♪ In every generation, there have been revivals, massive moves of the Spirit that changed the course of history. In every revival, there were believers like you who chose to answer the call, to become the one in their generation. Discover your call to be the one in your generation. Welcome back to Revival Radio TV. I'm Gene Bailey. Glad you're with us today. We're going to pick up where we left off last week with Scott Stripling.
Scott, thank you for coming back again this week and being a part of it. You know, if you missed the first week, we're not going to recap that because you just need to go back and watch the other program. But why does all of this really matter? What is all this that you're doing with archeology, why does it really matter? - Well, we are making faith commitments. We're all trying to assess, is our faith legitimate?
Someone was raised a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Muslim or a Christian, now a person reaches an age where one says, do I believe what was passed on to me? And what makes the Christian scriptures, Judeo-Christian scriptures, different from other writings and can I trust them? And so this is where archeology, textual studies come to bear.
When people tell us things like, you know, textual criticism disproves the reliability of the scripture or archeology proves that we're dealing with myths and not with reality, that's why it matters. And I hope that folks listening today will dive into that because we all know people and we have people either in our direct circle of influence or in our indirect circle of influence that have been impacted by those claims.
- So I know that you, obviously you've got your Bible here as a great textbook to refer back to, but what other literature do you look at or what else factors in to when you're on one of these digs and you're pulling up? - Yeah, very good question. We'll start with something called the Amarna tablets and this is a replica of one of the Amarna tablets, 285 I believe. One of the letters from the King of Jerusalem.
And these are very interesting, 382 clay tablets written from the Canaanite city states during the reign of Amenhotep III. So this is during the time of the biblical conquest or immediately after it, okay? So what they're doing in all of these letters, they're crying out to Pharaoh for help. We are being overrun, they said, by the Apiru, H-A-B-I-R-U, Habiru, and of course there's no vowels in these ancient letters, so we're talking consonants, the H-B-R.
So the H-B-R are overrunning our cities and if you don't send help, we won't be able to pay tribute this year. Now that's very interesting, Gene, because we have the book of Joshua, we have the book of Judges where we see something called the conquest. They are coming back into the land and they're taking over these Canaanite city states. Well, the Amarna letters show us that very same picture.
For example, Labayu, who's king of Shechem, Abdi-Heba's king of Jerusalem, Labayu has completely allied himself with the Apiru. He has forsaken Pharaoh and that's a dangerous thing to do. And Abdi-Heba over here in Jerusalem is saying, I'm the only one who hasn't defected to the Apiru, you better send help now and get me out of here or I'm going to be a dead man. That's the type of background stuff that we're talking about. Do I, am I excavating a site that's mentioned in the Amarna letters?
And so for example, El Amarna 288, which is a letter that I'm publishing right now, mentions a site called Silu, which I believe is Shiloh. And so the clues then, we take the biblical text, something like the Amarna letters, then the archeological record, we triangulate, and then we publish. - All right. So I know people are looking at this going, what? Like you're holding a piece of charcoal, you know, that you buy at the store.
So this was actually clay and then they actually write, make the letters out into that. - So though it's a cuneiform script and an ancient Akkadian. So Akkadian is the diplomatic language of the late Bronze Age. And there are tens of thousands of these that have been found around the ancient Near East. So these were never answered incidentally. These were all written to Pharaoh. They were found at Akhetaten's new headquarters in Egypt when he became a monotheist.
He moved the capital down to Akhenaten. That's where they were found by a peasant woman there accidentally. They were never answered. Like, why would Pharaoh not answer this? And I'm just thinking, well, if you just lost your military and you just lost your labor force and you encountered a series of natural disasters, including the death of the first born and the death of the cattle, you might be unable to rescue these. You're really losing your colonies.
It's equivalent to Great Britain losing the colonies in the American Revolution. - You said a lady stumbled, how did she find them? - She was digging for fertilizer for her garden and began to dig up clay tablets. She realized they might have some value. And of course, they did. - Oh, wow. That's amazing. All right. What else have you got over here? - Well, here's a look at what a Dead Sea Scroll would look like.
This is the Moses Scroll from what many believe are called the Shapira texts, which still something being debated whether this is legitimate or not, because this was found even before the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 began to come to light. - And where was this found? Well, the Shapira document, we don't know exactly where it came from because it came off the antiquities market, but they claim that it came from caves down near the Dead Sea, which is where, of course, the Qumran literature came from.
