Can the Old Testament be Trusted Historically? - Peter J. Williams

you what we're going to ask now is the question can the Old Testament be trusted historically I want to begin with a page what do you think the page is of well it's an old Bible it's in fact a 400 year old page of Bible it's from the original King James Version translation of 1611 it's a bit too small to read so let's blow it up and make it bigger in fact let's make it even bigger this comes from second Kings chapter 18 and what I want us to do is to read some of this together by the way what you'll see is that some of the shapes of letters are a bit different from what we're used to now there is this thing that looks like a very tall sea which is in fact an S but let's try and read it now in the 14th year of King Hezekiah did Sennacherib king of Assyria come up against all the fenced cities of Judah and took them fenced means wound or fortified and Hezekiah king of Judah sent to the king of Assyria to lakish saying I have offended I've done something wrong return from me that means please go away that which thou puttest on me will I bear which means however much you find me I will pay and the king of Assyria appointed under Hezekiah king of Judah three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold doesn't mean he gave it he said this is the find and Hezekiah gave him all the silver that was found in the house of the Lord and in the treasures of the King's house then just two verses later and the king of Assyria sent tartan and Rab saris and Rebecca from lakish to King Hezekiah with a great host that means a great army against Jerusalem and they went up and came to Jerusalem and when they were come up they came and stood by the conduit of the upper pool which is in the highway of the Fuller's field this is someone who washes clothes why would I bring this to you well it's a passage which was printed over 400 years ago but it contains some particular historical claims particularly it says there was a Judean king called Hezekiah that all of the fortified cities of Judah were captured all except for Jerusalem that's what's clear in the passage and that this was done by an assyrian king called Sennacherib the Sennacherib is particularly associated with a place called lakish and the rest of the passage will say that he fought against lakish and that he fined Hezekiah thirty talents of gold and 300 talents of silver so these are the claims that we have within the text and when we look at those we find that they correlate rather remarkably with things are known from history but what we find is that according to the text whereas Sennacherib finds Hezekiah thirty talents of gold and 300 talents of silver Hezekiah in fact gave all of the silver that was in his house his palace and in the temple why is he find thirty and 300 and then gives all is it because all of the silver in his house and in the end in the temple correlated correspond exactly to 300 talents of silver well I want us to think about a man who became rather famous for conquering large parts of the world called Napoleon Bonaparte Napoleon Bonaparte is said to be the person who began archaeology he took experts round with him in his army and that was around 200 years ago when he went to Egypt that was the first time that people actually dug things systematically out of the ground that means that our printed Bible which from 400 years ago but archaeology didn't begin till 200 years ago we then ask the question if the printed Bible was produced without any knowledge of archaeology that means all knowledge that is contained in that printed Bible could only have come through having been handed now from generation to generation in manuscripts we then ask the question how many of the things that they thought was a case have come to be confirmed by archaeology what we find is that there are a whole number of Assyrian Kings mentioned in the Bible and I could name a number of them we have figures such as tiglath-pileser the third and what happened is after archaeology began in the 1840s that was when a Syrian was deciphered they then find two gospel a to the third own monuments and they find that he's a real figure and at the right historical time or you could look at other Assyrian Kings they're in fact a series of five Assyrian Kings mentioned in the Old Testament people like shaman ISA the fifth or we we find that four of them are mentioned in a very specific order one of them Sargon is mentioned in the Book of Isaiah and you can't be precisely sure where he fits in with the rest but he more or less fits in the right place but also Sennacherib we find mentioned in the passage we've looked at and then later as I hadn't so we find them now why would I use this authoritative source of Wikipedia the reason I use that is because Wikipedia was founded by an atheist and I think it's very useful on all sorts of things like if you want to find out about a place you're going to visit on the other hand on certain key things such as the Bible I find it to be less reliable because I find it to be somewhat geared towards scepticism therefore when we have the agreement that something in the Bible is true it is because people have seen that there's such an overwhelming level of evidence they've had to concede that it is true so we have five Assyrian Kings basically in the same order as they are mentioned in the Bible so this is a really striking fact but it's not just that we have kings from other countries mentioned in the Bible we also have Kings from the Bible mention in the records of other