Biblical Archeology in Egypt with Nate Loper

It's taken a little while for it to go live. OK, 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 6 ,000 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 Nate. 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, BitChute, YouTube, and Let's Church. And that's let's .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 tinyurl .com forward slash, that's the one that leans right,

CFS Santee. I've also started a podcast at podbean .com.

And on there, we are CFS virtually there. 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? 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 geology of the West Coast. And tonight, we're going to 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 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 of those mythologies. The really main thing I really love studying and talking about ancient

Egypt is the apologetics side of things, things about when did we see

Joseph and Jacob enter into Egypt, what was the time frame there, the time frame of the Exodus, what interaction do we see between Israel and Egypt?

And many times, we talk about Egypt oftentimes, and there are some times that 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, 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 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 gonna 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, 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 gonna 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 gonna kind of investigate tonight. We're gonna 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 archeology, that again is one of my favorite things.

So I study and train as an archeologist. 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

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 gonna 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 with some of you guys, if you studied anything about archeology 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 gonna share with you guys this evening is part of my master's dissertation paper. So that is a very interesting, fascinating artifact that I wanna share with you guys.

And so kind of some cool stuff. But we'll just kind of dive right into here. And I wanna 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. 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, maybe 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's 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 archeologists 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 chapter six, verse one, which talks about the reign of Solomon.

And it says, when Solomon began to reign during his 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 timeframe and sorry,

Yul Brynner, Ramses II is not the Pharaoh of the Exodus. There's no archeological 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 timeframe of the

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 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 timeframe places it kind of right around the timeframe of the sojourning in the wilderness, the conquering, going into the promised land.

It's kind of right around that timeframe. 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

Sha, and that's a symbol for Sha. This plant growing up here, this would say Sa or Su, 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 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 desert, live in tents and roam from place to place to place, walking through the desert or 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.

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, 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. And 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 and maybe thousands coming to see and to celebrate for all these days, what they're gonna 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 wanna 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, okay? 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 and it's exactly what they did.

We can see Joshua 8, 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 saying that we are cursed because of our sins.

However, because of, you know, 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 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 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 of 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 of 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 the 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, you know, 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, it would be the 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, what'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 they, 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 oftentimes 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, you know. There 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 and 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, you know, 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'm 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.

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 what we refer to as the lead curse tablet from Mount Ebal. This was discovered by the

Associates for Biblical Research when they were down there doing some excavation work. They've been doing a lot of work in Israel and this whole region.

But during COVID, they couldn't have access to get to a lot of stuff. And so they actually decided they were going to sift through some of the piles of material that were pulled out of there.

Stuff going all the way back to the 80s. Adams Ertal had pulled out some of the fill, the rubble. He went through it, but they said, let's go through it with a fine tooth comb.

Let's use what we call wet sifting. And so they went through there and they actually discovered that there was this tiny little fragment, about two centimeters in size, two centimeters by two centimeters, tiny little small fragment of a folded lead tablet.

And so they would use a stylus, you know, a sharp metal tool or some kind of sharp thing to kind of write things on folded lead or lead.

And then they would fold it over and kind of seal it or close it. Many times lead tablets were used for curses and for things like that or for sometimes land agreements and promissory notes and things like that.

But anyhow, 2019, they discovered this. They were able to do some research on it and use actually some 3D tomographical scanning, kind of like CAT scan.

They couldn't open it up. They actually tried. They tried to open up and actually broke a section off and realized this thing is so brittle.

It's old lead. They can't open it without destroying and damaging the thing. But they use some fascinating new technology, this 3D tomographical scanning.

And what they found on the inside, they believe, are actually a series of letters and deciphering them, they believe what it says is a curse also referencing the god

Yahweh. And what they've made out for it to say is curse, curse, curse, curse by the god

Yahweh. You will die cursed. Cursed, you will surely die. Cursed by Yahweh. Cursed, cursed, cursed.

In other words, if we break our promise with God, we make a solemn promise that we invite a curse upon ourselves.

And interesting. Now this tablet, you may have heard lately, there's some controversy about it on the decipherment.

There are some people on both sides of it that believe the letters are genuine on the inside. There are some who don't believe it.

It's still kind of up for debate. But interestingly, we have in there the name of God, Yahweh.

And so then this actually could perhaps be the oldest known depiction of Yahweh.

We don't know exactly, but it's interesting. It's written in what we call proto -alphabetic or proto -Sinaitic. And so this is an early form of Semitic Hebrew, you might say, before they had the paleo -Hebrew that was used during the time of the biblical kings and judges and things like that.

And certainly before our more modern Aramaic block script Hebrew that we have today. This is some of the earliest known

Hebrew style writing you would see. Fascinating. Again, neat artifact to take a look at, to keep watching and reading about.

A lot of great work has been done there. Associates for Biblical Research go on there, take a look at their work. They've got some fascinating stuff been done on it.

