>> I've been a student of the
Bible for a long time, studying and searching for the truth. As a Bible teacher in the
United States, I've been asked if Israel's United
Kingdom really existed. Were the first kinds
of Israel real? Are the Biblical
narratives of events like David and Goliath accurate? My name is Jeremy Dehut and
I've met up with Barry Britnell, a seasoned traveler
and close friend. He's been to Israel
close to a dozen times and he'll be my guide on our
journey through this country. We're going to talk to experts
in the field of archeology and examine the geography,
comparing everything to what the Bible says. >> We're going to be able
to visit a number of places that have bearing on
the United Kingdom. I think we should
begin our journey where the scriptures begin. The story of the United
Kingdom begins at Shiloh. >> Did Shiloh exist? Was it a real place? Does it match the location
of the Biblical text? Does the function of the
city serve the same function that it did in Biblical text? Was it a Holy site? Were sacrifices offered there? Those are all questions
that I think can be helped by the study of archeology. >> Back in the 1980s, Israel Finkelstein lead
an Israeli dig here and you can see the
work that they did, exposing the big
fortification wall that surrounds the
entire perimeter. What we have done is take his
work and on the other side of us the work that the Danish
did in the 1920s and 1930s, and we're connecting the two. >> Now, the tabernacle
supposedly was here for several hundred years. Do you have any places
here at the site where you think it stood? >> It's all about the Mishkan,
which is the presence of God and I think it answers that most
basic of all human questions, like, "how do I connect
with God?" The tabernacle gives us a way
to do that and this is why it's so critically important. And, in the center of it
is the arc of the covenant. So, these are the main
ideas: Was the tabernacle on the northern platform
outside the city wall? Was it on the summit,
the apex of the tail? Number three, it could have
been on the southern approach. There's four churches on
the southern approach. Well, the Christians seemed
to really like the idea of the tabernacle being there because they're building their
churches there on that spot. It may have also
been functional. It's very flat and it
could have fit over there. Now, I've introduced
a fourth possibility. And, that's that the tabernacle
may have been mobile at Shiloh. It was not in one spot. By its very nature, it's mobile. >> Right. >> They are slaughtering
a large volume of animals. Certain times of the year, if you've got the
tabernacle setup say down here and the wind is blowing this
direction, it's just going to be unbearable
and not hygienic. Maybe seasonally, the tabernacle
is moving around Shiloh. So, it's not that
one site is sacred, maybe the whole site is sacred. >> And, are you finding
evidence for Israelite presence on this site during the iron age when Samuel was supposed
to have been here? >> Oh, absolutely. We've got abundant
evidence of that. You see a transition here
from the Amorites who dwelled, sometimes we say Canaanites,
but in the hill country, they're Amorites actually
that were living here. In some ways, you can see
that a different ethnic group or a different theological
persuasion has come in. Do we see a shift in
the material culture? Do we have Hebrew
inscriptions and writing? Yes, we do. So, there's no doubt that in
the period of the tabernacle that there were Israelites
at Shiloh. >> We're just inside this 5
1/2 meter wide perimeter wall that went all the
way around the site. And, what we have
are storage rooms that are built against this. What we're after
is an understanding of the stratification
of our site. And, you can see the
separation where we've got a lot of tumbled, crumbly,
grayish material into a brownish reddish soil,
down to about right here. So, that's about
a 10 inch spread. Now, we know we're
changing time periods. Something definite
happened right here. We're reading the balk. What we believe is that
this represents the iron age right here. This is the period of
the tabernacle at Shiloh. We've got late bronze, middle
bronze underneath this layer and Hellenistic and
Roman above this layer. You had to trim the balk so that
you get a better look at it. When I do, we're going
to lose this piece. So, now we can get
a good look at that. That's been worked, hasn't it? >> That is so light. >> So, that is clearly manmade. It's pumas, so put it in our
finds bucket right there. As we trowel through, there's
a nice piece of pottery. >> It looks like a rim. >> So, this is a
whole mouth vessel. This looks like it's from the
iron age, probably Iron II. Now, here's a bone. >> What type of animal
bones are you finding here and in what quantities? >> We found two to three times
the quantity of animal bone here at Shiloh in season
