♪ 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 to Revival Radio TV, I'm Gene Bailey. Glad you're back with us. Listen, today, get your notepad, get your pen, because you're going to want to take some notes. My special guest today, Scott Stripling.
Scott, thanks for joining us today. - Hey, Gene, pleasure to be with you. - All right, so instead of me botching everything that you're doing, I want you to explain who you are and your history. - Gene, I've been in ministry since I was 18 years old, and so that's over 40 years. And the Bible led me into archaeology. And I was tired of getting beat up, people telling us that archaeology contradicts the Bible.
And so I got involved in excavations, went back to school and earned a Ph.D. in the field. And now I am dual track and have been for many years, theology, archaeology. I'm provost at a seminary in southwest Houston. We have an archaeology program that's part of that. I'm president of the Near East Archaeological Society. And the director of excavations at Ancient Shiloh. I've been married for 41 years. I have four grown children, and my seventh grandchild is on the way.
- Well, that was really quick. - Yeah, I'm a blessed man. - Yeah, you are a blessed man. All right, so let's talk about, you know, you mentioned something. A lot of times we're faced with science as if it's proving there isn't a God. And I believe it was Father George Lemaître who said, "Science doesn't disprove, it proves that God exists." And that's really with archaeology what you're coming up with. So tell me about the most exciting find.
I just kind of want to hear, because, I mean, you know, we all want to be, you know, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones. But tell us about the most amazing find that you've been a part of. - Well, over the years there have been several. We're excavating Shiloh right now, which is the matrix of the sacrificial system that existed there for over three centuries. So literally the bone deposits and the altar horns and, you know, all the accouterments of the tabernacles.
So that's super exciting because you read it in the text, and then you find it in the material culture. You start thinking, well, a fair-minded person, if you start dealing with hundreds of these synchronisms, is going to realize that we're dealing with a reliable ancient source. I've never wanted the playing field slanted in my favor. I just wanted it level. And many times what I deal with as an academic working in this field is we take the Egyptian literature seriously at face value.
We take the Eucharistic literature at face value. But when we deal with the biblical literature, with most of my skeptical colleagues, the Bible is guilty until proven innocent. Then that's where I enter into the discussion and say, "Wait a minute, can we talk about this?" - Right. So tell me, have you been able to discover, have you been able to get past some of those issues with the archaeological community? - We have, and over the years I've built bridges.
When I publish, I bring in co-authors into the publication who are coming from a different worldview, a different university, and we've worked together, we've built bridges. And so when it's published, maybe under my name, but the chapters are written by leading scholars from other universities, what that says is this isn't just some evangelical out there trying to prove a point, but this is going to pass that smell test of peer review. - Right. All right. So let's dive into the topic.
We've talked a little bit about how the liberal side has affected the conservative or the theological side of America especially, but even the world. So tell me, how did liberal theology start? - That's a very good question. About 150 years ago, we had in Europe a movement that was centered in Germany, very much so, that began to look at the Bible critically. Now, in a sense, that's a good thing that we read the Bible analytically, not just devotionally.
But they were reading the Bible and attempting to dismantle it. And a man named Julius Wellhausen came up with a theory called the Documentary Hypothesis. And he tried to say that there were four sources that made up the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, J, E, P, and D. And the J was the Jehovah source, the E, the Elohim source, the P, the Priestly source, and the D, the Deuteronomy source.
And what they did is they took the book of Genesis and said, wait a minute, why do we have two creation accounts in the first few chapters? Why do we have doublets? Why are there two names for God used here and there? And they used this to say that there's not an internal consistency within the text. Now, here's what we know 150 years later, and within my area of expertise, we have lots of ancient Near Eastern literature, the Karnak Stele, the Berlin Stele.
There's many examples where we have the exact same thing in other ancient Near Eastern literature. And nobody even questions that that exists. Nobody's saying the Berlin Stele had more than one author on it. But we have the exact same genre blending going on. So I think it was an anti-biblical bias that existed that we've now been able to disprove. And me as an archaeologist, I come along and look at this.