countries after archaeology begin so we find many kings of Israel and of Judah are mentioned by these Assyrian Kings too you could come to the British Museum a very grand building in London where we have all sorts of stolen goods from the time before we lost our empire and within those rooms you can find the cartoons which Sennacherib had on his palace walls these were pictures of how he had defeated people and you'll find scene after scene here we have shields with people hiding behind them with arrows and we have of course because they didn't have the technology to animate they the scenes run through like this down at the bottom we have three people Jewish people from lakish who are being impaled this is the this is a picture of the city being seized up there that what he does he portrays how he defeated lakish we also there are three copies of this prism and this tells in turn Ackroyd's own words what happened this is what he says as for Hezekiah Judea and I beseech 46 of his fortified walled cities notice that phrase almost the same as the one in the Bible Fenster walled cities I conquered them and took out two hundred thousand one hundred and fifty people he himself I locked up within Jerusalem his royal City like a bird in a cage now this is what he's called spin putting a positive light on something you see he didn't actually conquer the city but how can you say I didn't conquer the city respectably you say I shut up heavy car like a bird in a cage are but Sennacherib you didn't get into the cage did you up Hezekiah was overwhelmed by the splendor by claudinha so he sent me thirty talents of gold eight hundred talents of silver now you're over in the Bible it was thirty talents of gold and three hundred talents of cymbal was the fine but then Hezekiah gave all of the silver that was in his house and in the temple now I find the agreement on the number of talents of gold an amazing striking thing and I find that far more striking than the disagreement on the amount of silver now you can explain the differences on the amount of silver by saying that either text a or text B has a copying error or that one it one of them is wrong and is exaggerating or diminishing or that they are talking about slightly different things one is talking about the amount of the fine the other is talking about the amount that was actually given those are all possible but the thing that I find really striking is that we have this text which says in the Bible thirty talents of gold was the fine and then after archaeology begins and then Assyrian is deciphered an account correlating to exactly that now I don't know of other historical records where a detail as precise as that has been confirmed by archaeology over that period of time we again remember this verse which talks about Todd tan and Rab Cyrus now in Hebrew terrip tan is spelt with a short a Tara and then along a tan and that's the way it's been preserved in Hebrew then what happens is people decipher a Syrian or Akkadian and there's a big long dictionary this is the Assyrian dictionary made in Chicago and you can see that there is one volume just 40 there's also another volume just 40 with a dot underneath but if we just take the concise version of this there's a something actually made in Cambridge the concise dictionary of Akkadian you can see that it says Titano means second-in-command so even the vowel length is exactly the same that they have preserved this and it's been decided deciphered and it found to be the case or when it says later or in another volume that Rab is the word for a chief or overseer a bit like our word rabbi one of the things you find is this the Bible is correctly handed down Assyrian words even though the scribes who handed down the Bible almost certainly didn't know Assyrian because it was a defunct language and handing down correctly the phonetics of words in languages that no one speaks anymore is actually a very impressive feat feat or another detail you have in the Bible that Hezekiah did Water Works he'd made a pit pool he made a conduit for water and brought water into the city again something which subsequent archaeology discover of the cylon tunnel has been rather interested in now if we take a Bible from between about the Year 1700 and the year 1800 we find that commonly they began to put dates in the margins here is a Bible from 1785 and we see that it when it dates the fall of Samaria to the Assyrians it says it happened at before Christ in the year 721 when we look at what has been thought after archaeology began we actually find in Wikipedia that it says that it believes this happened around 7 to 2 well what is so surprising the King James Version and other versions that were produced in Europe were produced on the basis of Hebrew editions one of the main Hebrew editions was made in 1525 but the earliest manuscripts available for that Hebrew Edition were from no earlier than the Year 1100 and then we find it there information has been handed down to 1100 AD or later from around the Year 700 BC so in other words we're talking about 1800 years of being transmitted through manuscripts and we're finding highly accurate information the Assyrian Kings names are spelt correctly so what we could say is I could go to an ignorant monk sitting in his cell somewhere in the Middle Ages before the Reformation before the Renaissance copying a Latin Bible and I could say tell me the kid names of the Assyrian Kings and he would look in his Latin Bible and he would give you a fairly accurate rendering of their names I was a tell me Oh monk when