Now, the Dead Sea Scrolls were enormously important for textual studies because, again, we were being told the Bible was written by men. It was copied over and over and over again. Errors have crept into the manuscripts. This was the criticism. Well, with the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we found that this simply was not the case. Here we had all the biblical manuscripts except Nehemiah, I'm sorry, except Esther. And we probably have a fragment of Nehemiah.
Then there were sectarian literature like the War Scroll, the Rule of the Community and so forth. Then there are commentaries on scripture. And then there's like pseudepigraphal literature, which is typical of the late Second Temple period. So this entire library, and it's so dry by the Dead Sea, it had survived. When you took those biblical manuscripts, like take Isaiah.
The four books, incidentally, mentioned that were most commonly found at Qumran are the same four books that the New Testament writers most often quoted from. So when you've got New Testament writers quoting scripture, it's Isaiah, Psalms, Deuteronomy, and Genesis. Those are the top four. Those are the most manuscripts out of Qumran were also from those four books, interestingly. - And what is this particular one? - This was what was called the Moses Scroll.
And a dealer, a scholar actually, by the name of Shapira translated this. Unfortunately, we have nothing surviving of it now except sort of squeezes and writings about it. - So is this like Deuteronomy somewhere, or is it...? - I don't, I'm not positive. I don't want to misspeak on that. But he was ultimately claimed to be a forger. In the end, it ruined the man's reputation. But now modern scholars have gone back and said, wait a minute, maybe not so fast.
And for example, you're located where we're sitting today is not far from Fort Worth and Southwest Baptist Theological Seminary here in Fort Worth a few years ago purchased some Dead Sea Scroll fragments from the Kendo family, the original family that had found the Dead Sea Scrolls. And these were later paid a lot of money for them. These were later claimed to be forgeries. Well now it's interesting how pendulums swing, you know, and we can all sort of get on board.
But now scholars, Dead Sea Scroll scholars in particular are going back and saying, now wait a minute, what are you basing that claim on? And it's pretty flimsy. You know, you're saying, well, the ink goes over salt on the... if you have leather, it dries out really fast by the Dead Sea. Everything by the Dead Sea is going to have salt fragments on it, okay, including leather. And so they're saying, well, it's going over the salt fragments.
And so it's evidence of a modern forgery, but wait a minute, did you go back and check the other Dead Sea Scrolls to see if we have the same thing? Now we've done that. You do have the same thing. You have ink that's going over cracks and they claim that's evidence of forgery. Well, we have the exact same thing in the other scrolls. So you know, we kind of want to keep our powder dry when we're calling something a forgery. But I think right now the jury's still out on the Shapira Scroll.
The big benefit for us is that we were able to take, say, the Isaiah Scroll and that people had said, there's no way that that was written at the time because those messianic prophecies had to be Christian interpolations, okay? They're too specific. Well, here we had from 200 BC, this Isaiah Scroll, and it had not changed from the text that we had today. - Well, that in itself is a miraculous that, you know, you can't pass one story down to a couple of generations without it changing.
- Right, right, right. Now this is not to say that we, there aren't some dots and tittles, and I'll give you a good example. Psalm 145 in the English translation, we've always struggled with that because it's what we call an acrostic psalm. So it's all the letters of the alphabet, say in English, we'd be going like, A, all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, B, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you'll be saved. So you'd just, you'd have a verse with each letter of the alphabet.
So we have several acrostic psalms. That's what Psalm 145 is. Well, verse 13 was missing. So the N in the acrostic psalm was missing. Well, you know, they didn't skip in, it's just the manuscripts have probably been damaged over time. You go to the Dead Sea Scrolls, you find the Psalm Scroll, there's Psalm 145 and there's your missing verse. Just like we knew it had to have been all along. So we're actually able to recover some of the biblical texts that had been lost.
So we're not saying that there aren't any inundations or changes, but we're saying that the thrust of the message is overwhelmingly consistent. - Wow. That's amazing. All right. The Mesha Stele. - Well, the Mesha Stele is a fascinating work. You have King Mesha, he's a Moabite king, and here you have a very early mention of Israel, just like you have in the Moabite Stone. Moabite Stone, Mesha Stele is the same thing, used interchangeably. So very, very fascinating.
