Episode 322: Cynthia Shafer-Elliott - Where Archaeology Intersects with the Bible
On this week’s episode of The Bible for Normal People, Pete talks with archaeologist Cynthia Shafer-Elliott about what archaeology can—and can’t—tell us about the Bible. Cynthia explains how archaeologists excavate ancient sites, highlights key discoveries like the Tel Dan Stele and the Lachish reliefs, and explores what everyday artifacts reveal about life in ancient Israel and Judah. Together they discuss how material culture complicates simple claims that archaeology either proves or disproves the Bible, offering instead a richer picture of the ancient world behind the text.
Mentioned in This Episode
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Pete: You are listening to The Bible for Normal People. The only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Enns.
Jared: And I'm Jared Byas.
Pete: Hey everybody. On today's episode of The Bible for Normal People, it's just me, Pete, and I'm talking about where archeology intersects with the Bible, with Cynthia Shafer-Elliott. Now, Dr. Shafer-Elliott, she specializes in the historical, cultural, and social context of Ancient Israel and Judah. In other words, she's an archeologist, um, especially working with domestic context, like homes and things like that.
And she uses this as a lens for engaging the biblical narratives that are set during the time of Israel's monarchy, which is a big period of time for the Israelites. And you'll also recognize her from her work with us as a past nerd-in-residence, and I am personally so excited to welcome her back here as a guest.
So let's get into this.
Cynthia: If you're trying to use archeology to prove the Bible, you're gonna be really unhappy. If you cherry-pick the biblical text, you can make it say whatever you want, and it's the same with archeology. If you're cherry-picking different artifacts and certain interpretations of those artifacts, you're actually doing a disservice to the people that you're actually studying.
Pete: Hey, Cynthia, how's it going? Welcome back.
Cynthia: Hey. Hey, Pete. Nice to be here on this side of the mic.
Pete: I know. And this, and it's gonna be fun. I'm, I'm looking forward to talking with you about archeology, which is, um, something I have a passing knowledge of, but not a deep knowledge. And this is what you do, and I think it's exciting and it's fun to talk about it.
So, um, let, let me just, let's just, okay. What do archeologists do?
Cynthia: Right.
Pete: What do they do besides get up at three in the morning? What do they do? Yeah.
Cynthia: Well, um, what we do, um, for those of us that actually do field archeology, so not all archeologists actually go in the field. Some, you know, don't, maybe they used to or maybe they just don't like it.
Pete: It's too hot,
Cynthia: You know? No. Um, and that's okay, but 'cause we need people to do all sorts of things. But, um, so those of us that do field archeology, what that means is we actually go and do the excavating. We are the ones that get up early in the morning. We're the ones that are trying to uncover the physical remains of ancient societies.
That's it in a nutshell.
Pete: Yeah. By digging.
Cynthia: By digging. Yeah. Yes. And we have a very slow, methodical process.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Cynthia: Because when we're excavating, at least when we're excavating in Israel, and this is gonna be different for different archeologists all over the world, but when we're digging in Israel, most of the time we're digging what we call our tels.
And tels are human made mounds that are basically layers of a buried city. And when we're excavating them, we're going from the top digging down. And so, the idea is that the most recent layers are on the top.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Cynthia: So you still, even if you're not interested in those most recent layers, like say for instance me, I'm interested in the Iron Age, but the Iron Age is quite some time ago, and there's lots of other layers, more recent layers of occupation.
Pete: And when is the Iron Age? Cynthia?
Cynthia: The Iron Age is roughly 1200 BCE to 586 BCE. Okay.
Pete: So it pretty much covers like Israel's existence more or less in the land right before.
Cynthia: Right.
Pete: Okay. Yeah.
Cynthia: That covers the time period that you see reflected in most of the Old Testament Hebrew Bible.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Cynthia: In particular the books of the former prophets, Joshua, Judges, Daniel and Kings. Um, those are the ones I'm particularly interested in. But, um, so we're trying to uncover ancient Israel's past, and we do that by digging in the dirt and uncovering, um, these different layers of cities and we still have to really document everything from the later time periods, even though they're not the time periods we're particularly interested in because someone might come along later.
Pete: You can't just trash it to get to your layer. Right.
Cynthia: That's bad archeology.
Pete: Yeah. They used to do that, I think, but they do anymore.
Cynthia: Well, yes.
Pete: You use a word that people might not be used to, but tel, with one “L.” What, what, uh, what does that word mean? Why did people keep building cities on top of each other? Instead of just finding a new plot of land or something.
Cynthia: Yeah. You would think that would be nice.
But I think because people settle for particular reasons, maybe a site is already on a raised area and you want to have an easy way to defend your, your home, um, maybe it, it almost always is gonna have some access to fresh water. That's gonna be a given.
Pete: Right.
Cynthia: Um, agricultural, it's got fertile land.
