Horizon (1964–…): Season 41, Episode 2 - King Solomon's Tablet of Stone - full transcript
In July 2001
a unique inscribed tablet of stone
mysteriously appeared in Israel.
It was an archaeological marvel
that seemed to solve one of
the Bible's great riddles.
Tested by some of Israel's top scientists,
it revealed that in the heart
of Jerusalem, 3,000 years ago,
one of the legends of the ancient
world had really existed
the magnificent temple of Solomon.
But that was just the beginning,
for there was another mystery
hidden within the stone
one that would have shattering
consequences around the world.
Tonight Horizon tells
the extraordinary story
of "King Solomon's Tablet of Stone".
KING SOLOMON'S
TABLET OF STONE
In Jerusalem during the summer of 2001
a secret meeting took place that
would shake the world of archaeology.
The story starts when this very renowned
professor receives a mysterious phone call
from a person by the name of Izak Tsu.
He's asked to meet him with
another renowned professor.
This person appears with a briefcase.
He opens up the briefcase
and very dramatically takes
out this beautiful black stone
with an inscription on it.
They look at the stone and it's beautiful,
it's important, they're amazed.
The mysterious stranger was
a private investigator.
And the inscription on his black stone
was in ancient Hebrew.
What it revealed was a wonder.
For the inscription seemed to offer proof of
something long searched for but never found
that nearly 3,000 years ago,
in the centre of Jerusalem,
there really had existed
the place the Bible calls
"The House of the Lord",
the magnificent temple of Solomon.
The biblical tradition tells that when
Solomon built the temple and dedicated it,
the first thing he did was he brought
into the temple the Ark of the Covenant.
The temple was built to house
the Ark of the Covenant
the shrine containing the Ten Commandments
the word of God written in stone.
So the temple symbolised
God's personal residence on earth
among his people in his chosen city.
The Bible describes the Temple
of Solomon in awe-struck terms.
The main room was panelled with
cedar and overlaid with fine gold.
The King also ordered his workers
to make two winged cherubim
and cover them with gold.
According to the biblical story,
the Temple in Jerusalem lasted from the
time of Solomon in the 10th century
until it was destroyed in 586 BCE by the
armies of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon.
And that has been the source
of the mystery ever since.
For even though the Bible describes Solomon
as the grandest of the Old Testament
kings with a mighty empire,
no trace of him, his empire
or his temple has survived.
The bible said Solomon's Temple
stood on the temple mount,
in the heart of Jerusalem.
Today one of Islam's holiest
mosques stands there.
At its edge is the Western Wall,
where Jews from around the world
come to offer their prayers.
But this wall was never part
of the Temple of Solomon.
It was actually built almost a
thousand years after Solomon.
With this lack of evidence,
some archaeologists began to
doubt much of the Solomon story.
There are a few pottery shells from
the 10th century on the ground,
a wall here and there maybe,
but nothing monumental.
We are left with no archaeological
evidence for the great kingdom of Solomon.
We are left only with the text,
and the text was put in
writing relatively late.
But all that was before
the discovery of the stone.
A few months after the private investigator
revealed the stone in the Jerusalem hotel,
he took it to one of the country's
leading scientific establishments
the Geological Survey of Israel.
Here, experts were asked to determine
the stone's authenticity
on behalf of its anonymous owner.
One of the first things scholars noticed
was that the stone was black,
like Israel's only other royal
inscription from the same period.
Then they looked at the
wording of the inscription.
This described detailed
building repairs to a temple
carried out by a King Jehoash
who had lived a century
after the time of Solomon,
while his temple still stood.
The bible describes similar repairs
to the Temple of Solomon,
carried out by King Jehoash.
The passage in Kings 2, chapter 12
begins by describing King Jehoash
raising money for the repairs.
"Jehoash said to the priests,
'All the money, current money brought into
the House of the Lord as a sacred donations,
have it donated for
the repair of the House.'"
Similarly, the inscription showed
Jehoash raising money for repairs.
"I Jehoash son of Ahaziah
King of the land of Judah,
when the vow of each person in the
land and in the desert was fulfilled
to give silver of the
holy offerings aplenty."
Then, when the money was raised,
the Bible continues...
"'They in turn shall strengthen
the damage in the house
wherever damage may be found.'"
And the stone said...
"I repaired the construction
and I made the repairs
in the temple and the walls all around."
Professor Hurowitz was sure
the stone and the bible
were describing the same events.
I think that we're speaking about the
same Royal act of repairs in the temple
and the language is also rather similar.
So, according to both
the bible and the stone,
King Jehoash first raised the funds and
then repaired the Temple of Solomon,
one hundred years after it was built.
But the scientists at the geological
survey still needed to be absolutely sure
that the stone really could have
come from the Temple of Solomon.
So the geologists subjected
it to rigorous tests.
Using a scanning electron microscope,
they set out to determine its authenticity.
First they looked at the patina
a thin surface layer that forms over
time on the outside of a rock or stone.
If we see in this sample we
have a very thin brown layer,
about 1mm thick, that covers the sample.
The formation of a patina
is caused by the interaction of
chemicals in air, water or soil,
with minerals in the stone itself.
In this one, we see the brown
and we can see that it may
be thicker or thinner,
but it covers all around and
goes all around the sample.
A patina develops slowly
and may take thousands of years to form.
The geologists studying the stone
found that the patina was continuous
across the front of the stone
and crucially within the inscribed letters.
This meant the inscription must have
been carved in the distant past.
Next, the geologists analysed the
chemical make-up of the patina.
They were looking for calcium
carbonate and other chemicals,
which would tell them if it had
formed in the Jerusalem area.
They found that the trace elements
like strontium, iron, magnesium,
and other elements that are
in the calcium carbonate,
they were exactly the same proportions
as in the patina in the Jerusalem area.
