We are in the midst of this series on apologetics, Defending the Faith, and we've been talking for several weeks now, on and off, about the question, the legitimate question that an unbeliever asks, how do I know the Bible is unlike other books? How do I know that, you know, the Book of Mormon or the Upanishads or the Avesta or the book of Buddha, they don't have a book of Buddha, but other sacred writings. How do I know that the Bible is unlike those? And specifically, how do I know that it's from God? The world, the view of the world is that there are lots of sacred writings around and they might be very helpful because they represent the meditations of human beings like us on the great questions of life. What is the meaning of life? Is there a God? What is He like? How can we be happy? Is this all there is? And, you know, nobody's... These are the great unanswerable questions, so nobody's word is any better than anybody else's in this respect. But it can be helpful to read the pious writings of all peoples, if for no other reason than it can give us insight into the human mind, this wonderful product of evolution, this climax of random, natural development. And it helps us understand ourselves a little better. And because we're emotional beings, I almost said creatures, but I don't want to insert religion into this discussion. But because we're emotional beings, it can help give us comfort and a sense of meaning. And if it does that, it doesn't really matter whether it's true or not. It makes us feel better. And that's the philosophy that dominates the last 50 years or so, the philosophy of existentialism. As long as you feel good about it, it doesn't really matter whether it's true or not. So how do we know that the Bible is a divine book? And I suggested a couple of lines of thought for that. The first is the literary unity. And I talked about the fact that this book clearly did not follow a natural human process in its development. That's the great lie concerning the Bible, that there are elements of literary unity, specifically development of theme, over a period of 1,500 years, 40-plus authors, most of whom never met more than, at most, a couple of the other authors, if any. And you have this wonderful thematic precision and unity. And we've talked about the details of that. And as part of that, I talked about the lack of contradiction. And as somebody who worked on books for almost 20 years and approved books that were filled with contradictions, in spite of our diligent efforts to avoid them, I'm as impressed with this simple fact as any other in the story of the Scripture is that it doesn't have contradictions. And we looked at some alleged contradictions, and I tried to make the point that, in fact, you have to read the book childishly, ignorantly, in order to say that there are contradictions. The more you understand about literature, metaphor, and so on, the more you see that the alleged contradictions are just silly. And we looked at 67 supposed contradictions at infidels.org. Only one of them was really even worth talking about. The rest were just silly. And the one, while it's interesting, isn't necessarily a contradiction. The fact is we don't have the data to make that call scientifically. And it's remarkable in that one instance, that's the thing with Jacob and Laban's animals, and he puts the little sticks out in front of them when they're breeding, and so they're born with stripes because he had stripes in the sticks. The passage never says that they were born with stripes because he had stripes in the sticks. It says that that's what he was trying to accomplish. And it says that God, in fact, saw to it that because he was going to get the striped animals, in order to bless him, God saw to it that the animals born had stripes. It doesn't say that the sticks caused that, and I think that's a very important... If you read other literature of the time, that's a very important distinction. It's amazing. The more you read, the more you study. Now, we've also looked at a second element, which is the idea of fulfilled prophecy. There are two kinds of prophecy in the Bible, prophecy that's been fulfilled and prophecy that hasn't. The prophecy that hasn't, we call eschatology. It's the future, the last things. And that's where you get, you know, 666 and Armageddon and all that stuff. But there is a good quantity of prophecy in the Scripture that is fulfilled. And we made the point that those prophecies are so accurate that critics of the Bible assume with no historical or manuscript evidence that those prophecies were written after the fact because that's how accurate they are. So nobody disputes that fulfilled prophecy in the Scripture is unbelievably accurate. So what they do to get around that is to say, well, it's history written as prophecy. And they do so literally without any evidence other than the fact that the prophecy is accurate. And that's called thesis pressure. And that gets