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The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
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The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
Hans Kristensen: Ten archaeological facts to increase confidence in the Old Testament
There are claims - and you hear them every so often - that archeology has disproved this story or that in the bible, and claims from this or that scholar of particularly late dating of different bible books.
How do we as evangelical pastors react/respond/answer those claims?
Hans Kristensen is senior pastor of Marsfield Community Church in Sydney and is studying ancient archaeology.
He suggests that there are 10 major archaelogical finds that help us to increase our confidence in the Old Testament:
- There’s evidence of a big population jump in Caanan at exactly the time that the bible said that Yahweh was giving Israel the land, called the ‘Hill Country Explosion.’
- The Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah boasts of raiding the land of Caanan, saying it was occupied by Israel.
- In the city of Hazor, archaeologists have found religious idols destroyed and other items intact, just as expected from Joshua 11-12
- The recently discovered altar at Mount Ebal is likely Joshua’s altar (Joshua 8)
- In the Tel Dan inscription we now have archeological evidence for King David’s existence.
- There’s consistent architectural town planning in the cities built around the time of David and Solomon - pointing towards planning and control under one ruler (eg a King).
- There are similarities between what we know of the temple of Solomon and a similar temple built at Ain Dara, about 30 kilometres from Beirut, showing Solomon’s temple fits into the religious and architectural landscape of the time.
- The discovery of six massive chambered gates at Hazor, Meggido and Gezer and other architectural discoveries at those sites corresponds with 1Kings 9:15.
- A ninth century battle account from King Moab of Mersha mirrors the one in 2 Kings 3.
- The Biblical chronology of the listed kings matches almost exactly with archeological evidence.
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Thought about that in terms of it having a that would have a derivative effect of increasing our church podcast audience yeah, Well, I mean occasionally, yeah, I mean, and I've actually gone out of my way not to do self-promotion type stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, not to do self-promotion type stuff, you know, yeah, yeah, I figure I have an enormous opportunity to that. I shouldn't take advantage of yeah, sure. Yeah, because it will just build resentment. Yeah, yeah. So I've tried to have a well, just a self-effacing posture. Yeah, yeah, yeah, just a self-effacing posture. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think what I've seen you do is you push the resources that you think are going to be helpful for people online.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's my consistent. I mean, I'm definitely trying to promote the ideas that I think will be helpful, you know, and on a range of topics, yeah. So, whether it's ministry pragmatism or personal trust in Christ, yeah, yeah, and push ideas that I think will be helpful, sure.
Speaker 2:You know, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Ready to go? Mr Wong, cool Ten archaeological finds to increase your Old Testament confidence. Hans christensen is our guest. It is the pastor's heart. Dominic steel is my name. There are claims, and you hear them every so often, that archaeology has disproved this story or that in the bible. Claims about the exodus, claims about joshua jericho, and claims from this or that scholar about particularly late dating of different Bible books. How do we, as evangelical pastors, react, respond, answer those claims and are they true? Today? An episode of the Pastor's Heart that will put confidence in your belly. We examine moments where archaeology and the Bible converge. Hans Christensen is with us today on the Pastor's Heart. I first knew Hans when he was a hipster church planter at the suburb next door.
Speaker 2:I'm not sure I was ever a hipster, but you know that's okay.
Speaker 1:He now leads the ministry at Marsville Community Church in Sydney and is studying ancient history. Church in Sydney and is studying ancient history. Hans, it was something in your pastor's heart that led you to be deeply interested in the intersection between, if you like, archaeology and the Bible, and particularly the Old Testament, and a frustration with what was happening with some of your peers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so just a bit of backstory. I think I first heard of archaeology and was inspired to think about archaeology, from Indiana Jones even though I wouldn't call him an archaeologist, he's more of a looter.
Speaker 2:But so I had a great history teacher at high school and in my early 20s I went through a period of doubting the reliability of the New Testament, the Gospels, and whether Jesus rose from the dead. And I was helped by a guy named IH Marshall as I wrote to him and he wrote back and said read this and think about this. But when I started at Marsfield, that's really cool.
