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05:31These great guests
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05:34These great mounds of red earth are the remains of the ancient city of Jericho.
05:37It's fascinated archaeologists for over a century now.
05:40This rich city at the edge of an oak by the River Jordan.
05:42They've hacked at it, dug trenches through it and argued over it.
05:46Found wonderful things too.
05:48too. But at the end of the day, the most important thing they've given us is a good idea of
05:55how the Bible's word may or may not be trusted.
06:10Even if the Bible had never told us that Joshua and his Israelites came through here,
06:14Jericho would still be one of the most famous cities on earth. To start with, it's the oldest city on
06:20earth and it was built at the lowest point on earth. This stone tower, nearly 10,000 years old,
06:27is the oldest stone building in the world. When it was made, it stood on a plain. All these huge
06:35mounds of earth around it, archaeological strata, represent various cities that were built up
06:41through the ages. It's actually an incredible time chart of man's progress on earth.
06:47Somewhere in there, then, might be the dust of ancient Israel, perhaps even the Bible's characters,
06:54Joshua, Samson, David, perhaps King Solomon even, and his thousand wives.
06:58The archaeologists that dug out the tower continued their trench right to the outside of the city. And as
07:08they cut through the mound, they cut through the city walls. City walls of various ages, like the rings
07:15of a tree, getting every later as it got to the edge. This is one of their walls here. One of the walls
07:23they uncovered. It's a rather unusual one. Dates from about 1600 BC. See, it's got a nice shiny plaster
07:30surface on. Now, these sort of walls came into existence just after chariots came into the area.
07:37What they were for, of course, was stopping charging chariots, because the chariots were skid on the
07:42shiny plaster and run off the wall that was at the top of them. Archaeologists were digging things like
07:47this up all over the place, but everybody was giving them different names. To some people, this was
07:53called a Hyksos wall, who were the people who attacked it. To other people, God knows, it was
07:57probably called a Joshuaite wall, or a Kenite wall, or an Adamite wall, or any sort of a wall, usually
08:03biblical names, because the sponsors of the expeditions like that sort of thing.
08:08In 1922, the British decided to put it on a scientific foundation. The man in charge of the archaeological
08:15mandate of British Palestine, John Garstang, decided to name all of the strata in archaeological
08:21excavations after the scientific terms used in European museums. That is, Stone Age, Bronze Age,
08:28and Iron Age. So that everybody from that moment on had to call their various stratas after those three
08:34things. Now, the particularly interesting point was the point at which the Bronze Age met the Iron Age,
08:40because that was about 1200 BC, and that was the point at which the Israelites were supposed to
08:45enter ancient Israel, with Joshua and everything. Now, so far, Garstang's been completely scientific,
08:53but at this point he succumbs to the temptation of reading the Bible into archaeology, and instead of
08:58looking for that joint between the Iron Age and the Bronze Age, he went looking for Joshua and the invading
09:04Israelites.
09:06Good morning, brother Pilgrim. Pray tell me where you're bound. Tell me where you're traveling to
09:12on a disenchanted ground. My name it is bold Pilgrim. The Canaan I am bound. Traveling through this
09:20wilderness on a disenchanted ground. That morning.
09:23Joshua, it's the battle of Jericho. Oh, yes. Oh, glad-a-dadda. Joshua, it's the battle of Jericho.
09:30And the wolves come a-tumbling down. That morning. Joshua, it's the battle of Jericho.
09:34Oh, yes. Oh, glad-a-dadda. Joshua, it's the battle of Jericho.
09:40And the wolves come a-tumbling down.
09:57That's where Garstang found Joshua and the Israelites at Jericho.
10:05This, he thought, was a late Bronze Age wall. Look, you can see the beautiful big Bronze Age bricks,
10:09these lovely brown bricks set in the wall here. And notice how they're all tumbling away at the end.
10:16Reminds you of Joshua's seven blasts from seven trumpets at seven circuits of the wall,
10:21and the walls came tumbling down, doesn't it?
10:24Actually, Garstang was a good archaeologist. He didn't believe in miracles.
10:27His suggestion was that there had been an earthquake. There were lots in this area,
10:31and the walls had tumbled down in a convenient earthquake.
10:33Well, he published his book, and it had a picture of this wall in it, and of the city that's behind the wall.
10:41And it said, the city of Jericho on Joshua's arrival. And everything seemed fine.
10:46The Bible and archaeology had been put together. There was one major snag, however.
10:51Years after Garstang worked here, somebody came back, Kathleen Kenyon.
10:55She was a very, very good archaeologist, and she had much improved techniques.
