Back to A Different Lens

The Shapira Strips, "fifteen or sixteen leather fragments bearing an abbreviated, unusual version of Deuteronomy," per its own description, carry three contested facts. Read together they are not one claim restated three times but a narrative arc, a verdict, a challenge to the verdict, and the reason neither can be settled.

The 1883 Verdict, and the 2021 Challenge to It

1883-verdict: "Declared forgeries by Clermont-Ganneau and Ginsburg, 1883," noted as a verdict that did not stay settled, "The forgery verdict was reopened by Dershowitz's 2021 reassessment; scholars remain divided." 2021-reassessment states the challenge itself: "Idan Dershowitz argues the strips were authentic and preserved a pre-exilic proto-Deuteronomy," noted as "Contested by Hendel, Richelle and others, who uphold the forgery verdict." Neither fact restates the other; one is the original judgment and the other is a specific, named, still-disputed reversal of it.

The Third Fact Explains Why the First Two Cannot Be Settled

The third fact is not another position in the debate; it is the reason the debate cannot be closed by new evidence: "Lost since the 1880s; last recorded in the London art market," noted, "Loss of the objects prevents scientific testing and keeps the case unresolved." A verdict, a reversal, and the physical fact that neither side can ever produce the strips themselves for testing: three facts because it takes three to say why one of biblical scholarship's most striking open questions has stayed open for over a century.

Where To Read More

• Shapira StripsManuscriptsA narrative arc, not a restated claim: verdict, reversal, and the loss that keeps both unresolved