(13) Archaeology & the Old Testament
Vern Peterman · Jan 8, 2006
Apologetics, No. 14
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4826234120728

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Last week, we finished up a two-part topic on the resurrection, and there was something I just wanted to bring up in the midst of that, and that is that, one, I've got a supplemental thing here, not required for everybody kind of thing, but an eight-page write-up by a Christian archaeologist that starts off on archaeology and then ends up with the resurrection.

So I'll make that available for anybody who'd like that. The other thing is just let people know that, you know, if you're talking about some person or aspect of the resurrection question, a lot of people think, well, they're just what's in the Bible, and outside of that, we don't know anything. You know, like it's easy for somebody to just make up stuff. But here's a for instance.

Herod Antipas is one who was very briefly addressed in the resurrection account because Pilate was trying to hand Jesus off. Jesus was, figuratively speaking, a hot potato. So he sent Jesus over to Herod Antipas across town, and Herod Antipas was looking for some entertainment, and Jesus wasn't up to it, wasn't going to do it, so he sent him back. But if you want to, like for example, you want to know about Herod Antipas, here's a whole book on the guy.

So we're not talking about somebody we don't know anything about. Or someone says, you know, Pontius Pilate, what do we know about him? So there's enough to fill a scholar's book on the subject. Caiaphas, the one who did the Jewish part of the trial. You want to know something about Caiaphas? There is substantial material to work with. It is not a matter of these are people we don't know anything about and the Bible just cooked up some names. These are people about whom we know quite a bit and about which there's a lot to reckon with.

How about the Roman soldiers and the way they behave? Full documentation on how the Roman soldiers behave. And this is just kind of one example. Here's another. How do these guys behave? What do they do? in their behavior with one another, it is something about which there's lots of material to work with, not something that can be just waved off out of hand, someone saying, oh, that's just myth and somebody cooked it up. Okay, there's a lot of material to set aside if someone wishes to do so.

Okay, now, archaeology and the Bible, we've got the Old Testament we'll be talking about this week, and the New Testament next week. It's a subject, excuse me, it's a subject that for me, it kind of hits me personally. And that's because right about when I was starting college, someone close to me said, oh, the Bible, you know, just has a whole lot of fictitious and made up and written. So it looks like it's real or sounds like it's real kinds of accounts. And so I thought, well, boy, that's quite a challenge, quite a statement. And it was somebody who I thought some of, and so it wasn't something I just set aside, but rather something I considered carefully.

So really, I would have to say, over the last 30 some odd years, I've been looking and continuing to look at this kind of subject One of the things that I've taken over that period of time is this is a quarterly journal I can easily recommend, written by scholars, but written at a level that it doesn't lose you and all sorts of, you know, pardon?

Yeah, this is Bible and Spade. The reason I'm holding this up and not giving more detail, I'll give you more detail in a minute, okay? But it is Bible and Spade. It's a quarterly. It runs about 35 bucks a year. But they also have a monthly email newsletter that they send out with some really good links. Anyway, I've gotten a lot out of it over the years and I'd easily recommend it to others. It is written particularly with the orientation that the Bible is reliable. The Bible is historically reliable.

So anyway, that's something that I'll recommend to you. Let's take a look through some things here. Some will talk about archaeology proving the Bible. You ever run across that? Archaeology proves the Bible. One of the points we want to make here is the nature of archaeology is that it really cannot prove the Bible. A better word is it confirms the Bible. And we'll see why in a minute. Archaeology is a science where you do not have all the data. You're looking at something historically. A proof is something you do logically. But this isn't a logic lesson.

Confirm is a better word, okay? And I think you can say categorically, yes, it does confirm the Bible. By the way, we have a handout here. We'll make sure you, get a hold of, and I don't want you to go in shock. It's a good thing you're sitting down, but just one page. Hi, welcome back here. So anyway, archaeology confirms the general historicity of the Bible. A better way to put it, archaeology confirms the Bible generally and in some cases specifically.

