...thank him for the privilege of doing this. I'm 
not so sure about the recording part, but okay.
All kinds of folks out there are going to see 
this. Maybe. Probably not. But anyway. 
[laughter]
I hope I can keep you awake in all of this. This 
is perhaps something rather different than 
what you all have talked about. This is not
your typical textual study kind of thing. Couple 
of you've had some of this. Some of this is 
going to be a nice review for some of you.
But hopefully it's still valuable.
The first discussion we're going to talk about 
this evening is the relationship of archaeology 
to the Bible.
As an archaeologist, and my doctorate is in 
archaeology from the University of Arizona,
with a minor in Biblical studies. I come at this 
sort of inverted from most of the folks
here, and I excavate every year in Israel--field 
direct an excavation in Israel. That's not a 
commercial, but if you want it to be one, okay.
And one of the questions that people often 
ask me, particularly in conservative church 
circles--Churches of Christ, and so forth,
is, well it's usually a comment. It's along the 
lines of, "Wow! Isn't it great how much 
archaeology proves the Bible?"
Well, I sort of cringe at that. But please let me 
explain what I mean by that. I'm certainly not
arguing that archaeology has no relationship 
to Biblical studies, because I'm convinced that 
it does.
But I do believe that archaeology should not 
be approached as an apologetic, as a way to 
prove the Bible.
Now, having said that, that doesn't mean it has 
no relevance to demonstrating the credibility 
of the Bible.
But a better strategy of how to deal with 
archaeology is to approach it as
"What can archaeology do to help us better 
understand what's going on in the Biblical 
text?"
Clearly the Bible is written in a sociological, 
cultural, geographical setting. Everything 
happens within some kind of setting like that,
and you and I are removed from those events 
by thousands of years and by thousands of 
miles and variant cultures.
Most of us don't know a whole lot about, say, 
Middle Eastern culture, particularly when we 
think in terms of the Arabic culture, and so
forth. And so those practices are rather 
significantly different than ours. The 
geography is little, like Arkansas.
If you're from southwest United States--
Arizona, and southern California, the terrain 
and geography and environment are
very very similar to that. If you're familiar with 
San Diego area, where I grew up, you're 
aware that San Diego is described as a
Mediterranean climate, and hence it plugs in 
to the very climate that characterizes this part 
of the world.
Israel itself, as we think in terms of Israel and 
the West Bank, vary significantly in geography, 
topography, weather patterns and so forth.
But the more we understand these kinds of 
things, the better equipped we are to 
understand what is going on in the Bible.
Now the way I often describe where you and I 
are in this study, and I'm not sure how much 
you all have talked about this, but
I doubt seriously it will have any kind of 
contradiction with Dr. Matthew's discussion,
the Bible is not written directly to you and me. 
It was written to people in the ancient times. 
Now that's not to say it's irrelevant
to you and me. I honestly believe that the 
message of the Bible is relevant to us. But we 
are not the primary recipients.
I liken it somewhat to imagining rummaging 
around in the attic of my grandparents' house, 
and finding
a cache of letters that my grandfather may 
have written to my grandmother years and 
years and years ago.
And while I open up those letters and can read 
them and understand a lot of what's going on 
there,
there will inevitably be allusions and 
references to things they shared, or to
events that they attended and to some trips 
that they might have made.
And those might be lost to me.
But one of the things that I can do is 
investigate and find out with clarity what was 
meant in those kinds of discussions.
That's sort of how you and I are in this 
enterprise. We're sort of looking over the 
shoulder
of the original recipients, reading on the 
document that God revealed to them,
but yet because of all of this lapse of time and 
mileage and culture and everything else, some 
of those things are sort of lost.
And this is the kind of thing that archaeology 
can really really help us better to understand 
what's going on in the pages of the Bible.
I find it, and I'm just fascinated with doing this 
kind of thing, because it's just amazing to me 
how much it opens up,
and makes real the events and the lives and 
often times the teachings that are found in the 
pages of the Bible.
So what I want to do in this presentation is talk 
about, more directly, how archaeology relates 
to the Bible. And I want to approach it
not as a proof of the Bible, but as an 
enlightenment--a clarification,
opening our eyes for a greater appreciation of 
what's going on. And I've divided the 
discussion into several categories,
and we'll-- if the thing will wake up here,
maybe not.
Ah, there we are. That's the title. Who cares?
Alright,
things have to catch up with us. I've divided 
this into several categories, the first of which 
I'm going to refer to as customs of the Bible.
And again, as we think in terms of the things 
that are going on in the Bible, a lot of things 
that are described there are very different
than what you and I would do. Most of them we 
can catch up with. A lot of times our 
translations will render these insuitable
comparisons, or suitable examples of our time. 
But one of the things the Bible talks about is 
"you shall not remove the ancient landmarks."
I remember when I was a kid I used to read 
this. I was a preacher's kid, so you're forced to 
read the Bible when you're a little kid, even
though you may not want to, kind of thing. I'll 
be honest about that. But you'll run into these 
passages, and I used to read these passages
out of the Old Testament. "Do not remove the 
ancient landmarks." And I used to think in 
terms of historical markers. You know, driving
down the highway, "historical marker ahead." 
And we'd occasionally stop and read, "Here at 
this location there was a great battle
between the Confederates and the Yankees 
and blah blah blah blah blah."
And that was one of the things that kept me a 
little bit interested in the Civil War, kind of 
thing.
But that's not what the ancient landmarks are 
in the Bible.
And it really took a number of years for this to 
click with me, that something else is going on.
There are a number of occasions in the Old 
Testament where these kind of prohibitions 
exist, "do not remove the ancient landmarks."
