Archeological Finds in Israel Proving Bible History

Nadene Goldfoot                                            

                                                        The Exodus

In 2011, archaeologists Uncovered  the  ruins of  the biblical city  of Shechem, or as we know it today as Nablus,  in war-torn Israel.  The biblical ruin lies inside a Palestinian city in Judea-Samaria; the (West Bank,) where modern researchers are writing the latest chapter in a 100-year-old excavation that has been interrupted by two world wars and numerous rounds of Mideast upheaval.  Excavation on Shechem was started in 1913 to  1934 by German archaeologists.   From 1948 to 1967 this land was in Jordanian territory illegally and since the 1967 War is under Israel's control.  It's earliest walls date back to 2000 BCE.  It was under Egyptian control as early as the 12th dynasty BCE.  Our biblical patriarchs camped under its walls and it was pillaged by Simeon and Levi as told in Gen.34.   Later, it was in the territory of Ephraim, and was a Levitical city and a city of refuge as well as the center of the House of Joseph.  Joseph is buried there.  

Before naysayers say that the Old Testament is just a bunch of myths, they should check out what archaeologists have already proven.  

Nelson Glueck took a Transjordan survey which is thought by some scholars to show that the Israelite entry (Exodus into Canaan) did not happen earlier than the 13th century BCE.  My encyclopedia has Moses dying by 1271 BCE  and our history is that he was not able to enter the land as he was already 120 years old by then, so had chosen Joshua to lead the Israelites in.  So they are in agreement with this.  It would not have happened, say, in the 14th century.  

The Merneptah stele which is dated c. 1231 BCE sets a terminus ad quem   (to which there) for the Exodus.   Others thought the same and this resulted from the researches at Jericho, Bethel, Lachish, Tel Bet Mirsim, Hazor, etc.  
                                                                     

                        King  Solomon's Temple, from Description

Pottery study has identified the Philistines, and work at Gibeah (Tel el Ful and Jerusalem which we also call Zion has cast light on King Saul's and King David's reign, just as digs at Tel el-Hesi and  other places may have revealed King Solomon's chariot stables, and Tel el-Khalife, which is also called Ezion Geber, his trade and mining center.      

Bible study is illuminated by archaeology both in and outside what was then, Palestine, now mostly Israel.    The Mesopotamian discoveries of Ur of where Abraham was born do indicate a period of great floods which are reflected in the biblical Flood Story found in Genesis.  

Both the Egyptian Execration of the 20th and 19th century BCE and the Mari along the Euphrates of the 19th and 18th century texts show the patriarchal period.  Transjordan researches show contemporary Middle Bronze Age life as semi-nomadic.   

There are the well known Tel el Amarna tablets from the 14th century BCE which illumine the Israelite advent.  The Hammurabi  and similar legal codes of the 18th century give us the background of Mosaic legislation  and the legal habits of the patriarchal period.   

Edward  Robinson in 1838-1852 was an archaeologist who tried re-identification of biblical sites.  "Robinson traveled to Palestine in 1838 in the company of Rev. Eli Smith, leading to the publication of Biblical Researches in Palestine and Adjacent Countries for which he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1842 He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1847. Robinson, together with Smith, made scores of identifications of ancient places including the tunnel dug by King Hezekiah shortly before the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem in 701/02 BCE, though the inscription at the southern end of the tunnel was to be found later.  The Robinson's Arch in the Old City of Jerusalem is named after him."  Edward was a farm boy from Southington, Connecticut born 4/10/1794.  He is a direct descendant of the Reverend John Robinson who sent the Pilgrims over from Holland to America on the Mayflower in 1620.  Most likely his Christian religion was the motivation for his digs in Palestine.  

He was followed by a lot of travelers in the 19th century.  F. de Suley carried out the first excavation of the Tombs of the Kings in Jerusalem in 1850.  The English Palestine Exploration Fund in 1865 started C. Warren's Jerusalem excavations in 1867 and a survey of Western Palestine was done in 1872 to 1878 by Conder and Kitchener.  His digs coincided with important work by C. Clermont-Ganneau, G. Schumacher and others.

By 1890, W. Flinders Petrie was at Tel el-Hesi and devised the system of pottery dating by looking at the stratification and cross dating it with Egyptian finds.  This started the methods used afterwards at Gezer, Samaria and other places.  They were able to go back to the Old Stone Age, or the Middle Paleolithic Age found in the Carmel and Nazareth skeletons, intermediate between Neanderthal man and Homo Sapiens. The Mesolithic's Middle Stone age culture is represented by the Natufian cave-dwellers, the first cultivators who lived around 8,000 BCE, and Neolithic, most strikingly by the Yarmukian settlement of Shaar ha-Golan.   

