Do Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob show up in archaeological records? Why or why not? Chapters 14 and 15 of Genesis are going to need a lot more archaeology to explain than what has gone before and so I thought it would be a good idea to talk about how we know what we know about the Biblical world, who figured it out, and how and most importantly, where I get my information from so you guys can find it too. There will be a ton of links in the transcript this week for those of you who really want to “dig in” to the world of the Bible.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.
Are you ready for some archaeology??? I sure am! We’re about to get into a really strange chapter of the Bible because it is about a war, and we haven’t seen any wars up to this point. We won’t even see Abram mentioned until verse 12, and he isn’t even part of the story until verse 13 when someone comes to tell him that his nephew Lot has been kidnapped along with everyone else in Sodom (remember how I told you that Lot’s choice for where he wanted to live was a really bad one in the last episode? This is just the beginning!). Because we are about to be introduced to a bunch of people and places we’re never heard of before and will never hear about again, this is a good time to discuss a very important topic. Namely, what does archaeology tell us about this war and about the people who fought in it and about Lot and Abram? But before we get to that, we need to have a talk about what archaeology even is because it is a word that means one thing but it also has a lot of related parts.
Archaeology is the study of human history, and so to study human history we need to find things that humans have made and left behind. Not everything that humans have used is helpful for archaeology. For example, we don’t have any idea how Cain killed his brother Abel but if he used a rock to hit him and then threw it down on the ground, there is no way for us to tell that rock from any other rock. But how about when Abel sacrificed one of his new lambs to God? Abel would need a knife, which he would have to make, and it would be made of rock so you would see where he used other rocks to chip away at it to make it sharp and maybe he rubbed the edge against another stone to make it sharper. Maybe he took some animal skin and wrapped it around one end for a handle. Now, if someone found that, then that could be used to study how humans used to do things. And they would look around in the place where that knife was found and maybe they would find a piece of a clay pot, or a stone used for grinding grain into flour, or maybe arrowheads or spear tips that were used to hunt deer or kill dangerous animals. In caves, they sometimes find art drawn on the walls by the people who once lived in there or hid in there. Maybe they might find evidence of ancient buildings—like rocks that were shaped into rectangles or mud baked bricks. If they found something that had to come from a long way away, then they knew that the people who lived there had either come from somewhere else or traded with people from far away. All of these sorts of things are very important for understanding the world of the Bible.
You might be really surprised at some of the things that archaeologists find. Some archaeologists work underwater finding shipwrecks, and others work in places where the lakes have dried up because the rivers have been moved. In fact, that’s how they discovered a fishing boat from the time of Jesus! Some of the things that archaeologists find can be moved and some can’t. For example, if they find a Spanish Galleon at the bottom of the ocean, they can’t take the ship and move it to a museum to study it but they can take the gold doubloons, silver, and precious jewels on board—which is what happened when they found the San Jose just seven years ago, three hundred years after it sank. But they found more than money because it also had sixty-two canons on it, and big pots that were used to carry oil and supplies, and also bottles. The dates on the coins made it a lot easier to figure out what ship it was, as well as the number of canons. Do you think something like that would be fun to do?
Another underwater archeologist named Franck Goddio found the lost city of Thonis-Heracleion deep under the water, four miles from the coast of Egypt near the mouth of the Nile River and not only that but it was covered by over thirty feet of water and buried under three feet of sand! He knew it was there somewhere because the Greek historian Herodotus, who lived long before Jesus, talked about it. They are still digging it up now, but they have found temples and all sorts of wonderful things that teach us more about Egypt!
