The power of biblical archaeology is it corroborates the historicity of the Bible down to its tiniest details.
Cameo figures from thousands of years ago come “back to life” through artifacts out of the ground.
Excavations in a Babylonian temple produced a small cuneiform tablet, quite mundane, that refers to a small gold offering made by the chief eunuch Nebo-Sarkesim in the 10th year of Nebuchadnezzar’s reign.
Who is this Nebo-Sarkesim? Not a figure of any importance in Jewish history. But he is mentioned in the Bible.
Jeremiah 39:3 states, “All the officials of the king of Babylon came and took seats at the Middle Gate: Nergal-Sharezar of Samgar, Nebo-Sarkesim a chief officer, Nergal-Sharezar a high official, and all the other officials of the king of Babylon.”
Jeremiah names the Babylonian officials who were present at the capture and subsequent burning of Jerusalem.
And there he is: Nebo-Sarkesim.
Once again a minor character jumps out of the Bible and into the pages of history via the pathway of archaeology.
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A gang of goons, acting on the authority of King Zedekiah of Judah, threw the prophet Jeremiah into a pit.
Two of them were Jehucal son of Shelemiah and Gedaliah son of Pashur.
Both men have been historically corroborated through the archaeological discovery of clay seal impressions dated to the sixth century B.C. bearing their names.
And that’s me, below, in the actual pit into which Jeremiah was tossed. Debbie my wife took his short video of me in Jerusalem earlier this year.
But how did Jeremiah survive?
“Now when Ebed-melech the Ethiopian, one of the eunuchs of the king’s house, heard that they had put Jeremiah in the dungeon…” (Jeremiah 38:7)
So the king’s own men put Jeremiah in there, but a low-ranking Ethiopian decided to take matters into his own hands.
Ebed-melech approached the king—a daunting task that involved great personal risk—and remarkably got permission to get Jeremiah out.
It took 30 men to pull Jeremiah out since he was trapped in the caked mud at the ...
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WHERE DID THE EMPIRES GO?
One standard skeptical or minimalist claim, sustained over many decades, was that the royal kingdoms of King David and Saul must be mythical, because there were powerful empires in antiquity and Israel was certain to be subjugated by one of them.
The skeptics said the biblical narrative about David and Solomon’s reign—and especially the account of Solomon as a wise and powerful ruler of international repute—must be wildly exaggerated, if not completely made up.
The painting below depicts a biblical story about the wisdom of Solomon.
Surely, the skeptics said, these rulers if they existed would be under the sway of the great powers of antiquity: the Hittites, the Egyptians, the Babylonians or the Mycenaean Greeks.
But David and Solomon ruled around the 10th century B.C. And as it turns out, the great empires of antiquity had subsided by then, with some of them only reviving later, when they were in a position to invade and occupy Israel.
The Hittite empire disintegrated ...
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