Maybe the most interesting one is the House of David inscription. Prior to 1993, we had scholars called minimalists from Copenhagen, Denmark. I was recently there speaking at an archeology conference. These are the guys who proclaim that biblical archeology is dead. So I was invited to speak there recently and I was able to demonstrate that we are quite not dead. The discipline is very well. Their school of thought, minimalism, at the University of Copenhagen is now dead.
They spread like wildfire and they told everybody, David is not mentioned anywhere outside the Bible. So you've got it in the Bible, you don't mean to tell me killing giants. I mean, this is like Greek mythology. This is what they told us.
Well, lo and behold, in 1993, in Dan in Northern Israel, Avraham Biran and his team uncovered this inscription in secondary usage from Hazael, king of Damascus, and it refers to, it's only about 50 years or so, maybe two generations after David's time, and it refers to the House of David and the kingdom of David, kingdom of David. - Wow. There you go. - So there you get your first mention. Since then, we now have three other mentions of David outside the Bible.
So since 1993, four mentions of David, and even his palace has been excavated in Jerusalem. So did anyone apologize? Did anyone admit they were wrong? No. They moved on to the next accusation. Okay. So, which is fine, but I think we need to remember this, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Wow. That's good. All right. Shotsu of Yahweh. - The land of the Shotsu of Yahweh. So this is an inscription from the Soleb hieroglyph down in Egypt, dates to the reign of Amenhotep III.
And so you're talking 1470, 1370 BC. So very, very early. And those who believe that the Israelites didn't even exit from Egypt until much, much later. If they even believe that there was an Exodus, this is very problematic. Because here, Amenhotep III refers to the land of the Shasu, which are nomads of Yahweh or Yahu, Yahweh. Which means in 1370, there's already a land where people worship Yahweh. Well, guess what?
The Israelites have just exited from Egypt, according to the biblical chronology. They've just arrived in the promised land. And so here you've got a reference in Egypt to a land where people are worshiping Yahweh. That's what we call a synchronism between the historical data and the biblical data. - All right. So Proto-Sinaitic, tell me about that. We have a place called Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai. These are turquoise mines.
And out of these turquoise mines, we have a number of Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions. And so this is, sometimes it's called Proto-Canaanite, Proto-Sinaitic because we find them in the Sinai. But no one's had the guts to call it Proto-Hebrew, which is in fact what it is. Here's what's happening. When I was in school, I was being taught that the alphabet came from Mesopotamia, that the Phoenicians developed this, and it came to us. No one believes that anymore, okay?
So we now all believe that the alphabet actually came to us from Egypt. So these Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs, and there's hundreds of them. If Moses was trying to write the Pentateuch in Middle Egyptian, which he certainly would have known, Middle Egyptian, you would have needed a library to carry it around, 700 different symbols, okay, instead of 22. You take, say, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the Aleph, an ox head, and it's morphing into an Aleph.
So that symbol is now going to carry a phonetic sound with it. So what we see in the Sinai is the emergence of the first alphabet. And I think we can argue that that very well may be Hebrew. Now it's not that the Hebrews are the only one using it, because people of different cultures use the same alphabet, okay? But were they actually Hebrews responsible for it? Were the Hebrews the one taking the Egyptian hieroglyphs and then giving sound quality to them?
I think there's a strong argument to be made for that. And the inscription that we found on Mount Ebal, which we touched on last week, was actually in that same type of what I would call a proto-alphabetic script. And think of it this way. I have a master's degree in English also, and so I've studied the development in the English language. We have Old English, which is like Caedmon and Beowulf. If you were to look at it on page, you'd only pick out a few words here or there. That's Old English.
Then we have Middle English, like Chaucer's English. You would recognize most of that. And then we have Modern English, of course. And then we have Texan, of course, which may be a whole different world. Various versions of English. My point being, you have the same development in Hebrew. So we have Paleo-Hebrew, which is Biblical Hebrew. This is Paleo-Hebrew, okay? Right here. But there's an ancestor or a predecessor of that, and that's not Paleo-Hebrew.
It's proto-alphabetic Hebrew, equivalent to Old English, if you will. That's what those proto-Semitic inscriptions are. - Wow. All right. So you've got some coins here. Explain to us what you have here. Well, coins are always interesting. We excavate... For example, at Khirbet el-Maqatir, we had 1,322 coins that we excavated. At Shiloh, we've excavated about 400 or 500 so far. The coins are very instructive. They begin in about the 5th century BC. And prior to that time, there are no coins.