Most archaeologists work on land, of course, trying to find the ancient cities talked about in the Bible as well as in the myths, legends, and history of other cultures. And sometimes, when those places are found we learn that the legends are actually true—like when the ancient city of Troy (warning, a bit of fake battle violence in video) was discovered and we found out that maybe the Trojan War was real after all! There are even special names given to the different areas where archaeologists work. Assyriologists study ancient Mesopotamia, where Abram and Sarai came from and where the Jewish people went into exile over a thousand years later. Egyptologists study the land of Egypt and have not only explored pyramids but have also discovered the kinds of homes that the children of Israel lived in. Classical archaeologists study the ruins of ancient Rome and Greece, uncovering the places where Paul preached the Gospel to the Gentiles. And most important of all to Bible archaeology are the people who work for the Israeli Antiquities Authority, which finds and protects every discovery in the land of Israel and especially the ones that are Bible related. If you ever go to the Temple Mount in Israel, you will see that archaeologists have dug down deep and discovered the buildings that were there when Jesus was preaching in Jerusalem! And Eilat Mazar discovered the palace of King David! A few years ago, a tourist who was visiting the city found something that belonged to King Hezekiah!
There are people who work alongside “digging” archaeologists who are experts at deciphering ancient languages, and others who know all about old coins and how they were made and where and when they are from. People who know all about pottery and the different kinds of clay from all over the world are incredibly helpful. Others know about weapons, jewelry, bottles, idols, statues, columns, writing tablets, tombs, graves, mummies, skeletons, clothing, keys, armor, art, musical instruments, tools, masks, and even toys! All of these teach us about the people who lived in a place at a certain time. I can’t even imagine being an expert about one of those things—those are some really smart people. But, when they are digging, how do they know what the date was on all the things they find? That’s a toughie. If they get lucky, they will find coins with a date on them, or something written that talks about when a certain king was ruling over them. But archaeologists can also tell how old a city is by how it was built, and what they used, and what kinds of metal objects they had in the city at that time. If a tool is made of bronze then it is probably a lot newer than a tool made of iron. A knife made of metal is probably going to be newer than a knife made out of rock. A city that has many items that were made from things that had to come from far away—like seashell jewelry in the middle of the desert—had to come from travel or from trading with people from other places.
Until just recently, most of the things that were discovered were stolen by robbers who would raid tombs and temples, steal the most valuable things and sell them to museums in places like France and England and other European countries. And they didn’t care about being careful or about the amazing wall carvings and paintings that they passed by. They just took what they wanted without permission from the people who lived there! That’s why Israel is so careful about their archaeology! But now, people are very careful and countries are very careful about who they let in and what happens to whatever they find. One of the most important things that was ever discovered was the Rosetta Stone in 1799. This was a really big rock that was carved with the same exact thing written in three different languages. Because one of those languages was ancient Greek, which people understood, they were able to decode two lost languages! One language was ancient Egyptian, written in hieroglyphs (which are pictures instead of letters) and the other was Demotic, the newer Egyptian language that replaced the language written in hieroglyphs. Before then, no one understood anything that was written from those times—not even the Egyptians because the language they speak now is Arabic and before that they spoke Coptic. What’s important about being able to understand ancient languages is that there is more than one type of Rosetta Stone found in that area of the world and because of it, linguists have been able to learn how to read ancient Hebrew, Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Amorite and Aramaic. In fact, I just took a really cool class about that from my friend Dr. Christopher Dodd about the history of the Hebrew Alphabet and he also did an online zoom version for teenagers so if you are interested, let me know and I will see if he will teach it again. Learning all these languages has often been about finding something that has two or more languages on it saying the exact same thing and decoding the unknown languages based on the one you know. Without all of that happening, we wouldn’t have any kind of proof that anyone from the Bible actually existed and we wouldn’t really understand very much about the history that those people were writing about at the same time.
So, whenever someone tells you things about Sargon or Hammurabi or anyone else who lived back then, the only reason we know anything about them is because someone found one of these things and very smart people worked very hard for a long time to figure out how to read a language that no one had understood for thousands of years. So, archaeology is like a treasure hunt, but not like how Indiana Jones does it because that man was a menace. He would destroy an entire Temple just to get something for a museum. When I took archaeology in college, back in the late 80’s, my professor hated Indiana Jones and he made sure that everyone knew that Indy was nothing but a grave robber who should be locked up for life. But the reason I told you all of that is so that you will have a better handle on things when we learn about Genesis 14, not next week but the week after because next week we need to talk about the Passover and the importance of being hopeful!