But around this timeframe, we also continue to see some things from the Exodus. So the fascinating thing about these artifacts, the fascinating thing about this altar, you might say, is it gives us, again, a biblical date for the

Exodus right around the same timeframe, OK, right at the end of the 1400s

BC. And also, not long around, not around that same time, we also find another fascinating piece of evidence from Egypt.

This is known as the Amarna Letters. And these are some clay cuneiform tablets.

And these are written from Canaanite and Amorite leaders in Canaan, written to, some of them are written to Amenhotep III, the same guy we talked about with the

Soleb inscription. But most of them are actually written to his son Akhenaten. And so Akhenaten was an interesting pharaoh.

He kind of developed his own form of, you might say, monotheism.

He decided to kind of do away with the Egyptian pantheon of gods and worship only one god he called the Aten, which was symbolized by a solar sun disk.

And so interesting. There's a lot of ideas on why he decided to do that. Maybe he saw there was power in the one true

God and maybe it was his way of trying to also worship one true God without the full knowledge of that, without the revelation that God gave to Moses at Mount Sinai and the

Ten Commandments. Maybe he's trying to abandon all these false gods, knowing and hearing about the power.

We don't know exactly. But anyhow, he moved the capital city to a city he named after himself called

Akhenaten in the region called Amarna. And so there are hundreds of these cuneiform tablets, about 382 of them were discovered.

A lot of them excavated by Sir Flinders Petrie. And they were found there and they are letters written from, again,

Canaanite and Amorite leaders from Canaan, written in ancient Akkadian. This is kind of the lingua franca of the day.

This is the actual script that was used throughout most of the ancient Near East. Some also believe this could have been the script that Moses actually would have written things with, because we don't really see a full development of early

Hebrew quite yet. And we don't think he would have written in the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Those are just not good for long script form.

But the ancient languages used here and certainly used in the land of Midian and places around there and the land of Canaan would have been this kind of written language.

So perhaps some have thought this might be the type of script Moses actually wrote the original, you know, five books of the

Bible in, perhaps. Anyhow, these clay tablets are fascinating because they contain about, oh, 30 of them contain references to a people group known as the

Habiru or the Hapiru. But the Habiru sounds very much like the word

Hebrew. And in Akkadian, this would basically be the same thing. Many biblical archaeologists and even non -biblical archaeologists believe that the word

Habiru is the same word for Hebrew that we would see in this ancient language. And here's a fascinating thing about these people groups, the

Habiru or the Hebrew. There are hundreds of them, about 30 of them mentioned these Habiru.

And here's what it says. Now, this takes place to set the stage. This takes place right around the time frame of the conquest of Canaan.

And we know during this time frame that the Israelite Hebrews were going into that promised land and they are laying waste to city after city after city.

God is going with them. And so they are becoming an unstoppable force. The entire land hears about them.

And of course, the Pharaoh in Egypt would have heard about them. We believe this because we see with Jericho when they go to Jericho, Rahab tells the spies, she says to them, you know, the whole city is in fear and trembling for your

God and for what we hear is happening because we have heard a tale of, you know, we've heard of what happened in Egypt and we've heard what happened in as you're going through the wilderness.

I mean, they know about the power of God at this point. And here are Canaanite leaders writing about these

Habiru people. And here's what they say. EA 286, which EA stands for El Amarna, the location where they were found.

El Amarna, EA 286 says in there, it says all the lands of the king are being plundered by the

Habiru. In other words, at this point in time, Egypt actually had dominance over the land of Canaan for a time.

And it actually continued that dominance until right around this time frame of Akhenaten's time frame.

Anyhow, they had dominance over there. They allowed kings and rulers of city states to continue to dwell and to live there and to kind of maintain the local population.

But if there are problems, they would write to the king of Egypt and the king of Egypt would come in and take care of those problems. And as long as they pay their taxes and the tributes, they were fine.

They were left alone. But anyhow, the rulers of Canaan are now pleading with the king saying, please send help because all the lands are being plundered by the

Habiru. Interestingly, another tablet, EA 288 says, but now the

Habiru have captured the cities of the king. And it makes reference in that tablet to say that these were slaves.

These were once slaves who had become the Habiru. So it's mentioning the Habiru as being slaves.

And now these former slaves are taking the cities of Canaan and they've captured the cities of the king.

And then EA 290 fascinating thing with that one actually says that there's a town near Jerusalem and in there it says

Bethlehem, which is the word Bethlehem that we see today, a town near Jerusalem, Bethlehem by name, a village, which once belonged to the king has fallen to the enemy.

If no archers are sent, the land of the king will be taken by the Habiru people. This seems to be one of the earliest known references to the city of Bethlehem, to the town of Bethlehem.

And so again, about 30 of these letters pleading with the king of Egypt to come and send help. And apparently no help was ever sent.