Maybe it's close to trade routes. Maybe there's a, some sort of family connection to the land. Um, so people will settle and they live there for a certain amount of time. Let's say for an example, maybe they lived there, them and their descendants lived there for maybe 150 years, and then for some reason, that town or village gets destroyed or abandoned, and then maybe it's abandoned for a short amount of time.
Maybe it's a long amount of time, but they come back, people come back. For the very same reasons that they settled there really in the first place.
Now one of the ways that these towns get destroyed is, you know, there's lots of ways, but one of the bigger ways is warfare. And so it depends on how much is really left of your town.
Do you bother? Um, can you rebuild from what's been left or do you basically have to start over?
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Cynthia: And so you might just fill in some of those gaps and build on top of it or reuse a lot of the material that is, you know, able to be reused. And that's one of the things we have to determine when we excavate.
Pete: I can imagine that's not. Easy, you know, to determine whether something was, uh, you know, rebuilt or using previous material or constructing new stuff, but-
Cynthia: Right.
Pete: And that tells us a lot about maybe what happened there, all that, all this.
Cynthia: Exactly. And sometimes you can see evidence of maybe, um, earthquakes.
Pete: Hmm.
Cynthia: Um, also, of course, if a city has been destroyed by fire, which often happens, especially when you get into the history with the Assyrians. They like to set fire to things.
Pete: Bully for them. Alright.
Cynthia: So the houses are destroyed and the town is destroyed. It collapses on itself.
But when we dig through that rubble, then that rubble is really laying on top of the floor of the house.
Pete: Mm-hmm. Right. But before we, I want to get into some specifics of like actual finds and just like maybe the most popular ones or some of the ones that have been really significant, just, but very briefly, I do think in popular culture, archeology, especially with Christians, it's either something that proves the Bible or disproves the Bible.
Um, can just riff on that a little bit and, and what you think about that?
Cynthia: Yeah. Sometimes archeology is used with apologetics trying to prove and support the Bible. Um, and then you could say on the other side of that same coin, um, that people are using archeology to try to disprove the Bible. Um, and I don't think either one of 'em are appropriate, really.
Um, because archeology is a very different field than biblical studies.
And archeology is what's been left behind. Now, we don't have a complete picture of anything. We have basically a giant puzzle with a lot of pieces missing, actually, probably more pieces missing than we actually have. And so when we're trying to do is trying to understand ancient Israel, we wanna use all of the tools in our toolkit, if you will.
That includes archeology, right? Biblical studies. There's a lot of other disciplines that are involved, but I don't think, because if you're trying to use the Bible archeology to prove the Bible, you're gonna be really unhappy.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Cynthia: Because a lot of times it doesn't prove the Bible.
Pete: I, I don't know.
See, so I, I don't know. 'cause on the internet today, I literally saw a guy had a picture of this huge monument. It was Egyptian. And on it, it was written like the whole story of the exodus and that proves it. And you know what, people like you don't want people to see that because, you're trying to hide it from them.
Right. That kind of stuff. That's sort of a, you, you're debunking that. And, and, and people, if you see things like that on the internet, just keep scrolling 'cause they're not true. If it's, if it's true, we'd know it.
Cynthia: We would. Well, and, and you also, the field of archeology has a very, has a lot of, you know, methodology.
You know, we have a methodological process to make sure that things are done properly.
And that it's not just the artifacts that we're interested in. We're interested in the context of that artifact. How was it found? Where was it found? What layer is it found in? What is its relationship to the building that it's in, to the rest of the artifacts?
What kinds of stories can we tell about that artifact? And so, you know, when you're trying to, you know, pick and choose, um, archeology to support anything. Um, it's, it's not gonna go exactly as you would like. Now sometimes archeology is really helpful sometimes. But sometimes it's not.
And, um, we just have to keep digging and maybe you'll come up with your answers.
Pete: A thought just came to my head. It's sort of like, you can't just pick and choose. It's like prooftexting, archeology. You don't, you don't see the larger context.
Cynthia: Right.
Pete: And that's sort of what prooftexting does too. With the Bible, you don't see the larger context.
There's a story being told here. That's really great. 'cause there are two stories. You know, there's a material culture story, there's a literature story and
Cynthia: Right.
Pete: And they can have a relationship. But you know, it's not a matter of one proving the other. So, yeah.
Cynthia: Right. And if you cherry pick the biblical text, you can make it say whatever you want.
Yeah. And it's the same with archeology. If you're cherry picking different artifacts and certain interpretations of those artifacts, that's another thing.
Pete: Okay. Right.
Cynthia: People tend to think that archeologists all agree, right. On everything. And they don't. They don't. It's just, it's just as much subject to interpretation as anything else is.
Of course. So if you're cherry picking either one, you're actually doing a disservice to the people that you're actually studying, I think, I think it really dishonors them when we-
Pete: It does dishonor the past, right?
Cynthia: Yeah, it does.
Pete: Yeah. Yeah. I feel the same way about texts too.
Cynthia: Yeah. I would agree. Mm-hmm.