You see, when we start Genesis 14, we’re going to learn about things that were a mystery even like a hundred and fifty years ago! When we read very old Bible commentaries, they didn’t really understand very much about the world of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and so they made a lot of really bad assumptions about why certain things were happening. But things started changing in a huge way at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. In 1870, an archaeologist found what he described as “Hebrew written in Phoenician letters.” It wasn’t until they found more and more that they realized they were looking at the original Hebrew alphabet! And because the letters were very much the same as could be found in other languages, they were able to translate what they found. And there are almost 2000 examples of this alphabet all over Israel. Of course, it isn’t a different language than Hebrew—it’s actually like a different font. Like Times New Roman on your computer and how it looks different from Calibri or Papyrus. The first alphabets of most languages had letters that looked like familiar things which started with the same sound. So, the aleph, the first letter, looked like the head of an ox and over time, it changed to look like a sideways “A” and then it started to look more like the modern Hebrew letter, which looks like a mangled x. And the letter nun originally looked like a snake, because the word for snake is nachash and so the picture represented that sound. Now it looks like a bracket.
But before this, something very unexpected had been happening in archaeology for about twenty years. When they excavated (a word that means to dig things up) places in Egypt and Iraq and Iran and Israel and Syria and Jordan and Lebanon and Turkey, they found palaces, temples and even libraries hidden under the sand. And in those buildings, protected for up to four thousand years, were thousands upon thousands of baked clay writing tablets! Archaeologists found tablets in Nuzi, at Tell el-Amarna, at Mari, Ninevah, Ugarit, and many other places. In fact, the very first discovery of these tablets was in the city of Ninevah, where the Bible tells us that Jonah preached! They found the Library of Ashurbanipal, a king who is mentioned in the book of Ezra! In that library they found like 30,000 of these tablets but it took them seven years to figure out the alphabet so that they could read them! There might be as many as half a million of these tablets sitting in museums and universities around the world. There are 130,000 of them at the British Museum, and in Iraq they have way more than that. From these tablets, written during the times of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and King David, we have found out about the laws of the world that Abraham lived in, and the answers to so many of the Bible’s puzzles. People who are named in the Bible but nowhere else have turned up in these tablets. These tablets have charts of the sky, maps of the ancient world, shopping receipts, letters from one king to another, epic stories about legendary figures and gods and goddesses like Gilgamesh, Ishtar, Marduk, and Ba’al Hadad, and Temple records that tell us how they worshiped ancient gods and goddesses—like the records we have from the Temple of Ishtar in Asshur. When that was discovered about a hundred years ago, a lot of people who had made up stuff about Ishtar worship started looking pretty bad. People had made up stories about all sorts of things that belong in a horror movie but really, she was not that much different from other gods in the ancient world.
That’s an important thing to understand about archaeology. We didn’t know very much for a very long time but during the last hundred years, we started learning a lot and a lot of books about the Bible had to be rewritten and we know more every single year. It is an exciting time to be alive and learning about the Bible! Everything I am going to teach you about the covenants we find in Genesis 14 and 15 are straight out of these cuneiform tablets! And I am telling you ahead of time so that you know I am not just making stuff up. I wouldn’t try to trick you guys because I want you to go read about this yourselves someday. Maybe some of you will become Bible scholars and theologians and archaeologists and teachers and I will read your books! Most of the stuff I teach you, almost all of it, comes from the people who study these discoveries and who love the Bible and spend their lives trying to make it easier for us to understand the confusing stuff. And if you guys ever have a question about where I got something from, you just ask me and I promise that when I am just guessing or giving you an opinion that I will tell you. I do want you to know that we don’t have the answers to everything yet. Some things are still a puzzle. Maybe the pieces of the puzzle are out there in the dirt or under the water and maybe not but there will always be new things to learn about the Bible even a thousand years from now.