We don't find any reply letters ever found in archeology. And we know that Akhenaten never did send anybody.

There's no record of any campaigns during this timeframe. It seemed like he was so obsessed with his new city and newfound religion that he didn't really want anything to do with that.

Or maybe, maybe he knew about the power and the devastation of what those 10 plagues on Egypt had done to the economy.

Maybe he knew about what happened the last time a Pharaoh tried to mess with the God of the Hebrews. He knew about the destruction of the army in the

Red Sea. He knew about what was happening as they were going through the wilderness and the provision that God had. Maybe he is saying,

I don't want anything to do with this. I don't want to mess with that God. I'm not going to come to help because I don't want to cause waste or ruin to myself either.

Interestingly, but this correlation, the Habiru people, we see at the same timeframe, the same place, the same people, the same timeframe is what we see in the

Bible. Fascinating stuff. Now, jumping ahead, that artifact there, just roll back for you guys.

I think if I mentioned this, this is actually, these are in the British Museum. So if you go to the British Museum, you can actually see these.

There's one of the things we point out on our tours there in London. And they also have a bunch of them in other museums.

There are some in the Cairo Museum that I've seen there in Egypt. And so lots of these letters and in the

Cairo Museum with one of my favorite artifacts. This is a fascinating artifact.

This is what we call the Merneptah Stele. Or you should actually probably pronounce it

Merem -Tah. That would be a pharaoh. He is the son of Ramses II.

Ramses the Great. Merem -Tah. A lot of people say Merneptah. And so we'll just simply say Merneptah.

This is a stele. It's a big monument tablet with all kinds of stuff written on here that talks about his great powers and things he had done.

Now, if you look at this stele, you probably would think like I did initially, I was thinking, oh, this is probably maybe three feet tall.

Not that big a deal. Two to three feet tall. I had seen pictures of it for many, many years. When I first saw it in person,

I was blown away. This was a lot bigger than I expected. So here is, here

I'm standing next to that stele in the Cairo Museum there. This is a big, huge monument tablet.

Much bigger than I ever expected. And boy, pretty fascinating. But on here, we have a record of all kinds of great things and accomplishments that Merneptah had done over his reign.

A lot of propaganda on here, like it was traditionally done. And so all kinds of stuff is listed on here. But this stone stela that we see here is actually referred to as the oldest undisputed reference to Israel anywhere in the world.

Now, there's the oldest known recording of the name Israel we have in existence.

And again, this is from Egypt. Pretty fascinating. So we have on here a list of all these different places that he had kind of defeated and the laid waste and things like that.

We've got a lot of places surrounding the land of Israel. But on here, we see this.

And so to set the stage again, this is right around the year 1208 to 1207

BC. We kind of look at it. This is the son of Ramses II. And so 1208, this places it biblically during the time frame of the judges.

OK, so this is the time frame of the judges. And what we see here is on here a list of all these different people.

And we see a group of hieroglyphic letters here. Now, again, to teach you guys a little bit of Egyptian hieroglyphics, when we read hieroglyphics, we always read toward the faces of the people or the animals.

So that's one way you can see. In ancient Egypt, they wrote from left to right. They wrote from right to left.

They wrote from top to bottom. It was all kinds of ways. But the way you know how to properly read the signs is you read toward the faces.

So here we see a bird here. This is a vulture or perhaps an eagle. See here, this is kind of a sound or a sound.

There's a face. He's kind of standing here. Here are two people sitting down. So we read toward the faces.

And what we see here is from right to left, the first recorded mention of the word

Israel. And so starting here, this is I. And this is kind of a bolt symbol for is like an

S sound. This symbol here, which is actually a symbol of a sign of a mouth. This says the sound

R, but also can say the sound L. And so it's usually an

R if it's in the middle of a word. And it's oftentimes an L sound kind of at the end. Ancient Egyptians didn't have two different sounds for R and L.

They kind of combined R and L. Even today, there are some Eastern cultures that actually have a hard time with R's and L's.

And so they say them interchangeably. In ancient Egypt, this is what it was. But yeah, we see is R, is

R, another I kind of sound, an A, Israel. And then same symbol we see here.

There was an R before. Now at the end of this word is an L kind of sound. Israel, this is

Israel. This is where we see the word Israel. And then what we end up having here is a, this is a throw stick right here.

And so the throw stick denotes a foreigner, oftentimes used to denote an

Asiatic people. So not necessarily Eastern Asia like we see today or think of, you know, the

Far East. Asiatic simply mean to the east, to Asia, to, and they would refer to people from Canaan and would refer to people from Babylon, especially, or sorry,

Mesopotamia. And so that's exactly where Abraham came from, from Mesopotamia.

We see this kind of curved throw stick, kind of like a boomerang sort of thing. This was used by the

Semitic Asiatics. This was used by Jacob's family when they came into the land of Israel or in the land of Egypt.

