Biblical Archeology in Egypt with Nate Loper

Biblical Archaeology and Egypt as a Witness to Scripture

It's taken a little while for it to go live. Okay, we are live. Good evening everyone and thank you for joining us, even amongst these technological issues. Creation Fellowship Santee. We've been meeting for over 10 years in person and presently online.

We are a group of people who come together to learn more about the six day creation account that happened some 6000 years ago. We also welcome any other topic that is closely aligned with the Bible or shows the Bible to be accurate and reliable book that it is, you'll see that tonight with name.

You can find Creation Fellowship Santee on Facebook. We have both a public page and a private page or private group. We also post to four video platforms, which are rumble bit shoot YouTube, and let's church, and that's let's that church, and there are searchable transcripts of our presentations there.

Please like and follow us on these platforms. You can find upcoming and past presentations at tiny URL calm forward slash that's the one that leans right CFS Santee. I've also started a podcast at pod bean .com.

And on there we are CFS virtually there. We, we welcome back, Nate Loper of Canyon Ministries tonight, this is Nate's third time speaking for us. Special thanks to you, Nate for your presentations as they're always informative and entertaining.

I'm going to stop sharing my screen and turn it over to you, Nate, there we go. Fantastic. You ready for me Robin.

Egypt, Israel, and the Apologetic Value of Archaeology

Yes. All right. Well, good to be back with you guys once again so like Robin said this is my third time presenting for the Santee group and so exciting. And previously we've talked about Grand Canyon, and then the last time I think we talked about coastal coastal geology of the west coast.

And tonight we're going to kind of change things up a little bit with a slightly different topic but one that is near and dear to my heart so beyond just geology. One of my favorite things to study and to teach is archaeology, and especially biblical archaeology so I'm going to go ahead and share this screen, and we can kind of start diving right into here.

So, one of my favorite things is biblical archaeology, especially related to Egypt, and so some of my, my schooling my background and my master's degree work is actually in archaeology, with a special emphasis on Egyptology.

And the reason that I love Egyptology so much is not necessarily about all the different timeframes and everything going on of Egypt. Certainly not the Egyptian gods and all those you know mythologies.

The really main thing I really love studying and talking about ancient Egypt is the apologetics side of things you know things about when did we see Joseph and Jacob enter into Egypt. What was the timeframe there, the timeframe of the Exodus, what interaction do we see between Israel and Egypt.

And many times you know we talk about Egypt oftentimes and there are some times that you know Egypt sometimes gets a little bit of a bad rap you might say. We do know that there were things like slavery that took place in Egypt and we sometimes think about that but many times what we actually see in scripture is that there's almost this bond and bane of brotherhood I like to say.

In other words, we do see that yes there was a time when they were enslaved, but also many times Egypt was used by God to shape and to hone his people to be a place of safety and of refuge. And so we see a lot of that and so we see that all the way going back to Abraham's time when there was a famine in the land, Abram and Sarai they went to Egypt and they were saved from that famine and when they left there, they left prosperous.

And then of course when we have Joseph going into Egypt, you know Joseph is there and he kind of sets the stage for his family going through Jacob to come down into Egypt during the middle of the seven year famine.

And so we see this famine taking place but they are saved through it. Not only that, but during that timeframe for the hundreds of years they're there, they become numerous and plentiful and powerful.

And eventually they are enslaved, but even from that they are made a great mighty people and when they exit that location, the Exodus, they come out, you know, as victors basically. And so God in many ways has used the nation of Egypt to shape and to hone his people.

We see many times throughout the time of the kings of Israel and Judah that the Egyptians were actually allied with them. For example, Hezekiah and the Pharaoh was allied with Hezekiah during the time when the Assyrians were coming down through there.

And when Sennacherib was laying a siege to Jerusalem, the Egyptians were on their way to help save the people of Judah. And then finally, of course, we also see Jesus himself, what happens when Herod is trying to kill Jesus and the newborn babes, the angel says to go to Egypt.

