Apologetics Session 8 - The Bible - Part 4

Prayer for the Church and Upcoming Ministry Events

So many things on our hearts and minds, and we first all wanna lift up your holy name, Father. You are a great and a wonderful God. Father, full of truth and mercy and righteousness, and Lord, you are just incredible with what you have created and how you sustain life and create life.

And Father, we just wanna sit before you and learn some things about what you have done throughout history. And Lord, with that, Father, we also, Lord, bring some very much needed prayers to you, Father.

We think of this family who has lost their mother, for this young girl, Rachel, who has lost her mother, and also for the husband, John, who's lost his wife. Father, we pray for that family. Father, please be with them.

Please comfort them, Lord. Lord, we lift up Bob Nichols and his family, Father, as they're trying to close on a house and sell a house and get everything straightened out. With that, we pray that you'd be with them, and especially, because Sue's supposed to have an operation the same day as all this kind of goes down.

So we pray for Sue, and we pray for Bob. Lord, please help them, and if they need any help, Father, maybe be willing to jump in if that's needed. We thank you for the evangelistic outreach on Thursday, and we pray for all the folks who will be part of that.

We're so grateful for that crew, and we'll pray, Father, that, Lord, your spirit will move among them, Father, and touch many hearts, and also for Good Friday service, Father. We're so thankful for that, that we can, Father, remember your great sacrifice, and then the Easter morning sunrise service, and then the Easter services.

I'm just very grateful, Father, that you're moving in the hearts of so many people in so many ways, Father, and, Lord, that you would do the same for our group tonight, Father. We pray in Jesus' name.

Amen. Amen. Okay. I'll stay up here for a second, but I'll get tired, so I'll sit down. So, very exciting, right? What Matt went over was thrilling. The fact that not only the Lord created his word, and he gave us the evidence of the manuscript over the years that Matt had compiled, all this information for us to show us how the textual basis for our Bible has been preserved and maintained, discussion about how the translations were made, and we can know, and actually, I don't have a Bible with me, but that the Bible we have in our hand was actually what was written, and the authors knew in their minds.

They wrote down what they wanted to write down. They were not trying to make up stories. They were trying to record events as they happened, and as God leaded them to, and as Matt said as well, that all of the scripture was God-breathed, that it was inspired by the Holy Spirit himself, and he was the author using men as the instruments, and it was just extremely exciting, and then comparing the other religions, the other textual ancient manuscripts and ancient documents.

So, we're there right now. So, we know the Bible was written, and it has been captured, and what was written is in our hands, but the question is, was what was written true? Matt actually didn't try to answer that question.

Archaeology as Evidence for the Historical Truth of the Bible

Is what the Bible says true now? That's very important. We've already talked about if there's truth in the world at all. Can we determine if there's truth at all? Now, we're going to see what truth we can learn about the Bible.

So, we're going to turn to archeology tonight, believe it or not, and I think we need to ask ourselves some questions about the Bible. Is it a collection of poetry? Well, there's certainly some poetry in it.

Is it a collection of legends and mythical writings? The answer to that is no. The Bible was written as a historical document with an active God in the lives of people throughout history, and that is so important.

I'm going to sit down and read some of the things I have here in a second, but you need to realize that if you're talking about historical events and the Bible, it's extremely important that we understand that the Bible maintains a truthful record of the historical events that it records.

Now, what do we say about other religions? Matt, last week, talked about the Book of Mormon. Well, the Book of Mormon also tries to have a description of historical events, and it does. It talks about this group of people moving from the Middle East into the South Americas, and there's wars in there.

There's talks about what kind of lifestyle they had, how the Incas and the American Indians came out of that group. Well, there's no archeological or DNA evidence that corroborates those statements. There's talks about elephants being over in South America.

There's talks about tools being used, steel tools before steel was invented. Many, many, many mistakes, and no corroborative archeological evidence. That's a problem. If you're writing a book that's supposed to be recording historical events as God works in them, that's a problem.

