Q&A 34: Historicity of the accounts from Genesis 12 through Joshua - Part I
Genesis 12 · Vern Peterman · Aug 29, 2010
Questions & Answers, No. 35
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/492621357412

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

We'll be taking a look here at, believe it or not, we're going to change subjects. That might be somewhat of a shock, but we actually are. For the next few weeks we're going to be looking at, is there any historical evidence behind the accounts that begin from Genesis 12 on in through the book of Joshua, largely dealing with the patriarchs and the Israelites as the We're in Egypt, left Egypt, went through the desert, and entered the promised land, and looking at that. It's quite an area of challenge, and the answers that you get are amazingly varied, and we're going to look at why first, before stepping into specifically the evidence. And just so that there's no misunderstanding, we're going to be looking at the question, is there any historical evidence and not hysterical evidence? OK, so we won't be doing that. So I'll be looking at historical evidence and we'll want to do it from this standpoint.

There are those who would say, okay, you've got science over here, you've got faith over here, and I think one of the Sunday school jokes is something like, there was one kid that said, faith is believing what you know isn't true. No, no, no, that's not quite right. It is not a matter of science versus faith. As we'll see here shortly, it's a matter of which faith do you hold to as you're involved in science. So we're going to see that distinction here.

One of the things we pointed out last week, and we will do so again because it's a big issue when we look at this, a minimalist believes that only those parts of the Bible that are independently confirmed are trusted to be historical. If you don't get some other confirmation, then it's just plain false. You can't trust it, right? So, look, the Bible is not trustworthy, everything else is.

That's kind of the thought there. God and all other spiritual beliefs, such as angels, demons, etc., are assumed to be the product of Jewish culture. Cause and effect must be explained entirely within the physical realm, excluding the spiritual realm in such explanations. Only science and the physical realm have a hope of being certain and knowing anything. It is assumed God did not part the waters so that the Jews could go through, just flat out. That's not an acceptable explanation. God did not make the walls fall down at Jericho. That's not an acceptable explanation, right?

So, only science and the physical realm have a hope of being certain and knowing anything. So this is the minimalist viewpoint and the maximalist is the Bible is taken as historical evidence on its own not requiring external verification of every person and event to be trusted. God is seen as the creator of all and other beings and things visible and invisible as the Bible says. Cause and effect may be explained within the physical realm or the spiritual realm or both. Only the Bible has a hope of revealing anything with certainty and knowing the truth, and scientific inquiry complements the Bible, but not on the same basis of authority and certainty. So you have fairly extreme views. One says the Bible is to be trusted, even over above science. The other of you says don't trust the Bible for anything. So rather extreme views. That's the minimalist and the maximalist.

So there are those with academic credentials in the realm of history and archaeology, but what the Bible is largely non-historical and not a reliable guide to actual historical events and persons. We'll be taking a look at who some of those guys are and what they say and believe. Then there are those with academic credentials in the realm of history and archaeology. Behold, the Bible is largely to entirely historical and is a very reliable guide to actual historical events and persons.

And both of them have academic credentials, doctorate degrees. experience and all that. The difference between these viewpoints is in their scientifically unverifiable presuppositions. It is not a matter of science versus faith, but faith versus faith. Not science versus faith, faith versus faith. When we go into history, we must operate with unverifiable presuppositions. And when we step back into prehistory, and you'll notice as I write this up and put it on the screen, I put prehistory in quotes. Why would I put prehistory in quotes?

When you have eternity, there is no beginning and end. All right. Jack says when you have no eternity, there's no beginning and end. Certainly, that's true. Let's have this question, though. Is there a written record of Adam? There is a written record of Adam. There's a written record of Noah. There's a written record...

And so what you find out is that if the Old Testament is taken to be historical, all the way back to the beginning, if it's taken to be historical, then you don't have prehistory. you have history going all the way back to the very first human being. And so that's why I put prehistory in quotes.

It's a term that has some assumptions built into it, isn't it? Or, and I have this, or portions of history where the evidence is scanty or circumstantial. We must operate with even more unverifiable presuppositions. Where we have less evidence to work with, what do we do? We work with more assumptions. We make more assumptions because we don't have the evidence.

