John Currid: Archeology & the Old Testament

it's my pleasure to welcome you students that are with us and you who are joining us online to another installment of our rare book room lectures we're here on the campus of reformation Bible College we are in our wonderful Library here on campus just over to my right is our rare book room it's a beautiful room full of all kinds of treasures and I'd love to show all of you that room and if you're ever able to get to us on campus we'd give you a great tour of that you could see the treasures that we have in there through the course of these rare book room lectures we've been highlighting some of the Bibles that we have in that collection we've been highlighting some of the classic texts even some early texts by John Calvin and some of the reformers this time we get to do something very special we are moving away from books and texts and we are going to Pottery in fact we are going to hear a lecture from Dr John courage on pots pottery and purpose and we're going to be looking at the relationship of archeology and the Old Testament well we have a number of pieces of pottery in our collection and I brought out a few just to show you we have a number of vases that go back to the second Millennia BC we have a number of oil lamps this is a an early BC oil lamp and you can sort of see the simple technology behind it and as you move into the First Century A.D you've seen how the technology advanced and evolved into this form of the oil lamp but we know how scripture speaks of oil lamps and this is one of them I think we like these things Pottery vases and oil lamps because they show us that the Bible took place in real places in real time with real people that used real objects one of those objects and it's it's my favorite collection of our Pottery is this now it's very heavy and it is a mortar and pestle and it dates to 4 000 BC and just for grinding herbs or grinding grain now you might be familiar with the bishop Usher's dates and Bishop Usher was in the time of the reformation and those dates made their way into the King James Bible but Bishop Usher dated the Garden of Eden to 4004 BC so because that is 4000 BC we affectionately call that Eve's herb grinder here at RBC and so we have it well I want to introduce to you our speaker we're going to be hearing in a moment from Dr John courage he is the Chancellor's professor of Old Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary he received his master's degree from Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary then a PhD from the very prestigious Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago he taught first at Grove City College in Pennsylvania not too far from the original Ligonier Valley study center there in Western PA and then for over 25 years he's been at Reformed Theological Seminary he taught at Jackson Mississippi the campus there and he taught rbc's very own Dr John tweedale he also went on to teach at the Charlotte campus and now serves as the Chancellor's Professor he is an archaeologist he has served in excavations at Carthage and at bethsaida and he was the director of the lahav grain storage project and he's also an author of many books he's written a number of commentaries on the Old Testament I'd recommend all of them to you but a number of books on the history culture of the Old Testament and Archeology one is this book Against The Gods so the Old Testament and its cultural context this one ancient Egypt and the Old Testament which I believe goes back to your dissertation studies even at a long time interest for you and if you have any interest in archeology I'd recommend that you start with this book it is the case for biblical archeology uncovering the historical record of God's Old Testament people in addition to these many books that he's written he's also the senior editor of this which is this is one of my favorite study Bibles I love digging into this thing it's the archeology Study Bible and so he served as a senior editor editor of it it is a treasure Trove of information and then everybody should have a big Atlas at their disposal and so he is also the author of The ESV Bible Atlas well it's a real pleasure for us to have Dr John courage come and deliver our rare book room lecture Dr kurd Welcome to our campus thank you it's good to have you and we look forward to your lecture thank you thank you thanks Dr Nichols welcome and it's good to see all of you here it's a real joy to to be with you this is my first time on the campus though I teach at RTS Orlando every January that's how I get out of the Indiana Winters is to come down at that time I've written a lot for table talk and for Ligonier and on this very topic of archeology and in fact this fall the table talk issue will be on on archeology so it's something really to look forward to this is sort of an anniversary for me I don't mean wedding anniversary if it was I'd really be in trouble but it's an anniversary for me in this sense that 50 years ago I participated in my first excavation in the land of Israel I look out there and I'm going they're not even 25 years old a lot of these people here this this afternoon and 50 years ago I started Excavating in Israel the name of the site was tell casila not a very well-known site but it's an ancient Philistine site that's located within the bustling Metropolis of Tel Aviv it was really quite ironic we would go out each morning and here we're digging this ancient Mound and skyscrapers were being built around us as we were Excavating this particular site it was quite paradoxical in my excavation area there were four of us working in that area we discovered the first remains of a