The patina confirmed that the
stone came from Jerusalem
and that the inscription
really was very old.
The big question now was, how old?
Although it was impossible
to date the stone itself,
luckily within the patina there
were minute particles of charcoal
and these could be carbon dated.
The results were conclusive:
they were 2,300 years old,
so the carving beneath the
patina had to be even older.
There was no doubt
the stone came from the Jerusalem area,
and the inscription was
thousands of years old.
And there was one last discovery
that helped clinch the case
that it came from the Temple of Solomon.
The patina contained tiny flecks of gold
just what you'd expect from a
stone that had been through a fire
in a temple lined with gold.
In January 2003
the Geological Survey officially
pronounced the stone
to be genuine.
Finally, the existence of Solomon's
magnificent Temple had been confirmed.
And the implications were staggering.
If the temple existed,
the legend of King Solomon was true.
And that meant an extraordinary section
of the bible could be verified as history.
For millions of people of different faiths
the authentification of the Stone Tablet
was a fantastic affirmation of their belief.
Here was a genuine archaeological find
that correlated almost word for
word with a biblical episode
that happened nearly 3,000 years ago.
But for the stone itself,
the next stage was to find a fitting home.
And one place seemed ideal:
the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
This remarkable museum is home to a
stunning collection of biblical antiquities.
They have the Dead Sea Scrolls,
the most important biblical
manuscripts in existence.
They also have Israel's only
other royal inscription
from close to the time of Solomon
The 'House of David' Stele.
This is the only reference
to Solomon's father, David
that exists outside the bible.
The Stone would be a fitting companion
for these priceless artefacts.
We would of course be interested
in acquiring something if we felt
that it would help to amplify the story
which are museum is meant to tell,
and our story is the story of biblical
archaeology in the ancient Holy Land,
so if something were to
surface of great significance
for the full telling of that story
we would be interested.
With its authenticity confirmed
the stone was offered for
sale to the Israel Museum.
The price was rumoured to be high.
There was a series of meetings
with the Israel Museum,
initial negotiations going on
between the two parties,
all sorts of sums are thrown around.
It's difficult to know exactly
what the sum was at that point
some people say three million,
some people say four million,
some people say ten million.
But before the museum would
part with several million dollars,
it wanted to know just one more thing
where exactly had the stone been found?
The Bible said that Solomon's temple had
been situated on Jerusalem's temple mount.
So the stone must have
come from there originally.
If an object is excavated
then you have a much simpler
time verifying its authenticity
because you are taking it
from its source of excavation.
However, there are no official
excavations on the Temple Mount
because it is home to one
of Islam's holiest shrines,
the Dome of the Rock.
The whole area is politically far
too sensitive for archaeology.
Still, rumours said the stone had been found in
rubble left from recent illegal building projects
being carried out on the Temple Mount.
But James Snyder needed more than rumour.
He wanted the full story of the
stone after it had been found.
You want to be able to track the history of
the object from the time of its excavation,
if it is possible to do so,
through its history of ownership
until it comes to you.
It was then that the saga of the
stone became very mysterious indeed.
Just when the museum wanted
to do their own checks,
both the private investigator
who had first revealed it
and the stone
disappeared.
So Amir Ganor
an investigator with the
Israeli Antiquities Authority
was called in.
For nine months he searched for the man who
had first taken the stone to the Jerusalem hotel.
We travelled all over Israel from
the north to the south.
That detective was a very wily person,
he left us very few clues.
In the end we found him
in an office in Ramat Gan
and he told us that he'd
been hired by Oded Golan.
Oded Golan is a businessman
and renowned collector,
owner of Israel's largest private
collection of antiquities.
He explained that he wasn't
the owner of the stone
and that he didn't know where it was.
He had just been involved as a middleman.
Sometime during 1999 I was called
by a very reliable Palestinian dealer
that I knew for many many years
who ask me to assist him
in selling an inscription.
It seemed to be very interesting
and I was ready to assist him
only under one condition,
that it will be offered only within Israel
and to a museum in Israel after
they will authentisize it.
Golan said that the owner hadn't
wanted to be identified,
which was why he'd hired
a private detective.
However, the owner had since died
and his widow had the stone.
But she was somewhere in
the occupied territories
and Golan didn't know how to contact her.
But Oded Golan did reveal one
vital piece of information
where the stone had been discovered.
It was found very near to the
Eastern Wall in the Muslim cemetery
in Old Jerusalem outside the Temple Mount.
It was stunning news.
Here was confirmation that
the stone had been unearthed
just yards from where the Bible said
that Solomon's Temple had once stood.
But then, the story of the stone
took another remarkable turn.
The reason
another, ancient biblical artefact.
Something called an ossuary or bone box.
Jewish families once used ossuaries to store the
bones of the dead in caves and burial chambers.
They were commonly used in Jerusalem,
and can still be found in caves today.
In 2002, one very special ossuary appeared.
Inscribed on the side were the words 'James,
Son of Joseph,
Brother of Jesus'.
It was heralded as the first physical
evidence of the existence of Jesus Christ
and caused a worldwide sensation.
It was displayed for the
general public in Canada
in the Royal Ontario Museum,
and the exhibit received
almost 100,000 visitors.
And strangely,
the owner
was Oded Golan.
Journalist Boaz Gaon
found Golan's connection to both
the stone and the ossuary
just too good to be true.
As soon as we made the link we knew that
something is sort of very strange here
because the same collector seemed to be linked
to these two incredibly dramatic artefacts.
It either was an extremely
wonderful stroke of luck
or something very suspicious.
The Israeli authorities were also suspicious
they raided Golan's
apartment and storehouses.
There they found the ossuary
perched on a toilet.
And they also unearthed the elusive stone.