And here we have an example of one of these. 
Although it looks like a fence that's there. Now 
this terrain, as you can look around in the
background of this, there's a lot of rocks in this 
part of the country. I can tell you a story about 
that one but I won't.
That's tantalizing isn't it? It's just sick. But 
anyway, this is one way to get the rocks out of 
the field, is make a little line here.
But obviously, that's not a very good wall. It's 
only about this high, and anything can get 
over this. So it's not going to keep anything
out of anything. Goats can go over it, cats can 
go over it, dogs can go over it. Babies can 
climb over this! I mean, it's nothing.
But the practicality of this is to give a line of 
demarcation between someone's property and 
another
person's property. Now this isn't to say, in this 
case we have different owners involved.
But the ancient landmarks are basically survey 
marks, that mark off one person's ownership 
of property from another.
If you're reading the book of Ruth, whenever 
Ruth comes back with Naomi to the land of 
Judah to Bethlehem,
the Bible talks in chapter two, she happens to 
go to that part of the field that belonged to 
Boaz.
Now the people in the ancient world typically 
would live inside a town, in the daytime they 
would go out into the fields to work
and spend most of the day out there, and at 
the end of the day they would come back into 
town.
In our culture, we have a tendency, if people 
are typically farmers, they'll live out in the field 
and occasionally come into town.
But in ancient society, it was sort of the 
reverse of this. And one of the ways to 
demarcate property from one another is to line
up the stones there. Now the next example 
shows a little better example of this.
The dotted line represents the line separating 
this person's property from this person's 
property. And again, I don't know
specifically that's the case here, but this is the 
kind of thing the people in the ancient world 
would have. Now if you look at
this and think in terms of "I want to be a 
cheater. I want to increase my land holdings,
under occasion, say, of a new moon," which 
means, there is no moon, if you'll recall.
You go out there, and sneakily move all those 
over about six inches,
and do that several months in a row, then you 
can increase your parcel and decrease your 
neighbor's,
and the Bible condemns that as land wrestling.
Stealing property from someone else. Now 
part of the issue here is the preservation of 
the inheritance that is passed on from
generation to generation. Part of it has to do 
with God's welfare system, if you will,
maintaining the integrity of the property for 
orphans and widows and so forth.
So God is concerned about the land rights, 
and that's what these refer to, when God
gives these kinds of prohibitions, and 
occasionally he refers to them as lessons.
Here is a region that shows the rather clear 
crop differentiation.
Obviously, that crop's different than that one, 
but you look through the middle part of that 
field, and you see sort of that
line of demarcation separating one parcel from 
another.
And so this is the kind of thing the Bible is 
talking about when it refers to the ancient 
landmarks.
Another thing that appears in the Bible in 
Isaiah chapter five and in the Gospel of 
Matthew,
is a reference to building watchtowers.
In both cases, they are set up in situations of 
parables.
This is a watchtower that I saw up in the area 
of Samaria,
now a long time ago, and grabbed this picture. 
And again, when I would read the story about
watchtowers, I would sort of transpose that to 
my earlier childhood living in east Tennessee,
back before we had a lot of-- as much airplane 
traffic as we have now.
And the watchtower was typically something 
that was built up on a hill to watch out for 
forest fires.
And so I had a tendency to think in terms of 
the watchtower as being that. Well, the 
watchtowers in the ancient world
were not primarily for fire prevention. They 
were primarily geared toward
prevention of theft of crops.
At the time of harvest that would come, there's 
tendency for people to come along and steal 
the crops out of the trees and so forth,
and at harvest time, they would post 
somebody out there on the watchtower to
make sure that the crops remain intact--
someone doesn't come along and steal it,
and of course there are still those people that 
would steal things. My daughter and son-in-
law own an alfalfa farm out in California,
and it's really interesting at harvest time when 
Casey will bale the hay, and have it stacked
up. He's always concerned, and rightfully so, 
about someone coming along and stealing the 
bales of hay.
And so he sort of goes paranoid sometimes 
about that, but I'm not faulting him for that, 
because there is that reality. Interestingly,
this plugs in to the timeless nature of some 
elements of humanity.
There's always going to be those who are 
going to be dishonest, and so this is a 
prevention dealing with that.
Notice again, the rocks that are still in the field 
here.
Another thing that the Bible talks about is the 
practice of threshing.
And here we have a threshing sledge in the 
background, and in the foreground is an 
ancient plow. Now the plow itself in this case
is not necessarily old--neither of these are 
necessarily old, but they are rather timeless in 
design.
We can see pictures in some of the Egyptian 
paintings and so forth, a plow that looks 
almost exactly like
that from ancient times. Nothing changed until 
fairly modern times.
But the threshing sledge is what I want us to 
notice in particular. It's standing on end. It 
normally would be lying down flat, but it's a
case in this case of three boards that are tied 
together, bonded with a reinforcement tie on 
the other side,
and then they would drill holes in the bottom of 
it and jam pieces of flint in this.
And they would-- when they cultivate the grain, 
whether it's barley or wheat, they would 
spread it out on a hard surface like this,
and they would drag the threshing sledge 
around on this. Now, the hooves of the 
animals, whether horses, donkeys, or cows,
and so forth, would serve as a breaking 
component as well, but those threshing 
sledges with those
pieces of flint in there being dragged around 
would break this up into smaller and smaller 
pieces until finally you just have this
mess that is there.
Now this demands, then, that you separate the  
chaff-- the grain--
the stalk part away from the grain. Well that's 
where you come in to the process of 
winnowing.