one than we have found in our other excavations. And, I think that's -- we've
got good reason for that. >> Yeah. >> We have an ancient text,
the Bible, that indicates that there was a cultic side that operated a sacrificial
system here. There was a massive favessa or
bone deposit in area D over here on the east, only bones from
the Biblical sacrificial system within that bone deposit. And, interestingly, we
get about 1% pig bone. In the pre-Israelite period,
it's 4% and then when you move into the Israelite
period, it's 1%. That's a significant drop. >> Yeah. >> And, so again, that's
an ethnic indicator that there's a change in
who's living at this site or at least their value systems. >> Absolutely. >> Their cultic understandings
have changed. So, the bones are very
interesting to us. >> That's charred pottery. That's good. We've got the naked eye
of the trained volunteer, then we have a metal
detectorist checking, now we're checking a third
time, then it's going to go through wet sifting
for a fourth time. We found that when
we dry sifted things, many times you could have
something as important as a scarab that still
looks like a clot of dirt. And, when you wash
it with a hose, wow. You realize the things
that you've been missing. [ Background Noise ] Maybe we're going to
have markings on here. Yeah. We're already seeing grit. We could have Hebrew
lettering on here. You can already see -
look at the difference between the pottery
that we've washed and what we haven't washed. So, it's popping. Sometimes we're wanting
to do analysis. So, I want to double check
everything before we publish it, so we'll take something
like this, for example, and when we get in the
lab, we'll look at it under a microscope and I have
a feeling, I'm seeing part of a Hebrew letter
there, but I'm not sure. It could be a random marking, so I want to get it
under a microscope. [ Music ] So, let's pull out these pieces
and when we're in the lab, we'll analyze them more closely
and see exactly what we've got. >> The development of the
central place of worship for the Israelites through the
united monarchy is an important thing to follow. And, I think the text implies that Shiloh was actually
destroyed by the Philistines after the death of Eli and his
sons and the loss of the arc. The central place of worship
started there and then it moved. I was thrilled just
to go to the site. >> Scott knows of a
lab near Jerusalem. It's in an undisclosed location. A number of these labs have
artifacts that are valuable or they may be politically or
religiously sensitive and so, they don't like to
advertise exactly where these labs are located. >> Our lab is pretty
unique here in Israel. You find a space
that's available, you get good lighting. You've got tables together,
a microscope, water, perhaps some chemicals
and brushes and tools and this is the way
that we work. Some of these artifacts that
we excavated, then were able to look at them under
magnification and see some things
that we couldn't tell in the field, obviously. I know one of the things that really caught your
attention was this jar. Looking to see if there are
any markings that we missed, any lettering, anything that's
intentional around the rim. And, I'm also looking at
the size of the inclusions. And, it's exactly
what we would expect. So, we would pretty confidently
date that then to Iron II. Maybe once every season we
get a whole vessel and we get about 2,000 broken pieces a day. When it has writing on it,
a sherd becomes an ostracon. And, now it is elevated
and importance -- >> Sure. >> -- to a whole another level. >> Sure. >> This also caught our eye. It's pumas. Why did it catch our eye? Because it's not
native to Shiloh. I mean, somebody brought
this from up north where we have the volcanic
material up in the Golan. It's clearly manmade,
it's clearly worked. And, it is kind of exciting
sometimes when you look under here, you'll end up
seeing a letter or a little bit of gold that's embedded that
you didn't expect to see that gives you a clue. That's an interesting piece. Now, the bone analysis at
Shiloh is critically important, because we're dealing with a
Biblical sacrificial system. >> What you were saying
at the site earlier was that that percentage
is consistent with an Israelite occupation,
that you see that percentage of pig bone go down to 1%. >> Well, when you're moving from say an Amorite controlled
culture to an Israelite culture, you see a significant drop
in the percentage of pork that they're consuming. So, we're not talking
about fairytales here. >> No, we're not. >> We're talking
about real people, real places, and real events. Notice now under magnification
we can see ridges and lines and all kinds of things. When I sit with our
zoo archeologist, I'm just fascinated the things that she's seeing
there that I wasn't. Okay, yeah, see if you can
see that collagen there. >> When you've got
that collagen, you're able to do
