0:00
[Music]
0:20
This is Undaunted Life of Man's Podcast.
0:24
I'm your host Kyle Thompson, let's get into it.
0:27
Titus Kennedy, welcome to the studio.
0:28
Look at you, you're looking great, son.
0:30
Hey, thanks Kyle.
0:31
Good to be good to be actually here this time.
0:33
I know, so for those of you out there in YouTube and Rumble Land,
0:37
so if you've been listening to this show for a long time,
0:39
you know who Titus Kennedy is,
0:40
you know who he's got some of his books here,
0:42
and we're going to be talking about the new one.
0:43
But you were like episode 240 or something,
0:47
and we're like well past 700, like 730 at this point,
0:51
and so like this feels like a million years ago when you were on the show.
0:55
And so if it's all right with you, we're going to treat this as kind of like a new interview
0:58
because we've gotten a lot more people just for some of your own show.
1:02
But I do need to give a quick shout out.
1:04
So thanks to Land in the Church of 1122,
1:06
we've got this new three-camera setup so we can like look at you guys
1:10
from all these other different angles,
1:11
or I guess you're looking at us the entire time.
1:12
But we had a private donor who will remain nameless that he's just like,
1:15
"Man, whatever you want to do so that you can take the podcast to the next level."
1:19
Like what is that?
1:21
And then I was like, "Well, you know, if we had like a more of like a three-camera setup,
1:24
we could do more of this kind of in-person thing."
1:27
And so he hooked that up for us.
1:28
He's like, "Man, whatever it costs, like let's just make sure it's done right."
1:31
And then, you know, here we are all squared away.
1:33
But I'm trying to remember like you are somehow tangentially connected
1:39
to Dr. Mark Hitchcock, who is the pastor of Faith Bible Church,
1:42
which is the church I attend, so that is my lead pastor.
1:44
And so a couple of the forging table guys were like,
1:47
"Hey, Titus is coming to Edmund, and he's going to be like speaking at our church.
1:50
You should see if he could like, he has time to come by the house."
1:53
And so I was like, "Oh, shoot," and so I like kind of jumped around and emailed you.
1:55
But how did you get connected with Mark or with Faith Bible?
1:58
So I first met Mark about, what, 13 months ago maybe now?
2:03
We were on a trip to Egypt, so I was helping to lead this biblical Egypt tour.
2:10
And it was through Dallas Theological Seminary, where Mark is a professor.
2:16
And Mark was on that trip to learn more about Egypt on the ground
2:22
and see all these different places.
2:24
And so we got to talking and got to know each other well and hung out a lot and had a great time.
2:30
And then he would call me occasionally and ask me a few archaeological questions
2:34
because he's been teaching through Exodus.
2:37
And so it was perfect and timely for him.
2:40
And then I recently got hired at DTS in Mark's department also.
2:46
So we will be teaching classes in the same department, not the same classes.
2:51
We've got different emphases, mine courses, archaeology, and historical context.
2:55
But yeah, that's where we met.
2:57
And sometimes we are at department meetings together.
3:01
And yeah, I was able to come up to his church this weekend.
3:05
And I had no idea that you were at that church until you emailed me and told me.
3:10
And I thought, "That's so cool."
3:11
Yeah, this is so small.
3:12
I didn't even realize that you were hired on at Dallas Theological Seminary.
3:15
How long ago was that?
3:16
In the summer, last summer.
3:18
So basically fall semester, that was my first time there and then spring semester.
3:24
So I did that Egypt trip again this spring and some other people from your city and from
3:31
your church were actually on the tour just a couple months ago.
3:35
And so have you relocated down to Texas or kind of how's that all over?
3:38
I'm still based in Seattle where the Discovery Institute is based, but I go back and forth.
3:46
There's a direct flight on Delta now between Seattle and Dallas, which is great for me
3:50
because that's the airline I typically use to travel out of the country.
3:54
Well, you know Texas and Oklahoma, we're free states down here.
3:57
Okay.
3:58
So I know you got a lot of that part of it.
4:00
Crefuffle up there, you know?
4:01
Yes.
4:02
You actually like that though.
4:03
No, I love down here.
4:05
Okay.
4:06
I'll stay down here.
4:07
Yeah.
4:08
But what we have up there that's missing is we've got the ocean, we've got mountains, big
4:13
pine forests, and not as extreme weather.
4:17
So we do enjoy some things there.
4:19
Well, I mean, some of our lakes are so big that you can't see across them.
4:22
So if you like squint, you can like pretend it's the ocean and there's no sharks, right?
4:26
So there's some pretty big alligator, garan, catfish and things like that.
4:29
Okay.
4:30
So we do need to kind of back up all the way because we kind of skip past the part that
4:33
you're an actual real life archaeologist.
4:36
And so I guess growing up, at what point, I know we talked about this first time you're
4:41
on here, but we got to treat this as brand new.
4:43
At what point do you realize that archaeology is not just like this interesting thing, but
4:47
like, that's the path I want to go and combo question, how much is your life like that
4:51
of Indiana Jones?
4:52
Is that like, is it really, really similar or we got a little bit of separation?
4:56
First, first part of the question is I really didn't decide to pursue archaeology as something
5:02
where I thought, all right, I want to study this in college or I want to try to make a
5:07
career out of this until my senior year in high school.
5:10
In fact, probably about halfway through.
5:12
I was really interested in it, been reading a lot of books on it.
5:16
I visited a couple of archaeological sites, but for me, it was more like, this is interesting
5:24
knowledge.
5:25
This is useful knowledge.
5:26
There's background context to the Bible as well as world history.
5:30
There's apologetics that can be used as well.
5:34
But then I decided, you know what, I don't really want to go to medical school or study
5:41
pre-med.
5:42
I want to try to do archaeology.
5:43
I'm more interested in this.
5:47
That was the turning point there.
5:49
As far as Indiana Jones, it's not very much like real archaeology.
5:54
I enjoy the older movies.
5:56
The first one I personally think is the best, but if you look at what he's doing in those
6:02
movies versus what happens in archaeology, there's not a lot of overlap.
6:06
The first one, they actually do go to an excavation in Egypt, right?
6:10
Although he's not working on it, he jumps down a hole and finds a scepter.
6:16
The rest of the time, he's usually running around chasing things or being chased.
6:22
We are doing a lot more methodical research or digging the sites physically ourselves
6:29
and recording all this and doing the photography and making maps and then publishing it.
6:36
Not quite Indiana Jones.
6:39
With archaeology, everyone has a tangential understanding because if you've had kids,
6:43
they all went through a dinosaur phase.
6:46
Your kids books, and we probably have half a dozen kids books down there that have archaeology
6:49
like happening where people are finding fossils and stuff like that, but that's basically
6:54
where people's understanding of that entire field of study ends is right there.
7:02
Before we get into some of the stuff that you've done and the biblical connection to
7:06
everything, I guess dispel with some of the rumors or give us a kind of a 101, 30,000 foot
7:11
view of like, "Okay, I am a professional archaeologist, so not day in day out because everything's
7:15
very different."
7:16
But like in a year, so if you've got a productive year, what are the things that you're working
7:20
on?
7:21
What does the actual work look like?
7:24
Every year, we're doing a field project, sometimes more than one.
7:28
It just depends, but let's just say you do a field project, and usually that is excavating
7:34
at a site.
7:35
Now, there have been years when I've had to do surveys where we're trying to locate
7:40
a new site or we're trying to figure out between several sites what is the one that we want
7:45
to go actually dig at.
7:48
But going to the site, a lot of work goes into that beforehand and we decide exactly where
7:55
on the site we want to dig, we dig, we record everything, we process that, start to publish
8:02
that.
8:03
So that is one of the things that I would be doing in a year.
8:07
And then I might be doing research at several other places, it might be at museums on specific
8:13
artifacts or types of artifacts, it might be at other archaeological sites that have
8:19
either direct relevance to where I'm digging, or maybe it's some other project I'm working
8:25
on an article or a book.
8:27
So that type of field research, but not digging.
8:32
And then I would be doing writing, writing articles, writing a book, or at least writing
8:39
part of a book.
8:40
And then I would have teaching, so teaching at the university or teaching it, the seminary
8:46
or going and giving a lecture at a conference, things like that.
8:51
So quite a few different things happening and traveling different places and sometimes
8:57
working at the home office.
8:59
So in the field of archaeology, because I've heard some different people on, I can't remember
9:05
the guy's name, he's been on Joe Rogan a ton, he wrote about, he's big on the younger
9:10
dryest impact theory.
9:12
And I can't remember this guy's name.
9:13
Graham Hancock.
9:14
Okay.
9:15
So when you listen to guys like Graham Hancock or some people that are in that world, it
9:19
seems like people can be very dismissive of archaeology and or depending upon the exact
9:25
study of archaeology, there's almost like this mob mentality.
9:29
I don't mean mob like, you know, a bunch of people with pitchforks, I mean, like the mob,
9:32
right?
9:33
Like LaCosa Nostra, like where it's like, you can't just, oh, I think I'm just going to
9:37
go to Egypt and I'm going to start digging around the pyramids or stuff like that.
9:40
Like there's like this code of things that you've got to get through to even be able
9:44
to be given access.
9:45
There's a lot of protectionism around that.
9:47
And so how much of that like actually goes on to where it's like, okay, ah, you're just
9:52
an archaeologist.
9:53
Get out of here.
9:54
We're the real scientists or hey, no, you're not going to get access to any of this.
9:57
We're not going to share our knowledge because of whatever reason.
10:00
So there's a process and protocols that you've got to go through.
10:04
If you're going to do an excavation at a site or even a survey, but it's more involved
10:09
for an excavation and that would be things like you've got to go to the Department of
10:15
Antiquities and you have to apply for a permit to do that.
10:19
Like in that country.
10:20
Yes.
10:21
Yes.
10:22
Because basically every country now, at least it has ancient remains has a Department of
10:27
Antiquities and it'll deal with their archaeological sites and their museums.
10:32
And a lot of them, it's part of their Ministry of Tourism because people are coming to see
10:40
those historic sites.
10:42
But you've got to get the permission from that local government to do the project there
10:49
because you're going to be digging up their land or sometimes private land.
10:54
And then the things that you find, they belong by law to that country.
11:01
And so you can't just take them out.
11:04
It's like going to somebody else's property and you start digging there and find treasure
11:09
and then take it.
11:10
That's illegal.
11:11
You just stole their property and you also basically vandalized their property.
11:16
So there are permissions that go through.
11:18
Now as far as the politics involved in that, yes, there definitely is some and it can be
11:28
at a personal level, it can be at an institutional level, it can be at a national level.
11:32
So there's things to navigate.
11:35
And there are viewpoints within academia that are not the majority view of the day.
11:43
And so if you don't hold all the same viewpoints as the majority or whoever is sort of in power
11:51
in that area, then you may have some additional difficulties because they don't necessarily
11:58
want you to be talking about or showing evidence for this view that they disagree with.
12:06
They just want everybody to be supporting what they're saying.
12:11
And that's probably one of the biggest hurdles is to be able to get a project you're interested
12:18
in even if you have a view about some of the things that's different from the academic
12:25
majority of the day.
12:26
Is that also go down into, okay, you're in a Muslim country that whether they're Sunni
12:31
Shia or something else, like they're a Muslim country, they don't want you digging finding
12:34
evidence for a resurrected Jesus, perhaps, right?
