Q&A 34: Historicity of the accounts from Genesis 12 through Joshua - Part II

Today, no handout. I hope that isn't shocking to anybody. We're going to look to things on slides entirely here. And we're going to continue on with this question, is there any historical evidence for the accounts from Genesis 12 through the book of Joshua?

And we talked last week focusing on this minimalist and maximalist assumptions. And the reality is We don't have all the information from times past, and there are good reasons why we don't. We'll talk about that in a minute. And so people can take the same set of information, the same set of data, and arrive at different conclusions based on their assumptions. So these findings are not the assured conclusions of science. And when we get back into history, and especially into realms where it's questionable whether it's history or not, it's the assumptions that end up guiding the conclusions substantially. And so with that in view, let's take a look here.

We're going to begin with a position, in other words, we're going to take what's called a maximalist position. that the Bible ought to be given the benefit of the doubt regarding its claims to historicity. Then we will see that there are a great many findings from written history and archaeology that harmonize quite well with what the Bible describes. The minimalist assumes that the Bible is not to be trusted unless you've got independent verification. The maximalist says, well, wait a minute.

Let's go ahead and give it the benefit of the doubt. and do trust it, since we in fact are lacking information on a lot of these things, and that there is good reason to trust the Bible at the outset. So anyway, we're going to take the maximalist view We should not expect to find that other societies mentioned in the Bible report the same details that are found in the Bible, since the other societies were prone to report only the things that were favorable to their own leadership, culture, and gods.

If you think about it, back in the time of the Roman Empire, did the Romans care about some guy named Jesus? No. What did they have to do with Rome? And that would be under the command of a rather obscure Roman governor. We have record of Pontius Pilate. He ruled from 26 to 36 AD. There are some inscriptions and records of him. The Bible of course records his name and we find some other record of him. But other than that he kind of disappears from the scene. As a matter of fact, that seemed to be what happened with anybody who tried to govern Judea. They eventually disappeared from the scene. You think about that.

One of the things that was characteristic of the culture throughout the Middle East and throughout the area around the Mediterranean is the various cultures would show allegiance to their god or gods, right? And so if here's the God of the Israelites, why do they want to give the God of the Israelites any credit? So they wouldn't. And if something happened that was not as good for some other country, what would they do?

They'd put a spin on it. Sounds like our media, right? There'd be a spin on what gets reported then, or a spin on what gets told, which also means that it's difficult to have objective independent verification. We, in fact, just simply don't have all the information we might want to have.

Why does not the Bible give the name of the Pharaoh who was Pharaoh during the Exodus? Is it because Moses didn't know? By the way, what's your name, Mr. Pharaoh, right? Is it because Moses didn't know? Interestingly enough, during that period of time, and it was only true for about 500 years, it was not the custom to use the name of the Pharaoh along with the title. So it fits, and that's one thing you'd say that supports the Bible. The other half is that it makes it more difficult to identify exactly which one it was.

Right? Okay. In the accounts in Genesis 12 through 50, so from the time of Abraham, which actually shows up at the very end of chapter 11, but starting most significantly in chapter 12 through 50, the last chapter of the book of Genesis, the place names and cultures have been almost entirely identified. There are a few about which there are some questions, but for the most part identified. Abraham started in Ur of the Chaldees. Here's a ziggurat from Ur that's in the background there in the foreground, some of the buildings.

And interestingly enough, that's just right inside Iraq. So when our troops went in from Kuwait, that was one of the first places that they got to. Oddly enough, Saddam Hussein was inclined to blow up his archaeological sites. I mean, it's funny, we have troops in there and so what did he do? Go shoot missiles at his archaeological sites?

I don't understand it. Anyway, they want to make sure if possible to avoid having him hit this. Abraham started there in Ur of the Chaldees. Here are the ruins, a little bit perhaps easier picture to see. It was a very sophisticated city that Abraham grew up in. He wasn't some country bumpkin, okay? Here's a cosmetic box. You can see a fair amount of detail in it and the use of quite a bit of gold.

Here is a game board that was found with the board and all the pieces. The one thing they didn't find was the rules. How do you play this? Yeah, it's some kind of weird checkers game or something. But at any rate, they don't know how to play it, but it's really well preserved, whatever the game is, right? Here is, oh by the way, the guy who did most of the excavation on Ur was Leonard Woolley.