People will tell you that there is nothing about Abraham, or Isaac or Jacob that has been found by archaeology and they are telling the truth. But it shouldn’t surprise us. After all, Abraham is one of the four most famous men who ever lived—behind Jesus and Moses and Jacob—but when he was alive, he wasn’t a very important man in the ways that get you mentioned in history books. Abraham wasn’t a king. Abraham wasn’t a great warrior taking over the world. Abraham was never the ruler over even a small town. Abraham and his kids and grandkids were pretty much just normal people in the eyes of the world. They kept their sheep and sometimes traveled around to new grazing spots, so they lived in tents and not in cities. No one had any reason to write about Abraham at all except for his descendants and mostly they didn’t talk about him at all outside of the book of Genesis. What was important about Abraham wasn’t that he was famous or powerful, because he wasn’t either of those things when he was alive. The Bible tells us that what was important about Abraham is that he trusted all the crazy, impossible promises that God made to him. That isn’t the kind of stuff that gets your name written down on cuneiform tablets.
Also, it is very likely that Abraham couldn’t read or write—because he didn’t need to. Only a very few people in those days could read or write because they lived in a world where it was totally unimportant. People talked and remembered. They believed that talking was more accurate and writing things down was only important for professionals like scribes and priests who got paid to copy things down for important people, like contracts and treaties and agreements. When normal people made agreements, they did other things like cut animals in half, or eat a meal together, or marry their kids to each other, or plant a tree or put up monument stones. They didn’t write it down because they depended on their gods to make sure that everyone kept up their end of the agreement and no one wanted to make their gods angry. Most likely, besides Pharaoh and his scribes and Melchizedek, Abraham might have never met a single person in his life who could read and write. And it seems so strange to us because we write down everything—even a lot of stuff that we definitely shouldn’t write down! And we have books and books and books about books of history. We even have histories of silly things. What they had was stories, like these stories that Moses told the children of Israel about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And they knew them by heart because they had heard them all their lives. It wouldn’t have been until many, many hundreds of years later that they needed to get them written down and even then they would have to wait until they had a place to store them—like David’s palace in Jerusalem or in the Temple.
They would have thought to themselves, “Why do we need to write about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob when even the smallest children know all the stories about them?” Just think of all the stories you would know if you didn’t have TV, books, movies, or the radio, right? They lived in a very different kind of world that is impossible for us to fully understand because it doesn’t exist anymore. And so, it shouldn’t surprise us that we don’t see these names outside of the Bible. In fact, the earliest name we see in archaeology is King David’s, written in stone nine hundred years before Jesus was born. There are also a lot of discoveries proving that there were Hebrews in Egypt working as slaves. But it would be wrong to think of archaeology or science or anything else as a way to prove that the Bible is true. After all, no one ever needed that before modern times. We know the Bible is true because once we come to know God, we begin to understand the things that were written about Him in the Bible by all the different writers and prophets and poets and apostles. The Bible is very important but it will never be more important than God or Jesus and knowing them. A lot of people in this world know a lot about the Bible and they think of it as a great book but they don’t know or believe in God. And there are many people who trust the Bible more than they trust God and they do some really bad and even mean things trying to prove that it is true.
But we don’t need to do that. God has never told us to prove that the Bible is true. God tells us to live as his very own image-bearers, showing the world what God is like by acting like Him. And that’s a hard thing to do, way harder than trying to prove that every single little thing in the Bible is accurate. I think that a lot of people who are trying to prove the Bible is true aren’t acting like it is true and I don’t want you guys to be that way. God tells us in His word to be loving and not hateful, humble and not prideful, peacemakers and not picking fights, merciful and not mean, gentle and not rough, kind and not cruel, trustworthy and not liars, generous and not greedy, patient and not demanding, able to control ourselves and not lashing out at people in angry ways. That’s what proves that the Bible is true—when people like you and me become more and more like God in the way we behave and especially in the ways that we treat others. And one of the best ways of doing that is by not trying to prove that we are always right about everything.
So we can’t prove that Abraham was a real person from archaeology—who cares? But when we serve the God of Abraham and become more and more like Him, just like Abraham did, people will believe the story just because they can see it is true in our lives.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I want you to think about the ways that you can prove God is real just by showing people His love.