Even if we attempt to use science for answers to historic or prehistoric questions, we are not operating in the ideal scientific realm. The ideal scientific realm is when you can verify things by human observation. We cannot go back in time to verify that any of our present processes or phenomena are actually, actually were as we observe them now, or how things were at the beginning. We can't go back and verify. That's one reason why I switched from geology to civil engineering. Because with civil engineering, it was a matter of these are all things that I can verify. You know, does this bolt hold 50,000 pounds? Well, you can take 10 of them and try, right? There are things back in the past, I can't repeat it. I can't verify it. I can't examine it. I can make assumptions, but I can't check them. There's no way I can do it.

We cannot repeat an historic or prehistoric event as we can with other fully scientifically verifiable processes and phenomena. Okay, Cecil B. DeMille may have had a different opportunity, but we can't go back and say, okay, all you Israelites get back on the other side of the Red Sea and let's see these waters part again and let's get those dead Egyptians out of the water and get them back up on the shore and let's run through this thing again. We can't do any of that. It's not subject to scientific verification in the same sense as all the other things that we rely upon.

You really don't want your car to be based on a lot of assumptions, do you? You drive the car down the road because the physics of the car and the physics of the road, all those things are based on repeatable, verifiable, science. Observations that we can go through again and again. In the end, the materialist or minimalist, when I say materialist, I mean those who believe that there is simply the material realm. If there is a spiritual realm, we have no way to access it.

That would be the position, is making decisions and arriving at conclusions on the basis of non-material entities. Show me a logic, would you? Would you cut me off a pound of it? Can't do that, can you? It is a non-material entity. Oh, and here's a real fun one. Why do we use logic? Do you understand what I've asked? If I say, why do we use logic? I've just asked a logical question that assumes logic. Can you prove that logic is logical?

There is a point at which human beings, we can't get behind it. And there are things that are non-material that even the person who is completely materialistic in their worldview has to assume. They've got to operate by it. concepts, scientific principles, presuppositions, and information. I don't mean the content of the information, but the concept of information. So it's not really a matter of viewing the historicity of the Bible as science versus faith, but rather of one faith versus another faith. Which faith do you hold to?

That's the question. Which approach to history and prehistory has the most reasonable, unverifiable presuppositions? Now, let me ask you this. How do you determine what's a reasonable, unverifiable presupposition? Something that's logical. And why is logic good? We assume that it does. Well, make sense is logic, right? We assume that logic is the right way to approach things. But can you prove it? And if you attempt to prove it, you're using logic. Right? We human beings have to assume things. That's the way we're made. Oh, wait a minute. I'm assuming something. Okay.

Which one leads to the most self-consistent answers given that the evidence is almost entirely circumstantial and by nature scientifically non-conclusive? A scientist or archaeologist or whatever will speak of something in the past and in fact they've made a great number of assumptions and then they'll make some grand pronouncement. Did they list all their assumptions? Usually not. Usually not.

So as we evaluate the historicity of the narratives in Genesis 12 on through the book of Joshua, keep in mind that the question of historicity is not simply one of science and historical fact versus faith, but rather faith in one set of unverifiable presuppositions versus another set of unverifiable presuppositions.

Both the minimalist and the maximalist have faith in non-physical entities. Both. It's not simply the physical realm. You've got to step outside of the physical realm no matter what position you take. The minimalist must ultimately assume either that nothing created everything. We got anybody that is a taker on that one? Nothing created everything? How many people do you think are going to buy into that one? Nothing created everything. Doesn't that sound great?

Oh yeah, and really, if you look at it, you've got this choice or here's the other one. The material world is somehow eternal. Paul talked to the philosophers on Mars Hill in Athens, remember that account in the Book of Acts? He talked to two different kinds of Greek philosophers. Both of those schools of thought believed that matter, the matter of the physical universe, was eternal. Problem.

Second law of thermodynamics says that everything is kind of winding down. Ultimately, this sun that, you know, we count on coming up every day, assuming Assuming the rate and processes operate as they are, we've got about a billion more years and it burns out. Well, if that's the case, how did it get started up? All by itself? Battery cables. There we go. Yeah. Yeah. Hand crank. Yeah. Yeah. It's like that 300-pound bore we had to move. Battery cables. That got it going. And a Ford coil. So look at that. Either of those assumptions, that's basically what you've got.

You've either got nothing created everything, and you could accent that a little bit more. Absolutely nothing created absolutely everything. or the universe is eternal. Neither of those fit with current scientific observation. So if you're going to pick one of those two assumptions, nothing created everything, or the universe is eternal, the material universe is eternal, you've got a non-scientific faith. As a matter of fact, it's anti-scientific. Both of these assumptions are unverifiable and contrary to extending our present observations of the physical world into the past.