Pete: All right, so listen, let's, let's, um, let's start. This is not random. Let's start in the ninth century. Around the ninth century, because that's where we begin to have, um, I think what most people think, some significant archeological finds that, um, intersect in some sense with either, either directly or indirectly, maybe not at all, but they also intersect a little bit with the biblical story.
Um, can, can you talk about like some of those first and just what are they and, and what do they say and what's their significance and why should people who go to church or whatever synagogue care?
Cynthia: Yeah. Well, there are a number of artifacts from the night century that intersect with Ancient Israel and how ancient Israel's text portrayed some of these people and events. So one of the things that comes to mind, I think is a really important artifact is the Tel Dan Stele.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Cynthia: So a stele is a stone monument and usually they're victory monuments. Think of it as political spin button stone.
Pete: Right.
Cynthia: You know, it's so true, but it's, and so the Tel Dan Stele was found at a-
Pete: I'm sorry, it's like a victory.
It's like a, a concert t-shirt. Yes, all the things you did and all the places, anyway, but okay.
Cynthia: Right. Like with all the names of the places that you-
Pete: That's my homey analogy. That's not really adequate. So. Alright, go ahead. Anyway, so Tel Dan.
Cynthia: Tel Dan. So it's this beautiful site up north, way up north in Northern Israel.
And um, if you ever get a chance to go there, it's just a fascinating site. But when they were excavating, um, I think this was early, this was in the 90’s and late 2000’s, actually. Um, and they found this kind of boundary wall or like lower wall, and one of the volunteers noticed it had some weird writing, it had some weird marks on it, and they recognized that it was, it was writing.
And so this stele, this victory monument, was broken and it was used in a secondary context. So secondary context means it's not where it was, it's original blind spot. It's not what it was originally intended for. So it was used in a secondary context and it says on there many things, but one of the things it mentioned is it's a battle really about, um, between um, what we think is Hazael of Damascus, so the Arameans and against, uh, Israel and Judah.
But it mentioned specifically Bayit David, which bayit means house and David is the name of David. Um, and so bayit can literally mean house, but it could also mean dynasty.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Cynthia: And the reason why this is significant is because until that was found, we had no outside evidence that a guy named David was king.
Uh, in the land of what became, you know, what became Israel. Um, and at that time there was a big controversy within the world of biblical studies and archeology of ancient Israel about the reliability of the Hebrew Bible as a historical document. And you had, and this is where you get that so-called minimalist and maximalist debate, you had people who thought the historical reliability of the Bible was very minimal.
Hence, they were labeled as minimalist. And then you had people who thought that the Hebrew Bible was nothing but history. So the maximalists.
Pete: Right. Max. Yeah.
Cynthia: Right. Whereas most people are somewhere in between. But, um, so the minimalist, you know, so-called minimalist would argue, well, there's no historical evidence that somebody named David or Solomon existed.
And then we find this. And so of course there's still some arguing about what that actually says and what it actually means. Um, but I think most scholars would agree that this is some sort of evidence, albeit a century later than when David is supposed to have existed.
Pete: Right.
Cynthia: Um. And it doesn't mention, you know, much of anything else 'cause it's broken, so it's not a complete picture of that stele and what it says. But that just, I mean, I remember I was a student and you probably remember all this too, Pete, the, the huge debates between people thinking that the archeology of Israel and the history of Israel is, um, minimal or maximal.
Um, so the Tel Dan Stele was really helpful in that respect.
And it's, it's a wonderful artifact and you can see it at, think it's at the Israel Museum. In Jerusalem.
Pete: Okay. And, and, um, it is significant. I mean, it, it doesn't prove or disprove anything. It's just, it's something like, you can't ignore this. If you're gonna talk about like, like to what extent the Bible has maybe a historical backbone or something like that.
Cynthia: Right. Exactly.
Pete: Mm-hmm. Okay. Well keep going. Okay. More. Ninth century is a fun century.
Cynthia: Ninth century. It, yeah. So, um, another, so again, we've got a lot of monumental type, uh, artifacts here. Uh, and so monumental means more official things from kings people in charge. So the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser is another fantastic artifact.
It is located at the British Museum, so you can go and see it.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Cynthia: Um, and Shalmaneser was one of the Assyrian Kings and the Assyrians became the superpower. And, when we, on this obelisk, it's so interesting because we, it's what we call iconography. So iconography is representational art.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Cynthia: So things like statues or pictures, painting and all of that would be considered iconography.
And we don't get a whole lot of iconography about ancient Israel. And when we do, um, besides the figurines, which we'll get to in a little bit. But when we do, it's oftentimes from another people group depicting them on something of theirs, like the Assyrians, who are depicting on this black obelisk.
And obelisks, you remember the shapes of an obelisk, like the, you know, Washington Memorial was the shape of an obelisk, and it's made out of this black stone, and it has all these panels on it. Each side of the obelisk has all the panels, but each panel represents a specific people group that Shalmaneser has, um, is being paid tribute to Shalmaneser from one of these people groups.
