Defense of the Faith - Archaeology & the Old Testament

What we have assigned is archaeology in the Old Testament today and archaeology in the New Testament next Sunday. The thing is, it is a huge field. It is a huge field. If we said we're going to spend a whole year on Old Testament archaeology, we would just scratch the surface because there's there's that much to deal with in the Old Testament you have you know Egypt keeps showing up in the Old Testament you have Assyria and Babylon and Persia and so you end up having lots of different you know major empires that were around. You had a time of the judges after Joshua. You had the kings and all those. And then after David and Solomon, the splits.

I mean, you've got a huge field to deal with. Some Christian archaeologists that I've had either contact with or have been aware of, a lot of them will specialize in something. Dr. Bryant Wood, who has spoken in this room a little over a decade ago. He specializes in Canaanite pottery and using that to date things. Looking at pottery makes and styles and things of that sort. You'll have Dr. Leon Rittmeyer. It's another one. And he specializes in the archaeology of Jerusalem.

So you've got guys that will spend their whole lifetime on one particular geographical area or on a particular specialty within archaeology. It's just a huge field. So we'll attempt to embrace all that in one Sunday morning, right? So we're brave. Alright, so what we have here is a handout and then we also have a pamphlet, there's so much in it that you'd have to take it home and it barely scratches the surface too. But let's first take a look at the handout.

It says on March 22nd we presented history, how do we know what we know part 2. We presented the three tests of classical historiography, by which in historical documents verified as to genuineness. So if you were, let's take it for instance, suppose someone said, you know, I have got an original of the Declaration of Independence. I've got an original of that declaration.

And so if you said, well, how do we know it's really real, or it isn't just fake? How do we know that you really have one? You would go through these three tests. The bibliographic test, that is, where did this document come from? How did you get it? How did you get it, and who has had this? Where has it been? Do we have good evidence that this has been in somebody's hands, who's reliable over time?

The next one is the internal evidence test. How self-consistent is it? If you looked at it and you said, well, wait a minute. You say this is an original of the Declaration of Independence, but it's signed by Dwight Eisenhower. You say, wait a minute, that doesn't sound right, right? So it doesn't ring true internally. And then checking external sources, how does it check against other things? Did somebody else write about this document? And do I have some other references? that this is genuine. So those are the three tests that get used. Here we have, with archaeology, we have the external evidence test.

For example, Jesus went to the Garden of Gethsemane as he customarily did in Jerusalem. Can you go to Jerusalem and find a place called the Garden of Gethsemane? Yes, you can. And as a matter of fact, the route that he walked is probably traceable. You could say here's the likely route that he took. He went from the upper room. to the Garden of Gethsemane.

And so you could check things externally to check the account, right? So here you look at it and you have the external evidence test, the quantity of evidence, and then the quality of the evidence. There's a handout over here. It just wasn't... Oh, you got it? Okay, all right. Okay.

So you're going to look in archaeology, you're going to look for things that connect to, and it's either going to confirm or negate what's stated in scripture. And it turns out that there's lots and lots of evidence, particularly I'm talking about the Old Testament, there's lots and lots of evidence that you can check. because so much of the Bible is written as an historical book. But then the next thing we have down there is where presuppositions come in. And we're going to look at an example, but this is where you can have archaeologists and they will have a very wide set of opinions among them.

You can say, wait a minute, I thought this was a science. Think about it, with archaeology, can you go back and rerun history again? You can't do that, right? So we have various kinds of evidence, sometimes it's written evidence, sometimes it's other kinds of evidence. We have various kinds of evidence that we can look at. We can look at it again, and sometimes that helps. But we can't go back in history and cross-check things. We can't go back to Nebuchadnezzar and give him an interview or an interrogation. We can't go back and do that.

So the presuppositions that people have, their worldview assumptions, end up affecting how they interpret the same data. So, here is the question, do we disbelieve a document's claims and content unless independently confirmed, that's called minimalism, we put minimal confidence in a document, or do we believe it unless clearly proven wrong, maximalism. At Holly Hills we tend to take the maximalist approach, that is we believe what the Bible says, unless there's some other indicator to the contrary. But there are those, and there's a spectrum among archaeologists, there are those who don't believe the Bible at all. As a matter of fact, they very much don't want to believe the Bible. And then, does a claim to miracles in a document categorically exclude its truth claims?