So you have those, the minimalist, who would just soon burn the Bibles, and then you have the maximalist, who holds up scripture as an authority, and respectable, and a reliable source. Here is an example of a minimalist, Dr. Israel Finkelstein, professor of archaeology at the University of Tel Aviv. He believes that the only parts of the Bible in the Old Testament that have any reliability whatsoever are those that start with about the Persian period, the very end of the Old Testament. Prior to that, it's all just myth and made-up stories. So, at any rate, he's pretty convinced about that. Not on the basis of fact, you understand, but on the basis of assumption. So when facts are presented to him that are contrary, he says, can't be. It doesn't fit my Persian-era theory.

Then, Philip Davies wrote The Old Testament World, similar viewpoint. Rabbi David Wolpe in Sinai Temple in Los Angeles publicly pronounced that there's no reality to the Exodus story. Told his congregation that. By the way, also a good friend of Rick Warren. At any rate, yeah, he said there's no historical reality to the exodus. So he tells his Jewish people it didn't happen.

Here's another, I was reading through this book, Archaeology, History, and Society in Galilee by Richard Horsley. In there I was kind of surprised he said all the descriptions of actual synagogue buildings in the New Testament are wrong. It says there were no synagogue buildings during the New Testament time. They're all wrong. Every one of them. Well, this book was written in 1996, and about this time last year, let's see, guess what? A synagogue building built 40 years before Jesus was born.

Hmm. On the western shore of Sea of Galilee. And what's that? What's that? When they date, like synagogue buildings and things of that sort, one of the things that they have, they have several different things to work with, but one of those that they have to work with is, for example, what are the dates of coins? and various political evidences during that time.

And this was actually built before Herod took power. So that was one. And then another one that was discovered just a year or two before that, also in the Sea of Galilee area. This one here was also discovered since this book was written. So he wrote this book.

The New Testament is absolutely wrong. No physical synagogues. you know, in the New Testament time, and at least two synagogues have been demonstrated otherwise to be the case. So I don't know what you do. Maybe you deny the synagogue existed or argue with dating or something.

Oh, by the way, the place where the synagogue was found just about a year ago, Migdal, that's where, you ever hear of the name Mary Magdalene? That's where Magdalene, the name comes from. She was from that area. Another fellow here is William Deaver.

He says that the Exodus never happened, the Jews were never in Egypt, and basically they're just a group of Canaanites that got together and and kind of formed her own group. So that's it. This guy's a professor at the University of Arizona. But he does hold to the historicity of the Bible before the Persian period. So good for him. Right? Okay.

Now, on the other hand, there's guys like Dr. Leon Rittmeier. Dr. Leon Rittmeier has worked around the Temple site area basically for most of his career. And it is amazing, this area, here's the temple site now, and at the bottom end of that photo is the city of David, and basically the city that was originally built and developed during the time of David. So anyway, Dr. Rittmeyer takes the Bible literally, But he has also climbed in and out of that temple area and been involved with the archaeology of the temple area for decades. And even going into underground tunnels and going inside, because there's apparently a whole labyrinth of tunnels all around the temple area, and he's been through them all. He and his wife, his wife is also an archaeologist, he and his wife work together and have written a number of books. I highly recommend them.

Dr. Bryant Wood, I have a picture of the inside of our building here because he spoke here about eight years ago. Dr. Bryant Wood is one who has his doctorate in dating using pottery types. And so he asked about how they date things. That's one of the ways they do it is they've found that during certain periods of time, certain pottery styles and even material sources were used, and they'll use that to date things.

So his doctoral dissertation was on that subject. He frequently writes in a popular magazine, quarterly magazine, Bible and Spade, that I've gotten since the mid-1970s. That was an earlier format and we'll be taking a look later on at some of his studies in Jericho. Jericho is a very interesting site because earlier last century it was thought that everything confirmed the Bible and Kathleen Kenyon in the 1950s concluded there was nobody there. during the time, and Dr. Wood has come back and said, Kathleen Kenyon, certainly a very qualified archaeologist, however, she made a mistake. Essentially, he goes and demonstrates, and we'll see pictures of it.

The walls fell out. They fell down. There was a mud brick wall that fell down. When it fell down, it made a running ramp for the Israelites to head right up into the city. And the Bible says everything was burned, and guess what they found when they did the excavation? Everything was burned. So anyway, we'll take a look at that. Randall Price, he's a fellow I've met on a couple different occasions and written several different books.