you a D on your freshman research paper in the average college. Now, before we move on, Let me tell you where we're going with this thing. We're going to get done with this eventually, honest. I want to spend at least a week on a couple of other concepts, and it may take more than a week. A couple of questions that have been really in the popular consciousness in the last few months are, first of all, the question of canonization. Who decided what books were in the Bible and what weren't, and how do we know they did a good job? And that's come up with all the whole Gospel of Judas. And actually, the Jesus Seminar for the last 20 years, 15 or 20 years, has been arguing that the wrong Gospels got in. And this Gospel of Judas recently, which, by the way, isn't a Gospel at all. There's a literary form that is called a Gospel, and it isn't one. It just says it is. And nobody seems to have pointed that out. The amount of inattention to detail in this discussion has been really interesting. I want to talk about canonization. How did these particular books get into the Bible? And that doesn't have to be boring. I'm not going to tell you the boring stuff, OK? We're going to talk about the interesting parts. And the other question is, how do we know that the book was preserved accurately? And that's where we get into the whole manuscript thing. And I don't intend to do a whole lot on that, but just to answer some basic questions. And I'm happy to take whatever questions you have and to pursue them as far as we need to. But when you lose interest, I'll stop. Now, in preparation for that, I want to wrap up kind of where we are to this point. I am arguing that the book bears internal evidence of supernatural origin. I haven't answered the question, was it God? Or beyond that, which God was it? We haven't gotten to that yet. But I'm arguing that there is evidence of something unnatural, something supernatural going on here in the creation, the assembly of this book. And before we go on to some of the historical elements since then, the development of the preservation and so on of the book since then. I want to wrap that up with some material that sort of summarizes these two ideas. First of all, the lack of contradiction, and secondly, the idea of fulfilled prophecy. And this is actually material that I used in here, I think, about two or three years ago. But there were a number of you here, there are a number of you here who weren't here then, and this just fits really perfectly here. So I want to put it in here as kind of a stone in the wall that we're building. I want to talk about some of the archaeological evidence that we've found that reinforces the historicity and has answered charges of contradiction in the Bible. and also has demonstrated some of the fulfillment of prophecy. And that'll kind of wrap up my argument that this book is demonstrably accurate and unusually so. And so I want to look at some biblical passages. These are all Old Testament. We're talking about very ancient Near Eastern archaeological sites. And I want to tell you, I've got 10 of them. I don't know how many I'll get through. But I want to take you to several of the ones that I think are the most interesting. And I want you to watch for a pattern here. There is a general pattern that people who want not to believe say, well, look, here's an error. This can't be so. And then they dig something up that proves that it did happen. And instead of being a man about it and standing up and saying, I'd like to hold a press conference and say that I was wrong, and I'd like to apologize to all those people I ridiculed, they just drop that argument and go on to another one. And they just keep doing that. Now, the number of arguments gets progressively smaller over time because these things And stuff just keeps coming out of the dirt that shuts them up. Now, when I get to the end of this, I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about where we go from here, because the fact is there are still some problems. There are still some difficulties. But based on a scientific analysis of the processes we see so far, what should be our logical response to problems? a good place to end this part of the series. Okay, let's look at some. I'm going to work through these in roughly chronological order. I want to start with a couple of really interesting sites up on the Fertile Crescent. You see my map here of the Fertile Crescent? You remember it from world history, right? You remember that? You paid money for that course. You should remember it. You got this thing that comes from Kuwait and Iraq today up the two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. And there's this kind of valley, not valley, but this area of watered land where because of the two rivers moving north from the, what is that Gulf? Is that the Arabian Gulf? Yeah, it's the Arabian Gulf and there's a fight right now over whether to call it the Persian Gulf or the