So here is Exodus. And all these plagues brought miraculously on Egypt. And then finally, the Pharaoh lets the Israelites go, and they come up to the edge of the sea, and what happens? What happens? What's that? Yeah, here's Moses, he holds his rod out, the sea parts, the Israelites go across, Right? With walls of water. I mean, this is the greatest aquarium you could ever imagine. Right? You're walking through the middle of it. So here they are walking, you know, on dry land. They get across. The Egyptians start chasing them. And then the water comes in and wipes them out. So, if you believe that it's possible for God to perform a miracle, then that's, you take the account at face value. If you think that miracles cannot happen, Miracles cannot happen, therefore this is a fictitious account.

And it's all based on, not evidence, but on presupposition. Presupposition. So that's where you can have a guy who's an expert, but it's what he assumes before he looks at the data that makes him draw the conclusions, not the data itself. You're going to have two guys, both with PhDs in archaeology. And if they have different set of assumptions, they'll end up with different conclusions altogether. Okay. So now, let's take a look at page two. So the discovery of historical documents and earlier New Testament documents and archaeological discoveries have tended to move the minimalist viewpoint closer to those of the maximalist over time.

There was a time when people said there is nobody named Pontius Pilate in history. There isn't any such guy. Well, then they found the name Pontius Pilate inscribed on stone over in Caesarea on the coast. And they found Pontius Pilate coins. so on and so forth. So then, oh I guess there was this guy named Pontius Pilate after all.

It used to be taught that the Gospel of John was written by somebody, not John, about 170 to 180 AD. Way, way after the time of Christ. About a century and a half after the events. So there's no possible way it was written by an apostle who walked with Jesus. That was the theory. Then in Egypt was found a fragment of the Gospel of John. There's the fragment right there, both sides. Just that one little piece of the Gospel of John in Egypt. Now why was it found in Egypt?

It was a very dry environment, right? And it preserved it. Because the problem with a lot of the papyrus is it just easily gets rotted away. But this dated to 125 A.D. And it was in Egypt, which meant that it took time for it to get there, right? From Israel, where it would have been written. So then the people who said, well, it was 170 to 180 A.D., they had to back away from that.

And just recently it was revealed that a copy, again a fragment, of the Gospel of Mark has been found. The study is not complete on it yet, but it looks to be dating several decades earlier than this fragment of John. So a lot of the accounts that years ago would have Held up because he didn't have any earlier documents now as they find earlier and earlier Documents the people who hold these positions of you know, it wasn't really written by an apostle Having to having to move closer and closer By the forced by the facts having to move closer and closer to believing That yes, it was actually, you know written Closer to the time Then It was also claimed and and I've got this Book by Richard Horsley he claims spends all of chapter 6 Luke was wrong Luke was wrong Luke was wrong there were no synagogues there were no synagogues there were no synagogues and Again, it was the idea that it was written by somebody later Written by somebody later and when they did have synagogues Projecting back into the time of Christ when they didn't have synagogues. So we're writing about Jesus going into synagogues when in fact there weren't any.

That's the way it was stated. Well, with the discovery of the synagogue at Magdala, and the coins in the floor, so they dig, they find, oh, that's this coin, and the coins date from a certain bracket of time, that synagogue was in use during Jesus lifetime and almost certainly he spoke at that synagogue and probably a number of times and so that the facts as more and more things are discovered the facts are moving the minimalist the one who doesn't believe in the validity of scripture closer and closer to what we believe Why did the middlemen believe that John was written in 170?

First of all, their assumptions, if you have miracles, right? Their assumptions are, well those are just myths and stories and, you know, it's made up. It didn't really happen. So that forces them to that conclusion. The other thing is that it takes time to sell a miracle. And there are things that are verifiable within lifetimes. I can use this example.

If I told you that when I was a kid, I used to call up Dwight Eisenhower on the cell phone all the time. and talk to him, right? Well, there's several different reasons why that's not going to fly, okay? I couldn't tell you that story. And what are some reasons why that wouldn't fly?