And they would go out there with a fork, such 
as this individual is doing, and stick it into that 
pile of debris, that looks like, and throw it up
in the air on a windy day, and the wind will blow 
the lighter chaff away, and the grain, being 
heavier, will fall back to the ground,
and you do this over and over and over and 
over, and over and over and over,
until you get to a point where you don't see 
any dust blowing away.
Now, John the Baptist refers to this practice 
when he talks about Jesus coming. His 
winnowing fork is in His hand, and He will--
the implication that there's already been 
threshing-- His winnowing fork is in His hand, 
and He's going to separate the wheat from the
chaff, and He'll gather the grain into His barns 
and the chaff he will burn with unquenchable 
fire.
So He's plugging in to this practice that has 
gone on for millennia.
I remember being over in Israel on one 
occasion, travelling around up on Mount 
Carmel region, and there was a gentleman
that had come out and he was-- actually it was 
Tabor, excuse me. Who cares? Anyway, he 
had his grain out there underneath a tree,
and he was beating it with a stick, in order to 
winnow it, and it was just fascinating. I grabbed 
my camera real quick to take a shot, but it's
one of those... never a good background, sort 
of hard to tell what's going on.
But, people can still be engaged in this kind of 
activity. This is-- we would sometimes refer to 
this perhaps as primitive, but it's very
functional. Very labor intensive.
Now, once they winnow it, and get all the grain 
or the chaff out of this
at least as much as they can, they're going to 
gather it up and put it in storage.
Well, here is a photograph where I was visiting 
the site of Gibeon, and the piles of grain are 
there on the threshing floor.
And in this case, they're waiting to take it off, 
put it in storage. Now some of them are 
covered in plastic in the background.
I'm not at all suggesting they had plastic in the 
ancient world. But this is the kind of setting, 
again, it comes back to the book of Ruth.
If you remember the story in the chapter three, 
of book of Ruth,
Naomi encourages Ruth to go to the threshing 
floor where they have been threshing the 
grain and so forth,
and apparently winnowing it as well, and she 
then comes and sneaks up to the feet of Boaz 
as he's sleeping, and she lies
down at his feet. We won't go into all the 
implications of that. But he is sort of resting on 
this, sort of makes a little nest inside his pile
of grain, and it serves as a mattress. And then, 
let's just put it this way: negotiations for the 
marriage ensue.
And-- but it's a setting, very similar to this. Now 
the reason he's staying there, is again, to 
prevent the theft of crops.
So it comes back to that reality again.
As I was leaving the sight, I was travelling 
along and looked down the slope, and saw this 
building here with something on the roof,
and I was just fascinated with this. Because it 
immediately reminded me of Rahab hiding the 
spies on the roof of her house, under the flax.
And you're studying Joshua, so it plugs well 
into where you are right now.
But I don't know if you're aware of it; there's a 
statement in the book of Deuteronomy, 
chapter twenty-two I believe it is, verse eight
or so, where God gives a legislation, that when 
you build a house you shall have a low wall 
around it--
some versions say parapet-- in order to keep 
people from falling off,
anticipating that the roof would be used for 
multiple activities.
And if you actually go through the Bible and 
begin to look at the activities that are 
conducted on a roof, you'll have for
instance Saul sleeping on the roof, when he 
goes and is eventually anointed by Samuel.
Now you and I have a tendency, perhaps, to 
read that as if, "well, it must have been hot, so 
he goes to the roof to sleep in the cool of the
evening," which certainly would be true. But 
the point is, the roof was commonly used for 
these kinds of activities.
For sleep-- you have Rahab drying flax or 
storing flax on the roof.
You have Peter in the book of Acts going to 
the roof to pray. Again, I always used to read 
that thinking he was just getting away from the
hubbub of the city life, but again the roof 
would often be used as a place sort of like a 
patio.
You remember the narrative when David-- is 
the time when kings go out to war, and he has 
his army off in Ammon or Rabbah, and he then
rises from his-- I refer to it as a siesta-- and 
he's walking on the roof of his house, and he 
sees Bathsheba down the way
and... problems ensue.
Now, I used to read that, but please don't 
connect this with VeggieTales, if you've seen 
that one where the king goes out there and
he's looking around for the rubber duckie. I 
don't know if any you have seen that. I have 
grandkids, so I've been forced sometimes to
see some of this. But that was not the 
situation. David is not on his roof as a peeping 
Tom. He very likely is simply there in the cool
of the evening, and enjoying a relaxing 
atmosphere, and he happens to notice this 
woman down the way. Probably down the
slope of the valley, taking a bath. Now, 
footnote here: the Bible does not say she is on 
the roof.
The Bible doesn't say where she is. So don't 
overread the text. Anyway, but this is an 
example.
And it's interesting that you have this building 
legislation. We might refer to it as a building 
code.
And I'm not going to say it's the first building 
code, because actually, you look at some of 
the earlier laws in other Mesopotamian
places, there are building codes that are in 
place. But the Bible does have that. Whether 
they had inspectors or not's another question.
Now as we move on down the way, we have 
another view of Gibeon.
Gibeon is really-- was really a fascinating site. 
It still is, but it's changed a lot.
And here is the city that is set on a hill, and 
this is the city from down below.
And of course, I'm reminded of Jesus' remark, 
"a city set on a hill cannot be hid."
Sort of a maxim. If you actually think about it, 
makes perfectly good sense. If a city's on top 
of a hill, it's easy to see.
But there's a reason cities in Palestine, in the 
land of Canaan-- the West Bank-- typically are 
built on hills.