With the artefacts now in their possession,
the authorities set up a committee
of linguists and scientists,
to determine once and for all the
authenticity of the ossuary and the stone.
Victor Hurowitz, Israel's leading
expert on royal building inscriptions,
was asked to examine
the writing on the stone.
The language and therefore the style
of the inscription is Biblical Hebrew.
It's eloquent, it's elegant, it's charming.
I enjoy reading it.
But as he examined it more closely
he found something that
didn't quite make sense.
It was all to do with the key phrase
"I made repairs to the temple"
or in Hebrew
"bedek a baied".
The main problem in this inscription
is this expression "bedek a baied".
In one word, this is an anachronism.
According to professor Hurowitz,
"bedek a baied" had a different meaning
in the time of the Temple of Solomon
to the meaning it has today.
In modern Hebrew it means to repair,
but in ancient Hebrew it
meant the exact opposite
to damage.
So its use in this inscription
made no sense at all.
"Bedek a baied",
which means, if I translate,
"I made damages to the temple".
Now this in a Royal building inscription,
where the king is taking
pride in what he's done
in the temple repairs, to say
that he damaged the temple
is absolutely ridiculous.
Victor Hurowitz now had
real doubts that the stone
had been inscribed in the
time of Solomon's Temple,
almost 3,000 years ago.
Unfortunately for the author,
where it gets to the
main part of the inscription
and says I made the "bedek a baied",
he fouled up and he put in modern Hebrew.
But not everyone agreed with
Hurowitz's interpretation.
Professor Chaim Cohen
is another expert in ancient Hebrew.
He believes that there are so few texts
discovered from the time of Solomon
that no one can be sure how the
language was used 3,000 years ago.
It was simply the way the
stone had been found
that made everyone suspicious.
Had the inscription been found in
controlled archaeological excavations
it would have prompted scholars
to say that now we must re-look
at the way we've been seeing the
vocalization in our Hebrew bibles to date.
Professor Cohen believes
that if the stone had been found
in a formal archaeological dig,
no one would have questioned it.
They simply would have seen the inscription
as clarifying the use of
ancient Hebrew words.
Beyond that,
he was convinced that the stone could
not have been the work of someone
who made clumsy mistakes.
If it is a forgery,
then the forger must
have been a near genius
as far as the level of sophistication
that we find in this inscription.
The linguistic evidence was inconclusive.
There was still no hard reason to doubt that
the stone had come from the Temple of Solomon.
Everything now hung on the investigations
of the scientists on the committee.
The focus of their attention was the patina
the weathered layer on
the outside of the stone.
It was this,
especially the charcoal particles that
were dated to 2,300 years ago,
that had convinced the scientists who
had carried out the original analysis.
Elisabetta Boaretto was asked
to re-date those particles.
The radiocarbon age was 2,250
plus/minus 40 years.
This is a very nice precise age,
and calibrated this corresponded to an interval
in time that goes from 200 BC, before Christ,
to 390 BC.
Her results seemed to confirm
the original research
the charcoal in the patina was very old.
But, it was theoretically possible for someone
to have to taken charcoal from another source
and added it to the patina.
For Dr Boaretto,
the only way to be absolutely
sure of the stone
was to look again at the patina in
which the charcoal was embedded.
The man charged with this task
was one of Israel's top
archaeological investigators.
Yuval Goren
is a professor of Archaeology
at Tel Aviv University
and a geologist.
He has a detailed knowledge
of both Biblical archaeology
and the rocks of the Jerusalem area.
He began by looking at the patina
on the back of the stone.
An authentic patina
would be firmly attached
to the underlying stone.
This patina on the back of the stone
is, actually it was very tightly
connected to the stone.
We needed a little chisel and a hammer
to peel off small samples of the patina.
This was clearly a natural patina.
But then professor Goren examined
it under the microscope.
He expected it to be made
of calcium carbonate,
which is local to the Temple Mount.
But what he saw was this
a patina made only of silica.
This could not have formed in Jerusalem.
In other words
the patina on the back of the stone
could not have come from the Temple Mount.
Puzzled, Professor Goren turned his attention
to the patina covering the inscription
on the front of the stone.
Here, he did find calcium carbonate,
just as one would expect of a
patina formed in Jerusalem.
But now there was a new mystery
how could the patina on
the front of the stone
be different from that on the back?
The answer began to emerge
as Professor Goren sampled the patina
from within the carved letters.
Strangely, it didn't seem to be bonded
to the stone in any natural way at all.
The patina is very loosely
connected to the stone.
Here we can see how it reacts to
me scraping it with a matchstick
and you can see that it easily peels
off the letters as opposed again
to the patina on the back side.
And when he studied the patina
on the front of the stone in detail
he found something else even stranger
tiny marine fossils,
called forams.
Within the patina they are quite
common, here we can see one,
and here we can see another two.
These fossils could only be found if
the patina formed beneath the sea.
And the Temple of Solomon
was nowhere near the sea.
Of course one can't expect to find such
fossils of plankton, of marine organisms,
in patina that is created
in the land environment.
This was a complete mystery.
It seemed impossible for a patina
from a temple built in Jerusalem
to contain the fossils of sea creatures.
Then came the most telling detail of all.
When the letters are cleared,
the inner part of the letter is exposed
and as you can see here
it is very freshly cut,
you can see even the little lines,
the little parallel lines of the chisel,
or even maybe some drill,
some electric bit or drill
with which the letters were engraved,
which is of course very unusual
for ancient inscriptions.
So he put it all together
the inscription had been recently carved.
There were two different patinas.
And the one on the front
contained marine fossils
impossible if it had formed in Jerusalem.
He concluded the patina on the
front of the stone was artificial
a mixture to which gold and iron age
charcoal had been added by hand.