Pardon? One, there wasn't any cell phones, okay? Pardon? Timeline. What's that? Yeah, that would mean I'm five years old or something like that. I'm just in kindergarten. And the president's going to take time regularly to talk to a five-year-old kid that lives across the country?

I don't think so. And so, yeah, it just doesn't ring true. But the thought is, well, if I have this account written enough later, then I don't have people who are familiar with the facts. Nobody is around to say, hey, wait a minute, I remember that guy, or I remember when they developed cell phones, and your story doesn't check. And so, as you get closer to the time, it's tougher to sell a miracle. It's tougher to sell a miracle because you have people around who remember these things and you've got easily available documents around and those kinds of things. So that's, you know, one is the miracles that are described. The first one in the Gospel of John, for example, is Jesus turns water into wine. Nobody's ever seen that done that's around today, right?

So what they do is they like to move it as far away as they can. And at the time when that theory was put forth, the earliest copies were after that 170 to 180 period of time. But as time goes on, we find earlier and earlier copies and fragments and things of that sort. And it starts making less and less sense.

And when you still have people around who can say, wait a minute, I was around and that's not the way it came off. If you still have people around to negate or support something, you can't sell myths. You can't sell miracles and made up stories. So anyway, does that answer your question?

So you end up having ongoing discovery keeps moving the minimalist towards the position that we hoped, and that is that these were written by men who are eyewitnesses, or in the case of Dr. Luke, the Gospel of Luke, he checked carefully with people who were eyewitnesses and noted some, as we've been seeing, some phenomenal details.

Okay, so let's look on to page 3. What we have here is 50 proofs for the Bible, Old Testament and New Testament. We're going to do New Testament next week, Old Testament this week. What it has is some pictures and some brief presentations of archaeological finds. Like I say, this is 50 items that are selected. The reality is that it's a vast field.

Let's say that you were an Egyptologist. You studied Egypt. That would give you some insights on parts of the Bible. So the person who is an Egyptologist, however, isn't an expert on Assyria. So that's an Assyriologist, right? And so then you have people who have more background in that. And then you have people who focus on Israel, and even within Israel, people who focus on one particular area or time period. And like I say, here's Len Rittmeyer. He believes the Bible was inspired. I wouldn't say he's the exact same kind of Christian we are. But he and his wife Have done lots of work, you know drawing up from the evidence different structures Around Jerusalem, so he's an expert of the archaeology of Jerusalem.

He focuses on that The one caution that I'll have is that they use this word proofs and And so, while I think this is very well done, I wouldn't have selected that word. And why would we back away from the word proofs? Or be cautious in our use of that? Can we prove these things with finality? Not really. Because, and why can't we prove a lot of these things with finality? a lot of people will come with their presuppositions to the very same facts. And we'll see that in just a minute here.

Here's an example, the Tel Dan Stele. Now, Tel Dan is a place we did not go on our trip to Israel. It was too far to the north. It's way up at the north end of Israel. It is very close to the border with Syria, which is politically very intense. So anyway, we chose among the various things we could have done, chose not to go there. But nonetheless, you see it's north of the Sea of Galilee. It is near mountains that have snow a lot of the year round. And so you see an aerial shot there, an oblique aerial shot of the excavation. What archaeologists will typically do, because these tells are big, we did go to Hazor, which is just a little bit north of the Sea of Galilee. That is 200 acres of tell, right? So are you going to excavate down on all 200 acres of tell?

Probably not. So what archaeologists will do is they'll pick a certain select area where they think they're going to find some valuable information, and they'll dig down there. But excavation is a very slow and painstaking process. I've not been on an archaeological dig. I have been on paleontology digs for fossils. And that's slow because you've got to be real careful.

And oftentimes, what's left is very sensitive, delicate, some things just touching them is enough to make things fall apart. So it's a very careful process. When they dig dirt out, they will oftentimes sift it through a screen to get out every little last thing that they can out of it. When they encounter something, you know, here's a jar, here's an inscription, here's a coin, When they encounter something, they'll go very carefully with little brushes to brush away things. So it's very painstaking.

