#Bible archaeology

[icecreamwithjackdaniels]

If anyone's interested in Bible archaeology, you can check out this YouTube channel for insightful content: https://m.youtube.com/@ExpeditionBible.

[vickihinze]

The Priestly Benediction Prayer

The Priestly Benediction Amulet is another key proof of Israel’s long ownership of the land. Five hundred years older than the Dead Sea Scrolls, it was found in 1979 in the Valley of Hinnom between Old City Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives by a team led by Israeli archaeologist, Gariel Barkay. They had tossed the small item aside thinking it of no consequence when a young boy standing by asked,…

[jstor]

Birds? In the Bible? It's more likely than you think.

This Open Access book, available to all on JSTOR, discusses the birds mentioned in Leviticus and Deuteronomy and the possible reasons for which they were considered prohibited.

Image: A Cormorant. Etching. Wellcome Collection.

[specialagentartemis]

I especially love that elodieunderglass wrote that whole rant about how historians are all conservative stupid-heads who just don’t understand storytelling or education and that’s why STEM gets all the funding, because children just aren’t compelled by art or history and historians never do public outreach and just don’t want to save the world, and then tags their rent as “I am not stupid.”

Unfortunately I have to disrespectfully disagree there. I Think You Are Kinda Stupid

[astoriachef]

But why does he look like Bret Hart?

[tammuz]

Sumerian Cuneiform tablet from the ancient city of Ur, dating back to 2100-2000 BCE. Museum of the Bible, Washington, DC. 

Photo by Babylon Chronicle

[funeralcity]

omg just received the coolest tumblr asks of all time

[barfouniverse]

The Hebrew Bible is not history; it doesn't pretend to be. It is literature, and a peculiar brand of theological literature at that. It is a reconstruction of the past after the past was essentially over; written, edited and put together in its present form long after the collapse of both the northern kingdom (Israel) and the southern kingdom (Judah). It therefore refracts as well as reflects, the past. The Hebrew Bible is a kind of revisionist history.

-Prof. William G. Dever - Archaeologist/Anthropologist University of Arizona

[byfaithmedia]

The cherubim were a mystery but in the ancient world the cherubim were everywhere. Take a look at their legacy.

[jackredfieldwasmyjacob]

i often think about the inscription of nora, in sardinia, where the ancient land of tarshish, a place also talked about in the jewish bible, is talked about; it is the only testimony we have of tarshish in the western mediterranean.

scholars have tried to locate tarshish for centuries; they presumed is somewhere in the western mediterranean, but there's no conclusion. there's a theory i like tho.

because tarshish sounds similar to tartessos. in the nora inscription it says that it was the people from tarshish who sailed there and founded nora. and in pausanias he recalls how a group of iberians sailed to nora and founded the city, the oldest one in sardinia. we're talking about 9th century BCE or earlier btw. and if tarshish is tartessos, that means they were integrated into the mediterranean cultural sphere long before we thought they were, being involved with affairs at the other side of the sea.

[prehistoricpatristics]

The actual Mary Magdalene

I will never forgive Pope Gregory I for what he did to Mary Magdalene and how she's been demonised for years because of it. Mary Magdalene was never a sex worker, and was one of the most devout women within the Bible. SHE WAS RIGHTFULLY AN APOSTLE, St. Thomas Aquinas even called her the Apostle to the Apostles, she only got a specific saint day (not a memorial day) in 2016-

Mary Magdalene has been destroyed by history, which she never deserved.

[brianchilton]

S7E12 The Historicity of the Bible (w. Dr. Michelle Johnson)

By: Brian Chilton, Ph.D., and Michelle Johnson, Ph.D. | November 30, 2023 S7E12 The Historicity of the Bible with Dr. Michelle Johnson on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Epiww_1aXa0%5B/embedyt%5D S7E12 Historicity of the Bible How do we determine if something is historically sound? What factors prove the historicity of creation? Is there any evidence to prove the biblical story of the…

[aboutanancientenquiry]

Tall el-Hammam, Biblical Sodom, “cosmic airbursts”, and pseudoscience

This is the beginning of an article of a team of two archaeologists and an anthropologist debunking a pseudoscientific paper which claimed that the site of Tall el-Hammam in Jordan would be the Biblical Sodom and that there would be evidence about the destruction of the same site by some kind of “cosmic airburst”.

