The Prophets Scribe The Relationship Between Jeremiah Baruch ben Neriah Investigating The Bible

In this series I've been trying to find out what lies behind the biblical story of the Israelites. That story created passions that are still very much alive today, I should know. It was taken as the literal truth for most of the past 2,000 years, but recently some scholars have been saying that it's a complete invention from start to finish and nothing to do with historical truth. In this program it's time for me to try and find some sort of an answer. The things that you're liable to read in the Bible, is they or ain't they necessarily so? The state of Israel exists in the framework of biblical history. It was established here rather than anywhere else because here was the Israel of the Old Testament. It had to struggle for existence then and it still does. Here we are, we're very high up looking down in both directions. What are we actually looking over? Very simple, what we are seeing here, Syria. There has been a state of war between Syria and Israel for more than 50 years. Uri Tzeltzion, an Israeli, lives on occupied Syrian land in the Golan Heights. When was the bunker built Uri? This bunker was built after the Six Days War in 1968. Has this bunker ever been used in an anger Uri? Yes, in 1973 this bunker was under big fire by the Syrians. Now what we can hear here, this is the real battle in 1973 in the Valley of Tears. There was a huge tank battle between the Israelis and the Syrians and you can hear the actual fight. This is the real recording? Yeah, this is the real recording. The ancient story of Israel, the Bible, is very important to me but I look at myself as an Israeli and a Jew. I can be non-religious and not believe in nothing but it's part of me. Nobody can help it, you know. I'm part of the Jewish family or the Jewish nation or whatever and the Bible for me, okay, it's not like for a religious person, the Bible, but I can read it and it's a good history book. The history of ancient Israel, as told in the Bible, is now a roller coaster ride in Jerusalem. Thrills, spills and the wrath of God. The Bible says the Israelites were freed by God from slavery in Egypt and dedicated to his worship conquered Canaan. Ever since then the flame of faith burns here and King David built his capital right here. That ancient flame, the flame of faith, burned on in the temple built by Solomon on this very hill. The story I have been discovering is very different from the one in the Old Testament. Canaan was an Egyptian province. The British Museum's display concerning Canaan is full of Egyptian objects found there. Around 1200 BC, Pharaoh Ramesses III had to defend Egypt from waves of invaders from the sea. Whole populations were on the move, including the Philistines. Egyptian control fell apart as Philistines settled in Canaan. In this period of chaos, people, apparently Canaanites, settled with their animals in previously empty land up in the hills. These people called themselves Israelites. We have no evidence that any of them came from Egypt. But they did choose not to eat pigs. Eventually, by the 9th century, the Kingdom of Israel emerged where Canaanite gods were worshipped but where the main god was called Yahweh. Jerusalem was not in that kingdom. It was further south in a less developed region called Judah. So why does the Old Testament tell the story it does? Why and when was it written? The oldest traces of the text are in the shrine of the book in Jerusalem. Odd word for a museum, shrine, but this text is sacred. The earliest parchments date back to the 2nd century BC, but they represent a tradition of careful copying of the so-called Five Books of Moses, the Torah, which carries on to this day. I am Sophie. Every word has to be sounded out loud before you write it, and every letter has to be sounded out loud as you write it. The text itself of the Dead Sea Scrolls, in fact, is identical. Now, it is true that we only have fragments of the Torah, and those we find to be identical. Well, the Dead Sea Scrolls is written on a kosher skin of an animal, and I also do the same. It is written with a special ink, as I do, with a 2,000-year-old recipe. The Dead Sea Scrolls, every one of the Torah sections had to be checked with the same accuracy in the same way that I do. And to ensure perfect accuracy in his copying, the scribe does not read the book he writes, he counts the letters. His job at the end of writing every part of his Torah, every section as he does it, is to count it and make sure that no letters are out. He has to then, once he's finished the writing of the entire scroll, again, count it from the very beginning to the very end. To write the name of God, the scribe must purify himself in a ritual bath. Such baths were also used by the scribes who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. But how far back does the copyist tradition go? To the time the books of the Bible describe were just as far as the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves. The Bible, old and true, or not so old and false? It does contain some accurate detail of life as it was many centuries before the scrolls were copied out. My translation of the Bible says, Now there was no smith found throughout all the land of Israel. All the Israelites went down to the Philistines to sharpen every man his plowshare and his axe, and they had a file. Apparently the word file there was a guess. The Hebrew actually says a charge of one pym, but the meaning was forgotten more than two thousand years ago. It was not until archaeologists actually found these little dome-shaped weights made of stone, turned it up on the bottom part, and there was written pym. So, you see, it was in just a moment the whole thing became much clearer, and we knew that they were talking about weighing out so much money, so much silver, to pay for sharpening the tools. But the oldest historical event in the Old Testament that we can connect with known evidence is recorded on this monument from