I think the Bible's talking about real people, real places, and real events, and I've got not only hundreds, I've got thousands of synchronisms that give me confidence in that claim, okay, from the Amarna letters and the Dead Sea Scrolls to my own excavations. I think Jesus said in Luke 19:40 that the stones would cry out like if we didn't speak. In a sense, inanimate objects like stones, they are speaking if we know their language. As an archaeologist, I happen to speak that language, okay?
The pottery's talking to me, the stones are talking to me, the bones are talking to me, and they're all giving me the same message. It's a very consistent message that we have a verisimilitude that exists between the archaeological data and the biblical text. - Can we trust the integrity of the Word?
- I'm trying to be as fair and as balanced as we can with the work that we're doing there so that the light of Scripture can shine, and I think when it does, then it's going to point people toward the Scriptures and ultimately toward Christ. ♪ 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 your host, Gene Bailey, and we're continuing to talk with Scott Stripling. Scott, we've talked about four conquest sites over the last few programs that we've done together, but tell us about Mount Ebal. Now, we know Mount Ebal is the mountain of cursing that is given in Deuteronomy, but kind of break that down to us because this is all about a covenant, you know, but I want to hear what you have to say.
- Okay, well, the most interesting thing that maybe your readers have not or listeners, viewers have not picked up on is that the Abrahamic covenant was cut at Buon' Amore, which is a stone's throw from Mount Ebal. That's important. So in Deuteronomy 11 and Deuteronomy 27, when Moses tells the Israelites, when you go back into the land, because they're at Shittim, about to reenter the land at this point. They're at the end of the 40 years. He writes Deuteronomy, goes up on Mount Ebal and dies.
Joshua takes over and leads them across. They camp at Gilgal. They have victory at Jericho, defeat at Ai, then victory at Ai. Then where do they go next? Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal because Moses told them when you come into the land and you gain a foothold, you're going to go to Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal. He's very specific what they're supposed to do.
You're going to put half the tribes on Mount Gerizim to pronounce blessings of covenant, half the tribes on Mount Ebal to pronounce the curses of the covenant. But we should all remember that the Abrahamic covenant is cut right there. And so what they're really doing is they're coming back and they're now reaffirming this land covenant that God had made with Abraham. So Gerizim is blessings, Ebal is curses. What they don't tell us in the text is that in between is ancient Shechem.
And the patriarchs have deep ties to Shechem. Jacob's well is at Shechem. Joseph's bones are buried at Shechem. I mean they carry him all the way out of Egypt to bring him to Shechem. So see Abrahamic covenant, bones of Joseph, well of Jacob, and now we're going to renew this covenant here. So that's the context. At the end of Joshua chapter 8, they do what Moses told them to do. They assemble, they have this ceremony, and then we get this very important verse, Joshua 8:30.
Joshua then built an altar on Mount Ebal, not Gerizim, but on Mount Ebal. - So what have you found? - Well let's back up to Israeli archaeologist Adam Zertal. He was a war hero, wounded badly in the war, walked on crutches then the rest of his life. He was a typical agnostic Israeli archaeologist, raised on a kibbutz, and the whole kibbutzim movement in Israel is secular. These are Eastern European Jews who when they relocated brought their agnosticism with them.
Zertal had never even read the Bible. After the war, he earned a PhD in Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology, well Israeli biblical archaeology, and received a position at University of Haifa, and he was placed in charge of the Manasseh Hill Country Survey. Now this is ironic because we have somebody who is surveying the Manasseh Hill Country who's never read the Bible.
So Zertal then with innocence alive, he has no agenda, he is on Mount Ebal, and he comes across this large cultic site, and it appears that it's been intentionally covered with what he called a mantle of stone. So he begins excavation, that's 1980. In 1982, he goes back and begins an excavation. So from 82 to 89, Zertal excavates. Very early on, a member of his team begins to show him the biblical text, and shows him a drawing of the biblical altars, and Zertal is blown away.
He says, you got to be kidding me. This is it. This has to be Joshua's Altar and he became a believer in the historicity of the text. Now this is a crisis in academia, of course. His colleagues at Tel Aviv University are not at all blessed by this. So we can't have our professors going around talking about Bible and archaeology or something like that, but that is exactly what Zertal did. And they lambasted him, they said it can't possibly be, it's a watchtower, or it's this, or it's that.