He excavated from 1922 to about 1934. He would have continued on, but his wife just couldn't stand it. Just year after year of being in this desolate site. So that's why he quit. His wife just couldn't tolerate any more of this excavation stuff. There's no social life when you're out there with this.

Anyway, about several centuries before the time of Abraham, The culture, even at that time, was quite advanced. Here are some items taken from Leonard Woolley's excavation. This ram in the thicket was one of the things that's in the British Museum. This golden bowl with some other artwork below it was kind of the front end piece on a harp.

This is Queen Pahu Abis. You know, kind of headdress and that sort of thing. There's another item that was a 24 foot long ribbon of gold included in this set. So really amazing. It's quite an advanced culture. So anyway, just kind of a sampling. But that's where Abraham was from. And what I'm showing you here is from several centuries before. So it's not like it just became an advanced culture. It had been so for centuries by the time that Abraham was there.

So was it burned? Was it destroyed or something? You wouldn't think they would leave gold just laying around. What's interesting is those things here were found in basically a burial site. And what's interesting is they found these objects that I'm showing you just samples of. They found the objects there buried with Queen Pahuabi. And they found artwork with all those same things. Those exact same objects, artwork there at the same place that was like a picture of the objects that were there. So real interesting. But a very advanced culture, and it was around for some number of centuries.

One of the things that changed, however, is that Ur was initially a coastal town, but what happens when you have sediment coming in from these large rivers, what was a coastal town later on isn't, right? And that's what drove Leonard Woolley's wife nuts. It's this town that used to be a coastal town, but then by the time the excavation was going on, it was well inland and just this rather desert-like environment.

Okay, yeah, here, for example, this is an artist's conception of what the original ziggurat might have been like with all the commercial activities going on. And you see off in the lower left corner, a fellow doing some record keeping, perhaps some calculating. And so lots of commercial activity. And not in just basic stuff, but things that are more advanced, in terms of expensive objects and materials and things of that sort.

So that's where, you know, Abraham was from. His father moved the family up to Haran. Haran is in an area where the culture, the people there, are called Hurrians. I don't know if they were in a hurry. They probably weren't. But they're called Hurrians, H-U-R-R.

And that's another place where it's been excavated, it's been found, and as a matter of fact, the town still exists. So they've got new buildings there right alongside older buildings, as we'll see here momentarily. So here's older buildings, here's some millstones from the time of Abraham. And so going in that area, you know, it's kind of an interesting thing. You've got to do your excavation right alongside other buildings that are more modern and recent. The area, as you can see off in the background, is actually a fairly fertile area. And cotton is one of the common crops there.

Then, as Abraham is described in scripture, he moved on to Canaan, as God said in Genesis 12, the land that I will show you. And of course, that not only is a well-identified land, but a number of the place names and cultures have been identified there. Here's Tel Balata, part of ancient Shechem. Now, one of the things you'll notice about that Tel, it looks kind of like a big hill, right? And what you'll see on the top is evidence of some excavation of the civilizations that are more recent. And that's something for us to take a look at.

How can you tell what's inside a tell? And by the way, sometimes tell is spelled with one L instead of two, but either way. How can you tell what's inside a tell? Well, what they do is they will do one of two things. They will either go down layer by layer and what you find is like we show here that there are in fact layers. So they'll go that way or they'll cut in a trench where they'll go through a portion of all the layers.

But the situation is like this. There would be the initial building on the site. And as that may have been destroyed maybe by a military attack, an earthquake, something like that, then they would go and build on top of that and build on top of that and build on top of that. So you end up having these layers that are shown here in colored form that eventually work its way into what looks like a hill. And that's called a tell. So places that were built and then rebuilt and rebuilt and rebuilt often show up in this tell kind of formation.

And so here is part of ancient Chechem. Now as you look at that, that's a fairly substantial piece of earth and rock there, isn't it? And what is one of the things you notice, they've excavated on the top, but what that means is that they haven't excavated underneath it. And here's one of the things that's curious. In order to have this so that people can see it, because what they've done is make it into an archeological park where you can go and people see it. In order to have it so people see it, they leave the area underneath it unexcavated.

Most of the information about that tell is now untouched, right? In order to preserve what's there at the top, most of what we could ever tell you about Shechem, if this isn't ever changed, will never be known. Is there evidence, because what's actually there is more recent than the time of Abraham, is there evidence of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob inside that tell? There could be and we'll never know.

