Bible
and Archaeology: Both Records Agree
There are
two copies of the history of God's dealings with mankind. One
we call the Bible. Through great sacrifice over the centuries,
thousands have lived and died so that we now have this record
in every major language on earth.
The other
record is less well known, literally dug from the sands of the
Middle East in the last two centuries. But as modern archaeologists
reconstructed it piece by piece, it agrees almost perfectly with
the Biblical record.
Hundreds of
mounds of rubble that were once thriving cities have been carefully
sifted. Many have a dozen or more layers, each left by a different
civilization. Each layer tells a story of a different era.
Key to understanding
this buried record was the decoding of the lost languages, written
in tablets of stone or sheets of animal skin. But scholars had
hardly a clue until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and the
Behistun Inscription.
The first
was a two-by-three foot black granite slab found by one of Napoleon's
engineers near the mouth of the Nile river in northern Egypt.
The other was an ancient 25 by 50 foot billboard, carved in the
face of a cliff 350 feet above the ground near Hamadan, Persia.
Each of these
discoveries contained the same story in three different languages.
Two of the Rosetta Stone inscriptions were unknown languages used
by the Pharohs, but the third was Greek.
By comparing
the unknown ones to the known Greek, scholars were able to decipher
them. This key unlocked the secrets of ancient Egypt. Modern man
was now able to read the other excavated writings formerly unintelligible.
To decipher
the Behistun Inscription, Henry C. Rawlinson, an English military
officer, spent four years suspended in a cage or clinging to a
narrow ledge on the face of the cliff making a copy of the huge
inscription. It also contained three lost languages of ancient
Babylon, Assyria and Persia.
After making
the copy, Rawlinson and others spent 18 more years decoding the
inscription. One of the languages was Babylonian cuneiform. Understanding
this language was essential to unlocking the secrets of the Tell
el-Armarna Tablets, considered the most important discovery ever
made in Egypt.
These were
found by a Bedouin woman who dug into a mound on the east banks
of the Nile. She was looking for some richer soil for her garden.
What she discovered was a few of the hundreds of tablets containing
the diplomatic records of the Egyptian foreign office during the
time of the Exodus.
These records
contain references to Israel, Canaan, and the Hebrews and indicate
that the Exodus occurred around 1400 BC.
Dr. G. Frederick
Owen writes in the introduction to the Archaeological Supplement
in the back of the Thompson Chain-Reference Bible:
"Now,
after more than one hundred and sixty-five years of topographical
and archaeological research, it can be rightfully said that the
large army of learned men have pooled their efforts and picked
up the threads of ancient life from a thousand city mounds and
woven them into a pattern which agrees almost perfectly with the
lives and recorded deeds of Bible characters"
Henry H. Halley,
in his Bible Handbook, page 57 also testifies to the agreement
of the Bible and archaeology:
"Many
of these Archaeological Discoveries, made in recent years by those
who have been digging in the ruins of biblical cities, are records
plainer than if written in a book. These records coincide exactly
with Biblical narratives. Piece by piece the Old Testament is
being confirmed, supplemented and illustrated. Even those things
which seem most like a myth are being shown to have been factual."
--from the
Flaming Torch 11/91 |
