6 Discoveries That Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Bible

Ouria Tadmor Eilat Mazar

Archaeology and historical scholarship are constantly turning up something new. New civilizations, new languages and new cultures have all been unearthed when curious humans went poking around in the dirt with a shovel. In the same manner, new information about old, familiar subjects has come to light. A new take on an ancient ritual might turn everything scholars know about a long lost culture on its head. An unexpected discovery could shed new light on an event that baffled historians for centuries.

Archaeology and improved translations can shake up how people approach even the most familiar of historical events. The Bible is no different in this regard. Archaeological evidence and a greater understanding of the world in which the Bible was written have given new importance to passages and events that had been brushed off and have changed how people look at some of the best known stories in Scripture. Sometimes archaeological finds support a specific theory on how something occurred. Other times, it is historical information that confirms that a person truly existed. Either way, the importance of such finds cannot be underestimated. Here are six discoveries that revolutionized our understanding of the Bible.

Existence of the Hyksos

Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons

The Exodus and the story of Joseph the dream interpreter are two of the most important sections in the Bible. They set the stage for the rest of the Old Testament and serve as the foundation for much of the biblical narrative. That said, Exodus and Genesis are the two books of the Bible that skeptics debate the most. The events that occurred in Exodus and Genesis are among the oldest in the Bible, so they are some of the hardest to prove. This has made it difficult for believers to disprove skeptics’ claims that the Exodus never occurred.

A discovery in Egypt, however, may hold the key to why there is so little archaeological evidence for Joseph or Moses. Around 1720 B.C., a group of foreigners invaded Egypt and set up their own kingdom along the Nile. These people came to be called the Hyksos and yanked the rug out from under skeptics and the faithful alike. With the discovery of the Hyksos the question raised was whether Joseph was consulting the Egyptians or the Hyksos. Both groups were at one point the dominant power in the region only to be dethroned by the other. The allies of the losing power, like the Hebrews would have been, were killed or enslaved. With the discovery of the Hyksos civilization, the Exodus was once again possible.

The Lachish Reliefs

Mike Peel/www.MikePeel.net

Skeptics thought for years that the so-called kingdom of Israel was nothing but a collection of small villages and that the kings of Israel were simple tribal chieftains. The nation was relatively weak, and the Old Testament was filled with false or at least wildly exaggerated stories of great warriors. The accounts of victory in battle were meant, skeptics claimed, to mollify a people who was largely at the mercy of their larger, more powerful neighbors. The Lachish Reliefs, however, shattered both those theories. Both modern and ancient Israel were small nations surrounded by larger powers that wanted it destroyed. Both versions of Israel, however, could hold their own against their more dangerous foes.

The Lachish Reliefs are a series of reliefs carved on large alabaster slabs that were placed on the walls of Assyrian King Sennacherib’s palace. The reliefs depict the Assyrian siege of the Israelite fortress of Lachish and eventual capture of the city. The fact that Sennacherib, the king who destroyed Babylon, found the conquest of Lachish worth immortalizing on his palace walls proves that this was not some small village. The Assyrian Empire was the dominant power in the Middle East at the time, and the siege Sennacherib wanted people to remember every time they entered his palace was that of Lachish.

The fall of Lachish was not a case of the Assyrians steamrolling over a small village armed by some angry farmers. This was a fight to the death, and the thousands of arrowheads and skulls unearthed at Tel Lachish support the Assyrian and Jewish story of a fierce resistance. This makes it all the more incredible that Jerusalem managed to hold out under Sennacherib’s onslaught. In fact, Jerusalem is the only city listed in Sennacherib’s Annals as failing to fall before the Assyrian besiegement.

Black Sea Flood Channel

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The initial creation of the world and the tale of Noah’s Ark are probably the stories in the Bible that are most commonly attacked as being completely impossible. As such, they are held up as proof that the events of the Bible did not take place and are simply fictitious legends. The flood in Genesis, however, has a solid basis in science once a common translational error is corrected.

The English translation of Genesis states that the entire world was flooded. The Hebrew word “’eretz,” however, does not mean “world” in the same way the English word does. ‘Eretz can also be translated as “land” such as in the case of its usage today in the phrase ‘Eretz Israel which is used to describe the modern State of Israel.

Once people let go of the idea that the entire world was flooded, the flood of Genesis becomes not just possible, but plausible. A 300 foot deep channel carved into the Black Sea shows that the Mediterranean Sea once roared into the Black Sea and buried more than 150,000 square kilometers of land under a deluge of water that carried a force more than 200 times that of Niagara Falls. The roar of the water would have been audible up to 100 miles away and would explain why so many Middle Eastern nations had a tale about a catastrophic flood. There really was one.

The Lion Gate

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For years, skeptics were convinced that several of the enemy nations mentioned in the Old Testament were fictitious. These peoples, skeptics claimed, were an invention by the Israelites who wanted to be able to claim great victories in the past to make up for recent defeats in the time of the writers. Among those supposedly imaginary people were the Hittites. Then, the not-so-imaginary Lion Gate was unearthed. Excavations along the Euphrates River uncovered the exquisitely carved Lion Gate, an ancient Hittite monument. Further excavations found other Hittite monuments, fortified cities and even the ancient capital of the Hittite nation. There were also thousands of documents and cuneiform tablets discovered that recorded Hittite culture, language and histories.

Far from being fictitious, studies of the Hittites and their artifacts showed that the Hittites were a very real threat to the Israelites. In fact, they controlled an empire that stretched from modern-day Syria all the way to Turkey.

Yehohanan’s Heel

CC BY-SA 3.0 / Wikimedia.org

The Romans were frighteningly fond of crucifixion. In more than one instance, they lined roads with thousands of crosses to showcase their power and torture the survivors of failed rebellions. Despite the commonality of crucifixion in the Roman Empire, there is surprisingly little archaeological evidence remaining of the practice. Almost everything scholars knew about Roman crucifixion was textual or found in paintings. Physical artifacts were practically nonexistent. Then, an ossuary from the 1st century was found in Israel. The bones inside the stone box had archaeologists in near fits of ecstasy because lodged within one of the heel bones was an iron nail. For the first time, scholars could examine the remains of a person who had suffered crucifixion and both prove and disprove a variety of theories. The placement of the nail helped explain how victims of crucifixion could survive for days on the cross rather than suffocating to death almost immediately, a puzzle that had baffled archaeologists. The nail itself also proved that the biblical account of the crucifixion was accurate. Scholars had long debated if nails, a precious commodity, were used at all in crucifixions. Some believed that victims were instead simply tied to the cross. The nail in Yehohanan’s heel and the slivers of wood stuck to the nail, however, proved that Rome felt cruel spectacles to be worth the use of valuable iron.

Khirbet Qeiyafa Inscription

The Old Testament has always been difficult to date, but most scholars believed that it was roughly as old as Hebrew writing itself. As such, the oldest books of the Bible were believed to date back to around the 6th century B.C. An inscription unearthed at Khirbet Qeiyafa near the Elah Valley, however, blew that theory out of the water. The piece of pottery was only about six inches long, and the script on it baffled translators at first. A closer look, however, revealed that the language was actually an ancient form of Hebrew from nearly 400 years before the language was even believed to have been invented. Gershon Galil, the man who finally cracked the ancient code, stated that the verbs used in the inscription “were characteristic of Hebrew…[and] rarely used in other regional languages. Particular words that appear in the text…are [also] specific to Hebrew and are written differently in other local languages.” The text itself was fascinating to biblical scholars as well because it mirrored Bible verses such as Psalms 72:3 and Exodus 23:3 despite being nearly four centuries older than the Bible was previously believed to have been.