Gabriel's Revelation

File:Gabriel's stone.jpg

A detail of the Gabriel Revelation Stone on display in the Israel Museum (fair use full view).

Gabriel's Revelation, also called Hazon Gabriel (the Vision of Gabriel)Template:Sfn or the Jeselsohn Stone, is a stone tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew text written in ink, containing a collection of short prophecies written in the first person. It is dated to the late 1st century BC or early 1st century AD and is important for understanding Jewish messianic expectations in the Second Temple period.

Description

Gabriel's Revelation is a grayTemplate:Sfn micritic limestoneTemplate:Sfn tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew textTemplate:Sfn written in ink.Template:Sfn It measures 37 centimetersTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn (width) by 93Template:Sfn or 96Template:Sfn centimeters (height). While the front of the stone is polished, the back is rough, suggesting it was mounted in a wall.Template:Sfn

The writing is a collection of short prophecies written in the first person by someone identifying as Gabriel to someone else in the second person singular.Template:Sfn The writing has been dated to the 1st century BCE or the early 1st century CE by its script and language.Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn David Hamidovic's analysis instead suggests a date after  CE.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn A physical analysis of the stone found no evidence of modern treatment of the surface, and found the attached soil most consistent with the area east of the Lisan Peninsula of the Dead Sea.Template:Sfn The text as a whole is unknown from other sources;Template:Sfn it is fragmentary, so the meaning is quite uncertain.Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn It is considered very similar to the Dead Sea scrolls.Template:Sfn The artifact is relatively rare in its use of ink on stone.Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn

Scholars have characterized the genre of Gabriel's Revelation as prophetic,Template:Sfn although biblical Hebrew scholarTemplate:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn Ian Young expresses surprise that it does not use Hebrew language characteristic of biblical prophetic texts.Template:Sfn Other scholars describe its genre as a revelatory dialogue similar to 4 Ezra or 2 BaruchTemplate:Sfn or even as an apocalypse.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

Origins and reception

The unprovenanced tablet was reportedly found by a Bedouin man in Jordan on the eastern banks of the Dead Sea around the year 2000.Template:Sfn It was owned by Ghassan Rihani, a Jordanian antiquities dealer working in Jordan and London, who sold it to David Jeselsohn, a Swiss–Israeli collector.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn At the time of his purchase, Jeselsohn says that he was unaware of its significance.Template:Sfn Lenny Wolfe, an antiquities dealer in Jerusalem, reports having seen it prior to Rihani obtaining possession of it.Template:Sfn Expert Hebrew paleographer and epigrapherTemplate:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn Ada Yardeni reports that she first saw photographs of the tablet in 2003.Template:Sfn

The first scholarly description of the find and the editio princeps of the textTemplate:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn was published in April 2007 in an article written by Yardeni in consultation with Binyamin Elizur.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn Yardeni gave the writing the name "Hazon Gabriel".Template:Sfn

since 2011Template:Dated maintenance category (articles), the stone was located in Zurich.Template:Sfn In 2013, the stone was loaned to the Israel Museum to be displayed in an exhibit there.Template:Sfn

The stone has received wide attention in the mediaTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn starting in July 2008, primarily due to Israel Knohl's interpretations.Template:Sfn

Authenticity

Most scholars have tentatively accepted it to be authentic,Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn although Årstein Justnes, a biblical studies professor, has published a refutation of its authenticity.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Doubts have further been expressed by Kenneth AtkinsonTemplate:Sfn and Jonathan Klawans.Template:Sfn

Interpretation and significance

Hillel Halkin in his blog in The New York Sun wrote that it "would seem to be in many ways a typical late-Second-Temple-period eschatological text" and expressed doubts that it provided anything "sensationally new" on Christianity's origins in Judaism.Template:Sfn

Translations of line 80

The finding has caused controversy among scholars.Template:Sfn Israel Knohl, an expert in Talmudic and biblical language at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, translated line 80 of the inscription as "In three days, live, I Gabriel com[mand] yo[u]".Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn He interpreted this as a command from the angel Gabriel to rise from the dead within three days, and understood the recipient of this command to be Simon of Peraea, a Jewish rebel who was killed by the Romans in Template:BCE.Template:Sfn Knohl asserted that the finding "calls for a complete reassessment of all previous scholarship on the subject of messianism, Jewish and Christian alike".Template:Sfn In 2008, Ada Yardeni was reported to have agreed with Knohl's reading. Ben Witherington noted that the word Knohl translated as "rise" could alternately mean "show up".

Other scholars, however, reconstructed the faint writing on the stone as a different word entirely, rejecting Knohl's reading.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Instead, Ronald Hendel's ([[#Template:Sfnref|2009]]) reading of "In three days, the sign ..." has gained widespread support.Template:Sfn In 2011, Knohl accepted that "sign" is a more probable reading than "live", although he maintains that "live" is a possible reading.Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn However, the meaning of the phrase in the currently accepted reading is still unclear.Template:Sfn Knohl still maintains the historical background of the inscription to be as mentioned above. He now views Simon's death, according to the inscription, as "an essential part of the redemptive process. The blood of the slain messiah paves the way for the final salvation".Template:Sfn

David Hamidovic suggests it was written in the context of the Roman Emperor Titus’ siege of Jerusalem in  CE.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

Gabriel's Revelation is considered important for broader scholarly discussion about Jewish messianic expectations in the Second Temple Period, specifically the themes of the suffering messiah and the Messiah ben Joseph, both of which are otherwise believed to be later developments.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn as well as the Davidic messiah.Template:Sfn

Publications

The Hebrew text and translation are available in several editions: ,Template:Efn , , , and . Photographs of the stone are printed in . Newer high resolution images are available from the InscriptiFact Digital Image Library. Detailed linguistic studies have been performed by , , and .

References

• This paper reworks and combines Elgvin's prior work on the Gabriel Revelation.
• Table of contents and preface
• . Also published as
• abstract
• The translation from this document has been republished and is available online at
• . An abbreviated versionTemplate:Sfn was published as
• Republished in
• From BAR website HTML archive without sidebars
• , translated with minor additionsTemplate:Sfn in

Further reading

• . An earlier draft of this chapter was published as
• PDF
• (abstract)

External links

• English translation from
• Hebrew text from