10:59And she proved, without a shadow of a doubt, that this wall was a thousand years older than
11:05Garstang had thought it was. So it couldn't have belonged to the time of Joshua and the Israelites.
11:11She proved something else that was even more devastating, too.
11:14She proved that the time that the Iron Age and the Bronze Age met,
11:17the time at which everybody was expecting the Israelites to get here,
11:21there was nobody living in Jericho at all. The place was completely deserted,
11:25and had been deserted for hundreds of years. So at that moment,
11:28it looked like the Bible and archaeology would never meet.
11:34That story of Garstang's walls and Joshua, and whether he was or wasn't there,
11:40has been repeated hundreds of times since those days. All over Israel, in fact.
11:45People keep coming up with new walls, new evidence of Bible characters,
11:49and both the walls and the Bible characters get knocked down again in the following generations.
11:53It's an endless, endless argument. But the simple result of it all is,
11:57the Bible cannot be taken as a reliable, obvious guidebook to the ancient world,
12:02or ancient history in this part of the world.
12:05The problem, then, is not whether or not the Bible is accurate, but how the Bible is accurate.
12:11What I mean to say is, the Bible is not an economic or a political history of part of the ancient world.
12:17What it is is a history of belief, of God revealed to a nation,
12:21and how they believed in him and didn't believe in him.
12:23It's a history of sacredness and of faith.
12:26Now, the wonderful thing about modern archaeology is it's beginning to dig up that.
12:30That's not to say they're actually digging up God or digging up Jehovah,
12:34but they're digging up the circumstances in which that particular God first came into existence.
12:39In the dark recesses of the Cairo Museum is a great grey granite stele that holds in its inscription
12:48the first known mention of ancient Israel, and that in the year 1207 BC.
12:55The stele has a victory hymn on it, telling us about a war that Pharaoh Menepotar's army fought in Canaan.
13:01The fortress city of Ascalon is taken, it says.
13:05The fortress city of Giza is captured, it posts.
13:08The fortress city of Yanoam is disappeared, no less, it announces.
13:12And then, and this is their good bit, the people of Israel lie desolate, their seed is no more.
13:20Now, it's especially interesting that Israel is not called a fortress city, but a people.
13:27And in the great temple of Karnak in upper Egypt by the Nile, there's something that bears that out exactly.
13:35A few years ago, a friend of mine found a wonderful visual footnote to the Israel stele,
13:41and he found it on this unlikely-looking wall.
13:44See that stele there? It's a very, very important historical inscription.
13:48And the scenes on either side, everybody had always thought, were part of that same
13:53story, the same story that this great historical text told.
13:58My friend found they were something different.
14:00He found they were from the reign of King Menepotar, the king of the Israel Steeler.
14:04You'll see that it's the king attacking fortresses.
14:07There's the chariot, there's all the dead people underneath the chariot,
14:10and he's attacking a fortress.
14:12And even that mess underneath, that's another scene and another fortress.
14:16And here, the same king attacking another fortress, Ascalon it is, one of the towns
14:24named on the Israel Steeler.
14:26And here is a guy chopping the doorway down, somebody lowering their dead child with one
14:32of Pharaoh's arrows stuck in it off the battlements, and all the people praying for the king to stop.
14:37So we have three towns, just the same as we do on the Israel Steeler.
14:42Up there, being crushed by Pharaoh's chariots and the Egyptian cavalry, is a Bedouin tribe,
14:48which, if my friend is right, is the same Bedouin tribe mentioned on the Israel Steeler.
14:54In fact, they're the oldest known pictures of the ancient Israelites.
14:58This is the ancient city of Megiddo, one of the first Canaanite cities, so the Bible tells us,
15:10that was captured by Joshua and the invading Israelites.
15:13Perhaps the same Israelites that are on that temple wall at Karnak.
15:18But you know, archaeologists working here haven't found a single trace of them.
15:28One thing you can be sure of, whether the Israelites were ever here or not,
15:36these Canaanite cities had a powerful influence on the people who wrote the Bible.
15:43And you can see them right through Israel, right through Syria too.
15:50They're usually set on trade routes, often amidst fields of corn, sometimes by the sea.
15:57But it's the land behind, filled by peasants, the land all around these tells,
16:01that kept the little courts who lived up here in a fair degree of luxury.
16:06There's a lovely, lively little drawing of one of these Canaanite courts.
16:10And it's cut onto a slip of ivory from the tusk of a Syrian elephant.
16:14And he shows the ruler proudly sitting on his recently imported Egyptian throne,
16:19all feathers and lovely leopard's legs and things.
16:23And in front of him is all his courts sitting out one by one.
16:26There's a musician plonking away on his lyre.
16:28There's the inevitable spear carrier standing there.
