Authenticity and Scholarship

The nineteenth-century verdict was forgery, delivered by respected scholars but under the shadow of Shapira's earlier sale of fake Moabite pottery. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the mid-twentieth century showed that ancient leather scriptures could survive in the Judean environment, and a few scholars began to reconsider. The modern case for authenticity was made most fully by Idan Dershowitz in The Valediction of Moses (2021), who argued from the surviving transcriptions that the text is not a copy of the received Deuteronomy but an older composition standing behind it, and that features once read as errors are marks of antiquity.

Critics responded forcefully: Ronald Hendel, Matthieu Richelle and others contend that the text presupposes the later Masoretic version and shows signs of nineteenth-century construction, making a pre-exilic date untenable. Both positions are argued in Biblical Archaeology Review and the scholarly literature. Because the strips themselves are lost and cannot be dated or examined, the question remains genuinely open, the reason the site marks the artifact debated rather than debunked.