Bible Unearthed Discoveries of Old versions of the bible)

Jerusalem this great city is sacred to three of the world's major religions Judaism Christianity and Islam the foundation of Judaism and Christianity is the Old Testament it's stories are also important in Islam this document has thus been hugely influential in shaping both the Middle East many people believe every word of the Old Testament is literally true even today this conviction is fueling arguments over issues from evolution to homosexuality to abortion the potency of these conflicts makes it important to know how much and what in the Old Testament can really be taken as literal truth two men are trying to shed light on these questions by investigating the archaeological evidence what they've discovered has sparked tremendous controversy and will revolutionize our understanding of the Bible so today we reveal the secrets of the Old Testament in recent decades Biblical Archaeology has undergone something of a revolution a more scientific approach has informed a younger generation of archaeologists and changing circumstances in the Middle East have allowed important new excavations which have brought additional evidence to light against this background a book called the Bible unearthed has proposed a radical new history of the Israelites and the Bible and powerfully challenged traditional archaeology its authors are Israel Finkelstein professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University and Neal Silverman director of the UNAM a center of public archaeology in Belgium hundred years ago when archaeologists came to a site and would find a piece of pottery like this they would try to fit it in somewhere in the biblical story saying this is a symbol of the time of Joshua or the time of Amos or another character we work an entirely different way for us the the evidence is the first bit of information we construct a story of the rise of civilization in this country and then in fact we see the Bible in the biblical literature and the biblical memories is somehow symbolic of the very basic changes in society that we see here for the first time we have this information not only about the main sites but also about the countryside this surveys in the highlands and other parts of the country have completely revolutionized what we know about ancient people in this country and on top of that that change of archaeology from you know the all traditional way to more scientific archaeology with all sorts of Sciences supporting what we are doing and providing us with wonderful information about the daily life about what people hate about the environment about how they exploited the different ecologic ecological niches and so on and I think that it's important to understand that the Bible of course is one of our most important ancient near-eastern texts but it's got a larger significance than that obviously at a time in the world where people are tending to use the Bible in a very literal sense for all kinds of rhetorical political reasons using the Bible as it is written it's very important but what we hope to do is to share the information that has been collected for the first time with the public to perhaps create a very more complex understanding of what the Bible is and what it actually says and perhaps at least cause people to understand that there is a lot more to the biblical history then just occasional quotations used for very tactical religious political purposes the Old Testament tells the story of the Jews ancestors the Israelites it says their history began with a family of nomads who migrated down from Mesopotamia modern Iraq to Canaan modern Israel their leader was a man called Abraham the Lord said unto Abraham get thee out of thy country and from thy kindred and from thy father's house unto a land that I will show thee that land was Canaan and according to the Old Testament God promised it to Abraham and his descendants forever this is the origin of the idea of the promised land for the best part of a century archeologists have tried to prove the Abraham story by finding evidence of appropriate migrations at the time suggested by the biblical account all this theory from A to Z of a migration from the north it's not accepted anymore today I mean it was a nice theory but there's no back end I mean the people of the beginning of the second millennium BCE are all form a local stock so there was no migration from the north that you can relate Abraham to the general portrayal of nomadic life in the Bible doesn't really reflect very strongly what we know about nomads nomads are often plunderers they often invade settled territories they there's reference to camels the camel nomads coming much later they are not characteristic of this period after arriving in Canaan Abraham and his family supposedly settled here in the city of Hebron this building the tomb of the patriarchs built by King Herod 2,000 years ago in Roman times is supposed to stand above their burial site what we can see here the main building the main building is the woman from the moment period probably her idea and you see the big stones above them much later a Muslim a mosque but what is the most important so I am here our aim here is the bedrock here this is the natural bedrock from the time of the canaanites period from the time of day of the settlement period and so on and in this a bedrock you cannot see it here but all around in this bedrock were cut tombs during the Canaanite period this was the cemetery of the of the town here so this is the source of the tradition which is not historical about the patriarch a bear may exact in Jacob that they also called buried here so do we have any actual evidence that Abraham and his family did at least exist there is no historical Abraham in the strict sense they are traditions but abomb what we read in the Bible are later traditions which have almost nothing to do with real history probably there was a sister of the tribes here named Abraham but we know nothing about him but his name the patriarchs could have been real figures who became mythical during the ages they could have been completely mythical we don't know and we'll probably never know in fact there's no way to know we've come to a complete archaeological dead end about Abraham there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Abraham was a historical figure but he is a prominent character in the book of Genesis and the book of Genesis is an ancient text is of course of incredible importance for us and what we see in the figure of Abraham is a symbolic representation of the birth of the nation because at the time of the writing of the Bible the history of the people of Israel was not considered to be history in the sense that we understand it of years periods of particular historical events it was seen more as the history of a family and of course the father of the family the founder of the family is a person of great significance although we can appreciate the importance of a mythical figure like Abraham the complete absence of any objective evidence indeed the inconsistencies in the biblical account inevitably weakens the claims made for it but what about other Old Testament heroes like Moses who brought us the laws on which so many of our basic moral ideas are founded can professor Finkelstein and Neil Silberman find any hard evidence that he at least existed according to the Bible famine drove Abraham's descendants away from Canaan to Egypt where they ended up as slaves in the Nile Delta after many tribulations a leader amongst them a man called Moses led them out of Egypt they headed eastwards back towards Canaan the Promised Land this famous journey forms the basis of the Old Testament books of Exodus and numbers and it came to pass that the Lord did bring the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt well here we have the Neal Silberman has come to discuss the evidence for