Faith Works 11-1-24
Jeff Gill
Ancient mysteries, modern challenges
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On November the First, one hundred and sixty four years ago, a remarkable discovery was made in our area.
David Wyrick, the former county surveyor and noted amateur antiquarian, was digging where once towered the Jacksontown Stone Mound, formerly forty feet and more in height and constructed almost entirely of rocks, uncut, loosely piled over what turned out to be a complex of smaller earthen mounds at ground level. Some two hundred feet across at the base, the piled stones were largely hauled away after 1823 to build the "Northbank" of the Licking Reservoir of the Ohio & Erie Canal – what we now call Buckeye Lake. Tens of thousands of wagon loads of stone were rolled from their hilltop to the valley below to the west.
A tomb carved out of a tree trunk, copper rings, and other funerary material had already been found at the ground level where the stone mound once stood. Digging beneath even that, Wyrick found on Nov. 1, 1860 a carved stone box in two pieces, and within what became known as the Decalogue Stone. It was covered in a squarish form of Hebrew lettering.
This was not, however, the first Hebrew inscribed stone Wyrick had discovered. On June 29th, just four months earlier, in a shallow pit near the Octagon of the Newark Earthworks, he dug up an oddly shaped rock which became known as the Keystone. Attention both locally and nationally was quickly focused on this strange object, with Hebrew phrases carved on the four faces of the Keystone.
There are volumes which could be written about the Newark Holy Stones, as these objects have come to be called. In fact, Brad Lepper and I mean to write at least one; he's been "on the case" a few years longer than I have, but we've been digging archivally and elsewhere into this mystery for over thirty years now, and it's time for something more than a few articles in journals and dozens of public talks, all of which we've done. They're interesting not just for "antiquarian" or archaeological reasons, but because their story, and what these objects might be saying about history and humanity in the United States, continues to fascinate and attract attention, right down to 2024.
We say they are hoaxes, which doesn't end the interest, but begins it. The briefest possible explanation for why we're so certain they're fake is because the Hebrew on each, the Keystone and the Decalogue, bear tell-tale signs of modern Hebrew. They aren't, they can't be 2,000 years old, or even two hundred. But if they were made in 1860, with such care and carved in stone, what was the purpose? What reasons justify the effort expended to create them & hide them for Wyrick to find (because we think he was a patsy, a victim of the hoax himself)?
Our best explanation has to do with what happened on Nov. 6, 1860. The period in which both Holy Stones were fabricated and found was while the nation struggled through a presidential election with high stakes, and then voted into office Abraham Lincoln.
The struggle, one that Lincoln himself wrestled with, was the human status of what at that time were seen as entirely distinct races of people, and the question of whether or not such differences were real, and if so whether those distinctions justified a different status under law. The Dred Scott decision three years earlier, and John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry the year before, all were a "tragic prelude" to the conflict everyone saw coming.
We suspect the Holy Stones were an attempt to influence the election, and public opinion, in favor of the equality of all humankind, whatever race or ethnicity. It's a debate we still are having today, and a book we really need to write. Stay tuned!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; yes, he's daring himself to get writing on this project described here. Tell him if you'd read that book at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
