Mysterious Hebrew stone displayed in Jerusalem

JERUSALEM (AP) — An ancient limestone tablet covered with a mysterious Hebrew text that features the archangel Gabriel is at the center of a new exhibit in Jerusalem, even as scholars continue to argue about what it means.

The so-called Gabriel Stone, a meter (three-foot)-tall tablet said to have been found 13 years ago on the banks of the Dead Sea, features 87 lines of an unknown prophetic text dated as early as the first century BC, at the time of the Second Jewish Temple.

Scholars see it as a portal into the religious ideas circulating in the Holy Land in the era when was Jesus was born. Its form is also unique — it is ink written on stone, not carved — and no other such religious text has been found in the region.

Curators at the Israel Museum, where the first exhibit dedicated to the stone is opening Wednesday, say it is the most important document found in the area since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

"The Gabriel Stone is in a way a Dead Sea Scroll written on stone," said James Snyder, director of the Israel Museum. The writing dates to the same period, and uses the same tidy calligraphic Hebrew script, as some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of documents that include the earliest known surviving manuscripts of Hebrew Bible texts.

The Gabriel Stone made a splash in 2008 when Israeli Bible scholar Israel Knohl offered a daring theory that the stone's faded writing would revolutionize the understanding of early Christianity, claiming it included a concept of messianic resurrection that predated Jesus. He based his theory on one hazy line, translating it as "in three days you shall live."

His interpretation caused a storm in the world of Bible studies, with scholars convening at an international conference the following year to debate readings of the text, and a National Geographic documentary crew featuring his theory. An American team of experts using high resolution scanning technologies tried — but failed — to detect more of the faded writing.

Knohl, a professor of Bible at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, eventually scaled back from his original bombshell theory but the fierce scholarly debate he sparked continued to reverberate across the academic world, bringing international attention to the stone. Over the last few years it went on display alongside other Bible-era antiquities in Rome, Houston and Dallas.

Bible experts are still debating the writing's meaning, largely because much of the ink has eroded in crucial spots in the passage and the tablet has two diagonal cracks the slice the text into three pieces. Museum curators say only 40 percent of the 87 lines are legible, many of those only barely. The interpretation of the text featured in the Israel Museum's exhibit is just one of five readings put forth by scholars.

All agree that the passage describes an apocalyptic vision of an attack on Jerusalem in which God appears with angels on chariots to save the city. The central angelic character is Gabriel, the first angel to appear in the Hebrew Bible. "I am Gabriel," the writing declares.

The stone inscription is one of the oldest passages featuring the archangel, and represents an "explosion of angels in Second Temple Judaism," at a time of great spiritual angst for Jews in Jerusalem looking for divine connection, said Adolfo Roitman, a curator of the exhibit.

The exhibit traces the development of the archangel Gabriel in the three monotheistic religions, displaying a Dead Sea Scroll fragment which mentions the angel's name; the 13th century Damascus Codex, one of the oldest illustrated manuscripts of the complete Hebrew Bible; a 10th century New Testament manuscript from Brittany, in which Gabriel predicts the birth of John the Baptist and appears to the Virgin Mary; and an Iranian Quran manuscript dated to the 15th or 16th century, in which the angel, called Jibril in Arabic, reveals the word of God to the prophet Mohammad.

"Gabriel is not archaeology. He is still relevant for millions of people on earth who believe that angels are heavenly beings on earth," said Roitman. The Gabriel Stone, he said, is "the starting point of an ongoing tradition that still is relevant today."

The story of how the stone was discovered is just as murky as its meaning. A Bedouin man is said to have found it in Jordan on the eastern banks of the Dead Sea around the year 2000, Knohl said. An Israeli university professor later examined a piece of earth stuck to the stone and found a composition of minerals only found in that region of the Dead Sea.