now famous Philistine Temple when we uncovered two pillar bases that stood in the main hall of the building these two pillar bases were about 10 feet apart and they would have supported two large wooden pillars and those pillars in turn would have held up a second story and the roof of the temple complex here we are these young diggers we were all around 20 years old and in our area and we will never forget when Ami Mazar who was the archaeological director of the site announced to us you have just discovered the Philistine Temple it was then that I was bitten by the proverbial archaeological bug there were four of us in that excavation area three of us now are trained archaeologists it was because we found that Temple now this was an important discovery not only for the understanding of philistine Temple architecture but it also helped us understand the story of the death of Samson in the Book of Judges remember after the capture of Samson by the Philistines they paraded him into the Temple of Dagon in their capital city of Gaza this can be found in Judges chapter 16. mocking Samson the Philistines made him stand between the two foundational pillars of the Temple Judges chapter 16 verse 25 and you remember when Samson pushed on the two pillars the entire edifice collapsed including the roof and killed many of the spectators the archaeological finds in the Philistine Temple at telcasila help us to understand that the events related in the Bible in the Samson story actually took place in a historical framework actually took place in space and time it was in a cultural framework of approximately 1200 BC see archeology can Enlighten us regarding many aspects of daily life in biblical times it provides an earthiness to scripture let me say that again it provides an earthiness to scripture another example may be helpful in Jeremiah chapter 7 30-32 we read the following for the sons of Judah have done evil in my sight declares the Lord they have set their detestable things in the house that is called by my name to defile it and they have built the high places of tofit which is in the Valley of the son of hinnam to burn their sons and their daughters in fire which I did not command nor did it come into my mind therefore behold the days are coming declares the Lord when it will no more be called tofit but the valley of Slaughter for they will bury and tofit because there is no room elsewhere now as we read that in Jeremiah chapter 7 you may be asking yourself well what in the world is that word tofit well the term tofit in the Hebrew Bible is a place of child sacrifice and burial so God through the Prophet Jeremiah is complaining that during the history of Judah the kings of Judah had been sacrificing their children in the tofit outside of Jerusalem now some archaeologists some historians would argue that there is little or no archaeological evidence for child sacrifice in ancient Israel or Judah or throughout the rest of the ancient near East however beginning in the 1970s an American excavation team from the University of Chicago began working at the site of Carthage in modern Tunisia now if you want to know where Carthage is you need to somebody stole my Atlas you need to get the atlas to know where Carthage is in North Africa beginning at that time and it's the excavations are still going on today in the 1980s I was one of the field directors at the site Carthage was founded by the Phoenicians in the 8th Century BC now do you know who the Phoenicians are this is why you need to get an atlas the Phoenicians were next door neighbors to Israel and they had great influence upon Israelite life and religion Jezebel that vile Toad on the throne of Israel the wife of Ahab was a Phoenician it was her people that founded Carthage as a colony in the 8th Century BC and in our excavations at Carthage we uncovered a tofit that is a cemetery bearing the remains of children who had been ritually sacrificed as burnt offerings to the Gods now if as we theorize that that that it is a child sacrificial cemetery and it's the largest one ever found it had a continuous use of 800 years or 600 years from 800 BC to the destruction of Carthage and 146 BC now the precise boundaries of the tofit precinct are unknown because modern housing occupies some of the cemetery you can get that real estate real cheap you have babies buried under your house but it's been estimated that the minimum size and in my opinion a conservative estimate is sixty thousand square feet the size of the toe fit which equals approximately two football fields the number of children in the cemetery is also unknown although a conservative estimate is twenty thousand burials between the years 400 to 200 BC which is only a third of the use of the cemetery now that the Phoenicians next door neighbors to Israel practice child sacrifice was well known and attested to in Antiquity for example the Greek author clitarcus at the close of the 4th Century BC commented he said this out of reverence for Baal the Phoenicians and especially the carthaginians where whenever they seek to obtain some great favor vow one of their children burning it as a sacrifice to the deity if they are especially eager to gain success their stands in their midst a bronze statue of Baal it's Hands Extended over a bronze Brazier the Flames of which engulfed the child when the Flames fall on the body the limbs contract and the open mouth seems almost to be laughing until the contracted body slips quietly into the Brazier they call this the act of laughing clitarcus lived when Carthage was in existence so he's a contemporary of carthaginian society and so his uh Works hold great weight in the truth of what was going