His area of expertise, he's been doing excavations on Qumran, which is thought to be the remote town slash city that the Essenes were operating out of and the people responsible for hiding the Dead Sea Scrolls. So he's an expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls. He's also a believer and a pretty neat guy. This is Eilat Matzar.

She's Jewish. She uses the Bible to guide her into what to excavate next. She's not a Christian, but she believes in the Old Testament as being a reliable guide. So what she did was she was looking at one place where it said David went down into his fortress from his palace. Well, guess what? They found the fortress. So she went up and found what she claims is the palace. and seems to fit the evidence. That was about 2005 when she did that. She published that article.

Anybody seen this book? Great people of the Bible and how they lived. Anybody got that? By the way, this is one that's out of print. Reader's Digest put it out several decades back. It was edited by the former, or I should say late, head of archaeology at Harvard.

Very good book. Gionis Wright was the primary editor. And you can get it, although it's not in print, lots of copies of it are available, sometimes quite inexpensively. I think Eliska bought a copy for like $2 and asked me if that was a good book. I said, that's a good buy and a good book. Get it. It's very well done. And it goes through the whole Bible and just kind of gives a lot of good Bible background with some good pictures and things of that sort. So, highly recommend it.

William Foxwell Albright was another archaeologist, died in the early 70s, but also had a regard for scripture. And I could go on, but that's enough of a sampling. Just this last fall, John Walton put together a five-volume set. I brought one of them because the whole set's pretty hefty.

But what he's done is he's gone through the Bible sequentially, you know, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, through the whole Old Testament. And what he's done is put together just in Bible sequence descriptions and pictures and fits all the archaeology. And the amazing thing is he's able to take all the archaeological findings and fit them perfectly. The background fits. And that's one of the other things that we'll find. In a lot of cases, what we find is not, here's some proof that there was a prophet Daniel, but what we find is the background fits what we do find.

Example, do you remember that Joseph was in prison with two other guys and one of them was the chief baker? Question, was there such a guy as a chief baker? Well, one of the things we'll be looking at is, little document that in ink script is a signed receipt, found in Egypt, signed by the Chief Baker. Now, does that prove that Joseph was there with the Chief Baker?

No, but it also fits, though, and it fits quite well. Now, that's circumstantial evidence, but there's a lot of it, and that's one of the things we're going to see. If you could go through the whole Bible, and by the way, this is just the Old Testament. Let me show you, that's the New Testament set. So essentially nine volumes going through and fitting the archaeology and the history with the Bible, page by page, passage by passage. And it fits. It fits. Additionally, there's the Archaeological Study Bible.

It's got a whole bunch of articles, and as you go through it, by the way, about 90 of the articles are by Dr. Wood, the one who spoke here about eight years ago, just fitting archaeology with the Bible, page by page, again and again and again. So, one of the things that, as people say, well, I don't believe it unless I find some independent thing stating it. Basically, I don't trust the Bible at all. The reality is the findings of archaeology by the thousands dovetail perfectly with what's in scripture.

And so these scholars have gone through with some of these recent productions and matched them together just incredibly well. And we'll go through some of the detail on that. It's another one that I would point out, Dr. Hoffmeier has written two books. One of them is Israel and Egypt, where he's put together all the archaeological background, fitting the archaeology and history of Egypt with the Israelites.

And again, he's not found any problem there. In fact, things fit quite well. Another one Ancient Israel and the Sinai. And again, it fits quite well. So the idea that you've got all these facts and pieces of information that contradict Scripture, no. That doesn't fit. Assumptions that don't fit Scripture, but not facts and information. Okay. Questions, thoughts, interrogations.

Before Christ came to the scene, what was the dating scheme? we have 10 BC, so was there any numbering scheme of years? Yeah, the way most things were done, and you'll see it in scripture itself, both Old and New Testaments, things were typically done by dating things from, like this is the third year of this particular king, usually by rulers And so you'll find that in the Old Testament, particularly, occasionally in the New, things were dated by who's the ruler, and this is, you know, and it'll even be down to, you know, this is the fifth year, and the third month, and the 22nd day. I mean, so they'll date things like that. But it wasn't until several centuries ago that this idea of dating things the way we date them came up where there's some sort of an absolute scale. Everything was relative to some certain king or ruler and what year and what month and that kind of thing.

