Biblical Archeology

[Gary Oak]

[youtube][/youtube]

This video is a good place to start

[Gary Oak]

[youtube][/youtube]

It is interesting that there is a wife of God and the figurines seem very similar to depictions of Mary and baby Jesus and by the looks of those figurines the ancient Israelites liked girls with a tremendous set of knockers

[Blue Frost]

Nova has great videos most the time, I might have seen those already.
Ill take a look when I have time, good to know even if I'm not into going to church.

[Gary Oak]

Archaeologists Uncover Entrance Gate To Goliath's City

August 05, 2015 | Arutz Sheva

An archaeological expedition has discovered the fortifications and entrance gate of the biblical city of Gath of the Philistines, home of Goliath and the largest city in the land during the 10th-9th century BCE, about the time of the "United Kingdom" of Israel and King Ahab of Israel.

The excavations, conducted by a team from the Bar-Ilan University headed by Prof. Aren Maeir, are being conducted in the Tel Zafit National Park, located in the Judean Foothills, about halfway between Jerusalem and Ashkelon in central Israel.

Prof. Maeir, of the Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology, said that the city gate that was discovered is among the largest ever found in Israel and is evidence of the status and influence of the city of Gath during this period.

In addition to the monumental gate, an impressive fortification wall was discovered, as well as various building in its vicinity, such as a temple and an iron production facility. These features, and the city itself were destroyed by Hazael King of Aram Damascus, who besieged and destroyed the site at around 830 BCE, according to a statement from Bar-Ilan University.

The city gate of Philistine Gath is referred to in I Samuel 21 in the story of David's escape from King Saul to Achish, King of Gath.

The Ackerman Family Bar-Ilan University Expedition to Gath is a long-term investigation aimed at studying the archaeology and history of one of the most important sites in Israel.

Tell es-Safi/Gath is one of the largest tells (ancient ruin mounds) in Israel and was settled almost continuously from the 5th millennium BCE until modern times.

The archaeological dig is led by Prof. Maeir, along with groups from the University of Melbourne, University of Manitoba, Brigham Young University, Yeshiva University, University of Kansas, Grand Valley State University of Michigan, several Korean universities and additional institutions throughout the world.

So far, according to the statement from Bar-Ilan, the group has discovered Philistine Temples dating to the 11th through 9th century BCE, evidence of an earthquake in the 8th century BCE possibly connected to the earthquake mentioned in the Book of Amos I:1, the earliest decipherable Philistine inscription ever to be discovered, which contains two names similar to the name Goliath.

They have also uncovered a large assortment of objects of various types linked to Philistine culture; remains relating to the earliest siege system in the world, constructed by Hazael, King of Aram Damascus around 830 BCE, along with extensive evidence of the subsequent capture and destruction of the city by Hazael, as mentioned in Second Kings 12:18; evidence of the first Philistine settlement in Canaan (around 1200 BCE); different levels of the earlier Canaanite city of Gath; and remains of the Crusader castle "Blanche Garde" at which Richard the Lion-Hearted is known to have been.


Read more at http://www.prophecynewswatch.com/2015/A ... QvT1RhB.99

[Blue Frost]

Very cool. want to see photos now

[Gary Oak]

This is long but it is interesting. There are a number of related articles on there that also look very interesting. I doubt that I will have time now to check them out. I will have plenty of time tonight.

King Solomon’s Mines Discovered: Kings and Pharaohs - Part I

- See more at: http://www.ancient-origins.net/opinion- ... XF7jS.dpuf

[Gary Oak]

I wonder how this discovery will fit with the bible's interpretion. By the looks of his corpse in the photo it looks like there is quite a lot of well preserved soft tissue. Perhaps they will be able to determine what his skin colour was, eye colour, hair and amny other details.