The reality is, however, that it being a science, or a use of science, can science prove something is spiritually true? No. That's right. What is spiritually true must be revealed by God. Science can at best imply something spiritually. For example, if I look at the world around me and I say, boy, that sure looks to me like somebody designed this, the implication may be spiritual, but science itself can't examine or reveal spiritual things. It can at best imply.

Okay, now, next part there, archaeology doesn't have all the possible data. Let's ask the question, why is it that archaeologists do not have all the data they might possibly want? What are some reasons? What happens so the archaeologists don't have all the possible data they might want? Yes, it is a question of what we've found. What are the limitations to an archaeologist finding something? And there are a number of them. Yeah, I can't get there. What might be reasons why the archaeologists can't get there?

Yeah, political situations. Countries with whom we have political problems. While there was, and it's still not all gone away, while there was tension between the Soviet Union and Turkey, getting into the area around Mount Ararat was nigh unto impossible politically. Pardon? Yes, and you bring up a good point.

You may have problems with weather, You may have problems with, for example, something is underwater. You may have difficulty with something that is about to be made underwater. I read of one account where they were putting in a dam and they told the archaeologists, you can go ahead and dig as long as you want, but when that water's coming, it's coming, okay? And so the archaeologists were kind of racing against the clock to get what they could done because once it goes underwater, can you continue to do archaeological excavation? Yes. What's the difficulty? Now everything's with the scuba and boats and much more difficult. Much more expensive and much more complicated and slow, very slow. Yes.

How do things get destroyed? Nancy brings up a good question. How do some things get destroyed? Wars, okay. Can you think of an instance where a war destroyed something? Pardon? Iraq, and oddly enough, the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein went and shelled one of his own archaeological sites. I don't know what he thought he was doing or whether they were just goofy, but yeah, that would be one case. There are other instances where wars destroy something.

OK, yeah. Things get bombed out. Good. That's another one. In our era, we have bombing and all of a sudden, boom, and you've lost something that may have been there, may even have been preserved in a museum or somebody's private facilities, and it's gone in an instant. Yeah, good. Any other way that war destroys something? Pardon? Weather and time and then weight. Ah, yeah. Things get decayed. And then what's that? Weight.

Now what happens, you get erosion, and erosion does two things to make the archaeologist's job more difficult. What's one of them? It wears away on the one hand, and then it does what? And then it buries it on the other. So the archaeologist has a double issue there, okay? We're not done. What else happens? Ah, they build on top of another thing. So here's, for example, we have the city of Thessalonica.

You'd like to be able to excavate? Oh boy, that's a modern city. And matter of fact, I think Dave Daniels has been there. It's a modern city and the excavated part that you can now go to is quite small relative to what it once was because it's underneath things.

Good. What else? Yes. Earthquakes and volcanic activity. When they had the area where Vesuvius You know, basically dump piles of hot ash very quickly. Several different places, several communities were buried in ash and getting that out of there afterwards, a big chore, big chore. Good. Earthquakes suddenly destroy the structure of something.

Yeah, good point. What else? Fire is another one. will come up either sometimes naturally or sometimes humanly caused, and both of those cause the same problem. Archaeologists simply don't have the data that was there. Good. We're not done. What else? Thievery. Okay, that is a big problem now. Archaeologists would like to be able to excavate something, but then somebody breaks into it, and it's either somebody breaking in just looking for, is there gold or silver, or somebody selling ancient artifacts.

Oh yeah, you're talking about St. Catherine's Monastery at the base of Mount Sinai. Here goes Count Tischendorf, who was happening to stay there, and he's looking at these ancient papyrus documents, and the monks there were starting fires with them. For how long, we don't know. But that's Yeah, that's where he found one of the oldest complete copies of the New Testament that they hadn't lit on fire yet.