12:37
They're fine with Jesus as a prophet, you know, as described in the Quran, they're fine
12:40
with the verge of birth or fine with all that, but this whole like rising from the dead for
12:43
your sins thing, they're not real big on that, right?
12:45
And they'll kill you if they find out that you actually believe that and they are actually
12:48
an adherent to their chronic texts, especially the Ninth Surah.
12:52
But in that particular context, is that the stuff that you run into, like the politics
12:55
where, well, I'm trying to think of a scenario, like where you actually find something and
12:59
then they don't.
13:00
It's more national politics than it is religion.
13:05
Now over in the US, the religion thing becomes much bigger, the secularists or the atheists
13:13
who dominate academia in the US, they are much more hostile towards the religious aspect.
13:20
For example, talking about the Bible as if it is a historically reliable text.
13:27
They don't like that because they say they're all these supernatural things in there and
13:33
it was just propaganda made by either the kingdom of Judah or by the early Christians
13:40
to try to get people to believe what they were saying.
13:43
But in the Middle East, it has more to do with national identity issues.
13:49
And a lot of the conflict is centered around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the sides
13:58
of that or what might impact that.
14:01
And so it's actually easier to have a discussion about, say, Abraham because everybody, well,
14:08
not everybody, but the non-atheists, the non-secularists, at least, can agree a lot about Abraham.
14:16
Yeah, Abraham existed and so forth.
14:19
But when you get into issues of maybe the Exodus or the Israelite conquest of Canaan,
14:26
then that becomes more complicated and they don't necessarily want to talk about that
14:33
or address that or have any projects that are going to show that there was this ancient
14:42
people Israel and they've been there for a long time.
14:45
Because now, that is so huge in regional and even global politics.
14:51
It wasn't always a problem like this.
14:54
It's become more of a problem in recent decades.
14:57
So on the one hand, religious issues, on the other hand, national political issues and
15:05
it kind of depends on where you are or the group that you're interacting with.
15:09
Okay.
15:10
So Christianity has kind of already been a three-point of this discussion.
15:12
So let's back up just a little bit to you personally.
15:14
So obviously, the work you're doing now is, I guess you can call it categorically, biblical
15:19
archeology that's been your area of focus.
15:22
I do want to ask, I'll ask it now, but we'll answer it later, about people that are like
15:26
New Testament scholars or biblical archeologists that have no faith in Christ.
15:30
Again, Calvinists, they're super all in that because they're like, yeah, well, they haven't
15:33
been given their faith yet.
15:34
But like for you, where's kind of your faith journey?
15:38
Start, did you grow up in a family that was Christian and kind of how did you end up coming
15:41
to faith?
15:42
Yeah, I did grow up in a Christian family.
15:45
My dad was a pastor for many, many years, only retired fairly recently.
15:51
He went to seminary actually where I'm teaching now at Dallas.
15:56
Okay.
15:57
Sweet.
15:58
Yeah.
15:59
And so when I was growing up, he was always reading the Bible with us and talking, answering
16:07
questions, helping us understand things and then giving us books so we could do some study
16:15
ourselves and learn about some of these subjects, not just theology, but he gave me a lot of
16:21
books on archeology and history connected to the Bible.
16:26
And so that's part of how I got into it.
16:30
And of course growing up in a Christian environment, even sort of a Christian education environment
16:36
in a way with church and my dad at home really impacted me a lot in seeing Christianity not
16:46
just as a lifestyle or a code of morals, but digging into the deep ideas and the historical
16:57
context and the complexities of theology and the text.
17:02
And so I really, really like to study it in depth and go beyond what you might have in
17:10
church or a Christian school.
17:12
Okay.
17:13
And so with that thirst, you still could have gone into archeology and not gone into kind
17:18
of like the biblical side of things.
17:19
And so how did those things end up converging?
17:22
That ended up converging because, so first I found out archeology existed.
17:29
You know, I liked history as a kid, but I didn't even know what archeology was.
17:35
And until I visited a couple sites and I read this book on the excavation of Troy by Heinrich
17:41
Schleeman, where his thing was he loved the writings of Homer and he loved the Iliad.
17:47
And he thought that it was talking about real places.
17:50
And so he wanted to find Troy, which he did or somebody else sort of did, but he excavated
17:56
it and he uncovered the Troy of the Iliad, although at first he didn't realize which
18:05
level of the city it was.
18:07
But that opened that up to me.
18:09
So then I start reading books about archeology in the Bible and I come to understand that
18:14
there is tons of material, tons of discoveries that have been made in archeology that connect
18:21
both indirectly and directly to the Bible.
18:24
And I was, you know, I was interested in just Bible study in general and theology, but that
18:30
was something I saw as incredibly interesting and sort of a niche for me that I was into.
18:38
And so I kept reading more and more and more.
18:40
And then as I got to high school and sort of encountered opposition to Christianity more
18:47
and people who were skeptical and asking questions like, you know, why would you believe that
18:53
or isn't this fairytales?
18:56
And I saw how archeology was also really helpful to confirm the truth of the scriptures.
19:03
And it provided a lot of answers for people like, why would you believe that?
19:08
Or is there any evidence for this story in the Bible?
19:12
And I saw, okay, it's got two major uses, at least that I see, one, it just helps us
19:20
understand the Bible better in its ancient context and for me personally, that was really
19:24
interesting and useful.
19:26
But then on the other side is that it helps to answer these skeptical questions or the
19:35
questions of seekers.
19:38
And they want to know, is this real?
19:42
Why would I believe this?
19:43
You know, some people, of course, are going to be affected more by a personal testimony
19:49
or a personal experience.
19:50
But other people, they want to see the hard facts, the hard evidence and archeology provides
19:56
that.
19:57
Hey, guys, real quick.
19:58
I know a lot of you guys struggle with getting a consistent workout routine.
20:02
So wherever you get to, whether that's the global gym or your home gym or even like a
20:05
parking lot somewhere, you get there and then you don't know what to do.
20:09
You get there and you're just like, well, what in the world am I supposed to do today?
20:11
And you just kind of meander around and maybe you're trying to get ready for like a mountain
20:15
hunt in the fall or you've got a mud race coming up or you just want to be generally
20:18
a strong and fit dude for normal everyday life, but you don't have a program that's
20:23
tailored for you.
20:24
I want you guys to stop wasting time at the gym or wherever you're working out and just
20:28
settling for that same old routine that you've always done.
20:31
It's time for you to get a guide that will help you reach your fitness goals.
20:35
And that's why I want to introduce you to my friends over at Mountain Tuff.
20:38
Mountain Tuff is a fitness and mental toughness app developed by military special operators
20:42
and mountain hunters.
20:43
That's becoming a global movement for building mentally tough athletes on and off the mountain.
20:48
So Mountain Tuff is a native app ready to be downloaded on all platforms.
20:51
So that includes iPhone, Android, Apple TV and Roku.
20:54
Once you sign up and download the app or access the website, you immediately have access to
20:58
literally hundreds of exercise programs and thousands of workout videos, thousands, okay?
21:05
That includes structured hybrid strength and endurance programs, daily workouts, the full
21:09
exercise library, mental toughness training, prehab and rehab, the mountain tough community
21:14
and accountability and a bunch of other stuff and guys, you can use it all on the go online
21:18
or offline, no matter where you decide to train.
21:21
Just getting started, no problem.
21:23
They've got programs for beginners have minimal gear or no gear.
21:27
All good.
21:28
They have minimal gear and bodyway programs wanting to get into or maintain elite level
21:32
fitness like me.
21:33
They've got you covered with programs for top tier athletes too.
21:37
And guys, for a limited time, Mountain Tuff is extending undaunted lifers like you an incredible
21:42
offer.
21:43
And MountainTuff.com, that's M-T-N-Tuff.com in inner of the code Kyle when you sign up
21:49
for a monthly plan to receive your first month free after your 14 day free trial.
21:55
So for guys that aren't good at math, that is six weeks free to make sure this app is
21:59
for you and I'm sure it will be.
22:01
That is six weeks free on the best in class physical and mental training app in the world.
22:07
Stop wasting time.
22:08
It's time to get real fitness results and let my friends at Mountain Tuff guide the way.
22:12
Again, go to M-T-N-Tuff, that's MountainTuff.com promo code Kyle.
22:18
Well, and so when you go back to scripture, loving the Lord your God with all your heart,
22:22
soul, mind, strength, those are four different categories that will pull on people's hearts
22:26
slightly differently based on their personalities, which they were also given by God as a gift
22:30
to them.
22:31
Right?
22:32
And so that's obviously someone who's a little bit more intellectual, someone that likes
22:34
to, because I know guys that experience God in their physicality.
22:38
And so when they exercise or when they get to the top of that mountain or when they finish
22:41
that race, there's this, you know, communing with the God of the universe that they get
22:45
that they maybe won't get sitting in a chair with a cup of coffee and the Bible where some
22:50
other people kind of get their thing.
22:51
And I want to get back to all that definitely, but I do want to kind of circle out to a little
22:55
bit of a tangent since you brought up Homer and the Iliad.
22:57
I had a very interesting conversation with Michael Walsh recently.
23:00
So he's, he's very prolific writer.
23:02
We wrote a book called a rage to conquer and it just talked about these different like
23:07
it was a follow up book to a book about last stand, so like real life last stands.
23:11
Why do men fight in these last stands?
23:13
What is it about a man that that does that?
23:15
But in this book, you know, they were talking about Von Kloshwitz and they were talking
23:19
about, I'm trying to remember the other folks, Napoleon was a part of that book.
23:23
So there were these like real world generals that we know a whole lot about Alexander the
23:27
Great was one of those, even though what we know about him is, you know, came hundreds
23:31
of years later and there's not as many transcripts.
23:33
Maybe we can get into that.
23:35
But I talked about, because in that book, he talks about the Iliad and when he talks
23:40
about Troy and Achilles and different things kind of in this, in this area.
23:45
And I brought it up.
23:46
I kind of posed the question as like, yeah, well, I'm okay, I'm curious why you put this
23:50
fictional narrative inside of this book that had all this historical context and all these
23:54
like real world people.
23:56
And he goes, I don't know that we can call this complete fiction, right?
24:01
Because of what we know about what happened in this area.
24:04
And then he talked about Alexander the Great, like he went and visited the tomb of Achilles,
24:08
which in modern day times we think of Brad Pitt and the movie Troy as like this, like
24:13
character that didn't exist, but like, oh, he's kind of this amalgamation of all these
24:17
other different things.
24:18
And so I guess for you, since you're in this world kind of all day, every day, like, what
24:22
do you think about like kind of the Trojan wars and in all those types of things like,
24:26
is that history?
24:27
Is it mytho history?
24:28
Well, how should we view that?
24:31
Well, that was one of the things that Heinrich Schleeman was looking at.
24:36
And he believed that it was history.
24:38
And that's why he was looking for Troy and Troy of the Iliad.
24:43
And he was laughed off by a lot of people in his day until the evidence from the archaeological
24:50
excavations showed this really did happen.
24:53
There was a city at that time.
24:55
It was attacked.
24:56
It was destroyed.
24:57
And of course, the Mycenaeans who launched the attack that we have all this evidence
25:02
of their civilization now.
25:03
So I mean, the Iliad is a, it's an epic poem.