Here at Tel Dan, Professor Biran, B-I-R-A-N, excavated there starting in 1966. And he continued to excavate, focusing on Tel Dan. So here's where archaeologists specialize. Professor Buran continued to excavate at Tel Dan from 1966 up to close to the time of his death in 2008. And so his specialty was Tel Dan.

Well, in excavating the gate, the gate structure, in excavating the gate, he came across a piece of rock. So let's look at the top of page four. What you see is that this is the Tel Dan inscription. It was found at three different pieces at three different times. He first found the one that you see on the right, and then there's two parts on the part that you see on the left that he found at separate times.

The reason it was found at separate times is that as he was excavating the gate structure slowly and carefully, This inscription had been broken up to use in different parts of the gate, which explains why he found it actually over a few years of time. But what he found on it, this inscription was written by King Hazael, who is mentioned about two dozen times in 1st and 2nd Kings and 2nd Chronicles and in the book of Amos.

King Hazael of the nation of Aram, that's to the north, had this inscription made and it talks about the king of Israel and the house of David. So this is, at least at present, the oldest reference outside the Bible to the house of David. written about 840 B.C. under King Hazael, mentioned in the Bible about two dozen times and so what has happened, the immediate outcry from some people was this is a fraud and they spoke horrible things about Professor Baran why?

It's because their presuppositions were that David was at best just a tribal chieftain, and all these stories in the Bible were kind of legends that are larger than life. That was the theory, and so when Professor Baran published this, the Israel Exploration Journal, 1993, immediate cries from those who were minimalist, you know, this is a fraud and calling him horrible names and just trying to ruin him.

Well, it's turned out over time, and especially with the subsequent find of these other pieces, it's turned out that the claims of fraud have pretty well died out. No, this is the real thing. This is really what it is, and it does talk about the house of David. and it talks about the house of David, and it talks about the kings of Israel in terms like the Bible describes. So here's what's happening. The bottom part of the page there. So those who regard scripture as some degree of unreliable have fallen into two camps regarding this inscription.

And we ran into this on our trip to Israel. Some have accepted the general validity of this inscription and have embraced that the inscription is real and that there is some actual historical basis for the house of David. Oh, there really was a guy named David, and he was a king. And that David was truly a person. Additionally, the northern kingdom of Israel is more or less like what is described in the Bible. Examples of that would be Joseph Garfinkel, and it was his son, Ido, that we hired to be our tour guide down in the Ella Valley and the Sorek Valley.

They don't believe the Bible is inspired. They don't believe the Bible is always universally and categorically true, like Randy taught previously, that the Bible is inerrant. They don't believe that. But they will say no the evidence is that there was a guy named David and he was the king and there there was a lineage of kings and It was enough so that the king of Aram would boast.

You know hey, I beat these guys right and so so is that would Joseph Garfinkel and a lot Matsar and Hebrew University are a couple of archaeologists that Would I would say hold this position? Okay, they're Jewish in background. They're not Christians. Yes Yes, this is on display at the Israel Museum and We went there, but it was Sabbath and they closed early so I didn't get to see it. So but yeah, it is on display there Quite a few just amazing things are on display there at the Israel Museum They've got the Israel Museum and then the the shrine of the the book which is the Dead Sea Scrolls You have the Dead Sea Scrolls there at the same place they've got The Aleppo Codex, which is the oldest Hebrew copy of the Old Testament, outside of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

So you got that, and then others have said that David was just a tribal chieftain, and the stories kind of make him larger than life. They even called the Tel Dan inscription a fraud and have spoken badly of its archaeologist discoverer professor Avraham Baran. Examples would be Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman of Tel Aviv University.

They fairly regularly belittle and publicly belittle anyone who talks about, for example, David as if he was a real guy as the Bible describes. So, what's interesting is, you know, here's the piece of evidence, and by the way, Professor Baran was not, he's not someone with some, you know, Bible is inspired kind of mentality. He's not that kind of guy. But he just said, you know, here's the evidence, and then, so what you will have is people who are minimalist and don't want to put any confidence in what the Bible says, People are minimalist, just infuriated by something like this.