Now, unless you get down to the coastal plain 
where it's fairly flat, most of those cities and 
towns in the inner areas are almost always
built on a hill. Several reasons for this: one, it's 
easier to defend.
It's always easier to defend yourself from 
higher elevation when somebody has to climb 
up a hill to get to you.
Secondly, because of the erosion that has 
taken place through time,
a lot of the hills become denuded and the soil 
has flowed down into the valleys, and it's 
relatively rich. And there's not a whole lot
of territory that's available for agriculture. So 
you don't want to come along here and build 
your town down here where otherwise you
need to do your farming. So you sort of 
escape that by
the duel benefit of the higher elevation for 
defense purposes, and the need for the 
agricultural land.
Now, that raises a problem that becomes a 
challenge. And we move now to technology in 
the ancient world.
The people in the ancient world were much 
more sophisticated often times than we give 
them credit for.
We have a tendency many times to be very 
intellectually snobbish,
and think that people in the ancient world 
weren't very sophisticated, I dare say if you 
and I
were plucked from our world and dropped into 
theirs, we would not survive very long.
Or we'd have to certainly adapt rather quickly.
But the people in the ancient world were quite 
sophisticated in what they did with what they 
had.
Now, one of the problems that arises, if you 
have a city that is built on a hill,
is normally the water supply is not up there.
Normally the water supply, if there is one, will 
be at the foot of the hill. And the Bible will refer
a number of times in its text to people going 
outside the city to the well.
And that, for instance, goes on when Saul is 
coming to see Samuel at Rama, and the 
people are coming out of the city
to go down to the well and so forth, and he 
meets them and asks "is the prophet here?" 
and so forth.
So this is a common kind of element, but the 
problem of having the water source outside 
the city,
means that the water source is vulnerable for 
enemy sabotage.
And hints the threat, then, if you have to go 
out to the water source during time of warfare, 
you then are vulnerable.
So the folks in the ancient world come up with 
a number of strategies by which to resolve 
this. Now this is the entrance into one
part of the water system at Gibeon. Gibeon is 
a fascinating site. It's amazing how many 
things here you can go and see.
And here, I'm about to enter into this tunnel, 
and as we go into the interior-- this is my wife 
standing up there. It was February, so she's
bundled up pretty good. And you go into this 
tunnel, and you come down this flight of steps 
which are sort of precarious at best,
and as you proceed down the way, you finally 
get to this point where there's a water source 
that you can access from inside the town.
Now they would have blocked this off on the 
outside to allow the water to come in , and you 
would come down this,
through this tunnel, and then come to the 
water, fill it up, and go back up the slope to the 
interior.
Now, there's another water source or access 
that is a Gibeon as well.
In some ways, more sophisticated, but it's not 
totally complete. But it is referred to, 
interestingly, in the Bible.
And it looks like this, this is a drawing of it.
This is cut through limestone, and I'm not sure 
what the depth of it is, offhand, I don't 
remember the dimension. But it's really quite
large. There's a-- it's cut through limestone, 
and you come down to this landing, and 
there's an element of scale you can see here
by the drawing that they put here of the little 
people standing on that platform.
And there's a flight of steps that's carved in, or 
shown in this, and then it goes through this 
massive rock and then the tunnel continues
down until finally you get down to the bottom 
and fill up your jar, and then you climb back 
out up this rather precipitous, precarious
flight of steps.
Now, typically-- not always-- but typically, the 
work of going down here and getting the water 
and climbing in and out was work for women,
in the ancient world. There are allusions to 
this, references to this, for instance, in the 
book of Genesis.
But you also have to realize that these water 
jars were often-- well, they're either jars or 
skins. But the jars if they're jars would be
something like that. I'll show this further in a 
moment. And not light to begin with, then you 
fill it up with water
then you've got quite a bit of weight. I don't 
think I'd wanna
wrestle with these women in the ancient world.
They were constantly going down there 
carrying these big jugs of water and 
everything else, and carting back out, but
there's also hazard that arises because these 
steps because there's constant traffic going up and
down them, they get slick
and the time of course comes that somebody's 
gonna lose the balance and drop the jars and 
then the water starts flowing down the steps,
and slime starts to grow, and it just becomes a 
mess.
Rather precarious, to say the least.
Now, looking at a picture of this, there is the 
flight of steps.
See that hump right there? Let me move over 
out front here-- there's a hump right here-- 
sorry, blocking your way-- and then if you look
over on that section, that hump corresponds 
to this. Can you see that? Some of you a little 
more direct, you can see the connection.
But the flight of steps, I could not get far 
enough away from this with my camera
to get a nice wide-angle lense, and I didn't 
have much of a wide-angle lense on it--
but here I am standing on that platform a 
number of years ago.
And this is a fairly normal parallax or
lense on the camera taking the picture. So you 
can get an idea that that's fairly deep down 
there. Now this is referred to in the book of
Samuel-- second Samuel, whenever Saul has 
died and you have twelve soldiers
from David's army, and twelve soldiers from 
the remnants of Saul's army gathering at the 
pool of Gibeon,
and they have this, I won't call it one on one, 
but twelve on twelve confrontation, and it 
takes place here.
Now some will say, "now wait a minute, it's at 
Gibeon but the text talks about the pool of 
Gibeon."
And it almost certainly has to be somehow in 
relationship to this shaft.
And the shaft does date back, as far as 
archaeologists are able to tell, back to the 
period before the time of David and Saul.
I'm-- my opinion is-- now I think it's sort of 
interesting, I can't prove it at all-- my opinion is 
that the twenty-four people are on this
platform, sort of in a forced arena, into contact 
with each other. And the Bible talks about all 
twelve of them killed each other.
