The study of antiquities is fascinating business, but it can be quite dangerous because the contemporary scholarly impetus is to fill in the gaps, often with purely hypothetical conclusions, when a wiser path would be to discuss options and then acknowledge that the present state of our knowledge is limited. Scholars tend to say more than can be definitively shown, when a more prudent path would be to present data and be conservative in conclusions.
Such is the case of the new discovery many of us are talking about, an ancient text written on stone known in many places as "Gabriel's Revelation." The only comment I want to make here regards the location where the stone was found. Put simply, we do not know where the stone was written or where it was originally found. This means that many claims about who wrote it have to be considered carefully. Even the moniker "Dead Sea Scroll in stone" has to be considered carefully, because we do not know that it came from the same region as the Dead Sea Scrolls. (This comparison is made because of the similarity in the writing and the grammar of the Hebrew written on the stone, but it is only a comparison, not a certainty.) Any conclusions made about this text based on a location are premature. It may be that with time we can figure out its provenance, but at the present time we do not have enough information to say from whence it came.
And with antiquities like this, the importance of knowing the original location is crucial for assessing the value. This link cannot be understated.
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