Other religions, let's say the Eastern religions, aren't necessarily that concerned with historical events. Why? A lot of the Eastern religions write in Proverbs. They're very hypothetical questions, theoretical questions.

It is more poetic. It is mythological and legendary, but it's more like, if a person is put in this situation, what should that person morally do? And those are the kind of questions that Eastern religions answer, but there's not historical basis in it.

And I have a real issue with that because I wanna know that there's an active God who cares about human history and who's active in human history, and if he is so, we have the book that has recorded what he's done throughout the ages.

A book that just says, okay, here's a hypothetical story, and if this person is going to go to war against this nation, what is the moral implications of those things? It's almost like reading a fictional novel.

Well, the Bible isn't like that. So, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, some of the other documents, writings of Confucius and whatnot, very proverbial in things, but not historically based with an active God.

So, let's look into what the Bible says about itself and see if we can discern if the Bible accurately recorded things in history. Oh, one less, one less. So, as I said before, it's not a collection of mythical writings and it is not to be interpreted as such.

If the historical content of the Bible cannot be trusted, the Bible itself cannot be trusted because it was written as a document that recorded events that we are to believe. Genesis was a true record of what happened when God created the world and worked among the nations at the beginning of his creation.

So, how in the world are we going to tell if events 3 ,000 and some years ago were actually true? We are going to turn to archeology to tell us whether the Bible recorded events as true or not. And we do have some issues with archeology.

We need to keep in mind that archeology is, I'm going to say it's an imperfect science. When an archeologist discovers things, they always have a presupposition or they look through the lens of kind of the mindset they have at the time.

For instance, well first, archeology isn't a repeatable scientific method, right? Events in history happen once in time and they are not repeated. So, if a person finds a piece of pottery at one site, that was it.

There's no possibility of that piece of pottery ever being created again. That person has to dig up that piece, interpret it for what it is, and the best one, the best explanation for the data that is collected is often the way the archeologist makes a determination or a conclusion.

But there's not a repeatable test like we think of in our scientific method. So, archeology, you have to know that going in, that we're going to be interpreting pieces of evidence that are gathered at one point in time.

Now secondly, archeology is definitely going to be fragmentary, meaning that you are not going to define or discover every single thing that happened in a city or a town or a population when you dig through and sift through the rubble.

You're going to find bits and pieces and fragments. Sometimes you're going to find incredible things that you didn't expect to find, things that are huge and have a lot of information on it. But again, you still have to interpret the data.

It's interesting because while I was putting this together, archeology really isn't as mature as we think it is. We think of it as, oh, archeology's been around since the beginning of time, since we were always digging up stuff.

Not really. The statement here, it says, it has been estimated that only about 3 of the 5 ,000 sites surveyed in Palestine or of the 10 ,000 sites in ancient places in adjacent lands have been systematically examined at this point.

And even that statement, the 3 we're talking about, that has really only blown up and blossomed since about 1850. It really has not been a pursued science until that time. So the people living before 1850 really didn't have a lot of discoveries and things.

They had some ancient writings and they knew about certain things. But archeology has really been a new science to say over the last 170, 180 years or so, which is kind of mind-blowing to me. And what they're discovering every day is also mind-blowing.

What I was gonna say is when I started this, Rich started sending me stuff which was very current and I did not include it in here. Ivan sent me stuff which was very current and I did include a link to that at the end.

But there are discoveries all the time that are proving out more and more things that we were hoping to be true or maybe not. But very interesting that this science has taken off in these last several years.

Now, you have to be honest with yourself. I talked about presuppositions just a second ago. If you're examining evidence and you want it to say a certain thing, that's bad science, that doesn't work. And if you are a biblical apologist and an archeologist, you need to be honest with the data.

When you see the data and you think it might contradict something, what you do in that case is you write down the results, you write down the data that was presented and you say, okay, it looks like this happened, but it's possible something later on down the line in archeology might prove that that statement might not be true.

