1winter 05/06

Gordon-Conwel l Theological Seminary

WINTER 05/06 VOL.35 NO.2

2 winter 05/06

Board of TrusteesMr. Joel B. AarsvoldMrs. Linda Schultz AndersonMr. Richard A. Armstrong, ChairDr. George F. BennettDr. Garth T. BolinderRev. Richard P. Camp, Jr.Mr. Thomas J. Colatosti,Vice ChairMr. Charles W. ColsonDr. Leighton FordMrs. Joyce A. GodwinDr. William F. GrahamDr. Michael E. HaynesMr. Herbert P. Hess, TreasurerDr. John A. Huffman, Jr.Dr. Walter C. Kaiser, Jr.Mr. Caleb Loring IIIMrs. Anne Graham LotzDr. Christopher A. LyonsMrs. Joanna S. MocklerFred L. Potter, Esq.Shirley A. Redd, M.D.Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, Jr.

David M. Rogers, Esq.Mr. John SchoenherrRev. Ken ShigematsuMrs. Virginia M. SnoddyMr. John G. Talcott, Jr.Joseph W. Viola, M.D., SecretaryJ. Christy Wilson III, Esq.Dr. John H. WomackWilliam C. Wood, M.D.

Emeriti MembersDr. Allan C. Emery, Jr.Mr. Roland S. HinzDr. Robert J. LamontMr. Richard D. PhippenDr. Paul E. TomsDr. Robert E. Cooley, President Emeritus

Editorial Advisory CommitteeDr. Sidney L. BradleyDr. Barry H. CoreyDr. Walter C. Kaiser, Jr.Dr. Alvin PadillaRev. C. Ronald Riley

Dr. Haddon W. RobinsonDr. Kenneth L. SwetlandMrs. Nina L. WaltersMr. David Zagunis

PresidentDr. Walter C. Kaiser, Jr.

Chief Development OfficerMr. Howard Freeman

Director of Communicationsand Editor of Contact Mrs. Anne B. Doll

Assistant Director of Communicationsand Assistant Editor of Contact Mr. Michael L. Colaneri

Graphic DesignerMs. Nicole Rim

New Orleans Pastor Sees God’s Protection, Provision During Hurricane Katrinaathy Dea

Weeping with Those Who WeepAnne B. Doll

Archaeology and the Reliability of the Old TestamentJohn H. Sailhamer

SIDEBAR: The Conquest and Ancient Near Eastern Warfare: The Element of FearJeffrey J. Niehaus

SIDEBAR: Archaeology and the Exodus: A Partial LookDouglas K. Stuart

What Good Is Biblical Archaeology to Bible Readers?Walter C. Kaiser, Jr.

Archaeology and the Reliability of the New TestamentSean M. McDonough

SIDEBAR: Justification by Works of the Law in the Dead Sea Scrolls?Roy E. Ciampa

SIDEBAR: How Archaeology Helps Bible InterpretationAida Besançon Spencer

SIDEBAR: Archaeology and the Letters to the Seven Chuches of AsiaColin R. Nicholl

The Top 15 Finds from Biblical ArchaeologyWalter C. Kaiser, Jr.

Reading the Bible from a New Perspective by Remembering the Old Perspective Duane A. Garrett

A Pilgrimage to Tell DothanGary D. Pratico

Tell Dothan: Profile of a Buried CityRobert E. Cooley

Trustee Profile: John TalcottMichael Colaneri

Seminary News

Glossary of Terms

Opening the WordHaddon W. Robinson

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Inquiries regarding may be addressed to: Editor, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary,

130 Essex Street, S. Hamilton, MA 01982 Tel: 978.468.7111 www.gordonconwell.edu

gordon-conwell theological seminary does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, national or ethnic origin, age, handicap or veteran status.

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tsTHE MINISTRY MAGAZINE OF GORDON-CONWELL

THEOLOGICAL SEMINARYWINTER 05/06 VOL.35 NO.2

Read about the new

Archaeological Study Bible,

a monumental publication

by Gordon-Conwell and

Zondervan due for release

in March 2006.

See page 26.

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ON THE FRONT LINES

New Orleans Pastor Sees God’s Protection, Provision During Hurricane Katrinaathy Dea

Weeping with Those Who WeepAnne B. Doll

Archaeology and the Reliability of the Old TestamentJohn H. Sailhamer

SIDEBAR: The Conquest and Ancient Near Eastern Warfare: The Element of FearJeffrey J. Niehaus

SIDEBAR: Archaeology and the Exodus: A Partial LookDouglas K. Stuart

What Good Is Biblical Archaeology to Bible Readers?Walter C. Kaiser, Jr.

Archaeology and the Reliability of the New TestamentSean M. McDonough

SIDEBAR: Justification by Works of the Law in the Dead Sea Scrolls?Roy E. Ciampa

SIDEBAR: How Archaeology Helps Bible InterpretationAida Besançon Spencer

SIDEBAR: Archaeology and the Letters to the Seven Chuches of AsiaColin R. Nicholl

The Top 15 Finds from Biblical ArchaeologyWalter C. Kaiser, Jr.

Reading the Bible from a New Perspective by Remembering the Old Perspective Duane A. Garrett

A Pilgrimage to Tell DothanGary D. Pratico

Tell Dothan: Profile of a Buried CityRobert E. Cooley

Trustee Profile: John TalcottMichael Colaneri

Seminary News

Glossary of Terms

Opening the WordHaddon W. Robinson

New Orleans Pastor Sees God’s Protection,Provision During

HURRICANE KATRINA

Up to his neck in water, trying to keep two el-derly women afloat in the putrid waters flooding New Orleans, pastor Michael Melon cried out to the Lord, “I’m tired! I’m exhausted! I can go no further.” “I looked to my right and there, tied to a stop sign 10 yards away, was a flat-bottom Jon boat. I thought, ‘The Lord has provided,’” recalled the bi-vocational pastor of Coliseum Place Baptist Church, a small 150-year-old inner-city church in the lower Garden District of New Orleans. Melon told his personal story of God’s protec-tion and provision throughout Hurricane Katrina to students at the University of Mobile in Ala-bama, where his daughter, Hilary, is a freshman. “Everybody knew the hurricane was com-ing, but many were either unwilling or unable to evacuate the city. I chose to stay behind due to the many elderly people in my neighborhood who were unable to evacuate,” Melon said. He sent

his wife, Jeanne, and 15-year-old son, Gregory, out of town, first to pick up Hilary, then on to his oldest daughter’s home in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Meanwhile, Melon checked on several elderly neighbors and prepared his home, located just five blocks from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He had earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees there before serving two years as a mis-sionary to Paraguay, South America, through the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. Melon then earned a Doctor of Ministry degree in Preaching from the Char-lotte Campus of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. On Sunday, hurricane-force winds lashed at the city. By 8 a.m. Monday, the Melons’ home began to take on water. Within half an hour, there was one foot of water in the house and by 10 a.m. the water had risen to two feet.

The following article

featuring Gordon-Conwell

alumnus Rev. Dr. Michael

Melon (D.Min. 2004) first

appeared on the website

of the University of Mobile

in Alabama. It is excerpted

with permission.

Kathy Dean

New Orleans Overview after Hurricane Katrina. Image courtesy of DigitalGlobe.

4 winter 05/06

ON THE FRONT LINES

There came a moment when Melon questioned his decision to stay and ride out the storm in his home. He was huddled in the attic, holding tight to the family’s dog, with the wind ripping the shingles off the roof just a few feet over his head. The water had risen to four feet in the one-story house, and the entire house was shaking as if a freight train were coming through it. “I took a Sharpie pen and wrote my name and my wife’s cell phone number on my body in case I turned up a floater,” he recalled. The water continued to rise. When it reached four feet inside the home, Melon stuffed the dog inside his trench coat and abandoned his house in the midst of the storm, heading toward higher ground. “Trees were blowing over, power lines were snapping, water was five to six feet in the street. I walked and swam to the seminary.” There he found shelter for the night. Tuesday morning after the storm, Melon swam to his house through streets filled with eight to 10 feet of water. “The water was filled with gasoline, raw sewage, vari-ous chemicals, plus the dead bodies of humans and animals,” Melon said. “I saw bodies floating by and wondered where they would spend eternity and if their loved ones would ever find them.” His home was filled with about six feet of water. He went

to his neighbors’ homes to see who was left behind. “Across the street was Miss Shirley, a 70-year-old widow who had spent the day and night and the following day in neck-deep water inside her home,” Melon said. He forced the door open and told Miss Shirley he would take her to higher ground. Together they went to the home of Miss Connie, a 79-year-old widow from Honduras. “Miss Connie had crawled up into her attic,” Melon said. “I called to her but could not enter the home due to the barred windows and debris.” Using an ax he had brought from his house, Melon chopped a hole in Miss Connie’s roof and pulled her out. With Miss Connie on his back and Miss Shirley hanging onto his shoulder, he pushed, swam and walked the women for four blocks, keeping their heads above water. “I couldn’t keep these women above water any longer, and the water was up to my neck. They were holding on to me and I was trying to push them and keep them up,” he said. That’s when he cried to the Lord—and saw the empty boat. He swam to the boat and brought it back to the two elderly women, heaving them into the boat and pushing it to dry ground.

“The problem was, dry ground was no safer than the flood area, due to the looters,” Melon said. “Many had broken into the post office, stolen postal trucks and were crashing them into the storefronts to gain access. Many guns were visible in their hands,” he said, describing it as “a scene out of Somalia with warlords.” Just two blocks from the seminary was a drug and reha-bilitation ministry operated by Melon’s friend, Mel Jones. Melon and the women made it to the site, which was dry and relatively safe. For the next two days, Melon paddled the boat through his neighborhood, rescuing people off their rooftops and chopping through roofs to rescue them from attics. “The sound of people trapped in their attic and crying for help is a sound that will stay with me for the rest of my life,” he said. He brought a total of 12 people to safety, while FEMA workers used the ministry site to bring about 60 people to dry ground. Because of the increasing violence of looters in the area, Melon and his friends decided to abandon the city on Wednes-day evening. They pushed a van through chest-high water onto the elevated highway and, with eight people aboard, escaped the city and headed for South Carolina where Melon’s family was waiting. But God’s providence had not ended. “We pulled into a truck rest area on Hwy. 55 in McComb, Mississippi, at about 2 a.m. Thursday,” Melon said. “I stepped out of the van and this young kid walks up and says, ‘Do you know how to get to South Carolina?’” That young man was 22-year-old Jamal, whose father drove a school bus for the New Orleans parish. Jamal’s father had handed him the keys to the bus and told him to evacuate the family. “This young man had never driven a school bus. He had loaded up the family and been driving in circles in Mis-sissippi trying to figure out the way to South Carolina, and when the bus was almost out of gas he pulled into the same rest area where we were,” Melon said. As a bi-vocational pastor, Melon had driven trucks and buses for a living. He drove the bus with 30 evacu-ees—and a dog—to South Carolina. “One lady on the bus said, ‘You needed us and we needed you. God must surely be working overtime,’” Melon remembered. Today the road ahead is filled with uncertainty. Before the storm, Melon worked as a retail accounts representa-tive for Coca-Cola, and the job is there if he wants it. But Melon said he can’t see going back to selling carbonated

“I TOOK A SHARPIE PEN AND WROTE MY NAME AND MY WIFE’S CELL PHONE NUMBER ON MY BODY IN CASE I TURNED UP A FLOATER.”

5winter 05/06

ON THE FRONT LINES

weeping WITH THOSE WHO WEEP Anne B. Dol l

Hurricane Katrina survivor Mike Melon recently reread the sobering opening lines of his doctoral thesis. “The people had the look of those who were shell shocked and had lost everything,” he had written. “The real problem was, they shell-shocked, , and they lost everything.” The scene was northern Greece on the border of Turkey. The year was 1998, and Mike, now the Rev. Dr. Michael P. Melon, (D. Min.’04), was ministering and preaching in a freezing, barely livable refugee camp to uprooted victims of the ethnic civil war in the Balkans States. “The magnitude of their tragedy I had never suffered and probably never would,” he wrote. “Never as a pastor had I felt such a loss for words or so inadequate and irrel-evant to a task.”

Today, as Mike ministers to Hurricane Katrina victims in his devastated New Orleans community, he simply “weeps with those who weep.” When the raging storm plowed a swath of destruction across the Gulf Coast, Mike and his family escaped with their lives. But they, too, lost everything. Their home and vehicles are destroyed. Their family his-tory—cherished photos of weddings, and children, and parents now de-ceased—succumbed to flood waters that topped off at seven feet. “When you’re ministering to someone in a neighborhood that’s lost everything, they know that you’ve lost everything, too, and there’s an immediate impact,” he says. “All you have to do is just sit there and listen to them...We can’t restore everybody’s possessions, just

beverages with his city in such need. His home is a complete loss, but his church is still standing. He is return-ing to New Orleans to try to estab-lish the church as a re-entry site for people returning to the city. “I was a bi-vocational pastor. My church can’t pay me. I’m going to be stepping out on faith and go full-time into ministry. There’s a lot of uncer-tainty right now,” he said. But there is one thing that is cer-tain in Michael Melon’s life. “God is the only sure anchor that we can hold onto. Psalm 46 says that God is an ever-present help in times of trouble. This flood was indiscrimi-nate in its destruction. It didn’t mat-ter if you were rich or poor, young or old, black, white, brown or yellow. But in the midst of this destruction, God made His provision tangible and His presence known.”

Kathy Dean is Director of Public Relations at the University of Mobile.

6 winter 05/06

like they can’t restore ours, and people know it. It’s a grieving process you have to work through, from numbness to anger...Somewhere you get to acceptance and from there, you move on, and it’s going to take time. “What you can say is, ‘Look, we’re here for the long run. We’ll help you with whatever we can.’” Miraculously, Mike’s 150-year-old downtown Coliseum Place Baptist Church, a towering structure with Revival style architecture and a sanctuary that once seated 750, escaped wa-ter damage, but felt the brutal impact of high winds that blew in all the windows and ripped back half the roof. “Right now, it’s not safe to be in,” Mike says. Located near the city’s center in a multicultural neigh-borhood of Caucasians, African Americans, Hispanics and Asians—as Mike describes it, “like all of New Orleans, Jum-balaya, a mix of everything,” —the church reaches out to the wealthy who are restoring massive historic homes on one side of the church, and to the poverty stricken who reside a few blocks on the other side. When Mike arrived in 2003, the church had been in decline for several decades. The church met only on Sunday mornings, and the 35 to 40 remaining members lived outside the city. Few, if any, community residents attended Sunday services, thinking that the church was closed. Through numerous outreach initiatives, including block par-ties and Bible Day Camps in the park across the street, Sunday morning attendance had climbed to about 50. “We did a lot of things just to let the community know that we were still in business and there to meet their needs; so we had begun to see a lot of community interest and community people coming in,” he explains. “It was as if we had bottomed out and were beginning to climb upwards when Katrina hit.” Mike and members of the church who were not displaced by Katrina are eager to get the church functioning again for ministry. “Our desire is to get the roof fixed, so that as quickly as possible we can at least open the church as a relocation center for people as they begin to drift back into the neighborhood,” Mike comments. “We want to get the building at least safe and functioning to where we can be a ministry point for food and clothing, and, if need be, even house people, if they come back and find that their homes are no longer livable.” To that end, every week he throws sleeping bags into the back of his truck—a welcomed gift that he outfitted with a cab for living and sleeping—and drives 650 miles back to New Orleans from his oldest daughter’s home in Spartanburg, South Carolina, his family’s current address. During the week, he holds church services in members’ homes, most of which escaped serious storm damage; minis-ters to grieving people suffering the aftermath of trauma and loss; and works on restoring the church. Through an Adopt-a-Church program, the Southern Baptist Convention is attempting to link churches like Mike’s with others across the country for clean-up and some construction. But the 75 foot high roof will require expert roofers, and the list for such services is long. “It’s something you need professionals to come in and

do, so we’re trying to locate financial resources and possibly professional construction teams that can come in and help us,” he says. As a pastor, Mike is dealing with questions common in any disaster: Is this the judgment of God? If God is a God of love, how could He allow this to happen? Just a year before Hur-ricane Katrina, Mike explored such issues in his doctoral thesis about preaching judgment during times of national and natural disasters.* Writing at the time in response to the 9/11 calamity, Mike noted that during and immediately after a crisis, like preaching at a funeral, pastors need to preach comfort and grace. “It’s not a time to preach judgment; it’s just not,” he insists. But he also addressed extensively the concept of the consequences of sin, as found in the Minor Prophets. “New Orleans has a reputation for being a sinful city,” Mike comments. “It is referred to as the second Sodom and Gomorrah...I would not say that this (Katrina) is not the judgment of God. I believe 9/11 was, and I believe this is. The Lord is beginning to do some things in the United States to wake us up and say, ‘Look, you’re going to be held account-able for what you do.’” Paraphrasing the Old Testament prophet Amos, he notes: “The Lord says, ‘I sent you flood, I sent you famine, I sent you warfare, I sent you disease, yet you would not return to me.’ Over and over, it’s repeated that the Lord has sent these many chastisements, yet the people would not return to him...In calamities, at the very least, it should cause us to look inward and say, ‘What is it we need to change? What is it that we may be involved in that God is not pleased with, whether as a society or as a church?’ “But even if Katrina is a judgment from God,” he adds, “it’s still the church’s responsibility and the Christian’s re-sponsibility to help restore people’s lives so that when they do get back on their feet, they’ll say, ‘This church was there to meet our needs. These are people who love and care about us. There’s something different about these people. When every-body left the city, when all the government agencies broke down, when all the government help was not there, the Church was there to help us. They’re the ones who saw us through this.’ And that’s what I think would help usher people into the Kingdom of God.”

*A book based on Michael P. Melon’s thesis, , was published by Xulon Press in 2004.

Anne B. Doll is Director of Communications at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

ON THE FRONT LINES

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The concern for the meaning and accuracy of OT (Hebrew) manuscripts is the task of Biblical Philology, including the related studies of Textual Criticism and the archaeology of ancient Semitic inscriptions. Tasks such as these can be carried out only by highly trained specialists in the Semitic languages of the Bible. The results of such study are in-dispensable not only for the lay person’s confidence in the reliability of the OT, but also for the scholar’s defense of that reliability. Much of this work must, understandably, be carried out behind the scenes, unnoticed by lay readers, but under the careful scrutiny of colleagues, evangelical or otherwise. What is at stake in this type of work is nothing less than the historical and scientific grounds for the claim of all Christians that the Bible is a faithful and reliable witness to its original texts and the historical events they record.

Philologists help us lay the founda-tions for that claim by demonstrating that the Bible we hold in our hands today is the same Bible penned centuries before the birth of Christ. Though such tasks may appear to be dry and arcane, it is helpful to bear in mind that some of our most popular English writers, such as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, were themselves philologists by profession. What Lewis and Tolkien did for the study of Old English literature, biblical philologists do for the Hebrew manu-scripts of the OT. Philology enables us to determine the age of biblical manu-scripts and the language in which they are written. It also helps us understand the relationship between biblical He-brew as a language and the languages of the ancient Near East. By comparing the biblical texts to ancient documents from the biblical era one learns much about the integrity of the biblical manu-

scripts and their reliability as witnesses to ancient historical events. Thanks to the contribution of philology to bibli-cal studies, we can confidently say that the biblical Hebrew manuscripts that lie behind our modern English translations give every appearance of being histori-cally linked to authentic ancient Semitic documents from the earliest periods of biblical history. In 1929, archaeologists uncovered a remarkable cache of clay tablets near the modern region of Ras Shamra, the ancient city of Ugarit, on the northern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. These texts date from the biblical period of the Judges. Some of these tablets were found still lying in the ovens where they had been baking at the time the city of Ugarit was destroyed more than 3000 years ago. Of importance to the philolo-gist is the fact that these tablets were written in an ancient Semitic dialect

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Examples of ancient inscriptions.