Now the pendulum has swung, and most scholars agree with Zertal that he was right. So what did he find? There is a rectangular altar, 9 by 7 meters, with a ramp to the west. Underneath that rectangular altar at the perfect geometric center, he found an earlier round altar, 2 by 2 meter round altar. So clearly the rectangular altar, which is from the period of Judges, was protecting and venerating what was underneath it.
That's what was sacred, what Zertal called the primogenial ritual site at Mount Ebal. - Wow. Staggering. So how do we take that, what does that prove other than the fact it really did exist? - Well that's a good place to start, okay, that we're dealing with historicity. Zertal excavated there, they published preliminary reports, but he died before he ever published a final report.
And so what I wanted to do with my expertise and interest in the conquest sites, a logical extension of our work at Khirbet el-Maqatir, biblical eye, where it's the next place the Israelites went, they went to Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim. And so of course I had my eye on this area. However, politically you are in the sensitive area of all Israel. In 1993, the Oslo Accords carved Israel up into three zones within the so-called West Bank, which is Judea Samaria, it's the biblical heartland.
You've got area A, which is under Palestinian control, C is under Israeli control, B is under divided control. So it's Israeli military control, Palestinian civil control. Mount Ebal is B. So it's not even clear who's in charge there, but it was grandfathered in because it's pre-1993. So it's levels of complexity, you know, of who's in charge and who gets to make decisions and so forth.
So I knew we couldn't excavate there right now, but I said, well, what if we, using our new technology we talked about in the last program of wet sifting, what if we took his old dump piles, the things that were thrown away, left behind, all archeological sites have big mounds or dump piles. And what if we relocated that, a place where we had water, and then we wet sifted it? I bet we would find a lot.
And I was going to do that at two sites and publish a boring methodological paper to my colleagues saying we can't keep excavating without wet sifting because look what we're missing. Well, I had no idea that we were going to uncover. I thought we'd get scarabs and things like that. Had no idea that we were going to uncover what many are now calling the greatest find of the century. - Which is what? - It was a small folded lead tablet. And as soon as I saw it, I knew what it was.
We call it a defixio or a curse tablet. Now, many of these have been found in Israel, no blessing tablets incidentally, but curse tablets. And Mount Ebal was the mountain of the curse. It came from inside the altar area. And I thought this is very interesting, but how do we know that it's going to date all the way back to Joshua's time? Because I thought, well, maybe someone in the Hellenistic period or the Roman period knew it was Joshua's altar, and they came and left the curse tablet there.
Now, Gene, these curses are usually real petty sorts of curses, like she stole my boyfriend, may her hair fall out or something like that. So very petty sorts of things. But this one was not that at all. And to make a long story short, we were to have the small folded lead tablet. I found a lab in Prague that had expertise in scanning through lead. Now, do we live in an exciting time or what? The ability to scan through lead.
So when you go to the dentist and they put that lead, that doesn't do any good, okay? We now know that we can scan through the lead, and we were able to scan and see the inside because we couldn't open it. It was too brittle. We knew there were markings on the outside. I was seeing proto-alphabetic letters, I thought, on the outside.
So when I began to get the scans back from Prague, and I had established a team at this point with paleographers and epigraphers on my team from different continents, different universities. And as they began to see these things daily, they're sending me updates saying, "Scott, you're not going to believe this." Because I thought, what if the first letter is an aleph? Because the word for curse in Hebrew is Arur. And so what if the first letter is an aleph? Well, it was. It was this ox head.
I thought, wow, what if it's a Resh? They are, and it was. Well, the first word I saw in this proto-alphabetic script was arur, curse. And so now we're looking at an altar that Zertal believed was Joshua's altar, and I agree with him, on Mount Ebal, a tablet that he missed because they weren't wet sifting. And we're now seeing the word curse. And ultimately, we recovered dozens of proto-alphabetic letters from this.
It's difficult to know exactly what it says because that early writing can be right to left or left to right or top to bottom. It can even be like the ox plows. And so it's very difficult to read, but to the best of our ability, we interpreted this to be a curse that contained the name Yahweh. Cursed are you by the God Yahweh. And that's the core of the curse. Isn't that the whole point of Deuteronomy 27? So it's self-imprecatory. May these curses come upon us if we do not keep this covenant.