Arabian Gulf. Iran wants one thing and Iraq wants another thing and they're having another argument. So you got this fertile crescent of watered area in what is large scale a desert. And that's the route that Abraham followed coming from Ur. It's the trade route that came down through Palestine and made Palestine such a central part of ancient Near Eastern history because it's right on the route between Mesopotamia and Egypt, which are the two dominant civilizations in those times. There are a couple of old cities that have been dug up on that fertile crescent. They're kind of up north of Israel. One is called Ebla, and Ebla was a city, E-B-L-A. Ebla was a city that was active about 2500 B.C., which is 500 years before Abraham. It's the oldest one we're going to talk about. There are a couple of really interesting facts that came out of Ebla. One of them is they found an inscription on a clay tablet describing a place. Now, in ancient Near Eastern languages, most of them used only consonants, and you kind of filled in the vowels as you went. Hebrew does that, and most of the other languages do, too. The consonants are S-D-E-M. And some of you are thinking, okay, Saddam Hussein, that was a prophecy about Saddam? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Now, if you're going to add the consonants, this could be a lot of things. It could be Saidum, it could be Asdam, it could be Esdama. You know, there are a lot of ways you could pronounce it. But one of the ways you could pronounce it is Sodom. Now, because it's just a single reference and we've got no context for it, we simply don't have the evidence to say that's what it is. But if it is, that is the first extra-biblical reference to Sodom in the ancient Near East. Now, obviously, we're just going to have to wait and see if anything else turns up. But it's just really fun to see. That's just a little hint, OK? Nothing conclusive. It's just a little hint. There is also a reference. There was another city near Ibla called Mari. And there is a reference to trade and tribute that went on between the two cities. And there is a record there in the Annals of the King in Ibla, who's really just the mayor in those days. But they called him king. There is a reference to the city of Mari down the road being conquered and paying tribute back to Ibla. And the amount was given as 1,000 talents of, I don't have here whether it's gold or silver, 1,000 talents annually, every year. A talent is, I forget the exact amount, it's like 15 or 20 pounds. That's a mess of silver or gold. Now I want you to turn to 1 Kings 10. 1 Kings 10 describes Solomon's great wealth. Remember the Queen of Sheba comes to visit and she says, the half was not told me. This is incredible. And you remember silver was like the dirt in the streets because it wasn't counted even valuable because there was so much of it. 1 Kings 10.14 says, The weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year This was from all of his, I assume, from tribute, from mining operations. The amount of gold that came into the kingdom, the gross national gold product, in one year was 666 talents. And for decades, critics looked at that number and said, 666 talents? You're talking thousands of pounds of gold in one year? There isn't that much gold in the ancient Near East. It's impossible. And then they find, they dig in Iblah, and they found out that Iblah claimed, remember, these are bookkeeping records. You tend to be accurate. You're not just bragging. You're keeping track of how much they're paying. They claimed 1,000 talents a year, 50% more from one city. And all of a sudden, the critics go, oh, well, maybe 666 isn't that big a deal. OK, let's find something else to criticize. What else we got? And they just quit talking about it. That's Iblah. The second city that I want to talk about is called Nuzi. Nuzi is about 500 years later. It's right about the time of Abraham. And this gets really interesting because what we find in Ibla is commercial and governmental records. What we find in Nuzi is social records, local government kinds of records. We found a lot of marriage certificates and birth records and adoption records and that kind of stuff. And in one of these cities, I forget which one it was, the library burned. And the clay tablets were fired by the fire. And so they got really hard and the shelves collapsed and the tablets didn't break because they had been fired in the heat. And so we've got these wonderfully preserved clay tablets because of the fire. Newsy is really interesting because it describes several marriages and adoption kind of things. And there's one, the names are really funny. They're names like Wooloo and Lulu and they got really funny names in Newsy. But there was a record found of a marriage contract between a man and a woman. And the contract said that if the woman could not provide a child for the man, this is a prenup, that it was her responsibility to go and find a woman