And I think that's one of the things when somebody makes some pronouncement, well, we don't have any evidence of this, we don't have any evidence of that. The reality is most of the evidence has never been touched. They've barely scratched the surface. There are some places that have never been excavated. And some you've likely even heard of. Paul wrote to the church at Colossae.

And you know, Colossae has never been excavated. There have been zero excavations at Kalesi. They can't get through the Turkish bureaucracy. So zero excavations there. None. We know very little about Kalesi. So the question is, how much evidence do we have We have, in fact, very little, less than 1% of all the potential things that could be excavated have been excavated. So what we have in the way of archaeological excavation is rather minor.

Okay, here is archaeological remains at Hebron that were present at the time of Abraham. Abraham lived around the year 2000 BC. These parts here in Hebron were built about 4,500 years ago. in these parts about 4,000 years ago, about the time that Abraham was around. Here is Hebron. This is a kind of an aerial view off from the side of the old city. This right here is the building. It's a mosque right now over the cave of Machpelah. This is what, when Sarah died, Abraham went to the elders, the leaders, the sons of Heth, and there at the city gate he negotiated to buy this property with the cave in order to bury his wife Sarah.

He was first offered the cave free, and he said, oh no. He says, I want to pay full price. Why? Because as someone who was a stranger, the laws were that if something was given to you and you were not a native, they could take it back anytime. He said, I don't want that. Why?

It's because this is the land that the Lord was showing him and so he negotiated by faith. He negotiated by faith in order to get this land and so this is from the generation of Sarah on down to the time of Jacob. Patriarchs, multiple patriarchs are buried in this cave. What's interesting, because it is now under the control of the Muslims, they won't let anybody touch it.

At two times, at least within my lifetime, starting back in the 1970s, at two times Jewish people have had the opportunity to sneak in there and take pictures and take notes and things of that sort. This place right here and this place right here are two accesses to this underground cave at Machpelah. And it's those two places that at two different times the different Jewish groups have gone in there, they snuck in. They snuck in there, gone in there and taken some pictures and taken notes and measurements and things of that sort.

Here is one of them. As you can see, it's a very small opening. So the first time, under Yigal Yadin, who was an amateur archaeologist but the Secretary of Defense for Israel, he was able to get the guards to go away for a while and he lowered a 12-year-old girl through that opening. He took the locks off and lowered a 12-year-old girl through the opening and she could get in to see part of it.

It was also at the other end, this part right here, right there, was the second Jewish group more recently and they went and took some of these pictures inside. Between the two times they've been able to put together kind of an overview map and then a side view map of what it looks like underneath there. And the second group even went down into the caves to where the bones and And they said there's various kinds of notes and coins down there, so real interesting. But they couldn't stay there long because they were there kind of in violation of the Muslims' wishes. Jews are not allowed in. So for them to be able to get in is something that's exceptional. Here is Tell Harar, which is the place where Garar, this is a place that Isaac had contact with.

As you can tell, there's been no excavation of that tell. And so it's one, it's entirely untouched. Nobody's touched it. Most of the information other than some surface surveys, most of the information about that tell is unknown. Here's Tel, now people pronounce this Beer-sheba. It almost sounds like a brand of beer. This is Beer-sheba, okay? But this is one of the places where Abraham went. And the name shows up later in Genesis as well. And you can see what they've done is they've excavated the top portion of the Tel. Again, the portions underneath have not been excavated.

There is possibly a lot of information there that we just won't touch. Now, one of the things we can do, it's not quite as good as excavating. One of the things we can do these days is use sonar techniques. to determine underground, you know, configurations and things of that sort. It's not quite as handy because if there's, for example, a coin, you're not going to see it and be able to get the information off of it. Pottery is used for dating and you can't date from the sonar technique. So there's some information they can get from non-destructive techniques like that, but it's not exhaustive.

Here is a well near the tower. And so this is, well, maybe as ancient as the time of the patriarchs. The patriarchal stories faithfully reflect customs that were not practiced in institutions that did not exist during later periods, some of which were even prohibited in later Israel. One of them, you see examples of things happening during the book of Genesis that later on were just simply not allowed.

And one of those is marriage to a half-sister. Sarah was Abraham's half-sister. In the Hurrian culture, it was actually not only allowed, but desirable to have a wife who was a sister. And if someone did not have a wife who was a sister, they would actually go through a legal adoption process to adopt her as a sister in order to have better standing. Yeah, he's a half-sister basically.