By 5,000 BCE, walled village settlement had evolved as in Jericho.  The use of copper began c 4,500 which started the Chalcolithic age in Jericho, Telulat Ghassul, and in the Beersheba district.  In 3,200-2,100 BCE we find the Early Bronze Age.  The Middle Bronze Age was from 2100 to 1500 BCE.  The Late Bronze Age was from 1500 to 1100 BCE which had walled towns that were spread out as revealed by excavations at Bet Yerah.  Megiddo, Jericho, Bet Shean, Tel Bet Mirsim, and so on are examples of that period.  

Research has even revealed the famous Hyksos of the 18th century BCE with fortresses at Hazor, Shechem and Horite or Hurrian migrations from the 17th century and growing Mediterranean contacts under Egyptian rule such as in Bet Shean from the 1500 to 1100 BCE period.  

Discoveries of the Ugarit (Ras Shamra) include  old Canaanite texts from 1880 to 1200 BCE. They shed light on the earliest poetical parts of the Bible.  Epigraphical finds at Sinai, Gezer Calendar, Siloam, the Moabite Stone, Lachish letters and the Arad Ostraca show the development of the Hebrew alphabet.  

Archaeology in Samaria has uncovered the palaces of Kings Omri, Ahab, and Jeroboam II and show the Phoenician affinities of their culture.  Many sites such as Megiddo and Lachish have  given us dates and show the extent of the destruction that came before the Babylonian exile.  

Excavations at Samaria, Beth Zur, Marisa, Beth Shean and Transjordan Tobiad Palace of the 2nd century BCE date form the Hellenistic period of the 3rd to 1st centuries BCE.  

The later Second Temple Period has brought researches into the tombs and ossuaries of the Jerusalem area and into the Herodian structures of the southern and western walls of the Temple area, the Jerusalem Citadel, Mamre and Masada with its remains of Herod's palace, the Zealot living-quarters and the Roman siege-lines.  
                                                                                 

Finally, in the 1st century belong the DEAD SEA SCROLLS with their affect on Bible study and knowledge of Jewish sectarianism.  Another important find in caves of the Judean desert was the correspondence of the Bar Kokhba period.  He was the leader who fought against the Romans from 132-135 CE but was finally killed.  

The catacombs at Bet Shearim gave us information about Jewish art, language, and religion of the 2nd to 5th centuries CE.  The Israel Government Department of Antiquities has from  1949 carried out the supervision and protection of antiquities, investigation of chance finds and systematic excavations.  The Israel Exploration Society has worked at Bet Shearim and Masada.  

PS 3/5/14:  Besides all this, check out Simcha Jacobovici and his TV programs where he shows what he has discovered and worked on.  Entertaining as well as factual, he's a delight.  Simcha Jacobovici was born on April 4, 1953 in Petah Tikva, Israel. He is a producer and director, known for The Naked Archaeologist (2005), The Lost Tomb of Jesus (2007) andCharging the Rhino (2007).

50 people from bible confirmed archaeologically from the reference-mosaic magazine cites below.  

A web-exclusive supplement to Lawrence Mykytiuk's “Archaeology Confirms 50 Real People in the Bible” feature in the March/April 2014 issue of BAR.  Purdue University scholar Lawrence Mykytiuk lists 50 figures from the Hebrew Bible that have been confirmed archaeologically. The 50-person chart in BAR includes Israelite kings and Mesopotamian monarchs as well as lesser-known figures.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2014/03/right-out-of-the-bible/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=e9a97c3ced-2014_3_5&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-e9a97c3ced-41144429
Resource: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Robinson_(scholar)
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/07/22/in-palestinian-city-diggers-uncover-biblical-ruin/

People that Validate Jewish History From Torah

Nadene Goldfoot                                                             

 One group of Protestants still respect  the Old Testament  who are called "Evangelicals."  James B. Irwin, astronaut on Apollo 10, was active in believing the writings in the Bible, especially after his experience on the moon.  He led an expedition to search for Noah's Ark.  I don't think his not finding it deterred him as he later "founded an evangelical religious organization."  His knowledge of science did not deter his validating the writings of the Torah. 

 What religion should do for a person is to give them that moral fiber to be moralistic. That includes all the good that people should be and how they treat each other.  One look at this world of ours, and we can see we are failing.  People are as crude and rude as they were back in the Neolithic days, ready to kill off most of the planet's population much quicker than the cave men could.  Those that are most ready to do so do not think much of the 10 Commandments, so basic to civilization.   