Speaker 1:I remember reading his stuff, yeah, but it never occurred to me to write to him.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so what happened was? I lived in Moree, I came down to Sydney for a concert and as I was going back it's an 11-hour train ride I picked up a book from Dimmicks by a guy named John Shelby Spong.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Why Christianity Must Change or Die. False teacher of the 80s yeah, yeah, yeah. And Episcopal bishop who denied pretty much everything in the Bible. He went through and one of the things he said was no major historian believes that the Gospels were true. They're historically reliable. That kind of thing which really put my faith in a tailspin. And then I went to Maury Christian Bookstore and in the 50-cent bin there was IH Marshall's book. I Believe in the Historical Jesus, I read it, I wrote to him and he wrote back over about six months.
Speaker 1:Isn't that great that he took an interest in a country, kid from.
Speaker 2:I know, I know beautiful man and when I've talked to other people who have known him they just say, yeah, that's pretty typical, that's just what he did. He's just a humble, gracious man. I look forward to seeing him in glory. But when I moved to Marsfield I caught up with some friends and they had read some books on archaeology and history and the Old Testament and listened to some scholars and some teachers and they got to the point where they were like I'm not sure if the exodus happened, I'm not sure if the conquest happened, I'm not sure of this.
Speaker 2:And I tried to find a kind of a John Dixon level book on these issues and there was nothing out there that I could find that was good and reputable. And I remember talking to Anthony Pedersen, who is an Old Testament lecturer at Morling, a good friend of mine, and I said mate, you need to write a book like this. He goes, mate, I wouldn't know where to start. And he said, well, why don't you write this book? I said I can't do that and he said, well, you can go to Macquarie Uni. I lived 10 minutes from Macquarie Uni. You can study archaeology, history, the Bible, all that kind of stuff there, and over time you'll amass knowledge that will be helpful for people. So that's kind of the journey.
Speaker 1:And it was to see my friends struggling with their faith. This is pastors struggling with their faith.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there was a couple of pastors. There was a couple of lay people that just got to the point where they were like I'm not sure I can for the pastors it was. I'm not sure if I can preach these parts of the Old Testament.
Speaker 1:And some of the problem is the theological education they'd had.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so they had received some teaching. It was directed to some to read some authors that had undermined confidence in the scriptures. Yeah, well, I think the problem was they were told that these authors are centrists, that they're not conservative like me on the Old Testament, but they're not really progressive. But this is where the field is and really these guys were quite progressive, quite, I would say, left of the mark when it comes to where most scholars are at with the historicity of the Old Testament archaeology.
Speaker 1:So how do we best start our thinking about archaeology, history Bible.
Speaker 2:Okay, the first thing to realise is that everyone's biased, right, so everyone's coming to archaeology history in the Bible with some kind of bias Everyone. And I think the reason for that is the Bible is still in play, and what I mean by that is that the Bible is shaping people's lives. The Bible is still shaping political thought. The Bible is still, especially in America, one of these things that gets quoted a lot, and so you cannot come to the historicity of the Bible and be totally objective. I can come to you know the historicity of, you know a pharaoh's, you know wars.
Speaker 1:And because it has no actual, real impact on your life, exactly you really don't have a dog in that fight. Yeah, yeah, whereas actually everyone's got a dog in that fight because it all works towards whether or not God exists and how I should live today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and especially if you are more on the progressive side of morality and politics. It does seem like you know, you can almost map it out the people who are more the scholars that are more progressive in their politics and you can see it on Twitter and Facebook and that kind of thing are generally more sceptical of the reliability of the Old Testament.
Speaker 1:What about when it comes up there's a claim that archaeology has disproved Jericho?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the first thing to say is there's very little archaeology can definitively prove and disprove.
Speaker 1:After all this study, that's what you've discovered. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's frustrating.
Speaker 2:So I got into this thing going, man, I'll be able to prove this and that and this, and I would say, well, actually I can't.