Nepal: Frozen Caveman Discovered in Himalaya

Pokhara| A group of climbers on an expedition in the Himalaya Mountains, have stumbled upon a complexe of caverns that seem to have recently surfaced after a series of violent avalanches in the region. Inside one of the caves, the team of Norwegian and Swedish mountaineers, found the remains of a humanoid male from the paleolithic era.

According to the primary analysis of the skeleton, it seems the bones belong to an adult male Homo habilis, which is believed to have lived from approximately 2.33 to 1.44 million years ago, during the Gelasian Pleistocene period. Further tests and analysis will be done to determine the exact nature of the remains, their age, and the individual’s cause of death. A crude stone spear and a few badly damaged leather objects were also recovered on the site and are currently being studied.

According to some experts, this could be by far the oldest sign of human life ever found in the region, dating possibly millions of years. Others seem to believe that the man was part of a small group that long-outlived the extinction of the majority of his species. Whatever the results of the carbon dating test, this opens a whole new interpretation of generally accepted views of the colonization of the planet by the human species. According to most widely accepted theories on the subject, Homo habilis isn’t normally believed to have travelled this far from Africa and lived in such hostile climates.

The remains of the man seem extremely well preserved considering their age, a miracle due to to the very constant and extremely cold temperature of the area, that would have kept his body constantly covered in ice for milleniums. They were discovered in a large cave, part of of a complexe of at least 65 separates cavities of varying sizes, that could have been a prehistoric settlement. A thorough search of the site could reveal many more artefacts and possibly other human and animal remains, but unfortunately the hostility of the climatic conditions and the remoteness of its location will certainly pose a lot of logistic and organizational problems for the preparation of a scientific expedition.


http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/nepal-f ... -himalaya/

[Blue Frost]

Something over 6000 years is not believed in Bible circles because that one monk added up the timeline in the Bible.
15000 years by by the oldest by some scholars.
Something other than modern man is not man either I guess, no links to apes aloud.

[Gary Oak]

This is not an ape though. This caveman is a human. Perhaps most interpretations of the bible aren't correct in regards to the pre flood world.

[Blue Frost]

Humans are all apes, but like to think they are not.
Any link that goes back to the hairy ape bible followers cringe at usually, the creation had God making man from his image.
Image could be more than looks though, mind, body, or soul, but people see it as image.

[Gary Oak]

Archeologists may be getting close to finally finding out who the Pheonicians really were. I have read about some evidence that the Pheonicians may very well have made it to the Americas and Australia and if that is the case probably near everywhere else too.

Ancient philistine cemetery in Israel could solve one of the Bible’s biggest mysteries

One of the Bible’s deepest and most important mysteries may be about to be solved.

Archaeologists appear to have found a cemetery belonging to the Philistines for the first time ever, along with the remains of 200 people who were buried there. And together they might help shed light on one the Bible’s most mysterious people.

The scientists have said that the members of the Biblical nation didn’t appear to be “philistines” – finding the people buried alongside jewellery and perfumed oil. They will now conduct further tests that could shed yet more light on the maligned people.

Those discoveries might be enough to make us rethink today’s use of the word philistine, which tends to refer to uncultured people who don’t know enough about the arts.

"The Philistines have had some bad press, and this will dispel a lot of myths," said Lawrence Stager, an architect who has led the expedition that found the cemetery since 1985.

Until now, most of our understanding of the Philistines came from the things that they have left behind. But now for the first time we have found their remains.

"After decades of studying what Philistines left behind, we have finally come face to face with the people themselves," said Daniel M. Master, professor of archaeology at Wheaton College and one of the leaders of the excavation. "With this discovery we are close to unlocking the secrets of their origins."

The discovery was finally unveiled Sunday at the close of a 30-year excavation by the Leon Levy Expedition, a team of archaeologists from Harvard University, Boston College, Wheaton College in Illinois and Troy University in Alabama.

The archaeologists kept the discovery a secret for three years until the end of their dig because of a unique hazard of archaeology in modern-day Israel: they did not want to attract ultra-Orthodox Jewish protesters, Mr Master said.