25:08
So it's not written as a historical narrative, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have
25:13
historical content.
25:15
It has theological and supernatural elements in it, all right, is coming from the perspective
25:22
of the polytheistic Greek or Hellenistic culture.
25:27
And so that's going to be something that people are going to have to look at and maybe filter
25:34
out.
25:35
But if you want to just boil it down to what happened with the human beings and the cities
25:42
and the weapons and all that, then you can sort of push that stuff aside and just look
25:47
at, all right, here's Achilles and here's Hector and here's Priem and here's the city
25:52
of Troy.
25:54
And that's the stuff that seems to be historical or at least largely historical, whether or
26:01
not Achilles as he's depicted in the Iliad was a historical person, I don't know, I would
26:08
say why not, but there's this tendency to throw away things that have supernatural elements
26:21
in the modern West.
26:23
And you know, those things can be evaluated differently, but just because a text has that
26:29
in it doesn't mean the rest of it is unhistorical.
26:33
In fact, if we go back to all the ancient cultures, there is some amount of theology
26:40
and supernatural that's going to be in those, whether it's the Assyrians and they're talking
26:44
about their God Asur or if it's the Babylonians and they're talking about Marduk or the Persians
26:50
and the Ahura Mazda, whatever, it's in all of those.
26:53
And so we've got to look at things from the understanding that these people had a particular
27:01
worldview and they worshiped this God or this God or these gods and goddesses.
27:08
And that's just how it was for them.
27:10
But that doesn't mean that they are fabricating the events that happened in their lives.
27:15
Right.
27:16
Well, so I was reminded whenever West Health was on the Joe Rogan experience, he said,
27:20
we're in this post enlightenment kind of hyper.
27:25
We want all the evidence laid before us and we want it in exact detail and we want it to
27:29
be like a term paper that we would read and then when you read through Genesis and it
27:33
doesn't kind of match that style, you're like, Oh, well, this just has to be.
27:37
This isn't like reading a chemistry or biology textbook.
27:40
So we're just going to set that to the side.
27:43
And so and then you have the problem with people taking things that aren't meant to be
27:46
taking literally to literally and then they're willing to die on that hill and pretend like
27:50
it's salvific like, no, the earth is 6000 years old.
27:52
If you don't believe that, you don't believe in the word of God.
27:54
It's like, Yish.
27:55
Okay.
27:56
We have a lot of issues there.
27:57
We kind of get back to the archeological stuff, but I want to circle back to something we
28:00
were that I brought up a little bit earlier.
28:03
It's interesting to me how somebody can work in a field that you work in, right?
28:08
Or they could work out of seminary, right?
28:11
And be an atheist because that's a common thing.
28:14
And again, with more left wing seminaries, obviously you get people that believe any
28:17
number of things, but how have you, I guess, well, I guess have you experienced that personally,
28:23
where you have people that are kind of like kicking around in the biblical world and they
28:26
just don't believe any of it, but they're just doing it because it's a job like how exactly
28:30
does that work?
28:31
So I always thought that was interesting.
28:32
How could you be an expert on Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and believe that their actual
28:37
tangible historical writings and then not put your faith in Christ?
28:41
Yeah.
28:42
If you look at all the different universities and seminaries and quote unquote religious
28:50
schools and think tanks, so forth like that, departments of antiquities, so you have a lot
28:55
of people that are studying the Bible in various related fields.
29:03
Some might be just straight biblical studies.
29:05
Some might be textual criticism where they're focusing on the different manuscripts.
29:10
Some might be archeology.
29:11
Some might be religion, theology, ancient history, but most of the people in academia today outside
29:21
of Christian universities or Christian seminaries that have adhered to historic Christianity,
29:30
they're going to have at least an atheistic, agnostic, or secular as bent.
29:37
They might have a belief in God.
29:41
They might have a belief in Jesus, but most of them don't.
29:48
I mean, if you're going to go to your typical university, and so it is kind of perplexing
29:53
that they would dedicate their lives to studying a book that they believe is a bunch of myths
30:02
and fairy tales and propaganda.
30:06
Some of them, it's almost like their mission is to deconstruct it and to show people that
30:15
it is this silly thing, their view of it, so that they can enlighten everybody, like,
30:22
"Oh, you stupid Christians or fundamentalists or whatever."
30:27
You guys are thinking that this stuff actually happened and this is true, but I'm going to
30:32
show you that it's not.
30:35
That's what you encounter most often, and now, as things always tend to go this direction,
30:42
you have schools that were historically Christian or they were even seminaries that, over the
30:50
course of many years, have now become bastions of secularism.
30:54
Yeah, look at all the Ivy schools.
30:56
Yeah, and so people look at that and they think, "Oh, this is a seminary or something
31:03
or this is some method of school or whatever."
31:06
They think that it's Christian or biblical and it's worldview, and then they read what
31:13
this professor is writing or listen to one of their lectures, and it's completely different,
31:18
and they're either confused by that or they're impressed by that as if, "Oh, now we've become
31:24
enlightened," or this is what the experts have figured out now.
31:30
We've got this divide in society now, where the academics are looked at one way by one
31:41
group of people and one way by another group of people, but I do think that things are
31:47
changing for the better and that there are more people with a biblical worldview going
31:51
into academia, and so, even though it's lopsided, I think in the next few decades, it's just
32:00
it may be a lot more balanced.
32:02
Well, Titus, there's so much that's been made of the downstream consequences of 2020,
32:07
and that's not just because of what we saw with COVID, but what we saw with race relations,
32:11
what we saw with media, what we saw with manipulation of election results, all kinds of stuff.
32:17
We're downstream of that four or five years now, but one thing is, I am very sensitive
32:23
now when I see a headline or something that says, "Expert's say," because how many, there
32:28
are innumerable examples of a quote unquote expert being quoted for something that the
32:33
expert wouldn't co-sign, right?
32:35
They're like, "Wait a minute.
32:36
You took my life's work and you made it a tweet, and it's wrong."
32:41
But that tweet went around the world and nobody's listening to little old me in the comments
32:45
saying, "No, no, no, yes, I said that," but they didn't get, they didn't quote the rest
32:49
of that sentence or the rest of that paragraph, or they didn't read my follow-up book where
32:52
I went back and recanted that because it was stupid and we have better evidence now.
32:55
So help me kind of understand the convergence of the experts, the academicians, but also
33:02
archeology, because something you mentioned off-air, which I thought was really interesting
33:05
was there are questions that you're answering today that if you're answering those questions
33:10
in 1990, there would have been no evidence to back up what you were saying.
33:14
Like guys, that's how young archeology is.
33:16
So maybe we can start there like, how long has this been a discipline?
33:20
Because I think people, again, that we just don't know better, we're not exposed to it.
33:23
We just think archeology has just been this thing that's happened for a long time.
33:26
How the heck do we know that we even had dinosaurs because fossils, because archeology, because
33:30
words and some such?
33:31
So talk about kind of where we've gone with archeology and kind of the timeline to get
33:35
us to where we're at today.
33:37
I think that would probably help us out.
33:39
So modern archeology is very young.
33:43
Now the beginnings of it have been around a bit longer.
33:47
If we went back to the Enlightenment, there were people that we would call antiquarians.
33:54
So they were really interested in old objects, artifacts, ancient art, things like that.
34:01
But they were interested more in a perspective of, I'm going to collect this thing and then
34:06
maybe I can study it and find out some more about the ancient world.
34:11
They weren't actually going and doing archeology, so they weren't going out to sites and doing
34:15
excavations.
34:16
That is much more recent.
34:17
Now we do have some digs that happened in the 18th century, but really most of it started
34:23
in the 19th century.
34:26
And at that time, even let's say the mid to late 1800s, that was the real beginnings
34:34
of it when they were trying to be more scientific, more methodical.
34:40
But I would say it's probably only been since around 1920s or 20s that things got to a point
34:50
where we would look at that today and say, yeah, that looks a lot like archeology does
34:56
today in terms of they understood the different layers of an ancient site, a city, how they're
35:04
built one on top of another.
35:07
They understood that the pottery, which is the thing that you find most commonly, at
35:12
least in the Middle East, it changes over time and you can associate those styles with
35:17
particular layers, particular periods and dates of BC and AD or other materials like
35:23
coins or inscriptions.
35:27
So it got to this point in the early 1900s where we could get a lot more meaningful information
35:37
out of it.
35:38
And so you're thinking about how young is it not much more than a hundred years in terms
35:43
of modern archeology, which is like a blink compared to other things.
35:47
I mean, because you just think history goes back thousands and thousands of years.
35:51
And I don't mean just biblical history, just history in general.
35:54
And so I feel like everything, well, again, this is coming from an ignorant point of view,
35:59
but whenever I was first exposed to archeology, it was all those like mummy shows that the
36:04
kind of like reality TV, mummy shows, when we were like kids or something like that, like,
36:07
Oh, we're going to go into the chamber that we've never gone before.
36:09
And it was like, they, the producers knew what was in there and what they were going
36:12
to find.
36:13
So it was all Hollywood.
36:14
When you're a kid, you're like, Oh my gosh.
36:15
But it feels like for whatever reason, everything kind of goes back to Egypt and the importance
36:22
of Egypt.
36:23
And again, that's how you and Mark got connected and all that.
36:25
And I just have trouble wrapping my mind around it because we pretend to know a lot, but we
36:32
basically know nothing.
36:33
I just saw recently where there was a lidar detection that was done on the main, the great
36:38
pyramid in Giza.
36:40
And they they showed that there's these columns that have a things that go that wrap around
36:44
and that go like way far below the surface in this idea that this was just a really rich
36:50
guy that thought himself a God that this is just his tomb.
36:53
That's just foolhardy at this point.
36:55
But for how many decades has that kind of been the narrative with Egypt?
37:00
And you have the Sahara and people say, Hey, that used to be lush and green and all that.
37:03
And now it's just shifting sands.
37:05
Like what in the world is under those sands?
37:07
But I feel like whether it's, you know, Bible or whether you're just like a materialist
37:12
atheist, everything about human civilization goes back to the sands of Egypt.
37:16
So am I maybe romanticizing that a little bit too much or okay, so Egypt is visually fantastic.
37:26
They're ancient civilization and in the way that they did things help to preserve certain
37:34
aspects of that civilization.
37:36
So think about the pyramids.
37:38
You think about the temples.
37:40
They built those out of stone.
37:42
So they're, they're funerary monuments and their temples.
37:45
They built those out of stone.
37:47
Those were their most fantastic looking things, sometimes the palaces as well.
37:52
But they're, they're normal civilization, they use mud brick.
37:56
And so there's hardly anything left of that.
37:59
So we're looking at it from a very skewed perspective.
38:03
They did the mummification, right?
38:04
So now we've got all these bodies that have been preserved in these amazing sarcophagi.
38:12
Sometimes they're, they're coffins in certain periods, wooden coffins, but so it, it lends
38:17
itself to a visual appeal because of that.
38:22
And geographically, you've got all this sand once you get off of the river, the Nile, and
38:29
the sand just covers it up very nicely.
38:31
So it's very easy to excavate as well without damaging things.
38:36
You just sort of clear the sand away.
38:38
If you go to another region like Mesopotamia, the birthplace of civilization, it's, it's
38:45
not quite the same.
38:47
So they were using mud brick there, even for some of their most magnificent buildings,
38:54
whether it's zigurats or temples or palaces.