So anyway, yes, what else? Yes. Uh huh. Yes, if we have time, I'll show you that, and you are correct. It's on the fire in the brimstone from Sodom and Gomorrah. Yep, yep, you're correct. Yeah, here's, you see it, boy, and it's quite a conflagration. The skeletons are sitting there in ashes. I mean, it's really something. There's something else. How about what happened, what did the Romans do with the temple? They knocked everything off the temple mount. And that had been roughly six centuries after Nebuchadnezzar had done the same thing. Everything was knocked down.

So you also have human destruction. Okay. There's one other one. I won't sit there and fish for it. Pardon? Ah, yeah. Chemical. And as we talk about weather decay, chemical decay is another one. Is that what you're referring to? Yeah. Chemical decay. And particular areas, you know, you get acid rain, particular ground conditions that can cause acid conditions and destroy archeological information. Deterioration, just plain deterioration, like papyrus documents.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, we had 22 copies of the Book of Isaiah. Some of them are in such good condition that even the stitching between the pieces of sheepskin is still good so that you could go and pull on it. Some of the other places, it's in little tiny pieces. So a spectrum there, some quite a bit deteriorated. Another instance that can easily come up is reuse.

When some archeologists were taking apart some of the stones that were in the amphitheater at Caesarea. Caesarea is where Paul was held for two years. Caesarea is where the deacon Philip had a home. That is where Peter brought the gospel to the centurion.

At that place, they pulled up one of the stones that had been kind of chipped away and reused for something, and that had an inscription about Pontius Pilate. So reuse of material. Think about it. If you're building material and you can't just go down to the Jerusalem lumber yard, you're going to be doing the right thing to pick material that's sitting right there on your site. And if it means reusing something that's been turned to rubble, that makes perfect sense, right?

So all these things put things out of reach of the archaeologist. There's one more, and we've alluded to it in some degree, And that is a government that for political reasons, but related to religious reasons, does not want you to excavate that. For example, here we are, we have not been able to excavate, and there was a university a couple of years back that was trying to lead the charge to get it done, but got turned back. We've not been able to excavate Colossae.

It's still a mound. You can walk around on it. You can see there are tombs there. There is the amphitheater, but it's all kind of covered up with weeds and things of that sort. So there's some things that you can see, but there's a big mound there and we've not been able to touch it because the Turkish government is of what religious orientation?

Muslim. And what would be the interest in digging into the Tellet Colosseum? Christian. So are they going to be real anxious to have us excavate that? No, bottom line, they don't want it. You come there and apply, who are you? Wait a minute, you're Christians. Declined, denied. So anyway, there's lots of reasons why archaeologists don't have the information. Sometimes they have it and can't get to it.

A hundred years ago, UC Berkeley, got tens of thousands of papyrus documents. Tens of thousands of papyrus documents from around the New Testament era, some right in the New Testament era. So here's just thousands of documents, thousands and thousands. After a hundred years, UC Berkeley has translated about 5% of those documents.

Now, if that's going to go on, it's going to take another 19 centuries to get the rest done. Yes. It's a financial issue. It's a priority issue. You know, basically they've got all these documents and they're just sitting there. And that's only one example. I can give you several other universities that have similar situations where they've got mountains of data. nobody has been able to put the time in to translate the information.

It would provide assistance in understanding, you know, the culture, the history, et cetera. Okay. Let's go farther here. Assumptions play a huge role in determining how an archeologist looks at things. Why would that be true? Why would assumptions matter? Isn't this all just science? Pardon? All right, you're going to draw a conclusion from it, all right? And essentially, the archaeologist is going to, in a very complicated way, use logic, correct? Going to use logic because it's hopefully a scientific process.

And by the way, the Indiana Jones thing is real nice for Hollywood, but most archaeologists spend hours doing very boring things, okay? And that's why they have volunteers doing things that are even more boring. running everything through a shifter. One of the archaeological sites in Israel is the Pool of Gibeon, and at one place in the historical books, it describes David and his men sitting or standing across from either side of this pool. Well, archaeologists went to dig it out, and this thing is wide and deep, 23,000 hours. of people time, bringing everything out and sifting through every last piece of it. Lots of time goes into it.