And one of those people groups is the Northern Kingdom of Israel. And it depicts King Jehu, um, bowing to Shalmaneser and paying tribute to him. Right. And so when, again, we don't get too many pictures, if you will-
Pete: Yeah.
Cynthia: Of, um, representations of ancient Israelites, but this is one of those.
Pete: Well, and, and I remember, I've seen that and I remember, um, I mean even allowing for the fact that this is Assyrians depicting Israelites.
Cynthia: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Pete: But I thought, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but is this the, the oldest representation we have of Israelites? Assuming they're reasonably accurate.
Cynthia: I mean, you do have, you do have depictions in ancient Egypt about Semitic people. Not necessarily labeled as Israelite, right?
I mean there's that, but we, this is a very early depiction of a Northern Israelite, and again, this, this really lends to some of that discussion about, um, how the northern Kingdom of Israel was probably quite a bit more advanced and an actual really proper kingdom, more so than Judah was. At least archeologically speaking, we have more archeological evidence for Israel, more so than Judah.
Pete: Right, right. And speaking of which, let's talk about Mesha a little bit. Yes.
Cynthia: Another one of these beautiful, wonderful steles again, victory monuments.
And the thing I like about this one is that normally on steles, you don't get the person who is having the stele inscribed, so a king of some sort of country, um, usually doesn't talk badly about himself. They're really a pat on the back for themselves most of the time.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Cynthia: They’re victory monuments after all.
But in Mesha Stele you do get some, a little bit of negativity on him himself and his gods because, but he only does it because it turns out in his favor.
Pete: Yeah.
Cynthia: So Mesha is the king of Moab, and Moab is on the trans Jordan, the other side of the Jordan River across from Israel. And during the reign of King Omri of the northern kingdom of Israel, Omri is the first king to really establish a proper kingdom in the north. It was really, he has the first dynasty.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Cynthia: Um, archeologically when we think of what makes a good king. One of the factors that makes a good king is a building campaign.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Cynthia: And of course, Omri has a great building campaign. As does his son Ahab. And we don't get a lot about Omri in the Hebrew Bible, but we definitely get more about Ahab.
Pete: He gets like a paragraph or something. Yeah. I mean, it just, and, and, and he's huge.
Cynthia: Apparently. He's huge archeologically. He, he's the man. He is in the north. He is. He's the guy.
Pete: Yeah.
Cynthia: And so, um, so Mesha, Moab is taken over by Omri and, and then it says also Omri’s son, um, on the stele as well. So, which we could assume is Ahab.
Uh, but eventually Mesha cries out to his God, Chemosh, and Chemosh helped him get their freedom back, which is why the then delay is erected because they, they did something good. They won.
Pete: Hmm.
Cynthia: Um, but the fact that it mentions Omri of the kingdom of Israel is really significant.
Pete: Okay. Well, before we leave this time period, um, talk about bees.
Cynthia: Oh yeah. The bees.
Pete: I know this is your favorite. We're gonna get to this one.
Cynthia: So Tel Rehov, um, a site in, it's kind of in the northern middle. It's in the Jordan Valley, which runs down the length of the country of Israel. Um, it's really where it, it's this deep valley. Parts of it are deep. That's where the Dead Sea, it ends up being on the southern end of it.
But Rehov was one of these sites that we were excavating in the late 90’s and 2000’s. And I can say we, because I was there mm-hmm. Um, that's where I trained as a student, was at Tel Rehov. Under the direction of Amihai Mazar, and, um, you know, until, for most of biblical studies in archeology, we wondered about honey, because the Hebrew Bible mentions honey, but we had no archeological evidence of beekeeping.
Especially industrial commercial level beekeeping. And most of the times that honey is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, it's mentioned as it's wild honey.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Cynthia: So a lot of scholars were thinking, well it must not really be honey. It must be the syrup made from pressed dates.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Cynthia: Um, and it's really good you can buy it still in Trader Joe's, it's fantastic.
Um. But we had no archeological evidence for it until, uh, let's see, I think it was 2005. Um, they found over a hundred apiaries at Tel Rehov. And so apiaries being the, the homes that people would make for bees to cultivate bees. And there are these long cylinders and they're stacked up, and there's a little hole on one side for the bee.
And then on the other side there's a lid for the beekeeper so they can take it off and they do residue analysis and they, when they, to make sure that yes, this was an apiary, and came back positive. Yes, this is for beekeeping, and that's where the sciences coming into archeology has just been, it's just been so amazing.
Um, and so they had these, like hundreds of beehives and so it is, you know, we, it is the proof that Israel did, um, conduct, you know, participate in commercial type of beekeeping instead of just honey. You know, wild honey, uh, or date syrup. And they also did a study and found out the type of bees that were from, that were being raised, I guess you could say in these cylinders, was a type of bee from Anatolia that was less, they brought in intentionally 'cause they were less aggressive.
