A year ago, scholars published a transcription of a fragment of papyrus, on which were written in ancient Hebrew the words “Jerusalem,” “king,” and “jars of wine.” A number of experts agreed with these scholars’ conclusion that the fragment was part of a letter dating to the 7th century BCE, a conclusion supported by the radiocarbon dating of the papyrus. Christopher Rollston, however, an expert on ancient Near Eastern epigraphy, concludes that it is a forgery. In part, he bases his argument on the irregular use of what linguists call the “construct form,” which was common in biblical Hebrew but is uncommon in the modern language. He also notes problems with the laboratory evidence:

[I]t is not all that difficult for someone to acquire ancient potsherds, ancient metals, stones of Levantine quarry, small pieces of ancient papyrus, or vellum. Therefore, the antiquity of the medium (e.g., papyrus, vellum, potsherd, or metal) is certainly no guarantee of the dating of the writing on that medium. To put it differently, only the dullest of forgers would forge an inscription on modern papyrus, modern vellum, modern potsherds, or modern metals.

After all, most forgers are quite sharp and they know that laboratory tests are routinely performed, and so the forgers know that it is important for them to use ancient materials from the correct period as their medium. And forgers have produced a fair number of forgeries in the last 40 or 50 years, and this is the way they do it. . . .

There are also additional aspects of the carbon-14 test that deserve scrutiny. Namely, quite a number of people said to me that the papyrus was carbon-dated to the 7th century BCE, and the script is also dated to the 7th century BCE; therefore, they said, that sort of correspondence is very good evidence for the antiquity of the writing. After all, it might be difficult to find a piece of papyrus that was from the 7th century, [as opposed to merely being ancient. However], for carbon-dating materials from antiquity, there is normally a fairly substantial plus or minus range. . . .

[In the case of this papyrus], the carbon dates . . . fell into the Hallstatt Plateau [a period during which it is impossible for radiocarbon dating to yield very precise results], and so all that can actually be said is that this papyrus dates to sometime between 800 and 400 BCE. . . . In other words, there is not some sort of dramatic convergence of the carbon date and the putative date of the script.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.