And then we see two people seated here, a man seated here and a woman seated behind him. Underneath that, we see these three lines, which is kind of a

R or U symbol, which means a plural, okay? So putting this together, we see

Israel, a foreign people group. And this is fascinating.

This section back here is interesting. The whole description goes on beyond this and it says, Israel, the people basically is laid waste and its seed is no more.

It continues on to say that. Doesn't necessarily mean that he completely destroyed the people of Israel because it actually doesn't say its seed is no more as in like people seed, we sometimes think the seed.

What it literally says in the Egyptian hieroglyphics is Israel is laid waste or Israel is defeated.

It's houses of bread grain are no more. That is the actual symbol.

I've seen them and it says the actual symbols. It's house of bread grain. It's houses of bread grain, which is basically seeds.

You're going out to plant crops, wheat seed and things like that, barley. And so literally it says

Israel is laid waste. Its seed or its grain is no more. In other words, just like a ruling.

Conqueror would do an army coming through and defeat the people and they would take their grain and they would take it so that they couldn't, you know, rebuild and take it for the army.

And so that's what it says. It doesn't say that Merneptah defeated and destroyed the Israelites and wiped them out. It simply says that, hey, we've taken all their grain.

But anyhow, fascinating thing about this that gives us fantastic references in the

Bible. Again, this during the time of the judges. And here we see Israel noted as a foreign people group.

Now that is very different from the other things listed on here. We see other places like Ashkelon listed on there and other cities.

And they are denoted as the name like Ashkelon. And it's actually shown with a foreign city symbol or a foreign nation, a nation, a actual established nation with a king and a kingdom.

Well, on this, we see that Israel is not noted as a king or a kingdom.

It's actually noted as a collective of people. Now, why don't we see

Israel as a kingdom? Well, it's because Israel had no king at this point.

Again, this is during the time of the judges. We didn't have a king until Saul came around, until they begged and pleaded with God for a king.

They wanted to be like the surrounding nations. And God said, no, you don't need to be like the surrounding nations, for I will be your king.

And he established that his priests and his judges will, you know, control and do his work.

But the people wanted to be like everyone else around. They wanted a king. And so later on, we get a king and a kingdom.

But before then, we don't have a kingdom. We have a people group living in this promised land.

And so it's fascinating that on the Merneptah Stele, what we actually find here from the

Merneptah, that this time frame of the judges, we find Israel referred to as a people group.

Again, this is confirmation to what we see in Scripture. Fascinating stuff.

The oldest undisputed reference to Israel that we would see. Another quick artifact we're going to jump into real quick here is the

Berlin Pedestal. Now, this is known as the oldest probable reference to Israel. And the reason

I say probable is the where we see Israel, perhaps is over on this side over here on the right hand side.

And as you can see, this is actually broken off. This is actually in Berlin. The museum there is why it's called the Berlin Pedestal.

On here, we see, again, the similar sort of captives or people that the Pharaoh was saying that he's in charge of.

And similar to what we saw with the Soleb inscription. In here, we actually see this, our different groups we see here.

So we got Ashkelon right here. This is A, a symbol for S, a hill slope for K, a reclining line for an

L, and then a zigzag kind of right here for N. This is Ashkelon. OK, we know that location.

We still have that today. Ashkelon. And then over here, we actually see Canaan or Canaan. Technically, it should be pronounced

Canaan. And so this kind of basket design here and a little zigzag for N and a outstretched hand and a little

N. So what we see here is Canaan or Canaan. So Ashkelon, Canaan. And then what we see here, perhaps if you reconstruct it, is a possible reading for Israel.

And I say it's disputed, not only because it's partial, you can make out enough of it to kind of figure out what the symbol should be.

But not everyone agrees with the reading of this. But again, this dates from an earlier time frame from perhaps the 1300s.

So we're talking, you know, maybe 100 years before the time frame of what we just saw with Merneptah.

But this is the oldest possible or probable reference to Israel. It's pretty fascinating stuff. Again, we find this from Egypt.

And then if we fast forward a little ways down the line, we end up coming to another time frame and another pharaoh that the

Bible mentions. And this is a pharaoh named Shishak. And we see in there, this is taking place during the fifth year of Rehoboam's reign.

And this is a wall, a temple wall down in Luxor today, ancient

Thebes. And on that wall, there's a temple there called Karnak Temple.

And here you can see one of these pharaohs here. And on here are all kinds of other kind of captive name rings, with all kinds of different names, dozens and dozens and dozens of them.

Most of them are cities and places that you see in Israel and in Judah and throughout the land of Canaan.

Now, the Bible tells us at one point, it mentions a pharaoh by the name of Shishak, OK? And it tells us that Rehoboam's time, that Shishak was coming and he basically laid siege to all these places around there.

And during this fifth year of Rehoboam's reign, it says that Shishak was on his way to basically lay siege and to take

Jerusalem. And the king and his rule, his elders decided that they were going to repent and try to get right with God.

