Overview

The Shapira Strips were a set of blackened leather fragments, inscribed in an archaic Hebrew script, that the Jerusalem antiquities dealer Moses Wilhelm Shapira brought to London in 1883 and offered to the British Museum as the oldest biblical manuscript in the world. The text was a short, distinctive version of Deuteronomy, including a variant of the Ten Commandments. Leading scholars of the day declared it a forgery within months, Shapira died by suicide the next year, and the strips subsequently disappeared.

For more than a century the episode stood as a classic cautionary tale of nineteenth-century forgery. Then, in 2021, the biblical scholar Idan Dershowitz argued in detail that the strips had been genuine after all, preserving an ancient source that lay behind the biblical book. The claim reopened a case most had considered closed. Because the physical strips have been lost since the 1880s and were never scientifically tested, the site records the artifact as debated in authenticity and lost in existence.