I mean the twenty-four just battle it out and 
they all die.
And it's again then referred to in the book of 
Jeremiah simply as a geographic reference 
point. But it appears twice in the pages of
Scripture. Some sophistication in the ancient 
world is really really impressive. Now most of 
us look at Tutankhamun's tomb and all that
kind of thing and are wowed by that. But that 
kind of sophistication extends broadly, beyond 
simple Egypt.
These are some very very nicely carved ivory 
pieces.
Book of Amos will refer to the decadence of 
the children of Israel in a time when they ought 
to be concerned about the well-being of their
fellow citizenry, of lying on their beds of ivory. 
And Amos just lambasted them for their 
neglect for the needs for
those who are less fortunate. And these are 
parts of some of those pieces of furniture.
Oftentimes they would be-- if I drag up a chair 
over here--
the parts of the ivory, imagine this chair for 
instance having arms on it.
And so you have an arm here and some of 
this ivory pieces would be the inset between 
the arm pieces or in the back of the chair itself
as the back piece. And typically the scholars 
and the art historians will look at this as
Syrian production that is therefore imported 
into the land of Israel. We don't have a lot of 
evidence of the Israelites having this kind of
craftsmanship, but it also implies therefore 
some rather extensive trade over--
not in this case thousands of miles, but 
certainly several hundred.
Anybody tell me what this is?
Making sure it's not labeled.
No guesses? [unintelligible]
Close. It's actually sewer pipes, though. Close 
enough. I'll accept that. These are sewer pipes 
from 1800 BC.
In the time of the patriarchs.
And I don't know how much you're familiar with 
construction materials and so forth,
it's only been in fairly recent times-- easily in 
my lifetime-- that sewer pipes have moved 
from being made out of clay with a
flare at the end and you put the narrow end in 
the flared end and seal it up with clay, then 
they went to this awful
asphalt
ply stuff that is just terrible.
And then eventually started coming out with a 
plastic kind that most of us are familiar with.
But that plastic stuff only comes into use since 
about 1980 or so,
and earlier sewer pipes were almost always 
made out of clay. Now these are about this big 
around, about a foot-- ten inches to twelve
inches in diameter-- and if you look carefully 
you'll see that one end is slightly tapered in to 
fit inside the other end and then they would
seal it with clay. I don't want to suggest that all 
cities in the ancient world had sewer systems, 
but some of them did have these drainage
systems, and to think in terms of cities as early 
as the patriarchs having this is impressive. 
Now if you actually travel around in the ancient
world and some of these sites you'll find that 
there's a lot more of this kind of sophistication. 
If you go to Mycenae for instance, they had
sewer systems and all of that as well. But 
these are the kinds of things that we tend to 
overlook when we are thinking in terms of the
people of antiquity. Again, we have a tendency 
to be rather intellectually snobbish and think 
we're the ones on the top of the heap,
and so forth and we're almost the first ones to 
ever thought of a lot of this stuff.
Now, looking at-- this is the site where I 
excavate and am field director, and a number 
of years ago there was a
accidental discovery that was made. A lot of 
the discoveries are somewhat accidental.
And a couple of guys were excavating and 
they found this opening in the ground.
And they reported it to the directors and said 
"well, it looks like a cistern," and the directors 
sort of wrote it off. "Yeah, yeah,
there's cisterns all over the place." So these 
guys took their video camera and turned it on
and locked it on and put it on a rope, and 
turned the light on and dropped it down in 
there-- lowered it I guess is a better term--
and then rotated it around to see what was 
happening and then brought it up and looked 
at it and this thing was huge.
And so, they decided they would get some 
spelunkers to come in and drop some rope
ladders down through the shaft and they got 
down in there and saw this huge
cistern.
Now, this was eventually found-- this was not 
what was initially discovered. The opening 
right here at the top that they initially found
when they dropped the camera in and they 
could see the arms of this radiating off from 
the center.
And when they were down in there, checking 
all of this out, they recognize there's a lot of 
soil that seems to tumble in down this
arm and taking a compass and measurements 
and everything else, they went back up to the 
surface
and began to excavate and found that flight of 
steps that we were just looking at,
and finally cleared it out. Here's sort of an 
isometric perspective view of what the system 
looks like.
This is the shaft that was originally found, 
through which they lowered the camera, and 
then they saw the spill coming through this
and went over to this area and began to 
excavate and found the flight of steps it comes 
down and makes this turn and enters this
huge cruciform reservoir. The capacity of this 
is about 211,000 gallons of water.
That equates to about five
standard-- which are not usually huge-- but 
five standard in-ground backyard swimming 
pools.
Now if you think in terms-- you and I use a lot 
of water. In one sense it might not register a 
whole lot
with us, but that's a lot of water. And this is dug 
out of solid limestone,
but the limestone has a tendency to lose 
water.
Water seeps through that fairly easily, so they 
have to plaster it.
And you can go down into this. You can still 
today go down into it, and you can go down 
there and
some of the plaster, a lot of plaster still on the 
walls about this thick.
Now the cistern, about-- to give some point of 
reference-- about four inches or so thick.
And,
you have to realize that this cistern went out of 
use, and was buried and obliterated by the 
Assyrians in about 680 or so BC.
Never to be found again until the early 1990s.
A lot of that plaster was still on the wall in that 
damp environment.
Now if you know anything about construction 
techniques,
we don't seem to be able to make plaster to be 
able to stick on a wall for very long.
It tends to fall off and collapse and all that kind 
of-- we need to take a few lessons from these 
folks.
They knew what they were doing, and they did 
it well.
