Yes, the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947, provided stunning confirmation of the reliability of the Hebrew Bible.
Previously the oldest complete copy of the Hebrew Bible, the so-called Masoretic text, was from around 1000 A.D.
That text is called the Leningrad Codex.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, dating from the 3rd to the first centuries BC, proved the Masoretic scribes had not altered the text in over a thousand years.
The Great Isaiah scroll for instance was virtually identical to the Masoretic version, with the differences being tiny and insignificant.
But interestingly the reliability of the Masoretic text could have been largely established without the Dead Sea Scrolls.
After all, the Hebrew Bible had between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC been translated into Greek.
This was done by scholars working in Alexandria and a few other places, and the translation is called the Septuagint.
So one could easily compare the Septuagint with the Masoretic script to see if, and to what extent, the text had been changed.
In fact, it had not. And this fact was then further corroborated by the Dead Sea manuscripts found around 75 years ago.
Bottom line: The Jews today read the same ancient Hebrew Scriptures that Jesus did. And so do we.
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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 ...
The Bible says that the Assyrian king Shalmaneser besieged and destroyed Samaria in the northern kingdom of Israel.
This was in the 8th century B.C.
This triumph is celebrated in Assyrian records, a series of inscriptions discovered by archaeologists in the Assyrian capital of Khorsabad.
Written in the Akkadian cuneiform dialect, the inscriptions are now in the Louvre in Paris. (See image below.)
They credit the Assyrian king Sargon II with the conquest of Samaria in the 8th century B.C.
So which version is correct, the Assyrian one or the one in the Bible?
As it turns out, both.
It was indeed Shalmaneser V who besieged and pillaged Samaria.
His successor was Sargon II, a usurper who seized the throne.
And it was Sargon who continued the military campaign in Samaria and finally conquered the city.
Once again, the historicity of Scripture is vindicated by archaeology.
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