A grey limestone slab — three feet tall, twenty inches wide — surfaced on the antiquities market around the year 2000 and was acquired by the Swiss-Israeli collector David Jeselsohn. Its provenance is unverified, though mineralogical analysis points to the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. Eighty-seven lines of Hebrew are written in ink, not carved — an extreme rarity for a stone object — in a Herodian-period script that places the tablet in the late first century BC or the opening decades of the first century AD. Israel Knohl of the Hebrew University published the editio princeps in 2007, naming the text Hazon Gabriel (the Vision of Gabriel) from its opening invocation. The text is apocalyptic. The angel Gabriel addresses an unnamed figure called the prince of princes, speaks of cosmic upheaval, the blood of Jerusalem's slain, and a fallen leader. Lines 80 and 81 carry the most-discussed reading. Knohl reconstructs l'shloshet yamin chayeh — "in three days, live" — addressed by Gabriel to a slain messianic figure he identifies tentatively with Simon, the leader of a 4 BC Jewish revolt killed by Herodian troops. Knohl's argument: pre-Christian Judaism already possessed a script of a dying-and-rising messianic figure, and early Christian preaching of the resurrection on the third day drew on that script rather than inventing it. The reading is contested. Ronald Hendel of UC Berkeley examined the text in 2009 and read the disputed line not as chayeh (live) but as ha'ot (the sign), arguing the surface damage will not bear the weight Knohl's reconstruction places on it. Other scholars — John Collins, Matthias Henze — have accepted the late-Second-Temple dating but withhold judgment on the resurrection reading. What is undisputed is that the tablet preserves a substantial Hebrew apocalyptic composition outside the Dead Sea Scrolls corpus, contemporary with the New Testament, in a non-sectarian voice. The tablet is on long-term loan to the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem. Sources: Israel Knohl, Messiahs and Resurrection in 'The Gabriel Revelation' (Continuum, 2009); Matthias Henze, ed., Hazon Gabriel: New Readings of the Gabriel Revelation (SBL Press, 2011); Ronald Hendel, "The Messiah Son of Joseph: Simon bar Giora and the 'Gabriel Revelation'" (Biblical Archaeology Review 35, 2009); Daniel 7:13–14.
Hazon Gabriel matters because it preserves a substantial Hebrew apocalyptic composition outside the Dead Sea Scrolls, dated to the late first century BC or early first century AD, raising the unresolved question of whether pre-Christian Judaism already held a template for a dying-and-rising messiah rising after three days.