"We had to bite our tongues for a long time," he said.

In the past, the ultra-Orthodox have staged demonstrations at excavations where human remains are found, arguing that the remains could be Jewish and that disturbing them would violate a religious prohibition.

Mr Stager's team dug down about 3 metres (10 feet) to uncover the cemetery, which they found to have been used centuries later as a Roman vineyard.

Ancient Roman texts shed light first Londoners 2000 years on

On hands and knees, workers brushed away layers of dusty earth to reveal the brittle white bones of entire Philistine skeletons reposed as they were three millennia ago.

Decorated juglets believed to have contained perfumed oil were found in graves. Some bodies were still wearing bracelets and earrings. Others had weapons.

The archeologists also discovered some cremations, which the team say were rare and expensive for the period, and some larger jugs contained the bones of infants.

"The cosmopolitan life here is so much more elegant and worldly and connected with other parts of the eastern Mediterranean," Stager said, adding that this was in contrast to the more modest village lifestyle of the Israelites who lived in the hills to the east.

Archaeologists and biblical scholars have long believed the Philistines came from the Aegean region, based on pottery found in excavations of Philistine sites.

But scholars have debated where exactly in the Aegean region the Philistines came from: mainland Greece, the islands of Crete or Cyprus, or even Anatolia, in modern-day Turkey.

The bones might hold the answers, said archaeologist Yossi Garfinkel, an Israeli expert on the period who did not participate in the dig. He called the cemetery find "a very significant discovery indeed."

The excavation of the cemetery has also shed light on Philistine burial practices.

The Philistines buried their dead with perfume bottles, placed near the face. Near the legs were jars that likely held oil, wine or food. In some cases, archaeologists found the dead were buried wearing necklaces, bracelets, earrings, and even toe rings. Some were buried with their weapons.

"This is how Philistines treated their dead, and it's the code book to decoding everything," said archaeologist Adam Aja, a participant in the dig.

Finds from the cemetery went on display Sunday in an Israel Museum exhibition held at the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem.

Additional reporting by agencies

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/anc ... &ocid=iehp

[Blue Frost]

Nice find, they where great sea people who did so much, and even speculated to be related to the Trojans, and Carthaginians.

[Gary Oak]

Physical evidence prophet Isaiah existed discovered in Jerusalem

An ancient clay seal discovered in Jerusalem may have belonged to the prophet Isaiah and could be the earliest physical evidence of the biblical figure.
"We appear to have discovered a seal impression, which may have belonged to the prophet Isaiah, in a scientific, archaeological excavation," lead archaeologist Eilat Mazar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Institute of Archaeology said in a statement.

The clay seal was discovered in Jerusalem in 2009, during excavations at the Ophel in East Jerusalem. It contains the word, Yesha’yahu, the Hebrew for ‘Isaiah.’

It’s been damaged over time, making it more of a challenge to determine which Isaiah it refers to. The upper part is missing while the lower left part is damaged.

The seal has a second word which isn’t legible as a letter is believed to be missing. If that missing letter was the Hebrew letter aleph, it would read ‘prophet’ in Hebrew, and could be the first evidence of the prophet’s existence, aside from the Bible. However, if the letter isn’t an aleph, the word could be a location or a father’s name.

"The critically important letter that would be needed to confirm that the second word is the title ‘prophet’ is an aleph,” Christopher Rollston, professor of Semitic languages at George Washington University, told National Geographic. “But no aleph is legible on this bulla [clay seal], and so that reading cannot be confirmed at all."

Drawing by Reut Livyatan Ben-Arie/© Eilat Mazar; Photo by Ouria Tadmor/© Eilat Mazar
Rollston also pointed to the fact that the Bible commonly refers to “the prophet” rather than simply “prophet,” casting further doubt on the archaeologists’ theory. "In short, if this were the word 'prophet,' I would have liked to have seen the word 'the,' as in 'Isaiah the prophet,’” he said.