16:31Behind him, the captain of the chariots.
16:33They love chariots.
16:34They used to go chariot racing.
16:35A lot of their wars were in chariots.
16:37Now, it's a lovely little drawing, but it's not great art.
16:40Canaanites never really made great art.
16:42But there's one way in which they influence us down till today.
16:46And that's through their literature and through their religion.
16:49And through those two things,
16:50they influence the Old Testament and Judaism,
16:53Christianity and the Bible.
17:16At the centre of all ancient cities, of course, stood the gods.
17:24And these Canaanite cities were no exception.
17:29In fact, they were built around even more ancient, higher places.
17:34That is, hills that from time immemorial have been regarded as sacred.
17:40Certain spots on them as holy spots.
17:42And this is one of them, the most ancient sanctuary of Megiddo,
17:47the high place of Megiddo, the heart of Megiddo.
17:51Or as the Bible calls it, Armageddon.
17:55In other words, this was the theatre, perhaps the stalls,
17:59from which you could watch the end of the world.
18:02Now, there was another one of these Canaanite high places at Jerusalem.
18:07That was the seat of another god, Baal Zephon.
18:09And that becomes the Christian's Mount Zion.
18:14When the archaeologists were digging here,
18:17they found the top of the altar covered in burnt bones.
18:22Animals were sacrificed on this altar in great quantity and then burnt.
18:27The offering was called Ola.
18:29It's where the Bible's word Holocaust comes from, a burnt offering.
18:33Now, this was put up probably about 3,000 years before Christ.
18:41Before long, Megiddo became quite a rich town.
18:46And they built this great temple behind the altar
18:52for more elaborate rituals for the gods.
18:56Consider for a moment what you've got here.
18:58You've got a place for burnt offerings.
19:03You've got the temple itself.
19:05Inside the temple would have been a place for washing.
19:09And you have its Holy of Holies.
19:11Now, these are exactly the same elements that you find
19:13in King Solomon's temple at Jerusalem, thousands of years later.
19:16That, too, had its burnt offering.
19:19It had its brazen bowl as big as the sea, and it had its Holy of Holies.
19:25King Solomon's name, incidentally, contains the name of a Canaanite god.
19:29The god Solom, the god of the evening star.
19:33Now, it might not look much at the moment, but it was home for a Canaanite god.
19:37Actually, in its day, it was a great black building with tiny little slits.
19:42And the shafts of light came down here on these two great columns.
19:48Certainly not as grand as ancient Egypt, is it?
19:51But when these temples were found, they had beautiful little incense altars along the front.
19:57And the nice thing about the Canaanites, they weren't great architects,
19:59but they did love their music.
20:02And on these incense tables, which still survive, you can find tiny little figures of musicians.
20:07And they're playing instruments, pipes, banging drums, all sorts of things.
20:11Canaanites adored music.
20:12This room must have really jumped when they got going for their god.
20:17An actual fact, you can still find something of this in the Bible.
20:20Look at the Psalms in an old Bible, and you'll find these strange words
20:24set between the verses, sometimes after the title of the psalm.
20:28They're old musical instructions.
20:29We don't know what they mean today. They've been left out of modern Bibles.
20:33But there's something to do with the wonderful music that was made in these places.
20:36It's all silent now.
20:38Actually, there are yet more connections with the Canaanites than that.
20:44Think of that great Psalm 137. Think of that verse,
20:47If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning.
20:52Well, that's a very clever old English adaption of a very difficult Hebrew line
20:57that nobody really understood before. It should read, as we now know when we've got Canaanite
21:02originals to tell us, may my right hand wither. Not quite as poetic, but probably more accurate.
21:10Now, I'm not saying that the Old Testament is all Canaanite literature.
21:15What I am saying is that traditions of Canaanite literature are very strong in the Old Testament.
21:21Just as the Bible says, ancient Canaan was destroyed.
21:25Archaeologists have found all these cities burnt and ruined.
21:29But they've also found that this wasn't done by the Israelites, but by a lot of other people.
21:34A great mass of tribes coming down from the north.
21:37And once again, in Thebes and Egypt, you can see pictures of them.
21:42Because after they destroyed Canaan, these same tribes went on to attack Egypt.
21:50And in the end, only the Egyptian armies were strong enough to stop them.
21:54After their defeat, one of these tribes went back to Canaan and settled down along the coast.
22:08The Egyptians had called them the Pelisset.
22:11The Bible knows them as the Philistines, the mortal enemies of ancient Israel.
22:16About a hundred years after the Egyptians had repulsed that terrible invasion,
22:23a priest set out from Thebes to go to Lebanon, sailing right up the Mediterranean coast,
22:29to buy some cedar wood for his temple.
