In 1869 a group of Bedouins met Frederick Augustus Klein, an Anglican missionary, at the ancient site of Dibon in Jordan. They showed him a large, black basalt slab, or stele, covered in 34 lines of writing that appeared to be very similar to ancient Hebrew. Klein agreed to pay the Bedouins the sum of 100 Napoleons to buy the stele.
It didn’t take long for archaeologists to date the slab to around 840 BCE and to decipher the inscription. They concluded that it was written in the Moabite language, a tribe mentioned frequently in the Bible, but of whom no archaeological evidence had ever been found.
Known as the Moabite, or Mesha, Stele, the slab describes the victories of Mesha, a Moabite king, over the armies of Israel and Judah. Part of the account parallels a story in the Bible (2 Kings, 3) but told from the Moabite perspective. Because of its age much of the text is undecipherable. Some scholars claim that the Stele contains the earliest mention of the House of King David. Others disagree, saying that the letters that are thought to spell out the word David actually spell Balak, a Moabite king mentioned in the biblical Book of Numbers. Either way, it was a very significant find.
Klein returned to Jerusalem and reported the find to his colleagues in the Anglican Christian Missionary Society. The news soon spread and a competition broke out between the German, British and French archaeologists who were working in the area. They all felt obliged to acquire the Stele for their respective countries. The French archaeologist, a man named Charles Clermont-Ganneau, was first off the mark. He sent a representative to Dibon to make a papier-mâché impression of the Stele. It was just as well that he did.
While the French envoy was waiting for his papier-mâché mould to dry, a fight broke out. It seems that other Bedouins in the area were angry that their stone was being sold and were resentful of the European interest in it. Realising that he was in danger of his life, one of the French envoy’s guides peeled the not-quite-dry mould from the Stele. As he tried to peel it off, it tore into several pieces. The guide stuffed the pieces into his pocket and the French party made a run for it.
Meanwhile the Germans were trying a different tactic to get their hands on the Stele. When the Crown Prince of Prussia visited Jerusalem later that year, he persuaded the Turkish authorities to help him to buy it. This approach did not go down well with the Bedouins who decided to put an end to the European interference. They threw the stone into a fire, poured cold water over it to soften it and smashed it into pieces, distributing the remnants among their various families.
Back in Jerusalem, Charles Clermont-Ganneau created a plaster cast of the Stele from the seven torn papier-mâché fragments. At the same time he negotiated with the Bedouins who had smashed the Stele and managed to acquire three large pieces and many tiny fragments. This gave him 613 of the original 1,000 letters in the inscription. His English counterpart, Captain Charles Warren, who was also on the lookout for fragments, managed to buy 18 pieces, giving him a total of 56 letters. Both Warren and Clermont-Ganneau gave their fragments to the Louvre in Paris, where the Stele was reconstructed as closely as possible. It is still there in the Louvre, on display. About two thirds of it is original with the missing bits made from plaster, cast from the original papier mâché mould.
TThe discovery of the Mesha Stele created great excitement. The field of archaeology was in its prime and the search for evidence of biblical stories and events was particularly popular. Archaeology, it was believed, offered the perfect antidote to those who doubted the literal truth of the Bible. So when the Mesha Stele was found to confirm details of a story that was also told in the Book of Kings, the trade in relics and artefacts from the biblical period began to boom. One man in Jerusalem came up with a very lucrative way of cashing in.
His name was Moses Shapira, an antiquities dealer with a shop in the Old City of Jerusalem who had a nice line in forged artefacts. In 1870, at the height of the excitement over the Mesha Stele, he sold 1,700 idols and statues to the Royal Museum in Berlin for a sum equivalent to about £300,000 in today’s money. They had all come from the ancient land of Moab, they all had the same provenance as the Mesha Stele and, as was soon to be discovered, they were all fakes. Shapira of course knew nothing about that, after all he was only a dealer, artefacts just passed through his hands; he couldn’t always vouch for their provenance. He blamed his agent Selim-al Qari; calling him a great rogue and giving him the sack.