Now, archaeology has minimalists, that is, the Bible is false unless proven true. I don't believe it unless it's proven true. There's a fellow, an outspoken minimalist, his name is Israel Finkelstein, He is a skeptical Jewish archaeologist and one archaeologist, we'll see here in a minute, found something and she says, I believe I have found David's palace. And of course his response is, that makes you sound like a lunatic, you know? So his skeptical assumption, of course this is false, makes this declaration by this other archaeologist, I think I found David's palace. just sound like it's craziness.

Why? Assumptions. Is it because he's got absolute proof? No, it's all in assumptions. His assumption is that the Bible is false, until definitely proven otherwise. And the other problem is, even if it's proven, he won't go for it, because his assumptions are that it's not. It's not true. Or the other one, the maximalist, the Bible is true unless proven false. Some take positions between the two different ends of the scale. Some are a little more skeptical, a little less skeptical, okay? So you'll have a range of positions. There are lots of resources available, and I have this on your handout.

Here's this archeology in the Old Testament. Rose Publishing has got a number of different pamphlets similar in style to what you see here. They have things on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Genesis Timeline, a number of different things of that sort. I would say probably about half dozen of them relating to archaeology, either directly or somewhatly. Biblearchaeology.org is the Bible and Spade source that I mentioned that I think is highly recommendable. Another one, World of the Bible, which is headed up by Dr. Randall Price.

I would call him an acquaintance. I've had several contacts with him and his staff over the years. Good outfit. Okay, so that would be another source. And another one, christiananswers.net, a great place if you got, well, what about this and what about that? And it is historical or archaeological in nature.

Great place because they've got all sorts of question and answer kinds of things with links and pictures. And so if they give you a Bible reference, you click on it, it goes to it. Real easy to track down, real easy to look for answers to your questions. You do search on it and find all the things that hit on your your keywords, really good. So highly recommendable.

Another one with the caution that this viewpoint is secular is the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They've got a link there. And here are, for example, these are some archeological sites that they have, you know, current information on and you can click on those links and get all sorts of information there. What we're going to look at today is things that are too new to have gotten in your pamphlet there. I am looking regularly at some websites that continue to report by the hour archaeological information related to the Bible. One I look at is paleojudaica.blogspot.com. Sounds like a bug splat, but no, it's Blogspot. Anyway, and that one, it has two posts this morning already.

So lots of things going on and there have been a lot of things happening just in the last few months that I think are really exciting kinds of things. And so we'll take a look at those because you've got things in your handout you can take a look at. You can dig into more detail on any one of the things that are listed there in kind of concise fashion. I think they've done a great job at pulling together libraries of information and giving it to you in a succinct, readable form.

We talked when we were going through Isaiah about the tunnel system was massive, employing cutting edge technology. This is in Jerusalem and Hezekiah had this tunnel built during the time of Isaiah. At the outside of the tunnel at the lower end here is the pool, the waters of Shiloh, the pool of Shiloh or the pool of Siloam. So it goes into the New Testament era. And the Spring of Gihon is mentioned numerous times, and that spring is there, the tunnel's there. If you go to Israel today, and it's only been since about the, I think about the mid-1980s, that you could walk through the tunnel, but you can do so. Yeah? Yeah, occasionally, occasionally they have political problems that may create a difficulty. What's really bizarre is, of course, this is right near the temple area. Here's the position that the Palestinians and the Islamic people have. They say the Jews never had a temple on that mount. They say the Jews never had a temple on the mount.

They constantly squawk about anything that goes on, even approximately in that area. They, as you have experienced, discourage people from looking at this stuff because they don't want people getting information that would lead them to put confidence in the Bible. They don't want you, whether Jew or Christian, to pursue this. They look at you as the enemy, and so even if it's encouraging the kids to throw rocks at you, they will do anything they can to dissuade you.