radiocarbon testing on that? >> That's right. >> Once it's all been
preserved and it's been analyzed and you want to hang onto it
for a while, where does go? >> We have a storage unit at the Israeli Antiquity
Authority that's devoted to our material. Every one of these has an
object number assigned to it. So, when we want to go back and
retrieve it for further study, we can easily get it out. I hope you have high
expectations and no matter how high they are,
they're going to be exceeded. So, this is one of my
favorite places, guys, because you can see that it's
floor to ceiling artifacts and it's super organized. >> How big is this place? >> Oh, this is the size of
a couple football fields. >> Wow. >> Just think back to the
famous Indian Jones scene where they're storing
the arc of the covenant. Welcome to that warehouse. In archeological terms,
when we're talking about the United
Kingdom, we're talking about what we would call
Iron I or the transition between Iron I and Iron II. This entire section is Iron I
material, which would be roughly from about 1200 to 1000. >> That's huge. >> So, if you want to
understand what the period of the judges would like and
that transition from say Samuel into Saul, what was the
material culture like? This is it. This is what we would
call a collared rim jar. Very typically Israelite. You find one of these,
for example, inside a four room house
with an absence of pig bones and now we've got ethnic
indicators that we're dealing with a different material
culture than had preceded them. The pottery is somewhat
static at the beginning because remember, God had
told them you're going to live in houses you didn't build. >> That's right. >> You're going to occupy
cities you did not construct. They really don't know a
whole lot about pottery making at this point, so when
they come in let's say around the year 1400, the pottery types don't
really change much until around the year 1200. So, those first couple
of centuries, they're very homogenous
with the Canaanite, Amorite culture that's here. >> Which makes sense. >> They're learning from them -- >> They're learning. Right. >> -- how to make pottery. >> One of the reasons I
appreciate coming to a place like this and looking
at this and learning about it is because, quite
frankly, I don't know that much about pottery. And, so there's a
separation between what I know and what I need to know. And, I think in doing so
we understand the context of the way those
versus are written and the people of the time. >> For most people, when they
hear pottery or the study of pottery, they would just
naturally think that has got to be so boring [laughter], digging up broken
ceramics out of the dirt. It's got to be all the same. And, what you've
shown us is it's not. [ Music ] >> No, it's not. >> It shows the development
of a culture, artistic expression,
and it's fascinating. >> One of the greatest
things about my job is that I learn something
new every day. >> Yeah. >> And, yes, I'm an expert, but all that has done
is give me the ability to understand how much I don't
know so then I can add to it. I just have this strong desire
to understand their culture, then and there in the setting so that I can peel
the whole thing back and reevaluate what I believed
and why I believed it -- >> Yeah. >> -- set it in a
context and go from there. >> I think there's a
resurgence in that. I think that even the
generation coming behind us, there's a strong desire
for that information. You mentioned that
you can attempt to triangulate a time period by
using several different methods. What are those methods? >> Okay. So, we look
at pottery, coins, because when you have
a new person in power, it'll say year three of, and
then we also can use scarabs. The Latin word scarabaeus
means beetle and so, what we have are each one of
these in the shape of a beetle. >> Look at that. >> What you have is each
pharaoh when he comes to power, he creates his own iconography
for that administration. So, we have very
good dates in Egypt and no future pharaoh ever
uses that same iconography. So, when we can get a scarab in
a clear archeological context, we can use it to
date everything else. All of these scarabs
would have had gold on it, so at some point -- >> Look at that. >> -- before these
scarabs were discarded, somebody pulled the
gold off of them, but this one, it
got left behind. So, you can see how beautiful
this would have been. >> Yeah. >> We do get them down
into the iron age. At Khirbet el-Maqatir, we found
one from the Iron II period, somatic scarab, which was
the first one ever found here in Israel, so it was
pretty significant. So, they are a very, very
valuable means of dating. >> There's a school of thought that increasingly
doesn't believe that the United monarchy
existed. They think that the
stories of Saul and David and Solomon are propaganda
pieces for an Israel government. With all the time that you've