Pete: Oh gosh, really?
Cynthia: Yeah.
Pete: That's pretty darn sophisticated. And I guess that should affect how, um, at least I was taught to think of a land flowing with milk and honey.
Cynthia: Right.
Pete: And I was, I was taught that it was, it's not honey, but it's just nectar or something like that. Right. But this, this raises a, a, a distinct alternate possibility that maybe it was something worth bragging about.
Cynthia: Right. Exactly.
Pete: That's pretty cool.
Cynthia: And so it's, yeah, that was, and that was, it means a lot to me because one, I study a lot of food things and then also because I was there.
Pete: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's exciting to uncover something from the past that nobody knew before. And there you were.
Cynthia: Yeah. Well, I wasn't part, unfortunately, I wasn't one of the ones that uncovered them. Mm-hmm. I was someplace else, but anyway. Still on the same site.
Pete: But you're, it's still, you're still genetically connected somehow, I think, to Tel Rehov. Right. Okay. Good. Alright, well, um, let's, let's move on a little bit further down the line in time and, um, a couple things concerning the year around 701 BC, which was significant.
So tell us what the significance of that is and, and what archeological fines we have about that time.
Cynthia: Right, so this is the same Assyrian empire that we were talking about just a few minutes ago. Um, so after they destroyed, uh, the northern kingdom of Israel's capital, city of Samaria around 722, 721.
A bit later, they turned their attention to the kingdom of Judah, because both Judah and Israel were vassal states with the Assyrian Empire, and they had made a treaty with them. Then part of that treaty is you're not going to rebel and you're not going to, and you're gonna keep paying us tribute. Well, of course they rebel, so you're gonna, you're breaking the treaty, so of course they're gonna come out and destroy you.
Um, and so, uh, they turned their attention south to Judah and in 701, um, you have Sennacherib who, uh, lays siege to 46 towns and villages in Judah alone. And this, you know, when you get empires, especially, you know, the Assyrian Babylonians. You start to get more of this, you know, monumental record keeping.
Say, and so one of the things that Sennacherib did was he had, um, in this artifact is, loosely, it's called Sennacherib’s Prism, but there's technically three of them and they have different names. But the Taylor Prism, um, is really, is the one at the British Museum. There's one, I think also in Chicago, and I think there's also one in Jerusalem.
But on this prism, it's where the new King of Assyria, Sennacherib, talks about his campaign into Judah, and he mentions, um, talking about, um, destroying 46 towns and villages in Judah. And one of those towns, um, another artifact is the Lachish reliefs. Lachish was one of these major towns in Judah, in fact, probably second most important, only after Jerusalem.
And it was destroyed by Sennacherib, and what Sennacherib had done was, again, here's this iconography, this representational art, where he had a relief created and it's really a series of reliefs. It's also at the British Museum, it has its own little room, and reliefs are, uh, or low relief is when, um, you're carving onto the stone and you're creating this kind of almost projected picture a little bit.
Um, and you go into this room and you can see the panels and they're quite large. They go from floor to ceiling and they tell the story of Sennacherib's campaign, uh, into, against Lachish.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Cynthia: And it shows, it depicts the walled city of Lachish, can see the date palm, the grapevine, the walls. And then you can see the attack on Lachish with the Assyrian soldiers and then finally, um, destroy, you know, defeating the city and taking people as prisoners of war into exile, punishing people.
Pete: It’s pretty gruesome. I mean, some, it's very, some of the depictions are pretty gruesome with their heads being cut off and-
Cynthia: Yeah.
Pete: People getting impaled and stuff like that.
Yeah. And, um, what's another one? Um, getting flayed. Yeah, that's okay. So in other words, don't mess with the Assyrians 'cause this is what happens to you.
Cynthia: Yes, exactly. And one of the things that's really interesting on that relief too is because is you can, it shows an ox, um, pulling a cart with some people on it.
And the people on it are women and children and I think also a baby. But the ox, you can see it, its ribs.
Pete: Oh, really? Which, okay.
Cynthia: Yes. Which I think is something worth pointing out because when the Assyrians attacked a city, they surrounded the city and the, the people in the city would shut the gates.
And they're basically besieged, they're locked in their city for however long, and it's usually a year, two years, maybe even three years. Um, and they're basically surrounded. So unless they have prepared, and have a fresh water source and have enough nonperishable goods to survive the siege, they will eventually, um, succumb to the enemy.
Right. And you can see on that picture of that ox, you can see its ribs, which I think, you know, indicates starvation.
Pete: Right. And, and, um, like Lachish and, um, Sennacherib, I mean, they show up in the biblical story of that event of 701, I mean, they don't match very well. Uh, you know, Sennacherib's account of what he did and then, you know, Israel, Hezekiah's account of what he did and-
Cynthia: Right.