So there's a lot of that that happens in archeology where there are things that are discovered that are newer that gives a much clearer picture at times. So saying that, I'm gonna read this paragraph here.

It says, in 1800s, there were many skeptics about the truth of the Bible because archeology hadn't taken off at that point. People thought, you know, the Bible talks about this great city Nineveh and there's books of the Bible that are dedicated to talk about Nineveh, Nahum and Jonah, certainly one, but you know.

And they're like, well, this city didn't even exist. How can we trust the Bible? Some thought that the Hittites never existed because they didn't have any evidence of the Hittites. And so they said, well, the Bible must be wrong.

How can we trust the Bible? Well, if you Google your Hittites right now, you're gonna find reams of information about the Hittites. But in the early 1800s, that wasn't the case. So moving into the 19th century and beyond, which is the 1800s, a door of information, as I said, was uncovered that opened up civilizations that had long been under the dirt.

You know, Greece we know pretty well because there's a lot of documentation from Greece, but civilizations like Babylon, Egypt, Assyria, the Hittites, other cultures, you know, came to life again, the Philistines, Persia, and it was a tremendous boon and it still is a tremendous boon of information.

Just fantastic. So with those things said, let's push on. And most of the work we're gonna do tonight is gonna be in the Old Testament. The reason is, is because the New Testament is much more, I'll say, contemporary.

It's still ancient history, but the documentation we have from the Roman and Greek world really proves out most of the events and the cities and places. So those things are not in question as much as the things in the Old Testament.

The Hittites, Nineveh, and the Reliability of Old Testament Records

So let's talk about these Hittites. Who are these Hittites? Okay, well, they're mentioned in Genesis 11 and Genesis 15, but as I said, in the 1800s, everyone thought, these people don't exist. We haven't found a thing.

Well, in 1862, and I'm not gonna read all of this, but there was a Frenchman, George Perrault, who found a tablet with a lengthy hieroglyphic inscription to it, but they didn't know how to interpret it.

They didn't see these types of hieroglyphics before, so they were like, well, we're not sure what this is. So they just kind of tabled it, and this was found in Turkey. So if you get an idea of where Turkey is, it's gonna be up and then to the left of Israel.

So then later on, we have some Americans in 1870 strolling through Hamath, and they noticed stones that had been reported, and they found some other stones, and these discoveries were 200 kilometers north of Aleppo.

Now, Aleppo is a city in Syria, and so now you're talking, if I'm looking at it myself, so Turkey's over here, Assyria's up here, and it's north. Okay, so we're talking a pretty big expanse, but the same kind of hieroglyphics were on the same, the tablets here.

So then in 1876, excavations at Carchemish. Now, this is 100 miles northeast of Aleppo, so now we have here, here, and here. So we have a big expanse of territory now, and it still had these inscriptions on it.

There was an archeological convention, Society for the Biblical Archeology in London, and a scholar named Archibald Henry Sace announced his conviction, despite the critics, that the monuments were all attributed to the biblical Hittites, meaning that not only they existed, but their empire was huge, big, very big, really the size of the Assyrian Empire or the Roman Empire, almost.

So it's like, ooh, gosh, we didn't hear about these folks before, but now we think that, well, it says the next year, the new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was published. That's not a religious document, folks.

That's a historical document, and under the heading of Hittites, there were two pages describing the discovery of this civilization. And then in 1884, an Irish missionary published a book called The Empire of the Hittites, which he presented to a massive scholarly evidence that defied resistance.

There was no question that these folks existed, and there was a civilization behind them. There were a lot of skeptics, folks, but the Bible was right, and everyone knows that the Bible is right now because, like I said, if you Google the Hittites, you're gonna get to see everything that we believe we know about them now, and I'm sure we're gonna find out more as we go.

Now, what about Nineveh? I didn't write down a lot about Nineveh, but again, this was a dig in the 1800s, and layered, Austin Henry found outlines of a royal palace. He was unearthing huge slabs of alabaster.