Speaker 2:But, they can't either. They can't either. So when people say archaeology let's take the Exodus for example right, when people say archaeology has disproved the Exodus, the first question I want to ask is what are our archaeological expectations? That is to say, when I read the Book of Exodus, what should I expect to find in the archaeology? Right? And so when you piece that out, when you ask that question, it sharpens what we're looking for, right? If you just say archaeology has disproved the book of Exodus or the event of the Exodus, well, it just seems very out there and nebulous. But now we're interacting and saying, okay, you've got to give me things that you think will disprove. And so I've heard people say, well, there's no record of the Exodusodus from the Egyptians, right, the problem with that is, what we've got in Egypt is monumental records that glorify the pharaohs, right, and so there's no way a pharaoh would ever say, oh, by the way I had this big defeat yeah yeah, we had this big defeat.
Speaker 1:It's a bit like if We've lost a third of our population, exactly.
Speaker 2:It would be like Kamala Harris if she took a billboard out in the middle of Times Square and say isn't Donald Trump great, he's the victor I lost. There's no way she's going to do it. There's no way an ancient pharaoh or any ancient ruler will do that. Other people have said we've excavated the Sinai Desert and you look at that claim and you go. Well, actually, you haven't.
Speaker 1:It's a big desert.
Speaker 2:I think it's far bigger than Victoria, right, yeah? And so what they've done is there's been certain work at the traditional sites of Mount Sinai, but the problem is it wasn't an excavation, right. It was basically a type of archaeological excavation. Well, not really excavation. We're basically going over the surface and seeing if there's pottery there and things left behind. So you might be able to say, well, this pottery is from this time and therefore there's some people there. But there's eight different places where Sinai could be right. And so you know, there's all these things where, when you dig down into it, it actually doesn't work. I'll give you another example, if you want the Book of Joshua.
Speaker 2:The Book of Joshua is probably the litmus test for a lot of people saying whether the Bible's true or not, the litmus test for a lot of people saying whether the Bible's true or not. And there was a great archaeologist called WF Albright you might have heard of him and he suggested in the early 1900s that what we should find, based on his reading of the Book of Joshua, is in all these tales, in all these ancient tales we should see these huge destruction layers because, where you know, the Israelites burned the cities and that kind of thing right, and so we should see it all around. And so archaeologists went looking for these destruction layers around the time that we would expect Joshua, and they're not there. And so a lot of people go well, that means the book of Joshua was wrong. But here's the problem you read the book of Joshua and it says only three cities were burned Jericho, hazor and Ai. And so what we're looking now for is destruction layers of three different cities, not the whole place.
Speaker 2:Also, joshua says that God gave the Israelites places that they didn't build. They were going to tend to vineyards that they didn't plant, and so what you would expect is not that the Israelites come into Canaan. This is from the book of Joshua. You wouldn't expect the Israelites to come into Canaan and destroy everything, because God says actually, you're going to actually inhabit these cities. So why would you destroy a city if you're going to inhabit it? So if we take the biblical books seriously and allow them to speak for themselves, then when we look at the archaeology, I think the archaeology doesn't give anywhere near a negative picture, like a lot of critics would say it does.
Speaker 1:What about when we hear or read that a narrative or story is dated much later than the events?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you read that all the time, right, and I think the first thing to say is if you go to Moore College, where we both studied I did this a few years ago and I was studying Joshua at the time and I picked up about 20 different commentaries on the book of Joshua and they have a section that no pastors read generally because it's generally boring- and it's useless for preaching. And that's the introduction, and they usually have a date.
Speaker 1:And it was interesting when the various commentators date the book. Yeah, yeah, yeah, date the book right yeah, and it was interesting.
