Ancient Artifact CONFIRMS Bible - New Discovery in Jerusalem!

Does this ancient artifact discovered in Jerusalem confirm the Bible is true, even in the tiniest details? Join us as we proclaim the truth of God's Word. A tiny clay seal was recently uncovered in the city of Jerusalem. It dates back 2,600 years to the reign of one of Israel's most famous kings, King Josiah. Now this tiny seal in archaeology is called a bulla, and how it's made is you have what we would call a signet ring, and you would press it into a lump of clay, sealing a letter, and then what you have remaining is a clay seal impression, or bulla. What's significant about this seal is that it says it belongs to Udaya, the son of Asayahu, who I'm sure you recognize from the Bible, he is found in the Bible, but he's a really minor person mentioned there, but he was one of King Josiah's senior officials. Now this interpretation of the seal, it is a preliminary result, peer-reviewed journal is coming soon, but a really, really neat find. And this seal was used most likely to close up a bag or storage vessel that was probably stored in the royal treasury storehouses on the Temple Mount. These clay seals are really tiny, but this one was found because of a new sifting technique that's being used, and you actually know a lot about this because you were involved with this type of research before. Yeah, so I actually have a really close relationship with this project because I actually volunteered at the Temple Mount Sifting Project, which is the group that conducted this investigation, and why this actually occurred is because in 1999 there was a legal excavation that was done on the Temple Mount area, and all the soil that was taken from this location was then dumped in three different areas in Jerusalem. And these different archaeologists said, we need to take the soil and we need to figure out what is inside of it, otherwise it's going to be thrown away and we'll never know what actually occurred on the Temple Mount. And so they used what's called dry sifting and wet sifting to find the different materials within that soil and then salvage it, so that way we can learn about it. And the seal was one of those objects that they discovered from the Temple Mount. Oh, that's so neat. So I've heard that this new technique is actually helping them find 10 to 20 times more of these tiny little archaeological finds. That's correct, and actually in an excavation I just completed in June, we, with Associates for Biblical Research, we sift, wet and dry sift, all of the material that we dig up, because you find more artifacts that way. So it's a really great technique that gives us more results. That is really cool. So if you're wondering who Udaya is, you won't find his name in the Bible, but you will find the father, that Asayahu, who was described, like I mentioned, as one of Josiah's senior officials, and that's in 2 Kings 22. So if we go to 2 Kings 22, verse 2, a little bit more about who King Josiah was, he's remembered as the boy king, because he was so young when he started to reign, just 8 years old, which I can't imagine being 8, ruling a kingdom. Here's what the Bible says about him. And he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, and walked in all the way of David his father, and he did not turn aside to the right or to the left. Now further on we read that Josiah sends Hekiah the high priest to the temple to clean it out and restore it back to worshiping the one true God. But while Hekiah is in the temple, he actually discovered what we call the lost book of the law. And he tells Shaphan, who's the secretary, to take it to the king and read it to the king. And when Josiah hears the law of the Lord, he tears his clothes because he was so distraught King Josiah calls together a group of men, including this Asaiahu, or Asiah, the king's servant. And Josiah commands them, This leads to reforms across the land and much of Judah returns back to worshiping the one true God, for a time anyway. Now do we know if this is the same Asiahu that is mentioned in the Bible, that's on the seal? Well the experts say, obviously we are not sure that the Asiahu mentioned on the seal is the same that appears in the Bible. However, several such artifacts found in the area of the Temple Mount carry biblical names and it does make sense because these were not objects used by common people. The press release goes on to say about this that the Temple Mount sifting project's researchers consider this possibility highly plausible. Historically, seals like these were reserved for officials of high rank, and many individuals named in similar discoveries from Jerusalem have been directly identified with biblical era officials. The artifacts discovered on the Temple Mount further supports the likelihood of this connection. But this is not the first find from Jerusalem. In fact, in 2019, we have a similar seal that was found in what's called the Gavadi parking lot near the Temple Mount and it bears the name of Nithan-Melech and he is a servant of the king. Yes, another name that might not be overly familiar, but again, another official mentioned actually in the next chapter, chapter 23 of 2 Kings. And this seal was found in what we would call a public building, but it was actually destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in the 6th century. Something God said would happen and it did. Now this is a new find, the seal of Assyahu, but the Nathan-Melech seal came from a few years ago and this just reminds us that the Bible is even correct in the tiniest details. It could not have been written long after because no one would remember these officials, especially after the sacking of Jerusalem. We would not find names of actual people who served in these roles if the Bible wasn't written at that time. Well, that's really true and I don't know about you, but sometimes when I'm reading the book of Leviticus or Numbers, it's super easy to skip over really important details and names that are just hard to pronounce. But when you actually stop and read it and then you find the archaeology, it just leaps off the pages. These are real people, real places in the Leviticus. Yeah, each person in the Bible is a real person who really did live. Another recent story claims to offer direct evidence for a much more well-known figure and that's Moses. I've heard of him. Yes, it's pretty important. An independent researcher, Michael S. Baran, claims that a 3,800-year-old inscription that was found in Sinai actually connects to the Israelites' enslavement and it mentions by name Moses. Now this is an interpretation of his, but it would be a big deal if it does actually say Moses. The script Proto-Sinatic is notoriously difficult to decode and his translation, which has been peer-reviewed yet, is controversial to say the least. Yes, very true and we're cautious about this story and I wouldn't use it as evidence that confirms the Bible without more details. But even without that controversial interpretation of the name Moses being there, there's other much more verified interpretations of those scripts that support what we'd expect starting with God's Word. And here to discuss this with us is documentary filmmaker Timothy Mahoney, the man behind the excellent Patterns of Evidence series. Welcome Mr. Mahoney. Thank you so much for joining us. You've traveled the world looking to see if there's evidence to confirm the Bible. What have you found regarding Moses? In this particular case, looking for evidence of Moses, I was thinking, well, how do you do that? You know, it's not like Moses, you know, slept here or these are his footprints. But the big question was, did Moses write the first books of the Bible? And that became the big investigation called the Patterns of Evidence, the Moses Controversy. What was very fascinating about this is that the very earliest form of the alphabet is found in the Sinai Peninsula, where many believe the Israelites would have been or had crossed. And that began sort of the basis of an investigation. Someone took Egyptian hieroglyphs and modified them into a phonetic language. But it wasn't Egyptians who did this. And it looked like it was people who were enslaved or slaves. And well, what does the Bible tell us is that the Israelites were enslaved by the Egyptians. So that began that investigation. In your research, what have you found about the Protestant script? This was talked about in our film. And then Maury Michael, who is a part of this, has been looking at this. He's actually involved with Hebrew. He's Jewish. He's been studying the Hebrew language. And when he was shown these inscriptions, he started seeing phrases or words. But the challenge to them is, which way do you read them? This is the early days of the people writing with these proto-Sinaitic inscriptions. And sometimes they wrote them from the right to the left or from the left to the right, or they wrote them up and down. And there wasn't any gaps. It was just a string of letters. And so what he did is he took it upon himself to look in this area of Sirabit el-Kadim, where there were these inscriptions. And he started finding references to the god El, and then to the hafo, or the ballot, which was the golden calf worship. So that's what this investigation that he was working on, and he has been working on, looking for words. And they're seeing the name Moses. And that's quite fascinating as well as controversial. Is it controversial because of the research, or is it controversial because of the conclusions they've come to that it says Moses? I think it's the conclusion. And in the film, The Moses Controversy, we have, you know, talked about the different ways that people have interpreted them. They can come up with a lot of different ways. Because you could decide, well, I'm going to read this word one way or another. And the other challenging part to this early form of alphabet is that there were no vowels. It was just consonants. You could add your own vowels in different places and make different words. And that's the challenge. Wow. The ancients really didn't make it easy for us, did they? No. But this was the very basis. And so the understanding or the thinking is that what I found fascinating for Sinai 357 and Sinai 361, that's how they named these inscriptions, Iblis included inscriptions including Zot Moshe, I think it is, or Nuam Moshe in English. But this is from Moses. It's a statement of declaration. And that's what has gotten everyone's attention. But what's fascinating, if we go back to the premise, is that in the