I was told over the years there was no alphabet with which the Israelites could have written. Moses was illiterate. - So therefore the thought that Moses wrote the Pentateuch would be bogus in their estimation. - Even though Jesus said he did. So as your Christian viewers, that's a good place to start. Jesus said Moses wrote the Pentateuch. But yes, that's what they said. There is no way he could have.
It wasn't composed until the Heavenistic period, perhaps the Persian period, a thousand years after the events that it purports to have. So we can't trust the source. You get this at places all over. But for example, Princeton University. I have a good friend who's a pastor, graduate of Princeton Seminary, a very bright man. And he told me, all these years, Scott, that's been in the back of my mind. You know, can I really trust the scriptures?
And what we found archaeologically with the Mount Ebal inscription, the oldest Hebrew inscription found with the name of God in it, dating to the time of Moses, there was an alphabet with which Moses and Joshua could have written. - Wow. So how does that affect the liberal theology argument? When you find this alphabet, what happened? Are they accepting that now? Or are we still dealing with the opposition?
- Yeah, well, as Jesus said, "Even if one were to rise from the dead, they would not believe." So I think you get three different responses. You get sort of those who have a proclivity toward belief, those who have a proclivity toward unbelief. They're not going to change their view no matter what. And then we have about one-third who are in the middle, and they will weigh evidence. And so we have passed the peer review process, and I think we've had exactly what I expect.
We had a broad range of reactions, many embracing this and then many saying, well, it can't possibly be because of our circular reasoning. - All right, so let's break out the documentary hypothesis. And I told you guys you're going to have to take notes here. So go slow and walk us through some of these issues, like the fact that it denies the authority of this scripture. - Well, that's right.
If Moses didn't write the Pentateuch, and we don't have an eyewitness account, then these are merely etiological myths or legends that are being cobbled together a thousand years later, like some other ancient cultures did, creating a history that didn't really exist. Jesus says that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, and so now we're talking about issues of inerrancy and historicity. Can we trust the text? - Okay, before you get going, you know, yes,
Jesus said Moses. So for most of us, that's good enough. But the reason we're diving into this is because I want you at home to understand the opposition of what you're having to deal with. So help simple people like me understand how to oppose this, such a prevalent issue in our society of saying that the scripture is not accurate. All right, so keep going. - Well, if we have multiple authors who cobbled together the Pentateuch, okay?
So it's a composite source that a redactor, to use their term, put together a thousand years later. Taking this J source, which predominantly uses the Jehovah name, and they would say, well, Hausen would have said that it was more of a Judean source. And then the E, which is the Elohim source, and incidentally they would point out that you're blending singular and plural pronouns there in Genesis, and that's a problem.
We've got lots of examples of ancient Near Eastern literature, creation accounts, as a matter of fact, that blend singular and plural pronouns as well. What we need to understand is how ancient literature was composed. And so on a very simplistic level, you could say things like, the book of Genesis mentions Philistines, but the Philistines hadn't arrived yet, the land of the Philistines. Well, that's a big problem with the book of Genesis.
We're not saying, Gene, that the Bible was never updated in language. So in the land of the Philistines, for example, if 500 years later they updated that so the readers would know what they're talking about, that's a very different story. But people are looking at anachronisms, singular and plural pronouns, different names for God as being a problem, in reality that confirms how ancient Near Eastern literature was written. - Wow. All right, so let's keep going. Well, let me ask you this.
When we're dealing with such opposition to the authority of the scripture or the accuracy of scripture, what is it... Because I love the fact you said you're on basically a dual track. You're in the church and seminary, but then you're also archeology, which we talk a lot about taking over the seven mountains, which you're on that mountain. So to speak, that you're taking it. What's the biggest thing you have to overcome?
- What I've encountered is the idea, how could Stripling possibly be unbiased or dispassionate because he has faith commitments or predisposition toward belief? I could just as easily turn around and say, how can so-and-so be dispassionate or unbiased when he has a predisposition toward agnosticism? I mean, the truth is we all bring predispositions to bear. So that's how I've had to encounter that and say we're going to use the best science, cutting-edge, avant-garde technology.