And so they go and they're in Egypt as a place of safety. And so many times, yes, we always associate Egypt and the Pharaoh of the Exodus and the bad slavery stuff. But in some ways we almost see this kind of a stepbrother, half-brother sort of relationship you might see that we see between Isaac and Ishmael.

We kind of see that bond and bane of brotherhood continue throughout Scripture. And I just think there's tremendous stuff that we see from the Egyptian side of things that really help us to get an understanding of the true historicity of the Bible, of those events.

And so we're going to talk a little bit about that tonight, you guys. But like Robin said, my name is Nate Loper, and I get to serve as the executive director for an organization called Canyon Ministries.

And so for 27 years now, we have been doing creation-themed trips, tours, and all sorts of events in the Grand Canyon National Park. All this stuff, creation, Christian tours from a biblical creation perspective, which is fantastic.

And so we get to take people from all over the world to see God's amazing creation on display. And, of course, we see that from places like the rim of the canyon. We see that on river trips. In fact, tomorrow I'm leaving to guide a four-day river trip through the Grand Canyon.

And then we also do multi-day backpacking trips down in and across the Grand Canyon. And so we really try to cover this place from top to bottom and everywhere in between. Because if you've seen the Grand Canyon, you probably would agree with me.

There is no better place on the planet to see and to study and to understand what we call flood geology. So not only are we learning stuff, but we're having a lot of fun, like you can see here. We take people on these amazing adventures.

Last year, we served over 3 ,500 people on trips and tours in the Grand Canyon National Park and places up into Utah and locations that we're just continually expanding into. And one of the new exciting things we're actually working on just this last week are expanding our tours to also offer dinosaur trackway tours.

So we can actually go and explore dinosaur trackways. And so really cool stuff. God has planted us in the middle of a beautiful location, not just with the Grand Canyon, but tremendous stuff surrounding us.

And so growing up in this kind of desert southwest environment, I very much like places like Egypt because it reminds me of home here. I've been to Egypt a number of times, and I'll be going back there again this October and then leading another trip, about a 17-day tour that I'll be co-leading next year with Dr. John DeLancey from one of the organizations that I'm on the board for, Biblical Israel Ministries and Tours.

And so we lead tours in Egypt, Jordan, and Israel. And so that is a 17-day tour that we'll be leading through there. And so I'll be doing a lot of the Egypt side. So tonight, we're going to give you guys a little bit of an understanding, an insight into that relationship between Egypt and Israel.

And really what I'd like to focus in on is evidence that we find in Egypt and related to Egypt for the things that we see in the Bible, the things that the Bible talks about regarding those events, regarding those relationships between Israel and Egypt.

We're going to kind of investigate tonight. We're going to take a look, if you will, and investigate some of those evidences and see where the fingerprint of truth lies. As we examine scripture and we examine the archaeology, that, again, is one of my favorite things.

So I study and train as an archaeologist. And so to be able to take something that I can find and say this is direct relation to the Bible or to lead tours through museums there in Egypt or like the British Museum in London.

There were, you know, Rachel, her home country, and near and dear to my heart because my wife is from there. So we've led tours through the British Museum many times, biblical tours that showcase God's amazing history.

And in my opinion, the British Museum has the absolute best collection of ancient civilizations in the Bible. You can start in rooms that have ancient Ur of the Chaldees, where Abraham came from. You can see the ancient Hittites and the Assyrians, the Babylonians, ancient Egypt.

You can go through the time of Greece and Rome all the way to the time of Christ. And so we have an entire day, one of those days, at this tour that we lead, like a seven-day tour. But one of those days is going through the British Museum through the Bible.

And that is definitely my favorite thing to look and to see the evidence that we see there. So some of the things we're going to talk about tonight are really dealing with artifacts that we find and some of the physical features that we find that help us to see and to understand that God's word is true and those events really did happen and some of the correlations.