Isaiah advised King Hezekiah, who ruled the area between the eighth and seventh century B.C. The seal was found 10ft (3 meters) from a seal impression belonging to King Hezekiah at an excavation site in the Old City of Jerusalem, at the base of the southern wall of Temple Mount, or Haram al-Sharif. The area is a holy site for Christians, Jews and Muslims, and is home to the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock.

The site contained a number of impressions stamped on clay, Mazar explains in Biblical Archaeological Review. The bulla, each measuring about 0.4 inches (1cm) in diameter, had been stamped with a seal bearing the name of its owner.

The excavation site included a number of seals belonging to a family named Bes, a name which isn’t known from the Bible.

This isn’t the first time two seal impressions of people mentioned together in the Bible have been found near one another. During the City of David excavations which took place between 2005–2008, seal impressions of Yehukhal ben Sheleḿiyahu ben Shovi and Gedaliyahu ben Pashḥur, high officials in King Ẓedekiah’s court (Jeremiah 38:1), were found only a few feet apart, Mazar said.






https://www.rt.com/news/419645-isaiah-p ... discovery/

[Blue Frost]

Very interesting, to bad the one letter is missing for the best proof.

[Gary Oak]

Such a precision meteor strike has to be the work of God.

New Scientific Study Confirms Biblical Account Of Sodom

A recent scientific study confirmed what students of the Bible have known all along: a catastrophe from the heavens destroyed all life in the area of the Dead Sea many thousands of years ago.

After a decade of digging, archaeologist Phillip Silvian of Trinity Southwest University in Albuquerque reported on his research on the Dead Sea area last week at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research.Silvia led excavations at five large sites on the Jordanian side of the Jordan River. According to Silvia, the 15 square-mile circular Middle Ghor was a fertile plain, populated continuously for at least 2,500 hundred years. Some form of catastrophe 3,700 years ago brought this to a sudden end, wiping out all of the estimated 40,000 to 65,000 people who inhabited the area at the time.

Studies of the remains of 120 small settlements in the region showed signs of extreme, collapse-inducing heat and wind. Pottery was discovered to have been exposed to heat so intense that it melted into glass. Zircon crystals in those glassy coats formed within one second at extremely high temperatures, perhaps as hot as the surface of the sun. Pottery fragments discovered at the Tall el-Hammam site contained tiny, spherical mineral grains that apparently rained down on the area.

The event was so catastrophic that the area remained unpopulated for 600 years.

The signs were clear but the precise nature of the catastrophe eluded researchers until they turned their eyes heavenward.

They suspected a huge and powerful meteor strike but the lack of a crater stymied them. An impact of that intensity would surely leave behind signs. The researchers came up with a slightly different scenario: a meteoric airburst like one that took place 100 years ago in Russia.

Tunguska is a sparsely populated forested region in Siberia, Russia. On the morning of 30 June 1908, a huge explosion flattened 770 square miles of forest. The explosion is generally attributed to the airburst of a meteor. Scientists concluded the destruction was the result of an airburst 3-6 miles above the area of destruction. The burst equaled that of a 15-megaton nuclear explosion, or 1,000 times more powerful than the first nuclear bomb ever made that was dropped on Hiroshima 37 years later. There were no known human casualties in the Tunguska Event.

"The destruction not only of Tall el-Hammam (Sodom), but also its neighbors (Gomorrah and the other cities of the plain) was most likely caused by a meteoritic airburst event," the authors conclude.

Silvia also found evidence that shockwaves from the explosion pushed a bubbling brine of Dead Sea salts over once-fertile farmland.

The scientific explanation clearly reflects the Biblical description of the destruction of the twin cities of evil located in the same area.

