The Pomegranate Ivory

A small ivory pomegranate, four and four-tenths centimeters tall, hollow at the base where a wooden rod once seated it — likely the head of a ceremonial scepter or scroll-staff. The fruit itself is genuinely ancient; thermoluminescence and stylistic analysis place the carving in the Late Bronze Age, roughly the fourteenth century BC. Around its shoulder run carved Hebrew letters, in palaeo-Hebrew script. André Lemaire of the Sorbonne examined the artifact in a Jerusalem antiquities shop in 1979 and read the inscription as "[Belonging] to the temp[le of YHW]H, holy to the priests" — the brackets marking letters lost where the ivory has chipped. He published the reading in Revue Biblique in 1981 and argued the object came from Solomon's First Temple. The Israel Museum acquired it in 1988 for $550,000 and displayed it as the only known artifact from the Temple itself. In 2004 a committee convened by the Israel Antiquities Authority — chaired by Uzi Dahari, with palaeographers and microscopists — re-examined the surface and concluded the inscription was a modern addition. Their report noted the engraved strokes stopped cleanly at the edges of an ancient break, indicating the letters had been cut after the breakage; if the inscription were original, strokes would run into the fracture. Yuval Goren contributed microscopic patina analysis in support. The committee declared the ivory ancient, the inscription a forgery. The forgery verdict is itself disputed. Aaron Demsky of Bar-Ilan University and a 2007 follow-up study by Lemaire defended the inscription's authenticity, arguing the alleged stop-at-the-break is a microscopic ambiguity rather than proof, and that the palaeography fits the late ninth century BC. The Israel Museum continues to display the pomegranate, now alongside a panel describing the IAA finding and the ongoing scholarly disagreement. Sources: André Lemaire, "Une inscription paléo-hébraïque sur grenade en ivoire" (Revue Biblique 88, 1981); Israel Antiquities Authority, Final Report of the Examining Committee for the Yehoash Inscription and Ivory Pomegranate (2004); Aaron Demsky, "The Pomegranate Inscription Reconsidered" (Israel Exploration Journal 57, 2007); 1 Kings 6–7.