Famed Jehoash’s Tablet Returned to Israeli Antiquities Owner
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
An Israeli antiquities collector on Thursday bested the state in a decade-long wrestling match, regaining possession of Jehoash’s Tablet, a unique stone inscription dated to 9 BCE that corresponds to biblical account of renovations to the First Temple by Jehoash, King of Judea.
The Supreme Court restored the sandstone artifact which the state had confiscated in 2003, charging collector Oded Golan with forging it and other antiquities, and dealing in them. For him, Thursday’s Supreme Court decision was the cherry on the cake of the appellate ruling in August 2013 that the state couldn’t prove its contention that the tablet was faked.
Over the course of seven and a half years, the court heard testimony from 130 witnesses, including dozens of Israel’s most prominent experts in geology, chemistry, microbiology and ancient scripts.
Golan has been at the eye of archaeological storms before, and the Jehoash Tablet was not the only antiquity he had been accused of forging. In an unprecedented measure in 2004, the collector was charged with fabricating and trying to sell a number of fake antiquities, any one of which would have rocked the archaeological world had it been found in the course of an accredited excavation – including the “James Ossuary”.
Read more at Haaretz.com.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