And so as a result of that, God tells him, he says, my wrath will not be poured out upon Jerusalem through Shishak.

But he goes on to say, nevertheless, they will become his servants, OK? So in other words, it says,

I will not destroy Jerusalem. However, you will basically have to pay homage to him. You will become his servants.

You'll be subjected to him. Now, Shishak is the name we see in the Bible. And in the

Hebrew, we don't have necessarily the vowels. So we see kind of the sh, sh and the k symbol.

Sometimes in our English, we refer to it, render as a K. It could also be a Q. They make the same sound.

So we see Shishak. And interestingly, at the same time frame, and with a whole other talk, we could do just about this one pharaoh in this time frame.

We see this other pharaoh by the name we oftentimes call him Shoshank or Shashank.

And in the Egyptian hieroglyphics, reading from our right to our left, we see the same pool with lotus plants saying sh, another sh, zigzag n, and a hill slope k or q sound.

So in the Egyptian, it says Shashank. And so we insert the vowels so that we can read it or say it easier.

So we say Shoshank or Shashank or Shoshank, depending on whatever vowel you want to insert in there.

But Shashank, and many believe, in fact, most believe that this Shoshank, Shoshank the first or Shashank is the same kind of transliteration that we see in the

Hebrew Bible for Shishak. And there's a lot of correlation between them, their queens, the events, things that take place.

And so the only difference is this n that is actually in the ancient Egyptian that somehow has been dropped in the

Hebrew, which is not uncommon at all. We actually see a lot of that translations and transliterations where there are some drops or even some swaps of some letters.

Most believe that Shoshank the first is the biblical Shishak. Fascinating confirmation of this on the

Karnak temple. This is referred to as the Bubasite portal gate. It's located on Karnak.

What we see here is Shoshank the first standing here and he's actually held it.

There's a bunch of captives down here that he's got kind of all tied up but he's ruling over them. He's got his kind of royal mace here and he's holding their hair.

Actually, he's kind of worn off here, but he's holding their hair and he's grasping them by the hair. These are a bunch of people from the land of Canaan.

It actually includes people from that time frame, including Philistines that are depicted on here and all these different captive names.

Now on here, we see a list of all of these different names. And so fascinating, though, when we look at this again,

Shoshank or Shoshank, we look at his name as a correlation between the two. But what we don't see on this list is

Jerusalem. We see cities all around Jerusalem, cities in ancient Canaan, cities in Judah, cities in Israel.

But we don't see Jerusalem listed on here. Now, why is that? If you're the ruling pharaoh and you're going to take this land, surely you would go after the capital city.

You would lay waste to these people. But we don't see that. And so the reason we believe that that name is absent from that list is exactly what we see in 2

Chronicles 12. God himself says, my wrath will not be poured out upon Jerusalem through Shoshank.

Nevertheless, they will become his servants. And so what we see is that it seems to be a tribute that was paid to the pharaoh.

In other words, hey, we will give you all this treasure. We will basically empty a lot of the treasures and a lot of stuff we actually believe that came from the temple at this time.

We will give this to you if you promise not to destroy us. And so what we see is that basically this pharaoh was bought off by Rehoboam and the people there.

And a lot of treasure is given to him to kind of pay him off. So they become subjected to him. They become his servants, you might say.

But Shishak, Shoshank spares Jerusalem. He does not destroy it like the other cities.

And so therefore on this list, we don't see the city of Jerusalem. It is not a destroyed city on here.

Pretty fascinating. Now correlating to this, right after this time frame, shortly after Shoshank the first, we have another pharaoh,

Shoshank the second. And this again, this is in the Cairo Museum. I've seen this here.

This actually is kind of a cool, kind of a horse falcon looking thing. This is the solid silver sarcophagus of Shoshank the second.

Now try saying that five times fast. Solid silver sarcophagus, right? Suffering succotash. Anyhow, this is a solid silver sarcophagus of Shoshank the second who comes to play shortly after Shoshank the first.

And interestingly, he's buried in a solid silver sarcophagus surrounded by all kinds of other treasures of gold and silver.

And you might be saying, well, silver, you know, why didn't he get buried in gold? Was he not that powerful? Well, actually in ancient

Egypt, silver was more valuable, was more rare than gold. They had a lot more gold.

Silver was the top of the line. Silver was the most precious thing you could have. So to be buried in a solid silver sarcophagus, there all of a sudden seems to be a massive injection of wealth and of silver into Egypt at this timeframe.

Now, there are a number of biblical archaeologists who believe that the silver we see here from this treasures and perhaps even this very silver sarcophagus, this actually could have been silver that was given by Rehoboam, treasury, from the treasury of Judah and perhaps from the temple that was taken, given to the king and then remade into these treasures that we find from his tomb basically.

