Chris Rollston, at The Blogs

Chris Rollston

Biblical Scholar, Epigrapher.

Dec 13, 2024, 8:04 AM

Sotheby’s Samaritan 10 Commandments and the Antiquities Market: Caveat Emptor

On the auction block at Sotheby’s is an inscribed stone billed as “the Ten Commandments Tablet, 300-800 CE.” ( Within Sotheby’s narrative (i.e., sale catalog) about this inscribed stone, the descriptors are ostentatious and glowing: “The Earliest surviving inscribed...

Sep 8, 2022, 6:46 AM

The Old Hebrew Ishmael Papyrus: Tapping the Brakes

On September 7, 2022, various press outlets ran stories about a First Temple Period Hebrew papyrus, with an Old Hebrew inscription. Four lines of text are partially preserved, with the first extant word of the first extant line reading...

Jul 10, 2022, 6:24 PM

Sensational claims about the Jerusalem Stone ‘Inscription’: Not so fast!

Gershon Galil announced (on July 7, 2022) that he has “deciphered the Jerusalem stone tablet”. Various press outlets have reported on Galil’s “decipherment,” including the Times of Israel. Within this blog post, I will cite Galil’s own statements, rather...

About Me

Professor Christopher Rollston is Professor of Biblical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at George Washington University (Washington, DC). He holds an MA and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He publishes widely in the fields of Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies, especially the field of ancient inscriptions (in Hebrew, Aramaic, Phoenician, Greek, Akkadian). He has held two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships (one in Israel and one in Jordan). For six years, he served as the co-editor of the Bulletin of the American Society of Overseas Research, and for twenty years, he served as the editor of MAARAV, a journal of Northwest Semitic languages and literatures.