on there at Carthage there are numerous other ancient authors as well who make mentions of carthaginian child sacrifice such as Diadora syphilis and Plutarch but they are after the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC in any event what we see at Carthage through archeology through excavation work is the child sacrifice was a dominant aspect of Phoenician Colonial culture and that it was well known throughout the Eastern Mediterranean this gives some weight and sway to the reality that the Kings of Israel and Judah both participated in it during the Reigns of wicked Kings over God's people you can also go to texts like Leviticus chapter 19 that talks about Canaanite culture and at the head of the list is child sacrifice so on the part of the Israelite Kings the Judean Kings there was accommodation or acculturation to these practices of the Phoenicians now what I'm getting at with with those stories of Tel casilla and then at Carthage is that the weight of archaeological research is that it deals with the very physical nature of things and therefore it grounds Us in what the Latins call the realia the the real things of of ancient life again it demonstrates the earthiness of the scriptures and how the episodes of The Bible occurred in time and place and history it provides us with insight into daily living let me give you a more recent example is that I've been on the archaeological staff at bethsaida since the mid-1990s bethsaida is a is an important New Testament site right on the Sea of Galilee it was the home of three of the disciples Peter Andrew and Philip were from bethsaida and the excavation field that I was in charge of was the domestic quarter of the New Testament City there we uncovered housing from the New Testament period grain storage facilities and lots of tools we found uh uh agricultural implements such as sickles and hoes and long nails and other hand tools the largest amount of small fines however were fishing paraphernalia Hooks and weights and so forth and and so on and that makes a lot of sense the name of the city best side of means House of the fishermen it also fits because Peter and Andrew were fishermen on the Sea of Galilee okay you see how all that works together so we didn't in all our excavations there the many years we worked there we did not find at the site anything specifically about Peter Andrew and uh Philip I used to have students volunteers they'd say to me ah maybe maybe we're digging in Peter's house and I'd say well if you can find a mailbox with the name Peter and Andrew on it maybe maybe you've got something there but what were we doing in our excavation of this area is to try and and get material to help us understand what it would have been like to be a fisherman living at beceda in the First Century A.D what it would have been like to be a fisherman during the time of Christ and his ministry there in uh in in Galilee more than this however it does more than merely place things in their physical setting that's helpful but it can also help to set the narratives of the Bible in their historical context now you may not think this is an important idea but I want to argue that this thought is crucial for our day and age we live in an age in which many people believe that history is meaningless that it's irrelevant and has no application to how we are to live today common thinking today we might Define it as a historicism and that a historicism is a foundational tenet to post-christian thought history has no meaning is what we are told today many academics argue that there's no such thing as true history in other words is based on writings that purport to record history but they are merely agenda-driven documents of propaganda I'm sure you've run across this type of thinking the lens of history today and its interpretation is what Carl Truman calls expressive individualism in which people Define what is real based upon their own individual psychological core but that view is forgetful of the historical and physical realia because archeology deals with material remains that is physical objects set in place and time and therefore it is a weapon to be used against expressive individualism whether an individual exists or not these material remains exist they are real whether you exist or not that pot does it's real it's true it's physical now in regard in that regard let me ask you a question as a rhetorical question and that is what is the most prolific object discovered through excavation of a site by far the answer is to my left is pottery it is everywhere it is ubiquitous it is durable it is everywhere in every level of uh of a site it's found by the bucketful in every layer of a site it's interesting when you have volunteers coming on the first day of excavation student volunteers oh man they're so excited when when they find Pottery shirts but the excitement wanes day after day and it gets to the point where they go another Pottery shirt because they are everywhere I remember when my nephew was uh opening his Christmas presents and first president he got was was a slinky remember slinkies they go downstairs you know he said oh great a slinky he opened up a presence from someone else it was a slinky and he went another Slinky and threw it over his head see that's what happens with student volunteers on excavation sites another piece of pottery am I going to find another piece of Potter yes Pottery however may not be exciting but it is important it is found in every layer of a site and its style changes from layer to layer and so it is the fundamental tool of archeology for dating each level has a different type of pottery and we're able to date layers based upon