Joe writes

Dear colleagues,

Whereas the inscription has gained a lot of media attention the last few days, front page of the New York Times, past experience has shown that its attention may be much ado about nothing and in the end may cause more harm to the world of science, religion and archaeology than good. One must remember that the inscription came from a robbed tomb, probably smuggled out of Jordan to Switzerland where it was purchased by a private collector. Thus, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, the race will now be on in Jordan in hopes of finding more Jewish tombstones with Hebrew inscriptions. This was the story with the scrolls in the forties and fifties in that most of the scrolls were found by Bedouin robbing the caves after the scrolls were found in cave 1 and not by archaeologists. It will be the same today on the other side of the Dead Sea as robbing graves in southern Jordan is a veritable ‘cottage industry’ with one area presenting thousands of robbed tombs. I find it somewhat ironic that those in the religious community, the same segment of the population that effectively put an end to physical anthropology in Israel are abetting this by buying ancient Hebrew tombstones, which in the end will only lead to further looting of tombs and wanton destruction of the human skeletal remains found therein. I’m sure that there will be folks out there trying to justify its purchase; however the question here is, of those thousands of tombs robbed both here and in Jordan , will any human skeletal remains for anthropological scientific research reach the world of physical anthropology from these tombs? Having been involved in this profession for over 30 years I can state that the answer is no, no dealer, no tomb robber and no collector has ever brought these remains to the world of science. They are simply left there, unburied, from dust to dust to environmental trash lying about as their value on the antiquities market is nil. We, in the anthropological profession returned, after research, human skeletal remains, accidentally discovered to the proper religious communities for reburial.

As for the object itself, the theology expressed here is not all that new for scholars dealing with the period, (see Hosea 6:1-2) in fact, what I find somewhat ironic and perhaps deserving is the question of the identity of the tomb occupant. Is it Simon as some maintain, the rebel leader killed in the first century in Trans-Jordan or is it simply another Simon? Had the tomb been excavated properly this question could have been easily answered by physical anthropologists in a matter of minutes as aging, sexing, forensics are today highly accurate. Moreover, here we have the story that Simon, if it is THE Simon, was beheaded, forensically this would immediately be shown in the remains. Viewing the remains together with the inscription, this question as to whether this is or isn’t the rebel leader, could have been solved immediately.

A similar high profile case involving inscriptions and alleged historical figures readily comes to mind and that is the famous Abba tomb-inscription in which it was believed that the human remains of the last of the Hashmoneans, Matthias were accidentally discovered in Jerusalem in 1971. Due to media pressure (I was present) during the filming, facts were manipulated to fit a pre-set agenda and so it was. Several colleagues were skeptical and doubted the veracity of the whole story until a well known phy. anthropologist checked the remains and immediately said that the young man, beheaded, was in fact an old woman, beheaded. Rahmani, showing the wisdom which has brought him to where he is today, decided to show it to a third individual, from EU, totally unaware of the growing controversy. His final decision- an old woman whom had been beheaded as we had long suspected. Did it help, only after the third showing and our protest was it pulled from the screens and never shown again. Only problem was that the producer never related the new finding to the public at large. Today the burial cave, which was not destroyed, has been turned by private individuals into a ‘holy spot’, the tomb of Matthias, the last of the Hashmoneans.

Perhaps even more poignant to this story of the looted tombstone is the question of women in Qumran which drew an enormous amount of attention in this week’s conference. Excavated in the 1950’s a significant number of the Qumran human remains were those of women and children, which rightfully so, according to the feminist scholars, were ignored by male scholars for 4 decades. Thankfully, the remains of the women and children had not disappeared from the face of the earth, for years they had been in the basement of a EU scholar, who, faced with the decision to toss them out, choose to store them in his basement for safe keeping. Beginning in the late 1990’s textual scholars had begun devoting their time to the fact that amongst the ‘celibate males’ of Qumran were woman and children. However once the human remains were ‘rediscovered’ in EU and examined by Israeli anthropologists, it was shown that the women and children were in fact, not two thousand years old as reported, but Bedouin from the Turkish period. Had the skeletons not been recovered or reburied, we would still be discussing the women and children as earlier reported but seldom discussed, by two generations of scholars. Colleagues wasted an enormous amount of time, money and energy on something fundamental to those of us working in burial archaeology, Bedouin recycle cemeteries and burials define sites. These two examples should be sufficient to show that when tombs are robbed, tombstones are without provenance and of limited scientific value. Had they been excavated in a proper manner one could readily know if it was Matthias, Simon, Josef or Josephine. Unfortunately with this Jordanian tombstone one will never know and the question now becomes, how many more tombs will be looted as it’s now in the public domain.

Lastly, before several of the folks out there particularly film makers, collectors and editors from the BAR ‘crowd, try to justify this find by saying that the original Dead Sea Scrolls were in fact looted, one must remember that the looted scrolls were immediately purchased and donated to the State, unlike this inscription which was bought for his private collection some 10 years ago.

Joe Zias www.joezias.com
Anthropology/Paleopathology

Science and Antiquity Group – Jerusalem
Jerusalem, Israel

As usual, Joe’s remarks are very much worth reading, and his cautions worth heeding.