Tag Archives: biblicalarchaeology

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Daily Broadside | Astonishing News That Has Nothing to Do with Politics

Daily Verse | 1 Kings 4:31
[Solomon] was wiser than any other man, including Ethan the Ezrahite—wiser than Heman, Calcol and Darda, the sons of Mahol.

Tuesday’s Reading: 1 Kings 5-8

It’s Tuesday and there have been some interesting tidbits that I wanted to call to your attention, especially since tracking the devolution of the United States is like watching a dumpster fire onboard a train jumping the tracks and arcing into the abyss in slow motion. It’s awful, but you want to see what happens.

Except I don’t mind tearing my eyes away for a minute to give them a rest.

308-Year-Old Stradivarius Violin Being Sold at Auction This Summer

A 308-year-old violin that was played on movie music from Hollywood’s Golden Age – including “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz – could fetch as much as $20 million this summer, which would make it the most expensive instrument ever sold at auction.

The violin was handcrafted in Italy in 1714 by Antonio Stradivari, the famed craftsman who made violins for the ultra-rich, including King James II of England, King Charles III of Spain and Ferdinando de’ Medici, Grand Prince of Tuscany.

It’s remarkable that such an instrument still has life in it, and its provenance works on several different levels to make it valuable. The first is its age, the second is its maker, and the third is its link to one of the most iconic American movies ever made and one of that film’s most iconic songs. It’s literally holding a piece of history in your hands.

Speaking of history, the next item is also connected to a well-known historical moment.

Fabric from Actress Laura Keene’s Bloodied Dress For Sale

A blood-stained fabric swatch that’s said to come from a dress worn at the time of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination is going up for sale.

The small rectangular strip reportedly belonged to actress Laura Keene, who starred in an onstage production of “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., on the day of Lincoln’s assassination, April 14, 1865.

While this one is sort of macabre, there’s something compelling about holding a physical object in your hand that “was there” when that moment happened, as though by possession it connects you to the moment. The relic of the tragedy gives us literal color and texture that words or primitive photos could only approximate. “So that’s what it looked like,” we say.

And finally, there’s this, which makes concrete something that up until now, was conceptual and disputed.

Curse Tablet Found on Mount Ebal Suggests Early Literacy Came to Israel

“Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse… thou shalt set the blessing upon Mount Gerizim, and the curse upon Mount Ebal.” (Deuteronomy 11:26, 29)

Now an official curse has been found, engraved on a lead tablet that dates to the biblical age and had sat in the detritus of an excavation of Mt. Ebal for decades, the Associates for Biblical Research of Houston, Texas announced on Thursday.

This is very exciting. What we have here is a tiny piece of folded lead (about the size of a postage stamp) on which is proto-alphabetic writing also known as Sinaitic script or proto-Canaanite script. If it’s dating is confirmed, it will be the earliest-known Hebrew text by several hundred years, and the first to contain the Hebrew name of God, YWH (or YHWH), also known as the tetragrammaton.

Consisting of 40 ancient proto-Sinaitic letters on a lead sheet that was subsequently folded, and could only to be read by tomographic scanning, the inscription reads:

“Cursed, cursed, cursed – cursed by the God YHW.
You will die cursed.
Cursed you will surely die.
Cursed by YHW – cursed, cursed, cursed.”

It’s a warning to those who break the terms of a covenant. The amulet was discovered on top of Mt. Ebal at the site of Joshua’s altar, where scripture reports he built one after entering the Promised Land.

Critics say that the accounts of Joshua and the Israelites were written hundreds of years after the events they claim to report. If the dating holds up, it’s more likely that the accounts in the “Old” Testament were contemporaneous, being written down as the Israelites walked through a parted Red Sea, trudged through the desert and crossed the Jordan.

Archeology always confirms the Bible’s accounts, never contradicts them.