Pete: And there's sort of like a little propaganda that seems going on between them. But that's, again, that's why you can't prove it's not a proof or disproof thing, right? But you look at that and you say, yeah, I'm pretty sure Hezekiah was a historical person. And, and you know, there was a place called Laish and all these towns and you know, these things happened, which doesn't mean the interpretation given to those acts in the Bible are, let's say, objectively assessing it.
There's always a moral to the story, right? Well, that, that's the danger of, of, of doing that, you know, trying to approve things from these archeological facts. You can't do it.
Cynthia: Right, whether you're writing or you're documenting it through in some other way, maybe Ancient Near Eastern text or iconography, someone always has a motive. They have a motive for writing and doing what they're doing, and they're going, and we all do it, you know?
Pete: Yeah, of course we do.
Cynthia: Yeah. Do it with our social media posts, you know, whenever you do that. But the thing that's interesting about, you mentioned Hezekiah, is that in that same prism, uh, so talks about his campaign against Jerusalem as well.
Yeah. Right. And he mentions shutting King Hezekiah up like a bird in a cage. And of course, you know, the biblical account of that story is that God intervenes. Yeah. Not that, you know, Sennacherib has mercy on the city.
Pete: Right, right. Yeah. So yeah, I mean that's, that they both have a take on, on, on that movement.
That's right. And when gods are involved, it's like they're all like bringing their own gods into it to sort of explain things. Just putting the biblical stories next to that stuff. It, um, I, I mean this not like in a, in a threatening sense to some listeners, but it relativizes the biblical story as an example of, um, ancient people coming to terms with what's happening to them.
You know, and, and how they see God is involved in those things.
Cynthia: And oftentimes from a much later time period than the events that they're trying to portray.
Pete: Exactly. Right. Yeah. 'cause they're, they have other issues that they're trying to address and talk about the past to get the, anyway, that's like the entire Hebrew Bible.
Before we leave this, um, Hezekiah’s Tunnel.
Cynthia: Yes.
Pete: There's a little bit of archeology there too, right? Explain that.
Cynthia: Yes. And you know, this, this one you gotta hold a little bit more loosely because you have different archeologists who have very different opinions about, you know. which tunnel is which and who belongs, who did what and whatnot.
But the idea here is that, um, when King Hezekiah, Judah was getting ready for the Sennacherib attack, um, he did many things, um, implemented many things to get Judah and in particular Jerusalem ready for attack. Now the main water source in Jerusalem is the Gihon Spring, and that is technically kind of outside the city walls.
And so they wanted a way to bring the water into the city in such a way that could not be seen by the Assyrians. Um, and so the story goes is that they had two working groups working underground to build a water tunnel from the spring to a pool inside the city walls. And that the story goes is that the two groups are going together and they, they get to a fissure and the rock and they hear that they're slightly off.
And they turn and they find each other. Um, but there is a-
Pete: How did they get that close? They're under, they're like, what? A hundred feet under the ground? How did they do that?
Cynthia: If you ever go to Israel, they, you can go to the southern part of Jerusalem. The city of, the city of David part? Yeah.
And they, they've turned it into like an archeological park.
Pete: Yeah.
Cynthia: And you can buy a ticket and you can go through the Hezekiah Tunnel. And there is water there, but you are way underground. So if you have any claustrophobia.
Pete: As I do, yeah. I'm not going.
Cynthia: out. Not a little bit, but I can, but there's no lights.
You gotta bring up a flashlight.
Pete: It's just, it's just amazing to me. 'cause the, the two dig, they start at opposite ends and they're not going straight. They have to navigate.
Cynthia: Yeah. Yeah.
Pete: So, I mean. I can't find the bathroom at night sometimes. And these guys are, like, doing this. I, I just think it's amazing, you know, and-
Cynthia: It is amazing.
Pete: And I know people have theories about how it happened and I'm sure like making noise or, you know, banging or something, whatever.
But I, anyway, that, that to me is sort of a fun thing.
Cynthia: But the inscription that they put there on, in the tunnel. Um, it's in the Istanbul Museum, but they have a replica of it.Both in the tunnel and in the Israel Museum. And it talks about the, you know, the building of this, digging of this tunnel.
Pete: It described.
Cynthia: And one of the other things that Hezekiah did interestingly too, is that in order to help all the other towns, especially the larger administrative towns like Lachish get ready for the oncoming attack of the Assyrian is they had all these big storage jars made and there's a stamp on the handle, that they're called LMLK handles, and it says, um, you know, of the king.
Uh, and usually there's some sort of like either winged scarab or um, off imprinted onto the handle of the storage jars. And you can be excavating in Judah, and if you know you're in that eighth century time period when you see, you find a LMLK handle.
Pete: Yeah. Right?
Cynthia: Yeah.
Pete: Right.
Cynthia: And the town that I was excavating at Halif, that was one of Sennacherib’s towns that he destroyed.