And so some of these things might be familiar to you guys if you studied anything about archaeology or things in the ancient Near East and Egyptology. But hopefully tonight we've got a few new things.

In fact, the last thing I'm going to share with you guys this evening is part of my master's dissertation paper. So that is a very interesting, fascinating artifact that I want to share with you guys.

And so kind of some cool stuff. But let's kind of dive right in here. And I want to showcase some of these artifacts that help us to see and to understand that God's word is true. So let's dive right in with our first feature of the night.

The Soleb Inscription and the Earliest Known Name of Yahweh

And this is a fantastic artifact known as the Soleb Inscription. This is the oldest known use of the name Yahweh that we see anywhere in the world. And this is found this is an Egyptian artifact. This is actually found in Nubia, so a little bit kind of further south of Egypt there.

This is what we refer to as the Soleb Inscription. And the reason it's called the Soleb Inscription is because it was found at Soleb Temple in Nubia, kind of Nubia, ancient Kush, places that we see down there to the south, south of Aswan, but not too far down there.

This is a pillar that contains a name ring. And so we see there's a name ring on here. And let me we can highlight this for you. This is the name ring that you see there. And this whole figure here is actually depicting a prisoner that you would see.

And you can see his hands are bound behind him. And so in Soleb, at Soleb Temple, there is a number of these kind of prisoners or captives, not necessarily meaning that they were actually captured but simply meaning that the pharaoh himself is proclaiming that he has the power over these people and they are subjugated beneath his feet.

And so there are numbers of dozens and dozens of these people listed on here. And so these kind of captives saying that the pharaoh is in charge of them. And in this name ring, we actually see the name of a people group.

Now, this is dated to around the year oh, this is about 30 years into the reign of Amenhotep III. And so he was kind of a pharaoh that lived, oh, around 1407. We kind of say to 1370 BC. And so if you know anything about Egyptian history and biblical history, this is around the timeframe, about 40 years almost, after we see the biblical exodus take place.

Now, most of us conservative biblical archaeologists would place the exodus right around the year 1446 BC. And so that date is given to us, we would see, or derived, I should say, from verses like 1 Kings 6, verse 1, which talks about the reign of Solomon.

And it says when Solomon began to reign, during this time that he began to build the temple, and this was 480 years after the exodus date. So we have kind of a rooted date, because most of us would agree that Solomon began to reign around the year 970 BC.

And so you kind of go back in time, and that 480 years from the time he started building the temple during his reign, and we land right around the year 1446 BC. And so that's there. It's also an interesting thing we'll talk about later, but also seems to be confirmed by Judges 1126, which also tells us that at that point, during the time of the judges, that Israel had been living in the land for 300 years.

And so it gives us a time frame. And sorry, Yul Brynner Ramesses II is not the pharaoh of the exodus. There is no archaeological evidence for that. It goes against what we see in scripture. It goes against what we see in Egyptian records.

But this kind of place is what we see, our time frame of the Egyptian exodus from Egypt in the mid -18th dynasty. And the best evidence that I and some of my colleagues look to is right around the year of a guy named Amenhotep II.

Pretty good stuff. That's a completely different talk. We could do a whole different time, Robin. Tonight we're just talking about some of these artifacts. But anyhow, this is during the reign of another Amenhotep, Amenhotep III, who comes in a little bit further down the line.

And so Amenhotep III comes in. He's basically the grandson, you might say, of Amenhotep II. And this time frame places it kind of right around the time frame of the sojourning in the wilderness, the conquering, going into the promised land.

It's kind of right around that time frame. And so again, on here we see this name ring. And this name ring, I'll highlight the hieroglyphs for you right here. In the middle, what we see is that it reads to us the Shasu of Yahweh or Yahuwah, which would be the earliest kind of known rendition of the word Yahweh.

And so we'll teach you guys a little bit of Egyptian hieroglyphics tonight. You'd see this kind of symbol right here. And this symbol here is kind of a pool with lotus plants growing out of it and some flowers.