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Daily Broadside | Quick Political Hits and One for Biblical Accuracy

Daily Verse | Proverbs 10:19
When words are many, sin is not absent,
but he who holds his tongue is wise.

Welcome to Wednesday and midpoint of the week. I’ve got a few hot takes for you this morning and end with some interesting biblical news.

The DNC junta now wants to censor your personal texts. According to Politico,

“Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are also planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages. The goal is to ensure that people who may have difficulty getting a vaccination because of issues like transportation see those barriers lessened or removed entirely.”

Censoring content on social media worked so well that now they want to add your personal text messages to fact-checking. Gee, once that’s implemented, what other kind of information should be fact-checked?

Joe Biden and his allies are returning us to our norms! Isn’t it great that we don’t have the authoritarian Donald J. Trump in office to be worried about?

Dennis Prager offers five things most Americans can do to make America better. I’m sometimes asked what we can “do” in response to the collapse of our country. From Prager’s column yesterday:

Throughout American history until the post-World War II era, had you asked almost any American what constitutes living a good life, he or she would have offered any or all of these five responses:

No. 1: Developing one’s moral character.
No. 2: Getting married and making a good family.
No. 3. Taking care of one’s family, especially one’s parents.
No. 4. Going to church (or synagogue).
No. 5. Taking care of the poor in one’s community, usually by joining a service organization such as a church charity, a Kiwanis, Lions or Rotary Club.

My suspicion is that if one were to ask young people today, and certainly anyone on the left, you would not receive any of those five responses.

He goes on to explain each in detail. Read the whole thing.

Texas Democrats flee the state to avoid voting on a number of changes to Texas’ voting system. According to The Texas Tribune,

More than 50 House Democrats left Monday for Washington, D.C., to deny the chamber a quorum — the minimum number of lawmakers needed to conduct business — as it takes up voting restrictions and other Republican priorities in a special session.

That agenda, set by Gov. Greg Abbott, includes House Bill 3 and Senate Bill 1, the election legislation at hand that would make a number of changes to Texas’ voting system, such as banning drive-thru and 24 hour voting options and further restricting the state’s voting-by-mail rules. Over the weekend, both House and Senate committees advanced the election bills.

These are the same hijinks the Democrats in Wisconsin pulled in 2011. But the most embarrassing moment of this entire escapade is this absolutely awful misuse of the song, “We Shall Overcome.” What a bunch of buffoons.

Clay jar from the time of biblical Gideon found in Israel. One of the reasons people who don’t believe the Christian scriptures is that they think they’re stories not grounded in actual history. That’s not really true, though. While the following story doesn’t prove that the account of Gideon is true, it does prove that his “nickname” was actually known and used in that day.

An inscription dating back some 3,100 years ago bearing the name of a biblical judge Jerubbaal was uncovered in the excavations at Khirbat er-Ra‘i, near Kiryat Gat in the Southern District of Israel, the Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced on Monday.

The researchers highlighted that while there cannot be any certainty on whether the inscription refers to the figure mentioned in the Book of Judges, this discovery offers important insights on the connection between the biblical text and historical reality.

Inscriptions from that period – the 12th-11th century BCE – are extremely rare. All the dating has been carried out through both pottery typology and radiocarbon of organic samples found in the same archaeological layer.

The writing, inked on a jug, marks the first time that the name Jerubbaal has been found outside the biblical text. It is believed that the owner penned his name on the jug.

Wow — to think it possible that we may have found an artifact with Gideon’s actual handwriting on it. There are a lot of archaeological finds that back up the history recorded in the Bible. Here’s a few more for you to read:

An Important Archaeological Discovery: A Gate-Shrine Dating to the First Temple Period was Exposed In Excavations of the Israel Antiquities Authority in the Tel Lachish National Park

A mark of power! Tiny 2,700-year-old royal seal of Judah’s ‘greatest king’ Hezekiah found in ancient rubbish dump in Jerusalem

Handwriting Study Finds Clues on When Biblical Texts Written