“OP-ED / COUNTERPOINT

When Biblically Inspired Pseudoscience and Clickbait Cause Looting

A team of anthropologists argues that flawed research linking biblical Sodom to an archaeological site led to media hype that harms science and encourages illegal excavations.

By MORAG M. KERSEL, MEREDITH S. CHESSON, AND AUSTIN "CHAD" HILL

15 DEC 2021

Archaeologist and co-author Morag M. Kersel stands in one of thousands of looters’ pits at the Early Bronze Age cemetery of Bâb adh-Dhrâʿ in Jordan.

Yorke M. Rowan

The whole artiicle can be found on https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/tall-el-hammam/

[feedingtheflockministry]

Discovering the MOABITE STONE...MATCHES the Bible!

The Moabite Stone (Mesha Stele) was almost ruined before it had the chance to be interpreted. Join Joel to learn about the exciting story of its discovery in 1868 and how it accurately matches historical details found in the Bible.

[quotesfrommyreading]

The Mesha Stele, a three-foot-tall black basalt monument dating to nearly 3,000 years ago, bears a 34-line inscription in Moabite, a language closely related to ancient Hebrew—the longest such engraving ever found in the area of modern-day Israel and Jordan. In 1868, an amateur archaeologist named Charles Clermont-Ganneau was serving as a translator for the French Consulate in Jerusalem when he heard about this mysterious inscribed monument lying exposed in the sands of Dhiban, east of the Jordan River. No one had yet deciphered its inscription, and Clermont-Ganneau dispatched three Arab emissaries to the site with special instructions. They laid wet paper over the stone and tapped it gently into the engraved letters, which created a mirror-image impression of the markings on the paper, what’s known as a “squeeze” copy.

But Clermont-Ganneau had misread the delicate political balance among rival Bedouin clans, sending members of one tribe into the territory of another—and with designs on a valuable relic no less. The Bedouin grew wary of their visitors’ intentions. Angry words turned threatening. Fearing for his life, the party’s leader made a break for it and was stabbed in the leg with a spear. Another man leaped into the hole where the stone lay and yanked up the wet paper copy, accidentally tearing it to pieces. He shoved the torn fragments into his robe and took off on his horse, finally delivering the shredded squeeze to Clermont-Ganneau.

Afterward, the amateur archaeologist, who would become an eminent scholar and a member of the Institut de France, tried to negotiate with the Bedouin to acquire the stone, but his interest, coupled with offers from other international bidders, further irked the tribesmen; they built a bonfire around the stone and repeatedly doused it with cold water until it broke apart. Then they scattered the pieces. Clermont-Ganneau, relying on the tattered squeeze, did his best to transcribe and translate the stele’s inscription. The result had profound implications for our understanding of biblical history.

The stone, Clermont-Ganneau found, held a victory inscription written in the name of King Mesha of Moab, who ruled in the ninth century B.C. in what is now Jordan. The text describes his blood-soaked victory against the neighboring kingdom of Israel, and the story it told turned out to match parts of the Hebrew Bible, in particular events described in the Book of Kings. It was the first contemporaneous account of a biblical story ever discovered outside the Bible itself—evidence that at least some of the Bible’s stories had actually taken place.

In time, Clermont-Ganneau collected 57 shards from the stele and, returning to France, made plaster casts of each—including the one Langlois now held in his hand—rearranging them like puzzle pieces as he worked out where each of the fragments fit. Then, satisfied he’d solved the puzzle, he “rebuilt” the stele with the original pieces he’d collected and a black filler that he inscribed with his transcription. But large sections of the original monument were still missing or in extremely poor condition. Thus certain mysteries about the text persist to this day—and scholars have been trying to produce an authoritative transcription ever since.

The end of line 31 has proved particularly thorny. Paleographers have proposed various readings for this badly damaged verse. Part of the original inscription remains, and part is Clermont-Ganneau’s reconstruction. What’s visible is the letter bet, then a gap about two letters long, where the stone was destroyed, followed by two more letters, a vav and then, less clearly, a dalet.

