2,800-year-old papyrus confirms organized kingdom at Jerusalem

The Israel Antiquities Authority has revealed the earliest known extra-biblical reference to Jerusalem in Hebrew writing on a papyrus document confiscated from thieves by Israeli authorities.

The 2,800-year-old papyrus was found following an international enforcement operation by the IAA against antiquities robbers operating in the Judean Desert. Where the robbers found the papyrus cannot be stated with certainty, but it seems to have been found in a cave by the Hever Stream in the desert.

The papyrus is rare not only for the ancient Hebrew writing and the name of Jerusalem, but for existing at all. The arid desert certainly has conditions appropriate to preserve organic material over centuries, but ancient documentation that survived thousands of years remains rare. Only two other papyri dated to the First Temple era have been found, one of which had been erased.

The papyrus was revealed at the IAA’s Innovations in the Archaeology of Jerusalem and its Region conference.

Archaeologists are usually wary of publicizing finds not made through formal excavation due to the uncertainty of their origin. In this case, the researchers are confident that the find is authentic.

Carbon-14 analysis suggests the papyrus is between 2,500 and 2,800 years old. The Hebrew lettering is typical of the seventh century B.C.E. (699 B.C.E. – 600 B.C.E.) Though the writing itself could have been forged, the archaeologists believe it too is authentic.

Two lines of ancient Hebrew script were preserved on the papyrus, the IAA says.

Most of the letters are clearly legible, say Prof. Shmuel Ahituv of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Dr. Eitan Klein, deputy director of the IAA’s Unit for the Prevention of Antiquities Robbery and Amir Ganor of the IAA, who believe the text says:

“From the king’s maidservant, from Naʽarat, jars of wine, to Jerusalem.”

In other words, says the IAA, the papyrus is an original shipping document from the time of the First Temple, describing the shipment of jars of wine from storehouses in Na’arat to Jerusalem.

Naʽarat would likely be the Naʽarat mentioned in the description of the border between Ephraim and Benjamin in Joshua 16:7: “And it went down from Janohah to Ataroth, and to Naʽarat, and came to Jericho, and went out at Jordan.” However, 1 Chronicles 4:5, 6 also indicates it could be a woman’s name.

Ahituv notes that the papyrus isn’t just the earliest extra-biblical source to mention Jerusalem in Hebrew writing – “to date no other documents written on papyrus dating to the First Temple period have been discovered in Israel, except one from Wadi Murabbaʽat.

“Also outstanding in the document is the unusual status of a woman in the administration of the Kingdom of Judah in the seventh century B.C.E.”

Ahituv adds that the document reinforces that the city’s original name was “Yerushalem,” not “Yerushalayim”, a later spelling that might represent a compromise with non-Jews, linking the name with either a pagan deity or the idea of 'two hills'. 

“The document represents extremely rare evidence of the existence of an organized administration in the Kingdom of Judah,” stated Klein. “It underscores the centrality of Jerusalem as the economic capital of the kingdom in the second half of the seventh century B.C.E. According to the Bible, the kings Menashe, Amon or Josiah ruled in Jerusalem at this time; however, it is not possible to know for certain which of the kings of Jerusalem was the recipient of the shipment of wine.”

Actually, according to biblical chronology, (see my column About Time, part two: Bible history versus secular history) the kings of Judah in the last half of the seventh century were:

• Josiah                          659-629 B.C.E.
• Jehoahaz                      628
• Jehoiakim                    628-618
• Jehoiachin                   617
• Zedekiah                     616-607 B.C.E.

 Bill K. Underwood is a freelance columnist and author of several books, including three novels.They are available in paperback or ebook on this page at Amazon.com. You can help support this site by purchasing a book.

Archaeological proof Hezekiah really did turn a pagan shrine into a toilet

“And they demolished the pillar of Baal, and demolished the house of Baal, and made it a latrine to this day.” (2Kings 10:27, RSV)

Israeli archeologists have discovered a stone toilet while excavating an ancient city gate at Lachish. The latrine is evidence a biblical king tried to stamp out idol worship there.

The scriptural reference above is to Jehu defiling a Baal temple, not Hezekiah making a latrine in the gate of Lachish. But finding this toilet at Lachish suggests that King Hezekiah seems to have followed the practice of Jehu, deliberately defiling the eighth century B.C.E. shrine at the gate to the ancient city, just as Jehu did to the north.

“A toilet was installed in the [pagan] holy of holies [“. . .the high places of the gates. . .” 2 Kings 23:8] as the ultimate desecration of that place,” the IAA said in a statement. “A stone fashioned in the shape of a chair with a hole in its center was found in the corner of the room.” The authority said it was the first time an archeological find confirmed the practice of installing a toilet to desecrate a pagan worship site. 

