11 thoughts on “The Jordinian Lead Codices… Expressing My Raw Feelings”

  1. The writings on the codex looks like the old Hebrew alphabet which is still used by the Samaritans.

    You have to flip the image in order to read it.

    What you thought is Egyptian ‘sh’ is in fact Hebrew ‘m’.

    I can read mwt “death”.

  2. From my previous studies of the characters, a few occur that simply do not appear in any Hebrew or Aramaic scripts with which I am familiar, and *certainly* do not appear in Paleo-Hebrew:

    http://aramaicdesigns.blogspot.com/2011/04/lead-codices-coptic-characters.html

    Here is my original character analysis:

    http://aramaicdesigns.blogspot.com/2011/04/lead-codices-character-sheet.html

    Secondly, the character distribution does not match Hebrew or Aramaic.

    Finally, again assuming Paleo-Hebrew, *where* on this plate is MWT? There is no such sequence.

    Peace,
    -Steve

  3. No, it’ not m-w-t, it’s m-t-sh. I was using Samaritan to read it.

    Now I am able to read this:
    ‘ayn – l – k/n – m – t – sh – q(?) – l (?) – w (?) – k/n – y/h
    You have to read it starting with the o (‘ayn), then going up then to the right, then going down, then reading the lower part from right to left.

    So the end result: ‘l km tshqlwny “for how much you weigh me?”.

  5. Also, concerning authenticity.
    From what I see, they look authentic. The script also looks authentic, though strange. But having a new type of writing is not an indicator that the thing is a forgery. Plus, forgers usually betray their forgeries one way or another.

  9. The question isn’t really about it being real or fake, we know the lead is probably old (I won’t hesitate a guess towards where they got it, though the IAA suggests they could have stolen it from a tomb), but the iconography is of course modern. The question is now more of a mind teaser, for myself anyway. Every time they release new photos it is interesting to see in what way they created the tablets and what they might have used to fabricate the iconography. If the script is Coptic, even if it is unreadable and meaningless, it might offer an insight into where the script came from.

  10. Here is an attempt at reading it in Coptic:
    left: o-s/g-f
    right: sh-kh-omega
    down: g/ks-f-e-i-ti
    I am assuming by analogy with the Abgar tablet that it should be taken from some book or some museum. However, if it is taken from a real source, then what will betray it is the fact that it makes sense. But this doesn’t make sense in Coptic.

    Now if you read it as I did as:
    left: עלכ
    right: םתש
    down: קלוני
    i.e., על כם תשקלוני “for how much do you weigh me?”,
    (keeping in mind that the forger changed the style on purpose), then it would not only make sense, but it would show that the forger, who knew Hebrew fully or partially (is it the Beduin?), was also fooling around.

    I don’t have a good image of the Christ head plate, so I can’t try making sense of it. But what I noticed from the table made by Steve is the redundancy of the same letters, which means that we are dealing with the same forger.

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