who could and to bring her to her husband to act as childbearer in her state. And we think surrogate motherhood is all this new idea. It's been around since the time of Abraham. And she was actually contracted. It was always viewed in the ancient Near East, when you couldn't have children, it was always viewed as a woman's fault. That's just the nature of the ancient Near East. I don't know of any cases where there was marriage after marriage after marriage, or surrogate after surrogate after surrogate, and whether it ever occurred to anybody that it might be the man's fault. But we know that nowadays, it can go either way. Well, in those days, it was always viewed as a woman's fault. And so the woman had to go out and find another woman who could bear a child. Now, this is the time of Abraham. And suddenly you start to understand what's going on in Abraham's household. Abraham is promised by God that he'll have a son. Sarah is not going to provide it. So she fulfills what is the social obligation of her day. What we're doing here is nothing. This isn't fornication. It's not adultery. It is part of the legal, the social structure of the day. It is the wife's responsibility to see that there are children in this household. And if she can't do it herself, she's got to find somebody who can. And that wasn't viewed as sleeping around. It was viewed as just the ordinary course of social life. Now, I'm not saying Abraham lived in Newsy or by Newsy's laws, but these reflect the standard traditions of the area in which he lived. Then you remember, he and Hagar have this son, Ishmael. And eventually, Sarah has a son, too. That's a supernatural act. They get to be a little older, Ishmael, who's apparently a teenager, is kind of teasing Isaac and tormenting him a little bit, you know, pushing him around. I'm sure it was just all in good fun, boys being boys, you know. But Sarah gets furious when she sees this interloper. You got to imagine the jealousy and the anger and the suppressed rage that comes from an arrangement like that. Well, she says, I want this kid out of the house and I want his mother out of the house. And it says Abraham is very troubled by that. Well, why should he be troubled by it? Well, the same contract says that if the wife can't have children, she needs to provide another woman who can, and if the wife later has children, she cannot expel the older children. Apparently, that would be a normal response, wouldn't it? And so the law actually said, the contract said, Those children by surrogates are legal children, legal heirs, and they cannot be expelled, and they cannot be disinherited. Well, Sarah says, get this kid out of my house. And she's flying in the face of social tradition at that point. What she's asking for is completely unacceptable. And Abraham is troubled. And that explains some of the reactions and why things happened and why people got upset and so on. It's part of the social code. And we find in the mid-1900s, we dig up Newsy and we find out that this kind of thing was routine. It was the way the culture worked. It was the way the system worked. By the way, there's another Newsy tablet which describes when parents are childless. And apparently all their efforts have failed and the surrogate business has failed. And here they are, they're aged and they have no children. That's a big problem in the ancient Near East because your children take care of you when you get old. And if you've got no children, you're 80, 85 years old, you're living on the street. You've got nobody to take care of you. And so it was customary, we find some contracts about this, that old people would find, particularly old people with means, they had some money. they would find a young person who was reliable and maybe needed a little leg up financially, and they'd adopt him. Now, his parents might still be alive. That's not the point. And they're not adopting him to raise him. He's an adult. He's 20, 30 years old. But, you know, he's starting out in life, and maybe his family doesn't have any money, and so they adopt this guy. And the contract says, You take care of us till we die, and when we die, you get our stuff. Now, any lawyers among us can see that there are just a whole bunch of potential problems in that arrangement. As soon as we die, you get our stuff, and you're taking care of us. There's a certain amount of disincentivization going on there, I think, but you would adopt somebody, obviously, that you trusted. By the way, there are arrangements like this today. I don't think this is an urban legend, but the story goes that in Paris, It's really hard to get an apartment. I don't know whether it has to do with rent control or whatever, but it's just really hard. People don't cut loose of their apartments. And so it's a tradition in Paris that you find some old person who's got an apartment and you agree with them, I'll pay your rent for as long as you live. And when you die, I get the