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Mysterious ‘Gabriel Stone’ displayed in Jerusalem exhibit

By C. J. Refsland on May 1, 2013 • ( 1 )

Source: CTV News

All agree that the passage describes an apocalyptic vision of an attack on Jerusalem in which God appears with angels on chariots to save the city. The central angelic character is Gabriel, the first angel to appear in the Hebrew Bible. “I am Gabriel,” the writing declares.

JERUSALEM — An ancient limestone tablet covered with a mysterious Hebrew text that features the archangel Gabriel is at the center of a new exhibit in Jerusalem, even as scholars continue to argue about what it means.

The so-called Gabriel Stone, a metre-tall tablet said to have been found 13 years ago on the banks of the Dead Sea, features 87 lines of an unknown prophetic text dated as early as the first century BC, at the time of the Second Jewish Temple.

Scholars see it as a portal into the religious ideas circulating in the Holy Land in the era when was Jesus was born. Its form is also unique — it is ink written on stone, not carved — and no other such religious text has been found in the region.

PHOTOS

A museum worker points at the ‘Gabriel Stone’ as it is displayed at an exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Tuesday, April 30, 2013. An ancient stone with mysterious Hebrew writing and featuring the archangel Gabriel is being displayed in Israel, even as scholars continue to argue about what the inscription means. (AP Photo / Sebastian Scheiner)

A museum worker walks next to the ‘Gabriel Stone’ as it is displayed at an exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Tuesday, April 30, 2013. (AP / Sebastian Scheiner)

Curators at the Israel Museum, where the first exhibit dedicated to the stone is opening Wednesday, say it is the most important document found in the area since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

“The Gabriel Stone is in a way a Dead Sea Scroll written on stone,” said James Snyder, director of the Israel Museum. The writing dates to the same period, and uses the same tidy calligraphic Hebrew script, as some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of documents that include the earliest known surviving manuscripts of Hebrew Bible texts.