This week we are going to do something completely different – I will be teaching the kids about ancient manuscripts and how we compare them in order to figure out what the Bible is saying. In this case, I am going to stick very close to the Bible with the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint, the Masoretic text, and the works of Josephus – with some actual documentary (not meaning a movie but ancient documents!) archaeology thrown in from the Babylonian Etemenanki Ziggurat and the excavation of burial sites from Ancient Israel.
An important reason to know about things like the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint is because anti-missionaries (people who want to destroy our faith in Yeshua (Jesus) ) will point out that NT quotes of OT verses aren’t accurate with the Masoretic – and they are right, but they are accurate with the more ancient Dead Sea Scrolls and Septuagint, so we will talk about that too. I am not going to let the anti-missionaries get our kids without a fight!
If you want to get an idea of the height disparity between David and Goliath according to the oldest Biblical documents, check out this awesome video of Spud Webb and his teammates!
As our “extra” resource this week, we are going with something fun. I am hoping that you will show your kids the source of all those fake giant photos on the internet – they were actually taken from a photoshop contest site called worth1000.com – which has now been absorbed by another blogsite but the pics are all still here. Check out all of their archaeological anomalies entries, they are very funny (note:I have never found anything inappropriate on this site, but as always, we need to be careful)
http://blog.designcrowd.com/article/880/giant-skeletons-seem-too-real-to-be-a-hoax
Here is the general archaeological anomailes page!
I wanted to present this information to the kids this week because there are people who take these photos, which were supposed to be for fun, and use them in order to lie to people. When believers reshare them, we look like fools – whether or not the original poster was just desperate to prove a point or was actively wanting to see how gullible we are.
If you ever want to know the source of a picture, from google chrome you can right click on it, and there should be an option to search google for the image. It works great when dealing with those pesky internet memes!