spent researching and digging in Israel, what do you
think about that theory? >> Well, we have two schools of
thought: we have the minimalists which are saying
well, they existed, but it wasn't exactly
what the Bible described. Then, we have another group, mythicists that are
just total deniers that it didn't even
happen at all. We have found the opposite. We have found in the material
culture if the Bible says that there was a river,
we can find the river, if there was a mountain, a
city was in a certain place, we find just many,
many synchronisms that passes the smell test. >> Yeah. >> It's what you
would expect to see from the literary
description that you have. And, so we have found just
a lot of direct synchronisms between the archeological
data and the Biblical text. >> The time that you've
spent researching and digging and exploring the
physical material is that it's reinforced your faith. >> Right. I was a Christian
before I began excavating, so it did not bring me to
faith, but it never scared me to examine the tough questions. Sometimes we do have questions
where we scratch our heads, but in archeology,
we say that absence of evidence is not
evidence of absence. Just because something happened,
let's say, a city was burned and we can't find
evidence of it, well a lot of things could
have happened to that burn. Wind and rain and future
people could have scraped the foundations clean. We've only excavated about
5% of the land of the Bible. 95% is still underground. And, so when we do
have some sort of gap between what we expected when we
read the text and what we find in the culture, you think
there might be some clues in the other 95%? >> Yeah. There's
some potential there. >> Our direct goal is
not to prove the Bible or to bring people to
Christ, but in the process, is there an apologetic
function of archeology? You better believe there is and
it comes across all the time. >> I think it was
important to start with the archeological piece. Just the shear volume
of what they're finding in the material culture and
archeological sites that attest to synchronisms from the
material culture in the Bible. I wish everyone could feel
what I felt as I walked into that site and to feel just
the weight and the enormity of, there is so much here and such
a great percentage of it speaks to a united monarchy and the
Biblical text being validated. There's a lot more to do, but I think this was a
great first step in trying to answer this question. I think it's important to
talk about Israel's enemies, especially the Philistines
and they're mentioned all through I and II Samuel. Israel's enemies play a key role
in the nation demanding a king. They wanted a ruler that would
go out and fight their battles for them like the
other nations have. That is a part of the catalyst
for them prompting Samuel to go to the Lord and find
somebody for them. >> During the reigns of
Saul, David and Solomon, we read about a number
of nations that they had battles with,
but the one that keeps creeping up every couple of chapters
are the Philistines. We are in one of the
Philistine cities. This is the city of Ashdod. Now, these ruins around us are
actually from Crusader time, so they're much later than the
time of the United Kingdom. >> Do we know where the
iron age Ashdod was? >> Yes. A lot of those ruins
are about a mile inland. This is one of the five cities
of the Philistine Pentapolis. Ashdod and Ashkelon and Gaza
are right here very close to the coast. Gath and Ekron are about
8 or 9 miles inland on the eastern side
of the coastal plane. As we read through
the book of I Samuel, the really first interaction
we have with them comes with a battle between
the Israelites and the Philistines a
few miles north of here. The Israelites lost
the first battle and so they thought they would
take their good luck charm as the arc of the covenant
into battle with them. Well, unfortunately, the
Philistines captured the arc and brought it to
the city of Ashdod. >> Now, that did not
go well for them. >> It didn't. >> When the arc of the
covenant, the Lord's mercy seat, is brought into Dagon's temple
and when the Philistines come in the next day, Dagon, this
stone statue, is on its face in front of the arc
of the covenant. And, so you have their idol
in a position of worship and adoration in front
of God's mercy seat. And, they prop him back up and
don't make a whole lot about it until the next day
when he's down again, but his head has been removed
and his hands have been removed and they're lying on the
threshold of his temple. God has humiliated, he has defeated what these
people are worshiping. >> Once the citizens of
Ashdod got tired of that, they sent the arc of the
covenant over to Gath and then it stayed there for a
little while and they sent it to Ekron and at that point, the
Philistines made the decision, we need to send this
back to the Israelites and they sent it
up to Sorek Valley. >> It is so gorgeous right here. Just beyond here as you move