And that's what I think we have here. We have a summary of the curses of Deuteronomy 27 laid on the altar and this table we're sitting at. The altar is not much bigger than this. So this is about a meter and a half. So you're talking about a two by two meter round altar. And the image is just powerful because they lay that tablet, this curse on the altar. The truth is the Israelites aren't going to be able to keep the law.
Abraham wasn't able to, nor any of us, but they're bringing a self-imprecatory curse. May all these things come upon us if we don't keep this law, but then what do they do with it? Wisely, they put it on the altar. Then their sacrifice, it's covered with blood. And so you see the man who will own up to his failure, who will come to the altar, won't have those curses inured to him. It's only the man who won't do that, who will have that self-imprecatory curse come upon him.
So the ramifications are theological and historical and archaeological. And as you can imagine, lots of people are excited about this. Lots of people are angry about it. Lots of people agree with me and disagree with me, but that's what it is. - Wow. That's outstanding. And this was all in the dump pile. - It was in the dump pile. What a metaphor, right? - And again, how big was this lead tablet? The lead tablet's tiny. It's about the size of, take a business card and fold it in half.
- Wow. - It's a very tiny, so very finely incised letters on this. Job 19:25, you might find this very interesting. 24 and 25, we think about the first mention of resurrection in the Bible, comes from Job 19. Most of us would think Job is probably the oldest book in the Bible, along with Genesis. Well, listen to this verse. Oh that my words were written on a lead tablet with an iron pen.
Okay. That's that very ancient, late Bronze Age way of thinking that bears that verisimilitude or that authenticity. So, you know, having this tablet in our hands, being able to then study it, bring it through the peer review process, and now it begins to make its way into journals and books and, you know, becomes a part of the historical record. - That's amazing.
- And the name Yahweh is so interesting because here you have the three-letter spelling of the divine name, Yod-Heh-Vav, not the four-letter spelling, which is more typical of the early period in Israelite history. Okay. So it's not only the handwriting style, but also little things like that, that paleographers use. And I'm not a paleographer. I'm more of a ceramicist. That's why I had them on my team. But I had to know enough about it to be able to intelligently make decisions.
- You know, back before I leave the lead tablet, is there anything else that stands out to you about this tablet that we haven't covered? - Well, a lot of folks don't know because we couldn't publish everything in this first article. We have a second article that'll come out. We also found styluses in the dump pile, too, that they had missed. And so not only the writing surface, but the writing implement as well. To argue that there wasn't literacy in early Israel is becoming very problematic.
Gene, that's the basis of the documentary hypothesis, that Moses could not have written this because there was nothing with which to write and there was no alphabet that existed. Now, this disproves both of those things. Okay. There was an alphabet and there was material with which to write. - How would, you know, I'm curious how they would even form the lead tablets and the stylus. I mean, that's outstanding just in itself. - Well, it is.
Think about Ezekiel, I'm sorry, Exodus 38, the builders of the tabernacle, Bezalel and Aholiab, are their names. And God says, I choose Bezalel, this is his father's name, because of his outstanding craftsmanship in metalworking, in textiles, and gives all this whole list of things. So he's got this incredible skill set. And God says, "I've been watching you down in Egypt when you develop this skill set and now, tag, you're going to build the tabernacle." So they did have these skills.
Many of them maybe used them as slaves in Egypt, but now they've brought them into the promised land. - Wow. All right. So you are a ceramicist. So let's talk about what you've been able to find. - Well, the pottery was important because that establishes the archaeological context. So I'm able to look at that pottery and see that we've got late Bronze Age pottery and we have Iron Age pottery, and to be able to separate it out because the Iron Age pottery dates to the rectangular altar.
The Bronze Age pottery dates to the round altar. And so that establishes an archaeological context. That means that it has to be no later than 1150 BC. So even if it was all the way down here to 1150 BC, the time of the rectangular altar, that's still older than any Hebrew we've ever found in Israel. Now we have the Soleb inscription we talked about last week from down in Egypt, the land of the Shashu of Yahweh, Yahu. That's also the three-letter spelling, by the way, there.