38:56
And so a lot of that did not preserve so well as it did in Egypt, whether using stones.
39:03
There's a, there's a lot of written material in Mesopotamia, but most of it's on these
39:07
little clay tablets with these sort of triangle dash looking things, cuneiform, all right?
39:14
So it doesn't look as cool as hieroglyphs.
39:18
And so a lot of it is, yes, visual and romanticism type of a thing.
39:24
If you go to ancient Israel, there's even less to look at from the period of the Old
39:32
Testament because they weren't building buildings as fancy as the Egyptians or the Mesopotamians.
39:38
And part of that had to do with, with the culture and the government.
39:41
So they weren't putting all their resources into making these monuments that took decades
39:46
and decades to build because they were more concerned with day to day life and practical
39:53
things.
39:55
So yes, part of it, part of it is just what's left today, what the, what the visual appeal
40:01
is of it.
40:03
But me, Egypt also is extremely ancient.
40:07
So it's incredibly important in terms of understanding world history.
40:13
But you know, it gets visited a lot more too.
40:16
So who's, who's going to Iraq these days to look at the ancient sites?
40:21
Not a whole lot of tourists.
40:22
Nobody.
40:23
Yeah.
40:24
And that, that's part of it too.
40:25
It is, where is the tourism going?
40:27
Where is the media going?
40:28
What are, what are the movies being made out of?
40:30
What are they showing?
40:32
So people are a lot more exposed to Egypt than they are to some of these other ancient
40:38
civilizations, which if they could show them more and people saw them more and had them
40:44
explain, they, I think they would get a lot of attention as well.
40:48
Okay.
40:49
And so we're getting into, and no, I've had this thought a lot of times, Hollywood studios,
40:52
if you're trying to figure out stuff to do, we don't need Toy Story 17, just go to the
40:56
Old Testament.
40:57
Like you can start telling a whole bunch of different stories, but we're going to be
40:59
getting into a little bit of the work from excavating the evidence for Jesus, unearthing
41:02
the Bible and the essential archeology, archaeological guide for Bible.
41:05
And so those are your books guys.
41:07
They will be in the show notes.
41:08
You can check them out.
41:09
They are right here.
41:10
But of all the things that you would have thought, secular archeology would have wanted
41:15
to do, if secular archeology could be a person that could have a goal, right, and go towards
41:20
that goal, it would be to dispense with these myths and these fairy tales that we see in
41:25
the Bible, beginning with the person and work of Jesus.
41:28
Now, Dorks Online had a heyday with trying to convince people that Jesus Christ was not
41:32
even a real person, or that wasn't his last name, but that Jesus, a Nazarene who was born
41:38
in Bethlehem, was not even a real world person.
41:40
When you hear really, really, really smart people like Joe Rogan, say out loud, do you
41:44
think he really existed?
41:45
Do you think that was a real guy?
41:47
It's like, do you think Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon?
41:50
Because we actually have more evidence that Jesus Christ was a real person than that Julius
41:53
Caesar did that.
41:54
And you just believe that without even thinking about it.
41:58
But archeology would want to disprove the Bible.
42:01
But every single year that passes, we get more and more evidence to support Old Testament
42:08
biblical narratives.
42:09
So perhaps for decades, people have been like, hey, this people group didn't even exist.
42:13
There's no evidence for their existence.
42:15
Fast forward a decade.
42:16
Oh, we have all this archaeological evidence that says, yes, they existed and they existed
42:20
right where the Bible said that they did.
42:22
So talk to me a little bit about kind of that, that awkward tension that's created between
42:27
like what archeology is trying to do, but how it's confirming things that are a little
42:31
bit inconvenient for people.
42:33
So there definitely is a contingent of archaeologists who, one of their goals, probably not their
42:40
only goal, they've got a job and they just go to the site they're working on.
42:45
But one of their goals is to demonstrate that their hypothesis of things is correct and
42:54
their hypothesis of things may be that the Bible was political and religious propaganda
43:00
that was put together at the time of Josiah or sometimes even later.
43:07
So we're talking 600 BC in order to prop up this quote unquote new belief system and
43:17
then give like a glorious history to his ancestors in the kingdom of Judah.
43:23
And Israel Finkelstein is sort of a poster child for this because he's been around for
43:29
a long time doing archaeological excavations and teaching at a university and writing articles
43:35
and books.
43:36
And he has tried to demonstrate that David and Solomon and Saul and all that stuff before
43:48
is just myth and that actually what you're seeing with the Old Testament is it starts
43:55
in the time of Omri and the northern kingdom of Israel.
43:59
And then what you're reading in the Bible is because the kingdom of Judah got control
44:04
of the narrative.
44:06
And so they made the Israel that and then Judah looked good or something like that.
44:11
So it's not quite as popular or well accepted today as it was in recent years.
44:17
Because like you said, more and more things are being found.
44:21
But if we go back to the 80s, which wasn't all that long ago, especially in terms of
44:28
history and in terms of cultural trends, if we look in the 80s and early 90s, what was
44:34
happening is that most archaeologists and ancient historians and even a lot of biblical
44:40
scholars because we like like we talked about just because your biblical scholar doesn't
44:44
mean you believe the Bible, they were saying David never existed.
44:49
He was a mythical king.
44:51
They were saying we have zero archaeological evidence for David.
44:56
All right.
44:57
And that was becoming widely accepted.
45:00
And to to their credit, we really didn't have archaeological evidence at that point for
45:08
David.
45:09
All right.
45:10
So you also have this perspective of whatever is in the Bible is guilty until proven innocent
45:19
or it's or it's myth until it's been clearly demonstrably demonstrated to be true based
45:28
on these archaeological findings.
45:30
And accepted by the majority of academics in that field.
45:32
Yeah.
45:33
So that was the view for David.
45:34
Then in 1993 excavating at the city of Dan in northern Israel, north of the Sea of Galilee,
45:43
the archaeological team there found fragments of this victory monument, a steely that was
45:50
put there by the Arameans, one of the enemies of Israel, they were fighting the northern
45:56
kingdom, especially a lot like during the time of Elijah.
46:00
Read about that in Second Kings quite a bit.
46:02
So they find this victory steely and they're reading about it.
46:05
And it was commissioned by this, this king of Arame, probably Hazael.
46:10
He's one of the people we see in the Old Testament a lot.
46:15
And he is talking about how he defeated these kings.
46:18
And so he, he mentions this king of Israel and then he mentions this king of Judah.
46:25
And then he says that he is of the house of David.
46:29
And suddenly almost overnight things changed because David's name, especially in the context
46:37
of kings of Israel and Judah had never been seen before on the archaeological record.
46:44
And this is from the ninth century BC.
46:46
So it's not far removed from when David was reigning as a king.
46:52
And so it was so drastic that people who had rejected the, the possibility that David
47:00
was historical, they were trying to figure out a way to explain this.
47:04
And so some people claimed that it was a forgery.
47:08
Some people claimed that it said something completely different.
47:13
You know, like they tried to, to read the, the word or something, the context differently.
47:19
And, and then others, they just had to change part of their historical viewpoint.
47:25
And that's actually what most of them ended up doing.
47:28
So now almost everyone accepts the, the hard fact that David was a real king who, who rained
47:35
around 1000 BC.
47:37
Because after this, another victory monument was looked at from the ninth century BC from
47:42
another enemy of Israel, the Moabites.
47:45
And they found, oh, this also mentions the house of David on it.
47:48
And then maybe this Egyptian inscription does too.
47:51
And then a few years later, they were digging in Jerusalem and they stumbled upon the remains
47:58
of, of what many archeologists think is the palace of David from 1000 BC built in a Phoenician
48:06
architectural style.
48:09
And so the evidence just kept piling up.
48:13
And now the, the discussion is not whether or not David existed, but how extensive was
48:19
his kingdom?
48:20
Was his kingdom the same way that it's depicted in the Old Testament?
48:24
Or was it this smaller, more localized kingdom that the, the writers of the Bible just tried
48:30
to exaggerate?
48:31
Okay.
48:32
So how, so, so I could see if I believed one thing for so long, and we, we've seen this,
48:37
we see this, you know, in TikTok videos and different things on YouTube, where people
48:41
will be presented with evidence that is ironclad.
48:47
It is evidence that disproves their worldview and their point of view.
48:51
And yet they will hold on to that worldview and point of view, even though it doesn't
48:55
have any, any support anymore, like literally a scaffolding was taken out from underneath
48:59
their worldview or philosophy or understanding of history.
49:03
And they're like, yep, I can't even defend it, but I'm still going to believe this.
49:07
Like how much of that have you ran into with some of some of this stuff?
49:10
Because I would feel like if somebody's life's work was spent convincing people or going
49:14
around and giving lectures about the fact that this David of the Bible, this guy, that's
49:19
this huge character in the line of this supposed Messiah that he didn't even exist being presented
49:25
with that evidence.
49:26
It's almost like when you see some of the, the, the four horsemen of new atheism, when
49:30
it was like, Hey, what would you have to be shown or what would you have to see for you
49:35
to believe in Jesus?
49:36
And then they would say whatever I would be shown, even if it was riding in the sky from
49:40
an actual God, I would just assume that I had lost my mind.
49:43
And so they're insulating themselves from having to change their point of view.
49:46
So like how have you dealt with that or seen that?
49:49
Yeah, you do see that.
49:51
So there is a contingent of scholars that are in this arena of archeology, ancient history,
49:57
biblical studies.
49:58
I would say actually the ones that are a bigger issue are the ones who are quote unquote biblical
50:04
scholars, the archeologists, true archeologists aren't really rejecting this, this David evidence
50:10
like that, but they are, they're trying to explain it away because they're unable to
50:15
accept that they're so committed to the Old Testament being written hundreds and hundreds
50:22
of years after David, some of them even say in the Persian period or the Hellenistic period,
50:28
like the time of Nehemiah or even the time of Alexander the Great.
50:32
So they're so committed to it being all these myths and propaganda that they're unwilling
50:38
to accept any of this evidence and they try to reinterpret or tell a new story about all
50:49
these different artifacts so that it can't be related to what's in the text of the Bible.
50:57
Other people, they just have to sort of, I think, go along with it.
51:01
They're not going to necessarily come out and say, hey, I was wrong about this.
51:06
They just kind of keep going and maybe they shift their emphasis a little bit.
51:12
Now it's not so much negative towards David's existence.
51:18
Now it's like, okay, he just lived in Jerusalem area and he had this little chieftain city
51:24
state or something, but still most of what we read in there is all myth.
51:30
Yeah, so it's acknowledgement but diminishment immediately.
51:33
Yeah, they're relying on the idea that we're not going to find much or much more related
51:42
to that.
51:43
And so they can continue to say like, oh yeah, this part of it, he did exist, but the rest
51:47
of it is just bogus because you think about it 3000 years ago.
51:53
We're not going to find everything.
51:56
The farther back you go in history, the less material is still remaining and people may
52:03
not realize this, they might think, oh yeah, you've excavated so much what's even left
52:09
for archeologists to dig up.
52:11
But we have, we, the collective, we have archeologists over the last 200 years have probably excavated
52:20
like less than 1% of what's out there in the ground.
52:26
And sometimes very important sites have barely been touched as well.
52:30
So there is so much that could be found still.
