In the 8th century B.C., the Assyrian empire led by Sennacherib attacked Judah, razed many cities and proceeded toward Jerusalem.
The righteous king Hezekiah, aided by his advisor the prophet Isaiah, prepared for a siege.
King Hezekiah knew the main source of water for the city was the Gihon Spring, which was outside the city.
Hezekiah had to find a way to keep the water out of the control of the Assyrians, and to make it available to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, so they could survive.
2 Kings 20:20 says that Hezekiah figured it out. “The rest of the deeds of Hezekiah, all his power, how he made a pool and brought water into the city, are they not written in the book of the annals of the kings of Judah?”
This somewhat obscure passage, alluding to another source that is now lost, is illuminated by the discovery of the Siloam Tunnel—also known as Hezekiah’s Tunnel—in Jerusalem.
Dated to the 8th century B.C., the tunnel is a marvel of ancient engineering. It is one-third of a mile long and connects the Gihon Spring to the Pool of Siloam inside the city.
Basically Hezekiah diverted the water from outside Jerusalem into a giant pool within the walls.
But how did he do it? As it turns out, Hezekiah’s Tunnel had a Hebrew inscription close to its end point.
Discovered in 1880 by a young boy crawling through the tunes for fun, the Siloam Inscription is now on display at the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. (See image below.)
The inscription details how stonecutters used axes to cut through the rock from both ends, eventually meeting in the middle and completing their project.
The two teams yelled out from each side to make sure they were moving in the correct way toward each other.
How this was done so flawlessly through a long distance of winding rock remains a mystery; what’s clear is that Hezekiah pulled it off, just as the Bible says he did.
More here: https://a.co/d/0g4iG7B4
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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