What Archaeology Reveals About The Old Testament
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Welcome to Politics by Faith. This is part two of our special. Did the Old Testament really happen? Is the Old Testament true? I know you will enjoy Dinesh D'Souza. He has a new book coming out exactly about this. And then we will wrap up with some Hebrews, Hebrews 11 and 12, which is what this podcast is named after, the By Faith section. And we explain the importance of that when it comes to believing the Old Testament. But first, Dinesh D'Souza. Welcome back to our special Politics by Faith. Did the Old Testament really happen? Just a quick recap. I was on Bill O'Reilly's show the other day, and Bill O'Reilly said, you don't really believe the Old Testament stories, do you? Like the frogs and the parting of the Red Sea.
I was like, yeah, of course I do, Bill. In an effort to continue that conversation, let's go to Dinesh D'Souza, who amazingly has a book coming out this fall. You can pre-order it right now. It's called The Stones Cry Out, Biblical Archaeology, Prophecy, and the Last Days. Dinesh, how are you, brother?
Hey, I'm doing well, thanks. Excited to have our conversation.
Well, it's great to talk to you. Glad you're here. Let's start here. Why is it important that the Old Testament be proven true? Why is it not enough? First off, you got some pagans who'll be like, it's not true. Okay. But what about people who are like, oh, well, it's just, it's a metaphor. It's a nice story. Why not just leave it there?
The Bible doesn't present itself as a set of parables or morality tales. There are some of those in the Bible, but the Bible depicts a kind of unfolding of history. And it begins with the patriarchs around 2000 BC. It continues through the kingdoms of David and Solomon around 1000 BC. Of course, there was the Exodus around 1500 BC, and then on to prophets like Jeremiah and Isaiah, who lived at particular times, at particular moments in history. And so, this is what the Bible says happened. It's quite clear the Bible is not saying kind of, I'm just giving you a fable for you to draw a moral lesson out of. And so the atheists, of course, recognize this, and the skeptics, and so they subject the Bible to critical scrutiny.
By the way, it's worth pointing out that they don't do this to any other religious text. I mean, no one ever tries to historically or archaeologically verify the Bhagavad Gita or the Koran or the Buddhist scriptures. The Bible is the only one that is even eligible for this kind of scholarly examination. And we've now had biblical archaeology for 150 years, and it has a lot to say about, not about the miracles, not about the theology of the Bible, but about the historicity of it.
Let's do some of that. What artifacts have we found that are convincing to you?
So let me take a relatively minor example because the minor example has a major consequence. Around the time of Jeremiah, now Jeremiah was a doom and gloom prophet. He was warning about impending doom for Judah and Israel, the Babylonian conquest that was to come. But the king at the time, a guy named Zedekiah, was very angry with Jeremiah because Jeremiah was like, this is going to happen. We're finished. We should surrender. And the king rounded up two of his interns, let's call them. These are two guys who make just cameo appearances in the Bible. One guy is named Jehukal, son of Shalamiah. The other guy is Gedaliah, son of Pashur. These are not major figures. They're minor guys in the Bible. And the king tells them, go keep an eye on this fellow, Jeremiah.
Now, there's a couple of incidents involving these two guys, but let's fast forward 2,500 years, and people are digging around the area of the Ophel in Jerusalem. It's near the temple, and out of the ground come all these clay seals. These seals were used to seal correspondence. And, of course, the parchment, the correspondence is lost, but the seals remain. They've hardened over time, and they contain names. The person who had the seal, who used his ring or stone to seal the letter. And one of those seals says, And the other says, Now, think about this.
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