the Exodus with Donald Redford one of the world's leading archaeological experts on Egypt's Delta region food preparation we know from the archaeological monuments and the the inscriptions that in the 13th century there was tremendous power in the Egyptian Empire how can you explain the possibility of such a large group as described in the Exodus story actually going out of Egypt is that possible well I couldn't explain it ha if I subscribe to that theory what you said is quite correct Egypt for in fact for five centuries from the fifteenth century on Egypt ruled an empire the largest at that time which extended 2,000 miles as the crow flies from a little north of Khartoum all the way to near the Euphrates River and the Egyptian army and occupation forces and its economy were extremely strong they held all of Canaan of course their sphere of influence extended to the Greek islands and Crete and there is no indication whatsoever in the records either archaeological or written of any major hiatus such as would have been created by the expulsion of upwards of 2 million people if we believe the biblical record that would have made such a hole in the population that would have brought the economy to a standstill it would certainly have turned up in the record somewhere now that's an argument from silence I understand but nevertheless the silence is absolutely watertight that there is no indication whatsoever the Bible also says that after leaving Egypt Moses and the Israelites wandered for forty years through the Sinai desert on their way back to Canaan it was here that Moses received two tablets of stone bearing the famous Ten Commandments which still today include some of our most basic moral norms this is also where the Israelites apparently agreed to give up the worship of idols for the worship of God and just the One God alone but could such a journey have been at all feasible all over the eastern Delta and in the Sinai and up in the Negev and further north there were permanent Egyptian Garrison's van garrison points checkpoints and we have records that the letters that were sent back in the reports of such police on the comings and goings of wandering peoples certainly there would have been no chance whatsoever for a group of people that large to move freely through the through the desert and into the negative at all moreover that would be the height of folly to go south into that inhospitable barren land with mountains everywhere and little water and less food supply the the story simply doesn't fit in so many ways and there's an even bigger problem throughout the entire period in which the Bible places the exodus Canaan was in fact an Egyptian province ruled by Egyptian governors we know this because we have extensive Egyptian records from Canaan and a wealth of archaeological evidence this is betcha on in Israel beneath these Roman ruins archaeologists discovered it had been a powerful Egyptian garrison in biblical times it signifies Egyptian control over Canaan in the Late Bronze Age if you want to to to understand the way the Egyptians dominated completely the country and the countryside you have to come here there was a strong garrison the war there were scribes here there were soldiers here there were administrators here and everything was under the control of the Egyptians which means that 20 kilometers from here 30 kilometers from here if somebody wanted to take some sort of a major economic decision of a major political decision he needed to come to betcha and to get the approval of the Egyptians there were the Masters of the countries so it makes no historic sense for Moses to have led the Israelites to Canaan in order to escape the Egyptians but what about Moses himself surely there must be some evidence for this most famous Old Testament hero perhaps the most famous of all Old Testament figures even if there's no evidence of the exodus they must surely be some record of a leader as important as him the name Moses is a name which is very popular from early periods right down into late periods so it's a fairly common Egyptian name that's that's all that we can say there is no text in which we can identify this Moses or that Moses as the Moses the question of the historicity of Moses is the same as the question of the historicity of Abraham that is to say maybe there was a figure maybe there was a leader I am NOT here to undermined historicity of Moses I think that it is possible but I would say it's beyond recovery perhaps the best way to make sense of the story of Moses and the Exodus is to understand that there was constant movement between Canaan and Egypt in ancient times we can't be sure if there was one incident in the hundreds of years that Canaanites came down to Egypt that more or less represents what we have in the story of the exodus but the experience of going down to exodus of being involved in Egyptian civilization of freeing themselves from the the rule of the Pharaoh happened again and again this is Mount Nebo in Jordan from here according to the Bible Moses looked down on the promised land of Canaan but died before he could enter it it fell to Joshua apparently to lead the Israelites across the valley and to take Canaan by military conquest then Joshua commanded the people saying within three days you shall pass over this Jordan to go in to possess the land which the Lord your God giveth you and it's a wonderful story a great saga of war and conquest and bravery and miracles and the question is did it happen did it really happen the way it is described in the text of the Bible of the book of Joshua the Bible says Joshua and the Israelites embarked on a seven-year campaign during which they conquered 30 Canaanite cities without doubt the most famous story is that of Jericho the priests blew with the trumpets and the people shouted with a great shout that the wall fell down flat so that the people took the city in fact distinguished British archaeologist Dame Kathleen Kenyon established 50 years ago that the walls of Jericho were destroyed many centuries before Joshua's time probably by earthquakes and that there was virtually nothing there in the conquest era the conclusion is when we look at Jericho Jericho was not inhabited in the 13th century BC probably and then anyway there are no fortifications so where are the big walls of Jericho I mean you have this wonderful description of the people of Israel going you know with the Ark of the Covenant with the trumpets and then the walls of Jericho collapse you know in the seventh day all of a sudden there's nothing there so this is not history in this simple sense and the case of Jericho applies also for other places mentioned in the tradition of the conquest in the Book of Joshua many of the cities mentioned were not inhabited at all in the Lebanese line and Silberman one of the cities mentioned in the Bible as having been conquered by Joshua and the Israelites was inhabited and was destroyed at the appropriate time it's hat saw in northern Israel and professor Amnon ben-tor is in charge of excavating it look at that that's the destruction of the entire palace if you look over there we go towards the southern wall we find ourselves in the throne room of the palace so we are in the throne room look at the correct basalt stones look at this normal heat doesn't do this only a very very intense fire look at what is happening on the walls see the ashes see the wood signs of the timber here on the walls wherever you look wherever you go same signs of destruction in the case of hot so we see undoubtedly a violent destruction like in no other place and the question which faces us is when did it happen and who did it I believe that by now we can say rather safely that the destruction of huts all the big final destruction of huts all occurred sometime at the in the first half or towards the middle of the thirteenth century BC and the question is who is responsible the destruction