One of the things that's been happening recently is the Muslims have been going in there with earth-moving equipment and hauling material from around the temple site that they're not interested in to the dump. And so what the Jewish archaeologists have been doing is sifting through the stuff that's been hauled and they found some interesting things. And that's one of the things, we won't get to it this morning, but it's one of the things that's ongoing right now. It's happening even as we speak.

Here are the steps that were found. This was June of 2004, which was about the time this thing was going to print. So it's not included in your handout. But these are the steps that go down to the Pool of Siloam. And it mentioned in Isaiah and in Nehemiah and the Pool of Siloam itself. Yes. Yeah, here was the deal. There was the spring, which had been there all along, of course.

It was at that spring where Solomon was anointed as king. That spring was there and there was a very small little tunnel system immediately by that and that was all. During the time of Hezekiah, he was saying, look, we've got to get our water system all within our wall here and we can't have it accessible by the enemy. So that's when he had the basically tunnelers come in from each end, from the lower end, let me back up, from the lower end there, at the lower left, and from the upper end, which is the part that was there initially, at the upper end, you see that kind of light brown color, that was there initially, but the whole length of the tunnel, which is kind of circuitous, he had the tunnelers come from each end and meet in the middle.

So it was quite a feat. It's actually, it was breakthrough technology because nobody had anything like that. Two centuries later, the Greeks did something somewhat like it. So it was breakthrough, starting at one end. Because the usual thing, if you've got a shaft that dances around in those days, was just have a vertical shaft at every turning point so that you could keep some kind of connection. But to have a real circuitous path, start from each end and then meet in the middle, and we actually have written record, that's the Siloam inscription, written record, somebody when they met in the middle told the story of how they met. They could hear the sound of the people picking at the other side. That's Hezekiah's system that he set up because he wanted to keep the water plentiful and safe inside the city walls when the Assyrians came to attack.

Does that answer the question there? So these are the steps. It was just discovered basically accidentally through a sewer project where they said, well, we're digging into more than, you know, just what we're expecting here. And if I can see the sewer pipe up top there. It's kind of a dark color. Okay, now here's one. This was just in the middle of November and I was, happened to be at, at paleogeica.blogspot.com.

And lo and behold, this thing popped up. name was found, and this was a November 10th report here. This archaeologist was digging right at the city of Gath, and of course that's where Goliath is from, Goliath of Gath is when you see it recorded in the scripture.

And what he found was a piece of broken pottery. Now one thing we look at, you know, piece of broken pottery, why would somebody write on it? In those days where you don't have paper available by the ream, writing on pottery was actually a standard personal and business practice. We have, for example, the chief baker in Egypt that Joseph was imprisoned with. We actually have a pottery sherd from Egypt where the chief baker signed on a pottery sherd for a shipment of grain.

So it was used for commercial transactions widely. So here he finds on this pottery shirt right next to Gath. Here's Professor Meyer. And he finds this, this is the big scale. And you have a tough time reading that. But if you can read the script of the time, it is from the same time as the lifetime of Goliath. It is from the city of Gath. And it has inscribed on it the name Goliath.

Now, here's the thing, if you look at it, what does the minimalist say when he hears that? He sees this, remember the minimalist is the one who doesn't believe the Bible is true unless confirmed. What's he going to say? What's that? Yeah, he might say, well that's just a fraud or something of that sort.

Yeah, it was just a common name. So, and this is one thing to be objective about it, we would have to say, is this Goliath of Gath the one that David took out with a stone? We don't know. What it does show, however, is that all the information makes it highly probable that the account, Goliath, is that a name that was in Gath at the time?

Yep. Okay. So there's nothing about the account from a background standpoint, an archeological background standpoint, that doesn't fit. So this is, does it prove that the account of David and Goliath? No. Is it confirming? Yes. So that's where the difference between proving and confirming comes up. What we have here is good confirming evidence. It's not proof. Here's another one.