apartment. That's just kind of a tradition they have. Well, this guy who's in like his thirties finds this 70 or 80 year old woman in Paris named Marie Calment. And he makes that arrangement with her. He says, I'll pay your rent for as long as you live, and when you die, I get the apartment. Okay, great. Sign the papers. It's done. Marie Calment, half a century later, was listed as the oldest living person in the world. She lived to be 120-something or 130-something. He paid her rent well into his 70s, and then he died, and he never got the apartment. So let that be a lesson to you. And she got free rent for all those years. It's a good trick if you know ahead of time how it's going to work. Well, anyhow, you see these arrangements. Now, God comes to Abram and says, you're going to have a son. And he says, that's impossible. I'm beyond the age of childbearing. My wife is beyond the age of childbearing. And this Eliezer of Damascus is my heir. What had happened there? Abram had adopted Eliezer and had made that arrangement with him. And so Eliezer was going to take care of him when he got to the point where he needed care. and perhaps, you know, needed decisions made for him and so on. And then when Abram died, Eliezer would get the property. Now, it's interesting because Abram later has children, several children. He's got Ishmael and then Isaac and then he has more children by Keturah later. And the Bible never tells us what happened to Eliezer. But legally, according to the social customs, Eleazar should have been provided for throughout his life out of Abram's wealth because of that arrangement he had made. I want to move way ahead here. I want to move up to 750 BC. This is during the time of the so-called the 8th century writing prophets. Isaiah is there. This is the time just before Israel goes into captivity in Assyria, the northern kingdom. There is a site called Deir Allah, which was destroyed by an earthquake about the 8th century BC. And it's interesting because the Bible says in Amos 1.1, Amos is an 8th century writing prophet. He says, the message of the Lord which came to me, I think he says like four years after the earthquake. And it's right in that period of time where this site was destroyed by an earthquake. But what's more interesting about it is that it contains some writings of someone named Balaam, son of Beor, the man who was a seer of the gods. And the gods there is Elohim, which is a form of the name for the Old Testament God. There are several prophecies recorded there, most of which are not in the Bible, but they are simply prophecies that he left behind. Now, that accounts for the historicity of this man, Balaam. And we read, of course, that he prophesied against the children of Israel for hire when they were coming into Canaan in about 1500 BC, 1400 BC. And then later he was killed as part of that invasion. So we got Balaam and we got an earthquake right when it's supposed to be. Okay, I'm going to skip some of the kind of boring ones. You all know about the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser in Assyria. There's a picture there of Jehu, the king of Israel, paying tribute to Shalmaneser. That's described in the Old Testament. The Moabite Stone, about 830 B.C. King Mesha of Moab is mentioned in the Bible. Mesha, king of Moab. You read about him in the Old Testament historical records. And he was a contemporary of Omri, and Omri's son was Ahab, one of the most famous kings of Israel. Mesha, on the Moabite stone, Mesha describes the battles that he had with Omri and with his son. He doesn't name him, but it's pretty clear he's talking about Ahab. At Nebo, that battle took place in 880 B.C. And this stone, by the way, is all of the Moabite literature that we know about. It's all we have in Moabite language. It's about yea big. And you'll see scholars who will pad their resumes by saying, I have studied extensively all existing Moabite literature. And that looks really good on your resume, but it's just a couple of paragraphs. He says, I took from there the, and there's a crack in the stone right there. I took from there the something of, YHWH, Yahweh, the personal name of the Israelite God, dragging them before Chemosh, which was the name of their God. I took from there the something of Yahweh. Boy, we'd love to know what that word was. If that was the word ark, I doubt that it was because it's a plural. He says dragging them before. But apparently, there were some things he took from the temple as part of the battle spoils. and used them in the service of his own God. And that ongoing conflict is described in the Old Testament. Okay, I'm real short of time, so I'm going to give you just a couple more that I think are really cool. They come from about the time of the Babylonian captivity, when Jerusalem was overthrown, the temple was destroyed. One of the key prophets at that time was Jeremiah, and he had a scribe named Baruch, or the long form of his name is