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directly related to the language of the Bible. Today that language is called Hebrew. An important outcome of this discovery is the evidence it provides for the age and nature of the language of the Bible. It is not a new language, nor is it a language unknown at the time the Bible was written. When the bibli-cal manuscripts are compared with these early Ugaritic tablets, it is evident that the biblical texts have preserved a very ancient form of the language of that period. This is especially true of the poetic texts. They are not rewritten or modernized versions of the language of earlier texts. They bear all the earmarks of the actual language of the Canaanites during the biblical period. It would have been impossible to imitate or artificially stage the kind of close identity that ex-ists between the language of the OT and that of the early Canaanites of the OT period. One of the most far reaching archaeolog-ical finds of the last half century has been the discovery of what have become known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. These scrolls are the remains of an ancient library of manuscripts stashed away in caves more than 2000 years ago. Of primary in-terest is the wealth of biblical manuscripts found among these scrolls, most of them dating from the first and second centuries B.C. Much has been written about this discovery and much more remains to be written. Needless to say, they cast a great deal of light on the history of the biblical manuscripts. In these texts we have actual manuscripts and parts of manuscripts of the Bible that go back to only a few short centuries from the time of the final com-position of many of the books of the Bi-ble. The similarity between these ancient manuscripts and our more recent Hebrew texts shows that the scribes who copied and handled them were as cautious and exacting as modern biblical scholars. The second question we have raised above regarding archaeology’s contri-bution to the reliability of the OT is whether the historical events recounted in the OT actually happened as they are recounted. Did the biblical authors get it right when they wrote these histories? Here we must lay aside our philological tools and become historians. That means we are faced with the task of recon-

structing the events recorded in the Bible and attempting to identify them with known historical events from the ancient Near East. Such comparisons of the OT with ancient history make it possible to measure how close the biblical writers’ accounts were to the modern historians’ understanding of what “actually hap-pened.” In attempting to get a fix on both biblical and secular historical events, archaeology is of prime importance. After nearly a century of serious digging, biblical archaeologists have reached a broad consensus on how the bits and pieces of the historical puzzle should fit together. In viewing the total picture, the pieces supplied by modern archaeolo-gists fit remarkably well with the picture supplied by the biblical narratives. It is, thus, widely acknowledged that, on balance, the events recorded in the OT Scriptures should not only be taken as historical in the true sense of the term, that is, they actually happened, but also

they should be considered as a close, if not exact, replica of the actual events of the ancient world. Such knowledge of the history of Israel, both in and apart from the Bible, is essential for demonstrating the truth-fulness of the biblical account. When we claim the Bible is true, we take that to mean it is historically factual and accurate. But how can we know it is historically accurate without knowing something of the events it is describing? How do we know that biblical history conforms to the events of ancient history unless we know what those events were and how they happened? Before the rise of modern historiography, readers of the Bible were more or less obliged to take the reliability of the Bible at face value. Scriptural reliability and accuracy was a matter of trust in the biblical writers. If the Bible appeared to be making a claim to be historically accurate, being the Word of God, it warranted the reader’s trust that it would make such claims with moral integrity. Since Moses wrote the Pentateuch and Moses was a man of integrity, one needn’t worry about the

accuracy of his work because he could be trusted to tell the truth. The situation today is quite different. Few today would venture the argu-ment that the OT is historically reliable merely because its authors were morally upright. As important as such an issue may be, it cannot be allowed a central role in biblical apologetics. In today’s world, it is expected that biblical truth, in so far as that means historical reli-ability, must pass through the same fiery trials as other documents claiming to be historical. That means the Bible must of-ten fend for itself in the arena of secular history, and in the face of an historical skepticism that places in doubt not only the central tenets of biblical history, but also any kind of history that involves a faith commitment up front. The question raised by such a “mini-malist” position is how to account for such a sudden change of attitude about not only the Bible’s historical reliability but also the reliability of nearly every

kind of historical ac-count. Has there been a fundamental change in the field of biblical archaeology? Has there been a surge of new archaeological discover-

ies which have turned biblical proofs into doubts about the Bible? What has been the source of such negative at-tacks on both the Bible and history in general? While it may be true that times have changed and new sorts of ques-tions must be asked and answered about the Bible, it is also true that this new attitude about history and the Bible has arisen not out of new evidence about past events, but rather out of deep seated problems that have beset histori-cal research in general. It is in response to such changes in historical method that I want to make the following four observations. 1. The increasingly negative tone of some historians and archaeologists is the result of new findings or new dis-coveries at the ancient biblical sites. The fact is that recent discoveries unearthed by archaeologists have continued to pro-duce historical evidence in support of the Bible. In 1993, for example, at the height of the new negativity within scholarly circles, an inscription was unearthed from the 9th Century B.C. which men-tions the name of David, the first king of

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the Southern Kingdom. At the same time the new archaeologists were presuming the stories of David to be fiction, this inscription established that David was a real historical figure. 2. The increasingly negative tone of some historians and archaeologists is

the result of showing that past dis-coveries of archaeologists were in error. Much of the work of past archaeologists which substantiated the biblical history still stands—in most cases more than ever before. The difference lies in how these earlier discoveries are now interpreted. An example of this comes from one of the most dramatic pieces of historical evidence yet to be uncovered by Egyptolo-gists. It was discovered over a century ago. It is the 13th Century B.C. inscrip-tion of the Egyptian king Merneptah which mentions a people called “Israel” along with biblical place names such as Canaan and Ashkelon. There could not be a stronger proof of the accuracy of the Bible than this inscription. Here in one of the king’s own inscriptions, we have the mention of the people “Israel” by an Egyptian king hundreds of years before modern “minimalist” archaeologists be-lieve there was an Israel. 3. The increasingly negative tone of some historians is the result of a funda-mental shift in the way biblical history is conducted. Put simply, according to the biblical “minimalists,” the biblical record cannot and should not play a role in reconstructing biblical history. It is, of course, valuable to view ancient history without an undue emphasis on the Bible. There are many persons and events in the ancient world not mentioned in the Bible. The problem, however, is that after these archaeologists have reconstructed the biblical history without the biblical text, they go on to accuse the Bible of getting it wrong because it does not conform to their newly reconstructed version of that history. The fact is, the only other written history of ancient Israel ever available comes from the Bible. They, thus, judge the biblical version against their own ver-sion of its history. One would think the Bible should at least be allowed to speak on its behalf and give its own version of the events it records. Both versions, the biblical one and the secular one, should be evaluated against the available evidence. To give one example, the archaeo-logical starting point of the history of

the dynasty of David and Solomon has always been the remains of monumen-tal structures from the 10th Century B.C. These structures were dated to this period because it was assumed they were related to the kingdoms of David and Solomon, which the Bible credits with the origin of the monarchy. Without the biblical picture by which to evaluate the archaeological remains, these monumen-tal structures could also be dated to the 9th Century and hence, to the time after David and Solomon. With such a view of the evidence, it would appear that the actual origins of the great Israelite mon-archy came after the time of David and Solomon. The Bible thus appears to be a hundred years off target. But, it is only by discounting the biblical record in the first place that these historians are able to conclude the Bible has mixed up its dates. If the Bible is allowed to speak for itself, it conforms without a hitch to the exist-ing archaeological evidence. 4. The last observation is complex, but it lies at the heart of the debate over history and the Bible. What the new historians and archaeologists are often saying is that their evidence sometimes contradicts what earlier archaeologists said about the Bible. Put this way, it is not a question of the historical reliability of the Bible as much as it is a question of the historical reliability of the work of earlier archaeologists. The question is not so much whether the Bible is true as it is whether the dominant theories of great biblical archaeologists were true. What often goes unsaid in these debates is that sometimes, in order to get their facts to fit the Bible, earlier archaeologists (such as William F. Albright) made assumptions about biblical history that contradicted the Bible itself. The negative work of the new archaeologists therefore can lend valuable support to biblical history by undermining previous false assumptions about that history. The past generation of archaeolo-gists, under the leadership of Albright, for example, unanimously assumed that Israel’s exodus from Egypt occurred dur-ing the time of the 19th Dynasty in Egypt under the reign of Ramesis II. Based on that chronology, earlier historians and archaeologists assumed the Bible to be in error when it recorded the destruction of the city of Jericho by the Israelites. Jericho, they argued, was destroyed more than a century the Israelites left

Egypt and entered Canaan. According to their chronology, Jericho was already in ruins by the time Israel had left Egypt. If they had followed the biblical chronology, however, it would have placed the exodus in the time of the 18th dynasty, more than a century earlier and at roughly the time of the destruction of Jericho. There is, thus, often a need for a correction, not of the Bible, but of the assumed results of earlier historical reconstructions. The study of history and biblical archaeology is a complex task. The bot-tom line in the above observations is that the new archaeologists (minimalists) are sometimes guilty of passing on their judgments about biblical history without considering all the evidence. No one is suggesting they must take the Bible as true in order to use it in reconstructing biblical history. They should, however, take the Bible seriously as at least one version of that history worthy of consid-eration and evaluation. To be sure, attempts to rethink the results of past work are admirable. While much of it might be called “revisionist” history, some of it may represent a seri-ous attempt to look at the evidence in a new light. Biblical minimalists, however, are wrong in discounting the biblical narratives as part of the evidence. Biblical narratives as a whole cannot always be treated as eyewitness accounts. Much of the book of Kings, for example, records events several hundred years earlier than the time of its composition. That does not mean that these narratives are spun out of thin air. Here is where evangelicals may serve a valuable (if unappreciated) purpose in the larger scheme of things. They, as few others, are prepared to take these biblical texts at face value and ask how they fit into what historians and archaeologists tell us happened.

Dr. John Sailhamer is Professor of Old Testa-ment and Hebrew at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, and is past-president of the Evangelical Theo-

logical Society. He is the author of numerous books, including An Introduction to Old Testament Theology, Genesis Unbound and The Pentateuch as Narrative, A Biblical-Theological Commentary.

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The Bible celebrates Rahab the prostitute for her faith, and rightly so (Heb 11:31; Jas 2:25). She not only hides the spies that Joshua sends to scope out Jericho and the land, but she also makes a great confession: “The Lord your God is God in heaven above and on earth below” (Josh 2:11). This is her statement of faith, and with it she abandons a lifetime of polytheism, which in Canaan, and throughout the ancient world, believed in “the great gods of heaven and earth.” For Rahab there is now only one God, the God of Israel. But before that statement of faith, Rahab also makes an impor-tant observation, and that is, “I know that the Lord has given this land to you, and that a great fear of you has fallen on us, so that all who live in this country are melting in fear because of you” (Josh 2:9). Her statement shows us two things: that the Lord has been faithful to his earlier promise to Israel, and that the Lord is doing in fact what the pagans thought their gods sometimes did. We owe our knowledge of the first point to the Bible, and our knowledge of the second point to the steady work of archaeolo-gists and translators. The fear of the Canaanites shows that the Lord has been faith-ful to his promises. It is true that the people in Jericho are afraid because they have heard what the Lord did to the Egyptians at the Red Sea, and to Sihon, and Og, the Amorite kings east of the Jordan (Josh 2:10-11). But it is also true that the Lord had prom-ised to do something else: to send his fear upon the Canaanites, so that they would be unmanned by it, and more easily defeated by the Israelites. God had promised this through Moses: “I will send my terror ahead of you and throw into confusion every nation you conquer” (Ex 23:27). God had also predicted it through Moses when he celebrated Israel’s crossing of the Red Sea: “The people of Canaan will melt away; terror and dread will fall upon them. By the power of your [i.e., the Lord’s] arm they will be still as a stone” (Ex 15:15-16). We now know, from other ancient near eastern sources, that pagans also thought their gods could send fear in advance, to en-sure an enemy’s defeat. A good example comes from Assyria. The Assyrian king, Tukulti-Ninurta I (1244-1208 B.C.), complains that his Babylonian vassal has broken covenant with him by raiding his territory. He addresses his complaint to Shamash, the sun god, who oversees treaties and laws, and who, interestingly, was com-monly called “the Great Judge of heaven and earth” (cf. Josh 2:11; Gen 18:25). Shamash answers his prayer, with the following result: “But Kashtiliash, because of what the decision of the gods sought, changed his mind, withdrawing at the word of Shamash, and fearing the hostility of the gods...the decision of the Powerful King [i.e., Shamash] bound his body like a vampire.” The Babylonian vassal then articulates his fear: “Now do I feel terror for my land; grave is the punishment of my misdeeds! A penalty which I had

The Conquest and Ancient Near Eastern Warfare:

the ELEMENT

of FEAR

Jeffrey J. Niehaus, Ph.D.

not feared is about to overwhelm me; death envelops me! The oath of Shamash oppresses me.” We see that Shamash judges the Babylonian king, and he does so by gripping his heart with fear. In that condition, as the poem narrates further, he makes irratio-nal military decisions and leads his army to defeat at the hands of the Assyrian overlord. If we ask how there can be such a theological parallel between a pagan source and the biblical account, the Bible seems to offer a brief but adequate explanation. The source of false religion is demonic. For example, Moses sadly prophesies about Israel that, once they have conquered the land and settled it, they will “sac-rifice to demons, which are not God—gods they had not known, gods that recently appeared, gods your fathers did not fear” (Dt 32:17). Later, the psalmist shows that this prophecy came true:

“They worshiped their idols, which became a snare to them. They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to demons. They shed innocent blood the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan” (Ps 106:36-38).

Paul likewise says that “the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, and I do not want you to be participants with demons” (1 Cor 10:20), and he warns Timothy against “deceiving spirits, and things taught by demons” (1 Tim 4:1). According to the biblical testimony, ancient near eastern religions were demonic in origin. The enemy, seeking to produce a counterfeit religion, naturally produced lies that had a ring of truth. The concept that a god would send fear in advance to un-man an enemy is part of such a counterfeit. So is the fact that, in one example, Shamash, the “Great Judge of heaven and earth,” does this to a covenant breaker. The ancients knew, and John rightly tells us, that “fear has to do with punishment” (1 Jn 4:18). But we, like Rahab, have come to know the one true God. And he “has not given us a spirit of fear, but a Spirit of power, of love, and of self-control” (2 Tim 1:7). Thompson, R. Campbell, and Mallowen, M. E. L., “The British Museum Excava-tions at Nineveh,” , Vol. XX (1933), p. 135.

Dr. Jeffrey Niehaus is Professor of Old Testament at Gordon Conwell Theo-logical Semi-nary. He has

published articles in the Journal of Biblical Literature, Vetus Testamentum, the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, and the Tyndale Bulletin. He has published two commentaries, Amos and Obadiah, and a book, God at Sinai.

An image of a sacrificial altar

photo courtesy of www.HolyLandPhotos.org

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Archaeology’s Indirect EvidenceArchaeology is the study of what can be learned from what people in the past left behind. When you’re just passing through a place, you don’t leave much behind. (What lasting impact do you have on a motel when you’ve stayed there for a night, or a campsite when you’ve tented there for a couple of days?) Accordingly, we would hardly expect to find a lot of di-rect archaeological evidence of the Israelite exodus, especially for the exact route they took as they fled from Egypt under God’s special protection, since they were, for the most part, only passing through the various places they visited. Yet there are many indirect ways that archaeology helps us understand the exo-dus, since archaeology allows us to take bits and pieces of knowledge about the ancient world from the remains we can dig up, and infer from these bits and pieces something of what was going on generally in those days, and sometimes even specifi-cally at a given location thousands of years after the fact. Using the bits and pieces that have come to light, let’s consider some of what we can understand about a part of the Israelite exodus as it is described in a portion of Exodus 13 and 14.

Archaeology and the General Picture of the Exodus From the archaeological evidence that bears on Israel’s wilderness journey to Sinai (Exodus 13:17-19:25, but particularly chs. 13 and 14), a certain kind of picture

emerges: For one thing, we can tell that the Israelites had much to learn. At the beginning of this block of biblical narrative, they had just begun to leave Egypt, where they had been for so long leaderless and subjugated that their entire way of thinking tended to reflect that of people who owed their identity to their plight. They knew themselves as victims of the tyranny of the ancient world’s greatest contemporary po-litical-military-economic power. They knew one place to live: the Gosh-en area of northeast Egypt. They had never been allowed military arms or the knowledge of how to use them, even though God had just begun to organize them as his army. They were not used to direct guidance from God, and understood little of the power of his presence among them. They operated with the usual assumptions of most people trying

to understand the workings of God: a good and powerful god would hardly allow his people to go through troubles, dangers, griefs and testings, would he? Their reasoning led them naturally to think: If God is all-powerful and can oppress the Egyptians via the plagues while sparing us, his people, entirely, we can now expect him to take care of all our wants and desires just as we define them, can’t we? The Exodus narrative takes the reader from Egypt to Sinai, and in the process through various hardships that the Israelites experienced: being pursued by Pharaoh’s vastly superior army, lack of water at various locations where God led them (what sort of god would tell his people to encamp where they couldn’t even get a drink or water their flocks?), boredom with the same food day after day, being at-tacked and having to fight their first battle—against a fighting force experienced in projecting power in the very wilderness that they were in—having disputes in such numbers that they needed a multi-tiered court system, and finding out that getting too close to a holy God was deadly. In all these events, however, God was at work to bring his people to a right relationship with him and to teach them dependence on his provision for them. He was shaping and educating them, al-lowing them to learn (frequently the hard way, since that is all too often the only way people really learn a lesson) what it meant to trust him in all sorts of situations. In addition, he was treating them in a way that has always been difficult for people to accept: he was not telling them everything they wanted to know. He told them what they needed to know in order to become his covenant people and in order to receive his salvation. They wanted to know much more, however: where to find water right away, how much longer this or that would last, how to be comfortable, how to avoid problems and dangers, how to get out of situations that they didn’t enjoy being in. Telling God how to do things and complaining about the things he does or doesn’t do have always been rather popular enterprises. The Israelites on the way to Sinai did not hesitate to indulge in them.

Archaeology and Reasons for an Irregular Exodus Route (13:17-14:4)Exodus 13:17-18 reads as follows: When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them on the road through the Philistine country, though that was shorter. For God said, “If they face war, they might change their minds and return to Egypt. So God led the people around by the desert road toward the Red Sea.” Since the newly-forming Israelite army was entirely untested, the

first reason for an irregular exodus route was the presence of the Philistines on the Asian coast of the Mediterranean, i.e., virtually on Egypt’s north-east border.2 No definitive documentation of Philistine military strength at the time of the exodus has survived from the ancient world. We know, however, that the Philistines were so daunting a fighting force at the time of the conquest, 40 years later and beyond, that even at Joshua’s death their territory remained unconquered (cf. Josh 13:1-5)3.

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We also know that they were bold enough to attack Egypt proper in an effort to capture territory in the days of Ramses III, i.e., about 1188 BC4, suggesting that they considered themselves at that time—considerably after the Israelites had entered Canaan—potentially able to defeat even the Egyptians. Accordingly, God did not want his people to try to enter Canaan directly via the well established coastal road from Egypt, the Via Maris, even though that was by far the shortest and easiest route from the point of view of travel time and theoretical convenience. The Via Maris led right through the heart of Philistine territory. Based on their behavior as recorded in Judges and 1 Samuel, the Philistines were looking to expand their territorial control, and would hardly have been willing to let the Israelites enter Canaan, on which they themselves had designs, without an all-out fight. By contrast, according to the Merneptah Stela5, Israel was not yet regarded as a nation, but merely as a people group even as late as 1230 B.C., a fact that may be taken as confirming the consistent biblical indications of their relative weakness militarily and politically. At least that is the sort of scenario that comports precisely with the picture painted in Exodus and in the books of Judges and 1 Samuel. Could God have destroyed the Philistines on behalf of the Isra-elites? Of course. But the Philistines had so far done nothing to the Israelites, and so were not in the same category as the Egyptians, who well deserved the punishment they had already received and were about to receive more of (i.e., their defeat at the Red Sea). More-over, the Philistines were latecomers to Palestine, as compared to the Amorites/Canaanites, and therefore did not fall under the blanket condemnation of the “sin of the Amorites” that God had announced to Abraham in Genesis 15:16 as the basis for the conquest of Canaan. So the Philistines were to be dealt with later6 rather than immediately; it was not part of God’s plan that they should be fought and subdued at this early stage. He, therefore, did not call Israel to try to conquer Philistine territory, and had they tried on their own to do so they would surely have been defeated, just as happened when they tried later, on their own, to defeat the Canaanites (Num 14:44-45). Without God’s help, he knew, if they face war, they might change their minds and return to Egypt. Would Israel really be so inconsistent as to give up the conquest and return to Egypt—of all places? And would they do so after all that they had seen and experienced in the 10 plagues? The answer is “yes”—decidely “yes.” Not only did this very plan to return to Egypt actually occur less than two years later (Num 14:3, 14), but one must not forget that the Israelites were ac-customed only to Egypt; they had lived nowhere else for 430 years. A properly chastised Egypt, which had perhaps “learned its lesson” about mistreating the Israelites by force of the plagues, might have seemed to them the very place they would now be most safe and happy, especially if they had been beaten in war by the Philistines (as would be certain without divine aid) and therefore would feel justified

in giving up on any plan to enter Canaan. God knew their limited perspectives and naïve expectations full well, and thus led them away from Philistine territory. God’s compassionate words in Exodus 13:17, “if they face war, they might change their minds and return to Egypt,” demonstrate his concern for the unpreparedness of the Israelites to fight any other military force at this point. Thus, , God makes clear that the Egyptian army, far superior to that of the Philistines, would have crushed Israel in any normal military encounter. The reader is there-fore prepared by this statement for the expectation that Israel will have little success in any future battle without special divine interven-tion—and, indeed, that is exactly what was required at the Red Sea (14:5 ff)7, Rephidim (17:8 ff) and thereafter throughout virtually all of Israel’s history. Accordingly, the divine defeat of the Egyptian army at the Red Sea would constitute an essential part of the deliverance of the people and a means of their encouragement to follow Yahweh from Egypt, and not back thereto.8 What, then, to do to avoid trying to go through Philistine-held ter-ritory into the promised land? The answer was for God to lead them in a very different direction and on a different road, i.e., by the desert road toward the Red Sea.9 Moses reminds his readers in Exodus 13:18 that the Israelites were God’s army: The Hebrew actually says, “The Israelites went up out of the land of Egypt organized by fifties.” Fifties were the one of the smallest fighting units, what might be called today “squads.” The term does not literally refer to groups of 50 men but is part of the “thousand-hundreds-fifties-tens” language employed to delineate military units.10 The Israelites were at this point hardly armed at all. Later, they would carry mainly short swords (cf. Exod 32:27). The short sword was a common armament of the day, but the overall evidence suggests that the Israelites were less trained than other ancients at this point in their history in all war skills, and were particularly deficient in archery, spear throwing, and slinging.11 Formed up for battle they may have been—after a fashion. Trained for battle they were not, however. There had been no permission or opportunity for learning martial arts under the Egyptians, and the fact that Israelite men could count themselves into (unarmed) squads themselves did not mean that they were, in fact, a capable fighting force on their own.