of hats or coincides with a period of great turbulence in the Middle East this is the temple of medinat habu in Egypt at this time mysterious people who came from the sea and are known as the sea people attacked Egypt and many parts of the Egyptian Empire they also attacked Canaan later they settled on its coasts and are known in the Bible as the Philistines there was a collapse of the Canaanite system and Egyptian administration in Canaan it didn't come you know in one overnight it was a long process which probably took almost a century from the beginning from the collapse of the first cities to the later ones and much of it must have been done or must have been related to the assault of the sea people in several waves possibly on the coasts of Canaan so slowly by slowly the cities of Canaan disappeared some of them must have been destroyed by sea people in the 12th century some of them could have been destroyed by reaction of Egypt some of them could have been destroyed by rivalry between fighting each other some of them could have been taken by those groups on the margin of the Canaanite society professor ben-tor believes that such a group did destroy hat saw and that since the bible names them as the israelites why disbelieve it nowhere in any document in egypt does it say that the egyptians destroyed what so so i think we can rule out the egyptians let's go back to the Canaanite city states which one of the canaanite city-states was big enough to compete with hot so which one could have destroyed what so I don't know of any such city-state I'll rule them out let's go to the sea people they have a very very distinct pottery we did not find even one shirt which is Philistine not one add to this the fact that it is too far inland the the sea people were coastal this is where their interests swim not so far so far inland is hot so I'd also rule them out it turns out that we are left without any grammatical right support o Israelites they were the ones responsible for her soul and that the traditions that are preserved hundreds of years later in the book of Joshua have a nucleus in the reality of the destruction of hutsul so it might have been the early Israelites who destroyed had soul but that one fact hardly vindicates the whole Old Testament account of the conquest so why did the story come to be composed in this form the way the story is written putting the conquest of the promised land into a single military campaign with a unified strategy to conquer the center of the country the north and the south is clearly later clearly a later attempt to explain how the Israelites conquered the promised land as one might expect the conclusions of archaeologists like Israel Finkelstein arouse fierce controversy even within the archaeological profession here professor Finkelstein is in Los Angeles taking part in a heated debate all kinds of retelling and editorializing and a major issue currently dividing archaeologists is the Old Testament portrayal of what happened after the conquest don't talk it's my dad and we have the Bible says that once the Israelites had established themselves in Canaan a great Empire eventually arose over all their people this unified Empire was supposedly established in the 10th century BC by David he of David and Goliath Fame his capital was at Jerusalem which is why it's known as royal David's City and after King David's death he was apparently succeeded by his son Solomon the heroic biblical portrayal of this dynasty has always made it seem a kind of golden age for the Israelites for once as far as David is concerned we can actually say with confidence whether he was real or not a steely is a stone tablet bearing an inscription in 1993 archaeologists excavating here at Tel Dan a northern outpost of the Israelite Kingdom found a fragment of a foreign Aramaic Steeley from the ninth century BC which refers to King David by name when you look at their and what is written there in the ninth fair roll one two four six of the letters make up the name which say can be read bet daveed it's the first time that the name of bed the vid or the vide is a the father of the kingdom of Judah is mentioned in a sauce which is extra biblical not something that was written by the Bible offer but something from the time from the ninth century BC and it's the first time than the name the Vedas mentioned it's a it's unique and it tells you that it could be that David was an historical figure or at least a people in a nice century thought of him as therefore is their founder of their Kingdom so it seems David was a real person the Bible says that his capital was Jerusalem it mentions large armies and important public buildings but professor Finkelstein is skeptical of this portrayal because present-day archaeology doesn't support any idea of Jerusalem being a big city at that time Ronny Reich is currently excavating the site of 10th century BC Jerusalem what a pocket here pocket there may be in other places which Kenyon has found but this for this particular period is not yet enough to save in I think the nature of the site is it a huge urban City it is definitely not in the ancient part of Jerusalem there's a curious stepped structure some archeologists think this might have been part of David's fortifications in my view David's Jerusalem was a kind of a citadel City it doesn't mean that he had a huge city around him the city was quite small but he probably gained a lot of political power and somehow succeeded to control the entire country in a time when there was a gap there was a kind of a vacuum political vacuum in this country there was no Egyptian Empire anymore the Canaanites were very poor and probably he took advantage of this situation but even this modest view of Jerusalem is hard to reconcile with the archaeology Ronnie Reich and professor Finkelstein are descending into the bowels of the city it seems Jerusalem at the time of King David was only sparsely inhabited so much has been excavated here in the area and nothing has been found no stones large stones of let's say 10th century no pottery pottery which is found everywhere and if if people were active in this place they might have left something behind must have left something behind so that here the negative results again and again and again simply prove the point the idea of a great Davidic of Solomonic Empire in 10th century BC is absolutely ridiculous because an empire needs a capital there's almost nothing in Jerusalem a very small village an empire needs manpower there's nothing in Judah a few small villages an empire needs administration there's no administration there's no scribal activity where is the Empire many archaeologists remain unpersuaded by professor Finkelstein they point to David's son Solomon he is famous in the Bible for his wisdom and judgment and for having been the builder of the first great Israelite cities and this is the reason of the levy which King Solomon raised for to build the house of the Lord and his own house and the wall of Jerusalem and hats all and Megiddo and Gezer the Bible mentions hat saw as one of the cities Solomon built the Canaanite city was indeed rebuilt in the 10th century BC and professor ben-tor can see no reason to doubt that it was Solomon's work how can we be sure and I'm talking only about what so now how can we be sure that these fortification that this gate will built by Solomon we cannot be sure there is no building inscription said I Solomon built this building but what we can be sure and we checked it again and again and again by means of stratigraphy by means of pottery typology we can be sure that these were built in the 10th century and since the Bible tells us that it was Salomon now you don't have to ask me how can I tell that it was Salomon is common sense if you want to say it is not Salamone it's you you tell me why it is not Salomon traditional archeology also supported the idea of Solomon as a great builder