So interestingly, what we see here, we see Egypt kind of doing okay for itself, you know, and all of a sudden we see a huge injection of wealth and estimates that there was a lot of wealth given.

So Rehoboam, of course, this is right shortly after the time of King David and of King Solomon and we know the wealth of Solomon at this time, we get to split the division of the

United Monarchy. Now we're now divided between kingdoms of Israel and Judah, Rehoboam and Jeroboam.

Rehoboam, and this is right after, you know, shortly down the timeframe there. What we end up seeing is that the treasures that were stored up there were now taken and given to Egypt at this point.

This in fact could have come from the loot, the treasure from that timeframe. Fascinating stuff. Okay, now we'll wrap up with one last thing, my favorite thing, and the thing

I told you guys that we're going to save till the end here. This is a fantastic artifact, my favorite one of the evening.

This kind of goes back again early, early in time for Egypt and Israel. This is a scarab that again is found in the

British Museum in England. This is not currently on display.

You actually had to get private kind of viewing to be able to see this. This is a scarab that dates back to what we call the

Second Intermediate Period during the 15th Dynasty. This is when we have a people group that come into there, a group of Semitic people that come from the land of Canaan that move into the land and live in the

Egyptian Eastern Delta, this land called Goshen, and set themselves up as being a kind of rich and powerful people group and rise to power from within.

Sounds a lot like the biblical depiction of these Hebrews. In fact, this is the topic of my master's work right now, is on this time frame of identifying the

Hebrews in the Egyptian record and a people group that I believe and many believe that we refer to as the

Hyksos. Now, we sometimes get a bad depiction of the Hyksos based upon the propaganda ideas of a guy named

Manetho, who said that these Hyksos was foreign people that were powerful and mighty and they came through and they defeated the people and some people have falsely attributed the arrival of the chariots to the

Hyksos. There's no evidence that the Hyksos had chariots, nothing that we find from them in the

Egyptian record, no time frame. It just happened to be the same time, so it doesn't mean that they brought it.

It just happened to rise around the same time. But anyhow, on this scarab, again, this scarab was found there. There are about 27 scarabs that bear the name of a person named

Jacob, which, of course, is how you say Jacob. And these scarabs are found in Canaan, Egypt and Nubia, in other words, widespread and has the name

Jacob, which we would say is Jacob. And in fact, there's a signet ring, a royal signet ring of Jacob found in Avaris, the capital city of these

Hyksos people. In fact, the capital city, the exact location of the biblical Goshen. Now, this is a very possible.

In fact, I would say very, very likely this is actually a description or depiction of the name

Jacob, Jacob of the Bible itself. It's the right time frame. It's the right location, the right name and fascinating stuff.

And so to read this, I blew it up a little bit here. So I took this original picture last time

I was in the British Museum. And if you blow it up, you can see in here that it's kind of hard to make out, but I put the letters on here.

Starting at the top, you get Ya, double Q's here, Ya -cub. And then there's this little

R symbol, that mouth symbol. Well, what did I tell you guys at the end of a word that R can also have the same

L sound? And usually at the end of a word, it actually is the L sound. So what we should read this,

I believe, the way I believe we should read this is Ya -cub L, Ya -cub L, or Ya -cub of L or Jacob of L.

Now, that's a fascinating thing because remember earlier we talked about Exodus 6, verse 3, that God told

Moses, your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they knew me by the name

El, which is Lord, El Shaddai, the God or Lord Almighty.

Jacob would have called God by the name El, meaning Lord or God.

So Ya -cub or Jacob of L, this is a fascinating thing because many other rulers and leaders, they would have a name like something of Ra or of Amun and things like that.

They would have a name that they were associated with their patron God that they would worship. Well, on here we have what seems to be the patron

God of Jacob, Ya -cub or Jacob of L, El Shaddai.

And so it's fascinating. Again, we see that same thing. So this to me is a fascinating thing. This is one of the things that I'm featuring in my paper.

So the kind of royal name, why is it in a cartouche? The cartouche was not always only for pharaohs.

It was also used for other rulers. In fact, some other mighty people, important people would have been, would have had cartouches as we see.

But also Jacob and his family would have been rulers of this land. The pharaoh of Joseph said to him and to Jacob, he said,

I will give you this land and you will basically live in it as your own. I will give you the best of this land.

So Jacob and his family were literally given entire Eastern Delta region as their own land.

They became their own rulers of this land. They became their own. They were able to live in there and it became their land.

And the people that we see, this Hyksos people, it's not actually a people. The word Hyksos is a title for one of these rulers.

And that title means overseer or ruler of the lands of the foreigners, which is exactly the right description you would give to somebody like Jacob and his sons as they lived in this land of Goshen as they became rich and powerful.

They were the overseers. They were the rulers of the land of the foreigners or the foreign lands. And so that's exactly what we see in scripture.