about 840 BC. This celebrates the victory of a Moabite king over the king of Israel. The Bible says the Moabites lost. This looks like history as we know and love it, biased accounts of real events. From then on, the history in the Bible is echoed in documents from a new empire, Assyria. Assyria made art of savagery, prisoners being flayed alive, vultures carrying human entrails, piles of human heads. Neither Israel nor Judah had seen anything like this before. This was an empire on a completely different and unimaginable scale, with very different policies. When you're dealing with the Egyptian empire before, you're dealing with paying off in terms of tribute, taxation, this sort of thing. The Assyrians were completely different. They came into this area, if you opposed them in the slightest, they came down on you like a ton of bricks. The level of taxation, booty, tribute they were demanding was absolutely crippling. But they also took the area over. They went and they took it over administratively, they put in their own governors. And of course, as we know, when they took these places, they actually deported whole sections of the population. And this is what happened to Israel? This is exactly what happened to Israel. In 722 BC, the forces of Assyria moved south and simply removed Israel from the map. They made a note that they deported 27,290 inhabitants. The history of Israel was over. For the first time in ancient Near Eastern history, the whole Near East is one, under one political control. There's now been a blending of peoples. The Assyrians had the policy of exchanging populations. While everywhere else was being put in the giant Assyrian blender, the little kingdom of Judah was not. And Jerusalem was swelling. Refugees came to Jerusalem. Some historians suggested that refugees from the northern sister kingdom of Israel came to Judah after those people were conquered by the Assyrians under Sargon II. And part of the people there were exiled to Assyria and part fled and even were invited by King Hezekiah, as is written in the Bible. After 722 BC, all the states of the Near East had been crushed. But Judah decided not to submit. Like Britain in 1940, the country stood alone. Judah's frontier fortresses faced an enemy so powerful that even Egypt was doomed. What would have been the risk in the Absolute foolhardiness, to be honest. I mean, they must have been complete idiots, because they must have seen and understood what had happened before and what was very likely to happen to them. I really don't understand myself why they opposed the Assyrians in the way that they did. Perhaps, like the British in 1940, they believed this was a war between good and evil and they had no choice. At the end of the 8th century BC, all the nations surrounding Judah had vanished and their gods humbled before Assyria. Every nation had worshipped a group of gods, but each used to have its own special god. When you conquer an area, you claim that our national god has put down your god and your god gets kicked down to a lower level of the pantheon. Now they were all cast down, subjugated to Ashur, the god of Assyria. Not only Judah stood alone, so did its leading god, Yahweh. Drawing his wagons into a circle, King Hezekiah shut down every place of worship outside Jerusalem. No gods could be worshipped except Yahweh in Jerusalem's temple. The attack came in 701 BC. This is Lachish, a key Judean stronghold about 25 miles southwest of the capital Jerusalem. It was probably the second most important centre in the kingdom. The Bible records its fall to Sennacherib and so did Sennacherib in a huge wall carving in his temple at Nineveh. There you can see the advancing troops, the battering rams and the huge ramp they built to scale the city walls. This is the ramp. Once this city was taken, the kingdom of Judah was reduced to Jerusalem and really not much more. Sennacherib said the king of Judah, Hezekiah, was shut up there like a bird in the cage. The cage was well prepared with a secure water supply and Sennacherib could not break in. But Jerusalem was now all that was left of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Your country is desolate. Your cities are burned with fire. Your land, strangers devour it in your presence and it is desolate. If the god of battles had not left this very small remnant, we should have vanished like Sodom, like Gomorrah. But this remnant was still there, burning with defiance. Under a new king, Josiah, in the 620s BC, Judah's rejection of foreign gods was redoubled. Anything relating to gods worshipped by the Assyrians was destroyed. Yahweh was not like the other gods. Surrounded by evil, Yahweh's people must stand for justice and stand apart. Then prophets proclaimed they could hold on to the land. If ye oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, and shed not innocent blood in this place, neither walk after other gods to your hurt, then I will cause you to dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers forever and ever. At that moment, a hundred years after the fall of the northern kingdom, a book appeared. Shaphan the scribe showed the book of the Torah to the king, saying, Hilkiah the priest has given me a book. And Shaphan read it to the king. That is the first reference to the existence of a written text. It's called the Scroll of the Torah, and it seems to be the core of the Hebrew Bible. But was it an old text, or did Shaphan the scribe actually write it himself? Any other scribe would have known. It's amazing what one scribe can tell you about another. Eric Ray has never seen this 19th century scroll before. I see here that the top of the aleph is raised a little bit to point to God to say we are being blessed by God. That was only being done in Czechoslovakia, and I see that here in the script. But then in Czechoslovakia, you would have an angle, and the angle changes when you go to Poland. Is it telling me that this is a Czechoslovakian scribe? He's writing in Poland. The next thing I look at, and I see if