Archeology itself is a soft science, but we bring all the hard sciences to bear in that. In just the last few weeks, I've done carbon dating on material. I've done DNA testing on bones. I mean, we're cutting-edge in the technology and then we publish with regularity and with excellence, and I think that's what gives us a seat at the table to discuss in the arena of ideas. If we do slipshod work and we're just saying, well, the Bible says it, bless God. - Yeah, that should be good enough.
- That's good enough. Well, it is for some people, the one-third I was talking about. But I care about the third in the middle that are persuadable. - Yeah, all right. So how is this, how has what you've done, because you mentioned how you went back to school to get a degree in this, and so you've started on the second. How has this affected your faith?
- I grew up a believer, and I never had a faith crisis or anything like that, but what I encountered was in the church, a lot of what I heard when we were dealing with biblical backgrounds, I knew it didn't resonate with me and it probably wasn't accurate. That didn't mean my pastor was trying to mislead me, you know, he was doing the best that he could, probably repeating what he had been told.
But I knew we had these thousands of years of distance, and I wanted to, sort of in a hermeneutical spiral, I wanted to make my way back to the historical Jesus. And archaeology was the means by which I could do that. And then I wanted to be able to communicate that to others, how that impacted not my faith, but my illumination of Scripture, how this brought it from then and there into here and now. - Right.
How is this... I know we're getting off topic, but I think this is so important for people to see and hear what you've gone through. How does this affect... Well, let me go a different direction. Let's talk about what you're working on right now. Let's talk about that. Tell me about some of your recent digs. - Since 2017, I've been the Director of Excavations at Shiloh. Shiloh was Israel's first capital before Jerusalem.
So while Jerusalem was still a pagan city, if you want to connect with Yahweh, you went to Shiloh. Like Hannah and Elkanah and people like this. This is where, according to Joshua 18.1, Joshua erects the tabernacle at Shiloh. And they have the sacrificial system there for over three centuries. Ultimately, Shiloh is destroyed because of their apostasy. The Ark of the Covenant is captured. And David ultimately brings the Ark to Jerusalem.
Later in Jeremiah 7.12, when Jerusalem has turned away from God, God tells Jeremiah, "Go now to Shiloh", He said, "See what I did there and make it known." In other words, don't think I won't judge you. Think how much I love Shiloh and I judge them.
So what I have the opportunity to do is to go back now as an archaeologist and begin to, like draining the water in a bathtub, lowering the dirt as we go, revealing all the ancient features, identifying the stratification so that we can accurately see what happened in biblical times. Now what we're finding is mind-boggling. - Well, tell us, what are you finding? - Well, a building that matches the dimensions of the tabernacle. And it orients east-west.
And, you know, you might be thinking, well, wait a minute, I thought the tabernacle was a tent. What do you mean a building? Go back and look at 1 Samuel 3. It's talking in 1 Samuel 3 about the house of the Lord and the temple, it calls it a temple of the Lord, and the doors of the house of the Lord, delet, door in Hebrew. So you've moved from temporary language now to permanence. Why they built a permanent structure? We don't know, but the text indicates that they did.
And then in the Jewish literature, what we call the Mishnah, you have two places, the Zevachim and the Seder Olam, that both say that a permanent structure was built at Shiloh, a permanent temple tabernacle with a tent over the top but walls and a foundation. Lo and behold, that is exactly what we are excavating on two-to-one ratios from holy to most holy space.
Oriented east-west, a demolished four-horned altar, palm granites, which are accouterments of the tabernacle, and this massive bone deposit from the sacrificial system. So I haven't even had time to publish all of this yet. We have various articles that are in the works, but it's very exciting. - It is very exciting. So when you uncover it, what is it that you're, I'm curious, how did you know that's what you, you know, it's the temple?
So as you're peeling back the layers, so to speak, what is it that you saw that you said, "Haha! This must be that." I was more surprised than anyone because I published an article in 2016 saying that I believed that the tabernacle had been at the summit of Shiloh. So we're on the northern slope.
I wasn't at all expecting this, but as we got down, the first thing I encountered was a very large east-west wall, and we called it Wall 10, and it just sort of was on my radar because I knew it was from the tabernacle period, what we would call the Late Bronze IIB, Iron Age IA transition. Well, the next season, we got a parallel wall over here. I thought, okay, well, this is getting more interesting, and that was the right dimensions. Then we got a perpendicular wall.
