King Uzziah: Digging for Truth Episode 104

welcome to digging for truth sponsored by the associates for biblical research i'm your co-host henry smith today we're going to be talking about one of the longest reigning kings of judah king uzziah abr staff member brian windall has joined us again to do another archaeological biography well welcome back once again brian to digging for truth thanks henry it's great to join you again this is fun it is fun we're uh you're you're as i said before you're you're becoming part of the scenery here at digging for truth and we're going to do a bioarchaeography the word that you invented we're going to keep sharing that word with our our audience in case we have new audience members so today we're talking about king uzziah who reigned for a very long time 52 years in judah so why don't you go ahead and tell the audience a little bit about this famous king and then we'll get into some archaeology well i would some usia's life up with the phrase how the mighty have fallen um and that's because you can divide uzziah's reign really into two parts the first part of his reign where he was faithful to the lord and the second part of his reign where he became very proud and suffered some consequences for this and so he was as you mentioned one of the longest reigning kings of of judah 52 years from roughly 792 to 740 bc and scripture records um how uzziah became king after his father's death and this is what it says it says and all of the people of judah took uzziah who was 16 years old and made him king instead of his father amaziah he built elath and restored it to judah after the king slept with his fathers uzziah was 16 years old when he began to reign and he reigned 52 years in jerusalem his mother's name was jackaliah of jerusalem he did what was right in the eyes of the lord according to all that his father amaziah had done he set himself to seek god in the days of zechariah who instructed him in the fear of god as long as he sought the lord god made him prosper and so uzziah also known as azariah in 1st kings 15 verse 1 to 7 and scholars really don't know why he has two names see some people say maybe one was a throne name that he took um we're just not sure we just know in the accounting kings he has a different name than the encounter in the book of chronicles but because he's best known by the name uzziah that's what we'll call him with today and as i mentioned later in his reign he became very proud of his accomplishments and after zechariah's death zechariah was his advisor priest who who taught him god's law after his death he decided he wanted to be priest he wanted to offer the sacrifices and so he went in to offer incense to the lord and usurped their role and as a result he was struck with leprosy and he lived as a leper in a separate house until the day of his death we're told that in ii chronicles chapter 26 and so beyond being a cautionary tale for all of us about pride the two questions that we have to ask ourselves is is there any evidence for king uzziah and can we determine the accuracy of the biblical account of his reign and so those are the two questions really that we should investigate this morning as it comes to king uzziah yeah that's a good that's good setting the stage you know funny i don't know why this came to mind i was thinking he was 16 years old when he took the throne you know i gotta think of modern day parents here in the us getting nervous about their kid driving a car right at 16 and here we have somebody who takes the throne of israel of judah at the age of 16 right wow what a responsibility uh the other part is is the warning that you talk about you'll talk about that more towards the end of our episode so but uh it takes a great deal of of spiritual strength to stay faithful to god and follow his law very strictly and here he violated it so but with that in mind let's move to the historical evidence let's talk about some uh discoveries related to his eye how about the um uzia tablet this is probably the most famous inscription about king uzziah and it has to do with a tablet that was found this square tablet it's a funerary inscription in 1932 this burial plaque was rediscovered we say it was rediscovered by e.l suknick a professor of archaeology at hebrew university in jerusalem he was looking through some items in the russian orthodox monastery on the mount of olives and he came across this marble slab that has this aramaic inscription which reads here were brought the bones of uzziah king of judah do not open now we want the viewers to know this isn't this does not date from the time of king uzziah this dates too much later than that sometime between the hasmonean and the early roman periods so about 150 bc to about 50 a.d and it appears to be a marker that indicates that they moved to the bones of king uzziah likely as a result of the city expanding and they didn't want the city to expand into areas where there were tombs and so they moved the dead bodies so that the people living there wouldn't be defiled and gordon france indicates he notes that josephus records that during the reign of herod the great they erected a monument over the tomb of david after some people tried to steal some of the gold and silver from that tomb and so that was probably around the same time that they also moved the bones of king uzziah and so the this usia tablet it's currently on display at the israel museum in jerusalem it's um it testifies to uzziah's historicity that he was the king of judah and uh indicates that at about 2000 years ago they moved his bones to a new tomb uh we don't know where that is that's been lost but we have this plaque now that uh that testifies to the fact that he was a real person and um and that they moved his bones at one time from the royal tomb that was within the city to another somewhere outside of the city at that time yeah it's interesting in a way in a way the tablet