And it's really impressive to see how much 
plaster is still on the wall in that damp 
environment.
This is a representation, a photograph of a 
surgical procedure known as trephination.
This dates from the seventh century BC from 
the site of Lachish,
and a number of these examples have been 
found.
Now, I'm not going to suggest that people in 
the ancient world always understood what's 
going on when they had headaches and stuff.
But this apparently is a surgical procedure that 
they would engage in
and then probably because of headaches that 
were chronic and trying to relieve it.
Now this person, normally they would cut the 
flap of skin, fold the skin back,
and saw-- you can see the saw marks, see the 
saw marks on that?--
saw this skull plate out,
and I assume that they felt like they'd liberated 
the spirits. I don't know if I'd know that or not 
from the pain that's involved. And then
put the flap of skin back and hope the person 
survives. Well this person didn't survive very 
long,
and we know that by the fact that the cut 
marks are still rather crisp,
if you will. But a lot of the folks who underwent 
this surgical procedure in the ancient world 
survived,
and examples of these have been found 
where the hole has been totally grown closed.
Raises some interesting questions. One, why 
did they do this? For which we don't have 
much of an answer. Secondly,
what kind of drug would you use?
That would probably be the most lurking 
question in my mind. What do you give the 
person to
kill the pain or at least make them oblivious to 
the pain in the procedure?
I'm not sure I have the answer, but I do have a 
proposal for you,
which we'll move to here in a second, moving 
into the area of ancient trade.
This is a nice little vessel. I have a sample of 
one here-- this is not my best example 
because I think it's at home.
This is the standard size of the vessel that we 
have shown on the screen
up here. This one's broken, as you can see. 
The handle's missing, it's been cut off, and so 
forth.
But you have this broken section, but they're 
delicate, nice little pieces like this. We refer to 
these as bilbils.
We don't know what the folks in the ancient 
world referred to them as.
But this is one of those
"archaeologists aren't always the brightest 
folks in the world," and we name it after 
something that's fairly
bizarre to say the least. If you were to fill this 
up-- obvious it's not going to hold much-- but if 
you were to fill this up
when it would be complete and pour the liquid 
out, it would go "bilbilbilbilbil..."
and so we call it a bilbil.
Like I said, we're not always the brightest folks 
in the world.
But as you look at the photograph here,
I want you to notice some features here. You 
notice this one has these little clay appliques 
on the surface. There's a little clay section up
here around the collar. This one has a clay 
applique as well as the applique on the body. 
This one,
while it doesn't have the raised sections, it has 
white lines drawn on it,
and you can see the remnants of the white line 
drawn on the body.
Well,
this was rather intriguing. This comes from the 
late bronze age, and these were almost 
exclusive to the late bronze age,
which, by the way, is the time period that the 
Israelites appear,
according to the Bible, within the land of Israel.
And a lot of scholars looked at this and 
wondered, "these are nice little delicate 
vessels. What in the world would they be used
for?" They seem to have been imported from 
the island of Cyprus predominantly, not 
necessarily exclusively.
Even the Israelites, or not just the Israelites 
necessarily, but the people in the land of 
Canaan were so enamored with them
they made imitations of them. Usually rather 
klutzy, but nonetheless, they were imitations of 
them.
Well, some scholars wrestling with "what do 
you do with these things?" decided that "you 
know,
it looks sort of odd. If you turn it over, it looks 
sort of like an opium poppy."
Well, I'll be honest with you, I'm not really that 
much into opium to make this immediate 
connection,
but this is the connection they had. Now if you 
look at this, you notice the sort of flared, let 
me go to the next one, you notice the flared
edge there, they would sort of correspond to 
that, sort of the bulbous body that is there. 
And even the little
ridges that are down the shaft you would have 
replicated on here.
Now the one, mainly, not necessarily 
exclusively, who suggested what these might 
be used for
is an archaeologist, but he was an 
ambassador to Israel from Australia
for a number of years.
And he suggested maybe these were used for 
shipping opiate derivatives,
and the typical response was "ah, you're 
loony."
Well,
eventually archaeology got to the point where 
it's looking at science and using sciences 
rather extensively,
and so some of these are submitted for 
analysis, and a very careful cleansing of the 
interior of the vessels, and running them
through various scientific tests-- 
spectrometers and that kind of thing, and so 
forth. I don't know specifics but I think that
would work, at least play into it. And at least 
some of the vessels were found to have opiate 
derivatives from the inside.
Well that sort of makes me wonder,
could that be what they used to drug them for 
trephination?
I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. I 
think an opiate derivative would drug you out 
pretty well, if you took enough of it.
Maybe this also helped the Israelites conquer 
the Canaanites.
Maybe the Canaanites were a bunch of 
drugheads and the Israelites come in and 
whack them, whack them a good one.
I don't know. Intriguing question. Bible does 
talk about sending a hornet before of them, 
maybe the hornet was the form of
"they're buzzed." Anyway.
Hadn't thought of that one before. But 
anyway... [laughter]
Another element of trade that we have are 
these oxhide copper ingots that are 
occassionally found. These are not usually
found on land. These will almost exclusively be 
found in the ocean-- underwater archaeology.
The reason they're called oxhide ingots I think 
is fairly obvious.
It's sort of in the shape of a stretch oxhide, 
and so forth.
The weight of these is usually designated to 
be a talent.
A talent. Remember in the New Testament 
there are these discussions about
the parable where Jesus talks about people 
being given talents-- five talents, two talents, 
one talent. We have a tendency sometimes to
collapse that to abilities that God has given us. 