And this in Egyptian would basically say shah, and that's the symbol for shah. This plant growing up here, this would say suh or suh, combined with this quail chick right here, which also says oo sound.

So shasu is what you would see here, shasu. And then these two kind of reeds growing up here would say yah. And then here, this kind of house symbol, the symbol for house is an H sound. So Yahuwa or Yahweh.

This is an early known name for Yahweh. In fact, the earliest known depictions of Yahweh or the writings of it aren't necessarily the Yod-Heh-Wah-Heh that we typically see today, that we kind of get Yahweh from, but Yod-Heh-Vav.

And so we would see here Yahweh, which is kind of the earliest known depictions. It's also what we see in ancient Israel. The earliest known written name of God would be kind of that. So anyhow, we see down here, we see Yahweh, the shasu of Yahweh.

So the question a lot of people ask is, what in the world does this word shasu mean? Okay, we know Yahweh, that's the God of Israel. We see that come in Exodus chapter six, verse three, I believe it is, where God is speaking to Moses and God says to Moses, your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they knew me by the name El Shaddai, basically Lord Almighty.

They knew me by the name El, but my true name is Yahweh. And that's where we first see God give his name to Moses. So this is the God of Israel. So who are these shasu people? Well, the shasu in Egyptian, it's also related to a similar word in ancient Akkadian.

Shasu basically means a nomad or a desert dweller, a wanderer. And the word shasu kind of has been said to literally translate as dusty ones, which makes a lot of sense. Those who live in the deserts, those who don't live in cities, but live in the deserts, live in tents and roam from place to place to place, you know, walking through the deserts are covered by dirt and stuff.

They are the dusty ones, the dirty ones. So shasu is kind of almost a derogatory term, but it basically means a wanderer or a Bedouin type person, which is actually the perfect description for the Hebrews, especially going all the way back to the time of Abram.

You know, God called Abram and then gave him the name Abraham. And he said, you will be the father of many people, but you will live in a land, not your own. You will be a sojourner in the wilderness in a land, not your own.

And so Abraham, unlike most everyone else, and unlike Lot who lived in the cities, Abraham chose not to live in the cities and God called him out of there. He dwelt in the desert. So he and his descendants, which was not just Jacob and the line of Jacob and the line of Israel, but all the other descendants that also would have been from Abraham.

Remember, father Abraham had many sons, right? There were a lot of those, even the lines of, we see going on Jacob and we see Esau. Esau would have also been a line of Abraham. He also would have been a Shasu.

His whole family, all the family of Abraham would have become these desert dwelling Shasu, these wanderers. But here we have a specific description that tells us who these Shasu were. These are the Shasu of Yahweh, a specific denotation for a specific people.

And we don't get that name Yahweh given until we end up seeing God give it to Moses shortly before the Exodus takes place. And of course, for the next 40 years after the Exodus, they are wandering through the wilderness.

It's exactly what's taking place. They are wanderers in the wilderness. So you fast forward to the timeframe of the conquest of Canaan and the people, the Hebrew Israelites are now moving into the promised land and they're becoming a powerful force.

Of course, you know, everyone's knowing about what's happening there. And Amenhotep III says, basically, I have power even over these Shasu of Yahweh. It's a list of many, many people that are listed on there.

Again, this is the earliest known use for the name Yahweh. And I think that's fascinating. And that's actually from Egypt. So the first recorded name we have for the Hebrew God, there is actually from Egypt.

And again, this is from the Soleb temple, which was erected in celebration of Amenhotep III, his 30th year on the throne. If a Pharaoh happened to last for 30 years, they would have a big celebration known as the Heb Sed festival.

And they would have a big celebration. They would also check and see if the Pharaoh was still fit enough to be the ruler and the King. So he would have to run all kinds of exercises and laps around things.

You have to throw spears and shoot bows and arrows and show his proudness and his might, and really to boast about himself. So naturally at this Heb Sed festival with all the hundreds of people, maybe thousands coming to see and to celebrate for all these days, what they're going to show is his power and might over all the surrounding nations and people groups.