Two sisters simultaneously was prohibited in Leviticus 18.18. You could not marry two sisters. That was not permitted even though multiple wives was permitted under the Mosaic Law. That was not permitted and yet that's exactly what you see.

If the book of Genesis had been made up at a later time, as minimalists claim, then you would not expect to find this, right? You would expect them to invent a story that reflected their own time and not some prior time when the culture and the laws were quite different.

The obligation of a barren, excuse me, a barren wife to offer a slave girl to bear children for her husband was the custom from the area around Haran that is the Hurrian culture. Said that if a wife was unable to have children, it was her obligation to offer her slave or to find one if she didn't have one so that her husband could have offspring.

One of the things that, as you read through Genesis, you find that Abraham is desperate to get offspring. I mean, he is practically panicky to get offspring. And it was part of the culture. Boy, you've got to have offspring. Very high priority in the Bible. We will do everything possible. to have offspring. That was the way the culture was set up. And so one of the reasons why if a wife did not seem to be having children, it was her obligation to find a slave girl, or if she didn't have one to get one, who would have offspring for her husband. So that was the obligation. It fit the culture of the time. It didn't fit the culture later, right?

All right, how about Sodom and Gomorrah? There have been various excavations around the Dead Sea area. And it's at the southern end of the Dead Sea, as the area described for Sodom and Gomorrah. And you have several different places that have been identified as some of the different towns that you see mentioned in the Book of Genesis. Excavation of the cities on the plains, there's a website there. Here is Sodom, some of the excavations there from Sodom, from the air.

Now what you see up, let's see if I can point it out, up here is a skeleton. And we'll be looking at some better pictures here. Dr. Bryant Wood, who spoke here in this room here in 2002, is here pointing out the burn layer. And so he says the facts there fit quite well.

He says all the buildings are collapsed and they're collapsed from the roof catching on fire and dumping in and it happens so hard and so fast when the roof's collapsed that you find whole skeletons inside and a burn layer in all the buildings that you need time to get out. The people in Sodom They were just buried from the sky with fire. Does that sound like what the Bible describes? Yes, it does.

So here, for example, here you'll see skeletons, and this is a black and white photo, but I think it's visible. Skeletons in a couple places, and then burn material there. So this is an excavation done in 1977. And that's what they found everywhere in that excavation.

All the buildings were collapsed from the roof, burning and falling in on the people so fast that none of them could get out. The bodies were right inside, just stuck there. They had not even the time to get out of the burning building that came down so fast and so hard. What it appears to have happened here is a cross-section through the Dead Sea and the cities of the Eastern Plain, and there is a fault, a vertical fault that goes in there, and apparently it broke open and just showered these people with burning sulfur in great quantities, very quickly.

So it fits what the Bible describes. And in Genesis 19, it says, now Abraham saw and behold, the smoke of the land ascended like the smoke of a furnace. Just boom, it hit the people. And that's what you see described biblically. That's what you find archaeologically.

Here is the north, the major fault cuts through this north-south area through the Jordan River Valley. There's the fault line goes there, goes up to the north through the Jordan Valley, up through the Sea of Galilee. and then out to the ocean, out to the Mediterranean near Haifa. So that's the fault line pattern there. It goes right through that area that's in the Sodom and Gomorrah.

Now, nearby, tradition holds that this is the Cave of Lot. This is the outside in the lower left, in the inside view. of the doorway in the upper right. Presently available information makes this a plausible site for Lott's cave. That is, not only does tradition say that that's what it is, but while it's not conclusive, the evidence seems to say that in terms of location and everything, it could well be feasible that this is the cave that Lott and his two daughters went to. Then, of course, they went down to Egypt, Abraham first, but then obviously ultimately Joseph and the rest of the family of Jacob.

This is, in the ancient city of Ann, this is the only object left from the ancient city of Ann. That's it. It looks like a mini version of the Washington Monument. It has engravings all over the side of it which have been taken down and recorded and translated. So this, they call it an obelisk. It's the one remaining structure from the time of the city on. Later on it was called Heliopolis. Helio having to do with the sun. Polis City, so Sun City.

So Jeremiah 43.13 records it as that.

It was the home city of Joseph's wife. And so then Pharaoh named Joseph Zephanath-Paneah and he gave him Asenath, the daughter of Potipharah, priest of On as his wife. So the descendants of Joseph include that Egyptian woman. there from as we see recorded in a few different places there in Genesis towards the end. Genesis chapters 40 and 41 mentioned Chief Baker five times. It was at one time an inmate with Joseph.

