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Topics mentioned with David... Greek Dark Age, The Exodus, Trojan War, Hyksos Invasion, The Sojourn, Solomons Temple, Pyramid Construction, Diorite Bowls, Longevity, Babylon Chronology, Hammurabi, Bronze Age Collapse, Etrutria, Aeneas, Greek Expansion, Family Planning in the Ancient World, Festival Of Drunkenness, Golden Calf, Spiked Wine, Psychedelics, Phoenicians in South America, 1177BC, Historicity of The Old Testament, King Saul, King David, etc ...

Israeli archaeologists have unearthed a rare sarcophagus featuring a slender face and a scarab ring inscribed with the name of an Egyptian pharaoh, Israel's Antiquities Authority said Wednesday. The mystery man whose skeleton was found inside the sarcophagus was most likely a local Canaanite official in the service of ancient Egypt, Israeli archaeologists believe, shining a light on a period when pharaohs governed the region. "This is a really beautiful face, very serene," said Edwin van den Brink, an Egyptologist and archaeologist with Israel's government antiquities authority. "It's very appealing." Van den Brink said archaeologists dug at Tel Shadud, an...

Perspectives on ancient chronology and the Old Testament—part 2 by Murray R. Adamthwaite 6-5-2019 It is well known that dates for the first millennium BC are fairly firm, and that the Assyrian Eponym Canon has a full record of years as far back as 912/911 BC. However, prior to that the chronology is very much ‘up for grabs’. For Egypt, the resort has traditionally been to the so-called ‘Sothic cycle’ and fixing dates by the few astronomical references in Egyptian records. However, the neat scheme established by this method has in recent years started to come unstuck, and serious challenges...

The Iron Age Israelites weren't known for their artistic tradition -- so much so that, according to the Bible, King Solomon had to outsource to the Phoenicians wood-cutting in the construction of the Jerusalem Temple and bronze-working for his other buildings (1 Kings 5:6-9; 1 Kings 7:13-14). But the discovery of an Iron Age basalt workshop at Tel Hazor in northern Israel reveals that the Israelites actually cultivated a basalt-carving craft, which they seem to have inherited from the Canaanites of the preceding Bronze Age... In 2010, the archaeologists at Tel Hazor discovered a basalt workshop dating to the ninth...

Archaeologists unearth 3,300-year-old coffin at Tel Shadud thought to hold Canaanite official in service of Egyptian pharaoh :snip: Found alongside the new sarcophagus was a scarab seal ring encased in gold, carved with the name of Pharaoh Seti I, who ruled ancient Egypt in the 13th century BC. Seti I conquered the region of today's Israel in the first year of his reign in order to secure Egyptian trade routes and collect taxes for Egypt, said Ron Beeri, an archaeologist who participated in the dig. The man buried in the sarcophagus might have been a tax collector for the pharaoh,...

An inscription carved into a limestone slab found at Tel Miqne, 23 miles southwest of Jerusalem, confirms the identification of the site as Ekron, one of the five Philistine capital cities mentioned in the Bible. The inscription is unique because it contains the name of a biblical city and five of its rulers, two of whom are mentioned as kings in texts other than the Bible. The only such inscription found in situ in a securely defined, datable archaeological context, it has far-reaching implications for our understanding of the history of Ekron and Philistia... The inscription was found in the...

Encore Presentation of Patterns of Evidence: Exodus by Jake Hebert, Ph.D. * The Exodus is one of the best-known narratives in the Bible. It details the Israelites' escape from Egypt after centuries of slavery, Moses' rise to leadership, the devastating plagues on Egypt, and the miraculous Red Sea crossing. Yet many, maybe even the majority, of archaeologists and historians insist there is no evidence that the biblical Exodus ever occurred. This debate is the subject of the award-winning documentary Patterns of Evidence: Exodus that has an encore presentation this Thursday.1 "Absence of evidence," however, does not necessarily indicate "evidence of...

Ancient ruins found in the Israeli wilderness could solve the biblical mystery of the Exodus, archaeologists claim. According to the Bible, Moses liberated the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and led them through the wilderness of Sinai, before they crossed the River Jordan into the promised land of Canaan. Yet no historical basis for the legend exists, and experts generally agree the Israelites were in fact native to Canaan - an ancient region covering modern day Israel. However, scientists are now analysing whether ruins near the River Jordan are proof of a nomadic Israelite people crossing into the ancient land...

Human Remains in Ancient Jar a Mystery Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News Jan. 23, 2007 — For over 100 years, four blue-glazed jars bearing the nametag of Rameses II (1302-1213 B.C.) were believed to contain the Egyptian pharaoh's bodily organs. But analysis of organic residues scraped from the jars has determined one actually contained an aromatic salve, while a second jar held the organs of an entirely different person who lived around 760 years later. Now the question is, who was this individual? "We do believe that the unknown person was of importance for at least two reasons," said Jacques Connan,...

Every year, usually at Christmas time, a so-called "mainstream" magazine takes up the topic of Christianity or the Bible. Often, Christians who believe the Bible get a fair hearing—other times, not so much. This latest time, it was Newsweek and journalist Kurt Eichenwald doing the "honors." Here's the title: "The Bible: So Misunderstood It's a Sin." Actually, this piece is so ill-informed that it's a sin—not just against God but against good journalism. Al Mohler had this to say: "[Eichenwald's] article is a hit-piece that lacks any journalistic balance or credibility. His only sources cited within the article are from...