beginning, some belief is that these inscriptions, this form of alphabetic inscription might have come earlier, but it was the Jewish people or the early Israelites, we should say, that were the ones who created it. The Bible says that they were in that area. They were, you know, enslaved. And some believe that it might have even come from a period earlier, such as the time of Abraham, and that they brought it with them to Egypt. But the concept here is this, is that hieroglyphs are symbols, but these proto Sinaitic inscriptions are symbols as well, but they're phonetic. So you have, you see something like the bull's head, you know, and eventually that becomes the letter A, ah, and Allah, and bah, and kah, so that you can form words, you can create words phonetically. And that was the incredible breakthrough with the alphabet. That alphabet that began somewhere in that region spread throughout the world, and that's the basis of all alphabets. It's interesting that the Bible talks about the word of God. In order for us to know who God is, we would have to have his word. In order to know God's word, you would have to have an alphabet. You'd have to have something that could take the words that Moses was given from God and put them down, transfer that throughout the years, throughout the centuries to others, and the prophets and all of them. And that's why I believe there's a connection between the alphabet and God's word. What does it say? In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. And the word became flesh and dwelt among us. So that's why this interest in this earliest, the world's oldest alphabet, is so significant and so important. So Mr. Mahoney, there is a controversy out there that Moses could not have written the first five books of the Bible. But based on your research, do you think he could have? Well I do, and that was the big question for me. I actually had a crisis of faith, I mean literally, when I came back from the very first investigation. The challenge here is that if Moses didn't write these books, all the rest of the books of the Bible, many of them reference back to Moses. And so, did Moses exist, did he really write these things, were they from God? You don't need to have the name of Moses in these inscriptions for you to see the pattern that out of nowhere emerges the most technological important discovery, which is the alphabet. And it shows up at a time and a place when the Israelites are there. The pattern of evidence is not just one point of evidence, but it's a huge pattern, and it echoes and mirrors the biblical narrative. And that's why I find this so encouraging, and that's why I believe that absolutely Moses wrote this. And Jesus references Moses as well. So that's why it's important to have these things established, and that's why I'm so thankful that we have these discoveries to continue to support the biblical credibility of the Bible. Where can people learn more about your work? They can go to PatternsofEvidence.com, PatternsofEvidence.com, and we have weekly updates. We've got a podcast as well talking about biblical archaeology, and then we've got all our films there. There's quite a few of them that people can watch and rent, and we've got homeschool curriculum as well for some of them. So yeah, that's where they go, PatternsofEvidence.com. Thank you so much for joining us, Mr. Mahoney, we truly appreciate it. Thank you for having me on. Archaeology is always coming up in the news. And when we see those stories, it's a good reminder we must do our due diligence in checking out the claims and testing them against scripture and observational science. Another story from Israel comes from a site called Kiryat Gath, and it's a city roughly 40 miles south of Tel Aviv. This is not the same Gath that Goliath is from. That's actually a different site called Tel Estafi, which is a much better candidate for the biblical Gath. But that wasn't discovered until after the site was named, and the name just stuck. What they discovered was a Canaanite blade factory, like an ancient workshop that was uncovered there. These stone tools are notoriously hard to date because they were used over such long periods of time. But what you do is you look at different styles and you try to narrow down the different periods that they were more commonly used in. Now there's other dating methods that are being used to try to narrow down and get more accurate results of when these tools would have been used, as well as what periods of time they relate to. But what's really cool is that these are beautiful blades, and they are made uniformly, which means most of them look like each other. They're extremely sharp, too. They would have been used for cutting and butchering, sickles for harvesting, things like that. And they were found in hundreds of these underground pits. Why would the people be working underground, Kori? Well, the answer is we don't know. But what we do find is they did most likely work underground, and we find these pits that were also probably used for storage, and maybe even dwellings. But again, what you find in archaeology is often fragmentary. So those are our best educated interpretations of how they would use these pits. But we're still researching. What they also found was these raw stone cores where