A strange turn in a highly sensitive court case over a contested object
By B.C.
IF IT is genuine, it may be the first piece of clear archaeological evidence from the early centuries of Solomon's temple. But the status of the Jehoash tablet has been hotly contested, not just among scholars but in an Israeli court-room. And this week, there was an extraordinary development in those proceedings. Having spent a decade trying to prove the item is a forgery, the Israeli authorities (in the person of a deputy state attorney) shifted position and said they must retain the object on grounds that it is an "antiquity".
The change of line was pointed out by Matthew Kalman, a journalist who has been following every detail of the case for the past decade and reported and blogged about it extensively. The judicial story begins soon after 2003 when the authorities seized hundreds of items from Oded Golan, a well-known antiquities collector, and charged him with forgery. The objects that were confiscated included both the Jehoash tablet and the so-called James ossuary, a stone burial box that is marked with the words "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus"—and is viewed by supporters as evidence of Christianity's founder.
Last year, Mr Golan was acquitted of all forgery charges. A judge who has overseen the entire case, Aharon Farkash, also ruled that the contested objects should go back to Mr Golan: since the state devoted so much effort to its unsuccessful bid to prove they were forgeries, it could hardly claim to retain them on the grounds that they were antiquities, Mr Farkash has pointed out. This week's hearing was part of a government attempt to overturn that ruling, at least with respect to the tablet—whose chiselled inscription resembles a scriptural passagerecording repairs to the temple by King Jehoash.
At one point in the latest proceedings, as Mr Kalman notes, the deputy state attorney asserted that the inscription was still considered fake but the stone itself was now regarded as ancient. During the forgery trial, the state took a different line: it insisted that both the writing and the fashioning of the stone had been carried out in recent times, with the intention of deceiving.
Interestingly, the state has not challenged the court order to return the James ossuary to Mr Golan. It has not yet complied with the order, but it has not tried to overturn it, as it might easily have done. As Mr Kalman put it to me, the state seems even more sensitive about an object which might bear on early Jewish history than it is about an object with possible implications for Christian history.
As for Mr Golan, he said he is quite willing to lend the stone tablet to a museum which might investigate and display it; but he is reluctant to leave it in the hands of a state which has put so much energy into trying to prove him a forger.
