For anyone familiar with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), you may be aware that they claim Joseph Smith found some scriptures in the form of ancient metal plates with words engraved on them. As the story goes, these plates were deposited by a Native American hundreds of years before European settlers arrived. And that Native American was actually a descendant of people who migrated to the American continent from Jerusalem around 600 BCE carrying similarly engraved metal plates kept by the Jewish people of that time.
Again, this is all according to the LDS church, and if any of it were true, I'd suspect we'd find historical/archeological data to back up these claims. To that end, is there any evidence that ancient Hebrews used metal plates to keep records? Specifically, are there any ancient Hebrew scriptures engraved on metal plates from around 600 BCE?
Thanks for humoring my odd question.
There is no evidence that ancient Israeites/Judeans kept any sort of records on metal plates.
We occasionally find inscriptions on what are called "prestige surfaces," but nothing akin to any sort of record that I believe you are describing. In Zhakevich's recent work Scribal Tools in Ancient Israel, he discusses, among other things, writing surfaces and implements utilized in Iron-Age Judah. His basic thesis is that writing technology in the eastern Mediterranean was essentially Egyptian in character, mimicking both the technology and language of Egyptian scribal craft over-and-against that of Mesopotamia. While there are some examples of short bits of writing on luxury items (such as the Ketef Hinnom amulets, which were inscribed on silver, we have no evidence for large metal plates.
The closest thing that comes to mind would be cuneiform inscriptions on things like ivory or, rarely, precious metals. I say this with emphasis: even those are exceedingly rare.
At a talk I attended at a conference years ago by Sonia Hazard, which has since been turned into an article, she posits that Smith actually did find metal plates, but that they were actually the plates utilized on a printing press with foreign language characters that he didn't recognize. It was a highly convincing argument rooted in three basic pieces of data: 1) the location of several printing presses near where Smith claims to have found the plates; 2) examples of bizarre books printed at these presses containing a high concentration of non-english characters on individual pages; 3) trade routes running near Smith's location.