That's not the point, that's not the story. It has 
to do with a measure of quantity
that is involved, and a talent of copper-- and 
that was usually considered the standard 
weight for the talent--
came to be roughly twenty-eight to thirty 
kilograms.
Now if you're not really up on your metric 
system, that's about sixty two to sixty six 
pounds.
And so, this would be a talent.
Now, the way these are typically transported 
are they-- on ships they would line them up, 
hanging them by
the splayed end, the stretched end, and hang 
them in racks.
Now I used to live in Arizona, which is where I 
got my doctorate, and lived in a copper-mining 
town,
and had a couple of these pictures and 
showed them before I got a huge slew of 
pictures. It was really interesting to watch the
copper-mining folks who, many of them worked 
at the smelter and so forth, and they looked at 
this and said, "wow!
That's not a whole lot different than we do 
now!" And they described more squared 
angles but with the little ears on the top and
they hang them on the racks and put them on 
the rail cars and everything else and ship 
them out to other destinations, all over the
world. So again, the folks in the ancient world 
have figured out this rather expedient way to 
transport goods. Now here's where this
becomes important: most of us don't stop 
really and think about these kinds of things,
but clearly it doesn't take a genius to figure 
out
no one location has everything.
You know, Searcy doesn't have gold.
Gold mines, to my knowledge. It doesn't have 
silver mines, doesn't have copper mines. 
Diamonds are down southwest section of
Arkansas, but that's a real rarity. Most people 
don't find anything when they go there.
But when we think about all of these raw 
materials, no place has all of them. And so 
people over time will find out "well they've got
copper over there, they have tin over here, 
they have silver over there, they have gold 
over here, they have
onyx over here, they have obsidian and
so forth" and you'll want various quantities of 
these and so a trade network begins to 
develop,
overtime.
And that's exactly the way people find out 
about it and they begin swapping goods. Now 
one of the things that's very important for us to
realize as we think in terms of these trade 
connections, is to realize that
not just the mileage that's involved,
although that's important.
Now how far is it from point A to point B? But 
then to have the second level of the
calculation, recognizing "how much time does 
it take to make that trip?"
And prior to the advent of the automobile and 
our easy access to fairly rapid travel, or flying,
people in the ancient world and even up until, 
early part of the twentieth century,
a lot of the travel was simply by horse or 
walking or whatever.
And you're not looking at over twenty miles a 
day.
Now let's put that in perspective:
it's forty five miles from here to Little Rock.
So under those kind of circumstances, it would 
take you at least two and a half days to make 
a trip to Little Rock.
So when you start thinking in terms of people 
trading goods over a thousand miles,
you-- to you and me a thousand miles isn't 
that far.
But a thousand miles in the ancient world, or 
pre-industrial world,
is really significant from the standpoint of time 
consumption.
And yet, you have these goods that are being 
swapped over huge distances.
And as we read the Bible and see the kinds of 
discussions, for instance when the Queen of 
Sheba comes from wherever
that is, we're not sure whether it's Yemen or 
Ethiopia, and makes the trip to Jerusalem,
if you just do a quick and dirty calculation 
here, it's like fourteen hundred miles! She 
travels,
and if you think in terms of twenty miles a day, 
which everybody did on the trip, but if you 
think in terms of twenty miles a day you're
talking about a two month trip one way to go 
see Solomon.
And then this just changes the dynamic 
significantly.
But this is the kind of stuff we have a tendency 
to trivialize,
because of our different cultural world and 
how things operate.
Alright. Here are a couple of drawings out of 
Egyptian sources and so forth. I want you to 
notice the oxhide ingots being
carried here. There's one up there by that 
guy, and there are two down here being carted 
along--
along with other goods that they're 
transporting. Now this is back at the site of 
Gibeon. Gibeon was known in the ancient
world, not quite in the earlier Old Testament 
period, but sort of the Persian period as a 
wine-producing area.
And these are some storage vats that are in 
the stone here that have been carved out of 
the interior in which to store wine, and
it's estimated that they can store 25,000 
gallons of wine here.
And the wine of Gibeon became fairly popular 
in the ancient world.
Now, we are nearing the end, in case you're 
wondering. This is from the site of Ekron-- this 
is where I actually began my excavating
experience back in 1985, and we're looking at 
an olive press facility.
I didn't excavate this one, but here is the vat in 
the middle in which the olives would be placed. 
The ripe-- the green olives,
typically, predominantly green-- and it would 
be put in there in a stone about
a foot in diameter and about a foot and a half 
long, two feet long maybe, would be put in 
here and rolled back and forth to crush this
into a sort of big pulpy mass. You can imagine 
how drippy and oily this would be, and then 
they scoop this up and put it in sort of like
burlap bags, and stack them on top of these 
two presses on the side,
and then they would have-- there would 
originally have been a wall back here with an 
opening in it with a huge beam, and they
would press the-- these burlap bags
with counterweights on the end in order to get 
the oil to go press into the vats here. Now, the 
next photograph shows a reconstruction of
this. There's your crushing basin, here is the 
olive oil press, and the burlap bags there with 
the bean coming out and the counterweights.
And they would press the oil and get it into the 
vats, and then they would carefully pour
quite warm water in here and lift the oil up,
and dip it off into the jars here and then ship it 
off to the ancient world.
Now, at Ekron, which is a Philistine site,
over one hundred of these olive press 
installations have been discovered.
We have to understand that it's only 
processing oil about two months out of the 
year,
before the season dies.
And the estimated production capacity is--
professionals coming in and evaluating this-- 
is about 1.1 million liters of oil a year.
Again, if you're not up on your metrics, that's 
slightly larger than a quart.