Speaker 2:People dated Joshua from the writing of Joshua from everywhere, from about 1100 BC right down to 3 BC. Wow. And so what they were mostly doing was saying this is the ideology of a particular period, this is what was happening in a particular period. We see in the book of Joshua that these things were happening. There's some overlap here. Therefore, Joshua was written here. But the problem scholars call that mirror reading, right? The problem with that is it's very subjective, right. You can mirror read the book of Joshua and you can say well, you know it's from this period or that period or that period, and I won't bore you with going through the different periods and how Joshua could be written at these different times.
Speaker 2:The other thing is, what a lot of people are doing now is going with the Hebrew language, the development of the Hebrew language, and saying biblical Hebrew only comes in at this time.
Speaker 2:The problem is there's this huge debate around when biblical Hebrew came in. But also the implication is that these books, or the sources that they came from, couldn't be written earlier, and I think there's great evidence to say that there was writing in Israel a lot earlier than a lot of scholars would say, and therefore at least the sources could be written earlier. And so when you're dating a book, you've got to not have one or two arguments, there's got to be a multiplicity of arguments. And when scholars, like a guy like Baruch Halpern, for example, when he dates biblical books, he uses all these different arguments. And when all the arguments come into play, when he's dating the book of 1 and 2 Samuel, for example, they're dated very, very early, like they're dated within. He dates 1 and 2 Samuel about 50 to 100 years after David, which, when you think about it, is very early for ancient historical records.
Speaker 1:Now I'm going to give you these 10 bullet points in a moment, but just before then our preaching. You've done this study. How do you think archaeology and history should impact just me as an everyday preacher?
Speaker 2:Okay. So here's a mistake that I made, right when I started, I was about to preach through the book of Kings and I thought, you know, what I'm going to do is I'm going to have a five minute section on why you can believe this bit of the Bible, right? And I bored everyone to tears, right. And I remember one lady coming up to me and saying, oh, you don't need to do that, all that stuff about you know, can you believe this section? I said, well, why not? And she said, oh, because it's boring and anyway, we believe the Bible already. I said but why do you believe the Bible? And she said because my mum told me it was true and I thought that's great.
Speaker 2:So I wouldn't necessarily go into just putting random bits in there, especially if you don't know what you're talking about. There is a lot of misinformation out there, especially on YouTube, and I've heard preachers and I myself have put in things that I've gone. Oh, I found out later that wasn't true. What I would suggest to preachers is to go to a website called bibleplacescom, called bibleplacescom, and what you can do there is buy photographs of the different sections of Books of the Bible. So you buy a bunch of photos from 1 Samuel and what they've done is order the photos in every chapter. So you get 60 photos on 1 Samuel, 1 and 60 and goes through, and it's got some commentary with that, and what I've been starting to use is those photos, a few of those photos, through a sermon, just to say what we've got here is real people in real places, in real times. This is real history.
Speaker 1:So just to move it out of the potential idea that this is kind of fairy tale. Yeah, exactly, you're not making much of it, but you're just grounding it in history.
Speaker 2:Yeah, to move it out of the potential idea that this is kind of fairy tale. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:You're not making much of it, yeah, yeah, but you're just grounding it in history. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So, for example, on Sunday I preach on Joshua 5, 13 through 15, where Joshua encounters the commander of the Lord's army. It's just out of Jericho. I had a photo of the Mount of Jericho and I said we know where Jericho is. This is real people, real places, real times. This is not Middle Earth. And then I moved on.
Speaker 1:Right, that's great. Now, okay, we're going to go 10 points. Yep, it's going to be one-day cricket fast shots Sure. Sure, let's go in Canaan archaeological evidence at exactly the time that the Bible says he brought the people of Israel in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So just one thing I would nuance in what you said. There's two different dates for when scholars think the Exodus happened and the conquest happened. There's an early date, around the 1400s. There's a late date, around the 1200s. I hold to the late date around the 1400s. There's a late date around the 1200s. I hold to the late date around the 1200s. But what's really interesting is that in the early 1200s, 1100s around there, what you see in the hill country of Israel, you see this population explosion. We've got a map Tell us about this map.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's all these little dots on that map, and those dots are these little villages that just pop up right From nowhere, as if somebody just moved into the land.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely. Now there are scholars who would say these guys were just low light. You know some Canaanites who were in the plain. They moved up. But it's such a population explosion and everyone says it's a population explosion, even if you're really sceptical of it that they had to come from somewhere. Right, the Bible would say well, they came from Egypt in the Exodus, and so there's much more to say about that, but I think that gives you a picture. That's a little archaeological fact and it is a fact. The population explosion that I think actually really works well with the Bible.
