GYC SE 2008: ReGeneration

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GYC Southeast

Michael Hasel: Archaeology, Science, the Bible--Crisis or Confidence

Michael Hasel

Moses, Egypt, and the Lie of the Serpent

Heavenly Father, what a privilege it is to worship and to fellowship this afternoon as we enjoy this Sabbath together here in Collegedale.

May your word speak to us and may we also be able to see that your word is reliable today.

We thank you for your love for us and for bringing us together to this place.

I've got 3 topics that I'm sharing, and you guys are free.

I know you're going to move probably to different places and different venues.

And always the problem being a presenter is you'd wish you could hear some of your colleagues giving presentations elsewhere.

But we're going to deal here with the issue of archaeology.

And does someone have a program for the exact title?

Yeah, this is, of course, that's the topic there.

But the name of the series is Archaeology, Science, and the Bible.

Many people, when they find out I'm a Christian, say, wait a minute, didn't you say you were an archaeologist?

And there's a lot of challenges out there today in the field of biblical studies, in the field of archaeology, as people on all different levels are questioning the historical sources and wondering whether those historical sources are valid.

Today we're going to go to ancient Egypt.

I've been there many, many times, and a country filled with ancient temples, A country filled with the fascinating pyramids.

Structures that were built, we don't know by whom or how long it took.

Some estimate perhaps it took 120, 000 slaves 20 years to build 1 pyramid.

But we certainly are confronted with these huge buildings that Moses would have already seen, that Abraham saw before Moses, long before, and that have been existing in that country for many years.

And you may not realize this, but until the Eiffel Tower was built in France in the 1800s, the Great Pyramid was the tallest building in the world.

So, you think about the tallest buildings today, and you think about the monumental architecture of Egypt.

These were sophisticated, educated people who were building these structures many years ago.

I mean, how long would the Sears Tower last?

How long would some of the other tall buildings in the world?

I recently was reading some of the new skyscrapers that are being planned in places like Beijing and Dubai and different parts of the world.

And thousands, millions of tourists come to Egypt every year to see these places.

The Hittites are mentioned in the Bible and mentioned in Egyptian texts over 28 times.

And the question for many years was, by Bible scholars and by historians, the Hittites are mentioned in the Bible, But we don't have any record of them anywhere outside the biblical record.

It wasn't until 1906 that the Turks were working near the site of Hattusha.

And there, they uncovered the capital city of this ancient civilization.

Not only the city, but an entire library was uncovered of cuneiform tablets.

It's a site that sprawls over many, many different places, or I should say hills.

You have to take a bus to get from 1 end to the other, okay?

I mean, not like some of the other cities in the ancient Near East.

This was a vast capital city of an empire that rivaled Egypt during the time of Moses and during the New Kingdom period.

So you can see here are some of the temples, multiple temples.

Later on this afternoon, we're going to talk about the gods and goddesses of ancient Israel and the pantheon and how religion in Israel was affected by the surrounding worship.

But again, it wasn't until that discovery was made and then recently, as Egyptology has taken off, we now know that the Hittites were a major people that were confronted by the Egyptians as well.

Last year, I was invited to London, England, to interview for a National Geographic special on the Hittites.

And by 8 o'clock, I was interviewed for 3 hours in a studio there, and then spent the weekend and then flew back home.

What do the Egyptians say about the Hittites?

Well, they depict them fighting against the Egyptians.

And today we know that these people not only existed, but that they were a major adversary and a major empire.

So sometimes when we don't have evidence, it doesn't mean that the evidence doesn't exist or that the people don't exist.

Sometimes silence in the archaeological record, in historical sources, does not mean that those nations, those cities did not exist.

Archaeologists every year are working in the field and uncovering monuments from the past, and new discoveries are made every single year.

How do we know that they're the Hittites?

And how do we know that this is the city of Kadesh?

It's the city of Kadesh located on the Orantis River in Syria.