22:32In the course of his journey, he stopped here, on the coast at Dor.
22:37Now, by this time, the Canaanites were no more.
22:40This was not the land of Canaan.
22:41The coastal area was called Philistia, our Palestine.
22:45And the Philistines lived here.
22:47Those same people who had attacked Egypt that sort of broke them back like a great way
22:51and settled along the plain, built big strong cities.
22:54They found that all this wonderful coastline was made of petrified sandbanks.
22:59And they were able to cut into it quite easily and make all sorts of harbours.
23:03Some of the oldest slipways in the world are still here.
23:06The Philistines had brought a completely new culture and completely new religion to this land.
23:11When they moved about, of course, they only had mobile things, things they could carry,
23:16splendid swords, fine helmets, all the sort of paraphernalia of mobile peoples.
23:22When they settled down, they started to make all sorts of things.
23:25They made especially fine pottery.
23:28And this is a splendid example.
23:30You can see a lovely seated lady looking at her eyeball to eyeball.
23:34You can almost feel the Philistines in her.
23:37She's wearing, too, or she would have been wearing, a beautiful gold necklace.
23:41The Philistines were quite good metal workers, too.
23:45So this is quite an elegant and refined thing.
23:48It's a funny thing to think, really.
23:49The Philistines weren't Philistine at all.
23:52It's just that they'd been given a particularly lousy press.
23:55Well, of course, we know who gave them a lousy press?
23:58The Israelites in the Old Testament.
24:00And where were they at this time?
24:02But they weren't along the coast.
24:03Nobody found anything of them here.
24:06In fact, nobody's found hide or hair of them for miles around here.
24:11Neither along the coast,
24:15nor on the plain behind.
24:19If you take the Bible's word for it, however,
24:24you can assume that they were up there in the mountains.
24:27Because that's where the Bible stories of early Israel are set.
24:31David, King David, was once a shepherd boy up in these hills.
24:36And when he fought Goliath the Philistine,
24:38he took the pebbles for his sling from the bed of a mountain stream.
24:42Most of the combats in the early history of Israel take place in just this area,
24:53in the zone between the green fields of the Philistines
24:57and the uplands of the Israelites.
24:59In David's stories, you can see it all very well laid out for you.
25:07Chalky mountains with caves where kings and things can hide in.
25:11Traditional crops, olives, grapes.
25:15The Bible here has painted such an accurate description of exactly what was going on
25:21in Israel at that time of history.
25:23What can archaeology tell us what's happening up in the mountains at the same time?
25:28The poor people who'd moved into the mountains were obsessed with storing food.
25:32It was a very hard life.
25:34They were even obsessed with water too.
25:37These pits, in most of the big rooms of these houses,
25:44were used to store rainwater.
25:46When the archaeologists came to dig them out,
25:49they found they weren't just any old pit.
25:52To start with, they're absolutely enormous.
25:55Whoops. Look at this.
25:59And it's really big.
26:01You could stand up in there.
26:03It would hold enough water to see you through the summer.
26:05And these people weren't half daft either.
26:08Because archaeologists soon realized that these systems were cut before the houses were made.
26:13In other words, the people turned up and thought,
26:15we're going to live here, God help them.
26:17They cut their systems, their elaborate systems,
26:21and then they put their little houses on top.
26:23They could read too.
26:25As the archaeologists were sieving through the dirt,
26:27they discovered tiny little fragments of Canaanite texts,
26:31so small that you couldn't even read them,
26:33but big enough to see that some of the people here, at least, were literate.
26:37And then, marvel upon marvels, in another site,
26:40they found a tiny little limestone tablet.
26:42Looks really miserable-looking thing, actually.
26:44It's got scratches all over it.
26:46But those scratches turned out to be what is now called Paleo-Hebrew.
26:50Because later on, it was an alphabet that would develop into Hebrew.
26:54Incidentally, that too came from Canaan,
26:57the original form of the Hebrew language.
27:00So, to sum up, what exactly have you got here?
27:05You've got intelligent people living as settlers with an imported technology.
27:10Where do they come from, these people?
27:13Well, all the hard archaeological evidence suggests that they've been refugees
27:17from the old Canaanite cities.
27:19Refugees from the invasions that were coming down the coast.
27:23From people, in fact, like the Philistines.
27:29So here we are, up in the hills, looking for the biblical Israelites.
27:33What have the archaeologists given us?
27:36Little groups of refugees living in small, open settlements.
27:41Modern archaeology has begun to reconstruct the lives of these ancient people.
27:46And if you do that, you start to come up with an amazing coincidence
27:50between scientific theory and the words of the Bible.
