash Inscription] is a forgery. We came to the conclusion that our analyses strongly support the antiquity of the patina, which, in turn, strengthens the contention that the inscription of the JI is authentic…..

It’s possible that these five experts have been fooled by someone more brilliant in geological matters, but it’s too much to ask me to believe that they are part of a conspiracy to conceal a forgery.

I do not recall hearing of the alleged provenance of the inscription (before it was sold on the antiquities market), but the article claims that it was found “near the southeastern corner of the wall of the Temple Mount complex where it was used as a secondary building stone in a tomb.” New tombs have been dug in this Muslim cemetery in the last decade, but whether or not this claim is true is impossible to know apart from some trustworthy witnesses. Some had speculated previously that it came from the Muslim construction of an exit for a mosque in “Solomon’s Stables.”

Matthew Kalman reports on the sentencing hearing this week for Oded Golan, convicted of three minor charges in connection with the James Ossuary case.

The Antiquities Authority, backed by State Attorney Moshe Lador, has launched a desperate rearguard action to reverse its humiliating defeat in a seven-year trial that ended with the acquittal of an Israeli collector accused of faking the burial box of [James] the brother of Jesus and an inscribed stone [Jehoash] tablet that may have hung on the wall of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. The latest twist came during a routine sentencing hearing at the Jerusalem District Court last Tuesday, two months after the stunning collapse of the high-profile prosecution. Prosecutor Dan Bahat revealed that the Antiquities Authority was determined not to return dozens of items, including the burial box and the stone tablet to their owner, despite his acquittal on all the relevant charges. Bahat compared it to returning drugs to a dealer acquitted on a technicality.

The rest of the article indicates that the IAA is playing the role of the sore loser but the judge isn’t falling for their dirty tricks.

The Haaretz Weekend Magazine has two interesting articles related to the forgery trial of Oded Golan. I think they express well some of the arguments of the defense. I agree with Golan (and archaeologists who are not usually mentioned in the news) that the Jehoash Inscription is too sophisticated to be a forgery. The photograph from the 1970s showing the James Ossuary with the full inscription is significant testimony that the prosecution could not counter.

I don’t think there’s any question that the motivation of many of those claiming forgery here is a desire to eliminate the antiquities trade. As noble as that may be, it does not overturn the weight of the evidence that the primary artifacts in question (including also the ivory pomegranate) are authentic.

According to Golan, contrary to the argument of the IAA, the world of antiquities forgeries in Israel is very small and makes no economic sense: “In order to make the Jehoash tablet, you would have to work on it for at least a year and keep a team of experts on writing and on biology and geochemistry and archaeology, among others, and in the end you wouldn’t be able to sell it. You have to do everything in secret and you’ll always get someone who will say it is a fake.
“If you can do all that,” he continues, “you might as well go and print yourself dollars.”
According to Golan, the community of antiquities collectors constitutes a very limited group of knowledgeable individuals, all of whom are experts, to whom it is not easy to sell fakes. He also mentions the absence of any logic in the forgery of which he was accused in the case of the Jehoash tablet.
“I said during the investigation that even if I had intended to make forgeries, I definitely wouldn’t have written 200 letters [of the alphabet], in which you can make mistakes in syntax and shape, and all this on stone that’s going to break,” he asserts. “If I were to forge, I’d make do with writing: ‘The Temple, entrance here.’ And if I’ve already written ‘brother of Jesus,’ wouldn’t it have been logical to add ‘of Nazareth’? Without that, it all remains in the realm of fantasy.”

The prosecution claims that Golan is a “genius” who is able to convince scholars of all different fields that his creations are authentic. Golan doesn’t give himself so much credit.

The full article is worth reading, as is the sidebar about Ronny Reich who says, “It’s hard for me to believe that a forger ‏(or group of forgers‏) could be so knowledgeable in all aspects of the inscription − that is, the physical, paleographic, linguistic and biblical ones − that they could produce such an object.”

It would be nice if the Jehoash Inscription went on public display in a museum. For previous posts about the Jehoash Inscription, see the following:

Jehoash Inscription: Five Scholars Claim Authentic

Jehoash Inscription: Geologists Think Authentic

Forgery Conference Report

HT: Joseph Lauer