Okay, the Egyptian is of course a pictographic as well as a phonetic language.

And here we have the Hittites depicted defending this particular city.

So again, these nations that the Bible talks about are real nations with real kings.

We have a whole dynasty of kings ruling over the Hittite Empire.

And today we can know a lot more about them thanks to the science of archeology.

But what about the ancient Egyptian scribes?

Here we see some female scribes copying on papyrus various manuscripts.

What do they have to say about other events in the Bible?

1 of the most critical events today that is questioned by more people probably than any other event in history is the period of the Israelite sojourn in Egypt, their slavery in Egypt, the Exodus and the Conquest.

Most scholars have written that entire episode out of history.

Well, don't the Egyptians mention the Israelites in their texts?

If this was such a monumental event that we read about in several books of the Bible from Exodus all the way through Deuteronomy, and Moses was the 1 who wrote those first 5 books of the Bible, shouldn't we have more evidence in the archeological world, particularly in Egypt, concerning this?

First of all, the evidence may exist, and we just haven't found it yet.

Because we only have excavated a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of what could be excavated in these countries.

I've worked at several sites in the Middle East.

Some sites have been excavated for 25 years by 200 volunteers and archeologists working there every single year, but less than 1% or 2% of the site is actually excavated at the end of that quarter of a century.

So there's a lot of work that needs to be done.

Isaiah and the Assyrian Terrorist Threat

Today we're going to talk about Isaiah, and the official title that I gave this topic in your programs is a little different than the 1 I have on the board.

I'm a little bit more careful now because the title that's in your programs I gave at a venue 1 time.

I talked about the Assyrian terrorist threat.

And I need to be careful because there are American citizens who are from Persia, from ancient Persia, I mean from modern Persia, which is what country?

And I certainly didn't want to imply anything by that, but I had some people in the back of the auditorium that day on the edge of their seats.

The point is, though, that, of course, during this time period, there was some major threats towards Jerusalem, and we're going to talk about that today.

In the year that King Uzziah died, so the text begins in Isaiah chapter 6.

This was a very traumatic time for ancient Judah because the king was dead.

Uzziah was 1 of the more powerful Judean kings that had reigned up to that point in time.

He had expanded economically the borders of Judah and, at that time, again, and Israel.

He continued to have strong economic policies that caused a resurgence.

Probably not since the time of Solomon did Judah experience such a surge of activity.

But then the king dies, and that leaves the country in a vacuum and with huge questions.

What is going to take place down the line?

And particularly regarding the Assyrian threat that was looming in the background, this was a big question that people were asking at that time.

Thanks to an Adventist scholar, Edwin Thiele, who was a professor at Andrews for many years, we have a definitive work now on the numbers of the Hebrew kings so that we can date precisely, based on the biblical evidence and extra-biblical evidence precisely when this event took place, when that year was.

Isn't it neat that we have that kind of corroboration?

Edwin Thiele wrote his dissertation at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute.

It was later published by the University of Chicago Press and is still in print today, even though it was published in the early 1950s.

It still is the definitive work on the subject.

In fact, I just read an article that came out this last week describing this for us.

Uzziah, or Azariah as he's called in another passage of scripture, lived from 792 to 739 BC.

So the year that King Uzziah died was what year?

So we're talking about 2, 747 years or so ago.

The demise of Israel, which Isaiah saw in his own lifetime, took place in 722 B.C., just a few years later.

And it is in the year that King Uzziah died that in Chapter 6 we read about Isaiah's vision and his call.

I referred to it this morning in my Sabbath school class.

You remember when he sees God high and lifted up, seated upon his throne with the seraphim on either side, singing 1 to another, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.

And he's trembling at this threshold when he is asked the question, or when God asks the question to the universe, whom shall we send and who will go for us?

Isaiah responds to that call immediately.

He doesn't hesitate like Moses did or like Jeremiah did.

He jumps on his feet and he says, Lord, what?