27:55Look, supposing these people had to fight off a Philistine invasion,
27:59or supposing they wanted to go down to the plain and fight for better land.
28:03They'd have obviously needed to form themselves into a coalition.
28:07So who runs a coalition?
28:09Well, they're really too poor to pay taxes to any central authority, I think.
28:15The Bible tells us that the people who lived up here weren't too keen on kings.
28:19And there's another thing, too.
28:21In the ancient world, abstract ideas are very, very few and far between.
28:27The word coalition, for example,
28:30is one that an ancient person could not have got his mind around.
28:32He could have got his mind around the idea of king,
28:35or he could have got his mind around the idea of god.
28:38So let's have a god of coalition.
28:40Let's pretend there was a big god up here that was a god of coalition,
28:43and the priests of that god preached that everybody had to join in this coalition,
28:48and the country would therefore be strong.
28:50It would have a strong army.
28:51There would be prosperity.
28:53But if anybody dropped out of the coalition,
28:55then there would be disaster, defeat, and all the rest of it.
28:59So there would be traveling priests, and they would go around,
29:01and the traveling priests would hold the identity of the god.
29:04And the religion would all be based upon the idea of oneness, of a joint identity shared,
29:11and of identity which was sort of bounced off against the neighbors,
29:14that it was different, peculiar only to them, and somehow very strong.
29:18Well, of course, that is exactly the situation in the earliest parts of the Old Testament,
29:23in the history of Israel.
29:24The traveling priests are the biblical prophets, and the god of the coalition is Jehovah,
29:30whose Ark of the Covenant, the rules of the coalition, the 12 tribes carried into battle.
29:37You know, here, you can almost dig up God himself.
29:49Slowly, the Israelites start to emerge.
30:05This is the fortress of Arad, on the desert edge of southern Israel.
30:10Archaeologists tell us that it was continuously inhabited from about 1000 BC.
30:16That's about the time of King David in biblical history.
30:18There's a temple here, too, from about the same time.
30:23Texts like this one, written in ancient Hebrew,
30:26tell us of an Israelite garrison here, a few centuries later.
30:31Thousands of years after that huge Canaanite temple at Megiddo,
30:36the Israelites of Arad have made their little temple to precisely the same design.
30:40Remember that long dark room, lit by narrow shards of light in the two columns,
30:45where the musicians used to sing and dance?
30:47There's a little version of it here, built by the Israelites.
30:52Here, just like at Megiddo, in the middle of the longest side of the temple,
30:58the actual altar of the sanctuary.
30:59Remember, at Megiddo, the incense tables are gone.
31:03But here, in the Israelite temple, two of them were found.
31:07And on the top of them, they still had the burnt resin in the middle,
31:10from the very last time that the great wands of smoke were sent up to God.
31:15Behind that, of course, the Holy of Holies, the high shrine.
31:18You remember, in the Bible, the prophets were always getting angry with these high stones
31:23that are set up and throwing them over for the glory of God.
31:26Well, they wouldn't have thrown these ones over, because that over there was where Jehovah himself lived.
31:30Even when you come out of the sanctuary, when you come into the courtyard of the temple,
31:39the resemblance of the biblical temple of Jehovah, Solomon's temple, is very strong.
31:43This is the same sort of courtyard as the five books of Moses described,
31:48Moses' building in the deserts of Sinai itself.
31:51This is called the outer court.
31:54And over here stood a great water basin, the lava as big as the sea, they say in the Bible,
32:01where the priests washed their hands before they went into the Holy of Holies.
32:06And over here, perhaps the most remarkable part of all in the temple.
32:11This is a sacrificial altar for the Holocaust offerings.
32:14Remember, the one at the Megiddo was big and round.
32:17Now this is built strictly according to the laws of Moses.
32:21That means it has to be five cubits long exactly.
32:24One, two, three, four, five.
32:32Five cubits exactly.
32:35So here you see, you've got an Israelite temple,
32:38built according to the oldest rules of the land,
32:41that go back thousands and thousands of years.
32:43But now an Israelite temple dedicated to Jehovah himself.
32:52And he was quite a different kind of god.
32:56You see, other ancient gods were often gods of parts of things.
33:01You had gods of medicine and gods of mathematics,
33:03gods of life, gods of death.
33:06You could say that the science of understanding the world
33:10had consisted of dividing it up into bits
33:12and giving each bit a different name and a different god.
33:17Now, Jehovah was a god of gods, a king of kings, the Bible tells us.
33:21He was the god of everything.
33:23He was the god of the universal creation.
33:25So he was the god of the beginning, the end of life and death,
33:29of medicine, physics, geophysics,
33:31every area of experience that you could think of.
