THE scene is straight from The Maltese Falcon. A secret hotel rendezvous, and a Jewish messenger and his silent Arab accomplice waiting while the learned Israeli academic peers at a black stone tablet.

This was how it began a year and a half ago, the first sighting of what is either a state-of-the-art hoax or an ancient Hebrew inscription — more than 2,000 years old — confirming the Biblical account of Solomon’s temple.

The fragment, 31cm x 24cm x 7cm of Arkosic sandstone, is the subject of intense debate among archaeologists in Israel, where politics, faith, science and money mix in an incendiary cocktail.

Of the stone’s ownership and place of origin, nothing is certain, save that agents representing its proprietor claim that it is a 15-line inscription in ancient Hebrew describing temple repairs ordered by the Biblical King Jehoash, who ruled Judea in the 9th century BC. It was found on Jerusalem’s disputed Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif complex, they say.

The text closely resembles descriptions in the Old Testament, II Kings, xii, 1-6 and 11-17, by recounting how the ruler tells priests to take “holy money . . . to buy quarry stones and timber and copper and labour to carry out the duty with faith”.

Dr Gabriel Barkay, a leading Israeli archaeological expert, said: “If this is genuine, it is the first time the Davidic dynasty in its very early stages is documented in an extra-Biblical source, and a reference to Solomon’s Temple. My impression is it’s authentic, but there is a Yiddish saying that translates: ‘It is too good to be true.’ ”

Dr Shimon Ilani, of the Geological Survey of Israel, said that carbon-dating had established that the stone’s crust was 2,300 years old.

Yet Professor Joseph Naveh, an academic asked to analyse the fragment in 2001, has declared it to be fake. He confirms that most of letter shapes are of 9th-century BC Hebrew, but says that others are typical of 7th-century Aramaic and Phoenician.

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