And that's why I say the initial reaction was claims of fraud and all sorts of things and belittling Professor Brand. And Professor Buran had excavated, he's dead now, he had excavated starting in 1966, he continued until shortly before his death, just for decades, excavating Tel Dan. So he was an expert on Tel Dan, and this is just what he found over a few years of excavation in the early to middle 90s. Starting in 1993. Was he a believer? Nope. No, he's just an objective observer.

He says, this is what I found. He just reported, this is what I found. It says House of David, King of Israel. You know, it is written in such a way that it is very compatible with what the Bible describes. And so you'll have guys like Professor Baran no longer alive. Yosef Garfinkel is alive. Ayelet Matzar is alive. And you'll have archaeologists like that who just look at it and say that this is what it is.

But then you'll have others who are wanting very strongly to disbelieve scripture. And so they will try to point out any flaws. They will claim fraud. They will push away the evidence. Because of what? Because of the facts? No. Because of their presuppositions. It's what they assume before they even look at the evidence. Yes, they have an agenda.

I mentioned Israel Finkelstein. He was brought up under a guy who believed that the Bible was real and who was a Christian. And then after a time he had this rebellion. And so now he goes around and verbally attacks, openly verbally attacks at meetings and through writings anyone who supports anything that sounds biblical. So is there that much opposition to other archaeological finds? Is it just like David, this one about David?

There are various things. Here's an example. I mentioned Bryant Wood, who's spoken in this very room. I've emailed with him some. Bryant Wood, he has his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in dating things using Canaanite pottery. He has excavated at Jericho, where Courtney and Egerton and Nancy and I were just a couple months ago.

He's excavated at Jericho and found the Canaanite pottery, and he found the walls of Jericho fell out, the mud brick walls fell out, and then it says even on the signs that are there, the last occupation of Jericho, the whole city was extremely burned. They'd find, you know, whole pots full of burned grain, for example. So, you know, Dr. Wood looks at it, as an expert in Canaanite dating using Canaanite pottery, and he says, everything fits exactly what the Bible describes.

But then, guess what? Then you get the people, They go into this wild reaction, accusing him of fraud and all sorts of things like that. It's a very volatile area, but the worldview that people come to the data with ends up impacting their interpretation greatly.

At Megiddo, the Bible says that Solomon went and reinforced the gates at Megiddo. So I've got a picture of Courtney and Ingrid walking through the gates that were reinforced at the time of Solomon. Well, Israel Finkelstein just hates that. So he's announced he's going to Megiddo to show that Solomon was not the one who reinforced the gates. So it's anyone but Solomon, right?

So the worldview is impacting the analysis rather than just looking at the data and saying, what does it say? He's got an agenda. He's got a worldview that he's got to push. And so the facts must line up with his worldview, right? Okay. So let's turn to page five. So we have other recommendable references as we look here. There is a document and the link is here.

It's not up there now, but rather than entering all those funny little characters, you'll be able to download it and just click on the link and download Top 10 Biblical Archaeological Discoveries by the Biblical Archaeological Society. Now, the Biblical Archaeological Society, they study archaeology relative to the Bible, but they're not necessarily all Christians. They're not necessarily all believers. There's a spectrum of people involved with that.

Nonetheless, there's some good information, and the guy who heads up the society is someone who believes that the Bible is true. Associates for Biblical Research, that's where Dr. Bryant Wood is the name I mentioned. He's the head of Associates for Biblical Research. They have a quarterly publication called Bible and Spade. You can subscribe to it. I've subscribed to it for about the last 40 years. It's quarterly and it's made more for the common person, not technical stuff for archaeologists so much. But it's pretty good.

And then if you're into more photographs and text, bibleplaces.com is great. They've got pictures of lots and lots and lots of different things. Both, here's a site and here's what this area looks like, as well as particular little objects and artifacts. So it's very well done and they're pretty thorough. A good combination of graphics and text is bible-history.com.

And I've used that for a number of years. So those are some things that are online. It's not the only thing, but some that I can recommend with those little caveats. Archaeology in the Old Testament by Alfred Horth. The only thing is it's getting dated. 1999, in archaeological terms, lots of things have been found since 1999. Lots of things have been found since 1999. On the reliability of the Old Testament, Kenneth Kitchen, a few years later, 2003. The Archaeological Study Bible from 2005.