But in Israel itself, we actually had older by several centuries and it included the name of the Hebrew God. And Canaanites, that's how we know that it's not Canaanite writing. Canaanites aren't writing about Yahweh. There's only one group of people in the ancient world who are worshiping Yahweh, and those are the Israelites. - Wow. Outstanding. So talk about some of the... well, let me ask you this. Does the archaeology support the biblical chronology of both Exodus and the conquest?
Yeah, that's a good question. I believe that the biblical date for the Exodus is around 1446 BC. And we know this from a number of sources, but a book was written that I was one of the authors of a couple of years ago, published by Zondervan called Five Views on the Exodus. And so they asked me to write chapter one, which was the biblical date of the Exodus.
And so their folks can get ahold of that book and they can see in detail the textual and archaeological reasons why we date the Exodus there. So does the archaeology support the textual ideas? Absolutely. And so I go into it in great depth in that chapter. - Wow. All right. So let me get back to the ceramicist part, because I think that's very interesting.
How does the ceramics from different eras, you know, like you're talking about the Iron Age, how does that, what does that really tell you other than dating? What does that tell you? - Yeah, a number of things. So imagine for those who are football fans who are watching, imagine so inexperienced person playing quarterback in the NFL and they're going to get the ball and he's got a couple of seconds to make reads before these big guys are going to try to kill him, okay?
If the quarterback's back, then I'm going to do this. If the quarterback steps forward, I'm going to do that. He's got three reads to make real fast before he gets killed. So reading pottery is what we call it. We have a number of diagnostic features. We want to know things like, does the rim evert? Does it invert? Is it straight up? What are the inclusions in the clay at that time? Is the base flat? Is it oval? Is there a disc type base? Is there a ridge at bottom of the neck?
So there are hundreds of little diagnostic things that with time and training, like an entomologist would look at bugs and they'll tell you it's a good bug or a bad bug because of his training. With time, we can pinpoint not only the century, but many times the decade from which that pottery comes. And it's a real picture for us kind of on a faith level. God's first act recorded in the Bible was pottery and clay. I mean, He takes the clay of the earth and He shapes man.
So He immediately shows Himself to us as potter. He's potter, we're clay. Paul picks up on that in 2 Corinthians and he talks about, we have this treasure of the gospel in jars of clay, which mean they can be broken. They can be shattered. The value is not in the vessel. The value is on what is inside the vessel. Now we have found we can put vessels back together. And of course, that's what God does too, is He puts broken vessels back together. - Yeah, He sure does. Right.
I want to make sure I get to this because, you know, it's politics as of right now as we're recording this. You know, there's all this issue with the Jews. Do the Jews really own the homeland? Is Israel really their basics, you know, from Judea and Samaria? What have you discovered? Does it prove that, that the Jews, that's their homeland or not? So we don't set out to try to prove that. All we're doing is bringing evidence to light. It's what I would call historiography.
How do you write history? You know, how do you do that? Well, we have historical written sources. Now we're revealing things archaeologically and then we get an idea and that becomes history. So whatever happened, happened. You know, I publish if they're Islamic remains, I publish those. Whatever there is gets published. It just so happens that we're dealing with biblical sites, Gene.
And so, of course, the things that we're publishing support that narrative, as I've been sharing with you, the synchronisms between the archaeological data and the biblical text. But that wasn't my goal. I didn't set out to do that. - Understood. - But everybody makes it. - Otherwise, that would tank everything you do. - That's right. But then even though I don't want to be political, both sides are dragging me into their camps, okay, because the archaeology is relevant.
Now, I know I'm not stupid. I know that it's relevant. But there was an Al Jazeera news story maybe three years ago where they named the top three foes of Palestine. And they said it was Benjamin Netanyahu, Mike Huckabee and Scott Stripling. I said, "What did I do? I'm an archaeologist. But from their perspective, our findings were illuminating the biblical text and strengthening land claims. So, yeah, we try to stay out of the political spotlight, but it's very, very difficult.
- Yeah. So. All right. So let's kind of start to wrap this up in the next five, six minutes. I want to know for you, normally I would say, well, what's next? And I want you to do that. But where is it? What's the one thing that's really nagging you that you want to get to the bottom of and find the facts about? - Well, that's a good question. My primary research focus is in the period of the conquest, and I'd like to excavate one more conquest site. I've got my eyes on one.