because at the two other sites mentioned in the Old Testament Hazare and Megiddo they found characteristic six-chambered gates just as it had saw this was taken as evidence of a common Solomonic origin what you see now is there the famous se6 gate room six rooms gate at a hearing gather the so called Solomonic gate it's it's hard to see because of all the vegetation and everything but you can still see the main pass in the middle and then two three rooms to one side and one two three rooms to the other side you still see the beautifully work stones at the entrance there is a similar gating huts or and there is a similar gate in in Megiddo and these three gates were thought to be because of the the passage in the books of King the Book of Kings these three gates were thought to be the gates that Solomon built the blueprint of the Solomonic architecture it doesn't fit because they there are gates like that also in other sites which are not a Solomonic in any way Ashdod it's the Philistine city tel Batoche it's on the border between Philistine and named Israel there is a later gate in a la Hache so it's like let's say this is more like a fashion of the Iron Age gate then something that singular a single out Solomonic building this is the similar monumental six-chambered gate in Megiddo found in the 1930s and also assumed to be Solomonic on the basis of the archaeology we can tell that the Israelite Palace which stood here was quite an elaborate and sophisticated building now modern radiocarbon dating tests are being conducted to try and establish the exact date of the palace the results of the tests are not conclusive but they point strongly to a date about a century after Solomon but this is the new data together is the old data and the one thing you can see is that the new data is consistent with the previous one so Congress we didn't change the picture and it's great because you don't want each time a new data comes the picture to be changed completely and moreover it support the picture because this red point which is the new one you just bought here is nicely consistent with the law phonology and fairly far away from daikon ologies objectively that's what we expect so great scenes fine the low chronology pointing well after the 10th century BC makes Professor Finkelstein and Neil Silberman doubt whether a great Empire could have existed at that time look it was a wonderful story it got people excited and really interested in the Bible but we we just can't accept the story of the Solomon's gates anymore for many reasons first of all right there from the beginning there was a problem because when you know you look at the reported archaeological facts on the ground the gate is definitely later it must be put somewhere in the eighth century or something like that but beyond that today we know that there are gates like this all over later than the 10th century in the 8th century and even in the 7th century and beyond the borders of biblical Israel but some archaeologists think there may well be something in the biblical account this is Thebes in Egypt the great temple of karnak records the history of the pharaohs and of the great Egyptian dynasties one of these inscriptions refers to the military exploits of a pharaoh called Shashank the first it details the blistering devastation that he visited on a hundred and fifty towns and villages in Canaan in the 10th century the supposed Solomonic era uniquely for an Egyptian campaign in Canaan Shashank forces turned inland from the coast and attacked towards the Highlands where Jerusalem is situated we have to ask ourselves what is the reason for such a pharaoh in the 10th century BC to invade the central mountains the hills which are well forested and well hard terrain to reach for a military campaign Egyptian military campaign I think that this is a good hint that there was some political entity in this region and this political entity in my view can be identified with this United Monarchy which probably threatened the Egyptians or they saw in it some kind of threat a political threat or economic threat so the evidence archaeological and textual provides a very contradictory picture of 10th century Canaan there may have been some kind of israelite entity but it seems highly improbable that it could have been the elaborate empire portrayed in the Bible it's confusing the highlands of the south are very sparsely settled there is no manpower for great Davidic conquests in Jerusalem is a small village nothing monumental no real evidence for big capital despite they despite the biblical evidence of course of no no evidence for a great soleimani capital ruling over a greater state rich state and so on and here at Megiddo the buildings the monumental buildings with which which had been described as the symbol of Soleimani greatness in fact date a bit later they don't date to the time of Solomon they don't date to the 10th century so we are in a situation of of a complete say negative picture negative evidence from coast to coast so what had been disconnected with Solomon and used as an illustration of his greatness is later and we're now we have to rethink the whole situation yeah we do it seems some of the early Old Testament stories may contain glimmers of real history so they're unlikely to have been simply made up and invented equally many key events cannot have happened the way it says they did so how do we make sense of this unevenness Israel Finkelstein has come here to San Diego to discuss this with one of the world's leading authorities on the old testament professor Richard Friedman the situation with the Bible is not just that it's a very old book but there's a tremendous difference from the oldest part of the Bible to the youngest part of the Bible so the the first sentence in the Bible whatever that is was written a thousand years before the last sentence in the Bible and in between there's maybe a hundred or 150 authors living in this century this century this century and so even when you know Hebrew you learn it's a different Hebrew all the way through it even when you think you understand one of the authors of the Bible but there's another author of the Bible who sees things differently so people say it's not a book it's books it's not a book it's a literature it's a library people use all these metaphors to try to capture the idea that the Bible is this amazing collection over so much time professor Friedman is passionate that we need to know the Bible's origins in order to understand the way it portrays history if you can know where the book came from who the author was why it made a difference then you understand how it came up with the particular conceptions of God that it did why it came out telling history the way it did it's everything that we think is so great about the Bible we try to find out through this search why is it so great how did we get this book archaeology and science can now for the first time begin providing the answer it's a largely new and unfamiliar story markedly at odds with the Bible's own account but why should we want to unravel the story of the Israelites and their Bible because they invented the idea of a single God because they invented written history because they invented the idea of the individual with rights and responsibilities that lies at the heart of Western civilization Judaism Christianity Islam we all owe an immeasurable debt to that impossibly distant group of people so who were they actually how did the Bible come to be written and how did they between us this extraordinary legacy as we've seen contrary to the Old Testament there's no evidence for any migration from Mesopotamia at the supposed time of Abraham said to be the Israelites founding patriarch we can't rule out the possibility that some nomads may have come to Canaan but modern archaeology suggests that rather than being Outsiders the people who later became the Israelites was simply