Barakiah, which is just the addition of Yahweh's name, blessed be Jehovah, or blessed by Jehovah. And we read about all that in the scripture. Well, there are available in the ancient Near East a series of little, they look like little rocks. They're called bullae. Bulla is the singular. It is simply a hardened form of the old clay seals they used to put on documents. They would wrap them in string and mesh the clay ball up in the string and then fire it. And then you couldn't get the string apart without breaking the seal. These bullae are still around. They look like little rocks. And there are several that have been found that bear the name of Baruch or Barakiah. Both names appear. There is a reference to a man named Jeramiel. Now, turn to Jeremiah 36, verse 26. The king commanded Jeramiel, the son of Hamelech. Hamelech is simply the Hebrew word for the king. So the king commanded Jeramiel, the son of the king, and Sariah. Well, there are bullae that contain the names of Baruch and Jeremiel, the son of Hamelech, the son of the king. Now, we know that there were several legal documents that Jeremiah was involved with. He was told by the Lord to buy a piece of property and to seal up the deed. We know that happened. We know that he created a document with his prophecies, which the king cut up with a penknife and threw in the fire. That might have been sealed as well. And he threw it in the fire. What might that have done to the seal? And here we have little clay bullae with the name of Baruch and with the name of Jerameo. It's just a little too much coincidence for my taste. Last one, this one I really like. Turn to Jeremiah 34. This is the invasion by the Babylonians into Palestine. They're destroying, they're doing a General Sherman act on the south of Palestine. They're just destroying it, leaving it waste. And it says in verse 7 of chapter 34, when the king of Babylon's army fought against Jerusalem and against all the cities of Judah that were left, against Lachish and against Azekah, for these defense cities remained of the cities of Judah. So the last three cities to fall, Jerusalem, Lachish, and Azekah. We have what we call the Lachish letters. They are a series of documents sent from a military garrison in Lachish back to headquarters. We don't know where headquarters was. We assume Jerusalem, but we don't know that. And in these letters, the garrison is saying, we're besieged, we're surrounded, we're starving, we need help. You need to send soldiers to rescue us. It's like the Alamo at Lachish. And they say, the signal fire from Azekah has gone out. Sometime after verse 7 was written, Azekah was the first to fall. And the Lachish letters record, that they had seen that the signal fire was out, so the city was fallen. Lachish is still there. Jerusalem is apparently still there. But the letters completely confirm this little offhanded comment back in a corner of Jeremiah's prophecy that is a verifiable historical fact. Now, I want you to understand that 200 years ago, we didn't know any of this. And you had the rise of rationalism, and critics are saying, well, you know, it's just a book. It's just a bunch of thoughts of pious people about the world and making sense of it and trying to answer the big questions. And we can profit by reading it, but, you know, it's not authoritative, and it's certainly not from God. And it's certainly not historically accurate. Well, we keep digging up stuff, and here's another thing, and here's another thing, and here's another thing. Now, there are still some difficult places. What do you do with those? Scientifically, what should you do with those? You should just say, huh. Let's see what happens. I'm willing to wait. Maybe we'll dig up something. Maybe we won't. That doesn't change my confidence in this book because year after year, dig after dig, little things keep popping up. And we say, you know, at some point you just have to say, I trust it. It's trustworthy. There is more verification of this ancient text than of anything else. And we'll talk about that some in the weeks to come. Okay, I hope that's been helpful to you. A little technical, but I find it entertaining. I really do. And I find it amusing that some people want so desperately not to believe that they simply will refuse to see the evidence that is before them. Okay, let's have a word of prayer, and we'll be dismissed. Thank you, Father, for the privilege we have of studying your word. We thank you that it is trustworthy. We thank thee that it reveals thee, and we pray that you will help us through this book not merely to know the names and the dates and the places, and the personalities and the events, but that we will know you, the author, and that we will walk with you and love you and grow with you under your careful watch, care, and good providence. Help us, Lord, to have that confidence that enables us to walk by faith and not by sight. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.