And so there's four or five more seasons left of work to do at Shiloh and to publish that and wrap it up properly. But my real passion is training my students. And it's not just my students. We have 16 universities that participate with us in this consortium, and it's empowering them. And the future of biblical archaeology is not me. It's my students. And so it's training and empowering them. So that's what's on my horizon. It's finishing well at Shiloh.
Then I've got one more site I want to excavate. Then I've got years of publication work to do. But it's to invest in my students and to empower them so that decades from now they are going to be leading cutting-edge, avant-garde digs at biblical archaeological sites with a high confidence in scripture and a high level of skill in archaeology. That's my passion. - How do you deal, you know, without pigeonholing you into a certain answer, how is it that you're able to deal with the politics?
Because there's, in the Middle East, I mean, everything's political. How are you able to deal with that to get to the bottom of it and find the facts? - We work in the so-called West Bank. That's where all these sites are, okay, that my research focus lies. So I've been working there for many years, and I've developed deep relationships. And my team has even before me, the Associates for Biblical Research, our team has been for over 40 years working in this area. So the ties go back a long ways.
And in the Middle East, the world moves at the speed of relationships. And so it's trust relationships that are built over time on both sides. And we've tried to walk a fine line and have integrity in what we've done. I'm not out to prove or disprove anything. Yes, I have my faith commitments, and everybody knows what they are, okay, that's no big secret. But I'm trying to be as fair and as balanced as we can with the work that we're doing there so that the light of scripture can shine.
And I think when it does, then it's going to point people toward the scriptures and ultimately toward Christ. - Yeah. So the average person watching as we wrap this up, what should be their takeaway? Can we trust the integrity of the Word? - Well, that's just it. I think the Bible's talking about real people, real places, and real events.
And I've got not only hundreds, I've got thousands of synchronisms that give me confidence in that claim, okay, from the Amarna letters and the Dead Sea Scrolls to my own excavations. I think Jesus said in Luke 19:40, that the stones would cry out like if we didn't speak. In a sense, inanimate objects like stones, they are speaking if we know their language. As an archaeologist, I happen to speak that language. - That's great.
- The pottery is talking to me, the stones are talking to me, the bones are talking to me, and they're all giving me the same message. And it's a very consistent message that we have a verisimilitude that exists between the archaeological data and the biblical text. - So do you do much, I would assume you would, but do you, you know, archaeology is such a big arena, like so much is going on in Israel and Judea, Samaria. So like, do you connect with the folks like at City of David?
- Sure. - Are you constantly working together in that? - We network a lot, and we partner with five Israeli universities in some capacity. My right-hand gal, Abigail, is now doing her PhD in archaeology at one of the Israeli universities. And I'm actually on her dissertation committee at the Israeli university. And so, yeah, we work closely with them. We use their labs and, you know, various things.
They're grad students, like being around universities, grad students working with us on flints, because that's their expertise. Ariel University on pottery. And so we've tried to not say this is us and that's them, but to say, hey, we're all under the same tent, let's learn from each other. - Well, thanks, Scott, for coming by and explaining. - It's been a real pleasure. - It's been great.
I know you've enjoyed, this is what I want to say, make sure you take these programs, watch them again, share them with your friends and your family, because we need to get the Word out. We're not, we're sharing the truth, the facts, as Scott brought out very clearly. These are just the facts. They are what they are. No matter where you come down, theologically, these are the facts. And so that's why it's important that we share them, and we know what the truth really is. So let me pray for you.
Father, I thank You for everyone watching. Lord, we pray over Scott, all the things that he is doing, that number one, he's protected wherever he goes in these sometimes dangerous places, but Lord, You give him divine insight into exactly how to approach some of these subjects that may be politically divisive, but or that he's able to operate clearly and effectively and efficiently in all of these areas.
Lord, pray over the sites and all that he's doing, that he continues to reveal the truth and the facts of what they prove in Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you, Scott, for being, come, please come back when you have something to share. - I'll do it. I would love to. Absolutely. - All right. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week. ♪ Thank you for supporting the mission of Revival Radio TV as we dig deep into the history of Revival together.
Just text RRTV to 36609 or on the web at govictory.com/RRTV. Just follow the information on the screen to join us in partnership here on the Victory Channel. Just text RRTV to 36609 or on the web at govictory.com/RRTV. ♪