That's a lot of olive oil.
And some evidence has been found through 
studies of ceramics and so forth that some of 
this was exported as far as Spain,
in the ancient world.
We're talking about thousands of miles away.
Now this is a New Testament example of sort of 
a domestic
olive oil producing facility.
There would be the post in the middle, the 
large stone, the olives would be placed on the 
platform and this would be rolled around and
around and around and around to crush the 
olives, and then the olive oil would sort of 
percolate
off to the side into a little trench, and then drip 
off into storage
jars and juglets and so forth.
But what's interesting is not so much the 
procedure here as what Jesus says about this.
And Matthew, I think it is chapter eighteen, 
Jesus talks about the influence that we have 
on people,
and he says "if anyone causes one of these 
little ones that believes on me to stumble, it 
would be better for him that a great millstone
be hung around his neck and he be cast into 
the depth of the sea.
This is the kind of thing that Jesus is talking 
about.
And I have a hunch you wouldn't escape.
The point is, I think, quite impressive. It doesn't 
simply say throw him into the sea, but...
I guess this would be the ancient version of 
concrete boots?
If we think in terms of
the mafia,
government, can't escape government.
This is an interesting little collection of material 
that was found a few years ago at Toccoa,
and the excavators-- this has been sort of put 
back in place to give some impression of what 
it probably looked like originally.
But you'll notice something in here,
and this is-- this picture of two of the vessels, 
and the inscription on the side says "chumash" 
which would translate in this case to a fifth,
not to be confused with Jack Daniels or 
Southern Comfort.
But it's probably a reference... yeah that was 
said at Harding.
Probably in reference to the tax rate.
Maybe a twenty percent tax rate that's under 
consideration. The contents turned out to be 
these pieces of silver that were chopped up
and stuffed into the jar.
And the vessels were probably kept in reserve 
to be shipped off to the central
government, indicating probably a twenty 
percent tax rate or so.
Now this is the way people in the ancient world 
would do their money. You remember the Bible 
will often talk about shekels?
The Old Testament will talk about shekels, and 
we have a tendency to collapse shekels into 
the idea of a coin, and that's not what it was.
A shekel would be a weight-- all it is is a 
weight-- and they would use a scale similar to 
this, and they would put a known weight on
one side such as... what's this?
Two grams, and put it in there, and then they'd 
put whatever the silver is if they want two 
grams here, and they would counterbalance it.
This is really a quite sophisticated system, and 
if you remember anything about early stores 
here in the United States this is a very
similar system that characterized weights and 
measures until modern electronics.
Not much different.
So again, the sophistication of the people in 
the ancient world was quite high.
You'll notice the cut marks that are on this. 
And what they would do is they'd have maybe 
jewelry or a chunk of silver and they need to
counterweight this, and so they just sort of 
shave off or cut off or pinch off a piece and 
drop it in there until they drop it in there until
they get it balanced and that's the end of it. 
And you have bent jewelry, and you have 
chunks of silver, and
all of that that's involved.
And of course, then, there's religion.
This is a New Testament issue. This is a baptistry at Horvat Shivta, in the southern part of Israel
out in the Negev, and area where it gets about six to eight inches of rain a year.
That's it.
You know anything about agriculture, normally you can't grow anything just from rainfall and the basis of that. And it's rather iffy, rather
dicey whether you're gonna succeed or not. So you need water reservoirs available in order to access water.
But yet, in spite of that scarcity of water, this church here is using immersion as the strategy by which to perform baptism.
And my suggestion here is, that if sprinkling or pouring were a legitimate meaning of baptism in this period, why not sprinkle and pour
rather than go to all the trouble in quote "wasting" the water to immerse?
It's not proof, but it's an interesting question as you look at the archaeology and activity involved.
Most of you are familiar with the dead sea scrolls,
and this is cave four at Qumran, and the discoveries here were certainly profound.
This is a photograph of one of the jars, and I have here a replica
of a Dead Sea scroll type jar,
and they're not all this size. They're not necessarily even all this shape, but this is a replica of one of the kinds,
and then the scrolls would be kept inside the vessel like this and closed up
and part of the point is to control the atmosphere to be a convenient location
to keep them-- to preserve them for future retrieval.
But of course, the Dead Sea community never came back. And those scrolls and those jars were there
for couple of thousand years until finally in 1947, this guy is chasing a goat
and happens to accidentally find all of this.
Now, the scrolls themselves are rather fascinating. This is a picture of one of the manuscripts-- a column from the commentary
on Habbakuk. But I want you to notice something here-- now not all the scrolls do this, I want to emphasize that very quickly,
not all the scrolls do what I'm pointing out here, but many of them do. This is a commentary, and as you look through this, this
is written in Aramaic script Hebrew characteristic of the post-exilic period.
But as you glance along here, you'll notice that there's a cluster of letters right
there that's written differently. Can you see the difference in style there?
And then as you come on down, down here these oddly are a little more pronouncably different.
These are letters that are written in paleo-Hebrew,
and the letters that we have here in paleo-Hebrew are the tetragrammaton; the name "Yahweh,"
so that when they come to name "Yahweh" in this manuscript, rather than simply write his name in the same script they would stop and
write it in antiquated form, to show reverence and respect for the name of God.
And of course, the mindset was "you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain," and so this is one way
that they are manifesting that reverence for the name of God.
I really don't think God had that in mind whenever He gave the command, but at the same time we have to at least appreciate their
effort to try and manifest this reverence for God as they're copying.
And that brings us to the end of this discussion.
Are there any questions that you might have?
You can wake up now.
Thank you very much. [applause]