the blades would have been stuck in to protect them. And all of this tied together, this whole idea of this factory and all these sharp blades and these stone cores, pointing to sophistication, a very sophisticated culture that had a division of labor and things like that. That's right. And researchers have actually said this is clear evidence that already at the onset of the Bronze Age, the local societies here were organized and complex and had professional specializations. And that is no surprise to us who start with God's Word. Within just seven generations of Adam, people were already making metal tools. People are intelligent right from the very beginning. But do studies like this prove the Bible? Well, speaking of ancient man, here we have Dr. Tim Chafee to help us answer this question. Really? You had highly intelligent, you could have chosen, and you picked ancient. Well, thank you for that, Corey. As far as does archaeology prove the Bible? I think we have to define what do we mean when we say prove the Bible. I think there are a lot of people who have unrealistic expectations of science and history and they have a misunderstanding of its role. So even if we had something, let's say from the Apostle Paul, let's say they could use video cameras back then, they had Paul preaching in Corinth or in Athens, it would still only be part of the Bible that is being shown to be accurate. So we shouldn't use the terminology that, hey, this one little bit of evidence proves the entire Bible. What it does show, what archaeology does over and over again, and Corey, you know this very well, this is your background, it corroborates what we read in Scripture. The Bible is true because it's the Word of God. And so we can trust it from the very beginning to the very end. And then what we find in archaeology and in history and in the other sciences is that these things constantly confirm or corroborate what we read in the Bible. I like that word confirm. So what's the proper use of evidence then, if it doesn't prove it? Well, I think we have to understand that the evidence that we find in the ground, and Corey, when you do archaeological research, you know that there are archaeologists who believe the Bible to be true and they're seeing that through a certain lens. You know that there are also archaeologists who do not believe that the Bible is true. And so they already have this worldview that they bring to the evidence, that they're looking at that through that lens. And so we have to understand that that sort of evidence is going to be interpreted through that framework. And the key is having the right framework. And for us, we tell people, you need to start with the Word of God, the Word of the One who has always been, who knows all things, who cannot lie, who told us what he did. So we're going to start there. So Tim, does the evidence speak for itself? Well, not really. And I want to be careful to distinguish between a couple of things. There is objective reality. You know, we can look at the Grand Canyon. It's there. I know it's there. I've been there a couple of times. I'm about to go through it very soon. So the Grand Canyon exists, but how was it formed? And when were those layers formed that we see there? That's when we're using our worldview to interpret the evidence. And so I think we have to understand that it doesn't matter what science you're dealing with. You are using your worldview to interpret that evidence. How are we using archaeological evidence in our coming Jerusalem model at the Arkham Canyon? Well, archaeology is playing a huge role in what we're doing. What we're building is the most accurate scale model of its kind anywhere in the world. And so it is going to be archaeologically up to date to the first century of Jerusalem, actually to the time of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection, A.D. 33. And so the city is going to look like what it was at that time. But we're also going to be teaching people where a lot of these different finds, these different discoveries were found, such as the bula that you guys were talking about and any other of the excavations that took place in Jerusalem. And we'll be able to show where these pieces of evidence that confirm the Bible were located. Well, I know I'm excited for this project. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Chafee, we appreciate it. We asked you what the best archaeological evidence for the Bible was, and 80% of you picked the Dead Sea Scroll, and then 5% of you said you were going to answer in the comments. A few responses included, Daniel's prophecies are spot on. And technically that's not archaeology, but I appreciate the enthusiasm. Fantastic confirmation of the truth of God's word. Another one, again, not technically archaeology, but we'll take it. The mathematical probability of all of the Old Testament messianic prophecies being fulfilled in one person, Jesus. I said Dead Sea Scrolls, but you can know the Bible is true just through general revelation in the nature that is observable to every man. Yes, God's word is true, even in the tiniest details. And that's because the Bible didn't come from the mind of man, it came from God. Until next time, trust Jesus and proclaim the authority of God's word. From the very first verse.