I can't imagine digging in these places and finding these huge things. A palace depicting the power of the Assyrian king and the groveling submission of his enemies. Within three or four years, layered had unearthed the civilization of ancient Assyria.

Until then, nothing more than a name mentioned in the pages of the Bible, and had filled the British Museum with sculpture and writing from the birthplace of urban civilization, the Assyrians. In 1849, his accounts of his excavations, Nineveh and its remains became an immediate bestseller as the whole world is mesmerized by these discoveries and how immense and beautiful and ornate these cities were that these people were unearthing.

Just imagine, but again, Nineveh, a lot of people doubted that it ever existed. The Bible was right again. Now, how about that flood? A lot of questions about that flood, right? Well, it's interesting that most of the skeptics who would say, well, this biblical account of a worldwide flood, it just couldn't be this miracle.

They're the same people that would say we've had how many ice ages over the last millions and millions of years where ice covered the earth or ice covered most of the earth? And that's the way they explain some of the evidence of the fact that there's crustaceans on the top of mountains and things like that.

Well, what about the flood? Do we have good historical evidence that would tell us that there was a worldwide flood? Okay, well, why do I have the Assyrians up here? The Assyrians have a story very, very similar to the biblical account, and it's called the story of Gilgamesh.

Yeah, Epic of Gilgamesh. Epic of Gilgamesh. The story is about a world drowned by a flood and a man who builds a boat and a dove released in search of dry land. Does that ring a bell with anybody? Yeah, so this archeologist, he discovered, he realized he was looking at a version of Noah's Ark, but the book was not Genesis, it was the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Written in the dammed clay, and it's actually, the date of it was 1800 BC, which is very, very old, this dammed clay document they found. So what's in this Epic of Gilgamesh? Well, this is a statue of King Gilgamesh.

I think I have his name right. I don't think it's different from the story. I think his name is Gilgamesh. And you see him holding an animal here. I think there's supposed to be a snake down here. Well, animals were taken aboard this vessel that he built so that the world would be able to be replenished again.

Again, very similar, right? Let me read part of the story here. It says, table 11 of Gilgamesh, says the gods were displeased with humans. A god, Ea, warns this guy, the Babylonian Noah, to build a square ship with pitch inside and out and to bring animals and the family aboard.

A week-long deluge ensues. All of humanity is killed in the flood except the inhabitants of the boat. The boat came to rest on Mount Nizer in Kurdistan. The water subsided and dry land emerged. The last of three birds sent out did not return.

Sounds familiar. There's differences, right? There's definitely differences. But think about that for a second. Okay, what did the Babylonians say about a worldwide flood? They have an epic called Artaxerxes.

These are tough words, folks. And a similar-sounding story as the Bible in Gilgamesh. Humans have displeased the gods, causing alienation. A god, Enki, warns Artaxerxes of the coming flood. The gods instruct him how to survive.

He builds a boat, gathers the animals and birds onto it. All mankind is destroyed except for Artaxerxes, who makes an offering to the gods to restore divine-human relationships. And here's some of the tablets they found on that.

Very similar again. Why do these stories exist? Okay, what about other cultures? And I didn't dig into all of these to say exactly what they recorded. But how many civilizations have recorded a worldwide flood story?

27, I think. I have two dozen. If you wanna throw an extra three in there, go right ahead. But in particular, these include Chinese, Jewish, Greek, Mexican, Hawaiian, Babylonian, Sumerian, and Algonquin Indian.

Why do all these accounts exist? Was there a worldwide flood? And which one is true? That's a good question for us. So what do these extensive stories of the flood tell us? These stories have many similar points, and they also have many deviations.

But what can we discern? Are there good reasons to believe that the Genesis flood account is the original, and that the other versions are exaggerations and elaborations full of hyperbole of the story?

So let's look at this for a second. I didn't write down all the points, but only in Genesis is the year of the flood given. As we know that it was related to Noah's age and the age of Methuselah back in Genesis, and it records exactly when it happened according to the ages of these people.

