Unearthing Israel's biblical past: Archaeological discoveries at Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal

Israel is filled with archaeological sites from the times of the Bible, many of which are only partly excavated. We can assume that many have not been discovered yet, and others never will be. Nevertheless, the sites we know about still have enough ‘unexcavated’ material to keep archaeologists busy for another century, at least.

In this series, we are examining some of the most important archaeological sites in Israel and learn a bit about the different discoveries found in these places. We started with Qumran, continued with the City of David, and in this third article, we will take a look at Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal, the two mountains of the blessing and the curse,

Ever since the founding of “The Palestine Exploration Fund” by the British in 1865, the exploration of the land of Israel has increased our understanding of the Bible and cast new light on it. The amazing thing is that the discoveries almost always largely confirm the biblical account, and have forced even the greatest skeptics to accept that the Bible is not an entirely unreliable source.

Anyone who delves into the details of the academic journals of biblical archaeology will notice the fierce debate between the “minimalists,” who wish to minimize the age of the biblical text, and the “maximalists” who have the opposite idea. A discovery that confirms the biblical account will cause the minimalists try to discard it with a plethora of excuses, which usually evaporate as the research proceeds through the years.

Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal stand on opposite sides of the ancient city of Shechem, mentioned as early as Genesis 34. The Romans later renamed it Neapolis, which was changed to Nablus by the Arabs. In Hebrew, however, the city is still called by its original biblical name Shechem.

In Deuteronomy 11, from verse 26 and onwards, Moses commands the people of Israel to stand on Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal to proclaim the blessings and the curses. This is then described in detail in chapter 27, where it says that six tribes are to stand on one mountain and six on the other. According to Joshua 8:30-35, these instructions of Moses were carried out to the letter.

But what happened after that? And what has archaeology found on these mountains? Well, the mountain of curse, Ebal, north of Nablus, was excavated by Israel in the 1980s. The mountain of blessing, Gerizim, south of Nablus, became the holy place of the Samaritans, and there was a Samaritan temple on the site once upon a time. They believe Mount Gerizim is identical to both Ararat and Mount Moriah in the Bible, and that when God speaks of a temple as “a place I will choose” in Deuteronomy, he means Gerizim and not Jerusalem. The excavations of the Samaritan temple were conducted between 1983 and 2006.

The Samaritans claim to be the remnant of the Northern kingdom, Israel, while the Jews claim they are descendants of people moved there by the Assyrians, according to 2nd Kings 17:24-41. They disputed with the Jews already at the time of Nehemiah, and at the time of Jesus, they were a significant threat to the Jews. They were significantly decimated by the Romans, and today they number just a few hundred people.

So what has the archaeology unearthed in these places?

Mount Gerizim:

Both historical sources and archaeology confirm that the Samaritans built a temple here in the 5th century BC – this is contemporary with Nehemiah, who was in fierce rivalry with “Sanballat the Horonite,” who, according to Josephus Flavius, was a Samaritan. If you read Nehemiah, it makes perfect sense that Sanballat would build a rival temple. A century after Nehemiah, Alexander the Great came along and Judah became more Greek than Persian. A few centuries later, after the Maccabee rebellion, Israel was an independent Jewish kingdom for about a century before succumbing to Rome. It was during this century of Jewish independence that the Jewish king, John Hyrcanus, destroyed the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim in 112 BC. The Samaritans, however, kept using the place to make sacrifices – which they do to this day.

The archaeological digs unearthed thousands of pottery vessels and burned bones of animal sacrifices, as well as many stones containing God’s name, YHWH. During the Roman era, the Samaritans and the Jews were rivals, and we can see many examples of this in the New Testament. Mount Gerizim is even implied in this passage,

“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

“Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. (John 4:19-22)

After the great revolt a few decades after Jesus, the Romans decimated both the Jews and the Samaritans, and unlike the Jews, the Samaritans never quite recovered – but a remnant survived. The Romans became Christians in the 4th century AD, and in the 5th century, they built a Byzantine church on Mount Gerizim. In the 6th century, they even outlawed Samaritanism, triggering a disastrous Samaritan revolt, which led to further decimation of the Samaritan population. This church has also been discovered in the archaeological dig, as well as remnants of a castle built in the wake of the revolt. Sources indicate that the Muslim rulers, from the 7th century, were more benevolent towards the Samaritans, maybe because they saw them as a sect of Judaism, and thus a people of the book.