east, it's still very fertile. Why would the Philistines
want to continue heading east into the Jordan Rift Valley? >> Well, like any
nation of that time, they want to expand their
borders and they want to control more people. And, of course, if they were
able to conquer the Israelites, they would use them as
slaves for their own good. >> Not only do we
know where a lot of the major events took place
on the Israel side of things, but even their enemies,
they're historically grounded and rooted. We know where their
locations were. >> The best way to understand
the full relationship between the Philistines
and the Israelites is to not only know the people,
but also know the geography. And, probably the best way to
do that is to get above it. >> I think to understand
a lot of the time of the United Kingdom,
I think it's important to understand the
geography as well. And, of course, there's
really no better place to do that than from the air. And, so what we're going to do,
Jeremy, is we're going to head over the Shephelah, which was an
area between the coastal plains and the hill country
was the border area between the Philistines who
lived in the coastal plains and the Israelites, which
lived up in the hill country. There was not very
many ways of getting from the Mediterranean Sea
for instance up to Jerusalem. Those small valleys
into the Shephelah were extremely important. >> Whoever controlled the
valley controlled the access. >> That is exactly right. And, that just jumps out
at you what you can see from this perspective. We're looking west
down the Sorek Valley. The Philistines after
wanting to return the arc back to the Israelites put it
on two milk cows on a cart up this valley that the citizens of Beth Shemesh saw the arc
coming down the valley and went down there and got it. Just south of the Sorek
Valley, we're coming up on the Elah Valley. It's raining down here
at the Elah Valley. >> We're not able to
do Elah right now? >> Not right now. >> I can take you to
Jerusalem if you want. >> Yeah, let's do Jerusalem. >> Yeah, okay. >> Jerusalem, okay. >> Yeah. [ Foreign Language ] >> Okay. We are approaching
the old city of Jerusalem. Okay. We're flying almost
directly over the city of David right now, which was
the original Jebusite city that David and Joab conquered. >> Wow. Wow, I see it. >> The Dome of the
Rock, of course, sitting on top of
the temple mound. >> It's amazing to see
the landscape change, the typography change
so quickly. >> This land is so small,
I mean, it's only 40 to 50 miles wide and, you
know, about 150 miles from Dan to Beersheba, but the
differences in elevation and contours of the
land is quite striking. Try for the Elah Valley? >> Continue? >> Yes. >> Okay. The Elah Valley goes
from east to west. You can see the entire
battlefield right here. The Philistines were on the
hill on this side of the valley. The Israelites were on the
opposite side on that hill. You can see the mountain
there below us with the brook running
through the valley. This is the brook that
David would have picked up his five smooth
stones when he went out to fight against Goliath. This is a beautiful, beautiful
view of the Elah Valley... >> That's an incredible
perspective right there. >> ...Where his famous
battle took place. >> Yeah. >> Okay. In just a minute, we're going to come
up on ancient Gath. Gath, of course, was
the hometown of Goliath. It's kind of ironic to
think about that Goliath as a young boy may have
played in the Elah Brook, which was the same brook that
David chose stones out of that later killed him. >> Oh, this has been
an adventure. I mean, how often do you get
to do something like this? [ Foreign Language ] >> It was so helpful
to meet Scott and to go to an actual archeological dig and see how the archeological
process works, then to go to the IAA warehouse and seeing everything
they've got there. >> I loved how organized
that place was. >> There's just so much
there that I think speaks to the period of the judges
leading up to the United Kingdom and seeing Ashdod and realize that not just the Israelites
left a footprint here in the land, but even the
enemies that they fought, the Philistines, left
footprints in all those cities. The plane ride gave a
perspective just like you said that you really needed
to get above and see how the valleys moved,
to see which way the roads went. All of that together
acts as evidence that corroborates the first
several chapters of I Samuel, as the period of
Judges winds down. The United Kingdom history
transitions from the Judges to the kings where Samuel
supposedly anoints this Bejamite named Saul. Is there any evidence that
points to the existence of the kings of Israel
specifically? >> Yeah, I believe there is. I can think of three
or four places that you will enjoy going to. In fact, one of them
is the location of one of the most famous
stories in the Bible.