part of the pre-existing Bronze Age population of Canaan people of the beginning of the second millennium BC middle Bronze Age and also the people of the intermediate Bronze Age in the third millennium later third millennium BC are all form a local stock so there was no migration from the north that you can relate Abraham to in effect the Israelites appear to have simply emerged out of the local population when is difficult to say precisely what we do know is that throughout the Bronze Age that is up until about the 13th to 12th century BC the land of Canaan consisted of a number of Canaanite city states though Egypt ruled the whole territory the city-states enjoyed considerable self-government city-state is a term that we use for the political organization of this country during the Canaanite period the country was divided into about 30 city-states this is quite a small country each state had the territory of about approximately 1000 square kilometer and each city state capital had a local kind of king teti king we may call it small king yet a palace here the his you know hotels around him and some noblemen and so on the wealth there was some here a hero he in the city the craftsmen and the priests in the common people and he had a group of small towns and villages in his territory so this organization of city-state is very common in the Levant in Palestine in Syria during the Bronze Age the Egyptian control of Canaan lasted about 300 years but the attack of the sea people from the late 13th century BC which led to the collapse of Egyptian rule and the slow destruction of the canaanite city-states unleashed tremendous regional instability the entire eastern Mediterranean was in a complete turmoil the economy was disrupted maritime trade routes were cut ports on the Mediterranean coast were destroyed were attacked and taken in a situation like this of economy falling famine political dysfunction then one city can I take another a gang of people from the Highlands can take a city pastoral nomads can come also and try to gain some advantage by attacking a single city isolated city everything was in cows no one really knows why this happened but out of the anarchy destruction and dislocation came a development which was to have the most profound consequences for the whole Western world it was nothing more extraordinary than that per backward and illiterate desert nomads were forced to start farming in this unpromising terrain but in time this particular group of people were to achieve something remarkable to establish kingdoms and a scripture and to invent the idea of a single God these poor backward illiterate nomads became the Israelites desert life has changed little over thousands of years in ancient Canaan as in modern Jordan nomads survived by trading and buying grain from small village farmers at the edges of the desert the pastoral nomads had hurts and could sell the products of the herds to the farmers however they needed surplus of grain for the farmers so as long as the farmers in the villages could produce enough surplus of grain to give to the pastoral nomads in exchange for day a product of the herd everything was went there on very well remember that in the last phase of the Late Bronze Age we are entering a major crisis in the entire eastern Mediterranean canon the neighboring countries Empire's collapse the Egyptian administration is gone from cannon city states are putting fire villages villagers are running away because of the sea people because of other reasons there is a complete turmoil throughout the land and they cannot produce the villagers enough surplus of grain in order to maintain this exchange with the pastoral nomads and the pastoral nomads are are they find themselves in a deep crisis as well it was this economic catastrophe which probably drove desert nomads at the end of the Bronze Age to start primitive settlements in nearby hills on the west bank of the River Jordan they were the first Israelites we discovered here in this country since the beginning of the seventies own after the six days war hundreds of sites throughout the central hill country of Israel we have these settlements these villages built right on bedrock in areas which will not settle at all by the Canaanites in the second millennium BC in the Late Bronze Age at least there are very simple villages they are not fortified usually except maybe a fence that's around the village we find a animal pens for example a Gila we found large animal pens which are used by these people so I think that here we have an emergence of something new a which can be related to the emergence of those Israelites from the extensive archaeological surveys of the last 30 years professor Finkelstein and his colleagues can now draw a detailed map of the earliest Israelite settlement patterns this map gives you the in a graphic way the final results of all the surveys of many years in the highlands from south to north that is to say you can see that there are areas like here in the South that have less side the number of sites to the south of Jerusalem is very limited and for instance in the North around shame and father drew north where you have bigger valleys you have more sites I can tell you for my knowledge of the landscape of the highlands that over there the only possibility and all the world the only reason to enter these parts of the Highlands is in order to grow olives and produce olive oil Olive Oyl it seems an unlikely agent of radical change but soon the early Israelites were producing a surplus and a surplus meant trade this is a courtyard of a normal dwelling of that period in the courtyard all kind of activities took place among them olive oil production what we have here is an olive oil press the crushed olives are put into the baskets once the baskets are full of the crushed olives the boom stands something like this and then the pressure apply to it by these weights which by the way are the original weights pushes the boom down slowly slowly gradually it's not happening in minutes it takes hours and the olive oil runs out of the baskets into this little drainage pipe you into the jug 'let's such an olive oil press is definitely much too big for one family that leaves you this is a production let's say a major production for export or for to be sold somewhere in the country or even beyond the well-watered valleys of the northern highlands ran down to the coast and so geography encouraged trade and prosperity in due course a more complex society arose the population grows there's hierarchy between the settlements there's intensification of the agricultural activity there is industrialization of the agricultural output there is specialization in grain growing and olive oil production all this shows that we are on the way to statehood there's this development which leads to statehood and all this happens in the north slowly but unmistakably this northern area became a recognizable Kingdom it was called Israel this was the Israelite city of Megiddo from this period on we can be fairly confident about events the Bible itself probably began to be compiled quite close to this period so it's more reliable we have detailed diplomatic records from neighboring territories like Assyria and we now find far more material facts on the ground on something Israel we have very interesting akia logical evidence and very convincing archaeological evidence for the development of the kingdom Samaria the capital is founded in the 9th century the same in jazz rail the other Palace all this confirms the Bible very well because the Bible tells us that Omri founded Samaria and a hub built also Samaria as well as giselle so concerning the northern kingdom Tel Dan a Megiddo cuts or tell rahova all these sides really give us a beautiful picture and so the northern kingdom of israel grew apace former Canaanite cities destroyed in the great chaos were now rebuilt as Israelite centers but