Rupert Murdoch took to Twitter tonight to defend 20th Century Fox's new movie "Exodus" that casts Christian Bale as Moses, and a variety of white actors as Egyptians. There’s been scuffle on Twitter ever since Murdoch made his observations. And a lot of this stems from a quote director Ridley Scott gave Variety about why he didn’t use Egyptian or Arab actors for the film. He said: "I can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such," Scott says. "I'm just...

Radiometric dating--the process of determining the age of rocks from the decay of their radioactive elements--has been in widespread use for over half a century. There are over forty such techniques, each using a different radioactive element or a different way of measuring them. It has become increasingly clear that these radiometric dating techniques agree with each other and as a whole, present a coherent picture in which the Earth was created a very long time ago. Further evidence comes from the complete agreement between radiometric dates and other dating methods such as counting tree rings or glacier ice core...

With Passover here, it is a propitious time to address the central issue of the holiday: the Exodus. Specifically, did the Exodus happen? My friend Rabbi David Wolpe announced some years ago that it didn’t matter whether the Exodus occurred. In his words, writing three years later: “Three years ago on Passover, I explained to my congregation that according to archeologists, there was no reliable evidence that the Exodus took place — and that it almost certainly did not take place the way the Bible recounts it. Finally, I emphasized: It didn’t matter.” “The Torah,” he continued, “is not a...

Spanish historians claim they’ve discovered the 2,000-year-old Holy Chalice, the biblical cup that Jesus Christ used during the Last Supper. Margarita Torres, a medieval history lecturer at León University and Jose Ortiza del Rio, an art historian, penned a new book claiming that years of research has led them to conclude that Christ’s chalice is somehow inside a medieval goblet that has been on display in Spain for 1,000 years, Daily Mail reported. Residing inside the Basilica of San Isidoro, a church in Spain that is located on the site of an ancient Roman temple, the goblet — known as...

I had the pleasure of joining an NBC expedition to Hawara on the edge of the Faiyum Oasis, Egypt. Researching a documentary about 2012, they wanted my comments on the fabled labyrinth located there... Herodotus (fifth century B.C.) and other Greek and Roman writers described a magnificent labyrinth in Egypt, containing three thousand rooms on two levels. Pliny the Elder (first century A.D.) related that the Egyptian labyrinth was already 3600 years old in his time. Since the nineteenth century, the Egyptian labyrinth has been identified with an area on the southern side of the Middle Kingdom pyramid of Amenemhet...

Following are excerpts from an interview with Lebanese columnist Jihad Al-Khazen, which aired on CBC TV on January 1, 2012: Jihad Al-Khazen: In Jerusalem, there are no archeological remains of the Jews or any of their prophets. They have no history. People forget that during Yitzhak Rabin's first term in government, in the early 1980's [sic]… I was in America at the time, studying history at Georgetown University. Rabin excavated under the Haram Al-Sharif, and uncovered the remains of an Umayyad palace. There are no [Jewish] archeological remains. There is no Solomon's Temple or any other temple. They did not...

Thousands of years ago, the king of a great city ordered that this inscription be carved in stone at the city gate: “Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, the pious prince appointed by the will of Marduk...full of prudent deliberation... the never-tiring governor who always has at heart the worship at Esagila and Ezida... the firstborn son of Nabopolassar, King of Babylon am I. “I had the gates built of sheer blue stone, on which bulls and dragons were elaborately painted. “I let the temple of Marduk, highest of all, supreme of gods, a place of joy and jubilation for major and...

...As for the name rings on the slab no. 21687, three names can be discerned. The first on the left reads... "Ashkelon." A similar writing (but with a vowel marker) is attested on Merenptah's Israel Stele... The name in the central ring reads... "Canaan." This form of the name is well attested during the Eighteenth Dynasty, and finds close parallels under Amenhotep II... Görg derives the name "Canaan"... translating it as "low land"... and suggests that the... ending reflects an Amorite name pattern. This too would underscore the antiquity of the name... As discussed above, evidence of early orthography is...

The material evidence that archaeologists have discovered supports the Bible. Sadly, in the 1900s there was a great deal of archaeological work interpreted in a way that discredited the Bible. Of course, it has been said that archaeology “proves” the Bible, and this is not technically correct either. The Bible contains much information about God, the spiritual nature of the world, and the future of man that archaeology can never prove. The best archaeology can do is substantiate what the Bible says about the past, but the importance of that should not be understated. If, time after time, archaeology substantiates...

An inscribed stele erected at Thebes by Ahmose, the first Pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty, documents a destructive storm accompanied by flooding during his reign. Fragments of the stele were found in the 3rd Pylon of the temple of Karnak at Thebes between 1947 and 1951 by the French Mission. A restoration of the stele and translation of the text was published by Claude Vandersleyen (1967). In the following year (1968), Vandersleyen added two more fragments, one from the top of the inscription and a small piece from line 10 of the restored text, which had been recovered by Egyptian...