And therefore I believe that the stone, or
not the stone of course, but the inscription
is not genuine.
Alarmed by what he'd found with the stone,
Professor Goren turned his
attention to the James Ossuary.
Again he found a similar story
a freshly cut inscription
with an artificial patina
applied over the top.
On the 18th of June 2003,
the Israeli Authorities
delivered their conclusion.
Good day to you, to all of us.
The patina in the letters in both items is
a modern forgery covering the letters.
The conclusion is that the two
inscriptions are modern inscriptions.
This is a forgery, totally,
without any doubt about it.
The two most important
biblical finds in a generation
were proven to be fakes.
There was no archaeological proof
for the existence of Jesus Christ.
There was no evidence for the
existence of The Temple of Solomon.
There was now outrage in
the world of Israeli archaeology.
How had the forgers succeeded in
fooling some of the country's top scholars?
How had they managed to pull it off?
Yuval Goren, whose work had
helped expose the forgery,
was determined to find the answers.
Forgeries are a contamination of
science, of archaeology as a science.
Science is being biased, history is being
biased, archaeology is being biased,
and there is, the more
sources like that appeal,
forged, fake sources like that appeal,
of course science is more distorted.
He began his investigations
with the black stone itself.
His analysis showed the
stone was of a rock type
that was not indigenous to Israel.
He knew that for the inscription
the forgers had needed and old black
rock already cut to a rectangular shape
and he thought he'd worked
out how they had acquired it.
Just up the coast from Tel Aviv
is an old crusader fortress.
The stones in its walls have
already been cut to shape.
Some of them are black.
And many are not local
the crusaders brought them here.
Ships that used to come to this place were
loaded sometimes with ballast stones,
to hold them balanced,
and then they used to unload them,
and so these stones were in
many cases reused for buildings.
This stone is a dark stone,
it's obviously not a
local stone to this area,
which is already carved,
it was probably carved to its rectangular shape
in order to place it as the dressing of this wall,
and so somebody coming to such a
place could find dark stones like that,
that are already made up to
a rectangular flat shape.
Professor Goren was now certain:
the stone used for the inscription
must have come from this,
or a similar, Crusader Fort.
But for the forgers
getting hold of an old
stone of the right shape
was just the first step in
making an inscribed tablet
capable of fooling the experts.
The team of forgers must have included
a scholar of ancient Hebrew,
to write the elegant inscription.
Then they would have needed
a master stone carver
who could inscribe it.
But above all else,
the thing they had to get right,
was the patina.
Just how had it been possible
to concoct a mixture that had
convinced Israel's top geologists
that it was an ancient patina
from Jerusalem's Temple Mount?
To solve this puzzle
the investigating authorities brought
in geochemist Avner Ayalon.
He dissolved samples of the patina in acid
to produce a gas containing
different types of oxygen atoms
called isotopes.
Each isotope has its own
unique atomic weight
and the quantity of each isotope in the gas
can be determined using
a mass spectrometer.
Measuring the ratio of
these different isotopes
tells Doctor Ayalon the temperature
at which a patina has formed.
His results were revealing.
The patina on both the
inscription and the ossuary
had formed at temperatures far too hot
for them to have occurred naturally.
The temperature which I calculated,
40 to 50 centigrade,
for sure, it is much higher than natural
temperatures that prevailed in the Jerusalem area
in the last 3,000 years.
This high temperature
gave Dr Ayalon a clue as to how
the patina had been formed.
He believes the ingredients of the
patina must have been ground up,
with hot water being added
to help them dissolve.
Someone grinded calcium carbonate.
You grind it and mix it with hot water.
If you use hot water then you
get a much better cementation
of the artificial patina which had
been cemented to the artefacts.
One of the crucial ingredients was chalk.
It was this that had provided the
calcium carbonate for the patina.
It also explained why
forams had been found.
They are very common fossils in chalk.
The patina mix also included a little
bit of soil from the Jerusalem area,
some gold and some iron age charcoal.
These were masterly touches
introduced by someone who knew exactly
what would convince the experts.
In the summer of 2003,
after the biggest archaeological
investigation in Israeli police history,
Oded Golan was taken into custody.
It was then that investigators realised
they could be dealing with more
than just the stone and the ossuary.
When police searched Golan's apartment
they found a hidden workshop
filled with tools
and half made artefacts.
There was this large dark stone
very like the stone used for the
Temple of Solomon Inscription.
Then there were these tools,
including a drill
and drill bits.
And there were also boxes of soil
that could be used in a fake patina.
But what was most suspicious
were the artefacts.
Some were in the early
stages of preparation,
like this casting for a bronze statue.
And some appeared finished,
like these royal seals,
or bullae.
What happened was that the Jehoash inscription
revealed this Pandora's box filled with antiques
and artefacts that have been
sold to various museums
and various collectors for various
very large sums of money
during the past 10 or 15 years.
The implications of this were immense.
Collectors around the world
have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars
for supposedly ancient seals, painted
pottery shards and other artefacts
that came through Oded Golan's associates.
Dozens of these items have now
been examined by Professor Goren,
and all have been revealed to be forgeries.
Police now suspect that artefacts
made by the same team of forgers
have found their way into leading
museums around the world.
The interesting question is now,
from the list of artefacts that are
currently shown in various museums
in Israel, in London, in New York, in Paris,
are they fake?
Are they authentic?
If Oded Golan was linked to any of them
does that mean that they are forged?
And this is going to be dramatic.
Everything which came to the
market in the last 20 years or so,
things which did not
come from an excavation,
should probably be considered
a fake unless otherwise proven.
It is a deeply shocking revelation.
And beyond that,
there is something even more disturbing.
The forgers were playing on the
desire of millions of people
to see the bible confirmed as history.
It is an immensely cruel and
cynical thing to have done.
