gabriel isreal stone
A museum worker looks at the
'Gabriel Stone' as it is displayed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Tuesday,
April 30, 2013. (photo credit: AP/Sebastian Scheiner)
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JERUSALEM (AP) — An ancient
limestone tablet covered with a mysterious Hebrew text that features the
archangel Gabriel is at the center of a new exhibit in Jerusalem, even as
scholars continue to argue about what it means.
The so-called Gabriel Stone, a meter
(three-foot)-tall tablet said to have been found 13 years ago on the banks of
the Dead Sea, features 87 lines of an unknown prophetic text dated as early as
the first century BC, at the time of the Second Jewish Temple.
Scholars see it as a portal into the
religious ideas circulating in the Holy Land in the era when was Jesus was
born. Its form is also unique — it is ink written on stone, not carved — and no
other such religious text has been found in the region.
Curators at the Israel Museum, where
the first exhibit dedicated to the stone is opening Wednesday, say it is the
most important document found in the area since the discovery of the Dead Sea
Scrolls.
“The Gabriel Stone is in a way a
Dead Sea Scroll written on stone,” said James Snyder, director of the Israel
Museum. The writing dates to the same period, and uses the same tidy
calligraphic Hebrew script, as some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of
documents that include the earliest known surviving manuscripts of Hebrew Bible
texts.
The Gabriel Stone made a splash in
2008 when Israeli Bible scholar Israel Knohl offered a daring theory that the
stone’s faded writing would revolutionize the understanding of early
Christianity, claiming it included a concept of messianic resurrection that
predated Jesus. He based his theory on one hazy line, translating it as “in
three days you shall live.”
‘The Gabriel Stone is in a way a
Dead Sea Scroll written on stone’
His interpretation caused a storm in
the world of Bible studies, with scholars convening at an international
conference the following year to debate readings of the text, and a National
Geographic documentary crew featuring his theory. An American team of experts
using high resolution scanning technologies tried — but failed — to detect more
of the faded writing.
Knohl, a professor of Bible at
Hebrew University in Jerusalem, eventually scaled back from his original
bombshell theory but the fierce scholarly debate he sparked continued to
reverberate across the academic world, bringing international attention to the
stone. Over the last few years it went on display alongside other Bible-era
antiquities in Rome, Houston and Dallas.
Bible experts are still debating the
writing’s meaning, largely because much of the ink has eroded in crucial spots
in the passage and the tablet has two diagonal cracks the slice the text into
three pieces. Museum curators say only 40 percent of the 87 lines are legible,
many of those only barely. The interpretation of the text featured in the
Israel Museum’s exhibit is just one of five readings put forth by scholars.
All agree that the passage describes
an apocalyptic vision of an attack on Jerusalem in which God appears with
angels on chariots to save the city. The central angelic character is Gabriel,
the first angel to appear in the Hebrew Bible. “I am Gabriel,” the writing
declares.
The stone inscription is one of the
oldest passages featuring the archangel, and represents an “explosion of angels
in Second Temple Judaism,” at a time of great spiritual angst for Jews in
Jerusalem looking for divine connection, said Adolfo Roitman, a curator of the
exhibit.
The Gabriel Stone, on exhibition at
the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, (photo credit: Sebastian Scheiner/AP)
The exhibit traces the development
of the archangel Gabriel in the three monotheistic religions, displaying a Dead
Sea Scroll fragment which mentions the angel’s name; the 13th century Damascus
Codex, one of the oldest illustrated manuscripts of the complete Hebrew Bible;
a 10th century New Testament manuscript from Brittany, in which Gabriel
predicts the birth of John the Baptist and appears to the Virgin Mary; and an
Iranian Quran manuscript dated to the 15th or 16th century, in which the angel,
called Jibril in Arabic, reveals the word of God to the prophet Mohammad.
“Gabriel is not archaeology. He is
still relevant for millions of people on earth who believe that angels are
heavenly beings on earth,” said Roitman. The Gabriel Stone, he said, is “the
starting point of an ongoing tradition that still is relevant today.”
The story of how the stone was
discovered is just as murky as its meaning. A Bedouin man is said to have found
it in Jordan on the eastern banks of the Dead Sea around the year 2000, Knohl
said. An Israeli university professor later examined a piece of earth stuck to
the stone and found a composition of minerals only found in that region of the
Dead Sea.
The stone eventually made it into
the hands of Ghassan Rihani, a Jordanian antiquities dealer based in Jordan and
London, who in turn sold the stone to Swiss-Israeli collector David Jeselsohn
in Zurich for an unspecified amount. Rihani has since died. The Bible scholar
traveled to Jordan multiple times to look for more potential stones, but was
unable to find the stone’s original location.
Israel Museum curators said
Jeselsohn lent the stone to the museum for temporary display.
‘Gabriel…is still relevant for
millions of people on earth who believe that angels are heavenly beings on
earth’
Lenny Wolfe, an antiquities dealer
in Jerusalem, said that before the Jordanian dealer bought it, another
middleman faxed him an image of the stone and offered it for sale.
“The fax didn’t come out clearly. I
had no idea what it was,” said Wolfe, who passed on the offer. It was “one of
my biggest misses,” Wolfe said.
What function the stone had, where
it was displayed, and why it was written are unknown, said curators of the
Israel Museum exhibit.
“There is still so much that is unclear,”
said Michal Dayagi-Mendels, a curator of the exhibit. Scholars, she said, “will
still argue about this for years.”
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press
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