The text was written in paleo-Hebrew on 16 leather fragments. In 1883, Moses Wilhelm Shapira, an antiquities dealer based in Jerusalem, brought the text to Europe. He showed it to a committee of scholars in Germany, who dismissed it as a fake. Shapira then traveled to Britain where he offered to sell the fragments to the British Museum for 1 million pounds. An expert working for the museum also dismissed it as a forgery, declining the offer. The next year, in 1884, Shapira died by suicide in the Netherlands.

Idan Dershowitz [professor at Univ of Potsdam] says that this text, with its shorter narrative, was written before the Book of Deuteronomy. "Far from being derivative of Deuteronomy, this text is, in fact, Deuteronomy's ancient forebear," Dershowitz wrote in the journal article.

Dershowitz makes numerous arguments to support his contention that the text is authentic. For one, he said that Shapira's own notes show that the antiquities dealer was struggling to understand the text. At the very least, Dershowitz said, this should prove that Shapira didn't fake the document himself.

The papers have "a great number of question marks, marginal musings, and rejected readings; it appears to be a preliminary decipherment. Indeed, Shapira was still in the process of working out the correct order of the inscribed leather fragments. If Shapira was the forger — or one of the forgers — of the manuscripts, why do his private papers include a not-altogether-successful attempt at deciphering them? It would surely be unusual for a forger to labor to understand a text that he himself had devised or inscribed."

These extraordinary fragments were brought to England by Mr Shapira of Jerusalem, a well-known bookseller and dealer in antiquities. Mr Shapira's name will be remembered in connection with the Moabite pottery in the museum at Berlin, which is now commonly regarded as a modern forgery. The leathern fragments now produced by Mr Shapira were, as he alleges, obtained by him from certain Arabs near Dibon, the neighbourhood where the Moabite stone was discovered. The agent employed by him in their purchase was an Arab "who would steal his mother-in-law for a few piastres", and who would probably be even less scrupulous about a few blackened slips of ancient or modern sheepskin. The value placed by Mr. Shapira on the fragments is, however, a cool million sterling, and at this price they are offered to the British Museum, where they have been temporarily deposited for examination. Dr Ginsburg, the well-known Semitic scholar, is now busily engaged in deciphering the contents of the fragments and examining their genuineness.

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