52:34
And we were talking about this earlier, almost every year, there is some kind of new discovery
52:40
in archeology that connects to the Bible, you know, sometimes it's a small thing and
52:44
other times it's a huge thing.
52:46
It was the big one last year with like under the Israeli prison or.
52:51
That wasn't quite last year, but yeah, it's become more well known.
52:54
That's the Megito Mosaic where there was the early Christian meeting place church that
53:01
was found, yeah, by that under that prison near Megito.
53:06
So third century, you know, it's before Christianity's legalized.
53:09
So it's, it's quite big in terms of the history of early Christianity.
53:14
But yeah, there, I mean, there's stuff like that.
53:16
There's, there's like the, the ring of Pontius Pilate or probably the ring of an official
53:21
in his administration that was found and then it sat in the box and nobody even knew what
53:26
it was for years.
53:28
And then they start processing the artifacts and they see, oh, Pilate's name is on here.
53:32
Like we never knew about that.
53:34
That was pretty big or, you know, the palace of David that we talked about or the, this,
53:40
the site called Kerbeck Hayafa that might be the, the town of Shaareem that's mentioned
53:46
in the Bible.
53:47
And that was overlooking the place where David and Goliath fought or, you know, this
53:51
ostracon with the name Goliath was found in Gath, not too many years ago.
53:56
So there's just more and more stuff keeps coming up and, and sometimes a big discovery
54:03
might not be that somebody has physically pulled it out of the dirt, but they may have
54:09
translated something that hadn't been translated before, it's been sitting in a, in a storage
54:14
box or they may have made a connection that nobody else realized and it clarified some
54:20
historical issue.
54:21
So there's a lot of progress being made in this world.
54:25
Okay.
54:26
So with that progress, I feel like you always have to look at people's intentions and what
54:30
their aims are because obviously if you have a scientist that is trying to make their experiment,
54:35
meet their preconceived notion or your, their conclusion that they've made before they seen
54:39
any evidence, like that's problematic.
54:41
You just have to like do the experiment and let the results take you where they take you.
54:44
I feel like though, if you're a biblical scholar that you're going to want to do the things
54:49
that only support that.
54:51
So like the same would be like a Graham Hancock or these people that look at, Hey, how do
54:54
we have all these ancient, uh, things like go back to a tepe and we've got these, you
54:58
know, these pyramids and these structures like in the middle of the Amazon that match stuff
55:03
that we see in Egypt, the match stuff that we see in like, you know, someplace in Asia,
55:07
like other different things, you're going to see what you want to see.
55:10
We do the same thing with scripture.
55:11
So like, you know, I mentioned Calvinism earlier, if you're a Calvinist or if you're an Arminius
55:15
or something like that, you're going to read the scripture through that lens.
55:17
And so everything that doesn't sound like a lecture and you're going to be like, ah,
55:20
we don't need that.
55:21
But if it sounds really electy, you're like, Oh man, I'm all over that like election, John
55:25
Calvin's the man.
55:26
And so how do you, I guess deal with that or what do you see in the archeological field
55:31
when people are just so like, they've already got the conclusion.
55:34
They just haven't backed it up with evidence yet.
55:36
You know what I mean?
55:37
Yeah, there is a degree of that.
55:39
So what I noticed in archeology is that the data isn't really the problem and the data
55:47
or even the interpretation of data is not so much the problem.
55:51
And that can be a huge problem in some disciplines.
55:55
In archeology, it's more the conclusions drawn from the data and from the interpretation
56:00
of the data because it's very difficult to assert something about an archeological artifact
56:07
or an ancient structure or a stratigraphic layer that is not true because it can be looked
56:17
at by other archeologists and they can expose that.
56:22
So it may be something like an inscription is discovered, okay?
56:28
And you know, you can't change it, it's there.
56:30
It's inscribed how it is, right?
56:32
So then you translate it.
56:33
Well, if you translate it and your objective is to have it give some information that supports
56:43
your hypothesis or worldview or bias and you obviously have changed some things.
56:52
You see some letters that aren't there or you like move the words around.
56:57
Other people are going to be able to notice that clearly and then they're going to say,
57:00
no, no, no, that's not even there.
57:02
This is obviously what it says and there will probably be very large agreement against
57:08
that radical interpretation or conclusion.
57:13
So it's hard to fake stuff like that.
57:14
Now, what becomes difficult with archeology is that there are a lot of people who will
57:21
read archeological reports or at least articles or books about archeology, but they themselves
57:30
don't have training and experience in archeology.
57:33
So they actually can't evaluate the conclusions because they don't understand the data itself.
57:41
So they just have to rely on what the expert testimony is.
57:45
And they say, okay, this guy, you know, he has this degree.
57:48
He teaches at this university, he's been digging at this site.
57:52
He wrote these books and articles, blah, blah, blah.
57:55
Therefore, he's the expert and he must be right about this.
58:00
He could be right about that and wrong about this, but they don't really have a way to
58:04
evaluate that.
58:06
And archeology is really kind of, it's something that's popular in a way.
58:12
People are interested in history and it's a little bit mysterious too.
58:17
And so I think it gets read much more than papers on microbiology, right?
58:24
Yeah.
58:25
And so there's a lot of novices so to speak and non-experts who are reading some of this
58:31
and they can't tell, they can't sift fact from fiction in terms of the conclusions.
58:37
So that becomes the main problem of the conclusions rather than the data.
58:42
Okay.
58:43
So for you in the work that you've done, let's get into some of the work that you've done.
58:46
So which I guess, if you want to break down, like, okay, how do you pick a place to go?
58:51
Where does the funding come from?
58:52
Is it all coming from think tanks or universities or private owners or whatever that thing looks
58:56
like?
58:57
And because again, as an ignoramus, I think there's a big open field.
59:01
You're like, I think we might be able to find something here and you just gravel shovel
59:04
and you just, and you just start like one thing at a time.
59:08
So you specifically, when you're first getting onto a site, what was the workup to get you
59:14
to that site?
59:15
Do you approach the site?
59:17
If you assume, hey, there's more stone stuff here, are you a little bit more, you know,
59:21
more intense with your digging?
59:22
Or if you're like, hey, we're, we're maybe looking for a prepyrus or pottery here.
59:25
Like everyone's got to be super careful.
59:27
Like, how do you start, start the dig?
59:29
And then we'll, we'll get into some of the stuff you've actually done.
59:31
Well, you probably would start with you're interested in a particular ancient city.
59:39
And maybe you know where that city is.
59:41
Maybe you don't.
59:42
Okay.
59:43
And you're trying to figure that out first.
59:46
And then one of the objectives of the excavation becomes showing that it is that city or showing
59:52
that it's something else.
59:55
You look at the ancient geographical references to that city.
1:00:00
So the Bible is a great geography book, even people who think that it's largely unhistorical
1:00:07
or contains a lot of historical errors will agree that the geography is very useful information.
1:00:16
So there are clues like, okay, it's this direction from this city.
1:00:21
It's east from this city and it's near this river.
1:00:23
And you can see it from this mountain.
1:00:27
And it was occupied in the middle bronze age and the iron age.
1:00:32
And then, you know, it was destroyed in the Roman period.
1:00:35
Stuff like that.
1:00:36
You can factor all that into it.
1:00:39
And so then you would go and look in that general area and you do a survey and you would
1:00:46
try to find if there is an ancient settlement in that area that fits those general requirements.
1:00:52
Now, it may have already been found.
1:00:55
And so you know, okay, I'll look at this site in more intensity with an excavation.
1:01:02
There might be multiple sites and you're not sure exactly where it is.
1:01:05
So maybe you'll have to decide between those.
1:01:09
But then the next step would be to get a permit from the local government, from that nation.
1:01:17
So you got to apply for that permit.
1:01:19
You asked about funding.
1:01:20
So, you know, funding can come from various sources, whether it is grants and sometimes
1:01:26
there are government grants.
1:01:28
But a lot of it comes ultimately from private donors who donate to say a research institute
1:01:37
or a museum or a university.
1:01:40
And then the funds are designated towards an archaeological project.
1:01:44
Let me actually ask a little bit more on the fund side of things.
1:01:46
So where was the last place you dug?
1:01:48
What country?
1:01:49
Jordan.
1:01:50
Jordan.
1:01:51
Okay.
1:01:52
So you go to Jordan, they've got their department of antiquities or whatever the thing is.
1:01:54
So no matter what you find, they own it.
1:01:57
Right?
1:01:58
I guess what is the benefit of American donors or American universities or American funds
1:02:05
basically going to pay y'all to do the job or to pay the Jordanians or both, like to
1:02:11
make sure this thing happens when y'all can't just take it back to some museum in America
1:02:16
or some traveling, you know, thing that goes to museums that is controlled by Americans.
1:02:21
Does that make sense?
1:02:22
Because it's like, man, that's a sweet deal for Jordan.
1:02:23
It's like, yeah, hey, you dig up our crap and then we get to keep it.
1:02:26
This is excellent.
1:02:27
Hey, this is great.
1:02:28
Yeah.
1:02:29
And that's actually affected archaeology a lot.
1:02:31
So things didn't used to be like that.
1:02:34
And that is how many of these museums got these incredible collections is because they
1:02:41
were paying for the excavations and they were doing the labor and they were doing the research
1:02:49
and the publication and then displaying it.
1:02:52
Now, yeah, things are different now, so they belong to whatever country you excavate.
1:02:57
Sometimes things are given on loan for temporary research or temporary exhibitions, but yeah,
1:03:04
ultimately they're going to go back.
1:03:06
So what do people get out of it?
1:03:09
And what they get out of it is knowledge.
1:03:13
So if they're only interested in making money or building a museum, they're not going to
1:03:21
be donating towards an archaeological project, but but if their objective is to help uncover
1:03:29
new knowledge and understand what happened better in history, then then that's what they
1:03:35
get out of it.
1:03:37
So I guess, yeah, as soon as you said that, I'm like, yeah, knowledge is power.
1:03:40
That actually does make a lot of sense.
1:03:41
And also you're helping uncover knowledge for humanity.
1:03:45
It's not like you in your little pocket of the world and you get to hang on to this knowledge.
1:03:49
Like we're so connected in all the information just goes around the world instantaneously
1:03:53
to where it kind of helps out with that.
1:03:54
So okay, let's get into your stuff.
1:03:56
And so obviously people love the credential and people love top 10 lists and hey, what's
1:04:00
on your Mount Rushmore of this, that and that thing?
1:04:02
Let's go through your your like personal Mount Rushmore of here were the sites that were
1:04:08
either my favorite or the ones where it's like, okay, here's where we we went in with
1:04:13
a hypothesis and man, we just hit grand slam after grand slam after grand slam.
1:04:17
Let's go through some of your greatest hits.
1:04:20
Well, I've excavated several different places, but you know, one of the most interesting
1:04:26
I would say is Jerusalem just because of how much history and how much biblical history
1:04:32
happened there, both old and New Testament.
1:04:36
And so I enjoyed that a lot.
1:04:40
I wouldn't say that anything that that we found there that I was a part of was totally
1:04:47
groundbreaking.
1:04:48
I mean, things have been found in recent years that were, but it was just from a personal
1:04:54
level, very interesting to me, you know, we're digging up some of the coins of say, Herod
1:04:59
the Great and Herod Agrippa and Pontius Pilate.
