A biblical text disguised as a forgery in the 19th century is not only authentic, but is actually a forerunner of Deuteronomy, says one scholar. Not everyone agrees.
The book of Deuteronomy describes some events in Israel’s early history and tells of various laws transmitted by God, including the Ten Commandments. Many scholars believe that the book of Deuteronomy was written about 2,700 years ago. This text would date earlier.
The claim has garnered considerable media attention, including an extensive article in The New York Times; however, most scientists contacted by Live Science expressed doubts, saying that the text was in fact a forgery.
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The text was written in Paleo-Hebrew on 16 leather fragments. In 1883, Moses Wilhelm Shapira, an antiques dealer in Jerusalem, brought the text to Europe. He showed it to a committee of scholars in Germany, who dismissed it as a hoax. Shapira then travels to Britain where he offers to sell the fragments for £ 1 million to the British Museum. An expert working for the museum also dismissed it as a forgery and turned down the offer. The following year, in 1884, Shapira died in the Netherlands by suicide.
After Shapira’s death, his widow sold the text to a bookseller named Bernard Quaritch, and its location has been lost since about 1900. But a number of handwritten copies of the text still exist today.
Is the text real?
In an article published in the March issue of the magazine Journal of Old Testament Studies, and in a recently published book “The Valediction of Moses: A Proto-Biblical Book” (Mohr Siebeck, 2021), Idan Dershowitz, the chairman of the Hebrew Bible and its exegesis at the University of Potsdam, Germany, case argued why the text is not only authentic but is also a precursor to the book of Deuteronomy.
The text, which Dershowitz calls the ‘Valediction of Moses’, tells a story in which God commands Moses to conquer the lands of a king named Sihon. ‘Moses and the Israelites attack Sihon [a place called] Jahas, kill all and take all the king’s cities. It is a short and straightforward narrative, “Dershowitz wrote in his recent book.” Despite being shorter than the book of Deuteronomy, the text contains the Ten Commandments, “he said. , but the book of Deuteronomy contains a longer description of the story.
Dershowitz says that this text, with its shorter narrative, was written before the book of Deuteronomy. “This text is not derived from Deuteronomy, but is the ancestor of Deuteronomy,” Dershowitz wrote in the journal article.
Dershowitz makes numerous arguments to substantiate his claim that the text is authentic. First, he said that Shapira’s own notes show that the antiques dealer is struggling to understand the text. Dershowitz said it should at least prove that Shapira did not falsify the document himself.
The papers have ‘a large number of question marks, marginal thoughts and rejected readings; it appears to be a preliminary decipherment. Shapira was indeed working out the correct order of the inscribed learning fragments’, Dershowitz said in the magazine article. “If Shapira was the forger – or one of the forgeries – of the manuscripts, why does his private articles contain a not-quite-successful attempt to decipher them? Which he himself devised or entered. ‘
Second, Dershowitz argues that the story of how the text was discovered is strikingly similar to how the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the 1940s.
“According to Shapira’s testimony, it was in the summer of 1878 that he first heard of some ancient manuscript fragments discovered by Bedouins in a cave near the Dead Sea, above Wadi al-Mujib,” Dershowitz wrote. Shapira claims he bought it for a modest amount from the Bedouin. This story of a text found by Bedouins in a cave near the Dead Sea is very similar to how the Dead Sea Scrolls found in the 1940s, Dershowitz wrote. This resemblance exists despite the fact that the Dead Sea Scrolls were only found decades after Shapira’s death.
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Dershowitz makes many more arguments to support his conclusions. Dershowitz, for example, claims that a forger of the 19th century would probably not have been aware of the paleo-Hebrew words used in the text. He also notes that the Bedouin, from whom Shapira claims he bought the text, would have had little reason to create an extensive forgery, as only a small amount of money was paid to them.
What Bible Scholars Have to Say
Live Science spoke to more than half a dozen scholars who are not involved in the research, to get their minds on the allegations. Most of them expressed skepticism and said that the text was probably a forgery.
One problem that scholars have noticed is that the text has been lost for more than a century, making it impossible to perform scientific tests on it. In addition, Shapira had a record of forgery, they said. In the 1870s, Shapira sold several prescribed objects that were presumably created by the ancient Moabites and that turned out to be counterfeit. According to scholars, the text contains a number of unusual features that suggest that a forger of the 19th century created it, such as letters written in views in which an ancient writer would not normally write.
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“Dramatic allegations require dramatic, compelling evidence, and we just do not have it with regard to the Shapira comics. On the contrary, we have the best hypothetical and circumstantial evidence., A professor of Northwest Semitic languages and literatures at the George Washington University, which has given a long list of reasons why the text is probably a forgery. “The text of the Shapira strips is flawed, and these errors are similar to the kind of errors found frequently in modern forgeries over the decades, said Rollston.
Sidnie White Crawford, an emeritus professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who is an expert on the Hebrew Bible and Hebrew language, also did not find Dershowitz’s arguments convincing. “The question of authenticity is based on the material remains – which are now missing and cannot be tested – and an analysis of the paleography – the manuscript,” Crawford said, noting that previous paleographic studies of the text found that it contains unusual features that indicate a counterfeit. Study of the text done in the 20th and 21st centuries relied on handwritten copies, while some of the studies done in the 19th century used the actual text.
Dershowitz contradicts in his book and article that the paleographic errors identified by scholars may be the result of the fact that the actual text should not be studied; 19th-century scholars could have suggested the errors when they copied the text by hand. In other words, the actual text may have looked different from the handwritten copies that exist today.
Some scholars leave open the possibility that the text is authentic. “Based on the few drawings made at the time, the fragments appear to have been poorly executed, which would not be surprising given that Shapira had been involved in a forgery case several years before,” said Michael Langlois, a theology, said. professor at the University of Strasbourg, France. “On the other hand, it is possible that the [copies] – not the fragments themselves – were poorly executed. Unfortunately, we do not have the fragments ourselves. Hence the dilemma. So, I would say that it is technically possible that the fragments were in fact genuine, ‘Langlois told WordsSideKick.
Originally published on Live Science.