in the southern highlands it was a different story this area was known as Judah and it was here that Jerusalem was located but one can see even today that this terrain was much less promising than in the Northern Kingdom of Israel as you can see it's a highland area it's a the highest in the central highland affair is a it's the most remote area it's the poorest area a not too much rain not too much a good day good field for agriculture they are but they're less than in the north in the 10th century the south is still very sparsely settled by just a few small villages and Jerusalem itself is only a God forsaken small and remote village there's almost nothing there but despite their differences the people of both Israel and Judah were one in the same in the North the much richer area with a richer environment with cities with trade routes it naturally became a powerful Kingdom that's the Kingdom of Israel in the south centered around Jerusalem was a kingdom based on the same principles but because of its environment because of its low population it was much economically weaker it was more isolated and yet the two kingdoms had a relationship they sprang from the same origins from the from the same historical period the Bible tells us that from the time of Moses several centuries before the Jews were monotheistic worshiping only one God the Israelites in both the northern and the southern kingdom did share a common religion but it wasn't monotheism we know from text and from archaeology that traditional Israelite religion involved venerating the ancestors the gods of the underworld so to speak we know from texts at least and from iconography that we find in the ground that traditional Israelite religion involved generating the Stars and the planets we know therefore the traditional Israelite religion was polytheistic we know that in the Canaanites and Israelites addition mountains were very important in the cult the well gods were related to mountains Baal the Battle of Carmel the Battle of film on the Battle of Siffin and so on and perhaps this tradition was transferred to the Israelite to these early very early Israelites the bull is also the symbol of course of Baal the God the main god of Canaan and also of el the chief god you know the the chief god of the Canaanite Pantheon but also is related to the Israelite God especially in the northern part of the country the golden cuffs they are the major symbols during the Israelite period there is a lot of continuity between Canaanite and Israelite religion but there was one quite extraordinary cultural difference between the Israelites and their neighbors there are no bones of pigs in their eye on one side of the Highlands the question is why but after all it there's no problem to raise the pigs in the highlands in the Bronze Age they did have pigs in the highlands so it has nothing to do with the environment or something like that there are several reasons possible reasons one is that if these people came from pastoral background of course the pastoral people do not have pigs and this could have been one of the reasons but I think that there is a stronger reason to the fact that there are no bones of pigs in the highlands and that is that at the same time exactly you have the size of the Philistines in the lowlands and in general the sides in the lowlands Canaanites Philistines and others they have a lot of they eat a lot of pork so the distinction between the people of the lowlands and the people of the highlands could have been a situation of we day-day eat pork we don't this is how we form our identity this could have been the reason whatever the reason the Jewish prohibition on eating pork continues a tradition which goes back 3,000 years to the highlands of Canaan as time passed the southern kingdom of Judah slowly became more densely populated and agricultural development slowly increased by the 8th century BC Judah like Israel in the north was also becoming a developed state with all the panoply of administration and bureaucracy literacy was the vital precondition and pottery remnants of the period testify to this key development the one that I have in my hands is the typical Jew died sin impression it has an emblem apparently the emblem of them kingdom the emblem of the king in the center and then it says belonging to the king he born it doesn't mean that the King was sitting in Hebron it means that either the tax was collected there at Hebron or that the vessels were produced there the standardized vessels of the kingdom the development of Judah was extremely fortunate for just as it was becoming a proper state Israel in the north was facing a mortal threat after the ninth century the period of greatness of the kingdom of Israel in the eighth century decline sets in because of the pressure from the north there are immense the Assyrians move down eventually in 732 they take the Galilee and that's the beginning of the end of the Kingdom of Israel one by one the northern cities were overrun and bit by bit the kingdom expired thus ended a state called Israel it was to be 2700 years before another state bearing that name would arise again in the Middle East but Judah survived according to the archaeology large numbers of people now began arriving in the Judah high capital Jerusalem about ten thousand people suddenly descended on the city in the late 8th century they were almost certainly the people of Israel Judah of the late 18th century was not at all similar to Judah of 30 or 40 years before and that was because of the torrent of refugees who came from the north after the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians came to Judah and settled here Judah was completely transformed from a small sleepy kingdom to one of the most influential kingdoms in the Levant and that is the first time that we see a real full-blown state in Judah these are the ruins of Lachish Judah's second city in 701 BC after overrunning the Northern Kingdom of Israel the Assyrians came south and began to attack Judah then ruled by an important king called Hezekiah as both the Bible and Assyrian records testify the Assyrians razed the city to the ground after a prolonged siege a hitch was built probably in the 9th century we don't have inscriptions so we don't have a day as a fortress city it became the second important city of the kingdom of Judah after Jerusalem this palace stood in the centre of the site and it was surrounded by very massive city walls and very massive city gate where we are standing now and it became the large is the most important Fault in in Judah after of course Jerusalem now in the 14th year of King Hezekiah did Sennacherib king of Assyria come up against all the fence cities of Judah and took them the attack on Judah is well documented in this Assyrian relief which records the assault on Lachish it shows the use of a specially constructed rampart which is still visible today the Syrians came here and they wanted to force their way through the wall which was high up on on the slope so the system was very simple they dumped tear stones natural stones which they took from all over the fields then they covered it with cement because soldiers cannot walk on stones and on top of it they built a platform of earth on which the battering rams stood and from which they could attack directly the wall and they could climb the wall and a go inside the Assyrian attacks put considerable pressure on the Judah height capital Jerusalem added to the refugees from the north people from the surrounding countryside also fled there for protection in ancient times people had come here to draw water from deep underground but because of the terrain the thousands now living in the city couldn't all get access we are now at the spring of Gihon the sauce which comes out here from a crack in the rock and is emanating all the year round this is a permanent source of water and this is a result that off of this village