Again, confirmation, the right time, the right people, everything lined into there. We could do a whole talk on just this again, but I know we're out of time and I've already probably gone a little bit beyond time here.

So I'm going to wrap up here, kind of turn the page back over to you guys and we can maybe open up for Q &A or whatever you guys would like.

I will be on here as long as you guys would like. But again, fascinating stuff from biblical archaeology related to Egypt.

So there you have it, my friends. That was amazing. Nate, I had a lot of questions

I didn't put down, but most recently is the scarab. Isn't that scarab the beetle that is like a pagan symbol?

Yeah, so a scarab can be used as that. It's also just used as a signet kind of thing.

So let's see here. Can you guys see that one? I don't know if you can see it very well or not.

Pull it back just a little bit. OK, there we go. There you go. So that's a scarab from Thutmose III we can see here.

Now, it was used sometimes in that way, but it was also simply used as a symbol of royalty.

It's kind of interesting. That's one of the interesting things we find. There was a lot of crossover between Egyptian iconography and even the land of Israel and Judah.

King Hezekiah, on his royal symbol in there, we actually find the Egyptian ankh, which nowadays we oftentimes associate with some kind of paganism and all that kind of stuff.

But really, the ankh was really a symbol for life. So we actually see on there, we also see on Hezekiah's symbol and I think some of the other ones, we see like a winged solar kind of thing, which in their minds was a depiction of God.

They didn't want to create an idol that necessarily represented God. So they had actually used that symbol to symbolize

God and whose wings are outstretched, you know, you're covered by the wings and the rays of the sun and the wings are covering over.

So on Hezekiah's symbol, you know, which the Bible tells us he was a good king, we actually see some of these symbols that, whoa, what are they doing there?

Isn't that pagan? Not necessarily. There's a lot of crossover between cultures. And so, yeah, we see the signet symbol for Jacob, you know, probably was part of the culture of that day.

And so. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah, yeah. And they spent a lot of years in Egypt.

So I'm sure they would have picked up a lot of their customs. They certainly did. Yeah. And then

Akhenaten, are you saying was the son of Thutmose the third? Of Amenhotep the third.

Amenhotep, that's it. So Amenhotep the third, Akhenaten, his original name was actually

Amenhotep the fourth. But when he decided to go to this kind of monotheism or some kind of, you know, venerating one

God, you might say, he named himself after this one God, Aten, that's where he got Akhenaten.

And so he changed his own name from Amenhotep the fourth to Akhenaten. And he's the son of Amenhotep the third.

And who do you think was the pharaoh of the Exodus? So a lot of us believe that would be

Amenhotep the second, which would be the grandfather of Amenhotep the third.

Okay, Amenhotep the second. Then the pharaoh after him would be Amen, sorry,

Thutmose the fourth. And then Amenhotep the third. And so that's kind of where we place it.

And a lot of that is using what we call Egyptian high chronology. There's a debate in Egyptian chronology,

Egyptian society today, in Egyptology between some time frames during the 18th dynasty, the

Egyptian high chronology versus the low chronology. And really, it really boils down to one simple thing.

And that was the heliacal observation of a star called Sothis, or today's star we call

Sirius, when that would rise in the east. And it would come up shortly before the sun would come up.

And the kind of first time you could see that star before the sun came in behind it, that was called the heliacal rise.

And it was a very special event because it kind of marked the beginning of the season of Akhet, which was the inundation period of the

Nile. So a big celebration. It was recorded during the time frame of Amenhotep the first, actually. I think it's during his ninth regnal year, something like that.

But Amenhotep the first, we know when that was. So the debate is, was that observation done from either

Memphis and Heliopolis, the traditional site of observation? Or was that done down in Luxor, in Thebes, where the capital was at that point?

Many of us and most of us throughout the time frame has believed it was Heliopolis, the traditional site.

The difference is in the latitude. The observation is different from one place to the other place. In other words, you can't see this event from one city and the other city until a few weeks afterward or something like that.

And that changes the time frame of about 20 years, actually. So the calculations and the dates and the observations we know with modern day's astronomical software, we can calculate when all this would have happened.

And the point of observation is separated by like 300 to 400 miles. And that observation point, if it was one versus the other, changes some dates of these rains of about 20 years.

So traditionally, the high chronology has been the accepted one until the 1960s, when liberal revisionism came into there and they changed a lot of the stuff and they believed it was down in Luxor or Thebes.

I don't find any good evidence of that. In fact, later on, the Ptolemaic period records for us the observation place was actually

Heliopolis and up there, that was a traditional location. So that gives guys like me and Dr.

Douglas Petrovich, we tend to favor that Egyptian high chronology, which shifts some of those dates slightly and gives us

Amenhotep II as the pharaoh of the Exodus. That's a very good outline of that.

I'm going to just refer to the chat here for some possible questions. And then

I'm going to shut off the live stream and the recording, and then we can have a more informal chat.