Hashem rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah sulfurous fire from Hashem out of heaven. He annihilated those cities and the entire Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities and the vegetation of the ground. Genesis 19:24-25

The similarity of their conclusions was not lost on the researchers. Co-author of the research paper, Dr. Steven Collins, wrote in an article in Biblical Archaeology Review article that the Biblical account was a result of a real event being incorporated into the collective unconscious and consequently being recorded in the Bible.

"The memory of the destruction of ha-kikkar, with its large population and extensive agricultural lands, was preserved in the Book of Genesis and ultimately incorporated into a traditional tale that, drawing on the layer of ash that covered the destruction of one of its major cities, remembered a place consumed by a fiery catastrophe from 'out of the heavens'," he writes. "The Bible gives the city's name: Sodom."

Originally published at Breaking Israel News - reposted with permission.

Read more at http://prophecynewswatch.com/article.cf ... WbiUPTg.99

[Blue Frost]

Being that the area is volcanic didn't hurt any which brought the fire, and brimstone.

[Gary Oak]

I wonder if there is any changes that have been made in the last 1,200 years ? I suspect that this current bible will be word for word the same.

1,200yo Bible found as cops BUST smugglers in Turkey (VIDEO)

https://www.rt.com/news/450778-suspecte ... ht-turkey/

[Blue Frost]

To bad it's in such bad shape, and likely worse off since it's not been protected from the air, and peoples hands.
It should have been in an air free environment.

[Gary Oak]

Perhaps the people who created this mural were at this actual event. https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/anci ... -pT5jCo8aE



Ancient mosaic found near Sea of Galilee depicts Jesus' loaves and fishes miracle
Rory Sullivan, CNN • Updated 20th September 2019
(CNN) — A colorful mosaic recently found in an ancient church in Israel appears to depict a miracle Jesus is said to have performed nearby -- the feeding of the 5,000 -- archaeologists say.
The discovery was made in the "Burnt Church" in Hippos, an archaeological site on a mountain a mile east of the Sea of Galilee. The church was built around 1,500 years ago and destroyed by fire in the early 7th century AD.
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Partially exposed a decade ago, the church has now been fully excavated by a team from the University of Haifa. The tiles uncovered in the apse show two fish and five loaves, matching the New Testament story of Jesus feeding the 5,000.
Michael Eisenberg, a co-leader of the excavation, told CNN: "As far as I know, this is the best view from a Byzantine church from one of the cities or settlements or villages around the Sea of Galilee.
"It is obvious that the people praying there....of course recognized the geographic position of what they thought would be the real place of the feeding of the 5,000."
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Although cautious about the interpretation of the mosaic, Eisenberg added: "It opens up a very healthy academic debate on where the miracle happened... I would suspect it happened at the furthest end of the territory of Hippos."
Christian tradition holds that the miracle took place on the northwestern edge of the Sea of Galilee, where the Church of the Multiplication now stands in Tabgha. Hippos' extensive territory was on the eastern side of the lake.
Eisenberg said he believes Jesus performed the miracle in the east, before he walked on water and crossed to the northwestern shore.
He noted that the Church of the Multiplication at Tabgha has a mosaic showing two fish but only four loaves of bread -- a slightly different total from the one depicted in the Burnt Church mosaic, which corresponds exactly to the story told in the New Testament.
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Although the mosaic in the Burnt Church is not of the finest quality, it was very well preserved, thanks to the fire that destroyed the building. The entire roof collapsed during the blaze, leaving a 12- to 16-inch blanket of ash over the mosaic that acted as a protective layer over the centuries.
As well as the two fish and five loaves in the apse, the mosaic in the nave details two rows of three differently sized fish. There are also baskets of pomegranates, apples and flowers.

[Blue Frost]

what a cute mural, and great find by the archeologist. I hope they clean, and preserve it.
They say it's not the finest quality of workmanship, but it's quality enough if they tried since many of the churches was poor unless in a big city.
Also unless a catholic church in the east these churches was on their own a lot of times.