In 1992, André Lemaire, Langlois’ mentor at the Sorbonne, suggested that the verse mentioned “Beit David,” the House of David—an apparent reference to the Bible’s most famous monarch. If the reading was correct, the Mesha Stele did not just offer corroborating evidence for events described in the Book of Kings; it also provided perhaps the most compelling evidence yet for King David as a historical figure, whose existence would have been recorded by none other than Israel’s Moabite enemies. The following year, a stele uncovered in Israel also seemed to mention the House of David, lending Lemaire’s theory further credence.

Over the next decade, some scholars adopted Lemaire’s reconstruction, but not everyone was convinced. A few years ago, Langlois, along with a group of American biblical scholars and Lemaire, visited the Louvre, where the reconstructed stele has been on display for more than a century. They took dozens of high-resolution digital photographs of the monument while shining light on certain sections from a wide variety of angles, a technique known as Reflectance Transformation Imaging, or RTI. The Americans were working on a project about the development of the Hebrew alphabet; Langlois thought the images might allow him to weigh in on the King David controversy. But watching the photographs on a computer screen in the moments they were taken, Langlois didn’t see anything of note. “I was not very hopeful, frankly—especially regarding the Beit David line. It was so sad. I thought, ‘The stone is definitively broken, and the inscription is gone.’”

It took several weeks to process the digital images. When they arrived, Langlois began playing with the light settings on his computer, then layered the images on top of each other using a texture-mapping software to create a single, interactive, 3D image—probably the most accurate rendering of the Mesha Stele ever made.

And when he turned his attention to line 31, something tiny jumped off the screen: a small dot. “I’d been looking at this specific part of the stone for days, the image was imprinted in my eyes,” he told me. “If you have this mental image, and then something new shows up that wasn’t there before, there’s some kind of shock—it’s like you don’t believe what you see.”

In some ancient Semitic inscriptions, including elsewhere on the Mesha Stele, a small engraved dot signified the end of a word. “So now these missing letters have to end with vav and dalet,” he told me, naming the last two letters of the Hebrew spelling of “David.”

Langlois reread the scholarly literature to see if anyone had written about the dot—but, he said, no one had. Then, using the pencil on his iPad Pro to imitate the monument’s script, he tested every reconstruction previously proposed for line 31. Taking into account the meaning of the sentences that come before and after this line, as well as traces of other letters visible on RTI renderings the group had made of Clermont-Ganneau’s squeeze copy, Langlois concluded that his teacher was right: The damaged line of the Mesha Stele did, almost certainly, refer to King David. “I really tried hard to come up with another reading,” Langlois told me. “But all of the other readings don’t make any sense.”

In the sometimes contentious world of biblical archaeology, the finding was hailed by some scholars and rejected by others. Short of locating the missing pieces of the stele miraculously intact, there may be no way to definitively prove the reading one way or another. For many people, though, Langlois’ evidence was as close as we might get to resolving the debate. But that hasn’t stopped him from inviting competing interpretations. Last year, Matthieu Richelle, an epigrapher who also studied under Lemaire, wrote a paper arguing, among other things, that Langlois’ dot could just be an anomaly in the stone. He presented his findings at a biblical studies conference in a session organized by Langlois himself. “This says something about how open-minded he is,” Richelle told me.

  —  How an Unorthodox Scholar Uses Technology to Expose Biblical Forgeries

[freebiblestudies]

Biblical Archaeology Lesson 02: The New Testament

In our previous study, we examined ten archaeological discoveries that demonstrated the historical accuracy of the Old Testament.  Today, we will examine ten archaeological finds with relevance to the New Testament.

Let’s read together Acts 13:6-12.

Sergius Paulus inscription

A Roman proconsul was a governor or military commander of a province.  Sergius was the proconsul of Cyprus under the reign of Claudius Caesar from 45 to 50 AD.  A stone with a Greek inscription dating to 54 AD was found in northern Cypress.  The inscription referred to an event that happened earlier than 54 AD and referenced a “proconsul Paulus.”  It is very likely this inscription is speaking of the same Sergius Paulus who encountered Paul the Apostle in Paphos.

