The Bible Belt
June 2000
Reader’s Digest
Is The Bible True>
Jeffery Sheler
From the Book
The archeological team had been tolling through the hot summer, excavating the ruins of the ancient Israelite city of Dan in upper Galilee. Gila Cook, the team surveyor, was carefully, drawing the stone-paved plaza and walls outside what had been the city’s main gate.
Now, as the rays of the afternoon sun angled across a recently exposed wall, Cook noticed something odd. On the exposed tip of one of the wall’s basalt stones, letters were inscribed.
Cook called to team leader, Avrahim Biren of Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. AS the veteran archeologist knelt to examine the stones, his eyes widened. “My God!” Biran exclaimed. “We have an inscription!”
The stone was identified as part of a monument , or stele, from the ninth century B.C. It apparently commemorated the king of Damascus’s victory over two enemies: the king of Israel and the House of David.
The reference to David was a historical bombshell. Never before had the familiar name of Israel’s ancient warrior king a central figure in the Old Testament and an ancestor of Jesus’ according to the New Testament been identified in ancient records outside the Bible.
Skeptics had long argued that David was a mere legend. Now, at last, there was an inscription written not by a Hebrew scribe but by an enemy of the Israelites little more then a century after David’s presumed lifetime. The 1993 discovery seemed to corroborate the existence of King David’s dynasty and, by the implication, the man himself.
The unearthing of an inscription or artifact can shed new light or cast a shadow on a scriptural passage. Yet in extraordinary ways, modern archeology is affirming the historical core of the Old and New Testaments, supporting key portions of crucial Biblical stories.
Age of the Patriarchs
The book of Genesis traces Israel’s ancestry to Abraham, a monotheistic nomad who, God promises, will be “father of a multitude of nations:” and whose children will inherit the land of Canaan. God’s promise and Israel’s ethnic identity are passed from generations to generation from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob. Jacob and his sons the progenitors of Israel’s 12 ancient tribes are forced by famine to leave Canaan and migrate to Egypt.
Modern archeology has found no direct evidence to confirm the Biblical account. Yet scholars like Barry J. Beitzel, professor of Old Testament and Semitic languages at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School of Deerfield, IL, are not surprised. There are “family stories” of an obscure nomad and his descendants, Beitzel says, not geopolitical history of the type one might expect to find preserved in the annals of kings.
Kenneth A. Kitchen, an Egyptologist and Orientalist now retired from the University of Liverpool in England, maintains that archeology and the Bible “match remarkably well” in depicting the historical context of the patriarch narratives. In Genesis 37:28, for example, Joseph, a son of Jacob, is sold into slavery for 20 silver shekels. That, notes Kitchen, was the precise going price of slaves in the region during the 19th through 17th centuries BC, as affirmed by documents recovered from what are now modern Syria and Iraq.
Other documents show the price of slaves rising steadily during later centuries. If the story of Joseph has been dreamed up by a sixth-century Jewish scribe, as some skeptics suggest, why doesn’t the figure cited ,that the slave price from that time period? “It’s more reasonable to assume that the
Biblical data reflect reality,” Kitchen says.
Flight from Egypt
The dramatic story of the Exodus of God’s delivering Moses and the Israelite people from bondage in Egypt and leading them back to the Promised Land of Canaan has been called the “central proclamation of the Hebrew Bible. Yet archeologists have found no direct evidence outside of the Bible to support this story or that Moses even existed.
Nahum Sarna, professor emeritus of Biblical Studies at Brandeis University , says that the Exodus story, tracing as it does, a nation’s origins to slavery and oppression cannot possible be fictional. No nation would invent for itself and inglorious invention of this nature,” unless it had an authentic core. Notes University of Arizona archeologist William S, Dever, “Slaves, serfs and nomads leave few traces in the archeological record.” The dating of the Exodus has long been a source of controversy. The Book of 1Kings 6:1 gives what appears to be a clear historical marker for the end of the Israelite sojourn in Egypt. “In the 460th year that the Israelites came out of the land of Egypt, in the 4th year of Solomon’s reign over Israel he began to build the House of the Lord.” However, that date does not fit with other Biblical texts or with known Egyptian history.
Sarna and others argue that the time span cited 480 years should not be taken literally. “It is 12 generations of 40 years each.” noted Sarna. Forty “is a rather conventional figure in the Bible” frequently used to connote a long period of time. Viewing the 1Kings chronology in that light is a theological statement rather than as pure history the Exodus can be placed in the 13th century BC in the days of Ramses II, where it finds strong circumstantial support in the archeological period.
Jesus
During the past four decades spectacular discoveries have produced data corroborating the historical backdrop of the Gospels. In 1968, for example, the skeletal remains of a crucified man were found in a burial cave in northern Jerusalem. It was a monumentus discovery: while the Romans were known to have crucified thousands of alleged traitors, rebels and robbers, the remains of a crucification a victim has never been recovered.
The bones were preserved in an ossuary a strong box for the burial of crucified bones appeared to be those of a man in his mid to late thirties with evidence that his wrists may have been pierced with nails. The shinbones appeared to have been broken perhaps corroborating the Gospel of John 19:32, 33 “So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and the other who had been crucified with him.”
It has been said that Roman executioners usually tossed corpses of the crucified into grave or left them on the cross for scavenging animals. With the remains of a crucified contemporary of Jesus found in a family grave, however, it is clear that the Romans sometimes permitted an internment consistent with the Biblical account of Jesus’ burial.
While building a park 2 miles south of the Temple Mount in 1990, workers discovered a hidden burial chamber dating to the first century, which contained 12 limestone ossuaries. On one, bearing the bones of a man in his 60s was the inscription “Yehosef bar Qayafa” Joseph son of Caiaphas.”
Experts believe these are the remains of Caiaphas, the high priest of Jerusalem who according to the Gospels, was involved in the arrest of Jesus, interrogated him and handed him over to Pontius Pilate for execution.
A few decades earlier, during excavations at the ruins of Caesarea Maritina, the ancient seat of Roman government in Judea, a stone slab bearing a badly damaged inscription may have read “Pontius Pilate, the perfect o Judea, has dedicated to the people of Caesarea a temple in honor of Tiberius.”
The archeological record is silent on much of the Bible’s history. But archeologists are convinced that a lot more evidence still lies buried in the sands of the Middle East waiting to be found.
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