And so the Shasu of Yahweh is one of those people groups listed on there. And I think it's fascinating. The oldest known use for the God of the Bible, Yahweh. Pretty cool. Now right around this timeframe, shortly after this, again, we have the conquest of Canaan taking place.

We have another fascinating thing that I want to talk about, and that is the Mount Ebal altar and tablet. So here you can see a depiction of two different mountains. We have Mount Gerizim over here on the left.

We have Mount Ebal on the right to kind of almost like twin looking mountains. In the middle here, we have ancient Shechem. This is the place where Jacob would have been dwelling, dwelling in between these two mountains.

Now, interestingly, when they go back into the promised land, one of the early places that they arrived to that Joshua leads them to is to Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim. And one of the reasons they do this is because Moses tells them this is what they were to do.

Deuteronomy 27 verse 11 says, On that day, Moses commanded the people, when you have crossed the Jordan, these tribes shall stand on Mount Gerizim to bless the people, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Joseph, and Benjamin.

And these tribes shall stand on Mount Ebal to deliver the curse. Reuben, Gad, Asher, Zebulun, Dan, and Naphtali. So what we're seeing here is that they were going into this promised land and the nation was to be divided.

Half of them were to stand on Mount Gerizim. The other half were to stand on Mount Ebal. And so what was going to happen is these tribes were going to be standing there and they were actually going to be proclaiming both blessings and curses.

Now, blessings of, as a people group, we devote ourselves to the God Yahweh and we will abide by his covenant. We will maintain our promise that we have made to him. And as we, as a nation, maintain the ways of God, may we be blessed by him is basically what they were declaring.

They were rededicating themselves to God. And the other half of the nation stood on Mount Ebal and said, and if we break our promises with God, if we, you know, break the covenants, if we stop doing these things, we invite a curse upon ourselves.

It was basically a solemn oath. It was an oath event, a promise keeping before God. And so Moses said, when you go to the land, this is what you shall do. And what we see is that they went to that land.

It's exactly what they did. We can see Joshua eight verse 30, and it says at that time, Joshua built an altar on Mount Ebal to the Lord, the God of Israel, just as Moses, a servant of the Lord had commanded the Israelites.

He built it according to what is written in the book of the law of Moses, an altar of uncut stones on which no iron tool has been used and on it, they offered burnt offerings to the Lord and they sacrificed peace offerings.

In other words, on Mount Ebal, the mountain of curse, they were to proclaim curses upon themselves. If they broke the promises with God and on that, they also built an altar to basically remove that curse.

And it was a symbolic way of saying that we are cursed because of our sins. However, because of, you know, this, the sacrifice that we can make to God, he was able to remove that sin, right? He's able to cover that over.

And so it says that he built an altar. Now, here is a fascinating thing. Back in the 1980s, an archeologist from Israel named Adam Zertal came to Mount Ebal and he discovered what turned out to be many believe is an altar, which is what you see here.

This main structure is a main altar platform surrounded by a whole other bunch of walls and structures and things associated with it. There's an altar that was discovered in the early 1980s by Adam Zertal, and he excavated this altar and it was kind of covered in by rubble and things like that.

And when they were excavating it, they were pulling out materials from in there and they're sifting things and they're looking for artifacts to kind of try to find dates and what this altar could have been.

It looked very much like an altar structure. This is kind of a sideways view, but interestingly, when they examined it, they realized this altar is made from uncut stones. In other words, it wasn't shaped, it wasn't chiseled.

It wasn't done like the rest of the Canaanites usually made their altars. This was uncut stone. And another fascinating thing, there's a ramp right here. Hopefully you guys can see that as I'm pointing it out.

There's a ramp right there on the top right. That ramp actually leads up to the main altar sacrifice platform. And unlike a lot of the Canaanite altars, which actually use steps going up it, this is a ramp leading to the altar, which is fascinating because when God is giving the law to Moses, talking about building the altar, he says, you shall build the altar with a ramp leading up to it.