It is good. I use it quite a bit. The only caveat in the early chapters of Genesis, they don't support a literal understanding of Genesis as much as I think they ought. With that caveat, it's pretty good for the rest of the Bible. And Dr. Wood, by the way, has contributed to that. Another one is the historical conquest. That's just about the Israelites going into Canaan and the historical and archaeological support for that. A hundred reasons, the same fellow, Murray Hebert, to trust Old Testament history. And that's more broad out of the Old Testament. And then finally, the Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary.

That's in five volumes. and large volumes, and it's good. It's got a lot of pictures and things like that. Again, lots of good material. The early chapters of Genesis are not as well supported in the first volume of this set as one might hope. So that's the only caveat with it. Otherwise, it's pretty recommendable.

The other issue with it, though, with any book that you get, or even magazine publications, is new finds since then, or new analysis since then, can radically change the picture on particular things. About a decade ago, actually more than that, but about a decade or so ago, the James Ossuary was found. It is a bone box that says, Son of Joseph, brother of Jesus. And guess what the first cry and screaming was when that was surfaced?

Fraud! Fraud! As a matter of fact, the Israel Antiquities Authority brought a charge against the owners. You've committed fraud, you know, with this thing. Well, as the trial dragged on and on and on, and as they went through it, increasingly, it became evident this is not a fake. So all the screaming and yelling that first came about, and the criminal charges, eventually the judge just said, case dismissed. An expert witness for the prosecution, so this is one that was hired to shoot this thing down, said, if this is a fake, I quit. It was just about two years ago that the judge came out with his final judgment on that after almost a decade long trial. First it was all, oh this is a fraud, this is a fake, and then, nope, it looks to be the real thing.

And this is James, half-brother of Jesus, author of the book of James, the one who wasn't a believer until, when in 1 Corinthians 15 Paul recorded that the Lord resurrected appeared to James. And that's his phone box. And their father was Joseph, the very one who did marry Mary. And it says, brother of Jesus. Now, those names, by the way, were not unusual names, none of them. James, common name, it's actually in the original language, Yaakov, more like Jacob. Joseph would be Joseph, and Jesus was actually Yeshua. And those were all three common names. What would be very unusual is the combination of those names, and it was very unusual to mention that this one was a brother of. Very unusual to see that. So this is the bone box of James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.

And it just gives you an idea, presuppositions are what tend to drive a lot of people's reactions, not the facts themselves. And many times, there is archaeological fraud out there, but many times, over time, these things, when they first get called a fraud, end up getting, okay, that really is real. So, one more thing, and that is that, like I said, this is a huge field. We could spend an entire year going over Old Testament archaeology, and we're not going to do that.

But what you have on page 6 is the genealogies from Saul and David and Solomon. on the one hand and then after the time of Solomon when the northern kingdom broke away and the ten tribes went with the northern kingdom then it shows that lineage as well what you can do is go through these names and find various sorts of archaeological finds that connect up with these names either in adjacent countries in their records mentioning these names, just like we see House of David in the Tel Dan inscription. We have, for example, with Jezebel, we have actually Jezebel's seal and the original, not just a stamp, but her original seal has been found. In the case of We get down to Hezekiah and Manasseh. We have Manasseh's signet ring.

In the case of Hezekiah, multiple references and even references in Hezekiah's time, the account of the Assyrians coming up to Jerusalem is recorded two places in the Bible and it's also recorded in the Assyrian record. and it's recorded in Herodotus, a Greek historian, writing later, and it's recorded in the Egyptians' records. So you have five different records, two of them in the Bible, of that one event.

So you've got multiple instances of backup for that. Hezekiah was getting ready for the Assyrian attack And in doing so, he sent around storage jars to those cities who didn't have their own water supply. And he had his personal seal put on those storage jar handles. So we have over a hundred of those storage jar handles with his personal seal on it. About 140 at last count. So there's lots of record.