And he then is told what he is going to expect now that he's accepted the commission to be an ambassador for the Lord.

Well, the Assyrian Empire is encroaching on Judah.

His message at first is directed to Israel, but Israel does not heed Isaiah's message or God's message through Isaiah.

And so Israel is decimated and its population is carried off into captivity in 722 BC.

Isaiah sees the fulfillment of that prophecy in his own lifetime.

And now, as the powers that would be, the Assyrian Empire moves further and further south, it encroaches on Judah, and there is in fact only 1 thing that is holding it back from its real goal, and that is to get down to Egypt and conquer Egypt itself.

And of course, the geographical reality of where God placed Israel, right in this land bridge between the major empires meant that it would be a territory that would be fought over, over and over again as the centuries went by.

God knew that he needed to place his people in a place where they could be a light to all the nations and he puts them right smack in the middle So that when the Egyptians had to go and do trading with the Mesopotamians, they had to go through Israel.

And when the Mesopotamians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and others had to come down, they had to go through Israel.

And so Israel was right at the center of the then known world.

The Assyrians were known for their bloodthirsty military tactics.

You read them today, and you see the images on the reliefs that have been found in the palaces of the Assyrian kings, such as this 1 here.

And you can see that they used every single military tactic possible to defeat their enemies.

Here You can see a guy that's tunneling his way into the city and others that are climbing up on siege ladders.

And later on you'll see others coming up with battering rams.

That is a battering ram that would have been filled with several soldiers.

In this case, there is 1 soldier that is larger than life than any other soldier in the scene, right?

And by the way, it's not only the Assyrians that show the king in their art this way.

Again, he is always shown larger than life.

He is the center of attention for these campaigns.

So here you see the siege ramps that have been built up against the mounds of these cities.

And you can see the various tactics employed to gain entrance into the city.

Again, wouldn't you hate to be this guy right up here?

I mean, man, your hand's not going to do very much.

But obviously, this is from the Assyrian perspective.

And the hand, by the way, is not up to protect his face.

It's up in a symbol of surrender in this particular stance.

And the battering ram is going against the city wall here.

We see all kinds of gruesome images of torture.

And in fact, the Assyrians were known to flail the bodies of their victims while they were still alive, and glory in that.

They were also often shown impaling bodies on stakes and so forth.

Crucifixion doesn't start with the Roman Empire.

It goes all the way back to the Assyrian Empire.

They were known also, sorry about the German, to burn cities.

That's not a pitchfork he's carrying up to go up against the gate there.

And he's taking it up to the city and is ready to light the gate on fire.

And here, of course, in this city, you can see them all running up to the city gate with torches, ready to light the gate on fire.

But you can see that flames are already spouting out the top.

Some art historians have interpreted those as antlers.

That, I think, is fire already consuming the city as well.

But in chapter 36, as we jump forward in Isaiah, 30 chapters after the call of Isaiah in chapter 6 in verse 1, and just ignore the second half of that.

If you want to learn a little German, you can compare the 2, okay?

Now, it came about in the 14th year of King Hezekiah, Sennacherib, King of Assyria.

Gods and Goddesses in Ancient Israel

1 of the exciting things about archaeology is that you can not only see that the events described in the Bible actually took place, but you can also tangibly feel and see and experience for yourself in a three-dimensional way objects and the everyday life things that people experience day by day.

You know, the Bible talks a lot about God's acts in history, but it doesn't always describe the specifics of how people lived, How they worshipped.

We know how the temple in Jerusalem was designed, a very active description.

But what about the temples of the Canaanites?

What about these ancient worship practices?

And so there are big questions sometimes that can be answered because archaeology gives us tangible answers to the kinds of cooking pots that people used, everyday implements, what kind of houses they lived in, who they traded with, what they traded, and what their economic system was like.

And to me, that's very exciting because it puts us in touch with the past and in a way that, well, I think most of us like to see evidence.

