It’s fitting that this subject comes up the week that we traditionally celebrate the triumphal entry. When you read that passage in Luke, it says
Luke 19:37-40
37 As he was drawing near—already on the way down the Mount of Olives—the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, 38 saying, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!”
As expected, some of the pharisees were bothered by this and wanted it stopped.
39 And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.”
The interesting part was Jesus’s response.
40 He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”
That statement is coming true today, the stones are crying out.
Archeology has been finding evidence over the last couple of hundred years that has made more than one skeptic eat crow. We live in a day and age where nobody wants to believe anything. Naturally that skepticism carries over into believing what is written in the Bible. After all these skeptics will tell you that the Bible, and even religion itself, is all made up by man to control you.
So I want to look at 3 examples of archeological finds that demonstrate that the “people in the know” don’t always have all of the answers.
Let’s start with Sargon II, who prior to 1843 didn’t exist, except in the book of Isaiah.
Isaiah 20:1
1 In the year that the commander in chief, who was sent by Sargon the king of Assyria, came to Ashdod and fought against it and captured it—
Herodotus, and Josephus were two of the best historians ever when it comes to understanding what took place before the 2nd century, but neither mention Sargon. There was a list of rulers in the 2nd century called “Ptolemy’s Canon of Kings”, Sargon was missing in that list as well, there was a ruler named Arkeanos listed in that time frame, but scholars struggled to identify him. Being as Sargon was only ever mentioned in that one verse in Isiaih the consensus became that Sargon didn’t exist.
There a few different theories as to why the name was in Isaiah, one being that it was he was just a literary invention, or a mistake on the behalf of Isaiah (indirectly implying that God made a mistake). Another theory was that Sargon was an alternate name for a more well know king such as Shalmaneser V or Sennacherib. A third possibility that was proposed was that Isaiah was simply confused when he wrote this (again denying the inerrancy of Scripture) Whichever view that anyone accepted, the assumption was that man was right and Isaiah was wrong.
That all changed in 1843, when Sargon’s palace was discovered. What happened was that Sargon was killed in a bloody battle and his body was never found, and to the Assyrians that was a divine curse. In an effort to remove himself from the shame of that curse, Sennacherib (his son) abandoned the brand new capital, and moved the government back to Nineveh, and he tried to erase the existence of his father. When Paul-Emile Botta discovered the palace in 1843, they found one of the most detailed records of any Assyrian king, and the stones cried out that Isaiah was correct all along.
Because I love the book of Daniel, one of my favorite archeological discoveries is the Nabonidus Cylinders. In Danial 5:7 Belshazzar makes an offer.
Daniel 5:7
The king called loudly to bring in the enchanters, the Chaldeans, and the astrologers. The king declared to the wise men of Babylon, “Whoever reads this writing, and shows me its interpretation, shall be clothed with purple and have a chain of gold around his neck and shall be the third ruler in the kingdom.”
The problem was, according to history there in no Belshazzar even though Scripture mentions him several times (Danial 5:1, 2, 9, 22, 29, 30 7:1, 8:1). History is very decisive that Nabonidus was the last king of Babylon. Again, neither the “Cannon of Kings” nor Herodotus mentioned any ruler named Belshazzar, so he obviously didn’t exist. Critics called the book of Daniel a fake, they claimed that it was written at a later day by somebody who obviously didn’t know history, or that Daniel just made him up. If you believe the critics and historians, when you read this passage, you are presented with 2 questions. 1. Who is Belshazzar, and 2. Why is he offering them the reward of being 3rd ruler in the kingdom, why not 2nd?
In 1854 the Nabonidus Cylinders were found. The Nabonidus Cylinders were the first non-Biblical proof that Belshazzar even existed, but the information revealed answered other questions as well. It seems that Nabonidus really had little desire to be king, he spend 10 of his 17-year reign in Arabia, and made Belshazzar a “co-regent”, basically giving him all the authority of a king. Not only did those cylinders reveal who Belshazzar was, they also explained the obvious mystery as to why he could only offer anybody the position of 3rd ruler in the kingdom, because he was the 2nd ruler. Once again, the rocks cry out and God is glorified.
The argument of silence is a common stance, that critics use to debunk the Bible. It basically goes something like this: “Because we find no evidence of the Hittites, other than the Bible, they clearly didn’t exist”. The Hittites were mentioned over 50 times throughout the whole Old Testament, but not in history, so obviously history is right and the Bible is wrong, right? That was the argument of scholars prior to 1906. They decided to classify the Hittites as a small little Canaanite tribe, or just a complete myth, but they were nothing like the powerhouse, almost equal to Egypt that they are described as in 2 Kings 7:6
6 For the Lord had made the army of the Syrians hear the sound of chariots and of horses, the sound of a great army, so that they said to one another, “Behold, the king of Israel has hired against us the kings of the Hittites and the kings of Egypt to come against us.”
Between 906-1912, Hugo Winckler supervised the excavation of Hattusa where they found a capital city library of 10,000 clay tablets. Those tablets document a signed treaty between the Hittite King Hattusili III and Pharaoh Ramesses II, verifying that they were strong enough that Ramesses couldn’t just overtake them, he had to make a treaty with them. While that verified that they weren’t just a small Canaanite tribe as skeptics tried to claim, there was more. The tablets contained land sale contracts with almost identical phrasing as you find in Genesis 23 when Abraham bought the “Cave of Machpelah” from Ephron the Hittite. Proving that it wasn’t just “Oral Tradition” written down centuries later, but it was written by somebody who understood the specific, complex legalities of Hittite real estate law from 2000 BC. What are the odds of that? It also showed that the structure of Deuteronomy mirrors the format of the Hittite “suzerainty treaties” from the 2nd millennium BC, supporting the idea that Deuteronomy was written when Scripture says that it was written and not at a later date as critics suggest. Yet people continue to trust the experts over the stones that verify otherwise.
It was my intent to share with you about the Pilate Stone (1961) and the Tel Dane Stele (1993) which both tell similar stories of skeptics saying that the Bible is made up because it makes claims contrary to what they “know” is true. I’ll have to let you look them up yourself, but I’m sure you’ve guessed archeology proved them wrong again. They are still discovering thing as recently as last year (The garden under the church, the AI “Time Machine” for the book of Daniel, and the Assyrian “Tribute Notice”) among others, so the whole story is not told yet.
We don’t have all the answers, and as of yet, we don’t have all the evidence that we need but when it comes to believing God’s word, or those who claim to know better, I’ll choose God’s Word every time.
Thank you for reading this, as always, I would encourage you to spend time in His Word, in prayer and in the fellowship of other believers. And if you haven’t visited already, I would encourage you to come visit our little church on the hill, it’s worth the drive.
Bro. Jason
Interesting!