THE BEHISTUN INSCRIPTION
Ancient cultures were once largely inaccessible to scholars because they didn’t know how to read their writing.
This affected biblical archaeology because the Bible describes empires hostile to the Israelites such as the Babylonian and the Assyrian.
The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in Egypt led to scholars being able to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.
But another key discovery in this area is the lesser-known Behistun Inscription.
It’s a monumental rock inscription carved high on a limestone cliff in western Iran.
The carved panel is huge: 45 feet high and 75 feet wide.
Dated to around 520 B.C., the panel depicts the Persian king Darius and proclaims his divine right to rule, sanctioned by the god Ahura Mazda.
The same account is given in 3 languages: Persian, Elamite and Babylonian Akkadian.
Since scholars knew how to read Persian, they were able to use the Behistun Inscription to crack the code of Mesopotamian writing.
The inscription helped archaeologists to unlock the whole archive of Sumerian, Babylonian, Akkadian and Assyrian literature.
How interesting that the royal boast of a Persian monarch proved so helpful in opening up whole civilizations and also their relationship to the Bible.
My new book on biblical archaeology is out October 13. Preorder here: https://a.co/d/00q56DcF
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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The Bible records that Jesus taught in synagogues, including the one in Capernaum. (See photo.)
But there are no synagogues in the Hebrew Scriptures—in the Old Testament.
Why is that?
Because the Jews of the Old Testament worshipped at the temple.
No synagogues—just the temple in Jerusalem first constructed by King Solomon in the 19th century B.C. and then reconstructed after the Babylonian destruction in 586 B.C.
The events of the Old Testament come to an end around 400 B.C., and then there is a gap of four centuries when the New Testament accounts begin with the birth of Jesus around 4 B.C.
This gap between the Old and New Testaments is called the Intertestamental Period.
It is during this period that the first synagogues came into use, and of course the synagogue as a center of Jewish meeting, teaching and worship continued into Jesus’ time and even later.
More here: https://a.co/d/00ntahhS
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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