And for those in search of Solomon
and his great temple,
it means their goal is as far away as ever.
a unique inscribed tablet of stone
mysteriously appeared in Israel.
It was an archaeological marvel
that seemed to solve one of
the Bible's great riddles.
Tested by some of Israel's top scientists,
it revealed that in the heart
of Jerusalem, 3,000 years ago,
one of the legends of the ancient
world had really existed
the magnificent temple of Solomon.
But that was just the beginning,
for there was another mystery
hidden within the stone
one that would have shattering
consequences around the world.
Tonight Horizon tells
the extraordinary story
of "King Solomon's Tablet of Stone".
KING SOLOMON'S
TABLET OF STONE
In Jerusalem during the summer of 2001
a secret meeting took place that
would shake the world of archaeology.
The story starts when this very renowned
professor receives a mysterious phone call
from a person by the name of Izak Tsu.
He's asked to meet him with
another renowned professor.
This person appears with a briefcase.
He opens up the briefcase
and very dramatically takes
out this beautiful black stone
with an inscription on it.
They look at the stone and it's beautiful,
it's important, they're amazed.
The mysterious stranger was
a private investigator.
And the inscription on his black stone
was in ancient Hebrew.
What it revealed was a wonder.
For the inscription seemed to offer proof of
something long searched for but never found
that nearly 3,000 years ago,
in the centre of Jerusalem,
there really had existed
the place the Bible calls
"The House of the Lord",
the magnificent temple of Solomon.
The biblical tradition tells that when
Solomon built the temple and dedicated it,
the first thing he did was he brought
into the temple the Ark of the Covenant.
The temple was built to house
the Ark of the Covenant
the shrine containing the Ten Commandments
the word of God written in stone.
So the temple symbolised
God's personal residence on earth
among his people in his chosen city.
The Bible describes the Temple
of Solomon in awe-struck terms.
The main room was panelled with
cedar and overlaid with fine gold.
The King also ordered his workers
to make two winged cherubim
and cover them with gold.
According to the biblical story,
the Temple in Jerusalem lasted from the
time of Solomon in the 10th century
until it was destroyed in 586 BCE by the
armies of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon.
And that has been the source
of the mystery ever since.
For even though the Bible describes Solomon
as the grandest of the Old Testament
kings with a mighty empire,
no trace of him, his empire
or his temple has survived.
The bible said Solomon's Temple
stood on the temple mount,
in the heart of Jerusalem.
Today one of Islam's holiest
mosques stands there.
At its edge is the Western Wall,
where Jews from around the world
come to offer their prayers.
But this wall was never part
of the Temple of Solomon.
It was actually built almost a
thousand years after Solomon.
With this lack of evidence,
some archaeologists began to
doubt much of the Solomon story.
There are a few pottery shells from
the 10th century on the ground,
a wall here and there maybe,
but nothing monumental.
We are left with no archaeological
evidence for the great kingdom of Solomon.
We are left only with the text,
and the text was put in
writing relatively late.
But all that was before
the discovery of the stone.
A few months after the private investigator
revealed the stone in the Jerusalem hotel,
he took it to one of the country's
leading scientific establishments
the Geological Survey of Israel.
Here, experts were asked to determine
the stone's authenticity
on behalf of its anonymous owner.
One of the first things scholars noticed
was that the stone was black,
like Israel's only other royal
inscription from the same period.
Then they looked at the
wording of the inscription.
This described detailed
building repairs to a temple
carried out by a King Jehoash
who had lived a century
after the time of Solomon,
while his temple still stood.
The bible describes similar repairs
to the Temple of Solomon,
carried out by King Jehoash.
The passage in Kings 2, chapter 12
begins by describing King Jehoash
raising money for the repairs.
"Jehoash said to the priests,
'All the money, current money brought into
the House of the Lord as a sacred donations,
have it donated for
the repair of the House.'"
Similarly, the inscription showed
Jehoash raising money for repairs.
"I Jehoash son of Ahaziah
King of the land of Judah,
when the vow of each person in the
land and in the desert was fulfilled
to give silver of the
holy offerings aplenty."
Then, when the money was raised,
the Bible continues...
"'They in turn shall strengthen
the damage in the house
wherever damage may be found.'"
And the stone said...
"I repaired the construction
and I made the repairs
in the temple and the walls all around."
Professor Hurowitz was sure
the stone and the bible
were describing the same events.
I think that we're speaking about the
same Royal act of repairs in the temple
and the language is also rather similar.
So, according to both
the bible and the stone,
King Jehoash first raised the funds and
then repaired the Temple of Solomon,
one hundred years after it was built.
But the scientists at the geological
survey still needed to be absolutely sure
that the stone really could have
come from the Temple of Solomon.
So the geologists subjected
it to rigorous tests.
Using a scanning electron microscope,
they set out to determine its authenticity.
First they looked at the patina
a thin surface layer that forms over
time on the outside of a rock or stone.
If we see in this sample we
have a very thin brown layer,
about 1mm thick, that covers the sample.
The formation of a patina
is caused by the interaction of
chemicals in air, water or soil,
with minerals in the stone itself.
In this one, we see the brown
and we can see that it may
be thicker or thinner,
but it covers all around and
goes all around the sample.
A patina develops slowly
and may take thousands of years to form.
The geologists studying the stone
found that the patina was continuous
across the front of the stone
and crucially within the inscribed letters.
This meant the inscription must have
been carved in the distant past.
Next, the geologists analysed the
chemical make-up of the patina.
They were looking for calcium
carbonate and other chemicals,
which would tell them if it had
formed in the Jerusalem area.
They found that the trace elements
like strontium, iron, magnesium,
and other elements that are
in the calcium carbonate,
they were exactly the same proportions
as in the patina in the Jerusalem area.