is sort of a evidence of a trail of a tradition if you want to say it that way because we don't have a written record keeping track of where the tomb was but nonetheless it's a very important piece of evidence it's interesting too because in between his reign and the plaque you know jerusalem was destroyed by the babylonians and somehow the people of uh of judah even after the exile were able to sort of figure out and keep track of where the tombs of the kings were i suppose the babylonians probably didn't care much about that and left it alone yeah we sometimes forget about um tradition and um we forget about the fact that there were people who when they returned from exile had been in jerusalem before the exile right remember we we read about how people who saw the new um the new temple that was built um cried when they remembered the old temple and so there were people who would have remembered where things were in the city and that knowledge would have been passed down and and um for us in the 21st century maybe it's kind of hard for us to think about how this all works and tradition because we want everything documented but oral tradition is a powerful thing in the middle east yeah it would seem to me that that would be the case i mean granted we had a little some time with the babylonian exile but not like you know hundreds of years and so uh it would seem it seemed to be very plausible that this tablet legitimately marked his tomb well friends we're just getting started here about king uzziah of judah who reigned for 52 years there in israel and with that word we'll be right back after a brief message in a culture of intense bible-denying skepticism associates for biblical research exists to strengthen followers of jesus by affirming the authority of the bible our archaeological field work and original research form a strong foundation in upholding the reliability of the scriptures for students or anyone asking if they can really trust the bible please visit our website and partner with us by joining our prayer team or financially supporting this ministry and thank you for standing with us hi welcome back to digging for truth i'm your co-host henry smith and today i'm here with brian wendell abr staff member pastor in canada and we're here talking about king uzziah who reigned in judah for 52 years now brian we were talking about the usia tablet in our last segment now we're going to shift and talk about some more archaeological evidence uh related to this famous king why don't you go ahead with our next uh discovery sure the usaid tablet of course as we talked about in the last segment comes from uh well after his reign but we actually have inscriptions that come from um the period of his reign and so two seals that once belonged to officials in his court um name him by name one reads belonging to abayu servant of uzziah it's made of egate and depicts a annealing uh figure an egyptian figure and was likely used in a ring and the second is made out of red limestone and it reads belonging to seb nyu or shebnai whose servant of uzziah and it depicts a man holding a scepter on his left hand with his right hand raised and based on the shape of the letters that are on here and the style of the seals they both date to the time of king uzziah now we do need to say this both of these seals came from the antiquities market and generally anything that comes on the antiquities market is with good reason um seen with skepticism however both of these were were purchased on the antiquity market in the mid 1800s well before the time people knew um how to forge the you know 8th century bc um in inscriptions and what the letters would have looked like and so it both of these are universally accepted as authentic and both have the words ebed for servant and that indicates that they were a servant of a king and so we now know that the uzziah that is mentioned on them is a king hence we have two seals from um servants who were from the king of um the king of judah now we don't know these two people those two people aren't named in scripture but again it's archaeological evidence and in this case archaeological evidence dating right to the period of king uzziah testifying to his historicity and then in addition to this we have another inscription uh from the assyrian king tigoth palestine iii and it mentions azariah of judah remember azariah was uzziah's other name and it mentions him several times um in one part he writes um ticos polizer writes 19 districts of hamath together with the cities of their environs on the shore of the sea of the setting sun who had gone over to azariah and revolt in contempt of of assyria and while this event is not known in scripture it is consistent with the description in scripture of uzziah's influence expanding through the territory and it seems that there was other countries or other nations or other city-states that joined with uzziah or azariah in revolting against assyria now i should note that that there is some debate around whether this inscription really refers to azerite the king of judah because it just says azariah of judah and some have suggested well maybe there was another azariah who was the head of another area named judah it just seems a little unlikely to me i tend to think that that it does refer to the king of you king uzziah it certainly fits historically and i think it's other evidence again of king uzziah yeah yeah i mean maybe you know this is when you're dealing with the past and you and you don't have a you know video footage and even then video footage uh in even today's world can be manipulated or misunder misinterpreted right so there's there's never the certainty that we would like to achieve but certainly your supposition makes sense by the way i asked my wife if uh if we had a son if we would name him tiglath pulaser iii and she she said no to that uh i love love these names from the ancient world you know so