33:35What we call religion then,
33:38that bit in the church, that bit in the holy of holies,
33:41is what the ancient people would have just simply thought of
33:43as the ineffable mystery at the centre of things.
33:46What we call religion then, that bit in the holy of holies.
33:51Arad's temple is contrary to Jehovah's law,
33:55which says that Israel must have but one temple,
33:58and that in Jerusalem.
34:01The Bible says that David took Jerusalem for Israel
34:05and named it the City of David.
34:08It also tells us that David's son Solomon built a temple there,
34:11a home for Jehovah to hold the Ark of the Covenant.
34:16Yet outside the pages of the Bible,
34:18there is no evidence at all that King David or King Solomon ever lived.
34:24No record from the early days of Israel has ever been found
34:28that mentions either of their names.
34:31There is the Bible, and there are myths, and there's nothing else.
34:36Yet today, archaeologists are excavating the site
34:39of the most ancient city of Jerusalem,
34:42which they are calling the City of David.
34:46Sad to say, it's not only David and Solomon that don't exist.
34:51At least they don't exist in scientific history.
34:54It's also really all of ancient Israel up until that time.
34:58Look, I'm standing in David's own city, the ancient city of Jerusalem.
35:02I can't say to you that any of these walls were made by an Israelite.
35:06They could have been made by a Bronze Age person.
35:09The culture's continuous.
35:11Even the pottery these people from the early Iron Age,
35:14who we call the Israelites, made,
35:16even their pottery is a continuation of previous traditions.
35:19There's very, very little here.
35:20And yet people so desperately want David and Solomon and glorious Israel.
35:27All this memorialisation of what is really an Iron Age village is proof of that.
35:32Christians and Jews alike desperately want this place to live.
35:36All the evidence I've been giving you is really circumstantial.
35:39It's saying, look here, this is what the Bible shows you.
35:42This is how it could have been.
35:44When I first came to Jerusalem,
35:47I went to see one of the leading archaeologists here.
35:49And he asked me why I'd come.
35:51I said I'd come to find the Israelites.
35:53And we both burst out laughing because we both knew that, in fact,
35:56it was a very, very difficult thing to do.
35:59But in the end, I found them.
36:01At least, I think I did.
36:02I didn't find them here in the walls.
36:03I didn't find them in the pottery.
36:05I found them in something so obvious that I'd overlooked it.
36:09I found it in the elements that went to make up its greatest memorial,
36:13in the written word, in the ancient written word of Israel.
36:19Until a few years ago, the written Hebrew word from the time of ancient Israel,
36:25the time of chronicles and kings, was very thin on the ground.
36:29There were just a few ancient seals inscribed with the name of the scribe who used it.
36:34Just a few spare sentences.
36:35There was very little.
36:37Then in 1980, in Jerusalem, there was a minor miracle.
36:41Somebody actually discovered a Bible text, dug it up.
36:45And it was such a text.
36:46It was actually written, just as the prophet Jeremiah said,
36:49on sheets of silver inscribed with a pen of iron, a tiny little plaque.
36:55And here it is.
36:56It's actually a fragment of the oldest Bible text in the world.
37:04When it was found, it wasn't laid out like this.
37:08Those little cracks that run across it are the results of a very careful unrolling by the conservators.
37:16Originally, you see, it had been written on and rolled up very tightly and string passed through it.
37:21And it was probably worn on a child's neck.
37:24When they started to try and decipher this text, because I don't know if you can see,
37:28but it's very difficult to read indeed.
37:30The very first word they were able to read was Jehovah.
37:35They read it actually three times on this plaque before they could read anything else.
37:38That was exciting in itself, because it was the oldest occurrence of the name of Jehovah in Jerusalem.
37:44That is 6th or 7th century BC, Jehovah had come back to his own city.
37:49It's actually a part of the Book of Numbers.
37:52It's the priestly benediction, the words that Jehovah gave Moses to give to Aaron the priest and his sons,
37:58the blessing for the children of Israel.
38:01May the Lord bless thee and keep thee.
38:03May he make his countenance upon thee.
38:04You know it.
38:05It's the prayer that's recited every day in churches all over the world.
38:09It's a prayer, incidentally, that my headmaster used to use at the end of every term to dismiss
38:14his boys from his school in deepest Surrey.
38:17When I told that story to the Israeli who excavated it, he laughed and said to me,
38:21yes, when he was a little boy, his father had come back from the synagogue,
38:26put his hand on his head and recited this same benediction.
38:29The Bible tells us that the children of Israel were in deep trouble when that silver plaque was made.