that yet in my view there is something even more important about Pottery at a base level it's real it's made of clay it's Here There and Everywhere it highlights the earthiness of what we do that is real it's Clay it comes from the ground you can't deny that just because your psychological core says this is a dog doesn't make it a dog it's a piece of pottery that's been around for thousands of years so you can say what you want but Pottery is real and true and not dependent on our own individual psychological core now don't get me wrong this does not mean that archaeological research has not been affected by modern progressivism because it has a recent movement in both the fields of anthropology and Archeology that when one finds a dead body whether a skeleton or a mummy or whatever that one should not publish the gender identity of the deceased because we don't know how that person identified its own gender in antiquity plus you're getting professors who are teaching that you can't distinguish between male and female bone structure of ancient humans don't believe that don't believe that that's certainly untrue so in the academic world archaeologists and others must Embrace Fields such as postcolonial thought feminism gender and queer politics and I racism racism and so forth if not then they are ostracized or can easily be canceled it's interesting what this has led to and what it's led to is anonymous internet publications of archaeologists who they don't give their names but they give their research they practice their craft anonymously so they won't get canceled that's kind of where we're headed in a lot of Fields today but for those of us who are Christians is critical for us not to give in to a historicism history is a pillar of scripture and the Christian worldview God is a god of History God created history and time is moving historically from creation to consummation creation fall Redemption glorification is both a theological and historical construct and the biblical writers knew this well in First Corinthians 15 for example Paul argues that if Christ has not been historically raised from the dead in time and in history then we are of all people most to be pitied if the resurrection was not a historical reality then let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die here is a hill for the believer to stand on and to die on don't listen to what the culture is teaching you listen to what scripture is teaching you and what reality is teaching you another aspect of this issue we are dealing with today is that we cannot assume that people are biblically and historically informed more so today than any time in our history as a nation is the reality that people are uninformed of such things most Americans today cannot name the four gospels one-third of Americans believe that Billy Graham gave The Sermon on the Mount so an important purpose of the study of archeology and its relationship to the Bible is to help us become informed literate and mature in our knowledge of the scriptures we must compel this age to learn God's word and to honor Christ now let me give you an example of how archeology can Enlighten our understanding of of the scriptures in Joshua chapter 2 verse 15 in the story of Rahab we read this curious statement says this then she let them down by a rope through the window for her house was built into the city wall so that she lived in the wall now the configuration of outer city walls surrounding ancient cities varied from period to period during rahab's time in the late Bronze Age many Canaanite cities had a thick solid walls fourth Acacia walls that surrounded their particular cities but through excavation we also know that some of the cities had what is called a casemate wall system a casemate wall was not a solid wall surrounding the city but it was formed by two parallel walls encircling the city with periodic perpendicular walls that created rooms in which people could live now in times of war and Times of Siege these double outer walls were filled in with Boulders and this would make the outer wall of the city a very thick but when these rooms were empty people use them as back rooms to their houses and thus we understand it is likely that Rahab just as the Book of Joshua says did indeed live in the wall of the city the city of Jericho now earlier in the account Rahab is pictured as hiding the two Israelite spies on on the roof of her house under stalks of flax that she had laid down on her roof now you think about It's Curious uh isn't it what was she doing exactly but archaeologists have uncovered many houses from this time that have staircases on the outside of the house that lead to the roof of the house to a flat roof on the house and just like today in villages in Israel the roof in ancient times was used for drying Foods in the Sun what Rahab had on her roof was common for the day and would not have raised suspicion from authorities it would have been a perfect place to hide the Israelite spies and thus they went undetected these are examples from Jericho how archeology can help us and Enlighten our understanding of difficult biblical texts see that's the primary purpose of archeology to Enlighten us to give us understanding of scripture now tried and true archaeological research of the Bible also fortifies us against falling prey to such things as what I call Pop archeology what do I mean by that well it receives a lot of press pop archeology announcing these staggering discoveries such as the Ark of the Covenant with blood still on it uh the Egyptian chariot wheels and the Red Sea Noah's house somebody's found or the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments on and on and on you'll get these people say they found these things now the purported stunning find has a long history in the church we're drawn to these things because we live by sight right and we're drawn to those for example in the early 4th Century A.D Constantine's mother Helena declared that she had discovered the true cross in Jerusalem she's the first pop archaeologist it's now commemorative you've been to Israel it's now commemorated in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher but many others throughout church history have made the same claim no that wasn't a cross I found the cross or someone else oh I found the cross no I found the cross even Erasmus the 16th century Catholic Catholic priest and famed humanist he was suspicious he said this so they say the cross of Our Lord which is shown publicly and privately in so many places that if all the fragments were collected together they would appear to form a fair cargo for a merchant ship or as Luther is purported to have claimed there's enough wood of the True Cross that we could build Noah's Ark now most of the claims of Pop archeology have been debunked and so the church we need to train our people we need to train people in our church our congregants to and and to educate them not to fall for uh charlatans not to fall for that stunning uh find whenever I I speak on on this topic on archeology uh rarely I'm not asked uh do you know where Noah's Ark is I go yes Genesis 6 through 9. yes I do no I don't know where the physical Arc is I was once asked by James Irwin you should know that name a an astronaut who landed on the moon he asked if I would go with his expedition to find the ark and I said no I'd sooner go to the Moon with you than go find Noah's Ark so no I did not participate in that the truth is we do not need to grasp for the for the spectacular find because archaeological true archaeological research has provided us with many important solid finds that help us understand the Bible foreign many of these discoveries are not well known by people in the church certainly not in society in in general so what I want to do for the remainder of our our lecture time here this afternoon is I want to look at a few of the most recent tried and true archaeological work that has truly illumined our understanding of scripture and help to set the narratives of the Bible in their proper historical setting I'm going to look at three recent finds during the iron one period now we're talking twelve hundred to a thousand BC when Israel was continuing its settlement in the land of Canaan there have been found no temples within Israelite contexts of the period some archaeologists however have proposed that some religious shrines do appear throughout the land but they're not full-fledged Temple complexes in the 1980s Adam zertal discovered a good example of a shrine from this time on the slopes of Mount evil and he identified it with the altar that Joshua set up to renew the Covenant recorded in Joshua chapter 8. now not everyone agrees with this identification but it seems to me it's a it's a it's a fairly solid identification recently a team went back to the site and what they did is they spent their time sifting through the soil dumps or the Earth dumps of zyrtos excavations in other words when you're digging a site and you go down you pull out all this Earth and you throw it into a dump okay so the this team went back and began sifting all of zertal's uh uh Earth that he had dumped out of the excavations in 2019 and just announced in 2022 that team discovered a lead tablet that is one square inch in size that contains four lines of texts cons text consisting of 40 letters It Was Written in early alphabetic Hebrew script and it's been translated by the archaeologists as follows cursed cursed cursed cursed by the god Yahweh you will die cursed cursed you will surely die cursed by Yahweh cursed cursed cursed well a writer he knew one word pretty well didn't he cursed this is obviously this uh inscription is some type of legal covenantal text that contains a curse invoking the name of Yahweh and of course that would fit with the context of Joshua chapter 8. where they go and on one mountain or the the half tribes of Israel saying forth the blessings the other half sing forth the curses okay so it would fit well with all of that and if this find proves to be genuine which which I I believe it will although the original inscription hasn't been published yet it hasn't been studied by the academic community uh I think if this is true which I think it it will be shown to be it is very important first it is likely that it is the earliest reference to the name Yahweh found in ancient Israel that's really important we're talking 1200 BC and secondly try and get this argument biblical Academia for decades has argued that parts of the Hebrew Bible such as the pentateuch could not have been written in the second millennium BC because the Hebrew language had not sufficiently developed during this time well we're learning more and more that that's not the case at all and if this inscription at Mount ebal is genuine and accurately dates to 1200 BC then we have further evidence for an early development of the Hebrew language second uh find in 2016 at the site of Lockheed which is in the foothills of Israel excavators found an ivory comb with an inscription on it the comb was made of elephant ivory it was a valuable object in Antiquity because at that time there were no elephants in the land of of Israel and therefore the peace must have been imported it perhaps came from Egypt where such types of combs are well known in antiquity the comb is an interesting ivory piece it has