In 1997, a lady over in Jerusalem, her name was Eilat Matzar. She is a professor of archaeology at Hebrew University. Her grandfather used to be the president of Hebrew University. She consulted with her grandfather, who also happened to have an archaeological background, and she said, you know, I find something here in the Bible that tells me that based on the excavations that we've got so far, says we've got a fortress stronghold that we've excavated. It's right here.

It's right in the area right next to the south of the Temple Mount. It's right in what is the old City of David area. And so now I have this fortress stronghold that dates from the time of David. That's been confirmed. Now, I read in the Bible where it says, when the Philistines were getting ready to attack, David went from his palace down to the fortress. So, if I have the fortress, where do I need to go to go to David's palace?

Up. That sounds logical, right? So here was a lady, she's Jewish by the way, her picture is on the lower left, she's Jewish, she wrote an article in 1997 based on gathering information, consulting with her grandfather. Her husband also at that time was alive and had done some work that was supportive of the investigation. She said, basically, here is what I think I would find if I excavated this. This is not too far from the Temple Mount, so guess what the Muslims thought of it?

They were screaming. They were really mad. because the last thing they want is some evidence of an Israeli king, especially someone as important to the whole picture as David. And after all, Jesus is who? Son of David. So they really don't want him to find this.

Anyway, she went through all sorts of rigmarole, and finally this last August was starting to dig through it. And anyway, this is her kind of initial report, and her question is, you know, did I find it? What are the minimalists going to assume about this?

Oh, that can't be David's palace. You found something. So they're going to assume the Bible is false unless proven true. So anyway, but all she did was say, we have a demonstrated, proven fortress from David's time. There's the fortress. It's in the right place. The Bible says that you go down from David's palace into the fortress. Here's the fortress, she says. So she goes up. and starts digging. And guess what she finds? Anyway, let's take a look. Here is the Temple Mount. You see the dome of the rock. You see the mosque just to the south of it, Al-Aqsa Mosque. This is, in this area, right to the south of that, those are the City of David excavations.

And right at the south end of the photo is where she was starting to dig. This is another shot out of her article, and it was this area right in here, right in there, where she began to do some excavations after going through all kinds of trouble getting permits. Yeah, question, Dan? It's always surprising to me how this stuff gets covered up. A few thousand years is a short period of time. Yes. And this stuff is 15 feet down. Yes, yeah. It's always amazing.

Yeah, if you think about it, you know, at any one location, you've either got erosion or deposition taking place. And that's one process. And it's not just water, it's also wind. So there's water and wind processes and occasionally others, but those are principally there. Additionally, you've got human beings that are around the process.

And a lot of times, you know, they just want to clear stuff off and build what they want to build. So the tendency is to get things buried. And that's why the Colossae is a tell, it's a mound of one on top of another, top of another, not because of natural processes so much as just human beings. So you have the combination of natural processes and human activity that together frequently bury things.

And this is the situation. Yeah, you do. You do. Here is a top of a column capital. So basically when she went and laid this out, says, you know, here is one of the capital columns that we found. She says, you know, what she envisions is here's a hallway and here's these columns and the whole hallway has column capitals, tops, just like that from David's palace. Here's the excavation of the palace.

And notice this thing, it's fairly steep heading down, even to the point where you see some buildings off on the other side of the valley there. But here she is. And then that's a person standing to give you a sense of scale. Okay. So this is a fairly substantial place. Here's another one. Here's the person to give you a sense of scale. And by the way, just so you get, This area here is shown here only from the other side. So you have this area here that she's got a photo of. Here's another shot. Again, here's the person in the picture.

Substantial rooms. Here is a jug that had been partially broken. Obviously what they typically find is a bunch of pottery pieces, but here's one where it's together enough you can see what it was like and you can even see the coloration on it and some decoration. Interesting stuff taken out of that. Here is the stronghold that I mentioned. This was the one that had already been excavated. So what that says is right up here is where she dug and found Based on just saying, okay, here's the stronghold, we know where it is, David went down to the stronghold, therefore the palace is up. Yes?