Today there are around 900 Samaritans, of which about half live in the Samaritan city Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim, and the other half in Holon, near Tel-Aviv. The Samaritans in Kiryat Luza are the only people in the world allowed to hold dual Israeli and Palestinian citizenship. Another city on the southern slope of Mount Gerizim is the Israeli settlement Har Brakha, which literally means “the mountain of blessing.”

Mount Ebal:

Mount Ebal was excavated in 1980 as part of the “Manasseh Hill Country Survey,” an archaeological survey conducted in the area allotted to Manasseh in the Bible, from 1978 and onwards. In this survey, they found over 200 sites from the Iron Age, including an altar structure on Mount Ebal which Adam Zertal (1936 – 2015) found in 1980.

A team from the University of Haifa and the Israel Exploration Society excavated Mount Ebal from 1982 to 1989 and uncovered scarabs, seals, and animal bones dating to “the Iron Age I period” (which is archaeological lingo for the Biblical era from the book of Joshua until King Solomon’s death in 1st Kings 11). Zertal suggested that this altar is identical to the altar Joshua built on Mount Ebal according to the biblical text.

In 2021, the Palestinian Authority destroyed part of the excavations and the stones were ground up and used to pave a nearby road.

Yet, this excavation from the 80s turned out to be even more significant, because the excavated soil was dumped and preserved near the dig site in case it contained anything the archeologists missed, as is typical with such excavations. In 2019, a team of scientists, including Scott Stripling of the Archaeological Studies Institute in Katy, Texas, sifted through a third of the dirt at Zertal’s east dump site. In it, they found a folded lead tablet – a stone book of sorts that couldn’t be opened without damaging whatever inscription was inside. The scientists were able to use modern CT scanning, however, to get a look, and it read,

“Cursed, cursed, cursed – cursed by the God YHW./ You will die cursed./ Cursed you will surely die./ Cursed by YHW – cursed, cursed, cursed.”

Based on analysis of the script, this tablet dates to the 13th century BC, which fits perfectly with the book of Joshua. Now, not all experts agree, of course, and there’s a lot of debate regarding this tablet. It has been accused of not having actual letters, but just a few dents and random marks that the archaeologists over-interpreted, and that it’s just a fishing-net sinker. Furthermore, Stripling and his team were accused of sensationalism and pre-supposition because of their religious faith.

Stripling was, however, confident that his findings would be proven correct. His team of scholars also included epigraphical experts Dr. Gershon Galil, a biblical studies expert from the University of Haifa, and Pieter Gert van der Veen of the Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz, Germany, who were responsible for interpreting the text. A fishing-net sinker had never before been found on the top of an inland mountain. As for the accusation of sensationalism and the way they revealed their findings in a press conference rather than an academic peer-reviewed journal, their explanation is that information about this started to leak online, and they needed to assert the find before it spread too far. They did publish the findings in a peer-reviewed journal after that.

If this is true, it’s the oldest Hebrew inscription ever, and the implications are actually pretty huge. It pushes back the accepted date of Israelite literacy by some 500 years. It could also indicate a number of things, once again proving the Bible more right than the archaeologists. If the Israelites were literate at that time, the idea of them writing down the events of the Bible close to when the events took place is a lot more plausible. Until now, most scholars still believe they were written down generations later. It also places the Israelites entering the land of Canaan a few centuries earlier than the scholars had thought until now – once again being more consistent with the Biblical narrative.

The experts have been wrong about a lot lately, and I wouldn’t be surprised if these skeptics are proved wrong in the end. Right now, Stripling is awaiting more peaceful times in the land of Israel, so he can come back and conduct further research. Let’s just hope that the Palestinian Authority doesn’t thwart this by destroying more Jewish history while we’re waiting.

In the next article in this series, we will take a look at Ziklag – the city which King David ruled as a vassal of the Philistine ruler Achish until the death of King Saul, as described in 1 Samuel 30.