So what do we do? We want to go back in and fit it into an absolute scale and sometimes we don't have enough information to do it with great precision. It's one of the reasons why you'll find things that are recorded. We're not uncertain about whether they happened, but we may have some debate or uncertainty about when it happened. If you find, for instance, certain variations in dates, one book versus another, and it varies by a year or two or something of that sort, Don't worry about it because it's really an uncertainty among the chronologists who try to put these things together. It's not a question of did this actually happen or did this person actually exist. Does that answer your question?

I guess you've got to stack all the kings up. Yeah, you think about it, you've got kings in Israel, you've got kings in Judah, and You got quite a few to try to figure out and then all right that did these overlap You know so that it gets to be your real head-scratcher Prior prior to or excuse me after the 7th century BC others going farther back in Egypt dates become uncertain and And here's one of the reasons why If one ruler came into power and he didn't like somebody else, he'd go and send an order out to chisel out the prior guy's engravings. And they can find some evidence where some of the old engraving is still visible when they put the new stuff on. So you'll have that kind of thing happening. There was also a tendency to exaggerate things or put things in a good light, which made it difficult. So, all those make for uncertainties.

Egyptologists, aside from any question of the Bible, prior to the 7th century BC, just have a hard time being real certain, and there's debates among them all. So, and that's one reason why insisting on some outside source confirming something in the Bible is apples and oranges? Because frequently, what are the Egyptians doing? We trust the Egyptians, but not the Bible. The Egyptians had 700 gods. And of course, if a god failed, or appeared to fail, they're not going to go brag about that, right?

There is a certain difficulty. What's interesting is it's only been in the last less than a century that that Gregorian calendar that we use has actually been totally accepted. It was a little bit less than a century ago that Russia actually adopted the Gregorian calendar. And one reason why the Gregorian calendar was accepted reluctantly It was because that was Pope Gregory. And if you weren't Catholic, you know, why do I want his calendar, right?

So, yeah. I was just wondering, a lot of times, like, Psalm 22 talks about the hill of my hands and feet, and Isaiah 53. And a lot of times I'll tell someone it's happened 500 years, but I always thought it's said it's over 500 years, that's not possible. But that's maybe plus or minus a few years. Yeah, if you look at it, they have to look at what evidence do we have that it's some particular date. In some cases we have very good solid evidence of a particular event. and even multiple events.

What we studied in the book of Isaiah, we went through Isaiah and we talked about the attack of the Assyrian ruler Sennacherib against Jerusalem when he attacked Hezekiah. and so that's recorded that's recorded in Isaiah I think it's first or second Kings it's also recorded so two places in the Bible that attack is recorded the attack is also recorded by the Greeks the Assyrians and the Egyptians that same event and so you know here we have five different records two of them in the Bible of one historical event so we've got some pretty good record of what took place. What's interesting is the difference in the reason why the Assyrians lost. The Greek account said that mice ate all the Assyrians bowstrings. Which is a little curious.

And the Assyrian account, Sennacherib's account, It's interesting, Sennacherib said, I went and wasted this city, and wasted this city, and wasted this city, but he didn't defeat Jerusalem, right? In the account, 185,000 Assyrian soldiers died at the hand of the Lord. And so Sennacherib's account, very interestingly, where he said, I wasted this city and destroyed this one, demolished this city. And he says, when he came to Jerusalem, he said, and I shut up Hezekiah in his royal city like a bird in a cage. But he didn't destroy it. He didn't describe it as destroyed.

So the Assyrian account, though obviously written with some political spin, is consistent with biblical account. And actually all the accounts are consistent, but if you look at it, the biblical account is the one that's most reasonable. Yeah, the genealogies will be of some help.

There are demonstrated instances where being the father of or being the son of is not direct descendancy. So unless you have the description that that spells that out. Sometimes the terms son of and father of are used where it's not this generation and the next, but in fact might be a few generations apart. So that's possible. So genealogies would tend to describe a minimum, but it doesn't particularly eliminate the possibility of additional generations in there. But then that also can help, and depending on what additional information we're given. And, you know, it gets back to the question he had.

Nobody, you know, you can imagine here's Dr. Luke, and he's writing the Book of Acts, and then he signs it, Dr. Luke 61 AD. No. Nobody did that. So what happens is we have to take all these other dating systems, and it might be an astronomical dating system, it might be this king, this year. We have to take all these other dating systems and try to back-fit them into our system of dating and timing.