which turned later much later into a into a city wouldn't it be for the water nobody would have come down to this place but we know we understand I think the broader situation here in the time of Hezekiah Jerusalem grew all of a sudden and became a huge city ten times bigger than 50 years before him to bring water to the new population of the extended City King Hezekiah now embarked on an extraordinary project tunneling through half a kilometre of rock the tunnel goes from here for over 500 metres cut from both sides they are met in the middle all in the rock well this is a real engineering achievement and we still don't have an adequate explanation how this was done so the building of the tunnel which came out here also shows the increasing sophistication of the kingdom emphasized by the fact that Hezekiah chose to record his feat for posterity this ancient Hebrew inscription is really one of the most important pieces of evidence we have for the rise of Judah as a kingdom it's dated to the time of King Hezekiah at the end of the eighth century BC and it records the the cutting of the long complicated Siloam tunnel that brought water to the city so it represents both the engineering that was possible by the kingdom and also the attempt of the kingdom to record that act in an official way in an official inscription and so this really brings us to a time when the kingdom was centralized when Jerusalem was a city that was administered by royal officials that had the power and the the the level of literacy to record their achievements in their history literacy also played a key role in the politics of Judah Judah was under siege the northern Israelites had fled south on mass Hezekiah had to hold the kingdom together it seems his priests collected the slightly different northern and southern versions of Israelite history and also wrote a new one to try to reconcile and unify the two traditions these various texts were later to become part of what we know as the Old Testament Hezekiah situation would explain the importance of portraying David and Solomon as having once presided over an empire of all Israelites based in Jerusalem to promote unification it seems Judah also now underwent a major religious purge it appears worship began to be centralized in the capital half a millennium after the supposed time of moses this was the real beginning of monotheism the belief in one God alone the biblical account of Hezekiah spurge more reliable because it was closer to the events describes the destruction of idolatrous shrines and Hezekiah did that which was right in the sight of the Lord he removed the high places and break the images what we are sitting with in the photos of our ad first of all it's not a big focus it's only about fifty on fifty meters that's all surrounded by a big wall and inside there is the most important find edit site in this site and one of the most important finds all over Judah in biblical times the temple which is right here be behind us this temple was probably constructed sometime in the beginning of the 8th century BC and lasted throughout the 8th century BC it was then destroyed and this reminds us of other sites in the Beersheba Valley in Judah and in the north also where you have cessation of cult places countryside cult places before the end of the Iron Age and apparently there was some sort of centralization of cult as part of the growing power of the capital and the administration and the king and the centralized government in Jerusalem in the late 8th century the new centralized cult in Jerusalem was focused on a special local Israelite deity probably as a way of rallying people behind the king and getting them to identify with the state that deity was called yahwah we know him from the Bible as Jehovah or more simply God the name Yahweh is a name of an Israelite God relating to Israel appears for the first time in the inscriptions of around 800 BC found in the Sinai desert and one of the inscriptions is a dedication to Yahweh and he's a shara that means Yahweh the God of Israel in this inscription has a consult a wife called azshara just like the main god of the Canaanites so you can see it 800 BC the Israelite religion was not yet the fully developed monotheism as we have it in the biblical tradition assure us female deities like these emphasized fertility and maternity despite the developing cult of Yahweh the population of Judah continued to flirt with polytheism long after Hezekiah spurge after the siege of La quiche Judah now revolving largely around Jerusalem sued for peace with Assyria over the next century there was a period of calm the stability led to growth and prosperity by the late 7th century Assyria had withdrawn from Judah Hezekiah great-grandson Josiah now appears to have begun developing ideas of expanding Judah to rally his population behind him he redoubled and intensified the centralization of worship around yahwah in order to achieve the ideas of extension territorial extension and so on Josiah needed centralization of power strong administration complete control of the state one way to do that was to centralize cult to do this reform of cult which would lead back to the idea to the punish the right idea that all Israelites will must worship one God that is the God of Israel in one capital that is Jerusalem in one temple there is the temple of the God of Israel under one monarch one king the king of the lineage of David that was the Panigale idea which started which came into being in the 7th century BC at this time Josiah's priests are said to have discovered a lost text which greatly emphasized the worship of Yahweh they called it the book of law it was almost certainly the Old Testament book that became known as Deuteronomy the book of Deuteronomy perpetrates one of the great Reformation in history it imposes a strict philosophical monotheism that banishes all other gods from traditional culture this was part of a Reformation aspre in which King Josiah attempted to centralize not only power but the ability to reach the realm of the divine into his own hands in Jerusalem in the temple the temple which sat in the backyard of the Royal Palace so somebody a person or a group sat down at that time and wrote the early core of the story and the story serves Judah it puts Judah in the center of the universe Deuteronomy was hugely important for Western civilization because for the first time the individual was singled out from the crowd as the focus of moral responsibilities and duties Baruch Halpern believes this was actually connected to the earlier Assyrian attacks on Judah many elements of the reform actually precede the reform they're the result of the exile of the rural population of Judah in 71 BC by the Assyrian King Sennacherib the extended family essentially disappears from the landscape of Judah in the 7th century after 701 BC we no longer have compounds housing extended families we have individual houses we no longer have a collective tombs containing hundreds of people being buried together we no longer have large uh cooking cooking pots we no longer have large ovens all these things shrink down in size as they do in other cultures when the extended family disappears a nuclear family family becomes the center of organization and identity effectively what you see in the 7th century BC is the development of individuality these social changes were reflected in radical new laws in Deuteronomy an ideological change of great enduring consequence there's something else about the autonomy which is remarkable and this is what we can call today the ideas of civil rights of rights of the individual of the person I mean the autonomy is full of ideas how to protect women children slaves people who lose their land the simple people it was probably one of the ways to attempt to mobilize the people of Judah behind the ideas of the newer forms you know because they give them you know the rights if you