you look on the side here, you see that the shin is slanted in this way, which means that to do that, you have to be away from the table, telling me this is a fat man who is writing. And then I see that there are big spaces in some of the words between the letters and not in others. This would not happen with a short man who can see very clearly and keep them all together. So we know he's a tall man with a belly. So this gives me a whole background on who the scribe was. This is the seal of a scribe from about 620 BC. He would have seen the scroll that Chafan took to the king and drawn his conclusions. He was Jeremiah's own scribe. Actually, that seal of Baruch, the scribe of Jeremiah, wasn't discovered at an archaeological site. It was bought from an antique shop. It's surprising just how much important archaeological material comes to light, not from careful and expensive excavations, but from the back rooms of a few dealers in Jerusalem. And this is the iron from also King David, oil vase. This is the oil vase. And together, these make a set. Correct. And from the Old Testament. All right, so this is the one I'd like today. Most people who find important antiquities, who are peasants or villagers, don't really know the proper channels to go to a museum. So they bring it to us. Dealers play a big role in supplying archaeologists with data on ancient civilizations. But sometimes the ancients speak for themselves. Jeremiah, and presumably his scribe Baruch, have left their own comment on Chafan's scroll. What makes you say that we have the Torah of Yahweh? It is lies from the lying pen of scribes. And every expert I've met certainly believes that it was quite new. The books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, the books of Samuel and Kings were put in writing in the 7th century, though, of course, it's possible that they have in them earlier materials. This was history with an agenda, a purpose. It aimed to show that the right kind of obedience to God, and only that, would permit the people of Judah to stay in the land left to them. The land was God's gift. That was shown by stories like the collapse of the walls of Jericho. Yahweh, your God, hath given you rest and hath given you this land. In this tale, God had originally promised not just the land that they now inhabited, but a vast area. Yahweh made a covenant with Abram, saying, unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates. And once upon a time, in this story, they had actually possessed such a land, in the days of Solomon. The story told was of a people raised up from the lowliest place possible, brought out of slavery by the God that controls the world, and poured into the land of Canaan. And, as the prophets explained, if their loyalty to Yahweh failed, he would remove them. Then shall the anger of Yahweh be kindled against you, and ye shall perish quickly from off the good land which he hath given unto you. It's a lesson from the past, indicating the importance of behaving properly vis-à-vis God, if you wish to remain in the land. And so it goes into a much deeper thing about how you relate to God, and the covenant, and all of the responsibilities that comes with it. If you disobey, the land, it says in Leviticus, will vomit you out. It did. King Josiah of Judah had used the Torah as the constitution of his state. But a new and even greater power replaced Assyria. And in 587 BC, the Babylonian ruler, Nebuchadnezzar, destroyed Jerusalem and carried off thousands of people into exile. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. Put yourself in the position of the Jews. Perhaps you would feel that you defended the gods that Josiah had stamped on, Baal and Asherah. And then what happens? Babylon is conquered by Cyrus, the nearest thing in the ancient world to a knight in shining armor. And he tells the Jews, go back to Jerusalem, rebuild the temple, and carry on your religion. Well, you might just think that Josiah had been right all along. And once back in Jerusalem, the people of Judah, the Jews, completed the text of what we now call the Old Testament. The fact that there are many incidental parts of the Bible which indicate a relationship to real historical moments or information or evidence, but they are incidental in a sense to the attempt to convey a message which happens to be there. The real point of the text is its message, the special relationship of the Jewish people to the only God they now recognized, a relationship which they projected right back through history, whether it had been understood by their ancestors or not, and which meant not just they should worship Yahweh, but that they should do good. Then God entitled them to the land. That feeling is still alive. The terrible irony is that the demand to be moral is bound up with possession of the land. Christianity and Islam inherited both sides of this dangerous equation. And for many Israelis, religious or not, this state cannot trade land for peace without betraying its moral authority. I'm not looking at myself as the chosen one. I'm trying to be normal like you. But I have a history, a long history. I'm part of the Jewish nation, and I want to stay like that. And this is part of my land. Call it the holy land, call it the state of Israel. This is my land. I was lived here, I was born here, my kids, and I hope that my grandkids will be born here. Questions about archaeology, about the past, and about the business of exchanging land for peace are all about the same thing. Can Israel become a state like any other that could be anywhere? Should it? Would we be better off without holy land? The Bible's spin on the history of ancient Israel tells the story so powerfully that it shaped Christian and Muslim tradition as well as Jewish. So this becomes everyone's holy land. Holy, special, separate, and endlessly argued over. And all three religions agree on one thing. When God finally brings peace to this land, history itself will come to an end. So, the final, definitive answer on the Bible? Stay tuned.