did those kings live and he would do his sons and would give me a rough date for when they lived which would basically be correct so how can that monk sitting in isolation in his cell copying out Latin Bible manuscripts correctly have information historical information from so much earlier this is an amazing thing and shows that what we have through the Bible is something that has been trusted and that Trust has been vindicated but I want to ask a question what's the most advanced is it the ancient Babylonian clay tablets or is it the leather writing of that medieval monk or is it a modern phone well we might think that the most advanced is the one on the left it seems to have the ability to send information round the globe so much more quickly this seems the least advanced it's chunky it's got 600 signs it's so complicated this is lighter and you have fewer letters perhaps this is more advanced than that but that's the most advanced on the left then you ask the question which lasts the longest well how many of you are using a mobile phone that you had five years ago one person well do take pity on that versus what we find is they don't last very long hard disks don't last very long but we know that books paper can last for hundreds of years leather can last for hundreds of years and we know that clay tablets can last for thousands of years but then you ask yourself the question what contains the oldest text actually the oldest text could be on your phone this could be a recent a late Babylonian tablet you could have the text from an old Babylonian tablet on your phone so what we're going to recognize is that by the Bible has come to us through a culture where they had an advanced writing system it was to write on perishable materials such as papyrus or leather and we know that not just because it's perished but also because we have leather preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls in jars or because we have the fiber marks from papyrus on the back of film films that were put on letters we know they wrote on perishable material that does not survive except in extraordinary circumstances but as a result of that we might think that that means the text is young but in fact the text can be very very old on that material it can be just as old as the things on the clay tablets so whereas we can go and see clay tablets in museums and think wow that's old we can't see Bibles that seem to be quite that old in museums and so some people think that means the Bible is young but that's simply committing a basic fallacy about the material that people wrote on I would want to suggest that the Old Testament when they wrote on perishable material using a 22 letter alphabet was actually a very advanced thing to do at the time and we have to remember that the whole of our society is built on copying when we hear someone's voice on the phone we don't actually hear their voice we hear a copy of their voice in fact a copy of the copy of their voice in fact a copy of a copy of their voice many many times repeated before it got to you every file we download is a copy everything that we see on TV is a copy we have great great confidence in copying in our society now people say couldn't someone have missed copied the Bible I want to put it like this we know that it's technically technically possible that you could be watching a sports match on your TV and someone could have falsified the image that you saw they have computer generation where they could make it so you're seeing something completely different from what your neighbor is seeing that is possible but the reason we think they're not that is we know that they would need a very big budget in order to get enough programmers to do that but it's exactly the same with mis copying the Bible you see it takes about a year to write a Bible out that's a big investment of time if you write a Bible on leather think how many animals you have to kill to have the number of animal skins you need for a Bible it is big budget business and so actually the economics of it suggests that this is not what's happened the most natural belief is simply that it's a copying culture where they hand things down you remember in the days of Jesus there were many scribes it was their job to hand things down there have always been scribes in a culture like that and what we see when we look at a passage like 2 Kings chapter 18 is really really precise information that has been handed down over thousands of years with utter accuracy now we cannot prove everything in the Bible to be historically true if we had cut we only believed it if we had corroboration for each part of it we would not be believing it if I said to my wife she said she's been for a walk I say can you prove that I'm saying I don't trust you actually I can prove many things that my wife claims but many other things I simply trust her word for it similarly with the Bible there are some things that have really been shown to been handed down over a long period of time and there are many things that have not been shown that way but it is rational to trust that they've been handed down it's one thing to prove something to be historically true I'm not saying I can prove it to be historically true I'm saying it is very rational to trust and believe that it's historically true thank you very much for listening [Applause] you

Channel: FOCLOnline

Views: 11,801

Rating: 4.7254901 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: lcgknT6TCQg

Length: 20min 2sec (1202 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 14 2017