Fantastic. Yeah, I'm reading through some of them right now as you're pulling some up. So whatever you see, just let me know. Carolyn is asking, this is way early when you're talking about what

Egyptians ate. She wanted to know if they eat crocodiles. No, they don't.

They didn't. They actually venerated crocodiles. They had one of their Egyptian gods called Sobek. And so they, yeah, they had a whole temple like a

Kom Ombo, which was a temple dedicated to Sobek, the god Sobek, they call him. And so to eat something like that would be very bad, as far as I know, unless somehow maybe the priest somehow had some kind of ritual ceremony of sacrifice.

I don't know. But nothing that we've seen the record of that. And it's actually kind of similar to what we see with the

Hebrews, when God is telling Moses and giving the laws and things they can eat not to eat. You know, things like reptiles like that were kind of off the list,

I believe. And so that's also there's a lot of carryover from Egyptian society that we see, too.

A lot of the clean records and things like that, things to eat, things not to eat, ways to take care of yourself and things like that were crossover.

So I don't think they ate any crocodiles. They saw them as a God. And so they wouldn't have eaten them necessarily. Well, my two granddaughters ate alligator when they were visiting me.

Yeah, I've eaten alligator before. It tastes kind of fishy, kind of like fishy chicken, right? That's interesting. Yeah, my littlest one said it tastes like chicken.

I think it's because it was deep fried. But I digress. I had alligator jerky. Yeah. All right.

What else? Bill Morgan said, most people don't know this, but the ancient

Egyptians did not have Zoom meetings. It's true. I'm very disappointed to find that out.

And we did have somebody join who was not happy with the Zoom meeting. So Samsung, I'm very,

I apologize for that. This is how we've always done it. A lot of times, people confuse

Bill Morgan's meeting with my meeting because we have the same name until you get to the end.

We're Creation Fellowship Santee. So I apologize for any difficulty you had getting into the

Zoom meeting. But we did make it complicated just for you.

No, just kidding. I'm seeing some great comments from Jim on here. He outlines

Exodus 20, verse 26 of the verse about not using steps for the altar. Fantastic. He also says this sort of act of repentance, about the scarabs perhaps given, thrown into the altar.

This sort of act of repentance is seen elsewhere in the Bible, burying the false gods. Absolutely correct. So very good.

Very good on that, Jim. Absolutely. One of the reasons that somebody suggested that Hatshepsut was

Queen of Sheba is because her chapel or where she was, what did they call that?

She would have a chapel, but it wouldn't be called a chapel. Dara Bahri. Yeah, her mortuary temple. Yes, mortuary temple.

Yes. Had a ramp instead of stairs. And that was not a typical

Egyptian situation. They generally built stairs, but Queen of Sheba had a, or Hatshepsut had a ramp.

Okay. And then, yes, Jim has many comments here. Linda says, this was wonderful.

We'll be listening again to absorb more. She's traveling. She's always traveling. Thank you,

Jim, for your comments. They were very welcomed. Oh, Bill Morgan, question for Nate.

How do you think the stones at Mount Ebal lasted so long without being distributed by either man or nature?

It amazes him that it's still intact. Yeah. So the original altar there, the Adam Zertal excavated, it was filled in with rubble.

And so, you know, once something gets buried, if it stays buried, it actually can remain protected quite well.

In fact, right here at the Grand Canyon, there's a place down there with a big delta that has like 52 archaeological sites.

And a lot of the excavation work was done in the 60s and 70s. They excavated it, documented it, and reburied it again because covering it back over preserves and protects it much better than leaving it out in the open.

So this altar site, there's actually a bunch of stuff on this hilltop and this altar. Nobody probably thought it was an altar for a long time.

It was just kind of covered by rubble. But when you kind of pull out the debris, you actually realize, okay, there are foundational walls.

There's a structure underneath here. And so by actually being covered, help protect it from the elements. Now, unfortunately, since that work, and even just recently, there's something else that happened.

The local people there that, you know, they're in that region that don't like the record of the

Hebrews being there and the Israelites and all this kind of stuff. They've been kind of defacing it. So recently there were a bunch of tires that were burned on top of it.

And so I think like black tar or some kind of stuff like, and then also recently around there, one of the retaining walls, or they're bulldozing.

They bulldoze some part of some kind of structure part up there to build part of a road nearby. And so the

Israel antiquities group are trying to really push for this to be a protected site. It's actually, it's not, it's in kind of the, what is it?

The Palestinian control or whatever that is. Not necessarily in Israel today because it's in the land of Samaria.

So they're trying to get it preserved and protected. So nowadays, now it's becoming known. Now more people are trying to damage it, unfortunately.

But if it's just a nondescript site for hundreds or thousands of years, yeah, it could certainly remain protected and preserved until recent excavations.

Oh, that's amazing. Steve, Steve has a question. But I'm thinking that we're gonna shut off the live stream and turn off the recording.