Christopher Columbus in 1492 could have been Jewish.   Jews in 1492 were hiding the fact to keep from being converted or killed and were called Marranos.  He could have been one, for that matter, though he is listed as a Catholic    He spoke Spanish better than Italian.   He wrote to his son in Hebrew.This was at a time where Spain was telling Jews that they had to convert or leave the country. The New Testament had replaced the Jews' history found in the Old.    The mapmakers he met with when in Genoa were Jews, as Jews had been merchants way before 70 CE and traveled a lot on the seas from Israel and Judah and probably did a lot of charting.  He must have found credible facts to undertake such a voyage, for Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 14 hundred and 92. If he trusted their map making, it also could be that he trusted their history, found in the Christian "Old Testament."  Being he was to become a very famous person, I have included him for representing a time when Jews were suffering the worst and had been forced to leave Spain, then Portugal and finally find other countries to live in such as Syria.

The United States of America was settled by religious people in 1620 who came to Plymouth Rock, the land later to become the state of Massachusetts.  They believed in G-d, and had a  relationship with the Old Testament, which they read. They even studied a little Hebrew.     They had broken off from Catholicism long before in England to become Protestants, and these Pilgrims were a branch of that group who felt they still had no religious freedom of choice, so off they went from Holland, which they had tried to settle in, to the unknown land of America in a little sailing ship called "The Mayflower."  They weren't the first to arrive in North America. English people had sailed to Jamestown much further south and established it with a colony  on May 14, 1607   "The colony gave England its first foothold in the European competition for the New World, which had been dominated by the Spanish since the voyages of Christopher Columbus in the late 15th century ".It later became Jamestown, Virginia.  

Being that the south was not settled by religious people of that day, they saw nothing wrong about having slaves and defied the request from the President and the North  to free them, which England had already done in 1833.   Therefore, the refusal to do so  started   the American Civil War in 1861 and didn't end till 1865. Since then, religion did make its way into the South.  

Religion is losing out in the USA.  Less and less people have any respect for the Old Testament, the part that tells the history of the Jewish people.   They think it is just an Old Wives' Tale, legends, having nothing to do with today's scientific facts.  Bring up borders, boundaries, land, and few heed the information IF it comes from the Bible.  "Oh, I don't believe that stuff.  It's not true."  Little do people realize that this written history is actually recorded history of the Jews, telling of battles and who with and what happened.  It even includes geography and genealogy.  Hebrew texts, material written in Hebrew, date back to the 2nd millennium BCE, when Abraham was living.

Why are Hebrew writings so easy to ignore?  This is history recorded in writing.  At the same time there was writing going on in Egypt, Babylonia and China. Moses (1391-1271 BCE) most likely was schooled in hieroglyphics.  In 1391 BCE Amenkotep III was the pharoah.   People pay attention  to material from those sources.  Why is the Torah not paid respect as a source of history by people other than the Jews?  The Culture, the foods, the animals and plants, all are recorded there.  It's a wealth of information. The Babylonian Empire, which existed at the same time, wrote in the Akkadian language.  That's where Hammurabi came from.  People were writing Akkadian, a cunieform style of writing  in 2,500 BCE.  Sumerians invented it in the 4th millennium BCE.

Jewish people do not use the King James edition of the Old Testament, however.  Translation errors have been made from Hebrew to Greek to English.  Our word for bible is Tanach, so we use The Stone Edition Tanach from the ArtScroll Series which is considered to be the most accurate.  There are people who think that the Torah has changed over the years, and they do not understand the original and continuing care that has been taken to make sure that not one word was changed.  Even pieces found in the Dead Sea Scrolls are proving that they haven't changed since the 1st century for the past 2,000 years.  One can visit the Dead Sea Museum online or in person which is in Jerusalem and view the original findings.  Evidently people like to be told things, like in a preached speech, and personal detective work is awkward for them to do a study on their own.  If they're not told this is it, they don't trust the information that this is not just folk lore.  .

 DNA, another science from geneticists, is giving us a clear cut road map of people, calling this new science population genetics.  Someday, the two must get together and see if they can mesh their findings with what we have known since Moses and his people who existed for over 3,000 years.  One thing about our writings.  They never have been known to put themselves in a better light by leaving out the bad parts.  Egypt was known to do that by covering over hieroglyphics that the next ruler didn't approve of.  They only wrote about their successes.  We wrote about our sins, that of David, especially, and the women in his life.  We learn from from, or try to.
                                                                               

Francis S. Collins, PhD is one of the world's leading scientists who studies genetics.  He was the head of the Human Genome Project.  He's also a man of unshakable faith in G-d and scripture and believes that faith in G-d and faith in science can coexist within a person and be harmonious.  He wrote the book, "The Language of God," which of course is our DNA.   In fact, discovering our DNA has made him more religious.  One of the more interesting chapters in his book is "Genesis, Galileo, and Darwin. Darwin is most interesting to me because the Nazis took his theories and used them to prove they had the right to exterminate all the Jews in the world, of course which was not what Darwin had intended.   

