March 7, 2006

Faith Meets History with Dr. Walter Kaiser


Sometimes the past speaks loudly and so it is with archeological findings that confirm what’s already written in the Bible. I’m Charles Morris and welcome to Haven Today where we’re telling the Great Story. It’s all about Jesus, and where we’ll be joined in a few minutes by the president of Gordon Conwell Seminary outside Boston, Dr. Walter Kaiser, part of the team that has produced the newly released Archeological Study Bible. How do faith and archeology mix? Can findings from the past prove the trustworthiness of God’s Word? This is a program called, “Faith Meets History”

Song: El Shaddai
Performed by:

This is Haven Today. We’re coming to you from Southern California, but our special guest is coming to us from Gordon Conwell Seminary which is north of Boston. The President, Dr. Walter Kaiser, and Dr. Kaiser, welcome to Haven Today.

WK: Well Thank you, it’s a delight to be with you Charles.
CM: I’ve wanted to have you on our program for so long. You have been on the board of directors of Bible Study Fellowship; you’ve been there at Gordon Conwell. You are not unknown in the Christian community, but you have the Archeological Study Bible that you and a team of people have just put out and it’s a good reason to have you on, so why don’t I just go ahead and just pop a first question out to you?
WK: Sure enough, go ahead.
CM: All right. Are there any discoveries in the field of archeology that perhaps could bolster our faith?
WK: Well Charles, there are so many I feel like a little boy in a candy store. Which one do you pick out first because there are just so, so many? But I think that one of the most interesting ones of recent days, that came about just about a dozen years ago was a basalt steely found up in the city of Dan, which is in the Northern part of Israel. They were excavating there and low and behold here came this reference, the very first one, to King David and to his household. Well, that was interesting because we had just come through a period in which some who are called minimalists because they take the minimal meaning of the Biblical texts, had said well there was no King David and he did not exist. But low and behold in 1993 and again in 1994 here they found 2 stones that had been made part of a wall, they pulled them out and here they had a beautiful inscription on them. And you can imagine how this had the biblical and archeological world buzzing.
CM: Well, I’m sure it did. Let me just through this out too. If I have a son or a daughter that heads off in particular to a secular university or college today, they take a Bible course, introductory course, they’re going to run into this view that there really was no exodus and there really was no Israel as we think about it today, but it was all made up after the fact, but yet here this discovery more than a dozen years ago flies in the face of that, doesn’t it?
WK: Yeah, it really does and you know it’s very popular to say that the first 5 books of the Bible, called the Pentateuch or the Torah, were not written by Moses, they really were the last books written. Rather than coming in approximately 1400 BC, very, very typical for the scholarly world to put them in 400 BC, but here again we had some excavating just south of Jerusalem in the valley, the Hinnom Valley, and there in 1979 what did they find but 2 amulets, silver amulets. When they unrolled them, these things which are worn around the neck like, low and behold they had the inscribed words from Numbers 6:24-26 – they didn’t have the reference there. Those are modern.
CM: Right.
WK: And another one had Deuteronomy 7-9. But here’s the interesting thing Charles, both of the Hebrew words on both those inscriptions had extraordinary correspondence to the wording and spelling which was found in both Numbers and Deuteronomy. And what was the date on these? They are 7th to 6th century BC, yet the scholars say that wasn’t written until 400 BC. That certainly is embarrassing.
CM: Yes, and I guess also modern scholars have said at the time of Moses although Egypt had a written language, if there were Israelites, what we would say Israelites today, they wouldn’t have had a written language. But I know one of your graduates last year, excavating in Israel, Ron Tappy – who’s over at Pittsburgh Seminary now – he found an “ABCD’iary”. The whole alphabet going all the way back, they’ve tested it and dated it, all the way back to David and Solomon proving that there had to be some kind of written language earlier than many modern scholars believe.
WK: Oh, sure. The Hebrew itself is a Canaanite language which we have represented in a site from Syria which is called Ugarit, u-g-a-r-i-t. This is a 1400, approximately 1400 BC script which has about, I would say, 50-55% of the same words, same vocabulary as can be found in Hebrew. And of course Egyptian, we go all the way back to 3000 BC with very, very good literary references.
CM: Wow. Let me just throw out a few other questions here, and I may be getting myself in trouble and you may be getting yourself in trouble, but –
WK: Oh, go ahead, we’ll have fun.
CM: All right. In the new Archeological Study Bible, you deal in Genesis 1 with the Hebrew world “Yom” day. There are a lot people out there today who are afraid if you believe in not a 24 hour day as we have a 24 hour day today that you are not orthodox, that you are heading in the direction of believing in evolution. And then I know scholars as well, biblical, evangelical scholars who believe in a literal 24 hour day. How do you deal with this issue and this Hebrew word and in light of Genesis 1?
WK: Well, Charles, first of all archeology can’t answer that question because we have no documents that really take us back to that early date. But on the other hand it’s important from a biblical scholar’s point of view to notice that the word Yom is used 3 different ways in the very chapters 1 and 2. It’s used of day light, he called the light day and the darkness night in chapter 1:5. It’s used of 24 hour day period in chapter 14, “on the 4th day”. So as Augustine showed, there were 3 creative days before we had a 24 hour day. Because of Augustine’s observation there, that was the prevailing view in the church up until the advent of geology when Lyell came in and then some in the church began to harden their position and say, “Well a day is a day is a day.” And of course it is, but look in this very passage it’s being used in a number of different ways. Matter of fact, Moses who writes Psalm 90 says that a day with the Lord is as a 1000 years. so you have that and of course in chapter 2, verse 4 he summarizes all 6 of the creative events and says that this took place in the day that the Lord God created the heavens and the earth. That word day there is like we say, “the day of Abraham Lincoln” or “the day of the horse and buggy”. So I think we’ve got to really be careful not to fix too narrowly on one meaning since all three are in use clearly as determined by context there.
CM: And you can still believe in Jesus
WK: Oh yeah.
CM: And take a different view of a 24 hour day or the Hebrew word “Yom”.
WK: Yeah, when we get to Heaven I’m sure there’s going to be a seminar on that and I think we’ll all be changed then so there won’t be any looking across the room and saying, “Aaaa, I told you so!”
CM: That’s right. Well, what does archeology serve? Can archeology build our faith or can archeological discoveries damage, dampen our faith?
WK: Well an archeologist, as you know, is a person who really tries to “dig up dirt” on previous civilizations. Pun intended there. And he really tries to take a small brush and little trowel and very carefully observe everything he can hoping not only for artifacts but also for written materials, we call it epigraphic materials which really helps us enormously. And that is what he does. Some of the archeologists love to say that their whole career is “in ruins”. And indeed it is. That’s what they deal in. But archeology can help us illuminate the text by getting the right cultural, the right setting background, cultural background, setting background and then often times it can come right down where someone has said, “No, there were no Israelites,” and then all of a sudden here comes the Vernepta Inscription from Egypt that talks about the land of Israel. And someone says, “Whoa, I thought they said there wasn’t any such thing.” And then they said, “Well there were no Hittites” and up until 1900 you could say that but then digging up in the middle of Turkey, present day Turkey, Boghazkoi here we found a whole civilization and one of my friends has just finished producing 20 volumes of vocabulary of the Hittites as a dictionary. So, they also said, “Look Isaiah 20 verse 1 says, ‘King Sargon of Assyria’. We have all the Assyrian kings on the Khorsabad King list and Sargon is not listed at all.” And someone went a little bit upstream from Nineveh and low and behold they found acres of a palace there which, written over the top of it “I am Sargon”
CM: Sargon
WK: Sargon, King of the Assyrians. So I mean, there you have direct confirmation which in previous years you could, in a university class just scare the daylights out of the students saying, “There is no Sargon, there are no Hittites,” and so forth. And I think the Lord enjoys that when people stick their neck out a little bit. He says, “OK, is it out far enough? Now I’ll give you the evidence.”
CM: Dr. Walter Kaiser, the president of Gordon Conwell Seminary is with us. And he’s also part of the team that has produced the Archeological Study Bible. Dr. Kaiser, would you mind closing us in a word of prayer that God’s Word would be made real to us and that, well, things we find digging in the dirt as you said, would also confirm what we know in our hearts to be true?
WK: I’d be delighted to. And thank you for this opportunity to talk to you about the Archeological Study Bible. It’s been about 5 years in production and we are just grateful for this enormous tool. By the way, printed in China. We used to smuggle Bibles into China, now we buy them. And it has some 8000 study notes, over 500 articles, over 500 full color photographs; right alongside it the NIV text throughout the whole thing, along with numerous charts and all that. We hope that it’s a real blessing to God and then as a bonus they’ve got a CD-ROM in the back of it too as well, so we trust that it comes as a gift to the body of Christ and a blessing to all of God’s men and women. Let me pray for us. So Heavenly Father, thank you for all of your gifts to the body of Christ and thank you too that history is indeed your story. It’s all about the King of Kings and Lord of Lords and you are the Lord who is the only one who is true, everything that is true, everything that is factual, everything that is real, everything talked about in this Word that claims that it happened, indeed it did happen. And it happened exactly as you have said it. Thank you for helping us time and time again as we have seen your marvelous ministry on behalf of all of us. And we pray Heavenly Father that it may come as a gift to men and women who still have not become part of the family of God that they may hear this word and turn to the only one who can give life and give it more abundantly. So we bless your name together for it’s in that great and glorious name of our coming Lord Jesus we pray, amen.
CM: Amen.