GO TO P.47 FOR FOOTNOTES

Dr. Douglas R. Stuart is Professor of Old Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachu-setts. He is the author of many books, including Old Testament Exegesis (Westminster Press), How To Read the Bible for All Its Worth (with G.D. Fee, Zondervan), Hosea-Jonah (Word Biblical Commentary), and A Guide to Selecting and Using Bible Com-mentaries (Word).

images courtesy of www.bigfoto.com

14 winter 05/06

what good is BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY to Bible Readers? Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., Ph.D.

1, 3, 4 Beersheba Iron Age excavation site 2 Tower in Jerash

5 Pot found in Carthage excavation site

the southwest corner of the Temple Mount and found a huge stone arch (now known as Robinson’s Arch) attached to the large retaining wall of the mount. But archaeology took on a life of its own when Sir Flinders Petrie, an Egyptolo-gist and British archaeologist, began excavating Tell el-Hasi in the Negev desert south of

Jerusalem in the beginning 1890s. Petrie established the use of stratigraphy and ceramic typology to enable excavators to determine a relative chronology. Petrie analyzed the manmade layers of human debris to set a context for any arti-facts and ruins found. He also used the broken shards of pottery, of which there was a super abundance on each site, to give a relative sequence of time, for pottery styles had a tendency to change as much as current day dress fashions or car models, and “dishes” in those days broke as easily (if not more so) than today. Thus, there were thousands of shards in every tell (archaeological site). But the young science of Biblical Archaeology waited for the arrival in the 1920s of one who would later be called the Dean of American Biblical

Archaeology, William Foxwell Albright (1891-1971), a professor of Semitic languages at Johns Hopkins Univer-sity. Just as illustrious was the work of Rabbi Nelson Glueck (1900-1971), a U.S. archaeologist and President of Hebrew Union College from 1947 to 1971. Albright used archaeology to challenge some aspects of the documentary theory, a popular view of the famous German literary critic, Julius Wellhausen, who taught that there was no real history in the Bible until the time of the post-Exilic

period of Haggai and Malachi. Following his line of reasoning, Noah, all the patriarchs, Joshua, David, all the kings of Israel and Judah, not to mention the exodus, conquest, and captivities, were historically without any support in reality. Albright and Glueck led an older generation

of Biblical Archaeologists. While neither would subscribe to a view of biblical inerrancy, Glueck would famously say: “...it may be stated categorically that no archeological discovery has ever con-troverted a biblical reference” (Nelson Glueck, , 1959, p. 31). Likewise, Albright wrote, “Dis-covery after discovery has established the accuracy of innumerable details of the Bible as a source of history” (W.F.Albright,

, 1954 edition, p. 128). But things were beginning to change. For example, two archaeolo-gists from the same family, Sir Frederic George Kenyon (1863-1952) and his daughter, Kathleen Kenyon (1906-1978), both became renowned British archae-ologists. The father was trained as a

So tell me: Did the biblical writers think they were telling the truth, i.e., the story as it really happened? Or, instead of giving us a “narrative his-tory,” did the writers of Scripture have some genuine sources and facts, but they manipulated them and, thus, gave us well-intentioned propaganda, a sort of “historicized myth?” Which is correct? To help answer this question, a relatively new science entered the scene in the mid-1880s—Biblical Archaeology. Two Americans, a noted geographer named Edward Robinson, and a Yale graduate and Congregational minis-ter named Eli Smith, together identi-fied more than 100 biblical sites, using topographical surveys and some limited excavation. In particular, Robinson created a sensation when he excavated

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PHOTO KEY

15winter 05/06

New Testament Greek and classicist scholar, while his daughter majored in modern history and field archaeology. F. G. Kenyon’s book,

(1940) found that archae-ology corroborated the history of the Bible; but his daughter seldom relied on any evidence from the biblical text, and argued against its history, especially the fall of Jericho. Why did this change occur? Moder-nity incorrectly concluded that Biblical Archaeology had a “fundamentalist agenda” to validate the historicity of the narrative in the Bible. Moreover, a famous principle was stated in 1974 that the materials of archaeology should not be evaluated on the basis of written texts such as the Bible. Thus, Biblical Archaeology began to fade as a disci-pline in many quarters, to be replaced by regional study now known as Syro-Palestinian Archaeology. Accordingly, somewhere in the 1970s archaeology was no longer connected in many quarters

to the Bible; the new archaeology now was a secular science with little or no attention to the Scriptures. Truth in religion, it was affirmed in this postmod-ern thought, was now independent of the facts, events and persons in history, as well as independent of the Bible. Two of Albright’s students, George Ernest Wright (1909-1974) and John Bright (1908-1995), seemed to notice what was coming in the 1970s and tried to show the importance of the factuality of the major events in the Bible. Wright warned that we should pay “close at-tention to the facts of [biblical] history .... because these facts are the facts of God.” “Now in Biblical faith everything depends upon whether the central events actually occurred.... [W]e must indeed take history seriously as the primary

data of faith” (G. Ernest Wright, , 1952, p. 38 and p. 126f).

This was not to “prove” one’s faith by archaeology or history, but it did argue that the difference between folly and faith was clear: folly was trusting some-thing when there was no basis for doing so, while faith was trusting on the basis of adequate evidence or fact. In light of the continuing discover-ies of artifactual material, and especially the thousands of ancient written texts on clay tablets, monuments, ostraca, parchments and papyri, it is becoming more and more difficult to declare, as some want to do, the failure of archaeol-ogy as an interpretive tool that had so often supplied exactly what was needed for modern readers to appreciate the contextual settings, preferred textual readings, and validity of the events of the narratives that carry the message of the gospel. It is rather amusing to hear such serious declamations as: “King David is

a mere legend invented just as other bib-lical stories were.” “David is as historical as King Arthur of the Round Table Knights.” And then to learn that on July21, 1993, just as Israeli archaeologists were concluding their work for the day on the Israelite city of Dan in upper Galilee, Gila Cook, a team surveyor, noticed an unusual shadow in a part of a recently exposed wall. On examining the flat basalt stone, she saw what looked like Aramaic letters. Immediately she called over the team leader, Avraham Biram of the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, and he exclaimed, “We have an inscription.” A year later, two additional frag-ments of what turned out to be a were found to fit together with the basalt stone. The inscription on the first stone

talked, for the first time in any archaeo-logical find, about the “house of David.” Moreover, the additional fragments made it clear that the Syrian king Hazel of Aram fought against King Ahaziah of Judah and King Jehoram of Israel, a battle scholars now believe is the one described in 2 Chronicles 22:5. Here is just one example of how a serendipitous find can have such power-ful bearing on illuminating the biblical text. It can also obliterate proud boasts to the contrary in one fell swoop, even though the mission of Biblical Archae-ology is not to prove or disprove the Bible. Our attitude as believers must be the same as the system of American jurisprudence that says the text is inno-cent until proven guilty! We must start by taking the Bible on its own terms and learn that the main criterion be-tween real historians and myth-makers is to determine what were the writer’s truth-intentions or straightforward as-sertions. Then, wherever we have the

occasional archaeological find to help us validate the setting, we can learn onceagain that the writers of Scripture did tell the truth.

what good is BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY to Bible Readers?

Dr. Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., is President and Colman M. Mockler Distinguished Professor of Old Testament, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. An internationally recognized Old Testament scholar, Dr. Kaiser continues his classroom teaching and is a popular Bible

preacher and teacher at churches and confer-ences throughout the U.S. and abroad. He has authored over 30 books, among them, Revive Us Again: Biblical Insights for Encouraging Spiritual Renewal, Toward An Old Testament Theology and A History of Israel.

Photos courtesy of Gary D. Pratico

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16 winter 05/06

This well-known verse from John 1:14 might seem a poor choice to introduce an article about New Testament archaeology, since broken columns and crumbling pots seem about as far from “flesh” as they could be. Yet the material remains of the first cen-tury serve as vivid reminders that Jesus did not inhabit the flan-nel-graph universe of our childhood. He really did take up flesh and walk among us. And what is true for him was true of James and Paul and Mary and Peter, as well. Thus, synagogue ruins in Palestine, fishing boats stuck in the mud of the Sea of Galilee, or fountains in Corinth are genuine points of connection with the world that was then...a world that is in fundamental continuity with the world that is now.

Much of the discussion in New Testament archaeology surrounds the identification of specific places mentioned in the biblical texts. Sometimes this can yield important insights. For example, the five-porticoed pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem (John 5) was thought by some to be a fiction invented by John to symbolize the Pentateuch or some other five-membered set. But archaeological study has demonstrated that John spoke about the pool because it was there, and he said it had five porticoes because it did. Just last year, ex-cavators in Jerusalem uncovered another pool mentioned in John’s gospel: the pool of Siloam to which the blind man of John 9 was sent. We might also mention the synagogue remains at Caper-naum, which provide some intriguing possibilities for locating one of the centers of Jesus’ ministry. That the site held a synagogue in

later centuries is secure; but there is also good evidence at earlier layers suggesting this was, in fact, the very place Jesus taught and cast out demons (Mark 1). (See Donald D. Binder, “Capernaum.” <http://www.pohick.org/sts/capernaum.html.) We can appreciate such “direct hits,” but we do not always need such specific links to benefit from archaeological discoveries of the NT era. In 1986, for example, a fishing boat was discovered on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. The odds are it is not the same boat used by Jesus and the disciples. But it certainly gives us a good idea of the type of boat they might have been in when the storm was stilled or the fish miraculously swarmed into their net. That should be sufficient to remind us that the biblical stories may have taken place long ago, and far away, but they took place in the same world we live in today. One question that arises from all this, of course, is how we can determine whether a given site really is something mentioned in the Bible or not. The question becomes especially crucial with the proliferation of tourist venues in the Holy Land. Is this really the Garden Tomb? Was Jesus born in this cave? Did he give the Sermon on the Mount right on this hill? At times we need to rely on the insights of professional archaeologists, who can assess the age of archaeological sites or determine the pres-ence of early Christian veneration at a particular location. But common sense should play a major role as well. Some scholars, for example, feel confident that a site in Capernaum containing multiple Christian inscriptions and the remains of a church is, in fact, Peter’s house. While Peter’s ministry carried him far from

Sea of Galilee. Photo by Matt Doll

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Capernaum, it is possible that the house stayed in the family and could have become a meeting place for Christians over several generations—assuming his relatives stayed faithful and survived the wars against Rome in A.D. 66-73 and A.D. 132-35. Since the house presumably did not move, there is a good chance people could have found it at later times. If nothing else, it shows us what a house in Capernaum in the first century was like. Locating a place like the Mount of Beatitudes, however, would seem to involve far more difficulties. The biblical texts give us no indication precisely where the Sermon on the Mount was given, nor does it indicate that Jesus chose it because of its spectacular views or aesthetic features. (As a friend of mine who lives in Israel commented on the popular location of the Mount: “It’s so nice you want it to be the right place...” But wanting, as he noted, does not make it so.) Since numerous sites could have served as the venue for the sermon, the possibility of later misidentification is multiplied. The intrinsic likelihood of people noting the precise place among all the hills of Galilee, and then passing along the tra-dition unbroken through the generations, seems fairly low. All in all, such identifications can be made only with great reservations.

THE WORLD OF THE WORDFirst century archaeology is a great help in illuminating the world within which the gospel emerged, and into which the gospel went. Sometimes the importance of a site or an artifact can be overlooked, since it does not speak im-mediately to the texts of the New Testament. Consider the Hyrcanus Complex. This may sound like a psychological disorder, but it is, in fact, a spectacular site in Transjor-dan. The ruins belonged to the descendents of Tobias, the scoundrel of the book of Nehemiah. This Tobias seems like a bit player on the pages of Scripture, but the Hyr-canus complex demonstrates this his family was a major player in the power politics of Palestine right up until the time of the Maccabean revolt. The presence of Syr-ian motifs in the complex (a lion frieze, eagles, gargoyles), coupled with the Hellenistic architectural style, remind us that Palestinian Judaism did not live in a hermetically sealed capsule in the ancient world. The threat of a take-over of Judea by syncretists like the Tobiads was a clear and present danger in the centuries leading up to Jesus’ ministry. This, in turn, helps us make better sense of Herod, who was likewise a Semitic, but strongly Hellenized, figure (and who left some impres-sive ruins of his own.) Other sites, such as Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, are of much more immediate relevance, though they are not mentioned explicitly in the New Testament. The settlements at Qumran have occasioned nearly as much discussion as the Scrolls themselves, with almost as much controversy. Yet most would agree that a breakaway group of Essenes, dissatisfied with the status quo in Jerusalem, began occupying the site at Qumran at least as early as the second half of the 1st Century B.C. The fact that they would be willing to endure such an inhospitable clime indicates the fractious nature of early Judaism, and the lengths to which those looking for the renewal of Israel would go to remain faithful to their vision. The very location of the site also gives us an indication of the mindset of such sectarian Jews: it hardly seems a coincidence that they chose a place near En-gedi, where Ezekiel prophesied the healing waters of the eschatological river of God would flow to enliven the Dead Sea (Ezek. 47:10). These were people who took the Bible seriously, even in their selection of real estate!

If the Hyrcanus Complex and the Qumran site help set the stage for the New Testament, other places become the stage, sometimes in quite literal fashion. The parade example of this is the magnificent theater at Ephesus, which could hold 25,000 people in Paul’s day. This site factors significantly in the story of Acts 19, where the enraged crowd of Artemis worshippers drag Paul’s friends, Gaius and Aristarchus, into the theatre, and are only kept from further violence by the calming words of the town clerk. Ruins of the Artemis temple are also in view in Ephesus, as are numerous other items of interest from the New Testament era. [For other examples of a similar nature, see Dr. Aida Spencer’s article on Corinth.] We began with a quote from the first chapter of John’s gospel. We conclude with a quote from the first chapter of his first epistle: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with

our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concern-ing the word of life...” We cannot touch Jesus now as John did, though we will one day. But through God’s grace we can see what

Jesus saw, walk where he walked, and even touch what he touched, because his world is our world. Each point of contact reminds us that we serve the God of history, the God who created all things and in the face of the disaster that his world

became, took up flesh and dwelt among us so that it could be put right. And even as we sift through the ruins to discern traces of what he has done through his servants through the ages, may we be reminded to look forward to the city which has foundations, the New Jerusalem, whose architect and builder is God.

Dr. Sean M. McDonough, Associate Professor of New Testa-ment, taught New Testament at Pacific Theological College in Suva, Fiji Islands, where he also served as Chair of the Biblical Studies Department before coming to Gordon-Conwell in 2000. Dr. McDonough’s teaching and research interests include creation/cosmology in the Bible and the ancient Near East, Hellenistic Judaism, Greek philosophy and religion, and the book of Revelation. His publications include YHWH at Patmos: Revelation 1:4 in its Hellenistic and Early Jewish Setting, Wis-senschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2nd se-

ries; “And David Was Old, Advanced in Years,” Vetus Testamentum; “Of Beasts and Bees: The View of the Natural World in Virgil’s Georgics and John’s Apocalypse,” New Testament Studies 46.

1 View looking straight on at the bow of the first century A.D. boat.

2 View of a full–scale model of the Galilee Boat, located on the grounds of Kibbutz En Gev — on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee.

photos of boats courtesy of www.HolyLandPhotos.org

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The Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), discovered in the mid-1940’s and !nding their way to publication (and broad scholarly attention) between then and now, have led to a tremendous growth in our knowledge and understanding of some of the diverse groups and biblical inter-pretations that existed within Judaism at the time of the New Testa-ment. Much of the language and many of the concepts mentioned in the New Testament have found parallels in those ancient Jewish manuscripts. One of the manuscripts which only came to publication in 1994 happens to be a !ne example of the light which such ancient manu-scripts can shed on our understanding of the New Testament. The document is known as 4QMMT and several partial copies of it were found in the fourth cave. The document mentions “works of the law” in a couple places and, in fact, it consists primarily of a list of “some of the works of the law” according to the distinctive views of the Qumran community, and of an appeal to the readers to adopt and practice them. There have been (and there continue to be) great debates over just what Paul had in mind when he rejected the possibility of being “justi!ed by works of the law.” Some scholars went so far as to argue that no Jewish teacher ever suggested one could be justi!ed by works of the law and that Paul had misrepresented or seriously

misunderstood Jewish teaching. Scholars had sifted through Rabbinic literature looking for the Hebrew or Aramaic equivalent to “works of the law” and had found nothing. There had been a few other phrases in the DSS that seemed to refer to works of the law, but they were not clear and certainly did not clarify what the expression might mean. Now, with the publication of 4QMMT we had the !rst and only clear reference to “works of the law” in the New Testament environment outside of the letters of the apostle Paul. According to 4QMMT, the expression “works of the law” seems to refer to the standards established for the community by the interpretation and application of the laws by its leaders. That is, they refer to what the authorities of the Jewish community had estab-lished as the de!nitive standards of the Mosaic law according to their interpretation of Scripture. 4QMMT does not simply give a list of some of the works of the law, however, it also tells its readers that they will be justi!ed if they accept and practice the works as outlined in the document. The !nal paragraph of the document reads as follows:

“

The !nal sentence re"ects the language of justi!ca-tion and clearly indicates the readers’ justi!cation may well depend upon their willingness to adopt and practice the interpretation of the law proposed within this document. Earlier in the same document the forgiveness of sins is tied to performing deeds which

re"ect respect for the law of Moses. No one has suggested that Paul ever read 4QMMT, but it is now clear that justi!cation by works of the law was a#rmed by at least some Jews, possibly many or most. Paul did not misrepresent or misunderstand Jewish teaching. Paul’s polemic and teaching against the view that justi!cation could be achieved through works of the law makes very good sense as a response to a group whose thinking on “works of the law” and justi!cation was similar to that which we !nd in 4QMMT. In this and many other ways the Dead Sea Scrolls help us gain a better understanding of the context and meaning of New Testament texts.

Justification by Works of the Law in the

DEAD SEA SCROLLS?

Dr. Roy E. Ciampa, Associate Professor of New Testament, taught and ministered in Portugal before coming to Gordon-Conwell in 2001. He continues to collaborate with the Portuguese Bible Society in its translation projects. He and his family attend Grace Chapel in Lexington, MA, where he also enjoys an active teaching ministry. Special interests include the exegesis and theology of Paul’s epistles and the use of the Old Testament in the New. His publications include The Presence and Function of Scripture in Galatians 1 and 2, and

articles in the New Dictionary of Biblical Theology, The Dictionary of New Testa-ment Background and in Portuguese periodicals.

Qumran caves. Photo courtesy of Dr. Gary D. Pratico

Roy E. Ciampa, Ph.D.

