Mount Ebal

The two summits stand at either side of a pass in the central hill country, with Ebal on the north. The mound of Tell Balata, identified as biblical Shechem, sits at the eastern mouth of that pass, and the Shechem page carries the case for that identification and calls it not seriously contested. The coordinates this site holds for the two summits differ by 0.0334 degrees of latitude and by about two ten-thousandths of a degree of longitude, which works out to roughly 3.7 kilometres summit to summit in a straight line. That is arithmetic on the site's own two coordinate pairs rather than a surveyed distance. Mount Ebal rises to about 935 metres above sea level, and Mount Gerizim to about 881 metres, so Ebal is the higher of the two by roughly 54 metres. Adam Zertal began a survey of the territory of Manasseh in 1980 and excavated a stone structure on the northeastern ridge of Mount Ebal from 1982 to 1989. In his report the structure is a rectangular installation roughly 9 by 7 metres with a ramp leading up to it, filled with ash and holding a large quantity of animal bone dominated by young male cattle, sheep, goats and fallow deer. He dated it to Iron Age I and identified it with the altar of Joshua 8:30. He put the case to a general readership in Biblical Archaeology Review in 1985, under the title Has Joshua's Altar Been Found on Mt. Ebal? Aharon Kempinski answered in the same journal the following year, in Joshua's Altar: An Iron Age I Watchtower. On his reading the structure is better explained as an Iron Age I watchtower or farmstead of a kind found elsewhere in the hill country, and the cultic identification is not required by what was excavated. Israel Finkelstein and others have questioned both the cultic identification and the dating, and Zertal replied in turn. That is the state of the argument: an excavator who read the structure as an altar, colleagues who read it as a building of another kind, and no resolution agreed by everyone. What is not disputed on this one is worth separating out. A stone structure of Iron Age date was excavated on Ebal's northeastern ridge. It held ash and a large animal bone assemblage, and the species mix is unusual enough to be argued over. What is disputed is what the structure was for. From 2019, Scott Stripling and colleagues recovered a small inscribed lead object from material discarded by Zertal's excavation, and reported that it carries an early Hebrew curse text. Gershon Galil worked on the proposed reading, and a publication followed in 2023. Associates for Biblical Research announced the find on March 24, 2022, and the peer-reviewed article, titled You are Cursed by the God YHW: an Early Hebrew Inscription from Mt. Ebal, appeared in the journal Heritage Science in May 2023. The object is a small folded lead sheet, about two centimetres square, too fragile to unfold, so the team read it by x-ray tomography carried out with the Czech Academy of Sciences rather than by opening it. Galil's proposed transcription reads it as a curse formula naming the God YHW, and the team dated the object to about 1200 BC. The reading has been strongly disputed by epigraphers including Christopher Rollston. The reading of that inscription is contested, and this page prints no transcription of it and treats no proposed wording as established. The textual question about the mountain itself is older than any of that. At Deuteronomy 27:4 the Masoretic Text reads Mount Ebal and the Samaritan Pentateuch reads Mount Gerizim, and the word decides which mountain the altar and the plastered stones belong to. Albert Barnes held that the Masoretic reading is original and reported that nearly all the modern authorities he knew agreed. Adam Clarke reported in 1832 that Benjamin Kennicott had defended the Samaritan reading at length, that Parry answered him in The Case between Gerizim and Ebal Fairly Stated, that J. H. Verschuir answered in his Dissertatio Critica, and that many in Clarke's day found Kennicott's arguments unanswerable. Support for the Gerizim reading has also been claimed from an Old Latin manuscript and from a fragment published in 2008, and both claims are argued over. How this site handles that dispute is stated plainly. Each community reads its own text. Neither text is called a forgery here, and no community is accused of tampering with Scripture. The nineteenth-century notes on both sides of the question carry a charge of that kind aimed in opposite directions, and those notes are left off this page for that reason. Two further claims a reader is likely to meet elsewhere are worth answering here. The first is that Gerizim is green and Ebal bare. Clarke reports the fertile Gerizim and the barren Ebal as the united testimony of the travellers he had read, naming Ludolf, Reland, Benjamin and Maundrell, while Barnes, writing in the same century, says that Gerizim is barren like Ebal and proposes that it was chosen as the hill of blessing because it is the southern of the two. Two respected commentators, two flat contradictions, and this page reports both. The second is that 1 Enoch has something to say about these mountains. It does not name either one.