The Shapira forgeries raise their moldering heads again

THE TIME OF ISRAEL: In the footsteps of a master forger: In 1883, respected antiques dealer Moses Wilhelm Shapira claimed to possess ancient scrolls of Deuteronomy. The text differed slightly from the accepted version: It had an 11th Commandment (Aviva and Shmuel Bar-Am).

Six months after the most important archaeological discovery of its time was declared a fake, the man who offered it to the world ended his life with a bullet to the head. His tragic suicide left unsolved one of most fascinating puzzles of the era. Had it really been bogus? Or could Moses Wilhelm Shapira have brought to light the world’s oldest copy of Deuteronomy, only to have it rejected by a battery of experts?

Follow the fortunes of this intriguing figure by taking an imaginary jaunt through the streets of Jerusalem (or a real trip, if you live in Israel). The route begins just inside Jaffa Gate at Christ Church, which was to become Shapira’s home-away-from-home.

[...]

The jaunt is entertaning, with lots of interesting background material, but this article is another example of the tired old meme about the enterprising outsider who is denounced by the rigid and unimaginative academic establishment but who maybe, just maybe, is vindicated after all.

In the first place, no one would have been happier than Clermont-Ganneau to have Deuteronomy scrolls from the biblical period. I really can't imagine him rejecting a genuine epigraphic find of such importance, even if he was mad at Shapira about the Moabite forgeries.

But let's say I'm wrong and Clermont-Ganneau let his resentment get the better of him and made a mistake. The Shapira scrolls are lost, but we do have descriptions and some drawings (online, e.g., here, here, here, and here) and we've had well over a century to revisit the case. Scholars are not shy about finding mistakes in the work of previous scholars, and the evidence has been reevaluated any number of times. It would be quite a coup to vindicate the Shapira scrolls and show that they were real artifacts from antiquity, and modern epigraphers would have no reason to reject a persuasive case and every reason to welcome it. But epigraphers remain unpersuaded, which indicates that no such case has yet been made. Maybe someday one will be, but I'm not holding my breath.

Background and links to a couple of reevaluations and rejections by epigraphers here (bottom of post).