So if you were going to tithe, for example, when you went to the tabernacle, just how do you do that? Because you can't go to tabernacle.org and make a secure online donation. You can't write a check. There's no coins. There's no cash. You're going to bring commodity, bushels and barrels and so forth that you're going to bring. But once coinage is developed, this changes things. And this gives us more historicity.
Every ruler mentioned in the New Testament, Festus Felix, Pontius Pilate, Herod Agrippa, everyone that is named, we have found their coins. Every single... Even the bad guys, okay? Antiochus Epiphanes and, you know, all these guys. They were real people. So Gene, the Bible is talking about real people, real places, real events, and we see it in the coins. A lot of people may not know this, but maybe another topic for another time, but the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin.
This is something that a lot of people came out and said, well, it can't possibly be. It's too good to be true. But wait a minute, maybe it actually is. And the more that I have personally studied this, I have learned a lot about it. As a matter of fact, I was brought into a Shroud of Turin project a few years ago. Many people don't know that there's a coin in the eye of this crucifixion victim. So there's no doubt that it's a crucifixion victim, okay? Now, is it Jesus of Nazareth?
I think it probably is, but we can't prove that. But it's clearly a first century crucifixion victim, and they put coins in the eye sockets. This was burial custom at the time, and of all coins to choose, the coin of Pontius Pilate. How would a medieval forger ever have been able to make that connection? So the coins are phenomenal. - All right, so you also found coins in Shiloh in storehouses, tithes? - Well, that's right.
The storehouses are adjacent to the cultic area, we would call it, where our building is and where our bone deposit is. And in those storage rooms, we have storage jars that are as big as us, okay? These are massive. And so again, it's what I would call verisimilitude. It's what you would expect to find if the narrative you're reading is true. So like I would expect to find evidence of a sacrificial system, that's what we're finding it.
I would expect to find evidence of a tithing center, that's what we're finding. So again, consistency in the biblical record. - Wow. So again, I'm going to go back a little bit. Why is finding coins so important? What does that really give us? - Real people, real places, real events. - And you know the dates, right? - The dates on the coins are very helpful, but they can be misleading. For example, Hasmonean coins like this, this is first century BC.
When the Romans arrived in 63 BC, they are under cruel, brutal military occupation by the time of the New Testament. We now have Roman coinage, but the local population as a form of passive resistance keeps using the ancient coins, the Maccabean coins, okay? These are Jewish coins. And so what we find as archaeologists in a first century AD context, all the pottery and everything else is first century AD, but we have first century BC coins.
And so they're continuing to use that coinage because they want to avoid these images-- - Just like we carry coins from 1960 in our pocket. - But even more so, okay, because you're talking over a hundred years of usage. All the coins have stories behind them. Jesus told a story in Luke 15 about lost things, a lost son, a lost sheep, a lost coin. Behold, there was a woman who had 10 silver coins. Now that word "silver", we can just read over and think it's not important.
But of all those coins at Cuban Omni Cotter, 1,322, two were gold, five were silver, 1,317 were bronze. Those are staggering ratios. A silver coin is two weeks wages. Behold, there was a woman who had 10 silver coins. That's five months disposable income. That's what your financial planner tells you you should have on hand. She's got it. We're beginning to understand that woman now. No wonder when she loses one, if it was this coin, she wouldn't have spent her time looking for it.
But it's this coin, she gets on her hands and her knees. She notifies the neighbors there's a crisis. She lights lamps, she moves the furniture. She searches for that coin. Well, the point of the parable is of course that we're the coin, okay? We are of great value. And the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which is lost. So the coins give us context, they give us historicity. Well, and think even about the Half Shekel coin. Judas Iscariot got 30 of those for betraying Jesus.
Peter reached into a fish's mouth, pulled one of those coins out because he went to pay the temple tax with it. Guess whose image is on that coin? The Roman god Melqart. It's the only coin they will accept in the Jerusalem temple. It's 92% pure silver. The average purity of silver is 80% in the first century. Whatever happened to the second commandment? This prohibition against images. No wonder Jesus on two occasions is turning over the tables of the money changers.
For profit's sake, they are taking a Roman god is the only way you can get right with God because you've got to take your money. If you're coming from Damascus or Egypt, you've got to train your currency into that coin in order to enter the temple to get right with God. These are the things that Jesus is pushing back on. - Well, it's mind expanding when you now read that scripture and I go, oh, okay. - Well, that's an example of what the material culture does for us.