teeth on both sides of the cone one was one side was for untangling knots in a person's hair and the other side was used to remove lice and eggs from the hair now we know that you're kind of that's pretty gross but we know that because through microscopic analysis remains of head lice were found on the comb we also know its purpose from the inscription which was carved on the comb the incision was a mere seven words with a total of 17 letters written in the Canaanite language and what it says is this may this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard who have a pretty good idea its purpose don't we now what's interesting about that that find is the archaeologist through paleographic analysis and other means determined that the comb and its inscription date to the middle bronze 2 period which is between 1700 and 1550 BC this is several hundred years before the Israelites as a people entered into the land of Canaan that dating is important because no Canaanite or Hebrew inscription has been found in the land in good context before the 13th century BC this script inscription therefore predates any other in scriptural inscriptional material in those Languages by at least 300 years why is this important it's the same argument I just used on the last Relic again it is often argued that the pentateuch could not have been written in the second millennium BC by Moses or anyone else because Hebrew had not yet come into existence or had time to develop fully but the reality is this the Canaanite language and the Hebrew language are interrelated in fact when I looked at the Lockheed inscription on the ivory comb I was able to read it immediately because much of the Canaanite vocabulary on the on the comb is the same as Hebrew vocabulary and so the language of Canaanite Hebrew writing was in the land of Canaan at least two to three centuries before the time of Moses if you look at the more liberal and moderate commentators or archaeologists or historians they believe that nobody can really write in the second millennium BC but now we're able to take it back all the way to as far back as 1700 BC all right let me give you one more and then we'll we'll close some things up here in 1979 the Israeli archaeologists Gabriel barque was Excavating an Iron Age burial cave at the site of ketth hinnum which is located just Southwest of the city of Jerusalem the tomb was a typical late Iron Age burial chamber dating to the late 7th Century BC so it was Judean it was from the time of the Judean Kings and the typical Judean Burial at this time took place in a rock rock cut cave and it was a familial tomb when a person died they would take he or she and place the the the body on a burial bench in the Tomb accompanied with personal items such as Pottery vases jewelry and trinkets once the body decayed the bones of the person were taken off the bench and placed in a repository beneath the burial bench with other bones of deceased that had preceded them in death it's like you're being joined to the bones of the fathers okay so familial down through the centuries your family dies and you put them in these caves the the meat uh uh rots off of the bones they take the bones and place them underneath uh the burial bench now when the team began to excavate the repository They Came Upon two small silver Scrolls and since the Scrolls were metal the archaeologists had a difficult time unrolling and deciphering the text on each scroll they began with the larger of the two Scrolls and it took three years to unroll it when unrolled it only measured about three inches long and when they finished unrolling it they noticed that the scroll was covered with very delicately etched characters the first word they were able to decipher was the name Yahweh after much work they were able to read the entire miniature scroll and it contained the Priestly benediction from Numbers chapter six may the Lord bless you and keep you may the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you may the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace the smaller scroll also contained the Priestly benediction from Numbers Chapter 6. it took so long to enroll and decipher the two Scrolls that the material was not published until 1989. these two scrolls are relatively unknown although they can be seen today in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and they are very important first they are the earliest known citations of biblical texts in Hebrew that have been found they predate the earliest Dead Sea Scrolls by more than 400 years and so they are helpful in matters of textual criticism secondly I'm getting back to this point again I made with the first two and that is many Source critics throughout the years had regarded the Priestly benediction to be from the so-called P Source you know what I mean by that the jedp theory there are all these different sources coming in that give us the Old Testament and the P source is called the Priestly source and scholars believe the Priestly source to be a very late addition to the five books of Moses many commentators argue that the Priestly benediction Was Written In the post-exilic period after the destruction of the temple in its earliest date may have been in fourth century BC but wait a minute we've got realia we have in our hands physical material examples of the benediction found in a certain context of the late 7th Century BC and in a context that perhaps reflects common usage of the time and it is in the context of the Old Testament in which Judah and Jerusalem are thriving Hebrew enclaves and it is before the destruction of Judah and Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians the discovery of these two miniature scrolls with the same benediction in a repository repository where the bones of many people were buried finally underscores the centrality of the Priestly benediction to the religion of the Israelites may the Lord bless you and keep you when I was a PhD student archeology at the University of Chicago my thesis advisor came to me one day and he said that he had a donor that had presented a proposal to him the donor wanted to fund fully an expedition to the land of Moab to find the bones of Moses that the Lord had buried there before the Israelites crossed into the land of promise my advisor this will tell you a lot said that he immediately thought of me to lead the Expedition because he knew I had a high view of the Bible he was honest with me however and said he knew I wouldn't find anything but that I would get experience in leaving an expedition but I turned down the offer because I read Deuteronomy chapter 34 verses 5-6 so Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab according to the word of the Lord and he buried him in the valley in the land of Moab opposite Beth pior but no one knows the place of his burial to this day I figured that if the Israelites didn't know where Moses was buried then I had no chance of discovering it at all see we need not go for The Sensational or the spectacular find we need to depend on tried and true archaeological work to reveal ruins and fines that can help illuminate and give earthiness to the scriptures well I have two words for you Dr kurd one is here's your Atlas back and secondly thank you we're going to take a quick break we're going to reset here to get some questions from the students and hopefully some answers from you and we'll be right back well welcome back we do have a few questions ready in our our first question comes from started off as an online student but Andrew has joined us on campus this year so your question Andrew so Dr kirid since we're not looking for Sensational archaeological finds like the bones of Moses the Ark of the Covenant the Cross of Christ and we're looking for artifacts that are more an earthy nature that brings us into the biblical text what would be something of that nature that would be a cool find for us to have it's a good question um at the excavations of hatsor you know that site hatsor north of the Sea of Galilee the archaeologists there believes there is a Israelite uh monarchic Library at that site they haven't found it yet but they found one or two clay tablets that indicate that it might in fact be there and that's what we really need we don't have a lot of in scriptural material inscriptional material from either Israel or Judah we have some but not a lot and that would be really good now I'm worse I'm also used to working in Egypt a lot of my work is there we have so much written material we can't even translate it all but the opposite's true of of Israel um Israel they were more don't take this wrong but they were more hillbilly okay Egypt would be seen as you know the Boston of antiquity where there's a university on every street corner they were doing brain surgery they were doing all sorts of things in ancient Egypt the Israelites were living up in the hills in in Canaan so to find something like that would be a great find of course probably the greatest find ever of course in Israel are the Dead Sea scroll so you get stuff in writing that's really what you want to see and if you note that all three of the uh the fines the discoveries I talked about today were all inscriptional writing is really important when it comes to archeology but thank you for that question why would it have taken so long to open the silver Scrolls uh that's a great Science question that I probably don't know the full answer to it they they had fear of destroying it if they went too quickly and so I don't know all the scientific stuff of the Alloys and all that kind of stuff but it was a scientific exercise that took them that long to do it because they were very being very cautious and slow not to destroy anything that was within them so that's not the best answer I get I can give you I mean my best answer to that is I have no idea thank you okay in regards to your excavation of the Philistine Temple was there anything reminiscent or similar to the judge's narrative uh the the main point would be what I said the two pillars which held up the entire Temple and then we see that in the story of Samson at Gaza I think there's also some relationship to the Israelite Temple because you have the two main pillars the Boaz and I can't remember the name of the other one that held up the the temple in Jerusalem as well it's not that the Israelites borrowed from the Philistines or anything like that but I think it was like common uh Temple architecture of that time thank you well thank you Dr kurd that was the last of our questions and we have a gift for you before you head off this is a leaf from a Geneva Bible wow that was printed in 1577. wow and it is from second chronicles but what makes this Leaf special is it says up at the top the Ark of the Covenant wow so we know where the Ark of the Covenant is it's right here that's right thanks again for being with us this is a real appreciation pleasure join with me and just thanking Dr Curry for spending this time with us thank you well that concludes our real book room lecture we'll be back shortly with another lecture and we'd love to have you join us again thanks so much

Channel: Reformation Bible College

Views: 11,206

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Id: XEcX5jLqGJE

Length: 58min 14sec (3494 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 20 2023