 

Laboratory tests suggest the stone toilet at the Lachish gate was never used, the IAA said, making its placement “symbolic, after which the holy of holies was sealed." It remained sealed until the city was destroyed.

Lachish, about 25 miles southwest of Jerusalem, was conquered by the invading Assyrians under King Sennacherib in the eighth century B.C.E. The city gate was first located “decades ago,” the IAA said, but was only fully exposed in early 2016. “The excavation revealed destruction layers in the wake of the defeat, including arrowheads and sling stones, indicative of the hand-to-hand combat that occurred in the city’s gatehouse."

The discovery is just one more in a long list proving that the Bible is trustworthy. To read another of my columns on the reliability of the Bible, click here.

Bill K. Underwood is the author of several novels and one non-fiction self-help book, all available at Amazon.com. You can help support this site by purchasing a book.

Quarry for stone jars discovered near Cana in Galilee

The account about Jesus attending a wedding in Cana includes this unusual detail: “There were six stone water jars set there for the Jewish custom of purification.” (John 2:6)

Archaeological excavations conducted in Galilee, under the direction of Dr. Yonatan Adler of Ariel University, have unearthed a 2,000 year-old cave which functioned as a quarry and industrial workshop for the production of stone vessels.

The large subterranean cavern, hewn into a chalkstone hillside, was discovered at a site named ‘Einot Amitai near Nazareth in northern Israel. The cave yielded numerous remains of stone vessels in various stages of production, attesting to a thriving industry.

In ancient times, most tableware, cooking pots and storage jars were made of pottery. In the first century of the Common Era, however, Jews throughout Judea and Galilee used tableware and storage vessels made of soft, local chalkstone. The reason for this curious choice of material seems to have been religious; according to ancient Jewish law, vessels made of stone can never become ritually impure, and as a result ancient Jews began to produce their everyday tableware from stone.

While fragments of stone vessels have been found in the past at numerous Early Roman period sites throughout Israel, and two workshops are known from the Jerusalem area, this is the first time that full-scale excavations have been conducted at a stone vessel production site in Galilee.

Aside from the small alabaster jar (Mark 14:3) of expensive perfume that Mary broke open - which was likely carved in Alabastron, Egypt - the miracle at the wedding in Cana is the only mention of stone jars in the Bible. The account specifically mentions that the stone jars of water were there because of "the purification rules of the Jews," meaning that, according to the burdensome rules of the pharisees and other leaders in Judea, an ordinary pottery jar touched by a person who was 'unclean' had to be thrown away, but a stone jar could be washed and reused.

The cave where they found the evidence of stone-jar-making is just south of a place that is today called Kanna... the Cana of Bible times.

Isn't it interesting how even small details in Bible accounts are being proven correct?

 Feel free to leave a comment.

 Bill K. Underwood is the author of several novels and one non-fiction self-help book, all available at Amazon.com. You can help support this site by purchasing one of his books.

Do camel bones disprove the Bible?

 

The news just loves to jump on a story that seems to contradict the Bible.

Headlines all over the net, from USA Today to the New Zealand Herald are blithely repeating a story that biblical archaeologists have proven wrong the account in Genesis chapter 12, which says that a ruler in Egypt gave Abraham some domesticated camels.

The story goes like this:

Dr Erex Ben-Yosef and Dr Lidar Sapir-Hen of Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology and Near Eastern Cultures found camel bones in an archaeological site that was anciently a copper smelting community, a dig that has been positively dated to between the 11th century and the 9th century B.C.E. They found camel bones at the level of 1000 B.C.E. and later, but none earlier. They used radiocarbon dating to confirm that the bones were indeed 10th century - 1000 years before Christ.

Therefore, say they, domestic camels weren’t around Israel prior to 1000 BCE.

Leaving aside for the moment that they’re digging up a copper smelting site that dates to the exact time period when the Bible says Solomon was busy using thousands of tons of copper to build the Temple and its utensils – giving more credence to the biblical narrative, not less - there are holes in their assertion big enough to drive a camel caravan through.

Archaeologists – the real ones, not the kind who love to grab headlines claiming they’ve disproved the Bible – have established that camels were domesticated in Southern Arabia somewhere between 3000 and 2000 B.C.E., and were definitely in Egypt by 2000 B.C.E.

From Southern Arabia to Canaan is about 1200 miles, and to Egypt even less.

A camel can walk, fully loaded, about 30 miles a day for days on end.

It would therefore take a camel train about 40 days to make the trip from Southern Arabia to Abraham’s home in the Promised land, less than that to travel there from Egypt.

Honest archaeologists have found abundant evidence of a brisk trade between Judea and Southern Arabia as early as 2000 B.C.E. If that trade was not moving by camel, how was it moving?