Pete: Oh, okay. Yeah. So I mean, I just, uh, before moving, there's some stuff, we have some time left. I want to get to some even funner stuff. But it seems that, I mean, I don't wanna be simplistic, but, come, the further you come towards us from the ninth century, it seems like you're finding more things. Yeah. And the further you go away from that, and that's something for people to remember too, that archeological evidence.
Like if you really want to talk about archeological evidence that intersects with the Bible, you're, you're probably starting in the ninth century. Yeah. Which is after, long after David and Solomon. Right.
Cynthia: And I mean, you, I think a lot of the development of scribal culture, and I'm not an expert on scribal culture at all, but it seems to me that with the rise of some of these empires in, in significant kingdoms is when you get more scribal schools, right.
And you start to get more documentation. Events, but again, monumental events, like things that, you know, relate to the king and the palace and the temple and all that stuff.
Pete: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Our friend Bill Schniedewind has a few things to say about that. I love, I love his writing on these things. Um, we're such a nerds, by the way, so glad people have shut this off like 20 minutes ago.
I don't care. It's your loss. Okay, so let, let's move on to, uh, you know, eighth, seventh century. Couple things to talk about there that, that are really interesting. And one is the Kuntillet Ajrud Inscription, which is a mouthful. And I see this on social media all the time. People talk about it. I dunno why.
So anyway, so what, what is it and why? Why might that be interesting for people to know something about. Or not, or maybe not that interesting. We'll see. Okay. You do, but, okay.
Cynthia: Well, Kuntillet Ajrud is a site way down in, I think the Eastern Sinai. So it, it thought it was one of these caravan towns, like, almost like you can, almost like a truck stop, I guess you could say today.
Um, and they found there some large storage jars and on one of the storage jars was some interesting painting. And, um, a bit phallic in nature painting. Um, and the inscription above it talks about Yahweh and his Asherah. And so this is one of those things that, and there's meant, there's a lot of things that we can point to that indicate that Israel and Judah weren't worshiping Yahweh alone.
They were worshiping Yahweh, and ___. So you've got, you know, this, I guess you know this syncretism in a way where, you know, you're worshiping these Canaan deities in particular, Baal and Ashera are mentioned all the time in the Hebrew Bible that the Israelites and Judahites are worshiping them.
Pete: Right.
Cynthia: They're both fertility deities, so that makes sense. When you're living on the land, and the fertility of your land and your animals and your people is imperative for your survival, you're, you're gonna worship fertility gods.
Pete: You're, you're, you're gonna just cover all the bases at that point.
You want some rain to show up at once.
Cynthia: That’s right.
Pete: So Ashura is, is a, is a, a female deity?
Cynthia: Female deity. She's a Canaanite female deity. And you know, like every pantheon of deity always has a sort of, you know, mother goddess. And in fact, a goddess, there could be more than one.
And Ashera is thought to be one of the Canaanite.
Pete: Right? I mean, some people would say, I mean, some people do say that, well, that doesn't prove anything, that that's a normal thing. That's just a one-off thing. Or, but there's, there's more to it than just this inscription and, um, but yeah, but the Bible says that's fault, so who cares?
But it shows something about the people and what the people on the ground did. Not the, let's say the official, um-
Cynthia: Party line.
Pete: Cleansed party line version. And that, see, that's where it gets interesting. You know how the material culture tells a story that intersects a lot with biblical stories, but it tells a different story entirely.
And, and you know, people say, well, we have the Bible, that's fine. But if you're interested in history, which I think, you know, most evangelicals will say, you know, I'm very, this is historical faith. I'm interested in history. Well, there you have it. And, and the history is sometimes a little bit, um, uncooperative with the party line that we see in the Bible.
Cynthia: Right. I would say though that, you know, if you read your Hebrew Bible, Hebrew, you see over and over and over again that Israel and Judah worshiped other gods. Right now, according to the party line, you know they weren't supposed to. Right. But they did.
Pete: But they did. Yeah.
Cynthia: And so this is one of those instances where people really want the archeology to prove the Bible.
Then you, one, you gotta know what your Bible says.
Pete: Right. Okay. And on that note, there are a lot of like figurines.
Cynthia: Yeah.
Pete: Female figurines, particularly.
Cynthia: Female ones. Yeah.
Pete: Yeah. Is that, how is that connected to all this?
Cynthia: Yeah, so we have, so figurines are made outta clay. They're usually about three inches, five inches tall.
They're not very big. Um, sometimes they're made by hand, sometimes they're made with a mold. Maybe a little bit of both. But, um, they're just these clay figures, and sometimes they represent animals. We call them zoomorphic figurines. Sometimes they represent people, uh, take the shape of a person. So anthropomorphic figurines.
But we have particularly a lot of female figurines and female figurines that seem to be reflecting in one way or another, some sort of stage in the women's reproductive role. At least this is what Carol Meyers argued. Okay. Um, and so, these figurines we find predominantly in houses.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Cynthia: Yeah.