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Performed by:

This is Haven Today and the program is called, “Faith Meets History”. And I want to especially thank Dr. Walter Kaiser, the president of Gordon Conwell Seminary outside Boston for joining us on this program. He’s part of the team that’s put together this brand new Archeological Study Bible. I’m looking at it right now. It’s full color all the way through. It is a visually compelling guide unlike any other. It has over 500 color photographs. It has thousands of cultural, historical and archeological references and quite a few other rare features. It reaches across the centuries and I must tell you it just brings the Bible to life. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. We have it available for you as a thank you for your support of Haven Today. And this is something that I think will be valuable for you in your Bible study that will help you whether you are just a person that likes to study the Word, whether you are a lay person involved in ministry in your church or whether you’re a pastor. This is something that will be of benefit to you. We have the NIV Archeological Study Bible produced by Gordon Conwell Seminary and Zondervan and we have it in 3 forms. We have it in a hard back, full color again, as I mentioned 2300 pages I think in a beautiful dust jacket as well. We have it in a European leather duotone and we also have it in black top grain leather. You can read about it, you can see more about it, you can even see a video clip of it at haventoday.org, that’s haventoday.org. We’re asking for a gift of $50, $80 or $90 for your copy of the Archeological Study Bible and we can get it out to you right away. Or you can call us if you would like at 1-800-65-HAVEN, that’s 1-800-654-3826. Please let us know the radio station you’re listening to. Something else, though before we go, if you go to our website, haventoday.org to find out more about the Archeological Study Bible, may we pray for you? We would like to. There’s a little button on our webpage that says, “Prayer” and if you’ll just press that you can send us a prayer request and a member of our prayer team will immediately respond to you and know that what you have need of will be lifted up before our Heavenly Father in Heaven. I’m Charles Morris and we’re going to talk more about what can be found in history that’s also found in God’s Word. And we’ll do that together, tomorrow here on Haven Today.