The Spade Testifies: Confirmations and Honest Puzzles

In the last unit we set the rules for hearing the third witness; now we walk the ground and let the spade actually testify. We will do two things, and we will do both honestly. We will look at the great confirmations, where archaeology has powerfully corroborated the Scriptures — kings and cities and events the Bible names, lifted out of the earth. And we will look squarely at the genuine puzzles, the places where honest questions remain open and no confirmation has yet come. Here is why this unit matters more than any other in the third witness. A witness who shows you only his strong points invites your suspicion; a witness who will look you in the eye about his hard cases earns your trust. So we will not hide the puzzles. We will set them on the table in full daylight, beside the confirmations, and you will see that they are few and that we are not afraid of them. And precisely because we have not hidden them, you will be able to believe us when we point to the stones that speak. Let us begin with a confirmation so striking that it comes from the mouth of Israel's own enemy.

In 701 BC the Assyrian king Sennacherib swept through Judah and laid siege to Jerusalem in the days of King Hezekiah. We have Sennacherib's own account of that campaign, carved on a clay prism in his own words. He boasts that he shut Hezekiah up in Jerusalem "like a bird in a cage," and he lists the tribute he exacted. But notice what the proud king does not say: he never claims to have captured the city. And that silence is thunderous, for it fits exactly what the Bible records — that the LORD delivered Jerusalem, and the Assyrian army withdrew without taking it (Second Kings nineteen; Isaiah thirty-seven). The enemy confirms the siege and cannot claim the victory. And there is more. Second Kings twenty tells us Hezekiah dug a tunnel to bring water into the city before the siege; that very tunnel still runs beneath Jerusalem, and in it was found an inscription left by the two teams of diggers, recording the moment their picks met in the dark. The enemy's prism, the king's tunnel, the diggers' own words — the whole crisis of Hezekiah stands corroborated in stone.

Now a case that shows the pattern of this witness at its most beautiful. The book of Daniel, in its fifth chapter, tells of Belshazzar, king of Babylon, feasting on the night the city fell, and of the writing on the wall. For a long time critics pointed to Belshazzar as proof that Daniel was wrong or written late, for the records of Babylon named a different man, Nabonidus, as its last king; Belshazzar, they said, was unknown to history. Then the clay tablets of Babylon were read, and Belshazzar stepped out of them. He was the son of Nabonidus, and his co-regent, left to rule the city while his father was long away. And this buried fact quietly solved a puzzle in the text itself. When Belshazzar offers to reward Daniel, he offers to make him the third ruler in the kingdom (Daniel five, verse sixteen) — a strange number, until you know that the first place was Nabonidus's and the second his own, so that third was the highest he had to give. A charge of plain error became a mark of intimate, first-hand accuracy. So the third witness often works: what one age calls a mistake, the next age's spade calls a signature.

These are not isolated cases; the confirmations run on and on, and we can only gather a handful. The Cyrus Cylinder, a clay barrel inscribed for the Persian king, records his policy of sending captive peoples home to rebuild their temples — the very policy the Bible reports as the decree of Cyrus that freed the Jews to return and rebuild (Ezra one). The Moabite Stone, carved for King Mesha of Moab, tells of his revolt against Israel and names the royal house of Omri, matching the account in Second Kings three. And the witness reaches into the New Testament as well. There is the ossuary — the bone-box — inscribed with the name of Caiaphas, in all likelihood the very high priest who questioned Jesus on the night He was betrayed. And at Delphi in Greece an inscription names the Roman official Gallio and fixes the year of his office, which lets us date to within a year the moment Paul was dragged before him in Corinth (Acts eighteen), anchoring the apostle's ministry in the datable history of Rome. Name after name, the Bible's world proves to be the real world.

Now we turn, without flinching, to a genuine puzzle, and it is a famous one. The book of Joshua says the walls of Jericho fell and the city was burned. John Garstang, digging in the 1930s, found fallen walls and a layer of ash, and dated them to about 1400 BC — a striking match for the conquest. But Kathleen Kenyon, re-excavating in the 1950s with more refined methods, dated the great destruction about a century and a half earlier, to around 1550 BC — which would mean the city was already long ruined and nearly empty when Joshua came, with no walls left to fall. Later still, Bryant Wood re-examined Kenyon's pottery and argued that Garstang's earlier date was right after all. The question is still debated among careful and honest scholars, and we will not pretend that it is settled. But hold fast to the rule of the last unit. We will not say "Jericho proves the Bible," and we will not say "Jericho disproves it." We will say the truth: here is an open question, where the reading of the ruins and the working-out of the chronology are still in honest dispute — and an open question is nothing for faith to fear.

Behind Jericho stands the largest disputed question of all: the Exodus from Egypt and the conquest of Canaan. Honest scholars debate even its date — an earlier Exodus around 1446 BC, drawn from the years counted in First Kings six, or a later one around 1260 BC, tied to the store-city named in Exodus one. And there is the matter of silence: Egypt left no clear record of Israelite slaves or of an Exodus, and the archaeology of the conquest is mixed, some sites showing destruction that suits Joshua's account and others not, with the traditional site of Ai raising a real and unsolved problem. Scholars hold a wide range of views, from a swift military conquest, through slower models of Israel's settling in the land, to outright doubt that any of it happened. Two things keep us steady in the middle of this. First, the rule we have learned: Egypt rarely recorded its own defeats or the movements of slave peoples, so silence here is weak evidence indeed. Second, a real anchor in stone: the Merneptah Stele, an Egyptian monument from about 1208 BC, names "Israel" as a people already settled in Canaan — an outside witness that Israel was in the land, and there early. The mechanism is disputed; the presence is attested. We keep the open questions open, and we do not let them shake what is anchored.

Now stop and see what we have just done, for it is the heart of this unit. We did not bury Jericho, or explain away the silence of Egypt, or hurry past the problem of Ai. We set them all on the table in full daylight, next to Sennacherib and Belshazzar and Cyrus, and we left the open questions open. And this — this candor — is exactly what makes the confirmations worth believing. A merchant who swears his goods have no fault invites your suspicion; a witness who will freely grant you the hard points earns your trust on all the rest. If this course had only ever told you that archaeology confirms the Bible, a thoughtful student would rightly ask what was being kept back. But because we have shown you the real puzzles and been honest that they are unsolved, you can believe us when we say the stones speak — that the enemy's prism, the co-regent's tablets, the Persian's cylinder, the high priest's bone-box all corroborate the Word. Honesty about the gnat is precisely what makes our testimony about the camel trustworthy. Here, in one place, stands the whole method of this course.

So the third witness has given its testimony, and the verdict is measured, and it is strong. Archaeology has not proved the Bible — no spade can prove a book breathed out by God — and it has left a few questions honestly open, as honest questions ought to be left. But across an immense field of checkable fact, from the palaces of Assyria to the pavements of Corinth, the world of the Bible has again and again turned out to be the real world, standing just where and when and how the Bible sets it. That is correlation, not proof, and it is a mighty thing. It shows that these Scriptures are not detached from history, but a record sunk deep into the hard ground of real places, peoples, and events. The third witness may sit down. And now a fourth and final witness rises to take the stand — not the events this time, but the very stage on which they were played: the land itself, with its roads and its rivers and its hills, described so exactly that you may walk the Bible with a map in your hand and find every step is true. We turn to the witness of geography.