And there's this wave of ritual purity that sweeps through like second Temple period Judaism that when we really get a handle on that, helps us understand the scriptures themselves. - That's amazing. All right. So tell me about, you found the gate where Eli fell down and died and you found the Ark of God. How did you? Tell us that story. - We began to uncover the gate. If you would have asked me back in 2016, Scott, what do you want to find at Shiloh? What would your aim be?
I would have said, well, from the Bible, the things that are most important would be the tabernacle and the gate and evidence of the sacrificial system. Well, providentially from my viewpoint, when I chose a field to work in, there's a picture of me nailing the first stake to begin the excavation. Lo and behold, you can call it accidentally or serendipitously or providentially.
But where I nailed that stake was right between the gate and the building that we now believe is the tabernacle building. We could have spent decades working, but we just from day one, we were in the right spot. And like Ehud Netzer at Herodium worked for 35 years looking for Herod's tomb. I mean, I could have done the same thing, but right off the bat, we were in the sweet spot. So when we excavated that gate complex, so folks need to understand, we're not talking about a swinging gate here.
We're talking about multi chambers within a gate complex where the elders, for example, sit in the gate of the city. Everyone assumed it was going to be on the South because it's a more gradual grade to get to the South. But here it was. We couldn't deny that. And it's right next to this building. So it makes sense that people would come in and be right there. If it is the gate that Eli died in, then we're in a very interesting matrix.
And Amarna letter 288, which I'm publishing right now, refers twice to the gate of Silu. So Shiloh, the gate of Shiloh is not only mentioned in the biblical text, but it's also mentioned in Amarna letter 288. And there's two people killed in the gate of Shiloh that are recorded here. Then we have the death of Eli there. So when people are working in that area, they're sort of wondering if the next shoe is going to drop. - All right. Wow. All right. So let's talk about pottery.
And you found pottery and pottery with seals of kings like Hezekiah. - You have the Hezekiah Bulla and the Isaiah Bulla found this far apart. You want to be Hezekiah or you want to be Isaiah? - I'll be Isaiah. - Okay, I'll be Hezekiah. So, I mean, there are seals in Jerusalem found by Eilat Mazar in what we call The Ophel, just on the southern steps of the Temple Mount, were just found through wet sifting.
Okay. This new technology that we're revolutionizing, they would have thrown them away if they were not doing wet sifting. But it's not just Hezekiah and Isaiah. - And quickly explain what wet sifting is. - Okay. Well, we take water and after we have checked it in the square and then we've dry sifted the material, we've now created a system by which we dump that matrix that's left in the tray in a funnel that takes it down into a bag. We then take it down to a washing station that we built.
We have our own water tower and water pressure and everything. It's time consuming, it's expensive, and it's a game changer. For every one inscription we used to find, we now find four. For every one bulla, one scarab, we've been throwing away, we archaeologists in the past, about 75% of the evidence. And so when somebody says, well, we excavated Megiddo or Hazor or whatever, and we didn't find evidence. Well, not when we're throwing away 75% of the evidence.
Okay. So that's why this is such a critical game changer. At Shiloh, we wet sift 100% of the material. We're training other digs in how to wet sift material also. And it's catching on, I'm pleased to say, even though there was resistance, you know, we're funny creatures, Gene. We cry out for change and then we resist it with all our might. - That's true. That's very true. - But I'm pleased to say that it is catching on.
But through that process of wet sifting, this is where we get things like bulla and inscriptions and scarabs that we have missed in the past. - Wow. All right. And so people can volunteer and go help you out. How do they find that information again? - Digshiloh.org. - Digshiloh.org. I think Revival Radio should go do a show... That'd be amazing. - Oh, I'm feeling this. This is good. - That'd be awesome. Well, thank you, Scott. I know we just barely started, but thank you. This is... wow.
This is mind-expanding. Let me pray real quick. Heavenly Father, Lord, I thank You for Scott and what he's doing and Father, the place that you've put him in. And not just for the knowledge that he's attained, but Lord, I thank You for the openness of his mind and his heart to find the facts and the facts prove Your Word accurate.
So Lord, I thank You as people watch this, they'll be excited, they'll be encouraged, inspired, but they'll also be motivated to go beyond what seems to be in front of them and go beyond and found the truth. In Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Amen. ♪ Thank you for supporting the mission of Revival Radio TV. Just follow the information on the screen to join us in partnership here on the Victory Channel as we dig deep into the history of revival together.
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