The patina confirmed that the
stone came from Jerusalem
and that the inscription
really was very old.
The big question now was, how old?
Although it was impossible
to date the stone itself,
luckily within the patina there
were minute particles of charcoal
and these could be carbon dated.
The results were conclusive:
they were 2,300 years old,
so the carving beneath the
patina had to be even older.
There was no doubt
the stone came from the Jerusalem area,
and the inscription was
thousands of years old.
And there was one last discovery
that helped clinch the case
that it came from the Temple of Solomon.
The patina contained tiny flecks of gold
just what you'd expect from a
stone that had been through a fire
in a temple lined with gold.
In January 2003
the Geological Survey officially
pronounced the stone
to be genuine.
Finally, the existence of Solomon's
magnificent Temple had been confirmed.
And the implications were staggering.
If the temple existed,
the legend of King Solomon was true.
And that meant an extraordinary section
of the bible could be verified as history.
For millions of people of different faiths
the authentification of the Stone Tablet
was a fantastic affirmation of their belief.
Here was a genuine archaeological find
that correlated almost word for
word with a biblical episode
that happened nearly 3,000 years ago.
But for the stone itself,
the next stage was to find a fitting home.
And one place seemed ideal:
the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
This remarkable museum is home to a
stunning collection of biblical antiquities.
They have the Dead Sea Scrolls,
the most important biblical
manuscripts in existence.
They also have Israel's only
other royal inscription
from close to the time of Solomon
The 'House of David' Stele.
This is the only reference
to Solomon's father, David
that exists outside the bible.
The Stone would be a fitting companion
for these priceless artefacts.
We would of course be interested
in acquiring something if we felt
that it would help to amplify the story
which are museum is meant to tell,
and our story is the story of biblical
archaeology in the ancient Holy Land,
so if something were to
surface of great significance
for the full telling of that story
we would be interested.
With its authenticity confirmed
the stone was offered for
sale to the Israel Museum.
The price was rumoured to be high.
There was a series of meetings
with the Israel Museum,
initial negotiations going on
between the two parties,
all sorts of sums are thrown around.
It's difficult to know exactly
what the sum was at that point
some people say three million,
some people say four million,
some people say ten million.
But before the museum would
part with several million dollars,
it wanted to know just one more thing
where exactly had the stone been found?
The Bible said that Solomon's temple had
been situated on Jerusalem's temple mount.
So the stone must have
come from there originally.
If an object is excavated
then you have a much simpler
time verifying its authenticity
because you are taking it
from its source of excavation.
However, there are no official
excavations on the Temple Mount
because it is home to one
of Islam's holiest shrines,
the Dome of the Rock.
The whole area is politically far
too sensitive for archaeology.
Still, rumours said the stone had been found in
rubble left from recent illegal building projects
being carried out on the Temple Mount.
But James Snyder needed more than rumour.
He wanted the full story of the
stone after it had been found.
You want to be able to track the history of
the object from the time of its excavation,
if it is possible to do so,
through its history of ownership
until it comes to you.
It was then that the saga of the
stone became very mysterious indeed.
Just when the museum wanted
to do their own checks,
both the private investigator
who had first revealed it
and the stone
disappeared.
So Amir Ganor
an investigator with the
Israeli Antiquities Authority
was called in.
For nine months he searched for the man who
had first taken the stone to the Jerusalem hotel.
We travelled all over Israel from
the north to the south.
That detective was a very wily person,
he left us very few clues.
In the end we found him
in an office in Ramat Gan
and he told us that he'd
been hired by Oded Golan.
Oded Golan is a businessman
and renowned collector,
owner of Israel's largest private
collection of antiquities.
He explained that he wasn't
the owner of the stone
and that he didn't know where it was.
He had just been involved as a middleman.
Sometime during 1999 I was called
by a very reliable Palestinian dealer
that I knew for many many years
who ask me to assist him
in selling an inscription.
It seemed to be very interesting
and I was ready to assist him
only under one condition,
that it will be offered only within Israel
and to a museum in Israel after
they will authentisize it.
Golan said that the owner hadn't
wanted to be identified,
which was why he'd hired
a private detective.
However, the owner had since died
and his widow had the stone.
But she was somewhere in
the occupied territories
and Golan didn't know how to contact her.
But Oded Golan did reveal one
vital piece of information
where the stone had been discovered.
It was found very near to the
Eastern Wall in the Muslim cemetery
in Old Jerusalem outside the Temple Mount.
It was stunning news.
Here was confirmation that
the stone had been unearthed
just yards from where the Bible said
that Solomon's Temple had once stood.
But then, the story of the stone
took another remarkable turn.
The reason
another, ancient biblical artefact.
Something called an ossuary or bone box.
Jewish families once used ossuaries to store the
bones of the dead in caves and burial chambers.
They were commonly used in Jerusalem,
and can still be found in caves today.
In 2002, one very special ossuary appeared.
Inscribed on the side were the words 'James,
Son of Joseph,
Brother of Jesus'.
It was heralded as the first physical
evidence of the existence of Jesus Christ
and caused a worldwide sensation.
It was displayed for the
general public in Canada
in the Royal Ontario Museum,
and the exhibit received
almost 100,000 visitors.
And strangely,
the owner
was Oded Golan.
Journalist Boaz Gaon
found Golan's connection to both
the stone and the ossuary
just too good to be true.
As soon as we made the link we knew that
something is sort of very strange here
because the same collector seemed to be linked
to these two incredibly dramatic artefacts.
It either was an extremely
wonderful stroke of luck
or something very suspicious.
The Israeli authorities were also suspicious
they raided Golan's
apartment and storehouses.
There they found the ossuary
perched on a toilet.
And they also unearthed the elusive stone.
With the artefacts now in their possession,
the authorities set up a committee
of linguists and scientists,
to determine once and for all the
authenticity of the ossuary and the stone.