Oh, oh yeah, but the imam there, his outright blanket statement, it doesn't matter what they find, they keep finding all kinds of stuff. It doesn't matter. His blanket statement is, the Jews never had a temple on this mount, ever. Period. So, yeah, they just deny the whole thing. It's not very respected in terms of even skepticals, even minimalists will say, you know, he's crazy. But nonetheless, yeah, that's their position.

Marilyn? Oh, in 70 AD, they shoved, first of all, they torched the temple. So the suggestion earlier, fire destroys thing, they torched the temple. They took every stone, just as Jesus said 40 years earlier, and left not one upon another. Those stones, I don't have a picture in the slide series. I will make a point to show it next week, because it will fit the New Testament archaeology. We have pictures of the stones that the Romans dumped off. They're all dumped off on a pile.

And some of them even have inscriptions on them, including the inscription that was the warning to Paul as he went into the temple. Remember, they were really upset because the claim was that Paul had taken the Gentile into the inner temple. Well, they found two of the inscription signs that say Gentiles are not to pass this point. They also found another one written in Hebrew that says, this is the trumpeter's place.

So, but those, the pile of stones have all been. Well, the question is, anything that was buried was preserved better than things that were on the surface. This included. Yeah. Typically not. Typically the burial was just part of over time. That was beyond happen. And sometimes just people shoving stuff off just so that they can build what they want to build.

Yeah, Reid. Do you have a question? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the bottom line is that's what you find in a great many places. It is the reason why archaeological sites are frequently, they start with the name Tell. And the idea is you got a mound, okay? And if we get time to, I'll show you a Tell, or I'll show a reference to it. Here's another shot of the stronghold. So I mean, it's been fairly well excavated and looks, you know, fairly well preserved. Why? Because it was buried.

Okay, here's another report. This was reported about the same time, like almost within hours of one another. An archaeologist, and this was a professor, Ron Tappy, at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and he was working on a site there at Tel Zayit. It is a 10th century, that is from the time of David and Solomon, a 10th century tell, and let me move on it.

In the, oh boy, I got something out of sequence here. Sorry about that. Man, I sit there and work on this and, anyway. I'm going to have to backtrack. This is when they were sorting through all the stuff getting down to David's palace. You know, Jack was asking about things getting covered up and how that happens.

This is a seal, it is slightly less than half an inch across, a seal impression. And it is a seal impression of a person mentioned twice in the book of Jeremiah. And it was found at a higher level as they're pulling the dirt off, because as I mentioned, archaeologists have spent lots of time, all the dirt that they pulled off of what they are thinking now is David's palace, they have to sift through all of it. sift it, including finding this little button of clay. And so here's this button of clay. And one connection that this gives us that we didn't have before is that we know this fellow's grandfather's name, Shovi. And that's not, that wasn't given, but same son of and everything. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, yeah, and there are invitations in here to do that.

For years they've been going through one of the archaeological sites in this particular group that publishes this. Yeah, you can go on volunteer things and spend days and weeks and months, if you want, sifting through things and sometimes you find something really valuable.

Okay, now back to this archeological find here. Here's the place that Dr. Tappe, he's instructing some of the people that had come for a tour, right? Students and whatnot. And this is giving an example, a little bit more of an aerial view of where he's excavating. As he was excavating, and it really looks like just kind of residential, He found an interesting object. You see pictures of Dr. Tappe at the lower.

One side has the entire Hebrew alphabet scratched on it like somebody had it there for teaching purposes, practice. The flip side is a bowl. How about that for double use? Okay, when you finish your breakfast, practice your alphabet, okay? So we don't know exactly why the double purpose, but I think it's just fascinating, the connection between the two. So anyway, this is what they found. It basically has a complete alphabet from 10th century BC, again, about the time of David and Solomon.