The stone eventually made it into the hands of Ghassan Rihani, a Jordanian antiquities dealer based in Jordan and London, who in turn sold the stone to Swiss-Israeli collector David Jeselsohn in Zurich for an unspecified amount. Rihani has since died. The Bible scholar traveled to Jordan multiple times to look for more potential stones, but was unable to find the stone's original location.

Israel Museum curators said Jeselsohn lent the stone to the museum for temporary display.

Lenny Wolfe, an antiquities dealer in Jerusalem, said that before the Jordanian dealer bought it, another middleman faxed him an image of the stone and offered it for sale.

"The fax didn't come out clearly. I had no idea what it was," said Wolfe, who passed on the offer. It was "one of my biggest misses," Wolfe said.

What function the stone had, where it was displayed, and why it was written are unknown, said curators of the Israel Museum exhibit.

"There is still so much that is unclear," said Michal Dayagi-Mendels, a curator of the exhibit. Scholars, she said, "will still argue about this for years."

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Tree Obama Planted in Jerusalem May Be Uprooted for Inspection

It's an old gospel song: Just like a tree planted by the water, I shall not be moved. But if you're the magnolia tree the president of the United States planted today in Jerusalem, there's a chance you might be moved.

Obama planted a tree on Wednesday in Israeli President Shimon Peres's Jerusalem garden. It's a gift for a man Obama said has planted "the seeds of progress, the seeds of security, the seeds of peace - all the seeds that have helped not only Israel grow but also the relationship between our two nations grow."

The tree was meant to signify the strong roots of the relationship between the United States and Israel. But before these American roots can take hold, the Israeli government will inspect them.

An Israeli official tells ABC News that the magnolia tree will be tested and possibly removed in a week by the Israeli Agriculture Department. The roots of the tree were apparently kept in a plastic covering during the planting. As in the U.S., Israeli law forbids plants and trees from other countries from entering Israel. The White House and the Israeli government were aware of the limitations ahead of the visit.

A White House official confirms that the tree given to Peres was grown from a set of seeds from the original Jackson Magnolia alongside the Rose Garden on the South Lawn of the White House. It was planted in the 1830s by President Andrew Jackson. An official says it is the oldest known presidential tree on the grounds of the White House.

During remarks at Peres's official residence, Obama mentioned the story in the Talmud of Honi and the Carob Tree: A man sees an older man planting a carob tree and tells him that it will take 70 years before the tree grows fruit. Obama told the crowd the older man's reply: "When I came into the world, I found carob trees. As my forefathers planted for me, so will I plant for my children."

There's good news for Obama's magnolia tree: If removed for testing, it is expected to be replanted in the same spot. It's currently near a tree given by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI during his May 2009 trip to the Holy Land. An Israeli official says Benedict's tree didn't undergo any testing because it was purchased in Israel.

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Jerusalem Arab residents contest highway route

JERUSALEM (AP) — A new Israeli highway project is threatening to add to tensions in Jerusalem by cutting through a quiet, middleclass Arab neighborhood to link a large bloc of Jewish settlements to the city.

The project comes during a flurry of Israeli building in east Jerusalem, the section of the city claimed by the Palestinians as their future capital.

City officials say the road is meant to serve everyone. Critics counter that the road is part of a grand scheme, including construction of thousands of apartments, to solidify Israel's control over the area and sever the connection between the holy city and any future Palestinian state.

"It changes the geography and demography in ways that will make a two-state solution very, very difficult," said Aviv Tatarsky of Ir Amim, an organization that lobbies for equitable treatment of Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem.

The highway project is just four kilometers (2.5 miles) long and will complete a north-south route across the city. It will link two of Israel's most contentious roads, allowing Israeli Jews living in the southern West Bank to zip into Jerusalem and to the coastal city of Tel Aviv with barely a stop.

Israeli work crews have already moved into the Arab neighborhood of Beit Safafa in southeast Jerusalem, and begun construction on the 1.5-kilometer (1-mile) section through the neighborhood.

City officials say the extension will improve transport for Jerusalem's Arabs and Jews. They said they couldn't hold up infrastructure development while waiting for a resolution to the decades-old Mideast conflict.