okay now we're going to shift to some more evidence one of the most important events that occurs uh during the time of the divided kingdom and that is famous amos's earthquake why don't you go ahead and talk about that a little bit sure well when we look at king uzziah one of the things that we ask as people who are interested in archaeology is does the archaeology support the description that we have in scripture from a particular person and from the reign and so with king uzziah one of the things that is attached to his life is this earthquake there was a famous earthquake that took place in the reign of uzziah so the prophet amos for example you mentioned he dates his ministry to this geological event in amos 1 1 we read the words of amos one of the shepherds of toccoa what he saw concerning israel two years before the earthquake when uzziah was king of judah the prophet zechariah also mentions this earthquake and by the way this zachariah is the prophet who lived after the exile not zechariah the priest who was the adviser to to uzziah so just not to confuse those two but the prophet zechariah prophesied he said you will flee to my mountain by my mountain valley for it will extend to azell you will flee as you fled the earthquake in the days of uzziah king of judah we have archaeological evidence of a massive earthquake in the whole levant region during the mid 8th century just when uzziah was said to reign it's found all over they found evidence of it at hadzor at gath um and and so at at telesafi which is gath for example they found this collapsed wall in which the bricks had moved laterally about two meters as a result of the earthquake had moved right off their foundation and then toppled and based on this uh strata stratographic conf context it's dated to the mid-18th century and was likely a result of the earthquake the excavator said this is probably usaid's earthquake that did this uh moreover there was a recent article in the journal tech techton physics and it dealt with the paleo seismic evidence so they they used carbon 14 to date the organic matter in these different deformed layers that they think came from these earthquakes and what they found is that there were actually two significant earthquakes in the may 18th century right around the time of uzziah and likely the the greater one is the one that's mentioned and remembered um with his um with his reign in fact some scholars have actually done looked at some of the evidence and calculated that it had a magnitude of 7.8 to 8.2 that is a significant earthquake now josephus ties the earthquake to um to this later sinful act of him trying to offer um incense and says at that moment there was a massive earthquake we we don't know that for sure josephus is the only ancient writer who who mentions this and we're not sure if that's just him taking some colorful liberty or not but we do know there is archaeological evidence all around um the levant the area particularly of judah that that shows there was this earthquake during the reign of uzziah that that's an excellent sketch yeah this this event is significant we think of significant events on a modern day 911 pearl harbor you know things like that events that shake people up and this one extends all the way down into uh several centuries later to the to the prophet zechariah so it's god's reminder of of the perilous nature of human existence and that there need to be reconciled to the creator so with that thought brian we're going to be right back for our third segment talking about king uzziah bible in spade is a non-technical quarterly publication published by the associates for biblical research written from a scholarly and conservative viewpoint bible and spade supports the inerrancy of the biblical record and is a must read for both the serious bible student and anyone asking if they can really trust the bible archaeological evidence properly interpreted upholding the history of the bible subscribe today at biblearchaeology.org [Music] hi welcome back to digging for truth i'm your co-host henry smith and i'm here with brian windall we're talking about king uzziah who reigned in judah for 52 years we were just talking about the earthquake that occurred during the time of amos the prophet who lived along at the same time azusa okay brian let's uh keep rolling along here with uh discussing the archaeology we talked about the uh the earthquake in our last segment why don't you uh pick it up from there for us please well uzziah of course is probably best known for the earthquake but he was also known as a prolific builder during his reign scripture records that he built towers in jerusalem at the corner gate at the valley gate and at the angle and he fortified them it says he built towers in the wilderness and cut out many cisterns for he had large large herds both in the shephelah and in the plain and he had farmers and vine dressers in the hills and fertile lands for he loved the soil and when we look at the archaeological record what we see is that in the mid eighth century there seems to be this kind of increase in building activity throughout the area of judah and um and so um for example an 8th century bc fortress was discovered at the site that's been identified as katish barnia had eight rectangular towers and a cistern and a citadel um and then towers and cisterns from this period have also been found at gibeah for example remember that's where where saul was from gibeah of saul also found at beersheba and then another man named pesach barad and he surveyed and excavated a series of 8th century bc sites in the judean wilderness and including qumran and what he found was that they resembled forts and and this would be consistent with what scripture says that he built towers and cisterns in the wilderness and it may have been a strategic attempt on his part to fortify some settlements to defend the eastern border of the kingdom and to control