Do not build it with cut stones and also do not build steps upon it. And the kind of funny reason, he said, the reason not to build steps is because if you're walking up the steps, you might show your nakedness, basically.

In other words, if you're, you know, giving a sacrifice and you've got this big kind of long dress-like thing and you're stepping up on the steps, somebody down below might be able to look up that skirt, you know, and say, hey, that's not good.

So God tells him, build a ramp so you're not stepping up on two steps, so your nakedness might not be revealed, basically, upon the altar. And so it's an interesting fact that we find this is a ramp leading up to here.

Now, when Adam Zertal excavated this, here's a picture you can see on the left-hand side. This is actually from one of my papers that I wrote a couple years back for my master's work there. I featured this in one of my research papers.

Their structure, the main altar structure, is the ramp you would see right here on the left coming up and a square-shaped circular structure here. And the original oldest section is actually right in the very middle.

The original part of the altar, they say, is right here in the middle. There's a circular structure right there in the middle. That's the first section. And then they expanded it over time. So it seems that this round circular structure was the original altar.

And then over the next couple hundred years, during the time of what we believe the judges, they actually expanded this, and this became a sacred kind of ceremonial site. Anyhow, when they were excavating this original section all the way down to the very first strata layer, in other words, when it was first built, Adam Zertal excavated, he found two Egyptian scarabs that you see over here.

Now, pretty neat. First of all, what are Egyptian scarabs doing way over there? Secondly, they're also fascinating because it helps give us an understanding of the dates involved because you can kind of correlate the depictions of them, what the context is, what the content is, the stylistic designs.

Just like art and styles change today, well, over the hundreds and hundreds of years of Egyptian history, different styles change. And so you can take a look at them. I've got literally entire books of Egyptian scarabs that have different dates, and you can kind of look at them and figure out their dates and times.

I've got a number of Egyptian scarabs in my collection here. After I'm done talking, actually, I'll be able to show you one that's very similar to the one you see on this screen. Anyhow, what they found were two Egyptian scarabs which helped give us a date for the foundational timeframe of this original altar right in the middle.

One of those scarabs we see here, this is a scarab from the pharaoh Thutmose III. Now, Thutmose III was one of the most powerful pharaohs of the Egyptian 18th dynasty. He was known as the Napoleon of Egypt.

He had a reign of about 54 years. This pharaoh, Thutmose III, is what many of us believe to be the pharaoh that Moses fled from and the pharaoh that dies shortly before he comes back to Egypt. If you look at this timeframe, Moses has gone, he flees, and a plain reading of Scripture gives us an understanding is the same pharaoh that he flees from is the same pharaoh that dies right before he comes back.

Because God tells Moses, He said, Behold, those who are seeking your death are now dead themselves. Only Thutmose III reigned long enough to be the pharaoh of 40 years while Moses is in Midian. Very interesting point.

His son, Amenhotep II, would be the pharaoh of the actual Exodus, the new kid on the block, which is actually matching exactly what Josephus tells us. The Jewish historian Josephus writes about the pharaoh of the Exodus and he tells us that the pharaoh of the Exodus had only recently acquired the government.

In other words, he was a brand new pharaoh on the scene. No way was it Thutmose III who was quite old at this point. That doesn't match the history. It doesn't match the biblical account, I would say.

And it doesn't match the chronology that we see either in Egyptian chronology. We look at the Egyptian high chronology. Anyhow, Thutmose III would be the pharaoh of that time. On this, the scarab is actually turned to the side.

The reason we call it a scarab is if you flip it over, the top side actually features a scarab beetle. And the scarab beetle was looked at from Egyptian history as being kind of a symbol of everlasting life, almost a reincarnation.

And so the scarab beetle was used as a depiction of that. And on the underside would be kind of the name or the feature or artistic designs or whatever you might want to carve on the bottom. Now this is turned sideways.