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Visiting the archaeological remains of a New Testament city may often give insight into the historical context of a New Testament letter written to that city. Let’s take, for example, ancient Corinth in Greece. How might the ar-chaeological excavations enlighten Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians? This beautiful city, not far from the blue Aegean Sea, appears to have been prosperous, and indeed the church should have had “plenty” to share (8:14). Alongside the road to Lechaios, one of Corinth’s seaports, are small shops where probably Paul, Prisca and Aquila had their tent-making shop. It is not far from an inscription “the synagogue of the Hebrews.” Corinth was an urban city where most people lived in closely packed shops and homes. Paul, Prisca and Aquila may have often heard many shopkeepers peddling their products for pro!t, but Paul and Timothy did not “peddle the word of God for pro!t” (2:17). In the center of the open marketplace, or agora, in Corinth is a very large square plat-form (about eight feet high). This was called the BEMA. The Roman proconsul Lucius Junius Gallio (Seneca’s brother) walked up these steps to judge the complaints against Paul in Acts 18:12-17. Paul uses the BEMA as imagery for Christ’s judgment of the world: “For we must all appear before the judgment seat (BEMA) of Christ” (2 Cor. 5:10; see also Rom. 14:10). No one will be able to escape seeing Christ as judge. The city of Corinth had many monuments to idols, such as Apollo, Hermes, Poseidon, Aph-rodite, Tyche. These idols would certainly have been in the Corinthians’ minds when Paul asked them rhetorically: “What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols?” (6:16). The answer, of course, is none, because unlike the pagan monument, God’s sanctuary was alive and the only living God was present (6:16). Looming high over the city is a massive rock mountain rising up to the sky over a 1/3 mile (1887 feet). It was part of a wall six miles

around the inner city. It was called the “Acro-corinth” or “acropolis” (“the high part of the city”). The top was reached by a winding road that went by many pagan sanctuaries (for the gods Demeter, Isis, Serapis and !nally, Aphro-dite). The ancients would use such a mountain as a defensive fortress when attacked. Paul uses the imagery of knocking down massive “strongholds” (OCHUROMA, 10:4) to describe the “arguments” and “heights” (HUPSOMA) that set themselves up against the “knowledge of God” (10:5). Instead of physically attack-ing fortresses of defense, the Christian captures “thoughts,” (10:5). Instead of oppressive leaders being able to hide worldly arguments in such defensive mountains, with God’s power they are taken “captive.” God’s presence is that powerful! About a mile west of Corinth was the potter’s quarter. Sometimes ancient people would hide their treasures in such a simple clay container, much as we today might hide money in an old shoe box. As believers we have a treasure: “the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (4:6). But we, too, hide it in “jars of clay,” mortal lives of di#culties arising from advancing Christ’s reign (4:7-11). These breakable “clay contain-ers” witness to a power outside any human ability because such “power is from God and not from us” (4:7).

How Archaeology Helps

B ib le Interpretat ionAida Besançon Spencer, Ph.D.

PHOTO KEY

1 Site of the BEMA overlooking

Aegean Sea.

2 View looking southwest at the seating and stage area of the semi–circular theater at Corinth.

3 View looking north at the southern side of the Acro-corinth.

4 View of the wall of the Acrocorinth

5 View looking northeast at the Temple of Apollo

6 View looking northwest from/at the Acrocorinth

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photos courtesy of www.HolyLandPhotos.org

Dr. Aída Besançon Spencer is Professor of New Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. She has written many books, including, Beyond the Curse: Women Called to Ministry (Hendrickson, 1985), 2 Corinthians: The People’s Bible Commentary (Bible Reading Fellowship, 2001), and Paul’s Literary Style (Univer-

sity Press of America, 1998), and numerous articles and book reviews.

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Colin R. Nicholl, Ph.D.

1 View looking north at the area where the Temple of Artemis was lo-cated. In its day, the Temple of Artemis was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. At its height it had 127 columns.

2 Close-up view of one of the stones of the siphon. Note how the interior has been clogged due to calcification. This eventually led to a reduced flow of water to Laodicea.

3 Altar of Zeus from the east looking west. The altar is rectangular in shape measuring 118 x 112 ft. [36 x 34 m]. The foundation stones are clearly visible. In the letter to the church at Pergamum it is written (Rev 2:13), “I know where you live—where Satan has his throne. Yet you remain faithful to my name.” Some commentators believe that the “throne of Satan” refers to this altar of Zeus.

4 View of the “interior” of the “water tower” in Laodicea. Note on the right side the individual blocks of stone from which it was constructed. The clay pipes are clearly visible as is the calcification that occurred over time.

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a n d t h e l e t t e r s t o t h e s e v e n c h u r c h e s o f a s i a

Archaeology has played an important role in the exegesis of Revelation, particularly the let-ters to the seven churches in chapters 2-3. Sir William Ramsey’s elucidation of these letters by drawing from his extensive knowledge of the archaeology of western Turkey (

) was famously reworked by Colin Hemer in his

. Both contended that numerous elements of the seven letters were illuminated by local phenom-ena as gleaned from numismatics, inscriptions, topography, ancient literary works and archaeo-logical excavations. Although many today have significant qualms about the lack of methodological cau-tion exercised by Ramsey and Hemer, judging most of their proposed local allusions as tenu-ous, the majority of scholars do nevertheless accept that the letters to the seven churches contain some local allusions. By far the most widely embraced local allu-sions are found in the letter to the Laodicean church in Rev. 3:14-22. Laodicea was a wealthy and self-sufficient city, which, according to Tacitus (Ann. 14.27.1), recovered from a major earthquake in A.D. 60 by itself, refusing to accept any financial aid from Rome. It may be this that is being alluded to in 3:17: “you say, ‘I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing,’

not knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked.” Then in 3:18, the Laodicean Christians are encouraged to buy from Jesus “white gar-ments,” apparently in contrast to the soft, glossy, raven-black sheep’s wool that was so critical for Laodicea’s booming textile indus-try and local economy. In the same verse, the Laodicean Christians are counseled to purchase from Jesus “eye salve.” This may well allude to a treatment for ophthalmia produced by the city’s medical school, known as “Phrygian powder,” which consisted of zinc, alum, copper and herbs. In the light of such plausible local allusions, the claim of Rudwick and Green that archaeo-logical evidence and the writings of Strabo point to another reference to the local situation in Laodicea in Rev. 3:15-16 has been received with some enthusiasm. 3:15-16 reads, “I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot; I wish that you were cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.” Rudwick and Green suggested that Jesus’ point was not the spiritual temperature of the Laodiceans, but their spiritual uselessness. Jesus was therefore alluding to the water supply of Laodicea in contrast to that of its neighboring cities in the Lycus Valley—Colosse to the south-

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east and Hierapolis to the north. While Colosse’s water was refreshingly cold and pure, and Hierapolis’s water had a reputation for being soothingly hot and medicinal, Laodicea lacked any natural water source and was forced to bring in water through stone pipes from hot springs in Denizli about five miles away. Sections of the impressive double aqueduct system remain today, and at points they are blocked with calcareous deposits (see photo 2), demonstrating that they used to carry water from hot, mineral-laden springs. By the time the waters reached Laodicea, they were memorably lukewarm and emetic (cf. Strabo). Jesus’ point then, according to Rudwick and Green, is that the Laodicean Christians were distressingly like their water supply: they were not a source of healing or of refreshment, but were useless and only made Jesus nauseous. Most com-mentators regard this as a likely hypothesis. With respect to Rev. 2:7’s reference to the “tree of life” in the paradise of God, Ramsey and Hemer proposed that John had in mind the sacred enclosure of the famous Ephesian Temple of Artemis, where criminals could secure asylum. They argued this on the grounds of the evidence of Ephesian coins associating Artemis with a tree and archaeological excavations revealing a tree shrine dedicated to Artemis. However, the ma-jority of scholars judge that the more obvious Edenic allusion probably explains the phrase adequately. Another proposed local allusion on the basis of archaeologi-cal finds is the identification of “Satan’s throne” in Rev. 2:12-13 as the 112 by 118 foot marble-covered, columned, Great Altar of Zeus discovered in 1878 atop the Pergamum acropolis. However, in view of the wider context of Revelation, it seems more plausible that the reference there is to the focal point of the Imperial Cult, the first Asian provincial temple built for worship of the Emperor, the Temple of Augustus. On that note, archaeology has played a key role in opening up our understanding of the formal worship of the Emperor in the Roman province of Asia. Based partly on archaeological excavations, scholars such as S.R.F. Price and Steven Friesen have shed new light on the prevalence, organization and

Jesus’ point then, according to Rudwick and Green, is that the Laodicean Christians

were distressingly like their water supply: they were not a source of healing

or of refreshment, but were useless and only made Jesus nauseous.

dynamics of the Imperial Cult in Asia in the last half of the first century, when Revelation was written. Since participation in the rituals of the imperial cult was perceived to be a basic display of loyalty to Rome and was expected of all citizens, it seems probable that essential to the difficulties faced by the Asian Christians, particularly those in Ephesus, Smyrna and Pergamum, was their unwillingness to participate in the rituals of the astonishingly popular Imperial Cult. Students of the New Testament therefore can be grateful for the contribution of archaeology to the understanding of the Apocalypse.

For further information:

Friesen, Steven J

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Hemer, Colin J. .

Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1986.

Price, S.R.F.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Ramsey, William M. London: Hodder &

Stoughton, 1904.

Rudwick, M.J.S. and Green, E.M.B. “The Laodicean Lukewarmness.”

69 (1957-58): 176-78.

Yamauchi, Edwin M.

Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980.

Colin R. Nicholl, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of New Testament, was born and brought up in Northern Ireland. Dr. Nicholl has studied both in the United States and Great Britain and has served as an assistant lecturer, supervisor, and examiner with the Divinity Faculty at Cambridge. He is the author of the recently-released From Hope to Despair in Thessalonica: Situating 1 and 2 Thessalonians (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and has published in the Journal of Theological Studies and various other British publications. His current research

interests include mission in the New Testament, the Sermon on the Mount, Mark’s gospel, Pauline epistles and theology, the book of Revelation, and eschatology. Dr. Nicholl has extensive ministry and preaching experience spanning three continents.

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photos courtesy of www.HolyLandPhotos.org; Photo captions by Dr. Carl Rasmussen

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top f i f teen f inds f rom BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY

1Ketef Hinnom Amulets

Pride of place no doubt belongs to the oldest Old Testament (#1) and oldest New Testament (#2) texts known to us at this time. The antiquity of the Old Testament text is witnessed by two silver amulets discovered underneath a rocky escarpment on which St. Andrews Church of Scotland stands, across the Hinnom Valley from the western walls of the old city of Jerusa-lem. They are known as the

, found in Cave 25 in 1979 by Gabriel Barkay. These 7th to 6th Century B.C. silver plaques, rolled up to form two amu-lets (the larger measuring 4 inches by 1 inch, and the smaller, 1.5 by .5 inches), are inscribed with words from Numbers 6:24-26 on one, and Deuteronomy 7:9 on the other. Both match the Hebrew words found in the Pentateuch and have extraor-dinary correspondence to the wording and spelling of these Scriptures, which chal-

It is difficult to reduce several hundred rather major archaeological finds to a mere 15 that top the list. In-

deed, Michael D. Coogan attempted to list the “10 Great Finds” in the 20th anniversary issue of the mag-

azine Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR, vol. 21.3, May-June 1995, pp 36-47). Some of my top picks will

coincide with his, but all 15 will be listed here because of the way each has affected the interpretation of

Scripture. With some attention to their importance, I will list the 15 in order of greatest significance.

shore of the Dead Sea, these 1100 ancient documents and 100,000 fragments, plus several intact full scrolls, represent portions or the entire text of every Old Testament book in Hebrew except the book of Esther. Somewhere around 230 of the total manu-scripts are copies of Old Testament books. Prior to their discovery, the oldest surviv-ing manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible came from A.D. 920. Some copies of the Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testa-ment dated back to the 3rd Century B.C., but up to that point none of the Hebrew manuscripts went back that far. Now we had Hebrew Scriptures that could be dated in the 1st and even the 2nd Century B.C. Most amazingly, these Dead Sea Scrolls showed that our Bible had been preserved with dramatic accuracy for what was by now over two millennia. One copy of Isaiah, our best example, showed that after a gap of 1000 years in textual copy-ing tradition, for what stretches to over 100 pages in our English Bibles, only three words in the whole book of Isaiah showed any difference—and those differences were variations in spelling comparable to the difference in English and American spell-ings of “honour” versus “honor.”

lenges those who give a Post-Exilic date for the Pentateuch to explain how two texts from the Law of Moses appeared so much earlier than the scholarly critical views have set for them!

2 John Rylands Papyrus

In a similar way, the John , found by Grenfeld in Fayum, Egypt, in

1920, yielded the oldest known fragment of a New Testament manuscript. It was dated by papyrologists to 125 A.D. But since it was in circulation that far south into Egypt, this small scrap of papyrus with the verses from John’s gospel (John 18:31-33; 37-38), successfully put an end to the then-popular attempt to late-date John’s gospel away from the disciple John and put it instead at the end of the 2nd Century A.D. No longer was such a move possible in light of the archaeological evidence.

3Dead Sea Scrolls

Probably the most sensational manuscript discovery of our times is the

. Found in 1948 in caves near the ruins of Qumran, a 1st Century B.C. Es-sene community located near the northwest

Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., Ph.D.

2 John Rylands PapyrusThe John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.

3 Temple Scroll from Qumran (on the cover)Z. Radovan www.BibleLandPictures.com

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4Beni Hasan Painting

In a village called Beni Hasan, some 150 miles south of Cairo, on the east bank of the Nile River, an 8 foot long by 11/2 foot high painting was found in an early 19th Century B.C. cave. Known as the

, it depicts “Asiatics” (but more precisely, eight men, four women and three children, led by two Egyptian officials) entering Egypt to sell eye paint. The men wear multicolored long kilts that cover their chests and one shoulder, and have sandals on their feet. Each man has a full head of hair, a short beard, but no mustache. Likewise, the women have multicolored garments, but these garments are much longer and have no fringes on the bottom. The women also wear a sort of slipper sock for footwear and a small headband on top of their heads of long hair. Two donkeys, accompanied by an ibex and a gazelle, trans-port what are perhaps bellows on their backs. The men are equipped with what appear to be water-skins, a musical instru-ment (lyre?), and weaponry of spears and bows and arrows. The kilts of many col-ors remind us of Joseph’s coat (Gen 37:3; cf 2 Sam 13:18), and provide a picture as to what the Patriarchal culture and its economic and political contacts with Egypt may have looked like. It is a fascinating picture of life about the time of the Patriarchs.

5Basalt Stelae from Dan

The from Dan, found in 1993 and 1994 with the words “house of David,” gave us the first external evidence to the Bible of the reality of King David’s existence. Previous to this, it had been fashionable to dismiss the David narratives

in the Bible as so much priestly propagan-da that had tried to give Israel a respect-able past history as they sat in the Baby-lonian captivity. Avraham Biran, of the Hebrew Union College, excavating a site in northern Israel known as Dan, found in an exposed wall of stones one basalt fragment about 12 inches high. In the same wall a year later, two other smaller pieces were found to be part of the original inscription. When the Aramaic words were translated from the paleo-Hebrew script, here was the first extra-biblical reference to King David. This announcement caused scholars to take another look at a basalt stone known as the Mesha Stele, from the Moabite King Mesha, that had been found a century earli-er. This text complained about “Omri, King of Israel,” who had oppressed the kingdom of Moab, a land east of the Dead Sea

and Jordan River (1 Kings 16:21-27). In a partially broken line of the Me-sha Inscription, a French

scholar named Andre LeMaire supplied two missing letters of the original five Hebrew letters so as to be able to now read the “House of David.” Thus, the stele told how Mesha threw off the yolk that the house of David had imposed on Moab years previ-ously (LeMaire, “The House of David...” BAR, 1994, pp. 30-37). Now we had two external references to a David that some claimed never existed.

6Gilgamesh Epic

Tablet 11 of the 12-tablet story called the is another flood story

named after the principal character, King Gilgamesh, who was alleged to have ruled the Babylonian city of Uruk around 2600 B.C. This epic, written in Semitic wedge-shaped letters known as cuneiform Akka-dian, has many striking similarities to the biblical story of Noah in Genesis 6-9, as well as just as many substantial differences. While Austen Henry Layard uncovered literally tens of thousands of tablets in Nineveh, which he shipped back to Eng-land up to 1851, it was George Smith, an assistant to the British Museum’s Assyrian department, who in 1872 discovered tablet 11 related to a flood story. Since the tablet was broken, Smith returned to Nineveh and within five days, on May 14, 1873, found another tablet with the missing lines. In the Akkadian epic, Gilgamesh is told about the flood by a man named Utnapishtim.

He had safely passed through a flood because a creator god named Ea had warned him that a flood was coming and he was to build a boat (as was the biblical Noah, Gen 6:2, 13-17). The storm that wiped out the rest of mankind ended on the seventh day and all emerged from the boat on the twelfth day (contrary to Gen 7:24). Utnapishtim’s boat rested on Mount Nisirin Kurdistan (rather than the Biblical Mt. Ararat in Turkey), as Utnapishtim sent out a dove, a swallow and finally, a raven (cf. Gen 8:3-11). When the raven failed to return, all left the Babylonian boat and offered a sacrifice to the gods (cf. Gen 8:12-22). Both accounts seem to reflect a similar event, but the Gilgamesh Epic has numerous legendary additions with a tone that is vastly different from the biblical account.

4 Beni Hasan PaintingErich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

6 Gilgamesh Epic Dr. James C. Martin, Preserving Bible Times

24 winter 05/06

7Pool of GibeonThe site of the , mentioned in 2 Samuel 2:13 and Jeremiah 41:12, was first identified by Edward Robinson in 1833 at the Palestinian village of el-Jib. James B. Pritchard excavated here in 1956-1960 and confirmed this identification with 31 jar handles with the Hebrew word for Gibeon on them. Apparently, Gibeon was a pro-ducer and exporter of wines, which required special provisions of water, since the summer months lacked any rainfall. Pritchard found two separate water systems: (1) a pool or reservoir measuring 37 feet in diameter, and (2) a tunnel that sloped down from inside the city walls to a water chamber just out-side the city at the base of the tell. The Gibeon Pool was cut through lime-stone bedrock to a depth of 82 feet to the water level, with a staircase and railing cut into the limestone winding down 37 feet to a level floor about halfway down. From there the stairs drop straight down another 45 feet to the water table. It was around this pool that 12 of King David’s men, under com-mander Joab, met 12 of King Saul’s men, under commander Abner, in a wrestling contest in which all 24 died as they grabbed each other by the hair and plunged a sword into one another.

8The Seal of BaruchThe was one of the 250 in-scribed bullae, or small clay baked buttons, that turned up in 1975 through an Arab East Jerusalem antiquities dealer. While they must have come from illegal digging in Jerusalem, they are important because they were origi-nally meant to seal documents or containers to prevent tampering. A lump of soft clay, attached to a sealing string, was stamped with a seal and left to harden. Most of the documents and containers, to which many of these were attached, were destroyed in a fire, but the bullae survived and were preserved by the fire all the more. Among them was a seal containing this name, “Berekhayahu [Ba-

ruch] son of Neriyahu [Neriah] the scribe” (Jer 36: 4, 8, 14; 45:1). The suffix on both names, yahu, is a shortened form of Yahweh or Jehovah. This Baruch was none other than the confidant and personal scribe of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah who took dictation from the prophet and had to hide with Jeremiah as King Jehoiakim sought to arrest both of them (Jer 36:26). Another bulla in this same lot contained the name of Ishmael, who assassinated Gedaliah (Jer 40: 7), the governor appointed by the Babylonians after Jerusalem fell in 587 B.C. An additional 51 bullae were found on the floor of the House of Bullae. Among the names recorded there was a bulla of “Gemaryahu [Gemariah] the son of Shaphan,” a scribe who served in the court of King Jehoiakim and who advised the king not to burn the scroll Jeremiah had written (Jer 36:10-12, 25-26). Almost 400 of these bullae have been found belonging to the period of the 8th to the 6th Century B.C.

9King Sargon II of AssyriaOne of the persons named in the Scriptures, but whose existence was doubted until mod-ern Biblical Archaeology “discovered” him, is of . Isaiah 20:1 was sure he was the King of Assyria, but he was not among those found in the excavations of the Assyrian capital, Nineveh. However, in 1843, Paul Emile Botta discovered that Sargon had gone to Dur-Sharrukin (modern Khors-abad), a virgin site some 12 miles northeast of Nineveh, where he began construction in 717 B.C. Stretching one mile on each side, this construction site was never completed or occupied before Sargon died, and was aban-doned by his successors. A massive 25 ton bull-man-god was one of several that guardedthe entrance to the throne room at Khorsabad.

10Black Obelisk of Shal-maneser IIIThe

standing 6 feet 6 inches high, was found at the Northwest palace at Nimrud commemorating Shalmaneser’s campaigns during his reign. On the second panel from the top, King Jehu of Israel (2 Kings 10:34) can be seen kneeling before Shalmaneser (known from elsewhere to have taken place in the year of 841 B.C.). This monument is of enormous histori-cal value, for it is the only secular piece of evidence where a historical personage of Scripture is depicted. The inscription below the depic-tion reads: “the tribute of Jehu (Ia-w-a), son of Omri (Hu-um-ri); I received from him silver, gold, a golden saplu-bowl, a golden vase with pointed bottom, golden tumblers, golden buckets, tin, a staff for a king, [and] wooden puruhtu.”