Speaker 1:Now, from the 12th century, there's a record of the Egyptian pharaoh raiding the land of Canaan and saying Israelites were there.
Speaker 2:Yes, so a guy, a pharaoh, named Maneptah. He was the pharaoh after Ramesses II. If you watch the Disney shows which talk about the Exodus, that's Ramesses II. In all those Disney shows Maneptah was a very old pharaoh. He wouldn't have gone into Israel himself. But he basically says Israel is laid waste and its seed is no more. Basically wiped them out.
Speaker 1:We've got the picture here. Tell us about that document.
Speaker 2:It's called the Maneptah Stella or the Israel Stella. It's very famous and it's got a line where it talks about Israel. Now here's the thing that does prove something. That proves that Israel is in the land of Canaan at the time that the book of Judges says it is. Now here's the other thing In the Egyptian language, or hieroglyphs, what they will do is use these things called determinatives, and they're just a few little symbols that kind of define an entity. And so the guy who wrote the Maneptus Stella, the scribe, uses the determinative of a people group. So Israel is not a state with a king at this time, it's a people group. Now here's the thing when you look at the Book of Judges, what do you see? In the Book of Judges, you see a group of people who have no king, and so I think there is a convergence here between what we see in the Book of Judges and the Maneptostella at this point.
Speaker 1:My dad is an expert on Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Speaker 2:Oh well, there you go. So I'm looking forward to asking him about this, ask him, and I would love to hear what he says about it.
Speaker 1:Number three in the city of Hazor, they've found religious idols destroyed. Yep yep and Well. Joshua 11 and 12 said. Deuteronomy said destroy those idols. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So in Hatsor Hatsor is one of the three places that Joshua said. The Israelites burned Hatsor, ai and Jericho right. And so at Stratum I think it's 12, there's this huge destruction layer like there's mounds and mounds of ash. The fire was so great that it turned some of the rock to glass. That was how hot it was right. There's two really interesting things from this. One that whoever burned it burnt the administrative centre and also the religious part of it. When you have a look at the book of Joshua but you also look at Deuteronomy, the Israelites were meant to go in and destroy the idols.
Speaker 2:The idols were all there. They're just destroyed. Now, in the ancient world, what you would do is you would take the idol as booty, but that's not what the Israelites were directed to do.
Speaker 1:They smashed them up, and they were told to smash them up, and they did smash them up.
Speaker 2:And so what we see in Joshua sorry, what we see in Hatsor is what we'd expect from Joshua in Deuteronomy a huge destruction layer where they smashed idols. And that's why there's two great archaeologists who were the main excavators of Hatzor, yigal Yadin and Amnon Ben-Tor, who both said this destruction is probably the Israelites.
Speaker 1:Okay, number four. The discovery of the altar at Mount Ebel is likely Joshua's altar.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so in 1980.
Speaker 1:We've got a photo of it here. Yeah, yeah, great.
Speaker 2:In 1980, a great archaeologist named Adam Zertal was doing a bunch of work in this area he was-and he came across this structure and he uncovered it a structure on Mount Ebal, and what he found was it had all the hallmarks of an altar. So there's a lot of ash around from burning things. There was a lot of animal bones and that kind of thing mostly kosher animal bones the stuff you'd expect Israelites to see, Exactly exactly. And then when you have a look at Joshua 8, you see that they had an altar on Mount Ebal, and so Adam Zertal, I think, puts a convincing case that this is actually Joshua's altar.