During the time of the end of the line of Israelite kings, the prophet speaking during that time was Jeremiah. Jeremiah has recorded in the book of Jeremiah, Baruch was his personal scribe. Two copies of a seal of Baruch have been found. One of those has Baruch's fingerprint on the edge of the seal, where he was holding the seal and pressing it onto the clay, and his fingerprint was on there. So for a lot of these, you can find things like seals, seal impressions, records not only in the Bible, of course, but from outside, lots of connections. Hezekiah, it says in Isaiah, it says that Hezekiah rerouted the waters to keep it away from the Assyrians through a tunnel, right? And so Courtney and Ingrid Nancy and I, you know, walk through that tunnel.

And, you know, up at the top, up at the top is the spring of Gihon. That's the source of the water. And that's where Solomon was anointed. So, and then it empties out at the pool of Siloam, where Jesus healed the blind man, called by two different names in Nehemiah and Isaiah. But that place, right there, we were there. Right across, like from here to that back wall, right across from Pool of Siloam was where the James Ossuary was found.

So there's dense archaeological finds. Just as you're walking around, there's like multiple things just all within one view. Lots to look at and confirm. Now, why don't we have independent, thorough independent records of every single one of these skinks? Why don't we have just, okay, here's the whole court record and, you know, we found all the signet rings and all the seals. Why don't we have all those? It's one thing we have we have dug up Probably less than 1% of all the potentially available archaeological data You know we went around to eight tells in Israel and they were all still mostly there which means all the material in all those tells have not been Excavated. Whatever's left, that's what they've not touched yet.

And one like Hazor is 200 acres. Huge. It is a massive tell, and it will take, if archaeologists said, well, we're going to completely excavate Hazor, which by the way would ruin it all, right? Because archaeology is a destructive process. It would take a massive number of archaeologists a long, long time to do that.

Tel Dan, that Professor Baran spent decades at, and then until just before his death, Tel Dan is still mostly there. After decades of excavation, he's still just scratched the surface. So that's one thing is a lot of evidence is still sitting in the tels. That's one reason why we don't have all the information that we might want.

Another reason is because the tells in Jerusalem itself give evidence of multiple times of destruction and then rebuilding. There have been a number of centuries of Muslim occupation of Jerusalem. Do the Muslims care to preserve any Christian or Jewish Artifacts now, you know, they just wreck it the the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives Was one that would had been basically vandalized and and Taken from they would use it for materials during the Muslim occupation and so a lot of that looks better now, but it's because they've done a lot of work to clean it up and But otherwise they'd say, hey, here's a piece of stone. I'm going to use that for my front steps, right? And go and vandalize it.

So Jerusalem itself has been through 40 cycles of destruction and rebuilding. So that's another reason why you don't have all the information that you might want. So not only is there a massive amount of information that's just not been accessed yet, but lots of destruction. over time as well. But nonetheless, they continue, it's interesting to watch it, they continue to find more and more things all the time and do these excavations, which again have to be done very carefully. But it is fascinating to see what's out there and what's being found.

Since the year 2000, let's see, Ron Tappe was the professor who found what looked like a child's bowl out of stone. Here's a bowl. And on the flip side was the Hebrew alphabet. So you can turn the bowl over and learn your alphabet, right? So he found that at the time was the oldest Hebrew writing in existence. And that was found, by the way, near Gath, which is where Goliath was from. So here's Hebrew writing found near Gath, not too far away from the Elah Valley where David and Goliath fought. A short distance. But then shortly thereafter, Joseph Garfinkel found an older piece of Hebrew writing.

So here within less than a decade, you had the record broken twice as to what's the oldest Hebrew writing that we have. So more things are being found. The tendency is to push the minimalists closer and closer to the position that Randy was teaching and that scripture is inerrant. Okay, let's pray. We're running out of time. And I've got much more to show you, but I can't. All right.

Thank you, Lord, just for this supporting and confirming evidence about your word and what Randy taught us last week about inerrancy. That what you have is indeed trustworthy and true. And we can believe you for it. And as we continue our study in defense of the faith, we just thank you that so many of these things are coming forth and are solid and firm. And we just pray in Jesus' name. Amen.