The next year Henry Lumley, a visitor from England, came into the shop. Shapira showed him a granite stone that had recently been discovered in Moab which dated from the time of Moses. Shapira translated the inscription for the fascinated Lumley. When he heard what the inscription contained, Lumley wrote an enthusiastic letter to The Times in London saying that this stone might prove to be even more significant than the Mesha Stele because it even mentioned the name of Moses!
Lumley went back to London with a drawing of the stone and took it to the British Museum. They recognised it immediately. It was a copy of a Nabatean mourning inscription that had recently been unearthed in Jordan. It had nothing at all to do with Moses; it certainly didn’t mention his name. Shapira couldn’t bluff his way out of that one; it was he who had pretended to translate the inscription for Lumley.
Shapira had a few quiet years - his experiences seem to have diminished his appetite for forgery. At one time he tried to put the lid of the biblical strongman Samson’s sarcophagus on the market, but he wasn’t taken seriously, everyone knew who he was. He waited a few years, allowing his reputation to recover. Then in 1883, he produced 15 blackened leather strips, charred pieces of a manuscript containing passages apparently from Moses’s concluding speech in the Book of Deuteronomy. They had been found in a cave near Mount Nebo in Moab, close to the site of Moses’ death. The text was slightly different from the Book of Deuteronomy in the Hebrew Bible. Shapira described them as “a short unorthodoxical book of the last speech of Moses in the plains of Moab.”
Shapira’s discovery and claim was convincing enough that he was taken seriously. He brought the fragments to London to offer them to the British Museum. The museum consulted Christian Ginsburg, the doyen of English bible scholars (who I will write more about another week). It took Ginsburg a month to make up his mind, during which time he published a transcript of the fragments and the museum put some of them on display. Eventually, just as popular excitement was growing, Ginsburg pronounced the fragments a forgery.
Nevertheless, the fragments had a curiosity value. The British Museum sold them for £10 to the German bookseller Bernard Quaritch. (His company still trades, in London’s Bedford Row). Quaritch sold them on to the naturalist Dr Philip Mason for £25. He died in in 1903 and the fragments were never heard of again.
We might wonder whether Shapira really was a trickster trying to cash in on the antiquities market, or whether he really was just a dealer who had been taken in himself by the people he bought from. The condemnation of the manuscripts as forgeries destroyed him. After Christian Ginsburg had delivered his verdict, Shapira wrote to him, saying: “You have made a fool of me by publishing and exhibiting them, that you believe them to be false. I do not think that I will be able to survive this shame.” He left London the next day and wandered, isolated, around Europe. Six months later he committed suicide.
Shapira’s tragic death is not the end of the story. There is a twist in the tale. In 2021 Idan Dershowitz, professor of Hebrew Bible at Potsdam University published his book The Valediction of Moses. In it he argued that Shapira’s fragments were not forgeries at all, that they were in fact genuine.
Dershowitz was not the first scholar to revisit the authenticity of the fragments, but his book has had far greater impact than any other. He argues that the fragments are not based on the Book of Deuteronomy at all. Rather, they contain an early version of Deuteronomy, written long before the biblical book. He says that they show none of the signs of the editing which biblical scholars claim the Bible was subjected to. As we might expect, Dershowitz’s argument was immediately challenged by other scholars, who continue to insist that the fragments are forgeries.
Of course, if the fragments themselves could be found then the matter might be settled; the technology for dating ancient manuscripts is far more sophisticated today than it was in Shapira and Ginsburg’s time. But the fragments have disappeared and all we are left with is a highly technical and specialised argument way beyond the ken of most lay people.
It is likely that we will never know whether Shapira was vindicated or not. From the intensity of the discussion still going on, there is no reason to imagine that the question of the authenticity of Moses Shapira’s fragments will be settled soon. It is a dispute that is likely to run and run.