38:52The nation was stumbling ever deeper into sin, it says.
38:56Jehovah's inexorable judgment was falling on those who broke his law.
39:03After Solomon's death, the Bible tells us, David's great kingdom had split into two halves.
39:10There was a southern kingdom called Judah, with its capital at Jerusalem,
39:15and a northern kingdom called Israel, with its capital at the hilltop palace of Samaria.
39:22Bible history and Israelite archaeology finally joined together here at Samaria.
39:37Here, archaeologists found an Iron Age palace.
39:41Here, the Bible tells us, King Omri built a palace.
39:46And that palace is mentioned in records from outside ancient Israel, contemporary records,
39:50where it's called Beit Omri, the House of Omri.
39:53So this, you can say, is a genuine Iron Age excavated palace from the reign of King Omri.
39:59I suppose it's Omri's son who's the more famous, though.
40:03King Ahab, who refused to walk in the ways of the Lord, as the Bible tells us.
40:09One thing the Bible doesn't tell us is what a great soldier King Ahab was.
40:13In the 9th century, he gathered up a coalition of lots of little kingdoms like this all around Israel,
40:19and together they went out and beat the Assyrian army,
40:22that tremendous force from north Iraq that used to raid westward practically to the Mediterranean every year.
40:28It was King Ahab and his little coalition alone that stopped the Assyrians for a couple of years.
40:33Anyway, Ahab and his friends certainly hadn't stopped the Assyrians for good.
40:39They kept on coming down into Israel year after year, just like a wolf on the fold, as they say,
40:45taking tribute and prisoners, destroying cities.
40:49And that, in 701 BC, was the sorry fate of the city of Lachish to the south of Jerusalem.
40:55Lachish must have been a hard nut for the Assyrian army to crack.
40:59These scenes celebrating the victory were taken from the central room,
41:03the very throne room of an Assyrian palace.
41:06And here's all the claustrophobia of hand-to-hand fighting.
41:10The ramps, the siege engines like funny tanks, the archers, the sappers,
41:14and the poor old Lachishites up their battlements fighting for their lives.
41:19In the Bible, the prophets bewail its form.
41:22Here, as the people leave their city for the last time,
41:25they passed the elders of their town impaled, stretched out, flayed upon the ground.
41:33So here's Lachish's families, with their lady carts, their women and their children,
41:38and a few pots and bundles.
41:40The eternal refugees with their carts leaving their land.
41:44The first time you'll see this scene in history.
41:52But it must have been a common enough sight at that time,
41:55on the roads that led eastward, from the cities of Israel and Judah,
41:59to the lands of Assyria, and beyond.
42:02And the trotzdem Musะปะธะฒatia is the mostinya.
42:03Theใใพใ to the outside world๏ฟฝ๏ฟฝ๏ฟฝer.
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42:04And the
42:13These were bad times.
42:32About a hundred years after the kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians, Assyria
42:39itself was destroyed by a group of cities it had earlier conquered, led by that most
42:45ancient of all cities, Babylon.
42:48Of course, it didn't matter much to the little guys that lived around the edge.
42:51They were just dragged off in chains to Babylon rather than being dragged off in chains to
42:54Assyria.
42:56Well, about 586 BC, Jerusalem itself finally fell.
43:02The Old Testament tells us that its king Zedekiah was dragged from the city, his sons were killed,
43:07and then he was blinded.
43:08Then, of course, he would have been put in chains, along with his courtiers and his priests,
43:14the priests of the Temple of Jerusalem, the priests of Jehovah, would have been brought
43:18here and dragged down this great processional way.
43:38These, then, were the gates of Babylon, the very gates that swallowed up what was left of
43:54poor old ancient Israel.
43:56The great whore, the scarlet whore.
43:58The prophets call this city and their curses, and they call it that because here it was
44:03that Hebrew was almost forgotten as a spoken language.
44:06And here it was that some of the Judeans took up worshipping foreign gods.
44:11Now, it must have seemed to some of the other Judeans in their little ghetto in this huge city,
44:15that their history, the history of ancient Israel, had come to a full stop.
44:21That Jehovah had created them, that they had lived, and then they had died.
44:28Their history, then, had become a finite thing.
44:30They must have looked back over that history, and seen that when they actually kept to the
44:36covenant, they did okay, that Jehovah smiled on them.
44:40But when they started to break the covenant and fall into sinful ways, their kings died,
44:44and finally their country was smashed, and they were led into exile.
44:48And it seemed, too, that they needed to write this history down, all of it, in the light of
44:52this new experience, because, after all, it was a history of divine providence at work
44:57on earth.
44:57Now, most of these other little princes, when they come here in chains, have been told to
45:03bring the city gods, their country gods, with them.