Was there really such an official as the Chief Baker? I mean that might sound a little odd. A Chief Baker is a political official? That's kind of strange. But guess what? Here's an ostracon. That's the term for a piece of broken pottery with writing, which was, you know, in our thinking, you know, who's doing that? Well, in biblical times, that was quite common to have writing on broken pieces of pottery. This particular one is signed by the chief baker of the Temple of Amun at Thebes, acknowledging the receipt of wheat. So yes, there was such a thing as a chief baker, and he signed this.

Here is an Egyptian tomb painting, Valley of Nobles, Thebes, 1470 to 1445. If we take a literal and strict interpretation of the various timings in the Old Testament, the Exodus, when it would have been 1446 BC, and there are those you should know who have come up with other dates, but this is the one that looks at scripture most literally. 1446 BC, so that this would have been towards the very end of this time period.

And guess what you see? The two kinds of slaves are Nubians, that is those from Africa, and so that's the dark-skinned, and the lighter-skinned slaves are the Asiatics, which would have included the Israelites. They were known as Asiatics. So those two kinds, both skin colors are represented in the tombs of the time. And so guess what? It fits. Does it give names of the Jews? No. Why would they write about the Jews? They're slaves, right? What you want to write about is the royalty and those who do great things. So they wouldn't write things about the Jews, but there's the evidence of it.

Here is an Egyptian brick mold from the 12th dynasty. In other words, this would have been the time period and the activity that would have involved the Jews. What would they do is they would take a wooden mold like this, and they would put mud and straw mixture down on that on the ground with that, and cast it in place, and then lift it up, set it down, and put another one in place. So they just imagined these Jews making bricks.

By the way, the Jews did not build the pyramids. Those were there before Abraham was there. That's a mistake some people make. The Jews never built the pyramids. Abraham saw the pyramids. Joseph saw the pyramids. The Jews saw the pyramids. They didn't build pyramids.

They made mud bricks. That's what the Bible says and that in fact fits exactly what we find archaeologically. Here is an example of a mud brick with Pharaoh's mark in it and that's the other thing. You imagine here are the Jews working and boy they put Pharaoh's mark on every brick. That's how it gets built up. So then they would stamp Pharaoh's mark and then when they get a new Pharaoh they put a different stamp on it.

Staff of Associates for Biblical Research has identified Hatshepsut as the most likely daughter of Pharaoh who drew the infant Moses out of the water. Hatshepsut at this point in time would have been young but she was one of the most powerful queens in the history of Egypt and so would have been in a position to say no I want that little boy here to be taken care of. I'll bring him under my care. Hatshepsut was powerful enough.

This is her tomb, which is still visible. You can see on the inside they did various kinds of hieroglyphic paintings. I'm sure glad I don't have to walk around like this all the time. I tell you, this is tough, you know. That's just difficult. But anyway, that's what they did on the tomb paintings. No, this is not.

This is stone because this was a tomb that's supposed to last some period of time. The brick and straw material does not last as well. That's one thing when the Egyptians wanted to build tombs, they just about always used solid rock. Because the idea was that when you built a tomb for the royalty, that they would spend their afterlife in the tomb, and it had to last for a long time. So they knew that the straw and mud brick combination, yeah, you can go and build things out of it, but it's not going to make a permanent tomb.

Yeah. Ah, the reason why she's shown with a beard, very interestingly, is not because she had one, but to show her with the power of a pharaoh. There were, in the line of pharaohs, very few women who had that position, but she was one that did. So, yeah, it's a good question. And basically, it's not because she had one, but simply to show that she had the power and position of a pharaoh. And so, yeah, various, let me go back to that. Yeah, that beard appearance was for that reason. It's not because she had one, but it was simply to show that she had the power of the Pharaoh.

The palaces in which it appears Moses was raised and in which Moses and Aaron went to tell Pharaoh to let God's people go have been excavated and surveyed by geophysical techniques. What you see is the areas that are dark have actually been excavated and the areas underneath have been Revealed by, this is the no digging excavation where they can tell the configuration of what's under there. So they'll look at, they'll excavate a part of the building and then use non-excavation geophysical techniques, sonar, to determine the rest of it.

