hi this is Matt Baker about a year ago we posted a video called 37 Bible characters found through archaeology in that video I emphasized the fact that all 37 of those people indicated here with a verification check mark lived during the Iron Age or later this is because the Bible is basically an Iron Age book meaning that it was during the Iron Age that the Bible started to be written to put it another way by the time the biblical authors put ink to parchment the Bronze Age was already a distant memory and therefore they had to rely on a lot of guesswork mixed with imagination to come up with stories from earlier times which is why Genesis and exodus read more like myth and Legend than say Second Kings which includes a lot of historical details that nicely line up with what we know from other sources now while critical Scholars are all basically in agreement about all of this there are still some people from certain religious C who continue to believe that the Bible is 100% literal history these people sometimes cite certain archaeological finds as evidence for Biblical characters from the Bronze Age therefore in today's video I'm going to take a look at some of these claims and I'm going to do so with the help of religion for breakfast tablets and temples dig it with Raven aluka and digital hamurabi but before we jump into it I want to tell you about a short cast that I've been listening to on blinkist a short cast is simply a short podcast and blinkist has lots of them as you might know blinkist is a website an app that provides you with the main ideas of over 6,500 books which you can either read or listen to usually in less than 30 minutes and sometimes in even less than 15 I often check out a book on blinkist before making a decision on whether or not I want to purchase and read the whole book well blinkist also has shortcasts such as Dan Snow's history hit I recently listened to this episode entitled archaeology discoveries and historical biases in fact it helped me in preparing this video and I think you'd like it too so if you'd like to get a 7-Day free trial and 40% off blinkist annual premium just click the link in the description or pinned comment or you can scan the QR code on screen right now all right back to the Bronze Age let's begin by taking a closer look at where the division between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age occurs on our Biblical family tree chart basically the dividing line would look something like this so characters such as the three Patriarchs as well as Moses all belong in the Bronze Age whereas characters like d'vorah Ruth David and Samuel belong in the early Iron Age as mentioned in our previous video the earliest Israelite leader for whom we have a a contemporary extra biblical source for is omry we do have an earlier mention of David outside of the Bible but it's not actually from a contemporary source as it only mentions him as being the ancestor of a later King so if we want a contemporary Source then no we don't actually have anything for David however when it comes to non-israelites mentioned by name in the Bible we do have someone even earlier than omry and that that is Shashank the first being that he was a pharaoh of Egypt we have lots of contemporary extra biblical sources for him okay so the goal of this video is to see if we can get a verification check mark for anyone even earlier than Shashank and in particular someone on the Bronze Age side of this big blue line so let's start with who I think is the best possible candidate for making this happen he's not actually shown on this family tree chart but if he was he'd be placed somewhere here as a contemporary of Moses I'll let Dr Andrew Mark Henry from religion for breakfast explain more balam son of beor is one of the more mysterious figures in the Bible a non-israelite prophet who does the bidding of the god of Israel only to be later cast as a villain and killed by the Israelites he appears in the Book of Numbers CH 22 the Israelites are nearing the end of their 40-year wander through the Wilderness after escaping from Egypt and they're camped on the plains of Moab AB just Northeast of the Dead Sea in modern day Jordan and the moabites are understandably alarmed the Israelites have just destroyed a few of their neighbors and the moabites are afraid that they're next so the king of Moab decides to hire balum who was famous for his very effective blessings and curses maybe with some Supernatural help with balum cursing the Israelites the moabites can properly defend themselves while balum Journeys to Moab on a donkey God grows angry with him and sends an angel to block his path the donkey can see the angel balum can't and while balum is striking the donkey trying to get it to move the donkey starts talking and is like hey why are you doing this to me finally balum sees the angel of the Lord who says you can go to the moabites but speak only what I tell you to speak and so when balum arrives instead of cursing the Israelites He blesses them in a series of four poetic oracles now up until the 1960s that's basically all we knew about balum along with a few other passing references in the Bible but in 1967 archaeologist discovered an inscription on a few pieces of plaster at an archaeological site called dear Allah the deer Allah inscription dates to around 800 BCE and it's written in a canite dialect with some similarities with Aramaic it starts this is the book of balum son of