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NARRATOR: God is dead...
or so it must have seemed
to the ancestors of the Jews in 586 B.C.
Jerusalem and the temple to their god are in flames
The nation of Israel founded by King David is wiped out
WILLIAM DEVER: It would have seemed to have been the end,
but it was rather the beginning
NARRATOR: For out of the crucible of destruction
emerges a sacred book: the Bible...
and an idea that will change the world:
the belief in one God
¶ ¶
THOMAS CAHILL: This is a new idea
It was an idea that nobody had ever had before
LEE LEVINE: Monotheism is well-ensconced,
so something major happened which is very hard to trace
NARRATOR: Now a provocative new story
from discoveries deep within the Earth and the Bible
EILAT MAZAR: We wanted to examine the possibility
that the remains of King David's palace are here
DEVER: We can actually see vivid evidence here of a destruction
AMNON BEN-TOR: Question number one: Who did it?
NARRATOR: An archaeological detective story puzzles together clues
to the mystery of who wrote the Bible, when and why
And it was very clear
it was some kind of a tiny scroll
I immediately saw very clear, very distinct letters
This is the ancestor of the Hebrew script
NARRATOR: And from out of the Earth
emerge thousands of idols that suggest God had a wife
We just found this exceptional clay figurine
showing a fertility goddess
NARRATOR: Powerful evidence sheds new light on how one people,
alone among ancient cultures,
finally turn their back on idol worship
to find their one God
This makes the god of ancient Israel
the universal god of the world that resonates with people,
at least in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim tradition
to this very day.
(thunder crashes)
NARRATOR: Now science and scripture converge to create
a powerful new story of an ancient people,
God and the Bible
Up next on NOVA "The Bible's Buried Secrets"
Captioning sponsored by EXXONMOBIL
DAVID H. KOCH
the HOWARD HUGHES MEDICAL INSTITUTE
the CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING
and VIEWERS LIKE YOU
Major funding for NOVA is provided by the following: NARRATOR: Near the banks of the Nile in southern Egypt in 1896,
British archaeologist Flinders Petrie leads an excavation
in Thebes, the ancient city of the dead
Here, he unearths one of the most important discoveries
in biblical archaeology
(worker yelling)
From beneath the sand appears
the corner of a royal monument, carved in stone
Dedicated in honor of Pharaoh Merneptah,
son of Ramesses the Great,
it became known as the Merneptah Stele
Today it is in the Cairo Museum
DONALD REDFORD: This stele is
what the Egyptians would have called a "triumph stele,"
a victory stele commemorating victory over foreign peoples
NARRATOR: Most of the hieroglyphic inscription celebrates
Merneptah's triumph over Libya, his enemy to the West
But almost as an afterthought, he mentions his conquest
of people to the East in just two lines
REDFORD: The text reads,
"Ashkelon has been brought captive
"Gezer has been taken captive
"Yanoam in the North Jordan Valley has been seized
Israel has been shorn, its seed no longer exists"
NARRATOR: History proves the pharaoh's confident boast to be wrong
Rather than marking their annihilation,
Merneptah's Stele announces the entrance
onto the world stage of a people named Israel
REDFORD: This is priceless evidence
for the presence of an ethnical group called Israel
in the central highlands of southern Canaan
NARRATOR: The well-established Egyptian chronology
gives the date as 1208 B.C.
Merneptah's Stele is powerful evidence
that a people called the Israelites are living in Canaan,
in what today includes Israel and Palestine
over 3,000 years ago
The ancient Israelites are best known through familiar stories
that chronicle their history
Abraham and Isaac...
(thunder crashes)
Moses and the Ten Commandments...
David and Goliath
It is the ancient Israelites who write the Bible
(reading aloud)
Through writing the Hebrew Bible,
the beliefs of the ancient Israelites survive
to become Judaism, one of the world's oldest
continuously practiced religions
And it is the Jews who give the world an astounding legacy:
the belief in one God
¶ ¶
This belief will become the foundation
of two other great monotheistic religions:
Christianity...
and Islam
Often called the Old Testament,
to distinguish it from the New Testament,
which described the events of early Christianity,
today the Hebrew Bible and a belief in one God
are woven into the very fabric of world culture
But in ancient times, all people from the Egyptians
to the Greeks to the Babylonians,
worshipped many gods, usually in the form of idols
How did the Israelites, alone among ancient peoples,
discover the concept of one god?
(man chanting)
How did they come up with an idea
that so profoundly changed the world?
Now archaeologists and biblical scholars are arriving
at a new synthesis that promises to reveal
not only fresh historical insights,
but a deeper meaning
of what the authors of the Bible wanted to convey
They start by digging into the earth...
and the Bible
DEVER: You cannot afford to ignore biblical text,
especially if you can isolate a kind of kernel of truth
behind these stories,
and then you have the archaeological data
Now, what happens when text and artifact seem to point
in the same direction?
Then I think we are on a very sound ground historically
NARRATOR: Scholars search for intersections
between science and scripture
The earliest is the victory stele
of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah from 1208 B.C.
Both the stele and the Bible place a people
called the Israelites in the hill country of Canaan,
which includes modern-day Israel and Palestine
It is here, between two of history's greatest empires,
that Israel's story will unfold
PETER MACHINIST: The way to understand Israel's relationship
to the superpowers Egypt and Mesopotamia on either side
is to understand its own sense of its fragility as a people
The primary way in which the Bible looks at the origins
of Israel is as a people coming to settle in the land of Israel
It's not indigenous
It's not a native state
NARRATOR: The Hebrew Bible is full of stories of Israel's origins
The first is Abraham,
who leaves Mesopotamia with his family
and journeys to the Promised Land, Canaan
READER: "The Lord said to Abraham,
'Go forth from your native land, and from your father's house,
'to the land that I will show you
'I will make of you a great nation
'And I will bless you
I will make your name great"
"Genesis 12:1 and 2"
NARRATOR: According to the Bible,
this promise establishes the covenant,
a sacred contract between God and Abraham
To mark the covenant, Abraham and all males are circumcised
His descendants will be God's chosen people
They will be fruitful, multiply, and inhabit all the land
between Egypt and Mesopotamia
In return, Abraham and his people,
who will become the Israelites, must worship a single God
This is a new idea
NARRATOR: It is hard to appreciate today
how radical an idea this must have been
in a world dominated by polytheism--
the worship of many gods and idols
The Abraham narrative is part
of the first book of the Bible, Genesis,
along with Noah and the Flood, and Adam and Eve