1:05:01
So all these people that are all named in the New Testament and they have part of the
1:05:07
life of Jesus, they're involved in that in the gospels.
1:05:11
So I love that.
1:05:13
As far as other sites that I've worked on where we're going in and we have a hypothesis
1:05:19
of, you know, this might be such and such site or this thing happened there.
1:05:24
One that I recently published as a small site.
1:05:28
So the name of the site in the Bible, at least what I think this site was, is called Beit
1:05:35
Avan and it's mentioned in Joshua chapter seven.
1:05:40
That's the primary reference, but it was this town or village or maybe a religious site right
1:05:49
next to the city of I spelled AI.
1:05:54
And that is the big city of the area that the Israelites fought against in Joshua seven
1:06:02
and eight.
1:06:03
All right, so we're looking at this little town and we did a survey first looking all
1:06:10
around the area with the main objective of just like when when was this region populated?
1:06:16
When was it occupied?
1:06:18
But secondarily was we're kind of looking for this this Beit Avan site.
1:06:24
Now we know that it was related to Canaanite religion because the name Beit Avan means
1:06:31
house of wickedness and so it it had been modified in the Hebrew to reflect that off
1:06:37
of its original names.
1:06:39
We see that a lot in the Old Testament where they take a pagan name and they modify the
1:06:44
pronunciation of it so that it's not honoring that pagan God anymore and transforms it into
1:06:51
another word that's maybe more reflective of what they're thinking.
1:06:55
So some kind of religious place and what we found at the top of this hill was some ruins
1:07:02
that looked like maybe this was an altar.
1:07:06
And so we decided to excavate there and it was an altar was a Canaanite altar from the
1:07:11
time of the patriarchs till the time of Joshua.
1:07:16
So just roughly say, you know, like Joseph through Joshua and then it's abandoned that
1:07:24
site is abandoned and no one no one lives there again later way later on.
1:07:31
It's used for farming in the Roman period in the Byzantine period.
1:07:35
So that is something where we look at it and we're like, okay, this is on the hill next
1:07:42
to I and in the Bible in Joshua it says that it's located adjacent to I so that would fit.
1:07:49
It is religious in character, it's a big altar on the top of a hill and it was used during
1:07:56
the time of Joshua and then it's abandoned.
1:08:00
So maybe because of the conquest it got abandoned.
1:08:05
So that's one of those situations where we went in looking maybe this is it.
1:08:11
What are we going to find?
1:08:12
Is it going to confirm or deny that and it seems to be confirming that.
1:08:17
So that that was a really exciting project.
1:08:20
I thought I mean, it's obviously pretty small and obscure place, but it's something that
1:08:26
nobody had agreed upon before like where where is this site of bait oven.
1:08:32
So now I think we have a pretty viable candidate for for that site.
1:08:40
I mean, I think the evidence is pointing there, but I don't know what everybody else thinks
1:08:44
about it at this moment in time, maybe as as the years progress that it'll it'll gain
1:08:50
some more support, but that was that was something that I really enjoyed done a few like that
1:08:58
since then at bigger sites.
1:09:00
We also excavated at I the archaeological sites called Kerbat et tell.
1:09:05
So it's a huge bronze age site massive stone walls all around it a big temple on the Acropolis
1:09:13
and it was destroyed by this intense fire and there was a there was a battle there as
1:09:17
well.
1:09:18
You could see from all the sling stones and then it was abandoned.
1:09:22
So that is something that that fits some of the general story of Joshua seven and eight
1:09:29
and there's other aspects of that like there's a big pile of stones was over one of the gate
1:09:36
areas that maybe is what's talked about in Joshua eight.
1:09:41
The pottery that we were finding actually that was one of our main things was we wanted
1:09:46
to know what was the approximate date when this city was destroyed and abandoned because
1:09:52
some things in the past archaeologists in the past have been saying one thing.
1:09:56
It was totally different than the biblical narrative.
1:09:59
And so we wanted to see what's actually there and and what we found was different than what
1:10:05
the previous archaeologists had been saying and it was more in agreement with with the
1:10:11
biblical text.
1:10:12
So that was another here's our hypothesis, you know, what are we going to find and then
1:10:17
the most recent one that was in Jordan and that's at the super recently, right?
1:10:25
Yeah, that was a month ago.
1:10:28
Okay.
1:10:29
So yeah, let's I want to dig into that for sure because that's not why you're you came
1:10:32
to faith Bible, you're going to be doing a little bit more like Exodus Mount Sinai type
1:10:35
stuff.
1:10:36
So I do want to ask you about that.
1:10:37
But yeah, let's talk about the trip to Zohar.
1:10:39
So Zohar is a city that's mentioned in Genesis at the time of Abraham and Lot.
1:10:47
And a lot of people probably have never heard of this city or they read it, but they don't
1:10:52
remember it because it's not a huge part of the narrative.
1:10:57
Almost everybody's heard of Sodom and Sodom and Gomorrah, you know, those are the two big
1:11:01
popular cities, but there were five cities in that region that are all part of that story.
1:11:07
So there's Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zaboyim and Zohar or Bella was its other name.
1:11:15
And if you read through, you get the Genesis 19 and Sodom and Gomorrah and Admah and Zaboyim
1:11:21
are going to get destroyed.
1:11:23
So Lot, he flees to this fifth city, Zohar.
1:11:28
And that's the one city that didn't get destroyed, the other four got destroyed, Zohar didn't.
1:11:34
And then Lot doesn't want to stay in the city, he's afraid, so he ends up leaving the city
1:11:40
and going up the mountains nearby and he hides in this cave, all right?
1:11:45
So the cave actually was rediscovered and excavated many years ago by the archeologist
1:11:54
that I'm working at Zohar, he's a Greek archeologist named Dino Politis, but he excavated the cave
1:12:01
of Lot which the ancient Christians, the Byzantines had actually built a church next to it to commemorate
1:12:09
and preserve it and there are all these inscriptions there about Lot.
1:12:12
And then when they dug the cave up, they found those pottery from before the time of Lot
1:12:17
and then into the time of Lot and then it was abandoned really until the Christians kind
1:12:23
of relocated it.
1:12:25
So that was actually, that's a clue in where is Zohar because in the text of Genesis, he
1:12:32
flees from Zohar up to this cave, it's somewhere close.
1:12:37
Now Zohar is also important in terms of where is Sodom?
1:12:41
And that is because he leaves Sodom by foot and he gets to Zohar pretty quickly.
1:12:50
So we know it's not very far away and those five cities are grouped together.
1:12:54
Well, Zohar is helpful though because it was not destroyed, it continued to be inhabited
1:13:01
and we can see this in the Bible, we can see this in other ancient texts and then eventually
1:13:06
in the archeology.
1:13:07
Like Zohar is mentioned by Moses in the book of Deuteronomy and then Zohar is mentioned
1:13:13
by the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah and so we see that it continues to be a habitated
1:13:23
city all the way through this Old Testament period.
1:13:27
Then if we look at the extra biblical texts, ancient texts that are not biblical, what
1:13:34
we see is that it continued to exist up until the medieval period.
1:13:40
The latest period it was a place where they were making sugar, well, sugar factory essentially,
1:13:48
refining it and then it was abandoned and kind of lost the history for a while.
1:13:52
But before that it was a Byzantine city, so there are multiple churches there because
1:13:59
most of the Middle East was Christian during that time.
1:14:03
Before that there was a Roman fort there as well.
1:14:07
And then we see Josephus talking about it in the first century, Ptolemy and his geography
1:14:14
mentions it in the second century.
1:14:17
So we know that it was around like the time of Jesus and the apostles through the early
1:14:22
church and then to the medieval period and we know that there's some Old Testament.
1:14:28
So that gives us some requirements basically for when we're digging that we should be able
1:14:34
to find those periods if it's the right site, but it also makes it easier because it wasn't
1:14:40
lost to history for thousands of years.
1:14:44
And in the late 1800s they found what's called the Mod of a Map at this church in Jordan,
1:14:51
the church of St. George in Mod of a.
1:14:54
And it was a map of the Holy Land from the Byzantine period.
1:14:58
The map was made in about 542 AD and it was a mosaic floor so it's on the floor of the
1:15:05
church and it shows all these historic locations.
1:15:08
And one of the places it shows is Zoar and another place it shows actually is the cave
1:15:14
of Lot right next to each other.
1:15:17
So Zoar is placed on the southeastern side of the Dead Sea.
1:15:20
So there's a map that really pinpoints it geographically.
1:15:25
Now all these other ancient texts we talked about, whether it's the Old Testament or it's
1:15:30
Josephus or it's Ptolemy, whoever, Strabo, some of these pilgrims from the Byzantine period,
1:15:41
they gave these different pieces of information that can help us situate generally where that
1:15:49
site is, but the map really helped a lot.
1:15:52
And so after that, archaeologists went to this area, they did these surveys to see what's
1:15:59
here, what kind of pottery are we going to find by these old villages.
1:16:06
And they found some cities that they thought, okay, this could be the place, one in particular
1:16:13
near the village of Safi, it's called southeast side of the Dead Sea.
1:16:21
And so they thought, all right, maybe this is Zoar and it turns out it happened to be
1:16:26
right by this cave of Lot.
1:16:29
And so then they started excavating at Safi area and they found the Byzantine city of Zoar.
1:16:38
Okay, so that's the one that was shown on that map.
1:16:40
And that's the one that had the Roman fort and that would date back to the time of Josephus
1:16:46
basically.
1:16:47
And nobody has found the Zoar from the time of Abraham and Lot.
1:16:52
And so that was the question that we were posing, our hypothesis was that city has to
1:16:59
be located right around here, whether it's directly under the main part of the Byzantine
1:17:05
city or if it's off to the side somewhere, we weren't sure.
1:17:09
So first objective was to dig down under the Byzantine city.
1:17:16
And what we found is that there's some pottery there from the time of Lot, but the city didn't
1:17:23
seem to have been located directly under that later city.
1:17:29
But it does seem to be next to it.
1:17:32
And so we've got a different area that we're planning to dig next year.
1:17:39
And that seems to have been where it was at this time of Lot.
1:17:43
And occasionally cities migrated a little bit.
1:17:47
I'm not saying they went miles and miles away, but you've got it in this part of the valley
1:17:51
and then it's on the ridge right there or something.
1:17:54
And this can have to do with things like the river changing its course.
1:17:59
And in the case of this city and actually those five cities and Genesis, they were all next
1:18:04
to a river.
1:18:06
They were coming down from the mountains, emptying into the Dead Sea.
1:18:09
And so it did change its course over time.
1:18:11
And that's probably why people moved the central area of the town a little bit over those centuries.
1:18:18
Well, even if people diverted the water or something like that, so I appreciate getting
1:18:21
into that detail.
1:18:22
I guess it's probably impossible to know.
1:18:25
So maybe asking you an impossible question, but like how close are y'all to being able
1:18:29
to definitively say as part of the historical record that this is exactly where this place
1:18:34
was?
1:18:35
What else needs to happen for that to happen?
1:18:38
I think we just need to go and excavate there another season to really definitively show
1:18:44
that yes, there's a city right here that was occupied at the time of Abraham and Lot.
1:18:52
And we know that later on, the cities called Zoar from all sorts of different records.
1:18:58
And so this would be the earlier period of Zoar.