So at any rate, now this, what's interesting is this bath area, here, what would happen is anybody who went to see the pharaoh had to go wash up first. And so they had a particular washing area where Aaron and Moses would have gone to initially to wash up and clean up before showing up before the pharaoh. Nobody could show up before the pharaoh dirty. Not allowed.

Nonetheless, it's been excavated in some degree and some geophysical survey done. and reported by Dr. Wood just two years after he spoke here. If you are interested in pursuing it, Dr. Charles Alling has put together a six-part series, biblearcheology.org, and you can also do a search on that website for Charles Alling 1L.

And he's got a six-part series and several other articles, but a six-part series on putting together the historical information with Joseph. So what he's done is to dovetail all the information that we have regarding Egypt and their history and how Joseph fits in with that.

The area where the Jews were said to have been, it was Goshen, and that area has been studied and excavated in some degree. The slave quarters were not built with fancy construction and not the same long-term construction, but there has been some excavation there. And what was interesting, was, you can imagine, and we'll go into the Exodus period next week, Exodus and the wandering through the wilderness and the taking over the conquest of the land of Canaan next week. But what's interesting is that there is a place there where the Jews were situated, where there appears to have been a statue of Joseph in one of the buildings.

It's broken, intentionally. It appears that somebody went in and shattered it. Now, can you imagine, how would you explain that? Well, it could happen in a number of ways, but here's one possibility. That after the Egyptians lost their slaves, and then they lost a good chunk of their military, there at the sea, when the sea came back together, that they were really angry and went back in and broke up this what appears to be a statue of Joseph. So that's what you'd expect. The Egyptians were repeatedly known for defacing and re-chiseling any inscription or monument of any prior ruler they didn't like. So this fits with that pattern as well. Now, so do we have proof that the Jews were in Egypt? No, we don't have anything quite like that. But everything that's described in the Bible can be fit together, accommodated with Egyptian history. So it's not proof, it's confirmation. It's not pure conflict.

If I were to come to you and if I were to say, you know, since I was a little kid, I've talked to George Washington every day on my cell phone. You'd be saying, Fern, we need to talk, or you need some help. Because why? There are several things wrong with that. You know, quite a bit of time that separates when George Washington was alive. I think he died towards the very end of 1799. And when I was born. And so that's one problem. Okay. Quite a bit of problem. The other thing is I just told you I talked to him on my cell phone.

And most certainly, you know, George Washington never had a cell phone or anything that would talk to a cell phone. and you know as well as I that they weren't around when I was a little kid, right? So you would say, well that's in just flat-out conflict, that there's no way you can reconcile that. What's interesting is the Bible doesn't have that kind of information in it that doesn't fit at all with the Egyptian record. So You do not find the conflicts like Vern talking to George Washington on his cell phone since he was a little kid, right? You don't find that.

What you find instead are things that fit well and are plausible, feasible, could in fact happen. Okay. I think we're done. Let's see. We have a little bit of time. Questions, comments? Exasperations? Anybody like to be an Egyptian? Like walking like this? Yes.

Wadi. The wadi is a local term for, you know, little valleys that not always, but often have ephemeral, that is seasonal, creeks and things of that sort. So that's the word Wadi, W-A-D-I. It's a valley that has a creek that comes and goes. In the middle of a storm they might have quite a flow through it, but then it might at other times have little to no water flowing in it. What's that? Have a lot of wadi in it?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's what a wadi is. And you'll find that term used throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. You know? Yeah. So that's a wadi. Other questions? Yes. When you talk about, you know, Colossians, where the Colossians were, that's a term you now... Right. A Colossae. Yes.

Like Paul was in his Lexus driving to the next flight. You know, it just really hit at that moment. It wasn't like a big picnic and he was sitting there sipping something. The Romans built the roads very well. Many of them are still in use. Some of them as exposed stones. Some of them as paved over, but using the same roadway. They built everything by hand, and the soldiers themselves did it. But they built enough roadway to go two times around the earth. Over 50,000 miles of hand-built roadway, much of which is still usable in existence. Paul traveled those roads, so he had that advantage. He also had the disadvantages of those roads, which were that they might take you in a place where you'd be subject to muggers and thieves and thugs.

And hence we have the account of like the Good Samaritan. Well, you would have places that were hot, places that were cold. They didn't care. The Romans had military outposts in places that were just cooking hot. They also, especially later in the Empire, had places, outposts, that were frozen lakes up in the Alps so that you'd have all kinds of different possibilities for stationing.