11 Caiaphas OssuaryThe High Priest Caiaphas, who served as the leader of the Sanhedrin from A.D. 18-36, is known as the one who gave cynically expedient advice that it was better for one man (i.e., Jesus) to die than for the whole nation to suffer (John 11: 49-53). Indeed, it was he who later presided over the late-night trial of Jesus (John 18:14). In what some considered to be the courtyard of Caiaphas’ house, where Peter waited for news about

Jesus (Matt 26:69-75), the , or bone chest, was found by accident in 1990 south of the Temple Mount as workers were building a water park in Jerusalem’s Peace Forest. Inscribed on the ornately decorated bone chest or ossuary was the inscription found in two places, “Qafa” and “Yehosef bar Qayafa,” i.e., “Caiaphas,” and “Joseph,

9 Winged Bull with Human Head, Palace of Sargon II Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

10 Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser IIIDr. James C. Martin, Preserving Bible Times

7 Pool of Gibeon Dr. James C. Martin, Preserving Bible Times

25winter 05/06

son of Caiaphas.” The historian Josephus gives his full name as “Joseph, who is called Caiaphas of the high priesthood.” Inside the ossuary were the bones of six people, includ-ing one 60-year-old man, probably Caiaphas. This was a remarkable discovery.

12Pontius Pilate InscriptionThe is a first century monument that was re-used in a fourth-century remodeling project. But it would seem that it was written to com-memorate Pilate’s dedication of a temple to worship Tiberias Caesar during Pilate’s term of rule in Judea. Pontius Pilate ruled over Judea from A.D. 26-36. It was during this time that he met with Jesus of Nazareth in that famous encounter where Pilate asked, “What is truth?” (John 18:36-37). The Latin inscription of four lines gave Pilate the title of “Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea,” a title reminiscent of the one given to him in Luke 3:1, “Pontius Pilate, Governor of Judea.” Once again, here was external evi-dence from archaeology showing that the gospel record was written during the time in which the events took place, for titles such as these tend to be forgotten in later times.

13Pool of SiloamThe pool where Jesus healed the blind man (John 9:1-41), was the In the Byzantine period, Empress Eudocia (c. 400-460 A.D.) built a church (over which now sits a

mosque), and a pool where the water emerges from Hezekiah’s tunnel. Hezekiah, king of Judah during the time of an expected Assyrian siege, had long ago constructed a 1750 foot long tunnel from the Gihon Spring, where twoteams of workers coming from opposite ends of the tunnel somehow mysteriously met deep un-derground in the middle—a feat commemorated by a plaque called the Siloam Inscription (now housed in the Istanbul Museum). The water flowed from Hezekiah’s tunnel to the Pool of Siloam (Isa 8:6; Neh 3:15 Shiloah = Siloam).

In June of 2004, however, it became clear that the Byzantine site of the fourth Chris-tian century was not the site of the Pool of Siloam of Jesus’ day. As workers were called to repair a sewer pipe in Jerusalem, archaeolo-gists Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron noticed a segment of descending stairways of five steps each, not far from the end of Hezekiah’s tun-nel, measuring 225 feet on one side. Using a metal detector, the ar-chaeologists discovered four coins in the plaster used in the first phase of the pool dated to the late Hasmonean period or early Herodian times (103-37 B.C.). In the second phase, a dozen coins dating to the period of the first Jew-ish Revolt, which lasted from 66-70 A.D., were found with the years 2, 3, and 4 of the revolt on them. There is little doubt that this was the Pool of Siloam where Jesus sent the blind man to wash so that he could be healed (John 9:1-12; BAR, 2005, 31.5, pp. 16-23).

14Beersheba Horned AltarAt the southern limits of ancient Israel (“from Dan to Beersheba”) was found at Beersheba a number of large, carefully dressed stones that had been re-used in a wall dating to the late 8th Century B.C. The

, when reconstructed, measured 63 inches high, 63 inches long and 63 inches wide, though more stones found later suggest it may have been closer to 9 feet. The tapered projections or “horns” (as in Exodus 29: 2 or 1 Kings 1:51; 2:28) fit the biblical description of an altar, but the hewn stones were not according to biblical instructions (Exodus 20:25). Also, the altar had a serpent inscribed on one of its stones and sacrifices had been offered on it, for its top stones were blackened. While there has been a huge controversy over the original location of the altar, all agree it gives us a good picture of an illegitimate place of sacrifice. In fact, Amos 5:5; 8:14 appear to say that Beersheba was a seat of pagan worship, where a schismatic sanc-tuary may have at one time stood.

15Cyrus CylinderFor our final selection of this large number of finds reflecting on the reliability of the Bible’s witness to its historical accuracy, we have chosen the . This cylindrical shaped record of the Persian king’s edicts matches quite

well with what we find in the books of Ezra (1:2-4) and 2 Chronicles (36:22-23). King Cyrus credits his god Marduk with selecting him and giving him the task of ruling the world. The prophet Isaiah would see it in slightly different theological terms, for in Isaiah 45:1 God called Cyrus by name long before he was born and destined him to “perform all [God’s] desire” (Isa 44:28). But even more significantly, the cylinder announces the Persian policy of Cyrus toward captive peoples, such as the exiled Israelites. All those exiled peoples would be allowed to return to their homelands where permanent sanctuaries would be established for them. That also accords with the Isaianic prophecy in Isaiah 44:24-28. There is much more to tell, of course, but the preceding 15 samples should have helped make the case that Biblical Archaeology is alive and well. It has served wonderfully well as an interpretive tool by setting the scene, customs, culture and details of the times in which each find was located. However, an unexpected sur-prise has been how unwittingly it has also served apologetically in defense of the Scriptures, even if that had not been its motivating force or its primary objective. In fact, the results continue to roll in right up to the present moment, and some may have occurred while we were going to press with this article.

Dr. Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., is President and Colman M. Mockler Distinguished Professor of Old Testa-ment, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. An internationally recognized Old Testament scholar, Dr. Kaiser continues his classroom teaching and is a popular Bible preacher and teacher at churches and conferences throughout the U.S. and abroad. He has authored over 30 books, among them, Revive Us Again: Biblical Insights for Encourag-ing Spiritual Renewal, Toward An Old Testament Theology and A History of Israel.

14 Beersheba Horned AltarZ. Radovan www.BibleLandPictures.com

12 Pilate InscriptionGary D. Pratico

26 winter 05/06

DUANE A. GARRETT, PH.D.

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om What did Jesus mean when he said that Gentile rulers love to be called “benefactors” (Luke

22:25)? What was going on when the women of Judah were “Weeping for Tammuz” (Ezek

8:14)? What bearing might the Roman dining room called the triclinium have on how the

apostles arranged themselves at the last supper (John 13)? All of these questions imply some-

thing that should be self-evident: the Bible is an ancient book, was written in an ancient con-

text, and alludes to customs, places, stories and events which are quite alien to us who live in

North America in the 21st century. It is obvious—or at least it ought to be—that our under-

standing of the Bible will be greatly enhanced if we are aware of the cultural background, the

beliefs, the concerns and the histories of the peoples we encounter in the pages of the Bible.

27winter 05/06

Sadly, many Christians read the Bible as though the histori-cal, cultural and archaeological background of the Bible were irrelevant. This is true not only of lay people but of pastors and scholars as well. Astonishingly, one can today read a book of Old Testament theology or even a history of Israel and find that its author gave virtually no attention either to the texts of the ancient Near East or to the archaeology of Israel. Such an attitude arises from a misapplication of the idea of the perspicuity of Scripture (the doctrine that the Bible is fundamentally clear rather than obscure). Although this concept is essentially valid, it is not an excuse for being lazy in our studies, nor does it guarantee that we will understand the background and meaning of every text. If we do not know who Tammuz is, then our understanding of Ezek 8:14 will be a guess at best and may turn out to be altogether wrong. Similarly, our perception of what is going on in Esther is made obscure by a cloud of ignorance if we do not know a few basic facts about the Persian Empire. Of course, it is not helpful simply to chide people for their lack of awareness of biblical backgrounds. Lay Christian read-ers have had very few resources available to them that lay out in a succinct way basic facts and issues in the archaeology, his-tory, culture and setting of the Bible. It is for this reason that we have produced and now offer to readers

. There are, of course, dozens of annotated study Bibles available to readers today. This one, however, is genu-inely different. It does not focus on theological interpretation, prophecy or devotional life. Rather, it draws the reader into the world of the Bible itself. Who were the Philistines? What was agricultural life in ancient Israel like? How was pottery significant for ancient peoples and for modern archaeologists? What is the story of Beersheba, a place closely associated with Abraham? Through short articles, notes, and photographs,

seeks to open the world of the Bible to readers. Some of the articles deal with ancient places and peoples, such as the Philistines. Others deal with ancient texts that help us to understand the background of biblical passages. Still others deal with matters pertaining to the reliability of the Bible. Thus, in one place the reader will find a citation from a Latin text that has bearing on New Testament issues. In an-other place a reader will encounter a parallel to the Bible from Hittite literature, with a discussion of how the Bible and the Hittite text are similar and how they differ. In Exodus, readers are given an extended discussion on the debate over the route of the exodus and the location of the Dead Sea.

We have all seen medieval pictures of biblical scenes in which the buildings look like European castles and the characters are all wearing the clothes of the 13th Century A.D. It is easy to smile at these obviously anachronistic portrayals of biblical scenes. We, however, are doomed to make the same errors if we do not take a little time to learn about the peoples, places, cultures and events of the ancient world. Our hope is that

will enable readers to do just this.

Dr. Duane A. Garrett, General Editor of the new study Bible is the John R. Sampey Professor of Old Testament Interpretation at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and formerly served as Professor of Old Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theo-logical Seminary. He has also taught at Bethel Theological Seminary, Canadian Southern Baptist Seminary, Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary, Houston Baptist University, Ko-rea Baptist Seminary, and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. In Korea he served with the Korean Baptist Mission under the auspices of the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist

Convention, and has also been a pastor in Canada. A prolific author, Dr. Garrett has written several books and many journal articles in the area of Old Testament studies. They include Authority and Interpretation (Baker); Angels and the New Spirituality (Broadman); Hosea and Joel, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs (Broadman, New American Commentary Series) and Rethinking Genesis (Baker).

28 winter 05/06

COMING IN MARCH

The Archaeological Study Bible by Gordon-Conwell and Zondervan

Students of the Bible can take an eye-opening and exceptionally informative walk through the world of the Scriptures in the soon-to-be released

Published through a partnership of Zondervan and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, this first full-color study Bible will introduce readers to the archaeological, historical and cultural contexts that framed the Bible’s narra-tives and the lives of its people. The new Bible uses the most-read NIV translation and contains more than 500 insightful and accessible articles from over 100 scholars. It also includes:

page study notes highlighting

historical, archaeological and

cultural topics

feature indexes, color maps and

NIV text, photographs, maps, and

charts included in the Bible.

Serving as Senior Editor for this major initiative was Dr. Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., President of Gordon-Conwell. General Editor was Dr. Duane Garrett, former Gordon-Conwell Professor of Old Testa-ment, now the John R. Sampey Profes-sor of Old Testament Literature at The Southern Baptist Seminary. The Bible was partially funded by The Grace Foundation and the Van Kampen family. Commenting on the new Bible, Paul Caminiti, Zondervan’s Vice President and Publisher of Bibles, notes: “Zonder-van’s partnership with Gordon-Con-well Theological Seminary united two passions to share the full meaning, relevance and depth of the Scriptures. Gordon-Conwell, with its strong com-mitment to scholarship, excellence, and the Scriptures, was the perfect partner for , a

monumental project that resulted in a study Bible like no other—one that gives readers a detailed look at the historical, archaeological and cultural context of the Scriptures through extensive photo-graphs, notes, articles and maps.” Dr. Kaiser adds, “We at Gordon-Conwell are extremely grateful for the fine partnership with Zondervan we have enjoyed during the five years this major project has been underway, and for the generous support of The Grace Foundation and the Van Kampen family in its development. Gordon-Conwell is known for its high view of Scripture and its vision to stem the famine of the Word pervading our culture. We trust that this fascinating and extremely acces-sible new study Bible will draw readers into its pages, help them to better under-stand its truths, and bring them closer to its Author.”

29winter 05/06

Here is a sample of numerous articles and notes readers will find in The Archaeological Study Bible.

30 winter 05/06

As we sat together in the small house on the southern side of this remark-able archeological ruin in central Israel, every sound and syllable echoed off the walls and down the short hallways. There is always an echo in rooms with stone floors and plaster walls, and in spaces that are sparsely decorated with furniture or rugs. The old man, at least he seemed to be old, who served us sweet tea with mint was the keeper and guardian of the tell, and he exercised his authority with a sense of paternal responsibility and devotion. As I looked through the window to the north, I could see only the lower slopes of this impressive ruin, just a handful of meters away. At first, I was impatient with the seemingly idle conversation between old friends. I was anxious to stand, for the first time, on the summit of this site that had been the object of my study for a few years. I felt like a pilgrim on the outskirts of Mecca, but I didn’t betray my impatience. Though I was attentive to the con-

versation, my gaze remained focused on the little that I could see of Tell Dothan, one of the impressive archaeological sites in the northern Samaria hills, not a great distance from the ruins of ancient Samaria and Shechem. Today, these three biblical sites are located in the so-called West Bank of modern Israel. Each was established in a spectacular setting. Shechem was nestled between the great mountains of Gerizim and Ebal from which the blessings and curses of the covenant were recited (Deut. 11; Josh. 8). The view of the surrounding coun-tryside from the summit of Samaria is breathtaking and leaves the visitor with no question as to why it took the Assyr-ians such a long time time to capture the city in the late 8th Century B.C., bring-ing to an end the history of the northern kingdom. The physical setting of Tell Dothan is equally impressive. The site dominates an expansive valley which has always been of strategic importance as the most easterly of the three main passes through

the mountains that separate the Sharon plain on the Mediterranean coast, and the Jezreel valley to the north and north-east. Rising approximately 60 meters above the surrounding valley, the tell is a prominent mound composed of nearly 15 meters of stratified remains on top of a natural hill some 45 meters high. Tell Dothan has been identified with the biblical city of the same name, mentioned in Genesis 37 as the place where Joseph found his brothers in the course of their wanderings with the flocks of their father. According to the story, Joseph was sent by Jacob from the valley of Hebron to find his brothers in the region of Shechem, but learned that they were tending the flocks in the area of Dothan. Thereafter, the narrative describes the intrigue that led to Joseph’s being taken to Egypt by a caravan of Ishmaelites (or Midianites) who were traveling to Egypt via Dothan from Gilead. During the period of the monarchy, Dothan is described as a well-fortified

Gary D. Pratico, Th.D.

31winter 05/06

Gary D. Pratico, Th.D.

1. Dothan excavation with Dothan Valley in distance. 2. Western Cemetery Tomb 1 interior; meter stick rests against chamber entrance from the interior. 3. Dr.

Joseph Free, director, Dothan excavations. 4. Western cemetery excavations with stepped entryway to Tomb 1 in foreground. 5. Detail of stepped entryway

to Tomb 1 burial chamber from the inside. 6. Tomb 1 pottery and burial deposits. 7. Dr. Cooley, workmen inspect excavations. Photos courtesy of the Dothan Project.

1 2

3

4 5

6 7

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city to which the Aramean king sent emissaries in search of the prophet Elisha (2 Kings 6:13-14). It was in this context that Elisha’s servant was encouraged by a vision of heavenly forces arrayed on a hill to the east of the town. It is one of those biblical narratives that stokes the imagination, though mine was about to be fired like an ancient pottery kiln with my first glimpse of Tell Dothan in its natural setting. It was March and the land had the ap-pearance of that time of year with those greens that belong only to springtime; the air was heavy and sweet with the fra-grance of fruit trees in bloom. As our host vigorously stirred the last glass of steam-ing tea, the sound of spoon against glass danced through the small open space. “I watch the site closely,” he said, as he adjusted his kefia and then passed out the glasses, beginning with Dr. Robert E. Cooley, who was at the time Chancellor of Gordon-Conwell Theo-logical Seminary and is now President Emeritus.The care-taker held his glass by the rim, between his thumb and index finger. I noticed that his hands were worn and bronzed by the sun and looked old. For many reasons, age comes quickly in this part of the world, especially in this part of the country. By way of further assurance to Dr. Cooley, he repeated his declaration but added a word of empha-sis, “I watch the site closely.” In the excavations of Tell Dothan between 1953 and 1964, Dr. Cooley had assisted one of the pioneering figures in the “early” history of the archaeology of this land, Dr. Joseph Free, who was a professor of Archaeology at Wheaton College. The field excavations represent-ed the first phase of the Dothan Archae-ological Project; its second phase was envisioned as a long-range undertaking that would publish a multivolume final report on the excavation of the tell and one of the most remarkable and impor-tant tomb complexes in Syria-Palestine. As the director of the publication phase of the project, Dr. Cooley was vi-tally interested in the protection and care of the site, partly in anticipation of a younger generation that would probe its story and treasures with new technolo-

gies and refined excavation techniques. Gordon-Conwell’s second president seemed assured by the words of the caretaker. “The tell is in good hands,” he said. At that moment, I recalled one of the excavation photographs with a very young Robert Cooley, stand-ing at a drafting table, recording some field measurements for the largest and best-preserved of the three tombs in the Western Cemetery. He looked different in those early excavation photographs, not as distinguished and confident as he does now, some 50 years later. I watched these two very differ-ent men, and I listened intently to their conversation as they talked about those early days of what now seems like the prehistory of field archaeology. Dr. Cooley remembered from experience; our host remembered because he had

become heir and caretaker of the tradi-tion as well as the site. He was a young boy during the years of excavation. Our friends from Jerusalem University Col-lege who had joined us on this excur-sion listened with interest as well. The conversation was filled with tidbits of information that were not part of the written record of the site’s archaeologi-cal history. I felt a sense of frenzy in my efforts to categorize and file in my mem-ory the wealth of anecdotes and mean-ingful excavation details. I wanted to take notes but feared that it would be an intrusuion and would hinder the casual conversation. This was a gathering of old friends and a recollection of distant and personal memories. I couldn’t bring myself to turn a living room, overflow-ing with hospitality and warm recollec-tion, into a lecture hall. I was struck by the bond between these two men, one created by their common interest in this well-known ruin. But even more, I was struck by the focus and sharpness of the recollection. One might expect the spirit and memories of friendship to endure but hardly the kind of detail that both

men resurrected. Now, only occasionally did my glance return to the window to the north. As I listened to Dr. Cooley recall the details of the dig and stories about Joe and Ruby Free, I found myself thinking, “I didn’t know that.” His recollections touched upon most of the major areas of excavation: Area T on the eastern ex-tremity of the tell’s summit, the highest part of the mound, which Free called the acropolis; Area A which was dominated by a Hellenistic settlement dating to the 3rd and 2nd Centuries B.C., and beneath which was discovered signifi-cant architecture from the Iron Age; the massive Early Bronze fortifications in Area D that were preserved to a height of 5 meters with a projected height of nearly 8 meters; and Area L with its Iron Age buildings and impressive Bronze