It talks about how long Noah took to build the ark and exactly who was on the ark. For instance, in this story, Artahasis, yeah, it seems to be the only one of the book. Now, I didn't read that epic, but there needs to be some continuity to the story for this to make sense.

So let's see how Genesis matches up with these other stories. Let's talk about the Babylonian ship. A cubical ship couldn't save anyone. It wouldn't have been seaworthy. And tests have been done with a square ship.

Tests have also been done on the parameters that we see in Genesis, where I don't have the number of cubits long and cubits wide, but people doubted for years that this ship type would have been seaworthy.

And people made ships like this and put them out there in rough waters to see what would happen, and it was incredibly stable. A square ship doesn't cut it, and it would not have been able to exist in rough waters.

And if it had been raining long enough for a worldwide flood, there'd be some rough waters. Now what about the length of the rainfall? The pagan accounts don't really have enough time for a worldwide flood.

Seven days. We see seven days of rain, and we're not, we definitely see floods, but they're very localized, right? Like Lumberdin floods all the time when a bunch of rain comes. Anybody who lives in Lumberdin, we know that.

But seven days of rain isn't enough. The biblical account of the rainfall is much more reasonable to believe that that much water came and flooded the earth. In addition, of course, in the biblical account, it talks about things opening up from the deep and also from above as well.

So the biblical account gives the amount of water that would be reasonable for a worldwide flood. Now beyond a miracle which is not stated in the accounts of some of the pagan ones, for instance, the one I read first, the Assyrian account, it said the time for the waters to withdraw was a day in the Babylonian account, I guess it was.

It's like, could that possibly happen in one day? Well, how long did it take, in Genesis, how long did it take the waters to recede? 150. Yeah, I think it was that or maybe even more than that. It was a long time, which makes sense.

And it also makes sense that because of the water covering the earth and receding like that, that we do have natural formations that we see out west and other places where we see these tremendous canyons and things.

So the biblical account, again, holds true the statement of reasonableness. Now what about the people itself? The statements about the hero of the story also differ, giving credence to the biblical account because in the pagan stories, they exalt the hero and give him the gift of immortality.

So this is like a legend, a mythical hero, this guy, Gilgamesh, or Artaxerxes, they are granted this measure of eternal life and immortality just because they behave themselves during this flood. But in the biblical account, it doesn't exalt Noah as a super person.

It says that he did find favor with God, but the story of that account also moves into Noah's sin and portrays him very much as a human being, faithful to God in many ways, but also a man who stumbled in many ways, just like we would.

So given these things, which account would be the original account of the flood and the more reasonable account, which accounts would be hyperbole and exaggeration? You know, the evidence really all points to the biblical record, but the fact that all of these other records exist also gives credence to the fact that a worldwide flood did happen, except that cultures kind of took it and expanded it and made it into a mythical legend.

I did not record the nations that had a Genesis story. There are also Genesis creation accounts that are very similar across peoples again. There's a few of them, and it's very similar to what I just said.

There's historical things that are about places, times, and events that we see in the Bible, and in the other stories, it's more of, you know, very poetic, very exaggerative language. You know, it would read more like a fictional novel with a lot of swelling words, where the biblical account's more like this happened, this happened, this happened, this happened, which very much, again, points to the Genesis account being the more historical one, and the other ones being more stories that people have exaggerated over the years.

So that's a little bit about the flood. Now, what about all of the cities, events, places that we see in the Old Testament? We would hope to find them, and if we didn't find them, we may think, well, gosh, you know, we heard about this war, we heard about this happening.

Why don't we see it? Okay, let's see what some of the things we found. I'm not gonna read this one. This is King Shishak. Now, that's actually a pharaoh, and you can see, you can read about this king in 1 Kings 14.

A stele is a monument. It's like a stone monument. It's an erect stone monument that has etchings in it. You'll see that word a lot in this document that I have. Found King Shishak. Hezekiah's Tunnel.

