The oldest text in ancient Hebrew ever found in Israel happens to be a curse. It is dated around the year 1200 BC and was found at Mount Ebal in the West Bank (the biblical Schechem, the first capital of the Kingdom of Israel following the split of the United Monarchy).
The text, which is inscribed on an amulet, was introduced to the world last March 25 during a press conference. What makes this finding so special is that it is the first object containing not isolated words (which have been found on numerous pottery shards) but full phrases and sentences. As Zvi Koenigsberg explains in his article for The Jerusalem Post, this amulet “attests to literacy among the ancient Israelites many hundreds of years earlier than conventional academic thinking,” which suggests that some biblical texts may have been written as early as 1200 BC.
That the text in the amulet contains a curse is also exceptional. Koenigsberg explains the talisman connects the archaeological site of Ebal with what the biblical texts say about the place: in Deuteronomy, Ebal is also known as the Mountain of the Curse. Deuteronomy 11, 29 reads:
Later, in Deuteronomy 27, a list of curses is included. In fact, verse 11 and following are known as “the Twelve Curses,” in a kind of “negative” version of the Ten Commandments. Part of the text reads as follows:
Konigsberg explains that “this is another record-breaker: it is the first time a site has been discovered that matches a segment of the Torah point-by-point.” What is even more striking is that the amulet might show that the Ebal segment of Deuteronomy is at least 600 years earlier than what biblical scholarship has commonly assumed.