Age fortifications. And then, finally, the reminiscences turned to the

in Area K. This was the part of the tell that I had been

studying for a time that could only be measured in years. Toward the end of the 1959 season, the excavators uncovered a circular, stone-lined pit that diminished in size until it funneled into a square-cut shaft in the bedrock. About 1 meter down the shaft, a stone slab was uncovered, lean-ing against a rock-cut doorway. Thus began the excavation of one of Tell Dothan’s most significant discoveries, the so-called . The largest tomb of this cemetery (Tomb 1) was discovered four days before the conclu-sion of the 1959 season. During those four days, the team worked around the clock in eight-hour shifts in the hope of clearing the burial chamber. The objective was not realized. Only 1 meter of the tomb chamber was excavated, with the removal of 52 pottery vessels of the early Iron Age (12th Century B.C and later), including lamps, bowls and chalices as well as numerous other objects and skeletal remains. Reluctantly, the tomb was sealed with reinforced con-crete. No one could have imagined that nearly 3000 more vessles, 234 bronze ob-

tell dothan has been identified with the biblical city

of the same name, mentioned in genesis 37 as the place

33winter 05/06

jects, and several hundred human burials awaited in the largest single-chambered tomb with the largest number of burial deposits to have been excavated in the Levant up to that time. It was the stuff of which an Indiana Jones movie might be made. Under Dr. Cooley’s direction, exca-vation of the tomb complex began the next season and continued into 1964. Three tombs were uncovered, but the largest and most important was Tomb 1. Its burial chamber was accessed through a vertical shaft and a stepped entryway. The chamber was basically rectangular with rounded corners, measuring near-ly 8.5 meters west to east and 5 meters north to south. The tomb contained eight crypts or burial niches; six were cut into the rock walls and two were constructed at a later time. A small channel was discovered above one of the crypts, which creat-ed an opening to the ex-terior of the tomb. Two large storage jars, each with a dipper juglet, were discovered below the opening on the outside. This channel obviously served a ritual function, likely the means by which provisions were pro-vided to the deceased after burial. Aston-ishingly, the tomb was distinctly stratified in five levels. Each of the five burial lev-els was clearly and completely separated from the one above and the one below by a layer of limestone and/or earthen fill. The tomb deposits in each level were remarkable in their concentration. The excavation photographs captivate the imagination. The five levels yielded ap-proximately 3000 pottery vessels of vari-ous types; dozens of personal ornaments, mostly of bronze, including bracelets, pendants, rings, earrings and toggle pins; numerous types of weapons, such as daggers, spears and projectile points; and many unique finds (seven-spouted lamps, zoomorphic vessels and a stun-ning anthropomorphic lamp). Scattered throughout the levels of the tomb were several hundred skulls in various states of preservation and hundreds of bones and bone fragments. Dr. Cooley’s recollections of the contents of the tomb were remarkable

in their detail. He remembered specific vessels by their field numbers and could even recall the relationship between various pieces of pottery in each of the tomb levels. It was clear that the details of tomb excavation had been indelibly seared into his memory. I suppose that is not unexpected when the excavation director is also the project’s architect, editor and one of its primary authors. Recognizing that our time was on the wane and still hoping for a brief stop at the biblical site of Shiloh on our return to Jerusalem later that day, it was suggested that we visit the site. The six of us climbed the steep pathway on the southeastern side of the tell, on the op-posite side of the western cemetery. We moved in the direction of the acropolis, the highest point of the site. The view in every direction was stunning. To the

north and east, the terraced hills rose well above the height of the tell and they were close, though not so close as to hinder the impression of Dothan’s topographical distinctness. The site was enclosed on its south side by hills of similar height, but they were more distant than those to the north and east. To the west stretched the expanse of the Dothan Valley. Though some ruins protruded from the surface and were visible through the low brush and grasses that covered the site, it was difficult at a glance to become oriented to the precise loca-tion of the various areas of excavation. Any measure of disappointment with the meager remains on the surface was diminished by the views, especially that to the east. Though it was not a breathtaking or panoramic view, as were those in the other compass directions, it was in this direction that Elisha’s servant was allowed to see the invisible armies of God that were gathered against the forces of Aram on “a hill to the east of the town.” This story from 2 Kings 6 has been

a source of endless fascination from my youth, specifically the vision of the prophet’s servant which appears to have been altogether comforting to him. Now, as I contemplated that ancient revelation in its real world physical setting, the narrative came to life far more dramatically and more powerfully than when my imagination informed my understanding. Approaching the half century mark as a serious student of the Bible, it is my firm belief that a measure of familiarity with the disciplines of physical and historical geography and biblical archaeology will immeasurably enhance one’s understanding of the bibli-cal record. In order to photograph the eastern half of the site in its physical setting and also to ponder ( ) the details of this mesmerizing biblical story, I stayed

behind as the group moved further to the north. Soon, I hur-riedly moved in the direction of the West-ern Cemetery. Neither thorns nor a shiny black snake hindered

my direct course across the tell to the western tombs, though the snake did elicit a modest scream! As I approached the depression which marked the loca-tion of Tomb 1 on the far western end of the site, even from a distance I could see a heavy concentration of potsherds protruding from the earthen walls. There was even one vessel that appeared to be completely intact, hanging precari-ously from a vertical wall of debris that preserved the archaeological record of the tomb. The presence of an Iron Age vessel, fully accessible to any passerby, was testimony to the fact that the caretaker did indeed watch the site with almost paternal devotion. While much of the tomb architecture was buried beneath fill, the area in general was strewn with a heavy concentration of pottery sherds, all of them recognizable forms from the tomb’s ceramic repertoire. I just looked and photographed, though the instinct to probe was hard to restrain. I kept an eye on my traveling companions who were working their way in my direction; there was still time to sit quietly on the edge

it was in this direction that elisha’s servant

was allowed to see the invisible armies of god that

were gathered against the forces of aram on

“a hill to the east of the town.”

34 winter 05/06

of this 3500 year old burial chamber and to reflect on a discovery which is as remarkable today as it was when first discovered in 1959. While there are many unanswered questions regarding the mortuary prac-tices of the Western Cemetery, a number of observations may be advanced regard-ing the reconstruction of Tomb 1 burial ritual. Upon the death of a family mem-ber, the body was taken to the ancestral tomb that was located in the limestone es-carpment on the extreme western side of the settlement. With the opening of the tomb, the bones of earlier burials were unceremoniously swept to the sides of the chamber, thereby pro-viding space for the new burial. The body was then placed on the floor of the chamber or on the debris of earlier burials, either in an extended or full-length position with no uniform orientation. Numerous buri-als were documented in which the skeletal remains were covered with the sherds of large storage jars. Vessels and personal possessions were either placed around the circumfer-ence of the tomb or carefully arranged around the body. The deposits appear to represent the full complement of everyday articles that would provide the deceased with material needs for the afterlife and/or the journey thereto. Food and drink were included in the burial deposits, and the presence of clay lamps in large numbers suggests the importance of light. Following the interment, the doorway to the chamber was closed with a blocking stone and the shaft was filled with debris. The tomb was reopened and the mortuary rituals were repeated with subsequent burials. The evidence suggests that there existed a contrast in attitude toward the corpse between the time of burial and af-ter the decomposition of the flesh. At the

time of burial, scrupulous care was exer-cised in the placement of the corpse and in the arrangement of the burial depos-its. Once the body was transformed into a pile of bones, it was treated with little respect. It was normal practice to sweep aside the bones and deposits of earlier burials into a heap. Apparently, it was believed that the deceased was sentient and therefore needed sustenance as long as the flesh had not completely decom-posed. With decomposition, however, the descendants could with impunity

destroy or perhaps even remove certain of the burial deposits. The tomb was not considered to be the permanent residence of the dead but only a temporary station on the way to the netherworld. There is no evidence that burial deposits were re-newed periodically, nor were additional offerings placed in the tombs in the years that followed burial. Though the Dothan tombs are not to be associated with the Israelites of the Old Testament, it would appear that the practices of the Western Cemetery (specifically those of Tomb 1) provide a cultural context for understanding the biblical formula “gathered to his kin/an-cestors/fathers” which clearly indicates death and the ritual of burial (Gen. 25:8, 17; 35:29; 49:29, 33; Num. 20:24; 31:2; Deut. 31:14; 32:50; 34:5; Jud. 2:10). Al-though various interpretations have been suggested for this expression, it certainly evokes the image of the deceased being reunited with ancestors in the family tomb. Interpreting the biblical formula in light of the material evidence of the Do-than burial complex, with its many strik-ing parallels with other Late Bronze Age

burial sites in the eastern Mediterranean, creates a much richer and more vivid understanding of the biblical imagery. In that soft and pleasing light of a late afternoon in March, we loaded into the van and began our return to Jerusalem through the Dothan Valley. Through the rear window, I watched the site diminish and finally blend with its natural setting. Seconds later, the dark green color of the tall trees beside the caretaker’s house disappeared as well. My traveling companions were fully

engaged in conversa-tion, but I didn’t hear a word. It was something of a surprise to hear them talking when I turned around. I didn’t join the conversation but now stared out the

side window trying to soak up the last impressions of the valley. In the distance, I caught a glimpse of a shepherd, stand-ing off to the side of a rather large herd of sheep and goats. It was perhaps fitting that this memo-rable visit to the Dothan Valley should end with an impression reminiscent of Genesis 37. It is one of the great joys of travel in this land. It takes little effort to see the Bible come to life. Sometimes, it happens when you just look out the window and watch.

Dr. Gary D. Pratico is Professor of Old Testament and Director of the Hebrew Language Program at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Mas-sachusetts. Dr. Pratico was curator of archaeological collections at the Harvard Semitic Museum from September 1982 until December

1993 and has participated in archaeological projects in North Africa, Cyprus, Israel and Jordan. He is co-author of Basics of Biblical Hebrew, with Miles Van Pelt.

The deposits appear to represent the full complement

of everyday articles that would provide the

deceased with material needs for the afterlife

35winter 05/06

Buried cities dot the landscape throughout the Lands of the Bible. In fact, it has been estimated that more than 25,000 such ruined cities are in existence. Over 6,500 sites are catalogued in the records of the Iraq Department of Antiquities. Israel and Jordan, the central geographical focus for the study of Ancient Israel, have over 5000 sites on record. One of these is the imposing and typical mound of ruins at Dothan. The Tell (mound) dominates the Plain of Dothan that was of such strategic importance during the days of Joseph (Genesis 37) and Elisha (II Kings 6). This fertile Plain lies between the northern end of the Sa-maria Hills and the Carmel range and provided excellent passage to the northern and southern regions of Ancient Palestine. The Tell rises 60 meters above the surrounding plain and com-prises some 25 acres of occupational space. Its sloping sides and "at summit give it the classic shape of a tell. An abundant source of water is located at the spring on its southern base and this source, no doubt, served the site well in antiquity.

My !rst viewings of the site are etched deep in my memory. It was in the late 1950’s that I joined the Dothan Archaeological Expedition to serve as the architect and an area supervisor. As I climbed the mound daily, I was reminded of all of the prerequisites that made this a signi!cant site for habitation—ample fertile land, acces-sible water, a defendable position and located on transportation routes. Agricultural and pastoral pursuits could sustain well a sizeable population, who could easily engage in commerce through-out the region. At the same time, its inhabitants were situated high on the foundational bedrock outcropping of limestone and could defend themselves from any invader. The major reason that cities in antiquity were buried was due to the building, destruc-tion and rebuilding cycle. Sites, such as Dothan, suited the needs of later generations, and the subsequent settlements in the same location created the arti!cial mound of ruins known as a tell. Armies and warfare were the major forces for destruction, but a site could be destroyed through earthquake, abandonment due to

Robert E. Cooley, Ph.D.

profile of a buried city

Photos and renderings courtesy of the Dothan Project.

36 winter 05/06

plagues or other such causes. Since Dothan was occupied for thousands of years, the accumulated ruins included more than 20 layers of ruined cities, each forming a stratum of material culture. These materials represent a span of time from the Neolithic Period (4000 B.C.) to the Mameluke Period (14-15th Century A.D.). The Expedition’s work yielded an impressive archaeologi-cal record of a city that was well forti!ed and served its popula-tion well, including the regional societies in the nearby hills. We investigated six major sections of the Tell. These sections were designated by letters—T, B, A, D, L, K. Within the “K” section, the site’s Western Cemetery was discovered. These six sections were excavated according to the methodology standards of the day and these were forged during the post-World War I period. At the heart of this methodological approach was a focus upon the horizontal dimension of occupational evidence, with

special attention to pottery and architectural remains. As a result, Dothan was excavated in “areas,” which were laid out on a grid pattern in each section. Further, each “area” was excavated in “levels” expressed in centimeters below the surface. These levels included varying soil conditions and several "oor levels, but usu-ally only one building structure. In fact, architectural remains of-ten determined when one level ended and another began. As the Expedition’s architect, I had the wonderful opportunity to study the remains of structures in all six sections. Daily pottery !nds and objects were recorded in large books. These records, along with !eld notebooks, drawings and photographs, constituted the basis for understanding the occupational history of the site. During this period of time, newer digging methods were be-ing designed by others and these were bringing a site’s vertical dimension and the sequence of culture history into signi!cance. Stratigraphical analysis, along with material analysis, computer graphics, integrated disciplines and newer interpretative frame-works now mark the progress in archaeological methodology. I was able to blend these two dimensions into a method for exca-vating the Western Cemetery, discussed in another article by my colleague, Gary Pratico. The summit of Tell Dothan slopes gently from east to west. At the eastern upper end of this summit was located Area “T” and designated as the “acropolis.” The major discovery in this area was a Mameluke courtyard farmhouse consisting of about 25 rooms arranged around the courtyard. At the southwestern end of the summit, numerous Mameluke burials were uncovered. Among the !nds were Islamic glass bracelets, painted pottery in-cluding geometric Arab and glazed painted ware, and a remark-able decorated pilgrim "ask. Numerous well-preserved bread ovens were found on beaten earth "oors. This early second mil-

lennium A.D. farmhouse and its associated materials should be of value to future studies of the Mameluke period. Area “B” is adjacent to “T” and includes some portions of the Mameluke farmhouse. This area produced substantial quantities of Roman or Byzantine pottery, and the architectural highlight was a building with massive walls. Its function could not be clearly discerned. The pottery consists of cups, plates, cooking pots and jugs. What does seem evident is that Dothan belonged to a network of small villages that dotted the region in the Early Roman and Byzantine periods, and its structures add another ex-ample to the growing corpus of settlements during these periods. As we continue our literary excursion down the vertical his-tory of Tell Dothan, we come to the Hellenistic period remains located in Area “A.” These remains are signi!cant in that they document the site’s existence during the times referenced in the

book of Judith, a Jewish wisdom story that is contemporary with the dated Dothan remains. Included among the remains are 16 Rhodian jar handles with stamp seals and a coin of Antiochus VII, inscribed “Antiochus the King.” While this Hellenistic settlement is small, the material culture provides new data for conceptualizing the book of Judith. I am con!dent that future investigators will expand understanding of the signi!cance of Dothan’s role in this time period and geographical setting. The Iron Age (1200–586 B.C.) at Dothan is represented in the extensive remains found in Areas “A” and “L.” Architectural remains in these areas feature numerous domestic structures, a long narrow street with walls preserved 2 meters high on either side that was named “Wall Street,” and several burials, including adult skeletons and infant jar burials. Among these structures was an Israelite four-room house and nearby, was a cache of whole vessels, the most famous of which was a unique zoomorphic multihandled krater. In fact, Areas “A” and “L” produced the best pottery assemblages discovered throughout the excavated areas. These assemblages are extremely valuable in the ongoing conversa-tion regarding Canaanite regions and Israelite settlements. In the western extremes of these two vastly excavated areas, signi!cant Iron Age II occupational phases were uncovered. Fourteen houses were revealed, and a massive building of thick walls and 20 rooms was uncovered and named the “adminis-trative building.” This building was designed around a central courtyard. Nearby were several silos for grain storage. Grain and other charred materials were found on the building’s beaten earth "oors. The most common pottery form found in this building was a handless jar with a "at bottom and thickened rim. C14 samples taken from grain stored inside these jars !t with the late 9th Century date for the destruction of the administrative build-

1. Biconical Jar 2. Biconical Jar 3. Pyxis 4. Chalice 5. Lamp 6. Multihandled Krater 7. Stirrup Jar 8. Flask

37winter 05/06

ing. These jars may have been a standard of dry measure. A series of burials were found across the “L” Area, including an adult burial in a pottery coffin and several jar burials. The evidence recovered from this vast area suggests the Israelite occupa-tion of the site during the days of Elisha (II Kings 6) and the subsequent presence of Assyrian populations. Although Late Bronze Age (1550-1200 B.C.) pottery ap-pears throughout the site’s assemblage, no substantial ceramic assemblage or coherent architecture was found on the Tell. This occupational period is best represented in the Western Cemetery, the location of Tomb 1 and its five levels dating to a time sequence of 1400 to 1100 B.C. Areas “A,” “D” and “K” provide sufficient evidence of the city’s fortification system, especially during the Early Bronze II-III phases and in the Middle Bronze period (3000-

1550 B.C.). Some of the walls remained to a height of 5 meters. A gateway and towers were partially un-covered and on the southern side of the tell, a large flight of stone steps survived to a maximum width of 4

meters. The Early Bronze II-III period has been characterized as a massive urbanization movement throughout the Levant. Tell Dothan flourished for the first time in the Early Bronze II period and reflects the pattern of urbanization discovered at other sites in the region. Therefore, Dothan represents a significant addi-tion to the inventory of Early Bronze Age remains in North-ern Palestine. The Chalcolithic and Neolithic periods (5000-3000 B.C.) round out the sequence in the culture history of Dothan. These periods are well represented at sites throughout the country’s northern region, so it is not surprising to find such remains at a site like Dothan. These prehistoric materials were found at the base of vari-ous probes in Area “D” and are in the form of distinct period pottery sherds. Future excavations may uncover substantial evidence for these early periods and add immeasurable infor-mation to our understanding of the prehistory of Palestine. Joseph P. Free, the Director of the Dothan Archaeological Expedition and the site’s primary excavator, by all accounts declared himself a “biblical archaeologist.” He constantly, throughout each season of excavation, emphasized the inter-secting of Dothan’s material remains with the biblical account of Ancient Israel. Our discussions were long and engaging, raising numerous themes relative to the nature of biblical narrative, of archaeology and of the “archaeologist.” Are the biblical statements of faith susceptible to the archaeological endeavor? Are archaeological methodologies sufficiently de-veloped to shed light on statements of historical fact? We can say at this point in time that no statement of historical fact in the Bible has been proven untrue on the basis of the material remains discovered through archaeological research.

Also, we can say that archaeology is only in its infancy as a research discipline and must continue to develop its methodologi-cal capacities to render clearer understandings of old data and to better understand new data as it is discovered. We cannot leave the “archaeologist” out of this discussion. The archaeologist not only digs, but he or she interprets the !ndings and strives to arrive at the fullest meaning possible. This means that the inter-preter brings to the task a particular educational background, life experiences, and his or her philosophical presuppositions. In Biblical Archaeology, this involves views of the Bible. Archaeo-logical research cannot be used to “prove the Bible.” The Bible needs no proof of its inspiration and authenticity. My “career in ruins” began at the buried city of Dothan.

Dr. Robert E. Cooley is President Emeritus of Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary and served from 1981 to 1997 as its second president. Under his leadership, the school expe-rienced tremendous growth in faculty, majors, students, and financial strength. During the past 40 years he has directed excavations at locations such as Tell Dothan, Khirbet Haiyan and Khirbet Raddana in Israel, Tell er-Retaba in Egypt and at numerous sites in North America.

1. Biconical Jar 2. Biconical Jar 3. Pyxis 4. Chalice 5. Lamp 6. Multihandled Krater 7. Stirrup Jar 8. Flask

Dr. Robert Cooley, right, at Dothan excavation site.

38 winter 05/06

TRUSTEE PROFILE

Seminary Trustee John G. Talcott, Jr. is immersed in history. He is a direct de-scendent of John Talcott, who was in Thomas Hooker’s company that founded Hart-ford, Connecticut, in 1635, and built the first home in

that community. And John Jr. was born in the town of Talcot-tville, Connecticut, in 1908, almost a century ago.

At 97, Talcott still feels it is important for a Gordon-Conwell Trustee to walk in the Gordon-Conwell Commencement ceremo-ny, mainly for the students and their families, “to support them and so they see that we are really interested in participating ... and the fact that I like to march anyway.”

Marching is also something John Talcott has done for quite some time, initially as a member of the Transportation Corps in World War II from 1942-1945. He has continued to do so as a Trustee of Gordon-Conwell since 1971 and at various other military related events. He most recently marched in the Fourth of July Parade in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where he currently lives during the summer.

Talcott grew up in Connecticut, eventually graduating from Yale University in 1935. After holding a number of positions at the Talcottville Woolen plant, which closed in 1941, he joined the Army. After leaving the Armed Forces, he then spent eight years on the Board of Education in Vernon, Connecticut, and five years as a Deputy Fire Chief. Since 1964, he has grown cranberries in Massachusetts and also served as a director of Ocean Spray Cranberries.

Mr. Talcott has filled his long life with a number of other posi-tions and accomplishments: Trustee of Springfield College, President of the Massachusetts Society for Aiding Discharged Prisoners, and founding member of Intercessors for America. As a resident of Plymouth, he was Chairman of the Plymouth 350th Anniversary Committee from 1970-1971; Chairman of the Plymouth Bicentennial Commission that erected the bronze statue of Governor William Bradford in 1976; Trustee, President and Fellow of the Pilgrim Society; founder of the Plymouth Rock Foundation, and the list could go on.

Mr. Talcott joined the seminary Board two years after the merger, and was Secretary of the Board from 1975-1997. During his tenure, Mr. Talcott has witnessed a number of changes, in the world and at the seminary. He has seen the seminary open the Boston and Charlotte campuses, and initiate the Jacksonville extension site; has observed the number of students, faculty and Trustees grow; and he has worked with three seminary presi-dents. “We have been very fortunate in the presidents that we’ve had,” he says. “They have been outstanding.” It was with Dr. Harold John Ockenga, first president of the combined schools, however, that he had a special relationship. Dr. Ockenga “was very inspiring to me,” he says. “We both had a summer resi-dence in Bridgewater, New Hampshire, [and] he was part of the Boston Billy Graham Crusade in 1950. I was born again at those meetings.” Talcott remembers the date exactly. “It was in Mechanic’s Hall. They had started the crusade at Park Street Church, but it got too large. So they moved it to Mechanic’s Hall. I had been going to church, but was a nominal Christian. I even was the Sunday School superintendent, but didn’t have a personal relationship. On January 5, 1950, my wife and I went forward and were born again. It was then that I accepted the sacrifice for my life of sin and the forgiveness of those sins.”

From that time on, his life began to change. He said his decision to accept Christ affected every aspect of his life, his family, his “associations and...the rules that I have followed.” It has also enabled him “to be able to overcome all of the activity and com-mitments and experience [the forgiveness], to be able to know the Lord’s will and to be able to do His will and make sure that it is His will and not just my own.” That, says Mr. Talcott, is an aspect of the Christian life that has taken a long time to learn. “More and more, [I ask] is this the Lord’s will, or have I allowed myself to dominate?