Everybody been to Jerusalem, to Israel? You been in Hezekiah's Tunnel? I believe we saw part of it, but I don't think we wanna throw it. Yeah, I've heard if you go try to go down into it, which is pretty long, it's kind of a bunch of muddy water down there, so you get kind of messy.

So it might not be the number one on your list if you go sightseeing. I hope you're claustrophobic. No, and it's closed in yet. But the fact is, it was described in the Bible. Let's turn to that. Could I have someone turn to, I guess, 2 Chronicles 32 .30?

Go ahead and read that, Mr. Phil. Just 30?

I think just 30. The same Hezekiah closed the upper outlet of the waters of Gihon and directed them down to the west side of the city of David, and Hezekiah prospered in all his works.

No, okay, I think I had the right verse, but that wasn't too clear about the conduit that he built. How about 2 Kings 20 .20? Maybe that one's a little clearer. But the Bible does record that Hezekiah built a conduit, and that conduit was used during the siege.

We're gonna talk about in a second when Sennacherib, the Assyrian king, was sieging Jerusalem.

Yeah, 2 Kings 20 20. Now, the rest of the Acts of Hezekiah, all his might and how he made a pool and a tunnel and brought water into the city, are they not written in the book of the Chronicles of the King of Judah?

Okay, that's our conduit. Well, in 1838, they discovered this tunnel. It hadn't been discovered until 1838, so this tunnel was pretty long. The ancient conduit says 1 ,200 cubits, but you can go see that now.

So they've uncovered that. Now, King Amri was a king of Israel, the northern kingdom. I am not gonna, I'm looking at time here. I thought I was gonna get through this real fast, but I'm seeing I'm talking more than I thought I would.

So King Amri, yes, he's depicted on this table. It's an Assyrian tablet, or carving here, and it goes through Shalmaneser 3, and you can see the years here. The King Amri was around. He was a king of Israel.

He was verified. It also talks about Amri's grandson, Joram, but it says that eventually that one of the descendants of Amri was Jehu. Now, you remember Jehu from the Bible. He was the one who took a big stand against Ahab and Jezebel, right?

Very much so, but the interesting thing is is Jehu is not a grandson of Amri. He was from a different line of people altogether, but the thing is, this is from the perspective of the Assyrians, so all the Assyrians care about is he was in the line of succession of the kings of Israel.

They're not necessarily concerned about getting the descendant tree right. They're interested in figuring out who was ruling Israel at the time and who was giving them trouble in the wars that they were facing against Israel, and that's some of the other things you need to understand when you're looking through archeology is if the Assyrians are commenting on the Jewish culture, do they necessarily care about getting all the information right about the Jewish culture?

Probably not. What they care about is exalting themselves in the stories that they tell. So in this particular case, we learn about Jehu, and the Assyrians thought that he was the grandson of Amri. Okay, he's not, but it still records Jehu and Amri, and then this tablet here was another stele.

It's called the Misha Stele, and that verifies that Moab was also in some conflicts with Amri at the time of like around 830 B .C. or so. This battle here, as another tablet was found, talked about, now this battle is not in the Bible, the Battle of Karkar.

You're not going to find that in the Bible, but it talks about Shalmaneser III, Ben-Hadad II, and we do see those characters in the Bible. We also see King Ahab of Israel. It says King Ahab of Israel contributed 2 ,000 chariots to a particular battle that was fought in between all these forces, and this is recorded on the Kirk monoliths, which is this thing here, and there's other monoliths that go along with it.

Now, the fact that the Bible doesn't record it means that the Lord didn't necessarily want us or need us to know about that battle, but all of these historical characters that are in the Bible are recorded on these tablets.

The city of Ur, would we think we would ever find anything dating back that far to say that the city of Ur was a real city? You're talking about going back a long way to the time of Abraham. Well, a stone was found that had been laid by the king of an unknown name, actually, of the first dynasty of Ur, and significantly, on the stone it says the scribes speak of this as the third dynasty after the flood, so again, that flood shows up, and the city of Ur comes to life in the historical record, and you would think, really, Ur of the Chaldees really was a city that really existed?

