Moses Shapira papyrus - "treated with chemicals to look ancient" ( yellow with age, tobacco, lemon? )

Steven Avery

Administrator
Tony Burke - Introduction

The nineteenth century also saw one of the few examples of a forgery related to the Hebrew Bible. In 1883 Moses Shapira, a Jerusalem antiquities dealer, made efforts to sell fragments of a Deuteronomy scroll written in Moabite script and containing an eleventh commandment (“Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thy heart: I am GOD, thy GOD”). This so-called “Shapira Scroll” was determined to be a forgery by Charles Clermont-Ganneau and David Ginsburg who argued that the text was written on strips taken from the lower margin of a disused synagogue roll and then treated with chemicals to look ancient.41


41. Chambers, History and Motives, 35.
For further discussion see
Rabinowicz, “Shapira Scroll”; and
Press, ‘“Lying Pen of Scribes.’”


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