Speaker 1:Number five we now have evidence for King David's existence, and it's called the Tel Dan inscription.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the Tel Dan inscription. So up until 1992, there was no archaeological evidence that King David ever existed, and so in 1992, at the site of Tel Dan in the north of Israel, a bunch of great archaeologists uncovered in a wall two, sorry three, fragments of the Tel Dan inscription, and it's got a phrase on it the House of David.
Speaker 1:We've got a picture of that here.
Speaker 2:Yep, yep, and so the house of David. We've got a picture of that here, and so the house of David. Now, this is a stela that was erected about 100 years after David, and so it shows you that the nation of Judah, at this point, is defining themselves by King David, right?
Speaker 1:House of David.
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah yeah, and so it doesn't prove much, but it definitely proves that there was a Judahite king named David, who was extremely significant for Judah. It doesn't prove that David killed Goliath, no, but it actually proves that David existed and that he was a culturally significant king.
Speaker 1:Now you also talk in number six about consistent architectural town planning across the Israelite cities, as if there was one governor king who was saying let's plan our towns like this. Now this is more… I mean it's a hypothesis, but it's interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, so about 10 years ago now, maybe a bit more, there was a place called Kerber Kiafa that was excavated and this is a very small site that was overlooking the Ilar Valley, right, and it really is a site that was around for maybe 50, maybe 100 years, right, very, very, very ephemeral site. Now what you see at that site is they've got the kind of architecture and town planning there that you see at other Judahite sites, right, and this is from the time of Saul David, and so what some archaeologists and I tend to agree with them would see the similarity in town planning. And also, you see, at some of these different sites. There are Kerber Kaufer, for example. There are ostracons. There's these little pieces of pottery with writing on there which implies that you know they're writing for a reason you just don't write in your diary back then. There's probably administration functions there, and so what a lot of scholars have seen is that all these towns have the same architecture, the same religion. There's no iconography, religious iconography there.
Speaker 1:Consistent with.
Speaker 2:Judaism. Exactly, it points to the fact that there's some kind of state functioning at this point. Now, this is debated. I want to say that this is debated, but I just tend to see that I'm won over by those arguments when I read those. So I think there is evidence of a small state around the time of David.
Speaker 1:Now, number seven is similarities between what we know of the Temple of Solomon and a similar temple that was built up near Beirut. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so consistent architecture of the day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so there's a temple called Ayandhara. I may not be pronouncing that right, but it existed from 1300 BC to around 740 BC, right, and it, in terms of the layout and the size of each room, is almost an exact match to the Solomonic Temple. In fact, what you see is there's other temples around the time of the Solomonic Temple which are almost exactly alike. And here's the other thing that's really interesting there's a sceptical archaeologist he's pretty interesting. There's a skeptical archaeologist he's pretty skeptical on a bunch of things called William Dever. He's one of the greats of the field and he's a guy who doesn't believe that Joshua happened, the conquest happened, the Exodus didn't happen. But he will say that every single thing that we read about the Solomonic Temple in 1 Kings can be confirmed archaeologically. And so here's a couple of things.
Speaker 2:One skeptical scholars will say that the Solomonic Temple is a later idea and they've just kind of made this up based on later ideas. Actually, if you take the archaeology, all the archaeology is from. All the archaeological remains that kind of correspond with the Solomonic Temple are around the time of the Solomonic Temple or before that. But here's an exegetical payoff All the archaeological correlates are from pagan temples and pagan religion, which goes to show you that Solomon was very influenced by his wives. You don't just get to I think it's 1 Kings 11, where it says he had a bunch of wives and they led him astray. You can actually see all the way through that Solomon is being led astray, all the way through that. Solomon is being led astray, all the way through 1 Kings, I think it's 3 to 10, and that's one of the bits of evidence.