“That has taken the longest time...to be sure that this is the Lord’s will, and to never miss an opportunity to witness. Some-times, God allows some of us to live longer because we haven’t accomplished all he wanted us to do.” Given the opportunity to witness, “I just don’t want to miss that point when it comes.”

Michael L. Colaneri is Assistant Director of Communications at Gordon-Conwell

Theological Seminary

John G. Talcott, Jr. Michael L. Colaneri

39winter 05/06

SEMINARY NEWS

Renovation of a new, larger headquarters for the Gordon-Conwell Boston campus, the Center for Urban Ministerial Education (CUME), is nearing the finish line.

According to Deney Morgenthal, Director of Facilities and Own-er’s Representative for the reconstruction project, the mechani-cal, electrical and plumbing infrastructure is in place; walls have been framed; and drywall installation is underway.

Occupancy of the 15,511 square foot building in the Dudley Square neighborhood of Roxbury, Massachusetts, is scheduled for mid-February, 2006.

The new campus building will triple the space available to serve Hispanic/Latino, African American, Caribbean-American, Asian and other ethnic minority students preparing for ministry as pas-tors, youth workers and church leaders in urban settings. The new facility will house a markedly expanded urbanology library, small prayer chapel, several classrooms, faculty and staff of-fices, and a large seminar and conference room equipped for videoconferences.

The new videoconferencing capability will enable students to take classes from the South Hamilton and Charlotte campuses, and for students from those locations to enroll in urban ministry courses offered at CUME.

To be known as The Michael Haynes Center for Urban Ministerial Education, the new campus headquarters is named in honor of Dr. Michael E. Haynes, a longtime seminary Trustee who served for 53 years on the ministerial staff of nearby Twelfth Baptist Church, including 40 years as Senior Minister. Dr. Haynes was

a leader in the development of CUME, and Twelfth Baptist has been a continuous site for classes since the campus opened in 1976.

In addition to utilizing the new classrooms at the Roxbury fa-cility, CUME will continue its longstanding Pilgrim model of education, also holding classes at multiple locations throughout Boston, Springfield and Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Provi-dence, Rhode Island. This model enables students to learn in the context where they will minister, and to take classes near their homes or workplaces.

A $6.2 million capital campaign is underway, with $2.5 mil-lion still needed to fund renovation and endowment. For more information and to contribute to this initiative, contact Howard Freeman, Chief Development Officer, at 978.646.4033, or hfreeman@gcts.edu.

New Boston Campus Opening Soon

New Archaeological Study Bible to Be Unveiled at March Ockenga ConferenceMark your calendars for a major Gordon-Conwell conference, The Bible and Archaeology: How to Read the Bible in a Whole New Way, March 21-22, 2006.

Filled with two days of in-depth lectures, breakout sessions and alumni/ae activities, the conference will celebrate a major seminary milestone—the publication with Zondervan of The Archaeological Study Bible sched-uled for release in March 2006—and will provide tools for pastors and lay persons that will enrich Bible study and awareness of the historical context in which the Bible takes place.

The new Bible, anticipated to be released just prior to the conference, will be previewed by Gordon-Conwell President, Dr. Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., who served as its Senior Editor, and Dr. Duane Garrett, former Professor of Old Testament, now the John R. Sampey Professor of Old Testament Literature at The Southern Baptist Seminary, who was General Editor.

Additional conference highlights will include a plenary presentation by Dr. Timothy S. Laniak, Associate Professor of Old Testament at the Charlotte cam-pus, and presentations on the Dothan project, a major excavation in central Israel at the site that appears both in the Joseph narratives of Genesis 37, and the 2 Kings 6 chronicle of the invis-ible armies of God. President Emeritus Dr. Robert E. Cooley, who served as an archaeologist at this site for more than a decade and has directed the subse-quent publication phase of the project, will address an evening dinner and cel-ebration event.

Other conference presenters who also served on the Dothan project will include Dr. Gary D. Pratico, Professor of Old Testament, Gordon-Conwell; Dr. John Monson, Associate Professor of Archaeology at Wheaton College; and Dr. Thomas D. Petter, ’97, Assistant Professor of Old Testament at Biblical Seminary. The first of two Dothan volumes was released by Eisenbrauns in November 2005.

For more information about the Biblical Archaeology conference, visit www.gordonconwell.edu/Ockenga, or call 1.800.294.2774.

40 winter 05/06

A number of prospective students have applied to the new Gordon-Con-well extension site in Jacksonville, Florida, and classes will begin in February 2006.

“The response of the Jacksonville community has been encouraging and gratifying,” says Dr. Sidney L. Bradley, Dean of the Charlotte campus and the Jacksonville site. “The applications are coming in steadily, and we anticipate a grand beginning.”

Two courses will be offered in February: Foundations of Leadership in Ministry and Church History. These will be available on weekends and occasional one-week intensives.

New Jacksonville Extension on Target for February Opening

Dr. Walter C. Kaiser, Jr. is the recipient of the Wheaton College Alumnus of the Year 2005 Award for Distinguished Service to Alma Mater.

Dr. Kaiser and his wife, Marge, were honored at a number of events at the Wheaton, Illinois, campus during Homecoming Weekend in early October.

A citation presented to Dr. Kaiser by Wheaton President Duane Litfin and Alumni Association President Bob Dye noted: “Guarding the gospel through scholarship and instruction, you have mastered the teacher’s

art. Sharing the gospel by mentoring and leading, you have for many decades sown rich seeds in young lives to yield an abundant harvest of righteousness. We thank you for your distinguished service to Wheaton, Walt. And we praise God for your faithfulness in showing us His glory.”

Dr. Kaiser received an A.B. from Wheaton College, a B.D. from Wheaton Graduate School, an M.A. and Ph.D. in Mediterranean Studies from Brandeis University, and was recipient of the Danforth Teacher Study Grant. He is a member of the Wheaton College Scholastic Honor Society.

Dr. Kaiser also taught Bible and archaeology at Wheaton College, receiving the Junior Teacher of the Year Award. He subsequently joined the Old Testament faculty of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where he was to become Senior Vice President of Education, Academic Dean, and Senior Vice President of Distance Learning and Ministries. In 1993, he was named the Colman M. Mockler Distinguished Professor of Old Testament at Gordon-Conwell, and in 1997, became the seminary’s third President.

Dr. Kaiser has been a member of the Wheaton Board of Trustees for 23 years, and also serves on the boards of several other Christian organizations.

President Kaiser Honored by Wheaton Alumni Association

Jacksonville resident Kent D. Gilbert has been named Assistant to the Dean and will manage operations for the Florida program. Gilbert served for 28 years with Young Life, including 11 years as Metro and Regional Director in Jacksonville, and most recently was associated with Cham-pion Golf Events.

Jacksonville students can pursue the Master of Theological Stud-ies (MTS) degree. Permission will be sought from accreditors in a few years to grant the Master of Divinity (M.Div.) degree. All degrees will be received through the Charlotte campus. Students can also take up to one-third of the required courses for either degree through Semlink, the seminary’s distance education program.

The new theological education program in Jacksonville began at the impetus of an exploratory committee of Jacksonville alumni/ae pastors and other church leaders led by Dr. Robert Morris, Senior Minister of First Presbyterian Church. The church leaders approached the seminary some months ago about providing courses in their region and have sub-sequently raised $142,000 towards operating the new extension site this coming year.

“It has been an exciting experience to be part of this new initiative by Gordon-Conwell, and to be part of a fabulous team in Jacksonville that has worked so tirelessly to establish the new extension site,” Gilbert says. “God has brought together a team that is truly a microcosm of our community. We would not be where we are today without the efforts of so many during the last 10 months.”

For more information, contact Kent Gilbert at 904.874.2556 or kgilbert@gcts.edu.

SEMINARY NEWS

41winter 05/06

Gordon Conwell offers free, online lecturesGordon Conwell Theological Seminary has recently completed Dimen-sions of the Faith, a free curriculum that offers 10 courses in subjects foundational to the Christian faith. Geared toward the general audience, the courses consist of study guides and audio lectures taught by current and former Gordon Conwell faculty.

Dimensions courses and the faculty members who teach them include:

Studying the Bible for All Its Worth: Biblical Interpretation, Dr. Doug-las K. Stuart, Professor of Old Testament

Creation, Covenant, and Kings: An Old Testament Survey from Genesis to Song of Songs, Dr. Douglas K. Stuart

Prophets and Promise: An Old Testament Survey from Psalms to Mala-chi, Dr. Douglas K. Stuart

Christ and His Church: A New Testament Survey of the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, Dr. T. David Gordon, former New Testament professor

Letters to God’s People: A New Testament Survey from Romans to Rev-elation, Dr. T. David Gordon

God’s People Through the Ages – Part I: A Church History Survey from Pentecost to the Reformation, Dr. Garth M. Rosell, Professor of Church History

God’s People Through the Ages – Part II: A Church History Survey from the Reformation to the Present, Dr. Garth M. Rosell

Theology Matters – Part I: What Christians Believe and Why It Matters, Dr. David F. Wells, Andrew Mutch Distinguished Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology

Theology Matters – Part II: What Christians Believe and Why It Mat-ters, Dr. David F. Wells

Loving a Lost World: Evangelism and Missions, Dr. Timothy C. Tennent, Associate Professor of World Missions, Director of Missions Programs and Chair of the J. Christy Wilson, Jr. Center for World Missions

Since the launch of Dimensions of the Faith, hundreds of individuals, churches and organizations across the globe have accessed this free course of study.

“The goal of Dimensions of the Faith has always been to provide a comprehensive course of theological education targeted for use in the Church,” says Dr. David G. Horn, Director of the Ockenga Institute. “In the process of development, we have also expanded our goals to include a special focus on international settings, particularly offering this pro-gram to missions and other parachurch organizations.”

While developing the program, the Ockenga Institute tested its use in various settings, both internationally and domestically. Horn says the re-sults have been very positive. A Romanian pastor wanted to be “...better equipped to preach and teach, and get leadership skills.”

First Congregational Church in Middleborough, Massachusetts, has been testing the program in a group setting. Says Pastor Peter Murdy, “I saw this as an opportunity to give lay people in the church a more serious and structured overview of several important areas of the Christian faith.”

Students who take all 10 courses receive a certificate of completion from Gordon-Conwell in recognition of their work to enrich themselves in the foundational truths of God’s Word. Courses from this non-degree program are not transferable to degree programs.

Courses are available in three formats. Students can access free lectures and study guides online; or they can order at modest cost either an audio CD and printed study guide, or a CD-ROM with audio and notebook files. The latter two choices are available at the Ockenga Store (www.gordon-conwell.edu/ockenga/store), or by calling 1.800.294.2774. To sign up for the program, go to www.gordonconwell.edu/ockenga,/dimensions.

Gordon-Conwell Professor and Students Provide Disaster Relief in Mississippi Dr. Paul Lim, Assistant Professor of Theology, four Gordon-Conwell stu-dents, and two members of Bethany Presbyterian Church in Brookline, Massachusetts where Lim serves as Associate Pastor, drove 28 hours from Boston to D’Iberville, Mississippi in early November to provide humanitarian aid for Hurricane Katrina victims.

Gordon-Conwell students participating in the outreach to the Gulf Coast included Meredith Conrow, Troy Henley, James Park and Nicole Poirier.

Living in a tent city, provided under the auspices of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PCUSA) and projected to remain open for the next five to six years, the team worked to “muck” a house on Pringle Avenue rendered uninhabitable after being submerged in 9 feet of water for four days.

The team’s other relief work responsibilities included rearranging the aisles in the POD (Point of Distribution), a make-shift “supermarket” for handing out daily needs of those affected by Hurricane Katrina. On their last day, the team cleared out debris at the home of a senior citizen where a number of trees had fallen during the raging storm.

Their labor in D’Iberville was rewarded by the visit of Mike, owner of the Pringle Avenue house, and Morgan, his five-year old daughter. The team prayed with and for Mike and Morgan, shared laughter, and presented Bibles to them and a Barbie Doll to Morgan. In return, Mike took off his fireman’s hat and shirt and gave it to Lim, promising to send the same for the entire team.

According to Lim, “It was a beautiful sight to behold, seeing the gra-cious cycle of charity make its round.”

Lim adds, “Franz Kafka wrote in one of his deservedly famous notebooks: ‘Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive,’ As bewildered as we might otherwise have been by Kafka’s depiction of suffering as potentially salutary and positive, during our trip down to D’Iberville, Mississippi, the eight of us got to experience how suffering can ennoble and inflame hope.”

SEMINARY NEWS

Katrina Outreach team members: Front, Katrina McGarry. Back row l. to r., Troy Hen-ley, James Park and Paul Lim

42 winter 05/06

Gordon-Conwell Student Discovers God’s Faithfulness in the StormWhen Cliff Singletary talks about the Gordon-Conwell community, he calls it “the family”—new friends who welcomed his own family when Hurricane Katrina de-stroyed their apartment and short-circuited his Master of Divinity studies in New Orleans.

Collectively, this community of believers—administrators, faculty, staff, students and their families—prepared a new home in Graham Hall for Cliff, Melissa and their young sons, Joshua and Caleb, stocking it with food, toys and the household items they would need. They came to visit, prayed with them, and helped Cliff get on with the task of preparing for ministry.

“It was unbelievable,” Cliff says “The family here has been a tremendous answer to prayer, and a blessing.”

The unexpected saga that led the Singletarys from their new home on the campus of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary all the way to Mas-sachusetts began on Friday, August 26, as Hurricane Katrina bore down on the Gulf Coast.

“We were watching the weather,” Cliff recalls. “I think everyone on campus was watching the weather. The storm was getting close and we were trying to decide what to do.”

They prayed during the evening, and the next morning, Melissa woke the family at 5 a.m. and said they needed to leave. Placing their important keepsakes “up high” on their couch and beds, they packed their two young sons into the family van, and set off at 6 a.m. for Cliff’s parents’ home in Tallahassee, Florida.

“We just thought, we’ll get a couple of feet of water,” Cliff recalls. “We were prepared for that. We had put things off the floor.”

Later that day, Cliff, received an email from the New Orleans Baptist Presi-dent indicating that classes would be cancelled on Monday, and to return on Tuesday. “I was all excited because I had something due on Monday. I had an extra day to do the project!” Cliff says. On Monday morning, Katrina hit New Orleans, and Cliff received another email, this time directing him to re-port on Thursday. Better yet, he thought. More time to complete his project.

A few days later, as levies began breaking in New Orleans, Cliff says reality began to sink in that they weren’t going back. “We got word from a student at the seminary...and found out that our apartment was completely under water. When we heard that, we knew there wasn’t anything there for us.” Gone were the keepsakes—Bibles from childhood with notes in the margins, photographs, blankets made by a grandmother—and all their furniture, clothing and household items.

“The furniture and clothes you can get back,” Cliff comments. “But some of the sentimental things—that’s hard. It’s literally like you walk out of your house to go shopping at the store and you never come back.”

With much of the New Orleans seminary under water, Cliff and Melissa now faced another reality: what to do next.

Before becoming a full-time student in summer 2005, Cliff had taken classes at the New Orleans Baptist extension site in Florida, and had also attended an intensive class on campus in January, taking his family with him. “During this time, we felt like God was showing us that this was the place where we were supposed to be. We went home and prayed heavily, and we knew God was telling us to go to seminary full-time. So we planned that. We started making preparations mentally, physically and spiritually.”

A few months later, Cliff quit his position at a Tallahassee newspaper; they sold their home and gave away some of their belongings; and by July, the family was living in New Orleans.

“That was a big change for us,” he explains. “We’d just gone from my work-ing full-time to going to school full-time and looking for a part-time job. So now we’d been there a month and a half (when Katrina hit), and we’re say-ing, ‘What do we do? I just gave up my job. I just sold my house.’”

A friend who taught at another seminary suggested he look over that school, so they packed up and moved again. “I actually enrolled in school,” Cliff recounts. “I was there two weeks, and it just didn’t seem like that was what God wanted. Classes were fine, but my family wasn’t happy.”

While Cliff was in school, Melissa was coping with living in an empty off-campus apartment, and trying to figure out what to replace first. “I was preparing myself to lose everything while we were in Tallahassee,” she remembers. “But then to walk into the apartment and there’s nothing there, that was overwhelming. And then going to the store, as a homemaker I was overwhelmed as to where to start. What were the essential items?”

“At that point,” Cliff says, “I began looking at other seminaries. I figured that this semester had already started, so we’d take our time to figure out where God wanted us.”

One of his contacts was to Dr. Barry Corey, Gordon-Conwell Vice President of Education and Academic Dean of the Hamilton campus. What Cliff didn’t know was that at the recommendation of the President’s office, Barry had already contacted his seminary in Louisiana, offering housing and tuition to displaced students for the first year.

“Barry told us, ‘Come up now,’” Cliff recounts. “That was on a Thursday. He told us if we decided to come, we had to be there by Monday, so we had a short time to pray and think about it. As we prayed on Thursday night and Friday, we felt like this was what God was working out, so we called Barry and said ‘we’re coming.’ And Saturday morning, we got in the van and drove here...It was really easy to get up and go, that part was real simple, because we literally just didn’t have anything.”

Embarking on their fourth move in four months, the family arrived on cam-pus Sunday afternoon, to be met by Campus Police Chief Mark Horvath. “He really did a great job of making us feel welcome,” Cliff recalls. “Our first impression of the campus was Mark, and it was a great one. Then we got to our apartment, and Miss Jean (Rouse) and Miss Marietta (Mrs. Robert Coleman) had this place livable—like a home. It floored us. We heard sto-ries that they had worked all night on it. It’s hard to describe how you feel when you walk in and see that someone had done so much to make you feel welcome. It was really touching.”

Early Monday morning, Cliff received a call from Scott Poblenz, Assistant Registrar, and together they worked out a tentative schedule. “He said, ‘Go to class at 8 o’clock, then come see me and we’ll figure this out.’” The rest of the day was a whirlwind as Cliff met and received the prayers of myriad faculty and administrative staff, and eventually completed his schedule.

SEMINARY NEWS

43winter 05/06

In Graham Hall, more than 100 people dropped by to welcome them. “It was unbelievable,” he says. “One of the reasons we didn’t feel like God wanted us (at the other seminary)...was because we were so isolated. We didn’t have a campus where you were among other believers. We had that in New Orleans and we really missed it.

“Here we have it, and it just seemed to kick into high gear when we arrived. The family just went out of their way to meet every one of our needs—mate-rial needs, friendship needs, everything we could think of.”

Melissa now attends a weekly women’s Bible study and a meeting for seminary wives—the same activities she enjoyed in New Orleans. Cliff still believes God called him to seminary, and considers their experience a bless-ing to him as a future minister. Through their ordeal, they agree, their prayer life has been enhanced 10-fold. “As for our marriage, it’s been enhanced,” Melissa adds. “We’ve learned to trust each other at a different level.

“We didn’t doubt that the Lord would provide for us because we knew he’d provide,” she says. “But we’ve been blessed beyond our belief. He’s not go-ing to forsake us anywhere we go.

“We’ve lost everything, but we haven’t lost Him.” Note: A second New Orleans Baptist student will be joining the Hamilton community in January, and a third student will join the Charlotte campus, also in January.

L. to r., IFOBA team members Peter Bradley, Kevin van Pelt, Freddy Boswell, Joseph Owens, Gary Simons, Roberto Laver, Todd Johnson and GCTS student Bayarjarqal Garamtseren from Mongolia.

IFOBA, Lausanne Team Convene on Campus

A team from the International Forum of Bible Agencies (IFOBA) met at the Hamilton campus in October to discuss how effective they have been in distributing scriptures. This coalition of Bible translation agencies strategically collaborates “so that the Word of God may be globally available and used throughout the world.” A major IFOBA report will be presented in Thailand April 4-7, 2006.

The Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization also convened its Operational Support Team on the Hamilton campus in August. Rev. Doug Birdsall, Director of the seminary’s J. Christy Wilson, Jr. Center for World Missions, is LCWE Executive Chair. The group met to orient new members, and to coordinate operations in support of its six working groups; its publications, including the new online magazine Lausanne World Pulse, and the Younger Leaders Gather-ing in Lumpur, Malaysia in September 2006.

DEVELOPMENT UPDATE

ON GIVINGBy Howard Freeman

Is charitable giving “an investment?”

The Chronicle of Philanthropy, among other sources, has noted in recent years the movement toward understanding one’s charitable gift as an “investment.” We applaud this distinction, because it brings with it the mandate that the charity

must be accountable for the proper use of the gift. But it is also important to define what we mean by “investment” and what returns are to be expected. Effectiveness must be judged through heavenly eyes.

To understand ministry effectiveness, we need look no further than Jesus’ own earthly ministry, and its short- and long-term impact. The Gospel accounts are replete not only with Jesus’ successes but also with those who reject-ed him: the rich young ruler, the nine lepers who failed to return, Judas. Five minutes after Calvary, all who had contributed might have considered – in human terms – to have irrevocably lost all their “investment.” One thinks of Joanna (Luke 8:3) and others, who had “invested” not only money but time and sweat into the ministry.