Yeah.

Herb Metaxas in his book is God that has that archeological evidence. He says Ur of the Chaldees was like the New York City of its time.

Yeah, again, we can do some Googling on that and find out what's been discovered about that city. That's going way back, and that's important, folks, because I may not get to it later, but a lot of people think the Genesis account is just a myth and a legend, that you don't have to read it like it's a historical account of events that happened in people's lives.

You can read it like just a figurative, poetic thing. You can interpret it however you want. It's an allegory, it's this, it's that. No, there's certain things we've discovered back from even in the book of Genesis that point to historical truth, and that's very important, because supposed critics and scholars will always attack Genesis first, Revelation next, and we should be diligent and take both of those at what the Lord said his word meant, and the words that he used and historical records that he recorded for us.

I'm going to skip over King Solomon here. This is about his building. I am going to stick with Daniel and Belshazzar for a second because everyone thinks the Bible is wrong about Belshazzar, because Belshazzar was not a king of Babylon.

Belshazzar was the last king of Babylon we see recorded in the book of Daniel, and then after that, we see the Medes conquer Babylon. So it's like, well, how can that be? He was never a king. Nabonatus was the last king of Babylon.

How can we resolve that conflict with the Bible and other historical things we've found? Well, a discovery was made that recorded that Nabonatus inexplicably removed himself for a 10-year period when he went to Arabia, leaving the kingdom in the hands of his son, Belshazzar.

And at the time, that was a co-regency. He didn't abdicate his throne, but he gave power over to his son, who was the effective king at the time. And that's documented. We have that, you know, everything I have here is in links and footnotes or references, so you'll be able to look any of these things up.

Very important, these things, because people will try to poke holes in all kinds of events. But again, the biblical record stands. I'm not going to read about King Isaiah. I'm not going to read about, well, the Barak thing is pretty cool, I think.

Barak was the scroll of Jeremiah. Jeremiah, obviously, a prophet, and Jeremiah was a prophet around the 600 B .C .s about in that area, when Babylon was about to destroy Israel. There was three different deportations that Israel had through the hands of Babylon, 605, 597, and 586.

And Jeremiah was around for all that. And at the time, if you remember, his scribe, Barak, shows up quite a bit in the book of Jeremiah. As a matter of fact, Barak was the one that showed the writings to the king, and then the king threw the letter in the furnace and burned it up, and then they just wrote it again.

But Barak actually showed up. It's like, well, would this character, Barak, the scribe, actually show up in some sort of a record that we would have? Let's read Jeremiah 30. Oh, that's a lot of verses.

Let's not read that. That's a lot of verses, but it describes the activities of Barak at the time. And this little thing right here, this little impression, this symbol, the seal, records belonging to Barak, the son of Neriah, the scribe.

That's incredible that we would find something like that to prove that not only did Jeremiah exist, but the scribe did as well, way back, way back. You know, we're talking 600 BC. I love Sennacherib, and a lot of you know why.

Time-wise, I am not gonna be able to read all these biblical verses. I'll just summarize. But as you know, Assyria was a powerful kingdom, and Assyria rolled over the northern tribes of Israel in 722.

That was Shalmaneser V, Shalmaneser V. Assyria kept growing and building its empire till we get to the time of Sennacherib. And Sennacherib is closing down on Judah, and he's closing down on Jerusalem.

And he says many, many things to Hezekiah and the people of Judah and Jerusalem, saying, all of these other kingdoms fell before me. You think your God is going to protect you? You can forget it. Well, this story's recorded in 2 Chronicles.

I have up here 2 Kings. It's also recorded in Isaiah 36 and 37. How did Sennacherib do against Judah and Jerusalem?

185 ,000 soldiers died.

Richie just said it, 185 ,000 soldiers died trying to capture Jerusalem. So, but it's interesting, what did the Assyrians record about that period of time? This is what's recorded in Assyrian history.