So, they found bones of a camel they’ve dated to 1000 B.C.E. and they claim camel bones are absent in earlier excavations. However, the same articles also contain this intriguing sentence:

“Any bones found in earlier archaeological layers most likely belong to wild camels, which are believed to have been in the area from the Neolithic period or earlier.”

Well, that’s convenient: ‘We’ve decided there were no camels around when the Bible says Abraham had camels, so if any camel bones are found that could be dated back to that time, they must be wild camels.’ How’s that for circular reasoning?

According to real experts, camel domestication had to have happened in stages. Because wild camels thrived in a desert unfriendly to predators, they were likely easy for humans to prey on. Gradually, people would have figured out how to herd them, then how to gentle them for milking, then for draft work, and finally how to ride them. To this day, there are wild camels, camels slaughtered for meat, camels used for milking and plowing and hauling loads, and camels used for riding.

So what do the bones of a camel in a 10th century B.C.E. dig prove? What is proven by the absence of ‘domestic’ camel bones in older digs? Well, I suppose I could just as easily claim that the bones prove:

• That 10th century B.C.E. copper miners developed a taste for camel steak that they hadn’t had previously, or,
• I could claim that camels had been rare in the area prior to that time period because the mining industry was too small to justify their presence, whereas the industry got a colossal boost from Solomon’s Temple construction project, or
• I could as easily claim that camel ‘technology’ was hoarded by Arabians, and thus while camels may have come to the copper area frequently bringing trade goods and carrying away copper, the absence of camel bones only proves that the traders didn’t allow the valuable animals to be slaughtered in Judea.
• I could even claim that, perhaps camel bones disintegrate after a few thousand years, depending on what kind of soil they ended up in.

What about other texts besides the Bible that refer to camels?

“Hamilton cites an Alalakh text (18th century B.C.E.) with ration lists including that of "one (measure of) fodder - camel", the very fact of feeding it seems to imply its domestication or use as a pack animal. Camel bones were also excavated at Mari in an early house possibly dating back to c.2400 B.C.E. An 18th century B.C.E. Byblos relief depicts a kneeling camel further suggesting its domestication and use as a beast of burden.”

Interestingly, according to that same author, “…the list of possessions [Abraham] gained in Egypt excludes horses…” As horses were not in use in Egypt before 1800 B.C.E., that’s not surprising.

But let’s reason on this: if Genesis was a fable written in the 10th century or later as Ben-Yosef and Sapir-Hen are claiming, at a time when Egypt was famous for horses, wouldn’t that unknown theoretical writer have claimed that Abraham was given horses instead of, or in addition to, camels?

The preponderance of the evidence, then, is that the account in Genesis 12 is true: Abraham was given camels while in Egypt. His successors Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph also used with them.

 

And a few camel bones unearthed in a 10th century B.C.E. dig do nothing to disprove that.

Bill K. Underwood is the author of several novels and one non-fiction self-help book, all available at Amazon.com.

 

Archaeologists find, argue about, evidence supporting The Bible

A story in Discovery News is reporting that an inscription on a 3,000 year old piece of pottery may be an early form of Hebrew.

If you're a Bible reader, that probably doesn't sound like news to you. However, "biblical" archaeologists - who mostly are anything but - generally go out of their way to prove they aren't being 'influenced' by their religious beliefs. It's sort of like a college science professor who sees the huge holes in evolution. If he mentions the holes, he must be a religious fanatic, not a "Serious Scientist". Or a medical doctor ignoring natural cures to make sure no one thinks he's a quack. 

 

So instead of showing how this or that find fits with the Bible, they often are more interested in showing how their findings disprove the Bible.

Does the Bible still matter? Part 3

 

As I wrote in a previous column, I sent a survey to several churches in my area about their view of the Bible. By now, all the churches that were going to reply have done so, and the results – no surprise here – are that nearly all churches claim unreservedly that the Bible is God’s inspired word and the only guideline for their beliefs.

Does the Bible still matter?

Holy books, Batman!

© Lisavan

It has been referred to as “holy scripture,” even as the “Word of God.” If you believe in God, that would make reading the Bible your highest priority.

 

A person who denies the Bible’s claim of being a message to mankind from God is challenging the belief system of literally billions of people over two millennia, who based their moral decisions on what they read in the Bible.

Comparing the Koran, the Book of Mormon, and the Bible

 

 

The previous columns in this series have been discussing the various merits and demerits of the Koran and the Book of Mormon. In this final installment in the series, we will discuss the Bible's inspiration.

Does the Bible really say kids should be executed?

 One of the commenters on my previous article, a Mr. Matthewson, left this little gem:

     “I am glad you admitted the bible is complete...now explain why I have to stone my son for disobeying me?”