some of the trade routes there although that's not what's said in scripture we can speculate that that might have been the case in fact if you go to qumran today there's a very famous round cistern at qumran which dates to the iron age you can see it in the middle of this photo and people have suggested scholars have suggested that this was a cistern that that is the remains there they also say there was the remains of a tower at qumran as well lakeish beth shemesh also appear to have areas that were constructed during the reign of uzziah and and so he he expanded and built up his kingdom but then we're also told in scripture that he expanded his kingdom by conquest second chronicles 26 6 reads this way it says he went out and made war against the philistines and broke through the wall of gath and the wall of jebna and the wall of ashdod and he built cities in the territory of ashdod and elsewhere among the philistines so he he expanded his territory to the west during this period now we've got these three sites we've got a gath ashdod and jebna and so the question obviously becomes if we go to those three sites do we find evidence of that and and the reality is that anytime you're looking at archaeology you're looking at fragmentary evidence um and and the data is always has to be interpreted and the fact is that the jabna which is likely televina it hasn't even been sufficiently excavated so we can't even gain an understanding really of that site uh at ashdod there are two 8th century bc destruction layers beneath an assyrian structure at the base of the tail and that may provide some evidence but it's not really a really clear picture there and then when we come to tell us safety gath we don't have evidence of the wall being destroyed at that particular part but what we do have is an 8th century bc judah height occupation in area f at the site which you can see on the screen labeled here which would indicate that at some point during the reign of uzziah likely um judah gained control of that site which would be consistent with this verse and so when we look at it it's like all archaeology our friend scott stripling likes to say you know where you have two archaeologists you have three opinions right right you're always interpreting data yes and what i would say is that there is data at at least two of those sites that can be interpreted to support this verse and isn't it interesting that we see in scripture and then we come to the archaeology and we can find data like that as well yeah a quick lesson for us too is to always wait for more data to come in before we jump to conclusions both in one direction or the other whether it's skepticism or affirmation of the biblical text but i mean we have confidence the biblical text is accurate because it's the word of god but nonetheless we have some anecdotal evidence that you laid out in the archaeology but brian we're going to shift now away from some of the evidence we have about two minutes left and i'd like i'd like you to wrap up the show by talking about the life lessons of uzziah this is always something we can draw out of the biblical text we see most of the kings were you know a variety of different character flaws that came out of them some of them worse than others but maybe you could you could wrap up the show this with this i think king uzziah is an interesting character and beyond the archaeology i mean 100 years of archaeology we have affirmation of him there is no doubt that there was a king uzziah and many of the the events from his life uh have been affirmed by the archaeology and so um so that's that's important but when i look at the life of king uzziah i think the thing that really strikes me is the pride that he has um and it's because of the pride we're told that that it led to his downfall how the mighty have fallen he tried to usurp a role that was not his he got too big for his britches if we want to use the old-fashioned term and he ended up living the remainder of his life as a leprous outcast i mean his life illustrates the um the proverb pride goes before a fall and a haughty spirit before destruction and here's where i i look at it today when it comes to the gospel the message of salvation through faith in jesus christ really it's pride that is a stumbling block for so many rather than admitting that we are sinners in need of a savior and submitting through faith and repentance to the lordship of christ many people harden their hearts and they reject the lord jesus now king uzziah suffered the consequences for his pride and his hardening of his heart and and we at abr pray that our viewers and those who hear the good news of jesus um will not harden their hearts either archaeology is important it affirms the stuff that's in scripture but the gospel message of what jesus christ has done for us when he took our place dying on the cross that is the core of what we believe who jesus is as god who came to earth in the form of a man and what he did for us by dying in our place and giving his life as a sacrifice for us that's the core of what we believe and i think even usia's life points at that with a warning of pride that's a great way to end the show brian thank you for being with us and friends we hope that you take uh what brian just shared to heart if you're considering the truth claims of the gospel today and receive the forgiveness of sins through the death and resurrection of god's son thank you for joining us today [Music] you

Channel: Associates for Biblical Research

Views: 4,703

Rating: 4.9012346 out of 5

Keywords: Associates for Biblical Research, Digging for Truth, Old Testament, Biblical Archaeology, Biblical Archeology, Apologetics, Christianity, Jesus, Jesus Christ, King Uzziah, Amos Earthquake, Archeology, Archaeology, History, Bible, Bible Archeology, Bible Archaeology

Id: A6c27BxtjfM

Length: 26min 0sec (1560 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 20 2020