Victor Hurowitz, Israel's leading
expert on royal building inscriptions,
was asked to examine
the writing on the stone.
The language and therefore the style
of the inscription is Biblical Hebrew.
It's eloquent, it's elegant, it's charming.
I enjoy reading it.
But as he examined it more closely
he found something that
didn't quite make sense.
It was all to do with the key phrase
"I made repairs to the temple"
or in Hebrew
"bedek a baied".
The main problem in this inscription
is this expression "bedek a baied".
In one word, this is an anachronism.
According to professor Hurowitz,
"bedek a baied" had a different meaning
in the time of the Temple of Solomon
to the meaning it has today.
In modern Hebrew it means to repair,
but in ancient Hebrew it
meant the exact opposite
to damage.
So its use in this inscription
made no sense at all.
"Bedek a baied",
which means, if I translate,
"I made damages to the temple".
Now this in a Royal building inscription,
where the king is taking
pride in what he's done
in the temple repairs, to say
that he damaged the temple
is absolutely ridiculous.
Victor Hurowitz now had
real doubts that the stone
had been inscribed in the
time of Solomon's Temple,
almost 3,000 years ago.
Unfortunately for the author,
where it gets to the
main part of the inscription
and says I made the "bedek a baied",
he fouled up and he put in modern Hebrew.
But not everyone agreed with
Hurowitz's interpretation.
Professor Chaim Cohen
is another expert in ancient Hebrew.
He believes that there are so few texts
discovered from the time of Solomon
that no one can be sure how the
language was used 3,000 years ago.
It was simply the way the
stone had been found
that made everyone suspicious.
Had the inscription been found in
controlled archaeological excavations
it would have prompted scholars
to say that now we must re-look
at the way we've been seeing the
vocalization in our Hebrew bibles to date.
Professor Cohen believes
that if the stone had been found
in a formal archaeological dig,
no one would have questioned it.
They simply would have seen the inscription
as clarifying the use of
ancient Hebrew words.
Beyond that,
he was convinced that the stone could
not have been the work of someone
who made clumsy mistakes.
If it is a forgery,
then the forger must
have been a near genius
as far as the level of sophistication
that we find in this inscription.
The linguistic evidence was inconclusive.
There was still no hard reason to doubt that
the stone had come from the Temple of Solomon.
Everything now hung on the investigations
of the scientists on the committee.
The focus of their attention was the patina
the weathered layer on
the outside of the stone.
It was this,
especially the charcoal particles that
were dated to 2,300 years ago,
that had convinced the scientists who
had carried out the original analysis.
Elisabetta Boaretto was asked
to re-date those particles.
The radiocarbon age was 2,250
plus/minus 40 years.
This is a very nice precise age,
and calibrated this corresponded to an interval
in time that goes from 200 BC, before Christ,
to 390 BC.
Her results seemed to confirm
the original research
the charcoal in the patina was very old.
But, it was theoretically possible for someone
to have to taken charcoal from another source
and added it to the patina.
For Dr Boaretto,
the only way to be absolutely
sure of the stone
was to look again at the patina in
which the charcoal was embedded.
The man charged with this task
was one of Israel's top
archaeological investigators.
Yuval Goren
is a professor of Archaeology
at Tel Aviv University
and a geologist.
He has a detailed knowledge
of both Biblical archaeology
and the rocks of the Jerusalem area.
He began by looking at the patina
on the back of the stone.
An authentic patina
would be firmly attached
to the underlying stone.
This patina on the back of the stone
is, actually it was very tightly
connected to the stone.
We needed a little chisel and a hammer
to peel off small samples of the patina.
This was clearly a natural patina.
But then professor Goren examined
it under the microscope.
He expected it to be made
of calcium carbonate,
which is local to the Temple Mount.
But what he saw was this
a patina made only of silica.
This could not have formed in Jerusalem.
In other words
the patina on the back of the stone
could not have come from the Temple Mount.
Puzzled, Professor Goren turned his attention
to the patina covering the inscription
on the front of the stone.
Here, he did find calcium carbonate,
just as one would expect of a
patina formed in Jerusalem.
But now there was a new mystery
how could the patina on
the front of the stone
be different from that on the back?
The answer began to emerge
as Professor Goren sampled the patina
from within the carved letters.
Strangely, it didn't seem to be bonded
to the stone in any natural way at all.
The patina is very loosely
connected to the stone.
Here we can see how it reacts to
me scraping it with a matchstick
and you can see that it easily peels
off the letters as opposed again
to the patina on the back side.
And when he studied the patina
on the front of the stone in detail
he found something else even stranger
tiny marine fossils,
called forams.
Within the patina they are quite
common, here we can see one,
and here we can see another two.
These fossils could only be found if
the patina formed beneath the sea.
And the Temple of Solomon
was nowhere near the sea.
Of course one can't expect to find such
fossils of plankton, of marine organisms,
in patina that is created
in the land environment.
This was a complete mystery.
It seemed impossible for a patina
from a temple built in Jerusalem
to contain the fossils of sea creatures.
Then came the most telling detail of all.
When the letters are cleared,
the inner part of the letter is exposed
and as you can see here
it is very freshly cut,
you can see even the little lines,
the little parallel lines of the chisel,
or even maybe some drill,
some electric bit or drill
with which the letters were engraved,
which is of course very unusual
for ancient inscriptions.
So he put it all together
the inscription had been recently carved.
There were two different patinas.
And the one on the front
contained marine fossils
impossible if it had formed in Jerusalem.
He concluded the patina on the
front of the stone was artificial
a mixture to which gold and iron age
charcoal had been added by hand.
And therefore I believe that the stone, or
not the stone of course, but the inscription
is not genuine.