So I asked our guys, we do drone photography every day, and we have, you know, lots of photogrammatic software that we're using to create these things. I said, give me the dimensions of the tabernacle as given in the Bible. Take our images of what we've excavated and superimpose. It was a spot-on fit. And I thought, okay, now I'm really interested. Well, since then, now we have the corners, we have the other perpendicular wall, and that's how I began to identify it.
Now, what would someone, an archaeologist who does not know the biblical text, what would he have identified there? So I'm not against the other literature. In fact, I studied the other literature, but I'm saying you have a distinct advantage if you're excavating biblical sites to know the biblical literature.
- Well, and I think that's great, and that's another reason why it's so important that we take people like you that are believers, go take these mountains and be educated and go do exactly what you're saying. So how does this change any type of theology that we've had when we see that there's a temple? Of course, the obvious part is there was a permanent structure, what you just said. What else? How does that change everything?
- Well, I think as we understand the tabernacle, we begin to understand the incarnation. John 1, verse 14, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us, skene, which is skin in Greek. So the tabernacle is made of skin. So Jesus, when John is trying to describe the incarnation, he takes the tabernacle imagery. He says, so the Word became skene, skin, tabernacles covered with animal skins, and he tabernacled among us.
And so as we begin to study and look into this and all the accoutrements of the tabernacle and the sacrificial system, we think about, for example, the price that Jesus paid for our redemption, and then we look at these about 100,000 animal bones that I have in this fevisa, this sacred deposit. Every one of those, from clean animals, young animals, disproportionately from the right side of the animal, Leviticus 7, tells us this.
Again, how would a Bible reader pick up on the significance of that left-right ratio type thing? These are the bones that now we carbon date, we have ceramic dating, we have luminescence testing where we get readings off the soil. When soil is exposed to sunlight for the first time, you can get a pretty accurate reading off of it as far as age goes. So, glyptic readings, anything we can get. - You can actually age soil.
It's a new technology, but it appears to be just as accurate as carbon dating. Now, I know carbon dating among evangelicals has maybe, there's some questions. You know, like, can you trust this because people are trying to tell us the earth is billions of years old based on carbon dating. We use carbon dating, and it's very accurate back to a certain period in history, about 1400 B.C.
Around 1400 B.C., and this is not just like a Stripling thing, this is a thing in academia that we're all dealing with. Why do the carbon dates stray after that point? They match up to, say, 3400 years ago. Our ceramic dates, our glyptic dates match the carbon dates. But when we get here, now they begin to diverge. So, when we're using them, we're using them up to 3400 years ago accurately. Before that, I don't know why they stray. - Well, that's very interesting.
- Yeah. - So, could it be something that happened in the earth during that time? - It had to be something atmospheric. So the absorption of carbon varies. You know, you can have something like the eruption of Santorini in about 1600 B.C. We know that carbon ratios fluctuate around that time. So, something happened around that time, but I don't know what that event was. - So, you mentioned the animal bones in DNA. Tell me about the DNA.
- Well, I don't even have all the results of it yet, but it's exciting because we're just now beginning to build databases of ancient DNA. And now we're dealing with sacrificial animals from Shiloh. So, as we sequence, it was really exciting. We just did this very recently. The Creation Labs in Glen Rose have brand new DNA testing equipment. And so, they graciously did it for us at no cost. And so, when we saw the DNA sequencing actually forming and we had the entire genome, it was fascinating.
We now have a database that we can compare. For example, when we get sacrificial bones from Jerusalem, we can see what the relationship is between these. As we excavate more and we build this database, it may be decades from now that other archaeologists will be able to use the data that we're compiling at this time. - Wow. It's amazing. - Yeah. - It's amazing. All right. So, let's talk about what else have you discovered that stands out?
I mean, what's happened at Shiloh is obviously very exciting, but let's talk about something else that you found. - Well, prior to Shiloh, we excavated for many years at a site called Khirbet El-Maqatir, which is 10 miles north of Jerusalem. Shiloh is 20 miles north of Jerusalem in the hill country.