The book, followed up with its own movie,  "Roots," by Alex Haley, set me on fire as far as dabbling into my own genealogy.  He tells of the African custom of reciting their oral history before their family group. He was able to trace his family line to one tribe in Africa through oral history.

 Our oral history has accompanied our written history as well.  We Jews probably did the same thing, recite this history of ours, telling of things left out when Moses set down his 5 books, another thing that modern people of today want to pooh pooh.  We have since printed the oral history before we forgot it.  It's called the "Mishnah."  So we have 3 sources of importance, The Torah or 5 books of Moses, the Talmud and the Mishnah.  Rabbis have been discussing our writings since the fall of Jerusalem of 70 CE with Rashi being the most famous commentator (1040-1105 CE)

Jews in Israel depend on the Torah for their strength.  I've known of soldiers who used its geography descriptions of the terrain to get themselves out of harm's way when confronting the enemy.  It worked!  They found paths, ancient, but still usable for them.  The description of Eretz Yisrael giving the boundaries and the description of it is found in the Tanakh.

King David (1010-970 BCE)  is said to be the author of Psalms.  I found #62 that is most prophetic. He speaks for all Jews of today.   The first stanza goes like this: and is addressed to the wicked, murderous schemers.  One must never allow the power and ill-gotten wealth of the oppressor to erode one's trust in G-d and faith in His justice.

For G-d alone my soul waits silently,
    my salvation comes from him.
He alone is my Rock and my  salvation
     my stronghold,
   I shall not falter greatly. 
 ------------------------------------------------
To falter-means to stumble, to hesitate.
-------------------------------------------------
You'd think someone wrote that today, knowing how many have tried to convert us since the many Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition and people ringing our door bells.  For us, G-d remains that unseen force that created everything.  Could it still be that anti-Semitism, because Jews have not converted to others' religions, is the cause of not wanting to believe anything written by Jews?  It most likely goes like this:  since Jews are wrong about G-d, their book has to be all wrong, too.  They ignore that their Savior was a practicing  Jew.  
                                                                               

Therefore, when we give testimony of our former history in Eretz Yisrael, people can hoot and holler all they want.  They just show me that they have read but very little history.  The archaeologist just beginning in their professions seem to be one of the worst in reading about our history, thinking they can know all the history from the few remains they find after 3,000 years. Of course the findings are fantastic and  validate our history, but somehow there are those who still hold out that our Torah is just stories for children. "Oh no", they say, "It can't be." I'd say they are in denial, like an alcoholic.  They want to ignore the findings that do prove our existence and story.  For instance, an ancient 4th century CE Samson Mosaic  was found in a synagogue in Israel in September 2013. A stone altar was discovered in November 2013 dating back to the Israelite kings at Shiloh from 1010 BCE.  "Three complete cooking pots and a small ceramic oil lamp were uncovered in June 2013 inside a small cistern in a drainage channel that runs from the Shiloah Pool in the City of David to Robinson’s Arch near the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City that were at least 2,000 years old.  A 2nd Temple period ritual bath was located  in April 2013 in the  Qiryat Menachem quarter of Jerusalem, a rare ritual bath - known as a mikvah in Hebrew." So, young archaeologist, pay attention to what has been going on in the archaeology areas in Israel before you say nothing is found to prove our existence there or our facts thereof.  

Christopher Columbus updated: 2/19/14.

Resource:  http://abagond.wordpress.com/2012/11/21/america-did-not-start-with-the-pilgrims/
http://www.historyplace.com/civilwar/
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/talmud_&_mishna.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Irwin
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/10/us/james-b-irwin-61-ex-astronaut-founded-religious-organization.html
http://www.hebrewhistory.info/factpapers/fp009_navigation.htm
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=883&dat=19651105&id=46ccAAAAIBAJ&sjid=smEEAAAAIBAJ&pg=3959,4986769 (Columbus)
http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/egyptian.html
http://judaism.about.com/od/jewishhistory/a/Hebrew-Language-Origins-History.htm
https://www.sron.nl/~jheise/akkadian/akframe.html
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Archaeology/archdiscovery2013.html
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/09/09/archaeologists-stunning-find-ancient-treasure-trove-at-temple-mount-is-a-once-in-a-lifetime-discovery/