1:19:02
I mean, I think we have good evidence already for that, but to really put the nail and the
1:19:11
coffin on this case, we've got to excavate that period of the city and substantially
1:19:21
so that we can clearly show without question.
1:19:24
Yeah, here's all the buildings here.
1:19:26
Here's all the pottery from those time periods.
1:19:28
It's obvious, it's obviously from this time and it's right next to that Byzantine city
1:19:36
of Zoar.
1:19:37
So we know it's the same place.
1:19:39
So I'm going to shift gears just a little bit because I'm going to be selfish here because
1:19:42
I can't go to your talk tonight because I'm teaching Jiu Jitsu.
1:19:45
And so I want a miniature version of the talk before you give like the actual big daddy
1:19:50
talk with the mic on your face and that whole thing.
1:19:52
So obviously you go from, you know, Zoar and this kind of more obscure part of the text.
1:19:57
It's not as popular.
1:19:59
And then you got Mount Sinai.
1:20:00
Okay.
1:20:01
So you've got, you've got Moses.
1:20:02
You've got the 10 commandments.
1:20:03
I mean, the sermon this morning was on how Moses came down off of the mountain for probably
1:20:08
the seventh time and his face was glowing.
1:20:11
He was radiant.
1:20:12
There were like beams of light coming off of his face and kind of, he didn't even realize
1:20:15
that.
1:20:16
But you know, it was happening with all the people around him, but there is, I mean,
1:20:18
I watched documentaries about where Mount Sinai is and where, where it should be and where
1:20:25
it couldn't possibly be, but everyone seems to not be able to have a historical like,
1:20:30
no, this was it.
1:20:31
There's no consensus whatsoever.
1:20:33
So tonight are you going to be giving everybody kind of your consensus expert opinion or you
1:20:38
just kind of going to be presenting like here are the options of where it could be?
1:20:42
I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the different ideas, but I am going to focus
1:20:49
in on one in particular and I'm going to try to build up to that by looking at the evidence
1:20:56
from other sites on their wilderness itinerary, some inscriptions that have been found, ancient
1:21:03
sources that talk about Mount Sinai or Horeb, same, same mountain, right, and show the historical
1:21:10
progression of it that it wasn't completely lost to history ever really and why that leads
1:21:20
us to one particular site.
1:21:23
So if we're looking at the geography of the Bible, we're trying to find ancient locations
1:21:32
or even people that are talked about in the Bible, we can't just read one section of the
1:21:40
Bible in isolation to be able to definitively show that, right, because if we read through
1:21:47
Exodus and we get all this information on Mount Sinai, there's not a map in there, right?
1:21:53
Okay, maybe at the back of your Bible, you have a map and it shows Mount Sinai wherever,
1:21:59
but it's not in the original text, right, okay, so we have some information which we
1:22:04
got to use.
1:22:05
We have other passages in the Bible, we have some information and then we have information
1:22:09
about it or other sites or other people from sources outside of the Bible.
1:22:15
The maybe Egyptian papayri or inscriptions or some ancient geographic work or old maps
1:22:24
and then investigations on the ground through archeology, looking at what kind of material
1:22:30
remains in their time period.
1:22:32
So we've got to factor all those things into it and with the Sinai issue, I find that it
1:22:42
often boils down to about three major things.
1:22:48
The first is that, okay, we have a traditional Mount Sinai site, right?
1:22:54
And we also have a traditional lots of other sites, biblical sites in the Bible.
1:23:00
Now these, all of these were marked by the early Christians.
1:23:04
We would call them the Byzantines, you know, Byzantine churches generally starting in the
1:23:11
three hundreds, okay, once Christianity was legalized.
1:23:13
Sometimes there was stuff that existed there earlier, it just couldn't be an official church
1:23:18
building and sometimes they waited a little bit and then built a bigger structure in the
1:23:24
next century, but mostly the three hundreds, okay?
1:23:28
So these are people that their family has lived there for generations, their Christians,
1:23:38
they believe that the Bible is important, they believe that the historical events are
1:23:43
important.
1:23:44
So they're not just like looking at some rock next to them and then making a claim that
1:23:50
something important happened there, it's been handed down from generation to generation.
1:23:55
But a lot of people, especially Protestants, I use the term broadly, evangelicals, independent
1:24:05
churches, whatever, they look at those Byzantine churches and they look at them and they see
1:24:12
them as some kind of like Catholic or even a crusader thing where, oh, that's not taking
1:24:19
the Bible seriously or it was just invented by some branch of the church or some people
1:24:25
a lot later and they didn't know what they were talking about and it's not the real place.
1:24:31
But what we found is that basically every time there's an ancient Byzantine church attached
1:24:38
to a historic site, it's the right site.
1:24:41
So they have a very good track record of this.
1:24:44
With that being said, that is the case at traditional Mount Sinai, at Jebel Musa Mount
1:24:52
Sinai, Mount Catherine, lots of different names, but for some people that's a negative.
1:24:56
So they look at that and they almost discount it just because of that.
1:25:00
For me, it's the opposite.
1:25:02
It's actually, that's a plus, I'm not saying that that is the evidence that says it's there
1:25:07
for sure, but I think it's positive.
1:25:11
Okay, so that's one of the things that's usually a pro or a con depending on your viewpoint.
1:25:18
The other thing that a lot of people attach onto is a discussion of Midian.
1:25:24
So Moses goes into Midian, meets his father-in-law, then he leaves, he leaves Midian, goes back
1:25:32
to the mountain.
1:25:33
And so they think about Midian and they think, okay, Mount Sinai has to be in Midian or it's
1:25:38
got to be like right next to it, okay?
1:25:41
But Midian was not a country.
1:25:45
Midian was a region inhabited by Midianites and they are a semi-nomadic people.
1:25:52
So we know generally the area where that was, but we can't delineate a border really.
1:25:59
So Mount Sinai should be outside of Midian and fairly close, but that can't be like our
1:26:10
main criteria either.
1:26:12
And because of that Midianite idea, a lot of people have located it in what is now Saudi
1:26:19
Arabia or let's just call it Arabia.
1:26:23
There's a secondary component to that and that is in Galatians, 425 that Paul mentions.
1:26:29
Mount Sinai in Arabia, okay?
1:26:32
And they look at that and they say, oh, yeah, obviously Paul is telling us that Mount Sinai
1:26:39
was in Saudi Arabia.
1:26:41
The problem is we have a Nachronism kind of here.
1:26:44
They're looking at Arabia in their 20th or 21st century context, but in the first century
1:26:51
when Paul was saying that, Arabia means the province, the Roman province of Arabia, which
1:26:58
encompassed the Sinai Peninsula.
1:27:01
So the Midian Arabia thing, that's one component of it, okay?
1:27:07
Then the Byzantine church part of it.
1:27:11
Then the other part is the ancient Egyptian sources.
1:27:16
What do they say?
1:27:18
And I find that some people largely ignore that, but they're very useful because the
1:27:25
Egyptians lived at this same time as Moses and they wrote about different geographical
1:27:32
places.
1:27:33
And so they actually, the Egyptians actually talk about a number of sites that are mentioned
1:27:39
in Exodus and are related to the itinerary.
1:27:44
One of those is the area of Sinai actually.
1:27:48
The name Sinai appears in an Egyptian text of the 11th dynasty.
1:27:54
So this is way before the time of Moses.
1:27:58
And this is fairly new information, really.
1:28:02
I think there was a treatise on this published only five years ago, less than five years
1:28:09
ago.
1:28:10
So for a long time, many people who reject the traditional site or just the mountains
1:28:16
anywhere in the Sinai Peninsula, one of their main points was that Sinai, we don't know
1:28:24
where that name came from.
1:28:27
It was just applied to what we call the Sinai Peninsula in more modern times.
1:28:31
But we know now that it's very ancient and it did actually apply to what we still call
1:28:38
the Sinai Peninsula.
1:28:39
And most names are like that, biblical type names.
1:28:43
They are retained into the modern period or at least to say the medieval period or sometimes
1:28:50
the Ottoman period, they don't really get lost all that often unless the place is lost
1:28:58
to history.
1:28:59
People aren't living there anymore.
1:29:01
So we say, okay, so Sinai that name existed early on, it seems it's applying to somewhere
1:29:08
in the Sinai Peninsula still, so that works, that's okay.
1:29:12
What about some of the other places, the sea crossing and some of the areas around the
1:29:17
sea crossing in Exodus, like Pihahirath or Middall or Baal Zephan?
1:29:23
And all those are mentioned in Egyptian text and they're all kind of near that border of
1:29:29
Egypt, which is something else a lot of people don't understand, is that the border of ancient
1:29:35
Egypt was right before you go over into Sinai.
1:29:39
It's kind of where the Suez Canal area is today.
1:29:42
So outside of that was not Egypt.
1:29:45
The ancient Egyptians never called that Egypt.
1:29:48
Egypt was the black land, they called it Chemit, so it's the flood plain of the Nile.
1:29:55
So the Sinai was something else, they referred to it usually as the land of turquoise or
1:30:02
a place where they would do mining, because they would do seasonal mining there.
1:30:06
And turquoise is one of the things they mined, well that brings us to another location in
1:30:12
the Exodus itinerary, which is Dovka.
1:30:15
And this is actually an Egyptian word, it's the Hebrew rendering of an Egyptian word that
1:30:21
means turquoise.
1:30:23
So the Israelites visit this turquoise place, well there were two turquoise mining places
1:30:30
in Sinai.
1:30:31
They're in southwestern Sinai.
1:30:34
One of them was huge and really important site.
1:30:38
It's called Saravit al-Haddam, and this is where the earliest alphabetic inscriptions
1:30:45
were found, that they're written in a Semitic language like Hebrew, which I think there's
1:30:49
some connection and relevance there.
1:30:52
But we know where that site is, so that seems to be on the itinerary, the wandering itineraries.
1:30:58
We know approximately where they were before they crossed the sea, and then we know that
1:31:04
they headed down to this place in southwestern Sinai.
1:31:10
There's a few other sites that have some good linguistic connections, some archaeological
1:31:16
findings, but that one is one of the strongest.
1:31:20
Now we also know where Kedish Barnea is, which that helps us to see, where's the general
1:31:26
area that they ended up, and also we can trace how far is it from Kedish Barnea to these
1:31:33
different Mount Sinai locations.
1:31:35
So Kedish Barnea, if you're looking at a map today, is going to be just across the border
1:31:43
from southwestern Israel into Sinai, into Egypt.
1:31:48
And it was this huge oasis, actually the biggest oasis in all of Sinai, and there's evidence
1:31:54
of people passing through and using that even before the time of Moses.
1:31:59
So when Moses is going out into the wilderness and over to Midian, he's probably stopping
1:32:04
at Kedish Barnea, he's stopping at that spring to get water for himself and for his flocks.
1:32:12
And of course, they end up back there later on and they're camping there because it makes
1:32:15
sense because there's water there.
1:32:18
Now that, again, it's in the Sinai Peninsula today, so they're staying in this area.
1:32:25
I would, one other really important thing I think before I get to the mountain itself
1:32:29
is an Egyptian inscription that mentions the nomads of Yahweh.
1:32:35
So this is the Israelites while they're in the wandering period.
1:32:38
Their worshipers of Yahweh, that's why that name is used.
1:32:43
On the Egyptian geographic list where this is found, it groups those people with people
1:32:50
who are present in the areas of Sinai, Edom, and Moab, or Trans-Jordan, okay?