Even if Jerusalem is divided to serve as the future capitals of Israel and Palestine, the road networks would likely be shared, said deputy mayor Naomi Tsur.

"Whatever the future status of Jerusalem, people have to have access from one end of the city to the other," Tsur said. "They still have to get to work, clinics, schools and universities ... even if half the city is Palestine, they will have to have access."

Beit Safafa residents say the project is destroying their community by separating thousands of resident's from the neighborhood's center, where the schools and medical clinics are. In an area where olive and almond trees still peek out among buildings, they also warn that the construction will remove what little remains of their rural past.

"Children will be cut off from school, the elderly from mosques," said resident Alaa Salman. "When somebody dies in our village we carry them with our hands to our cemetery. How will we do that after the road is built? All that will change," he said.

Residents have built a protest tent on part of the highway's route, and others have scrawled angry red and yellow signs near where bulldozers churned up land on a recent day. They are meeting municipal officials, organizing protests and petitioning Israel's Supreme Court to move the highway underground.

Tsur said the city is trying to minimize disruption to Beit Safafa's residents.

The city is planning to bury 180 meters (600 feet) of the Beit Safafa route and build parks on top. Tsur said concrete walls and acoustic barriers will conceal exposed highway sections. Planners promised to soundproof windows of nearby homes and build vehicle and pedestrian bridges to link the neighborhood.

Yair Singer, chief project engineer, said the new road will ease traffic from two settlements on Jerusalem's southern outskirts, Gilo and Har Gilo, and bypass congested urban roads. More than 60,000 people live there now, making the need for a new road more pressing, Singer said.

The underlying issue is Israel's control over the West Bank and east Jerusalem, territories it captured in the 1967 Mideast war. After the war, Israel annexed east Jerusalem and surrounding West Bank territory to the city's municipal boundaries, claiming the entire city as its capital. Most of the international community does not recognize that move.

Palestinians seek these areas for their future state, with annexed parts of Jerusalem as their capital. The competing claims to east Jerusalem, which is home to sensitive Jewish, Christian and Muslim holy sites, has been the most explosive issue in past Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and has led to periodic bouts of violence.

Complicating the equation is some half-million Israelis who live in Jewish settlements in those areas. Nearly half of them live in east Jerusalem, where settlements are integrated as regular neighborhoods.

The international community has repeatedly condemned Israeli settlement construction and supported efforts to create a Palestinian state, including a vote last November at the U.N. to recognize a future Palestine in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem.

Netanyahu opposes any withdrawal from east Jerusalem. He has given grudging agreement to the need to establish a Palestinian state, but peace efforts remain stalled, in large part because of Palestinian objections to continued settlement construction.

The road project appears to be part of a larger Israeli plan for Jerusalem. The final stretch of the Begin highway, named after the late Prime Minister Menachem Begin, is crucial for consolidating Israeli control.

The decades-old project will link Route 60, a thoroughfare for West Bank settlements southeast of Jerusalem, to Route 443, a highway that links Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Route 443 has drawn criticism because part of it runs through the West Bank.

Along with the road, several thousand new apartments are in various stages of planning in the east Jerusalem area.

Much of the new construction is slated for settlements that surround Beit Safafa. In addition, Netanyahu has promised to push development of an area that links east Jerusalem to the nearby settlement of Maaleh Adumim.

As Netanyahu prepares to form a new coalition government this week, there are no signs the construction will slow.

Netanyahu is expected to put the pro-settler "Jewish Home" Party in charge of the Housing Ministry, giving it vast budgets to promote more settlement construction.

"The third Netanyahu government has one clear goal: enlarging the settlements and achieving the vision of 'a million Jews living in Judea and Samaria.' This magic number will thwart the division of the land and prevent once and for all the establishment of a Palestinian state," wrote Aluf Benn, editor in chief of the Haaretz daily, using the biblical term for the West Bank.

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