wish for the first time this pottery fragment from Josiah's time records a petition from an unknown agricultural laborer against his local commander what it testifies to is is a new consciousness at the end of the seventh century in the time of King Josiah even among simple agricultural workers that the power of the governor was subject to some greater laws some greater morality and it's here on this broken piece of pottery as archaeological evidence from the time of Josiah that what we now still believe as biblical tradition and biblical morality was born among the people in the fields of ancient Judah at the end of the seventh century BC what you have here is a case of the rejection of tradition it's not the invention of tradition it is the rejection of tradition and that is the mindset the self-conscious mindset on which science and monotheism and Western civilization have been found despite Josiah's confidence his ambitions were soon thwarted in 609 BC here at Megiddo Josiah was killed by Egyptians in uncertain circumstances he was still a young man his dream of a great new Israelite Empire smashed it seemed a terminal disaster for the Israelites and this catastrophe has been immortalized in the biblical name for Megiddo Armageddon but Armageddon was not the end the Israelites greatest achievement was yet to come the death of Josiah in 609 BC at the hands of the Egyptians seemed the end of all Judas hopes and now everything is ruined the Egyptians have power over the country in the East Babylon becomes a great power and they have power over the country things continue to go worse to worse and first there are three different sons and one grandson of Josiah who get to be the king and finally the last one of them is King Zedekiah the Babylonians come under the great emperor Nebuchadnezzar they surround Jerusalem they defeat it they march out all of Zedekiah's sons and they execute them one by one in front of him and then they put out his eyes and they put him in Chains and they take him back to Babylon and Nebuchadnezzar carried away all Jerusalem and all the princes and all the mighty men of valor even ten thousand captives with the elite of Judah removed to Babylon and Jerusalem devastated the kingdom was destroyed and the remnants of the population left scattered and leaderless but the Judah Heights taken to Babylon managed to preserve the memory of their religion and history Jerusalem or Zion remains central to their thoughts it was a complete cuttest off it could have been the end so it's really interesting that at that time the only hope the only way to keep the identity and the tradition was around you know the old stories by the rivers of Babylon there we sat down yayyyy we wept when we remembered Zion but in fact the Judah Heights exile didn't last long within sixty years the first of them began returning to Jerusalem the Persian Empire conquered the Babylonian Empire and under the Persians the Jews were allowed to return rebuild their temple rebuild Jerusalem rebuild their country under the Persians we are now in post-exilic times in the fifth century BC or immediately thereafter there's no king there was no dynasty Judah is not independent we are speaking about the community of yahood and there the Persian Empire the needs are very different the situation is completely different than before the Judah heights or Jews as they now became known were led by priests and one of them played an absolutely critical role in the history of the Bible this priest gathered together the various Jewish texts which was still remembered and put them into an official compilation known as the Torah Richard Friedman believes this priest was called Ezra he's a priest he's a scribe he has access to the texts and he's someone who has power because he someone is strong enough to come to the Jews and say okay this is the Bible from now on this is Torah and he stands the people up and they hold a tremendous ceremony and he has the priest stand up and read the text of the taurah and that taurah that he created the five books of Moses is the Torah that everybody has read for two and a half thousand years since that time the year was 458 BC the Torah the first five books of the Old Testament and in many ways its core was later supplemented by further texts these collective works have come down to us as the Old Testament from their own complex and difficult history the Israelites had wrought a document that is still influencing the world the Bible is of course the most important creation of the Israelites everywhere it is it is the most wonderful and reach literal recreation ever created I think it's still the best seller isn't it it's the best salt book until this very day it's this continuing influence particularly in moral debates that makes the Old Testaments reliability as history still a matter of importance professor Finkelstein and Neil Silberman have shown that not every story or word of the Old Testament can be literally true and that as history it has to be carefully interpreted but their objective is not to undermine or dismiss deeply held beliefs despite all the controversy what we are doing is creating that archaeological story that goes in parallel with the still very profound and cherished biblical tradition what we are trying to do what we wish to do is not to discard you know the biblical text but to make a distinction between tradition which is important to all of us and scientific research this I think is a central piece in what we wish to do put this distinction between the dual tradition is important archeology cannot trash the tradition ecology cannot destroy tradition because the lesion has life of itself we're not saying that one is correct and one is incorrect any more than we would say that the poetry of Genesis is incorrect now that we know a bit about human evolution what we're doing is just continuing a struggle a scholarly struggle that's been going on for a hundred years the boundary just now happens to be in the story of the Israelites and the Israelite Kingdom and it's moving forward slowly to separate religious literature and spirituality from what we call history modern scholarship is showing then that the Old Testament was a human and highly partisan construct this does not however take away its power or enduring moral force indeed in many ways it makes the achievement of those who wrote the Old Testament all the more remarkable sometimes when I see how great it is that there was a source that pictured God is very heavenly in Universal and another picture God is the god of your father very close and personal then they come together and you get a Bible about a guy who is universal and also close it's God who created the universe and God of your father to me this is a great thing but I still haven't really come to understand how it worked out so well we're not talking about one author sitting down and designing something so it comes out nicely at the end we're talking about 100-150 authors in the whole bible writing and you get a story that flows and works so well and makes such sense and has consistency in it that to me that is you know I hesitate to use the word but a miracle the deep-sea detectives attempt to get to the bottom of a mysterious disappearance and a possible case of mass murder in the Mediterranean next

Channel: Universe Code

Views: 1,314,149

Rating: 3.8909805 out of 5

Keywords: bible, unearthed, old, versions, discoveries, religion, christianity, jesus, new, testamony, christ, jewish, bc, documentary, hd, Old Testament (Religious Text), Jesus Christ (Deity), Judaism (Religion), History, Spirit, Holy, Gospel, archeology, old story, people from the past, bible history, history of the bible, religion history, jerusalem history, roman bible, The Bible (Religious Text), The Bible Unearthed, Bible Translations

Id: O5RfScpEcZ8

Length: 84min 58sec (5098 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 29 2013