This is the top up here where you see this lizard or gecko. This is the bottom down here. And it's hard to see here, but on the side, we actually have a depiction of Thutmose III. He is holding a bow, which symbolizes that he was a great, powerful ruler.

He was a man of might. So here he is kind of seated holding a bow. And over here on this side, it's on the top section here, but on the right-hand side of the actual scarab, if you turn it correctly, this is the name ring called the cartouche of the pharaoh.

And it's hard to see. And these are pretty small, only about an inch in size, sometimes even smaller than that. I've got one that's about three-quarters of an inch. I've got another smaller one that's actually only about a half an inch.

But here we see the name of Thutmose III, his Egyptian royal throne name, and that is Min Keper Ra. In the middle here, we have the symbol here, Min, and then Keper, Keper beetle, and then the symbol Ra.

Min Keper Ra was the throne name for Thutmose III. His birth name was Thutmose, or Thutmose. His royal throne name that he took when he ascended the throne was Min Keper Ra. And so we see here, this is a scarab of Thutmose III.

The other scarab they found is another one more artistic in design. It actually has some crowns of lower Egypt there, the Deseret crowns. But what we see on here, the stylistic designs places this scarab into what we call the second intermediate period to the Egyptian New Kingdom period.

Fascinating because this is the exact time frame that we see the Israelite Hebrews living in Egypt and at Exodus. And so coming out of Egypt, it seems that maybe somebody would have brought this scarab with them.

Now, why would they have done that? Well, the scarabs of Thutmose III, many of them were made in the thousands. In fact, I have two of them in my collection. I have two of the scarabs that are 3 ,500 years old from Thutmose III.

I can show you guys a little show and tell later. But these scarabs were often looked as good luck charms because the pharaoh was a powerful man. He was great and mighty. So if you carried an emblem with his name on it, it might give you good luck.

Now, why in the world would they carry them out of there? Well, they came out of Egypt being immersed in that culture, probably had a lot of stuff going on that they shouldn't have. We know that that definitely took place.

But the big question is, why in the world were these two scarabs found in the foundation deposits of this altar? Now, we don't certainly know exactly why, but there are two main reasons of thought. Perhaps as an altar of curse, maybe they threw the scarab of Egypt with Thutmose III, the pharaoh of Egypt, into the altar of curse as a way to also curse this pharaoh.

In other words, curse be the land of Egypt, curse be the pharaoh. That could be something associated with that, perhaps. But I kind of like another idea that has been proposed, and that could be that as they were coming into this land, as they were rededicating themselves to the god Yahweh, they were getting rid of stuff that they should not have had.

This was right after the conquest of Ai. So during this time frame, this is Joshua 8, verse 3, what we see there, it says that Joshua built an altar on Mount Ebal to the Lord, the God of Israel, just as Moses, servant of the Lord, had commanded the Israelites.

This takes place after Jericho, after Ai, and if you've seen the power of God literally lay waste to an entire city like that, and you've seen what happened to Achan when he decided to take some of the riches from Jericho, all this kind of stuff, you're realizing I don't want anything to do with anything other than this god of our people.

It could be that this Thutmose III scarab and the holdovers of Egypt were thrown into the sacrificial altar pit as a way to get rid of this, to say I don't want anything to do with that. I am dedicating myself to God, and I'm getting rid of all this stuff, of any foreign gods, of any foreign deities.

I don't want anything to do with this. I am dedicating myself to God because that was what the whole ceremony was all about. So fascinating that we find these. This correlates to the time frame, we believe.

We believe that this altar, the altar like you saw before, this altar is believed by many archaeologists to be the altar that Joshua himself built, at least the initial middle section here, and then added to.

And so interestingly, another recent find, not going all the way back to the 80s, but 2019, there was another fascinating artifact that was found there. You may have heard of it. This is referred to as the lead curse tablet from Mount Ebal.