So some cases we've got some really good information to work with and some cases we're still scratching our heads. And historians, you know, just look at the evidence that they have and sometimes one will take one position, sometimes one will take another, sometimes they'll debate it back and forth. But it doesn't mean that the event is uncertain, it means that the date is uncertain, right? Yeah. Other questions? Thoughts? Okay. Well, I can't believe it. We actually finished on time.

What we'll be taking a look at is we'll be looking at the evidence for the patriarchs, that is, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and on into Joseph, and entering into Egypt and all that. And one of the things I'll tell you right off is while the names Abraham and Abram and Isaac and Jacob can all be found in records during that time, none of them outside the Bible explicitly state those specific guys. So does that mean none of it's true? No. What it means is that we have background confirmation, circumstantial evidence that it's true, and as I mentioned here, we can look at lots of details that fit when they wouldn't fit at a later time.

Like, here's Abraham and Mary's half-sister, right? Well, we find out that that was actually a cultural practice, and even a desirable cultural practice. They even had a circumstance where if a wife was not a sister or a half-sister, they would adopt them as such, because that was so desirable. The multiple wives and even the responsibility, if a wife could not bear a child, to have a slave substitute to bear the child, that was right in the tablets and the culture of the day. Do we have a record of Abraham and Sarah specifically? No. But the names are there and the cultural practices are right there. and they fit perfectly.

And then here's another challenge. A lot of times we have documents, many documents, that have not been even translated or looked at. You know how many clay tablets we have from ancient times, from the Middle East? About a half million. A little over a century ago, over 100,000 Greek papyrus documents from around the New Testament time were sent to various universities around the world. Berkeley's got about 20,000 of them, to my recollection. After a hundred years, about 5% of those have been translated.

The other 95% haven't even been touched. So there may be evidence of things that nobody even knows about. You tell me, why is it that so many tablets and so many documents wouldn't even be translated? They'd just stick them out in some closet somewhere. Why would they not translate that many documents? Possibly there, but I think there's another reason. There's nobody to do it.

Can you imagine what that would take? Let's say that you were trained in New Testament Greek. Are you going to make it your career to go scanning these things and translating and publishing all the translations of thousands and thousands of documents? And some of them, some of them that have been translated, they're available online. The scan is there. The translation is there. And it's things like, I sold two donkeys and six slaves to this guy over here for this much money. That's it.

Or you know how Joseph and Mary were required to go to Bethlehem and register for the tax rolls, right? Well, a lot of the documents are tax registrations, just like, so if you translate them, you know, you're just going to find out names of people who registered, you know, and this is, this is my wife and this is my son and we're from this group and, and, but all it's going to do is going to give you background, lots of background. But, but as a career, it's rather dull. Yeah, that's the problem, is as a career you're going to learn New Testament Greek and then spend the rest of your career translating these dusty documents, right?

And getting those things all in place. And it's just, it's tax receipts, it's I bought 500 bananas, you know, it's all these kinds of accounts and stories. And sometimes you run into something interesting. stories of, for example, a prodigal son. There are multiple stories of the prodigal son accounts. And even one where a son's off at college and he writes his parents for money. Was that? Yeah, hard to believe, right? So you have things like that. It fits the biblical pattern and even some of the things we look at quite well.

There's another account where You know how salt was valuable? Your accounts of like we have our word salary comes from the word salt salt was used as payment and there's one account where some guys tried to hoard the salt market and So they went out and bought a whole bunch of salt.

They filled a house full of salt Problem the ground was wet They lost it all. They lost it all. That does fit where Jesus talked about the salt losing its savor and just throw it out. Because what would they do? They'd throw dirty salt out on the road. Why would you throw it on the road? Because that's where people walk and it keeps the plants from growing there, right? You wouldn't throw it on the crops.

So you find little details of everyday life, but there's nobody to do it. It's not an exciting career. So the vast majority of those documents never get translated, even though some of them may have explicit evidence relative to both the Old and New Testaments. because nobody wants to pay for that and nobody wants to make a career of it. So after a century of time, a very small percentage of the total has been translated.

Okay, we'll move on to kind of looking at pictures of archaeological evidence and things of that sort. I find it's fascinating and exciting. It's a confirmation Even though a lot of it is circumstantial, confirmation I think of just the veracity, the trustworthiness of scripture. So we'll look at that over the next couple of weeks here. Okay? Let's pray.

Lord, we do give you thanks that you do provide evidence, support, confirming our faith and confidence in your work. We just thank you for that. We thank you for the perspective that we can have here about these things and that indeed you are trustworthy in every point. We just thank you in Jesus' name. Amen.