45:06Now, the Judeans obviously couldn't have brought Jehovah.
45:08He wasn't about to be put in a box and carried anywhere.
45:11So they brought the temple treasures in Jerusalem, which the Babylonians put in their treasury,
45:16and they must have brought some sacred writings, too, because the Bible, the Old Testament,
45:20actually mentions all these writings which were around in the time of ancient Israel.
45:24There were lists of laws, talking about sacred books.
45:28There were histories, hymn books, all sorts of wonderful things.
45:31This it was that they would use to make their history, the history of this country, their
45:36country, which had somehow seemed to stop.
45:39They didn't want to write an archaeological history.
45:41They didn't want to write a scientific history.
45:43This was a sort of a summation of a nation.
45:46It was its last thing.
45:47It was its apotheosis.
45:49It was a divine history of this grand experiment between a god, a covenant, and a people.
45:54It had never happened before on earth.
45:57This was its memorial.
45:59Because here it was at Babylon that the Old Testament, or the greater part of it, was
46:03finally written down.
46:05Isn't it this?
46:14I sit in one of the dives on 52nd Street, uncertain and afraid.
46:22Now, look to this.
46:25By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down.
46:32Yea, we wept when we remembered Zion.
46:35If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
46:41They're both, of course, poems by exiles.
46:44The last one, Psalm 137, written by an Israelite, by the waters of Babylon.
46:50The other one, by W. H. Auden, English poet, September the 1st, 1939, just as the Second
46:57World War was breaking out.
46:58Now, that poem, as it goes on, the Auden poem, is full of very specific references.
47:04And you have to really know that the war is breaking out.
47:06And you have to know Auden, the young man in a foreign country, that he's deliberately
47:11chosen to leave.
47:12There's a whole set of literary references which make the poem really hum.
47:16And the more you know about them, the more the poem hums.
47:18Because Psalm 137, we know so little about those Israelites by the side of the waters
47:25of Babylon, that really the references we have can only be of the most general.
47:31Now, supposing Auden, Auden's poem, had been written a couple of thousand years ago.
47:37And historians were trying to, you know, make some sense out of it, put it all together.
47:41You can just see the word dive, for example, it caused terrible problems.
47:44Archaeologists would go to New York looking for diving boards on 52nd Street.
47:48Or somebody would publish a street map of New York with a couple of graffiti that might
47:53have some special moral reference.
47:55That's the sort of condition we're into with the Bible.
47:59There is, of course, one basic condition those two poems both share.
48:03And that really is a quality of nostalgia because the Old Testament, being put together after Israel's history, is looking back on ancient Israel.
48:15And it sees, it sees the land through somebody's mind's eye, through somebody's sad mind's eye.
48:23So you get visions of every tree and every stone of Israel.
48:27As the scribes go for walks across its country and its pages.
48:31And every land purchase of Israel is delicately recorded.
48:35Every time, say, Abraham buys his burial ground from a Hittite.
48:40Or Jehovah grants the land, the patriarchs, very carefully recorded.
48:44Huge genealogies to make sure that that careful recording comes right up to date.
48:50So if the exile should return home, they would know exactly where their land was.
48:54The land they bought.
48:56The land they remembered.
48:57So, this exile has a most profound effect upon the Old Testament and its writing.
49:06They're looking back to see what went wrong with their contract with Jehovah.
49:10So they're remaking their own history.
49:13You get a slow slide.
49:15It's a tragedy from the high days when there's high morality and the slow slipping away from the covenant.
49:20And if you add that, if you add that quality to the tremendous cultural contraction that must have happened in Babylon.
49:28The Jews fighting for their identity in this vast old city with lots of other little people all around them.
49:33Then you get perhaps the basic ingredients of the Old Testament as you see it now.
49:37You get nostalgia.
49:39You get this absolutely rigid adherence to the idea of the race, the Israelite race.
49:46And you get also this tight examination of history and how Jehovah worked with it and how they have somehow fallen from grace.
49:55And that is why that early part of the Old Testament gives you this amazing romantic evening glow of history with heroes like Samson, with David and wise men like Solomon.
50:07All these fabulous people living in a fabulous long-ago land.
50:11All these people living in a fabulous world.
50:41Very beautiful del gras for the most people are watching this globe.
50:42All these people living in aSun Chuck could are always buying in different parts of their family and their enemies.
50:44All these people living in aennialennialenanigans who enjoy enjoying music.
50:45jNOUTC
50:58All these people living there are one of my grandstack ฤรณ you can imagine a little bit if you can imagine by.
51:00At this time, take care of meJust As it should be savory as something you have a year right.
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