Let’s read together John 9:1-7.

Pool of Siloam

The pool of Siloam was a freshwater reservoir in the time of Jesus.  It was at this pool where Jesus miraculously cured a man of his blindness.  It was accidentally discovered in 2004 by workers doing sewage pipe maintenance in the old city of Jerusalem.  The discovery of the pool of Siloam shows that the book of John is not a purely theological book.  Rather, it is grounded in history.

Let’s read together Acts 19:22; Romans 16:23; and 2 Timothy 4:20..

Erastus inscription

A stone with a Latin inscription dating around 50 AD was found in Corinth.  The inscription translated in English reads: “Erastus in return for hisa aedileship laid (the pavement) at his own expense.”  (An aedile was a Roman magistrate in charge of public works.)  This discovery points to the historicity of Erastus, an evangelist and a socially elite individual mentioned by Paul the Apostle.

Let’s read together Matthew 26:3 and John 18:13-14.

Caiaphas ossuary

An ossuary with the engraving “Joseph son of Caiaphas” was discovered in a burial cave in the old city of Jerusalem.  The skeletal remains inside the ossuary were of a 50 year old.  This ossuary is very likely the remains of the priest who presided over the trial of Jesus.

Let’s read together Acts 21:27-30 and Ephesians 2:14.

Temple warning inscription

The Jewish historian Josephus wrote of a partition in the Jewish temple with a stone inscription forbidding foreigners from entering the temple upon penalty of death.  A complete stone inscription with such a warning was found in Jerusalem in 1871.  Interestingly, there were traces of red paint in the stone inscription, meaning it was meant to be very visible to people.

This inscription correlates with the story in Acts 21:28-30 where the Jews accused Paul of bringing in Greeks into the temple and defiling it.  Paul may have also referred to this barrier in Ephesians 2:14.

Let’s read together Leviticus 23:24 and Matthew 24:1-2.

Trumpeting place inscription

A stone with the Hebrew inscription “to the place of trumpeting” was discovered in Jerusalem, dating to the first century.  It is thought this stone was atop the southwest corner of the temple of Jerusalem before it was cast down.  This is evidence for the existence of the second temple of Jerusalem, which was destroyed in 70 AD.

Let’s read together Matthew 28:11-13.

Nazareth inscription

This stone inscription contains an edict from Caesar proclaiming the death penalty for those caught stealing bodies from tombs.  This is a rather unusual decree as grave robbers normally would steal items from tombs, but not the bodies.

It is quite possible this inscription was written by Claudius Caesar in response to hearing Christians sharing the story of Jesus’ resurrection.  Claudius would have considered Christians a dangerous anti-Roman movement.

Let’s read together Acts 18:12.

Gallio inscription

This is a collection of nine stone fragments of a letter written by Claudius Caesar in 52 AD.  The Gallio inscription was found in Delphi, Greece, which is about 50 miles northwest of Corinth.  This inscription makes mention of Junius Gallio being proconsul of Achaia.  Gallio only served as proconsul from 51 to 52 AD.  The Gallio inscription is a fixed marker that allows us to date Paul’s ministry.

Let’s read together Matthew 27:1-24 and Mark 15:1-15.

Pilate stone

Pontius Pilate was a Roman prefect governing Judea from 26 to 34 AD.  He is mentioned by the historians Josephus, Tacitus, and Philo in addition to the Gospels.  The Pilate stone confirms the historicity of Pontius Pilate.

Let’s read together John 18:31-33.

P52 fragment of John 18:31-33

This is a papyrus fragment dating to 125 to 175 AD.  This is the oldest known fragment of the New Testament Gospels.  The significance of this fragment is that it was written within 100 years of the events of the Gospels.

There has not been an archaeological find that contradicts the Bible.  The historical events recorded in the New Testament are factual.  The archaeological discoveries mentioned in this lesson should increase our trust in the Bible.

Friend, will you trust what the Bible says about historical things?  Will you trust what the Bible says about spiritual things?