Now, whether you know it or not, photos are being taken of various parts of the world, just about the whole world at different scales. Here's Holly Hills right in the middle of that photo. OK, just to give you an example. And if you look real closely, this photo was taken on Sunday morning.

And if you look real closely, this is the Henderson's van. There's my car. And I think somewhere over here is the Anderson's van. I think Norman Eleanor's car is over there. Anyway, real interesting. This is the way the air photos work. I'm going to use it here to show you.

Here's Sidon, which is mentioned in the Bible starting around the time of the judges in Joshua, okay? And so there's Sidon in Lebanon. And to the south here, this is Tyre. So Sidon and Tyre, both of those are mentioned at about the time of the judges and time of Joshua is where the names first come up. They are prominent through the rest of Scripture, even into the New Testament times.

What is now happening, you've probably kept some track of finally they got the Syrians pulled out you know of Lebanon so now things are calmed down enough that the archaeologists can go in there with some geotechnical equipment and for the first time now and this is going on right now so I don't even have anything to show you on it when I do I'll let you know at paleo Judaica blogspot.com right so I will let you know But what's interesting is they're looking now and finding out that all the stuff that's on the surface is more recent.

The harbors, the way they were in biblical times, it's all buried. It's all underneath and that's kind of what you'd expect. But they're finally being able to get with the geotechnical information and the technologies that are available now, get information about what the harbors were like during biblical times.

So anyway, real interesting. They're going back thousands of years and they're also doing corings, you know, going down out in the harbor and putting in corings down at certain levels and being able to cross correlate that with other data. So that's something that's ongoing. Here's Sidon and it's the harbor area that they're able to go in and get some information on. And here's Tyre, which we'll be looking at later on in the book of Isaiah, because it comes up in Isaiah and there's a fascinating history and a fascinating connection to biblical prophecy as well. Yeah, if you want to join a dig, here's all the sites that are currently being excavated in Israel now and they keep a list and you can check and go see them all if you want. You can just go dig yourself crazy.

Yeah, art. I wonder, is there a danger between our reliance upon facts to believe something rather than faith? You know, it's an interesting thing. Ultimately, one must trust in what God has revealed. Isn't that the case? And that's one reason why I would encourage the use of the word confirm because that supports the idea that God's already revealed us the truth. All this stuff, this stuff doesn't prove it. It just confirms what we already see because God's revealed it as to what's true. Yeah, good point. At best, what we can do with archaeology is confirm because we already know what is true because God's told us exactly what it is and we can count on it.

Well, there's all kinds of other things here we don't have time to cover. We ran plum out of time, so we'll have to stop there. I would mention in the area of Old Testament archaeology, there's lots of data, okay? Lots of stuff to work with. Feel free to come up and take a look at some of the books and whatnot. There's plenty to work with. For somebody to just wave it off with, oh, that's just all mythical, or somebody just made that up. Boy, hey, there's a lot of ignorance there, yes. Well, actually, there's still people trying to pursue it.

The great difficulty remains that even with the USSR Turkey tensions cooled off from what they were, you still have the Kurd issue that's around there. And the Kurds are a people who you know, across several different national boundaries and a very troublesome group within each of those nations. Not that they're bad people, but it just, they're in conflict with the various Muslim political and religious groups that are around there. So rather than get some Christians stomping around in that country, they just say decline, denied when you put in an application.

So that's just, that by itself has kind of put a damper on things. It made it tougher. There have been some excavations. A lot of those have slowed down. Again, some of the reasons why archaeologists don't have access to the data, political being one of them, weather being another. Okay, let's pray. Lord, we thank you.

As we look at these things, certainly these things do confirm many times over the reliability of your word. But in truth, we knew that already. And you are a God who speaks and reveals the truth to us. You are a God who tells us what we need to know because you love us and care for us. And we thank you for that. Thank you for your reliable word upon which we can count. In Jesus' name, amen.