The Romans took the southern half of Britain and up to what was called Hadrian's Wall. Hadrian was an emperor right after the New Testament era who had that wall built at the north end of the Roman occupation in Britain. At one point in time, Rome controlled from Britain to the Persian Gulf.

And they wanted roads to all of it, right? So, yeah. Yeah. Yes. The ziggurat, they call it. Yes. Yes, what they've done, I'm going to try to get back to it here. This is the artistic rendering of it, but that one. Yes, and the thing is, yes they have excavated, but also with these archaeological sites, they have a kind of a question, do we take this apart?

Because that's ultimately what archaeology does. It takes everything apart. and then analyzes everything, but you end up losing the material. That's one reason why you want a well-qualified archaeologist to go through and record everything, because as you excavate, you lose it. I've never worked on an archaeological site. My background years ago was in paleontology, so I've done something similar looking for fossils. But they have to go through things very carefully. You can imagine they have some large site like this and they go through things with little brushes. And so it takes a long time to go through and excavate a site.

Yes, this is stone and it has been fairly well preserved. They've made some efforts to hold it and I think the term that they use is arrested decay. That is, you don't want to have things be all restored like they're just modern, but you also don't want to have things come apart. So they try to hold things together as much as possible in a state of arrested decay.

And so they have a choice here with these archaeological sites. Do we keep digging and ultimately tear everything to pieces? Or do we go in and stop at some point so that people can see it and so it's preserved? And so there's a question there. We saw the picture of, let's see, there.

Ancient Shechem. One of the choices that they've made so far is to have it as an archeological park. Most of the tell, that is most of the information, is still underneath that pile of rock and soil. Most of the information is unknown. And we're going to see, for example, the tell at Jericho, which is probably one of the oldest cities of which we have any record, is very deep.

Very little of it's been touched. I'm sorry, you started to say something. They've gone off to this, then there's on the top here, they've certainly gone there. You can also step down and there's an area down here. But all of this underneath there also has ancient city material underneath it and it's been untouched. What's on the outside? Down here? Yeah. Notice here's the high area, here's more area off to the side and it even goes off the photo where you've got other excavation that you can go see. I'm not sure about this part here. I can't tell you.

But the reality is most of what is there in the way of archaeological information is untouched and unknown. And that's one of the things, when you have someone make an arrogant statement, oh, there's no evidence that the Jews were here, look, we haven't even touched this, right?

We haven't even touched it. And that's true of most archaeological sites. If we've done any excavation, we've just barely touched it. And it's one reason we will never have all the archaeological information. So for somebody to come and say, well, there's no evidence of Abraham or no evidence of Jacob, This is ignorance of the facts. The facts are there's all kinds of information we have not touched.

We've touched less than 1% of their archaeological information out there. Of the clay tablets, I mentioned previously a half million clay tablets have been found. A very small percentage of those have been translated. The rest of them, They're just stocked away in some archaeological back room, an archive, for some later date. Like the last scene in Indiana Jones? Yes.

This is all man-made, and I don't have a number on the height, but it appears, if I were to guess something upwards of 100 feet, it would probably not be far off from the appearance of it. That's a lot of dirt. Yeah, and if you've got to move it all with little brushes, and I mean, what they'll do, because I've been at not an archaeological site, but paleontological excavations, a number of them. And they'll go through and sift every little bit and not dump it until they've sifted it out because you will have little tiny things that will be of significance.

Shakers. Yes. Yeah, they'll put on a shaker, a sifter, and they got to go through everything. And a little sidelight, there was a gal I knew who did her master's degree on mouse fossils in Ant Hills in Nevada. And so all she had, she went through these anthills and did shakers and found mouse fossils. That was government finance. Yeah, oddly enough, no. But it's just an example.

You have to take great care and go through every little piece if you find something. You can't just go shoveling with a shovel. You find something, you have to go brush things real carefully. Sometimes things will be very delicate. But you may find something quite valuable. Yes. Yeah. Okay, now we do have people pressing their nose against the back windows. We paid for an archaeologist to be on site during all the digging so that if they were suddenly found, we stopped there and removed them from the site.

Okay, let's pray. Thank you, Lord, for what you have made evidence of here. We thank you for the confirmation of your word, and we thank you for the confidence that we can place in what you've revealed. And we just thank you for your love and your grace. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.