Alarmed by what he'd found with the stone,
Professor Goren turned his
attention to the James Ossuary.
Again he found a similar story
a freshly cut inscription
with an artificial patina
applied over the top.
On the 18th of June 2003,
the Israeli Authorities
delivered their conclusion.
Good day to you, to all of us.
The patina in the letters in both items is
a modern forgery covering the letters.
The conclusion is that the two
inscriptions are modern inscriptions.
This is a forgery, totally,
without any doubt about it.
The two most important
biblical finds in a generation
were proven to be fakes.
There was no archaeological proof
for the existence of Jesus Christ.
There was no evidence for the
existence of The Temple of Solomon.
There was now outrage in
the world of Israeli archaeology.
How had the forgers succeeded in
fooling some of the country's top scholars?
How had they managed to pull it off?
Yuval Goren, whose work had
helped expose the forgery,
was determined to find the answers.
Forgeries are a contamination of
science, of archaeology as a science.
Science is being biased, history is being
biased, archaeology is being biased,
and there is, the more
sources like that appeal,
forged, fake sources like that appeal,
of course science is more distorted.
He began his investigations
with the black stone itself.
His analysis showed the
stone was of a rock type
that was not indigenous to Israel.
He knew that for the inscription
the forgers had needed and old black
rock already cut to a rectangular shape
and he thought he'd worked
out how they had acquired it.
Just up the coast from Tel Aviv
is an old crusader fortress.
The stones in its walls have
already been cut to shape.
Some of them are black.
And many are not local
the crusaders brought them here.
Ships that used to come to this place were
loaded sometimes with ballast stones,
to hold them balanced,
and then they used to unload them,
and so these stones were in
many cases reused for buildings.
This stone is a dark stone,
it's obviously not a
local stone to this area,
which is already carved,
it was probably carved to its rectangular shape
in order to place it as the dressing of this wall,
and so somebody coming to such a
place could find dark stones like that,
that are already made up to
a rectangular flat shape.
Professor Goren was now certain:
the stone used for the inscription
must have come from this,
or a similar, Crusader Fort.
But for the forgers
getting hold of an old
stone of the right shape
was just the first step in
making an inscribed tablet
capable of fooling the experts.
The team of forgers must have included
a scholar of ancient Hebrew,
to write the elegant inscription.
Then they would have needed
a master stone carver
who could inscribe it.
But above all else,
the thing they had to get right,
was the patina.
Just how had it been possible
to concoct a mixture that had
convinced Israel's top geologists
that it was an ancient patina
from Jerusalem's Temple Mount?
To solve this puzzle
the investigating authorities brought
in geochemist Avner Ayalon.
He dissolved samples of the patina in acid
to produce a gas containing
different types of oxygen atoms
called isotopes.
Each isotope has its own
unique atomic weight
and the quantity of each isotope in the gas
can be determined using
a mass spectrometer.
Measuring the ratio of
these different isotopes
tells Doctor Ayalon the temperature
at which a patina has formed.
His results were revealing.
The patina on both the
inscription and the ossuary
had formed at temperatures far too hot
for them to have occurred naturally.
The temperature which I calculated,
40 to 50 centigrade,
for sure, it is much higher than natural
temperatures that prevailed in the Jerusalem area
in the last 3,000 years.
This high temperature
gave Dr Ayalon a clue as to how
the patina had been formed.
He believes the ingredients of the
patina must have been ground up,
with hot water being added
to help them dissolve.
Someone grinded calcium carbonate.
You grind it and mix it with hot water.
If you use hot water then you
get a much better cementation
of the artificial patina which had
been cemented to the artefacts.
One of the crucial ingredients was chalk.
It was this that had provided the
calcium carbonate for the patina.
It also explained why
forams had been found.
They are very common fossils in chalk.
The patina mix also included a little
bit of soil from the Jerusalem area,
some gold and some iron age charcoal.
These were masterly touches
introduced by someone who knew exactly
what would convince the experts.
In the summer of 2003,
after the biggest archaeological
investigation in Israeli police history,
Oded Golan was taken into custody.
It was then that investigators realised
they could be dealing with more
than just the stone and the ossuary.
When police searched Golan's apartment
they found a hidden workshop
filled with tools
and half made artefacts.
There was this large dark stone
very like the stone used for the
Temple of Solomon Inscription.
Then there were these tools,
including a drill
and drill bits.
And there were also boxes of soil
that could be used in a fake patina.
But what was most suspicious
were the artefacts.
Some were in the early
stages of preparation,
like this casting for a bronze statue.
And some appeared finished,
like these royal seals,
or bullae.
What happened was that the Jehoash inscription
revealed this Pandora's box filled with antiques
and artefacts that have been
sold to various museums
and various collectors for various
very large sums of money
during the past 10 or 15 years.
The implications of this were immense.
Collectors around the world
have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars
for supposedly ancient seals, painted
pottery shards and other artefacts
that came through Oded Golan's associates.
Dozens of these items have now
been examined by Professor Goren,
and all have been revealed to be forgeries.
Police now suspect that artefacts
made by the same team of forgers
have found their way into leading
museums around the world.
The interesting question is now,
from the list of artefacts that are
currently shown in various museums
in Israel, in London, in New York, in Paris,
are they fake?
Are they authentic?
If Oded Golan was linked to any of them
does that mean that they are forged?
And this is going to be dramatic.
Everything which came to the
market in the last 20 years or so,
things which did not
come from an excavation,
should probably be considered
a fake unless otherwise proven.
It is a deeply shocking revelation.
And beyond that,
there is something even more disturbing.
The forgers were playing on the
desire of millions of people
to see the bible confirmed as history.
It is an immensely cruel and
cynical thing to have done.
And for those in search of Solomon
and his great temple,
it means their goal is as far away as ever.