A proselyte's "hex" tombstone at Beit She’arim

FUNERARY EPIGRAPHY: Convert’s ‘Bloody’ Curse Against Robbers Found in Ancient Galilee Grave. The first inscription to be found at Beit She’arim, Israel in over six decades warns would-be thieves that Jacob the Proselyte will curse them (Ruth Schuster, Haaretz).

About 1,800 years ago, a convert to Judaism named Yaakov died and was interred in a cave at Beit She’arim, with a hex designed to deter grave robbers that looks like it was scrawled on the limestone slab in blood.

It wasn’t. It was scribbled in uneven Greek writing in scarlet paint. We know he was a convert to Judaism because the full reference to the deceased is “Yaakov HaGer” – Jacob the Proselyte. We may also surmise that he died at age 60.

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Other red-painted epitaphs from a century or two later are known from Zoar, in southern Jordan near the Dead Sea. An unprovenanced one, reportedly also from Zoar, turned up some years ago in California. It is now, I believe, at Yeshiva University. These other painted gravestones are written in Aramaic.

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