And the idea is, is that these figurines, these are some of the teraphim that the Bible talks about. The idols. Yeah. Um, archeologically, we call them figurines, but, um, but we, that's one of the arguments is that, uh, and longstanding argument that these figurines are representing Ashera. Uh, in particular, so some sort of deity, but, or maybe Ashera or maybe even, uh, an ancestor.
'Cause we have also ancestor worship in ancient Israel too.
Pete: Right.
Cynthia: Um, but that the, the, you know, the longstanding idea is that these figurines represent, um, Ashera, and that they were used or that they were used in the worship of her, or in combination thereof. And so when we think about, and because we're finding them in houses, you know, this is an indicator of household religion that you know, the difference between what the official religion is versus what the popular religion is.
Pete: Which leads, I mean, to a common theme in, in modern scholarship that, um, you, you have this enforcement of, um, I, I mean, what priests want or what Kings want.
And, uh, you know, that's a whole other discussion that we can have too. But it's, it, it creates an interesting conversation that, um, if you have curiosity, it's, it's wonderful. But, uh, if you're sort of on feeling like, uh, my Bible's being taken away from me. It's not, it's just, it's being broadened and, um, and maybe that's okay.
So I dunno.
Cynthia: Yeah. It is.
Pete: Well, okay, so, um, okay. We have time for one more thing.
Cynthia: Okay.
Pete: And how, what do you, what what, I mean, I have a thought, but what, what do you, anything you wanna talk about?
Cynthia: No, I’m looking at you.
Pete: How about houses? You wanna talk about just-
Cynthia: I could talk about houses all day, Pete.
Pete: Well, we don't have all day Cynthia, so, um, but you know, uh, they found, we have a good idea of how Israelites lived.
Cynthia: We do, we have a pretty good idea. And that's one of the things I really love to study, um, is daily life in Iron Age Israel. And if you want to understand everyday life, you have to look at the home, where people lived and where they worked and where they spent their days. Because remember, these are not people who go off to work.
Most people worked on the family farm. So, um, so we, um, can excavate these houses and pay attention to not only the architecture, but the artifacts that are found inside. And most of the things that we find are related to, you know, production as far as, um, you know, farming and herding of animals. Um, taking the sheep's wool, the fleece that you have, and turning it into garments, weaving that into garments, so rugs.
Taking the wheat and, um, processing it to make bread, um, storing things so you have enough. And that, you know, little critters don't get to it. And you know that your family can survive. And not only with food, but with the animals and that the family itself survives with fertility. So while we don't have a complete house, it's not like Pompeii.
I wish we did. Um, but we do have the remains of the first floor of houses. We do think they were two-story. But they're pretty basic rectangular buildings. They're not, I mean, they range in size depending on their circumstances, but you know, they're not very big. But it also indicates to us what type of, or structure of people who lived in the household, and it would've been a multi-generational family.
Um, and also people who weren't related to you could live there and work there too.
Pete: Do you have a sense of like, how, like square footage. You know, uh, I mean, um, I, I don't know if there's an average kind of idea. I mean, you don't have that much to go on, but-
Cynthia: I have it published somewhere, but I don't remember off the top of my head.
Pete: Okay. Alright.
Cynthia: I mean, not very big. I mean, even at Halif, where we did household archeology. Um, the house and, and the houses share walls. Especially in cities where you have a city wall around you, so your space is limited. Right. But the house that my house was connected to was significantly larger than my house.
Pete: Oh, oh really?
Cynthia: Yeah.
Pete: Okay. Wow. That's pretty cool.
Cynthia: But still small by our standards.
Pete: And the thing is, you know, Cynthia, people lived there one day a, a long time ago. You know, real human beings live there. And, and we have. A text, which I think sometimes dehumanizes, right? The fact that there is history there.
Mm-hmm. You know, and again, it's not about proving or disproving, but there's, there's, there's a historical, um, rootedness to Israel's story. Not, not all of it maybe, but a heck of a lot of it. And, uh, I just think about. They're probably just like us. They just lived 2,500 years ago or 3000 years ago, you know?
Cynthia: Yeah. I think that's a nice note
Pete: That humanizes the Bible for me too. So anyway.
Cynthia: I think so too, because if, when we find things, one of the things I tell my student is think about who used this last, what did they use it for? Yeah.
Pete: Right.
Cynthia: You know, what's the story behind it and who made it? When did they make it?
How did they make it? Who used it? Why? What kind of meal? If this was a cooking pot, I wonder what kind of meals were prepared in it. Yeah. Now there is types of archeology that can talk about those things.
Pete: Yes. Right, right.
Cynthia: Um, you know, that can do that kind of testing, so it is, it's, it's the stories behind the artifact that I think are really fascinating.
Pete: Right. Yeah, I agree. Well, Cynthia, I think, uh, I do mean, I think we could go on for another hour or two. At least I could go on listening to you and, uh, we'll have to do that again. Another time to maybe get to some of the things that we didn't have a chance to get to today that are also interesting and important for various reasons.
Thanks for being on.
Cynthia: Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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