We've grown up in a media-driven culture where to touch and to taste and to feel and to see, in particular, to hear, are all elements that we like to experience the world of the Bible with.

And what I often tell people as we take tours to the Middle East, as we go on excavations with students from Southern Adventist University and others as well, community people can be involved too, is that when you take these trips, the Bible comes to life in a way that it hasn't been alive before.

And during the Sabbath service, Sean Boonstra was speaking, and a lady who had just been with me to Turkey this past summer leaned to me and said, I will never read the book of Acts the same again.

You've walked in the places that Paul and the early missionaries went out to.

You visit Jerusalem and you now see the relationship between the Mount of Olives and the Garden of Gethsemane and you suddenly those places are real places.

They're not simply something you read about and that you've imagined in your own mind.

So archeology makes things tangible but it also makes things real.

Sometimes it's a little disappointing because we imagine things that we think are a certain way, and then we get there.

That's why a book is always more interesting to read than watching the movie afterwards, right?

Because we've imagined it a certain way, and when we see the movie, it's always a disappointment, because it's not the way we've imagined it.

I remember the first time I took some students across a boat on the Sea of Galilee.

And afterwards, I asked them, and some of them were absolutely blown away by the experience.

We actually stopped and turned off the engine in the middle of the sea.

And we cast in a net like Peter would have done years earlier when Jesus asked him to do so.

And I breathed a sigh of relief when no fish came up in the net.

And it was incredible to be out on that calm sea.

But afterwards, 1 of the students said, it's so small compared to what I imagined.

I saw some skyscrapers from the top of a dune 1 time from Chicago, only once in my life, and I grew up there my entire life.

So you have all kinds of imaginings of what things are like.

And 1 of the things that it does is it makes the ancient deities that the Bible describes real as well.

Today we're going to talk about the gods and goddesses of ancient Israel, ancient religion in Israel.

And as we do that, let's look at what the Bible says.

In the Old Testament, there are over 200 occurrences of 12 terms describing cultic images.

Were the Israelites supposed to worship these images?

In addition, Asherah or Asherim are mentioned another 40 times.

I don't know if any of you have ever heard of that deity, but she's mentioned in the Bible 40 times, okay?

Indicating that the writers and the prophets had a major issue at hand.

If something's mentioned in the Bible and condemned enough in the Bible, you know that it was a problem, right?

It wouldn't need to be condemned unless it was a problem.

Just like parents, if they have to say something over and over again.

You wouldn't have to say anything if it wasn't a problem.

Some scholars say it was an Asherah herself, but Asherah in the Bible could also refer to a wooden pole or image.

In fact, in some translations, most of the time when Asherah occurs in the Hebrew, it's simply translated as pole or wooden pole or something like that, or tree.

So it can mean either a goddess itself or in wooden pole, perhaps representing that goddess.

Here in Deuteronomy 7, the Israelites are told specifically not to worship the gods of Canaan.

You shall tear down their altars and smash their sacred pillars." What is Deuteronomy, by the way?

It's the message of Moses, of God through Moses, to the people of Israel just before they were what?

So this is his last message before his death.

And this is what God says to the Israelites, but thus you shall do to them, you shall tear down their altars and smash their sacred pillars and hew down their Asherim.

Im by the way is like an S at the end of a word, it's the plural in Hebrew, okay?

And burn down their graven images with fire for you are a what?

A holy people, a people set aside to the Lord your God.

The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for His own possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.

Israel, of course, was not supposed to be exclusivistic.

They were supposed to be a light to the rest of the nations, right, and share with them what God has shown them.

In Deuteronomy 16, so in this particular passage, Asherah is a kind of something that can be hewn down.

Here in this particular chapter in 16, you shall not plant for yourself an asherah.

Series

Michael Hasel: Archaeology, Science, the Bible--Crisis or Confidence

Isaiah and the Assyrian Terrorist Threat

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

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Gods and Goddesses in Ancient Israel

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