But 10 miles north of Jerusalem is this site that is a small Late Bronze Age fortress that many people now believe, myself included, was the site of biblical Ai or Ai of Joshua 7 and 8, the second site of the conquest. My primary research focus is on the conquest, and so I've had the privilege of excavating four conquest sites.
And that means that I'm not just looking at one site but a regional perspective of what's going on so we can understand trade patterns and ceramic distributions and all these things in a regional paradigm. So that was terribly exciting because we had a New Testament city on top of an Old Testament city, which is what we have at Shiloh also, by the way. But at Khirbet El-Maqatir, we uncovered what we now believe was biblical Ephraim of John 11:54.
So when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, he could no longer go about openly. They all sought to kill him. He went to a village near the edge of the wilderness named Ephraim, and there he remained with his disciples until the triumphal entry. So we've known a lot about the Week of Passion, but we've known almost nothing about the month before that, the final month of Jesus' life.
Well, to have the privilege to excavate that matrix, that material culture, you know, the stone vessels and the tools, the coins, the accouterments, you know, when I said earlier I wanted to get back to the historical Jesus, I felt at that point that I had. You know, that we're dealing with the human remains that we uncovered. These are people who encountered Yeshua. This city was wiped out by the Romans in AD 69, just before Jerusalem was wiped out.
And we've done final publication, but we're continuing to do follow-up publications on this. So that was really exciting, too. - I bet. I bet. So what are you looking for in the future as we start to wrap this up? - Well, that's a good question. I have four or five more years of work at Shiloh, at least to finish doing... - Now, you've got a big team there at Shiloh. - Yeah. - How many people are working on that?
- Well, we'll have about 300 people in an average season in the field, not all there at the same time. - Sure. - But we have specialists. We have a zooarchaeologist and an anthropologist and a numismatist and a ceramicist. You know, there's all these specialists and then lots of volunteers, folks just like your viewers who can go to digshiloh.org and get the dates and figure out if that's something that they would want to be a part of.
And for me, Gene, I get the biggest thrill out of putting the whole thing together, sort of helping everyone find their spot and to efficiently flow within that team. - Wow, that's amazing. So how are you able to fund all of this? This has got to take a lot of money. - Well, it does. Our average dig season costs about $500,000, and those are hard costs. That's not talking about the soft costs also because the scientific testing is, of course, very, very expensive.
And you've got to travel to the other side of the world and accommodate a large team for a long period of time. But my friends and my family, God bless them and everyone who catches the vision, through digshiloh.org, they contribute. We have some legacy projects that we're working on now, building at Shiloh, so that when we leave five years from now, after the dig is completed, what's the signage going to look like?
And I want to pave the road so that it's handicap accessible so everyone can get there. I want to leave a playground behind for children there, and there's several things. And so recently some people have very kindly written some checks to me, and it's just friends and family and folks who catch the vision. - Well, that's wonderful. But people can find out more at digshiloh.org. - Digshiloh.org.
- That's really, you know, this is a great, you know, people donate to ministries and ministers and churches, obviously. But to donate to something like this is really an exciting thing. It's a whole other level of how your funds help. So let's pray. We're going to have him back next week, but I want to pray with you. Because before I do, why don't you look at this camera and tell, why should people care about all of this?
- I think archaeology matters because it illuminates the text of Scripture. And if somewhere in the back of your mind you've read something or heard something that you can't trust the Bible because archaeology contradicts it, I'm still waiting for the evidence of that. Because as an archaeologist, I haven't seen that. I think you can have confidence.
Sometimes evidence has been lost over thousands of years, but it's amazing how often we recover that evidence, it synchronizes with the text, and it, in fact, illuminates the text of Scripture. And so we don't set out to prove the Bible. What we want to do is to illuminate it, set it into a context so that we understand it here and now the way that they did then and there. - Amen. Well, thank you, Scott.
All right, so listen, what you need to do, you need to go share this program on your social media. Copy this, the link that's always there on our social media and share this because this is a great... I think this is actually a great witnessing tool for people to use. Let me pray for you real quick. Heavenly Father, I thank You for every person watching this program.
And all those that this program will be shared with, that they begin to see, as Scott says, the Scriptures illuminated in the archaeological finds. And we praise You and thank You for it. In Jesus' name, amen. All right, we'll see you next week. ♪