Speaker 1:Now these chambered gates at Hazor, Megiddo, Gezer, and their discovery corresponds with 1 Kings 9.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So 1 Kings 9.15 says that Solomon built up Hatzel, megiddo and Gezer right. And what we find at Hatzel, megiddo and Gezer are these things, six chamber gates and there's a photo coming up on the screen about them. And basically everyone says these are huge, monumental gates which suggest an organised state, right. And so when I think it was Yigal Yedin once again saw these, he looked at these and said this is a state. This corresponds with 1 Kings 9.15, and if you have a look, especially at Megiddo, the same level that this gate is on at Megiddo, you see a palace, you see other things.
Speaker 2:Now I've got to say that there was an archaeologist named Israel Finkelstein. He's a great archaeologist, very sceptical of the Bible, very creative. Now he wants to date this architecture later, by about 100 years, but basically there's no archaeologists that will really side with him. The majority of archaeologists think that his redating is absolutely wrong. So these gates, which a lot of archaeologists would say show state formation, are dated to the 10th century, which is around the time of Solomon, which shows, I think there's a correlation between 1 Kings 9.15 and these gates. Now I would love to say that Solomon has written his name on there, so I was here.
Speaker 2:It's not that we don't have that, but I think there's a good argument that can be made for it.
Speaker 1:Let's go quickly. The last two yeah, ninth century battle from King Moab. Yeah, and his account of that corresponds with 2 Kings 3.
Speaker 2:Exactly In 2 Kings 3, there is a coalition of Judah Israel who attacks Moab, king Mesha, and King Mesha has got his own stellar, the Mesha stellar.
Speaker 1:You put that on the screen, yeah.
Speaker 2:It gives a parallel account of two kings, three, which when you read them together you would expect both are biased in certain ways, but they basically give the same account.
Speaker 1:And then, finally, the biblical chronology of the listed kings matches almost exactly with archaeological evidence.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And so one of the things that's really interesting is that a number of the kings, whether they be Judahite or Israelite or foreign kings, are found in various inscriptions around the times that they were around, right, and what historians can do with those inscriptions is come up with a chronology of those right, and then when you have a look at the chronology of the Bible, you actually see that the chronology of the Bible is actually extremely accurate, which shows, I think, that the biblical writers, one and two kings, were using records that were contemporary with the kings that they were talking about.
Speaker 2:Right, and they didn't mess with these records. They didn't mess with their sources and make stuff up. I think they were very conservative with those sources and you actually can see evidence for that in the Book of Kings, where it says if you want to know more about this king, go and read this annul all that kind of thing, those annuls, I think know more about this king, go and read this animal or that kind of thing. Those animals I think this argument shows that they existed, that they were used and that the historians who wrote one and two kings were very conservative in their handling of the sources.
Speaker 1:Now we should say you have a blog, yep, we've put the link to that in the show notes Yep. And we should say to Christian Publisher go and look at that blog and then Hans will work with you to turn it into a book and for the rest of us, we can go and read it for free now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So it's got a bunch of the essays I've written for uni and a few other things on there, so yeah.
Speaker 1:And the heavy reading that you're recommending.
Speaker 2:So there's two books. When pastors ask me well, what are two books?
Speaker 1:These are thick ones. I'm looking forward to your book. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So the first one on the right is a book called Ancient Israel's History and Introduction to Issues and Sources, and it's written by a bunch of evangelical archaeologists and historians and they basically take you. They write an essay on each kind of section the Book of Judges or the period of the Judges and it's actually really, really good, and so that's one I recommend. More on the apologetic side is this book. Kenneth Kitchen is a great evangelical Egyptologist and it's got a lot of detail there. Just a warning with the book he's very dismissive of other people's ideas in a way that I think is sinful. But if you can overlook that, it's a treasure trove of amazing information.
Speaker 1:Great. So not that good on tone, but really good on facts. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for coming in and talking to us. Thanks for having me. Hans Christensen is our guest on the Pastor's Heart and he is the senior pastor at Marsfield Community Church in Sydney. My name's Dominic Steele. We'll look forward to your company next Tuesday afternoon on the Pastor's Heart Cool.
Speaker 2:Cool.
Speaker 1:Wasn't too painful. No, it was good.