1:32:58
It doesn't put them with anything in what is Saudi Arabia today.
1:33:04
So that's another little clue, all right?
1:33:07
So we got a lot of stuff that's converging in the Sinai Peninsula and there are a few
1:33:14
different mountains that have been proposed in the Sinai Peninsula as Biblical Mount Sinai
1:33:20
or Mount Horeb, but there's a requirement, a geographic requirement, I think it's really
1:33:26
important information that Josephus gives us.
1:33:29
So he's writing in the first century.
1:33:32
He has a massive amount of historical information if you've ever read Josephus.
1:33:37
He has tons of info, not just about the first century, but going back into earlier biblical
1:33:44
history.
1:33:45
He occasionally gets some stuff wrong, gets some people confused or something.
1:33:50
But by and large, he's very accurate and he's getting this from somewhere.
1:33:55
So a couple of things he says about Mount Sinai.
1:34:00
First of all, he geographically places it in what we would now call the Sinai Peninsula.
1:34:06
Second, maybe more important even, is that he says it is the tallest mountain in the region.
1:34:13
So back in ancient times, it was kind of hard to get that information and then quickly figure
1:34:19
out where it could be because they didn't have topo maps or they couldn't look up on
1:34:25
Wikipedia, the mountain ranges and all that.
1:34:27
Today it's a lot easier.
1:34:28
We don't have to physically go there and measure the mountains.
1:34:33
And the tallest mountain in that whole region is Mount Catherine.
1:34:40
So Mount Catherine is the tallest peak of this bigger Mount Sinai mountain.
1:34:46
So Jebel Musa is the secondary peak, but it's actually all one mountain.
1:34:51
So if you do the hike, you hike up to where this old monastery is on the top of Jebel
1:34:57
Musa, that is right next to Mount Catherine's peak.
1:35:02
You'll just see it right over there.
1:35:04
You could take a different trail and get to the other peak.
1:35:07
So Mount Catherine is the tallest in the region.
1:35:09
So this is where traditional Mount Sinai is.
1:35:13
This is where in the 300s, they established this chapel of the burning bush to commemorate
1:35:20
where Moses went and saw the burning bush.
1:35:24
And then of course later goes up onto the mountain.
1:35:29
If we look at some of the geography besides the tallest one, it's on that same trail,
1:35:35
so to speak.
1:35:36
Going south, you hit the turquoise mining place, and then you keep going a little bit
1:35:41
more and you get to Mount Sinai.
1:35:44
And there's water there.
1:35:47
There's a huge open plain in front of the mountain.
1:35:50
In fact, that's why today it's the town of St. Catherine because it's a place where you
1:35:55
could actually have all those people living.
1:35:58
So the big camp of the Israelites would be right there.
1:36:01
I mean, it perfectly accommodates them.
1:36:04
Now as far as do we have these ancient Hebrew inscriptions or all this pottery or something
1:36:12
that's left over from the Israelites, no.
1:36:14
And there's some reasons for that.
1:36:16
First of all, you don't really find archaeological remains of nomads from the distant past like
1:36:24
that.
1:36:25
And the Israelites weren't making pottery.
1:36:26
They weren't building buildings.
1:36:28
They were living in tents, so they're not leaving that kind of stuff behind.
1:36:33
Do we find some inscriptions in the future?
1:36:35
Yeah, sure.
1:36:36
Maybe.
1:36:37
I don't know how much they were going around carving stuff onto rocks, but that's a possibility
1:36:42
right now.
1:36:43
I don't think anything has been found or if it has, then it's not known.
1:36:49
But it's fitting all these different things very, very well.
1:36:55
And so my view is that the quote unquote traditional Mount Sinai is the correct location.
1:37:03
And there's stuff we could get into with some of the other proposed locations like alleged
1:37:08
evidence of why that's Mount Sinai that archaeologically doesn't make sense.
1:37:14
And earlier you had mentioned consensus and so forth like that.
1:37:18
Well, what I can say is that generally people who are archeologists, they lean towards the
1:37:28
traditional Mount Sinai heavily and they really don't take the Arabia theory seriously.
1:37:39
And there's really only two other mountains in the Sinai Peninsula that a couple archeologists
1:37:46
push as this is a viable alternative.
1:37:49
Okay.
1:37:50
Well, we got to get you out of here before too long so that you can actually go get ready
1:37:53
to give that talk.
1:37:54
But I appreciate you getting into that.
1:37:55
Just real quick to put a bow on the Mount Sinai stuff, I'm struck with kind of two questions
1:37:59
as it pertains to that.
1:38:02
Number one, will we eventually know beyond a shadow of a doubt like right now we know
1:38:06
exactly where the Statue of Liberty is right in for forever.
1:38:10
We will be able to know even if they take it down or we send it back to France like they
1:38:13
have requested, we will know exactly where that was.
1:38:17
Okay.
1:38:18
Is it knowable right beyond a shadow of a doubt?
1:38:20
Number one.
1:38:21
The secondary, secondarily, why exactly does it matter because I watched this guy, he had
1:38:26
like a two or three part documentary series where he was like trying to find in all that.
1:38:29
And I was just the whole time.
1:38:30
I'm like, I didn't want to say it was foolish, but I'm like, why does it matter if it's this
1:38:34
one versus that one versus, Hey, how about we try to live out what we got, you know, supposedly
1:38:40
that came down off of that, that mountain.
1:38:42
So help me out with those two, right?
1:38:44
Yeah, those are, those are great questions.
1:38:46
By the way, we could lose the location of the Statue of Liberty, just like other things
1:38:51
have been lost in time.
1:38:52
But what would have to happen for that?
1:38:55
You would have to get destroyed or move somewhere else.
1:38:58
And then New York would have to be uninhabited for a long period of time.
1:39:02
Yeah.
1:39:03
Yeah.
1:39:04
So that can happen, but it's unlikely, right?
1:39:05
Yeah.
1:39:06
And that's, that's why we know where so many things are is because there were still people
1:39:10
living around there and there's, you know, remnants and records, but you're, you're right.
1:39:17
Why, why does it matter?
1:39:20
I don't think it actually matters that much.
1:39:23
I think the main point is that we would like to know the correct place and the correct
1:39:29
history for all these things from, from a standpoint of showing that the Bible is historical,
1:39:37
it would be very hard to show that that whole narrative with Moses at Mount Sinai was historical
1:39:46
because, you know, this is the right site for Mount Sinai.
1:39:49
Okay.
1:39:50
So, so from that perspective, it really doesn't matter that much.
1:39:54
I think it's just of interest and, and we have enough, we have, we have good enough candidates
1:40:02
from Mount Sinai that I think we can say like, okay, yeah, it could have happened here.
1:40:05
It could have happened here.
1:40:06
Like the story makes sense.
1:40:09
But will we ever know for sure?
1:40:12
I don't know.
1:40:13
It's possible.
1:40:14
But some more information could be found, whether it's some inscriptions that are found
1:40:20
around the mountain somewhere or in a cave somewhere, Elijah went there, right?
1:40:27
And he was in a cave or maybe it'll be some ancient text or an ancient map that happens
1:40:34
to show the location or give us, you know, some more detailed geographic data that allows
1:40:41
us to say, oh yeah, it's in southern Sinai, it's in northeastern Sinai, it's somewhere
1:40:44
else.
1:40:45
So yeah, we definitely could and I wouldn't be surprised if that was found in the next
1:40:51
few decades.
1:40:52
But to your point earlier, yeah, I don't think it's that big of a deal.
1:40:57
Like it's not the Exodus story, the historicity of the Exodus, it doesn't hinge on if we
1:41:03
have everything lined up to show that this particular site is where Mount Sinai was.
1:41:09
It's useful, it's good to component of that, it's interesting.
1:41:14
Maybe some evidence will be found that shows the Israelites were there.
1:41:18
I think that would be pretty significant.
1:41:20
But yeah, there are other things to focus on just within archeology that I think would
1:41:26
have a greater impact in terms of establishing the historical reliability of the Bible.
1:41:31
All right, last question of the day.
1:41:32
And I've been sitting on this question since the moment you got here, okay?
1:41:36
And so I've been very, very patient.
1:41:38
And so we got here to the end.
1:41:39
So I want to know if you had unlimited budget, okay, and you had a golden ticket that you
1:41:46
could use with any site on the planet and that local government would have to be like, yep,
1:41:50
you get to dig here, you get as many diggers, you get all the tools, you have as many employees
1:41:54
as you need to, you've got all the backing on the planet.
1:41:59
Where is the one site on planet earth that you would want to excavate and what do you
1:42:04
think you might find there?
1:42:06
I think that would probably be Jericho just because it's been so controversial.
1:42:14
And I think that we have enough clear archeology there that establishes the historical narrative.
1:42:21
But it's been a long time and it's very confusing for people.
1:42:26
So what I would want to do is to excavate more of the wall around that city, the area
1:42:34
of the wall, and some of the interior, and really just hopefully uncover more material
1:42:40
from right before the time of Joshua and leading up to that and show that that is really clear
1:42:48
and then show things about the falling of the wall and what all that looked like.
1:42:55
Because it's one of those things in biblical history that often gets picked out and pointed
1:43:02
at as like, this is an example of archeology proving the Bible wrong.
1:43:09
And again, I don't think that's the case.
1:43:11
I think we have the archeology there, but it needs to be done again, very clearly, very
1:43:19
definitively, and show that, you know, not relying on stuff from 100 years ago or something.
1:43:26
So that would probably be my pick.
1:43:29
All right.
1:43:30
Very good.
1:43:31
I'm just saying any longer, Mark's going to be mad.
1:43:32
I mean, you don't want your pastor of your church to be mad at you for stuff like that.
1:43:36
So I really appreciate you spending some time with us and spend some time with the audience.
1:43:40
Anything else you want to get off your chest before we let you go?
1:43:42
No, I just want to say thanks for having me here.
1:43:44
And I'm glad I could come and be here in the studio with you.
1:43:48
It was great.
1:43:49
Hey, if you keep coming through Edmund, again, if you're going to be at DTS, you keep coming
1:43:52
through Edmund, you keep finding cool stuff.
1:43:54
You'll always have you always have a place here at the table.
1:43:56
So appreciate it again.
1:43:57
Sounds good.
1:43:58
Thank you.
1:43:59
Thank you for listening to this podcast.
1:44:00
Wherever you're listening to this, please subscribe, rate, and leave us a positive five
1:44:03
star review.
1:44:04
If you want me to come speak live at your event or on your podcast, shoot me an email
1:44:07
to info@undonton.life.
1:44:09
That's I-N-F-O@undonton.life.
1:44:11
Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook and check out our website for everything else,
1:44:15
including how to donate to keep more content like this coming your way.
1:44:18
Just go to www.undonton.life.
1:44:20
And as always, we want to thank the band Holy Name for allowing us to use their music for
1:44:24
our content.
1:44:25
The music on this podcast is our song Perpetua, which is off their self-titled debut album
1:44:29
on Face Down Records.
1:44:30
The links are in the description.
1:44:32
I'm your host, Kyle Thompson.
1:44:34
Remember, keep pushing back darkness, keep forging spiritual, mental, and physical resilience.
1:44:40
Keep seeking the lion of Judah.
1:44:59
[BLANK_AUDIO]