At what historical point does one judge Christianity “suc-cessful” and therefore a good “return on investment?” Was it the first Easter Sunday? Pentecost? The establish-ment of a state religion by Constantine? What criteria should we use to structure our giving? Scripture has two answers for us.

First, we give because God says we should (Mal. 3:10). In fact, we should “test” the Lord in our giving, not only testing our own ability to get along with less for ourselves but also to test the Lord that giving toward His Kingdom is a sound investment. Giving to one’s church is a non-negotiable, even if it seems like a bad investment in hu-man terms. We give out of obedience, and our happiness comes from following the Lord.

Second, we give because we know the end of the story. We know how the investment finally pays off. Anyone who has read the Bible through to the last verse of Revelation knows that giving money toward God’s ultimate purpose is not only the safest investment; it’s the only investment that will produce a return that lasts (Cf Matt. 6:19ff).

So how do we participate in obedient giving that pro-duces a lasting return? Jesus was anointed by a woman using costly perfume, an episode that was related in all four Gospels (Matt 26, Mk 14, Lk 7, Jn 12), and an act of such import that Jesus said, “wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.” Most certainly some of the woman’s perfume spilled off Jesus’ feet onto the ground. Her actions were misinterpreted by those present, who regarded her gift as too lavish and unwise. And yet Jesus commended her, because as she had been forgiven much, she gave much. The giving was not about her but about Him.

In light of Jesus’ mercy toward us, can our giving be any less obedient, any less hilarious, any less lavish?

44 winter 05/06

ALUMNI NOTES

In Memoriam Lark, Dr. Roger K, ‘70, passed away on June 24, 2005. He is survived by his wife of 51 years, Mary A. Lark, and a brother and sister.

60sPowell, Rev. J. William, ‘62, retired from 43 years of ministry in October, 2005. He had served at churches in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Illinois and New Brunswick, Canada.

70sClark, John A., ‘73, assumed the position of Communications Specialist at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA. He is also involved as a facilitator in a local marketplace ministry called Theology Café, and has taught in the Lifelong Learning program at Emory University of Atlanta.

Pavelko, John H, ’75, celebrated eight years of being cancer free, and received a Doctor of Ministry degree from Fuller Theological Seminary. The dissertation was entitled, Reforming the Reformed Pastor.

Winter, Dr. Jeff, ‘76, is Interim Pastor of St. Paul’s Cultural Center in Antalya, Turkey. He remains president of a Presbyterian Church (USA) renewal ministry, One-by-One, that equips the local church to reach out to those who struggle with homosexuality, pornography and sexual abuse.

Herkelrath, Dr. William, ’77, is Dean of the Masters of Psychology program at Northwest University, Kirkland, WA. This program was developed four years ago with an emphasis in cross cultural studies and social justice.

80sHarper, George W., ‘83, has recently published a new book, A People So Favored of God: Boston’s Congregational Churches and Their Pastors, 1710-1760, University Press of America, and was also named Professor of Christian History and Theology and Director of Doctoral Studies at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Osijek, Croatia.

Warren, II, Thomas S., ’82, D.Min., ‘93, recently published Dead Men Talking: What Dying Teaches Us About Living, (iuniverse). In June 2005, he was elected President of the Advent Christian General Conference, headquartered in Charlotte, NC.

White, Daniel, ‘83, recently returned from a year’s deployment in Kosovo as a United States Army Chaplain, and is currently active duty chaplain for the 9th Regional Readiness Command, US Army Reserve Pacific, in Hawaii. His wife, Marilee, is homeschooling three of their four children.

90sWright, Linda, ‘91, and husband, Scott, are expecting their seventh child in April.Mitchell, Chris, ’94, co-wrote

DEVELOPMENT NEWS

Development Department Welcomes New DirectorErica Giovanniello has joined the Develop-ment team as Director of Stewardship Services.

In this capacity, she has responsibility for fundraising initiatives related to the An-

nual Fund, Partnership Program and other capital projects, and performs fundraising research, analysis, strategic planning and implementation.

Prior to joining the seminary staff, she served with a GE subsid-iary, Electric Insurance Company, Beverly, Massachusetts, in po-sitions within the Environmental Data & Analysis section ranging from New Claims Specialist and Settlement Team Leader/Man-ager, to her most recent position as Departmental Project Leader. She also served with the same subsidiary as a Human Resource Consultant, and with GE Capital Corporation in Stamford, Con-necticut, and Aetna Life and Casualty in Middletown, Connecticut.

She holds a degree in Computer Information Systems and Man-agement from Bentley College.

Erica is active at Our Savior Lutheran Church in Topsfield, Massa-chusetts, where she is on the Missions Board and Worship Team, is a youth ministry leader and committee member, and has been co-coordinator of the Vacation Bible School. She has also par-ticipated in the church’s mission outreaches to Togo, Africa, and Cochabamba, Bolivia. She is the mother of three: Erika, Chelsea and Anthony.

Nominate a high school junior for Compass The Compass Program at Gordon Conwell is currently accepting applications for 2006.

Compass partners with local church pastors to identify young people for future ministry. Each year, up to 40 high school juniors are selected nationally from across the geographic and ethnic spectrum, and participate in a Real Ministry Immersion during the summer before their senior year. This month-long program includes a wilderness experience, mission trip and introduction to theological education by Gordon-Conwell faculty. Compass scholars then continue in a four-year mentoring relationship with a pastor.

Originally funded by a Lilly Endowment grant, Compass is currently raising funds to sustain the program. “Lilly has called Compass ‘the Cadillac’ of its programs,” states Kerry Luddy, Director of Institutional Advancement—Compass. “With only seven percent of pastors under age 35 today, Compass is a needed resource in raising up young leaders with a passion to serve God.” For more information about the program’s needs, please contact Kerry at 978.646.4031 or kluddy@gcts.edu.

To learn more about Compass, go to www.gordonconwell.edu/ockenga/mccy. To apply, contact Julie Dillard at 978.646.4167 or jdillard@gcts.edu.

45winter 05/06

A Place for Skeptics with Scott Larson, recently published by Regal Books.

Nance, Darrell Lee, ’98, is serving on a new ministry field as Senior Pastor of Kinza Memorial Baptist Church in Stanfield, North Carolina, and completed a Doctor of Ministry Degree program in Pastoral Studies at Covington Theological Seminary in Georgia.

Peake, Mark, ’98, recently moved to New Jersey to serve as head of staff of the Presbyterian Church of Pleasantville in Pleasantville, New Jersey, and is also on the board of directors of the Atlantic City Presbyterian Mission Council.

Shriver, Andrew, ’98, had an ordination council on Aug 25, in the CCCC. If approved, he will be heading into the U.S. Army Chaplaincy this January and will be deployed next spring to either Iraq or Afghanistan.

Gurtner, Dr. Daniel M., ’99, earned a Ph.D. in New Testament from the University of St Andrews, celebrated the birth of his first child, Matthew (June 18, 2005), and accepted a job as Assistant Professor of New Testament at Bethel Seminary in St Paul, MN. He says, “GCTS gave me a GREAT start!”

Smith, Dana, ‘99, his wife, Kristen Lakutis Smith, ‘99, and their two sons, Micah and Caleb, have returned to Massachusetts after having served a wonderful church in Pennsylvania for six years. Dana is now the chaplain at Lexington Christian Academy in Lexington, MA.

Soh, Shin, ’99, joined the U.S. Air Force as a chaplain in June 2005, and has been assigned to Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota.

00sPan, Ju-Ta, ’00, finished his Ph.D. study at the University of Edinburgh and has become the minister of the Chinese Bible Church of Greater Boston.

Lesniewski, Sarah, ’01, and Jack and Hannah have left the jungles of Guatemala for the jungles of Chicago, where Jack will be studying at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago.

Watson, Shaye, ’01, was married on June 25, 2005, to David C. Watson, and now lives in northeast Baltimore County.

Carter, Jason. ’02, will graduate in January 2006 with a Th.M. from Princeton Theological Seminary. Jason and Lisa (Faria, ’01) will also leave in January to serve as missionaries to Equatorial Guinea with WEC-International, where they will teach at a Bible school, training and equipping pastors and leaders for the country.

Choong, Gary KG, ’02, is currently pursuing a Ph.D. (Education Administration) at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University.

Davis, Joshua F., ’02, and Margaret welcomed P.J. into their lives on May 9 of last year. Rev. Davis has been pastor of the First Congregational Church of Williamsburg (MA) for a little over a year.

Dowdell, Aaron, ’02, is employed as an in-home clinician for a program directed toward families with severely emotionally disturbed children in Lexington, KY. He has one son, Will, who will turn two in November.

Thomas, Amber, ’02, and her husband, Joshua, were blessed with a baby girl, Miriam Faith, on July 19, 2005. She weighed 5 lbs., 13 oz. and was 181⁄2 inches long.

Cho, Dan, ’03, finished an S.T.M. at Yale Divinity School in May and just started as the executive director of the Veritas Forum, a national organization seeking to engage university students and faculty in discussions about life’s hardest questions and the relevance of Jesus Christ to all of life.

Jumper, James, ’03, just entered his first year of graduate school at Harvard, studying the Hebrew Bible in the Near Eastern Languages and Cultures Program. He has three children: Michael (4), Elijah (3), Nicholas (1), and one on the way.

LaPointe, Doug, ’03, has accepted a new call, effective August 15, 2005, to First Presbyterian Church in Stuart, Florida.

Vermilion, Jon, ’03, is pastoring an English speaking multi-national church on the French Riviera in the historic village of St. Paul de Vence. His wife, Robin, gave birth to their third child in October 2005.

Henry, Doug, ’04, and his wife, Hak, have been serving as English Ministries Pastor and Assistant at the 1st Full Gospel Church of Tacoma in Washington State. “We are a community church serving families of Korean/American cultures with military backgrounds.”

Lindsay, John P., ’04, was ordained and installed as pastor of Riceville Presbyterian Church (USA), Asheville, North Carolina, in February, 2005.

Vincent, Bryan, ’05, is now Director of Student Ministries at Colorado Community Church in Denver, CO.

ALUMNI/AE NOTES

Are you receiving InCommunity, our Alumni/ae email newsletter?

As an InCommunity subscriber, you’ll receive brief monthly updates on Gordon-Conwell faculty, programs and upcoming opportunities for graduates. To begin receiving InCommunity, contact Michael Colaneri at 978.646.4064, or publicrelations@gcts.edu.

Send Us Your News

Alumni/ae Notes helps keep you connected with fellow grads. Please keep us updated on your career changes, books and articles you’ve written, new degrees, family news and other items of interest. Send news tips to editor@gcts.edu.

Know someone who would enjoy reading Contact? Send us your referrals at editor@gcts.edu and we’ll add them to our mailing list.

Sabbatical for PastorsThe Lilly Endowment’s National Clergy Renewal Program is now accepting appli-cations. Congregations are awarded up to $45,000 to design, with the pastor, a Sabbath rest and renewal program. The pastor must have a Master of Divinity de-gree. According to Lilly, “both the pastor and the congregation come away with renewed appreciation and concern for each other.” Go to http://www.gordoncon-well.edu/alumni for more information.

46 winter 05/06

ARCHAEOLOGY (also spelled ARCHEOLOGY) Scientific study of the physical evidence of past human societies recovered through excavation.

ARTIFACT An object produced by human workmanship, such as a tool, weapon or orna-ment of archaeological interest.

BASALT A hard, dense, dark, often glassy volcanic rock.

BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY The discipline developed by biblical scholars and archaeolo-gists, who used stratigraphy and ceramic/pot-tery typology to establish a reliable historical framework from earliest times through the first Christian century for the persons, events and cultures of the Bible.

CERAMIC/POTTERY TYPOLOGY The charting of changes in pottery styles.

HISTORIOGRAPHY The principles or method-ology of historical study.

INSCRIPTION Letters or words engraved, carved or printed on any surface.

LEVANT The Orient, especially the Near East.

OSTRACON A piece of ancient pottery on which writing is found.

PAPYRUS A paper made from the pith or stems of the papyrus, used as a writing mate-rial in ancient times; also, a document written on papyrus.

PHILOLOGY Historical linguistics.

SEMITIC LANGUAGES A subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic language that includes Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic and Aramaic.

SHARD (or Sherd) A piece of broken pottery

STELE An upright stone pillar that bears an inscription, carving or design, and memorial-izes a person, deity or event.

STRATIGRAPHY The reconstruction of the history of the site, layer by layer, period by period, studying debris left by successive oc-cupants of the site.

TELL An artificial mound that was the site of an ancient city. The mound can contain centuries of accumulated debris, and stand many meters high.

TOPOGRAPY Surveying the features of a region or place.

TYPOLOGY The study of types, as in system-atic classification.

ZOOMORPHIC Symbolic, literary or graphic representation of animal forms; also, attribu-tion of animal characteristics to a deity.

1 Some material for this article is taken from Dr. Stuart’s forthcoming commentary (spring 2006) on Exodus in the New American Commentary series published by Broadman and Holman.2 That Philistia was considered to be right on the border between Canaan and Egypt is indicated by the wording of Gen 26:1-2, wherein God allows Isaac to go only as far as “Abimelech, king of the Philistines” and is told not to go further by the words “Do not go down to Egypt, . . . stay in this land,” implying that to go further south past Philistia (Gerar, specifically) would be to enter Egyptian territory. 3 Indeed, not until David’s day did Israel dominate the Philistines. Thus it would hardly have been possible for the Israelites to beat them in a straight match-up a few weeks out of Egypt.4 In Ramses III’s eighth year the Egyptians claimed to have turned back an onslaught of Philistine groups trying to invade Egypt proper, according to the Medinet Habu inscriptions at Thebes. Some came by sea; others by land. According to the texts, “Their confederation was the Philistines, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen, and Weshesh, land united. They laid their hands upon the lands as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting: ‘Our plans will succeed!’” (ANET 262). In other words, the five groups known collectively by the name of their most prominent people group (the Philistines) constituted

a formidable fighting force. In the same text is also found the statement: “No land could stand before their arms,” a fairly clear assessment of Philistine military prowess.5 The Merneptah Stela is also sometimes called the “Israel Stela” because of its mention of Israel as a people living in Canaan but apparently not yet in full control of it. It is dated to the fifth year of Merneptah (about 1230 B.C.), and its claim that the Egyptians in some vague way pacified the Israelites is stylized in the sort of way that suggests little historical reliability. The actual statement about the Israelites is “Israel is laid waste, his seed is not.” (ANET 378). No actual military encounter with the Israelites is mentioned. Naturally, the Pharaoh’s claim to have subdued all of Canaan would be expected to include at least a pro forma boast that Israel was among the groups now under the Egyptian thumb. What is especially relevant to our discussion about the stela is its designation of Israel—alone among the national groups mentioned—as a people group rather than as a country/nation. This would seem to confirm its reputation, at least as far as the Egyptians were concerned, as a “small potatoes” foe.6 It was under David’s leadership, ca. 1000 B.C., that the Philistines were permanently subdued (2 Sam 8:1; 21:15-22; cf. 1 Kings 4:21).7 Indeed, Bernard Bachra (“Structural Regularities

in the Story of the Passage Through the Sea (Exod 13,17-22 and Exod 14),” SJOT 16 [2002], 246-263) points out that the entire unit of text from 13:17 through the end of ch 14 is united by a number of concentric patterns that show that it is not an editorial composite from disparate sources but a coherent composition. Thus, already what 13:16 ff. is talking about prepares the reader for what ch 14 describes.8 Josiah Derby, “The Miracle at the Red Sea.” JBQ 20 (1991-92) 250-55.9 On this route, see also vv 20, ff. Ferdinand Re-galado (“The Location of the Sea the Israelites Passed Through,” Journal of the Adventist Theological So-ciety 13 [1, 2002], 115-134) suggests that the sea through which the Israelites passed was one of the lakes now incorporated into the Suez canal district, i.e., either Lake Timsah or Lake Ballah but not the Gulf of Suez in the Red Sea itself. Our position is that the sea was indeed the Red Sea, but it is not impos-sible that the lakes of the Suez region were loosely included in the Hebrew term yam suph in Bible times.10 As in Exod 18:21, 25; Deut 1:15.11 Later, archery was more frequently used (Josh 24:12; 1 Sam 18:4; 2 Chron 26:14 et al); while spear throwing remained rare (1 Sam 13:22) and slinging became more common (Judg 20:16; 2 Chron 26:14).

CONT’D FROM PAGE 18

Recommended Reading on Biblical Archaeology

Amnon Ben-Tor, (ed.), The Archaeology of Ancient Israel. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.

A.J. Hoerth, Archaeology and the Old Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1998.

Philip J. King, Amos, Hosea, Micah: An Archaeological Commentary. Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press, 1988.

Philip J. King, Jeremiah: An Archaeological Companion. Louisville, KY: Westminster-John Knox Press, 1993. W. Harold Mare, The Archaeology of the Jerusalem Area. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987.

Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1990. J. McRay, Archaeology and the New Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1991.

A. Millard, Treasures from Bible Times. Belleville, MI: Lion, 1985.

A. Millard, Discoveries from the Time of Jesus. Batavia, IL: Lion, 1990.

Randall Price, The Stones Cry Out: What Archaeology Reveals About the Truth of the Bible. Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 1997.

Keith N. Schoville, Biblical Archaeology in Focus. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1978.

Recommended Subscriptions

Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR), Biblical Archaeology Society, Washington, DC, www.bib-arch.org

Bible and Spade, Associates for Biblical Research, Akron, PA, www.Biblearchaeology.org.

47winter 05/06

Haddon W. Robinson, Ph.D.

opening theword

I I Timothy 4:9,13

Dr. Haddon W. Robinson, Harold John Ockenga Distinguished Professor of Preaching, Gor-don-Conwell Theological Seminary, is widely recognized as an expert on biblical communica-tion, and has been named one of the 12 most effective preachers in the English-speaking world. A contributing editor for Preaching, and a Fellow and Senior Editor for Christianity Today, Dr. Robinson is a prolific writer who contributes

regularly to Our Daily Bread, and has written for publications such as Leadership, Christianity Today, Bibliotheca Sacra and Decision. He has authored seven books, including Biblical Preaching, used by 120 seminaries and Bible colleges worldwide. He is also lead teacher of the radio program Discover the Word that airs 300 times daily on stations around the world.

What a person facing death considers important reveals what matters in their life. That’s why Paul’s words at the end of his final letter are worth noticing. “Do your best to come to me quickly,” Paul writes to his young associate, Timothy. “When you come, bring the cloak I left with Carpus at Troas and my scrolls, espe-cially the parchments” (II Tim. 4:9, 13).

Paul sits chained in the Mamartine dungeon. Ahead looms a bone-chilling winter and a vio-lent death. In that stress-filled hour Paul asks Timothy for things vital to his existence. First, he needs friends. The apostle possessed rich spiritual resources and knew the presence of his risen Lord, but he needed friends. Of course, he valued the presence of his doctor, Luke, but he urges Timothy to leave his ministry in Ephesus and come to him. He also asked for Mark to come as well. At times of crisis, nothing takes the place of the presence of good friends.

Then there was the cloak, probably a travel-ing coat with long sleeves. That coat had been soaked with the brine of the Aegean Sea, yel-lowed with the dust of the Ignatian Way, and wet with the snows of Galatia and Pamphilia, and it was stained red with the blood of his beatings. Now, Paul needed that cloak again to keep his aged body from the sword-like thrusts of the winter cold.

The winter would be long and cold, and the apostle needed also to engage his mind and feed his spirit. So, he asked for his books. Paul was not a man of one book but of many. What an intriguing request! Here sits a man who wrote 13 of the inspired letters of the New Testament, but he still needed to learn from the writings of ordinary men. Never again would he preach a sermon nor would he write another inspired letter. Yet, he still felt the need to read and study.

Charles Spurgeon caught the significance of this request. “Even an apostle must read. He is in-spired and yet he wants books. He has seen the Lord and yet he wants books. . . He has been caught up into the third heaven and had heard things which it was unlawful for a man to utter, yet he wants his books.”

“What kind of person do you pity most?” some-one asked Benjamin Franklin. Franklin replied, “A lonesome man on a rainy day who does not know how to read.” He might have answered, “A lonely apostle in a dungeon without some books to read.”

Above all, of course Paul wanted his parch-ments, probably his own personal copies of Old Testament books. He had carried them, studied them, and memorized them. Yet he wanted them in his hands again so that they could comfort him and keep his perspective eternal.

A few months, or perhaps weeks, after Paul penned these words, guards dragged him from the dungeon and took him outside the city wall. He bowed his head and the executioner’s sword flashed in the sunlight, and Paul went to be with Christ.

At his death, Paul’s example speaks to us. “Read good books, and the Best Book,” it says. “Choose them carefully, and read them thoughtfully.”

48 winter 05/06

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