beor a seer of the Gods the gods came to him at night and he beheld a vision in accordance with L's utterance so here we have an extra Biblical reference to a Seer named balum critical Scholars agree that this is referencing the same character that we see in numbers the text describes the chief god of the king canite Pantheon L coming to him with a message of disaster the gods have banded together the Shai gods have established a council and they have said to the god of shagar sew up close up the Heavens with a dense Cloud that Darkness exists there not Brilliance so balum learns of a plan from the shadine some sort of divine Council of gods who oppos the chief God L and their planning to blanket the land in darkness the text as you can see is very fragmentary but it seems that balum successfully averts the shad's plan the historian numbers and the dear Allah inscription demonstrate that balum was a known character in the region east of the Jordan River now some Scholars think he was a historical figure some sort of wandering profit for hire but at the very least this is evidence of a shared tradition in the region about a heavily mythologized celebrity Prophet when we compare this inscription with the Book of Numbers we can see how Israelite religion was embedded in the local cultural context and has affinities with other religious traditions in the region in the de la inscription balum is a prophet for the chief God l and in several instances in his Oracles in the Book of Numbers he refers to the god of Israel as L we see something similar with the Council of gods in the dear Allah inscription called the shadine shadine is a plural form of the word Shai which appears in balam's oracles referencing the Israelite God the Oracle of balum who hears the words of L who sees the vision of the Shai usually translated as God and the almighty respectively and narratively speaking Scholars have pointed out similarities between the story in numbers and the inscription both in include poetic oracles and both include the plot point of having a vision at night that's then reported the next morning Scholars argue that this means the story numbers knows what a balum story should sound like in other words if balum is a stock character in the local folklore then it would have been a literary convention to include a nocturnal Vision so Scholars generally agree that the dear La inscription and at least parts of the story and numbers derive from the same cultural context though repackaged for different audiences now none of this proves the historicity of the story in numbers the dear inscription dates to the Iron Age around 800 BCE The Book of Numbers describes a narrative that claims to be situated in the late Bronze Age maybe around the 15th century bcee but numbers itself the book was composed centuries later also during the Iron Age so we're talking a span of hundreds of years between the supposed events of Numbers 22 and the date of composition of both ad deot inscription and Numbers 22 it's more likely that both of these texts are drawing on a local tradition about balum that was circulating east of the Jordan River in the 9th to 7th centuries BCE the story in numbers also seems to reflect the political reality of the Iron Age when the kingdom of Moab was a frequent rival of the Israelite kingdoms so as Dr Henry explained it is possible that balum was in fact a real historical person however the extra biblical Source we have for him comes from the Iron Age not the Bronze Age so in other words it's not a contemporary Source or it could be that balum actually lived lived in the Iron Age and that the biblical author simply placed him further back in time either way we can't give balum the same kind of verification that we can give to Shashank or omry balam's verification would be more at the level of David regardless the dear Allah inscription is an amazing find and does at least open the possibility that the Bible contains a reference to a real Bronze Age person who was important enough in the region that his name was remembered centuries later let's now take a look at the most important biblical figure from the Bronze Age Moses is there any evidence in the archaeological record of him well there's one particular inscription that some argue does in fact mention Moses I'm going to let PhD candidate Lan Davis from the upand cominging YouTube channel tablets and temples tell you more this is the Sinai 361 inscription one of several carved inscriptions discovered near an ancient mining site on the cyani peninsula bold claims have been made that these texts contain the name Moses as well as descriptions of events from The Exodus such as Moses performing Miracles and creating a bronze serpent statue the inscriptions date to the second millennium BCE and are written in prootic the oldest known alphabetic script from which The Phoenician and paleo Hebrew alphabet is descended so are these writings evidence for Moses and the The Exodus one such Advocate is Dr Douglas petrovich who translates the inscription as follows our bound servitude has lingered Moses then provoked astonishment it is a year of astonishment because of the lady such a reading evokes images of slavery and miracles performed by Moses in the book of Exodus another translation by Professor calov reads this is the site of where stood the snake of bronze that a meaning Moses mahb Baal made he argues this is a reference to the bronze serpent Moses created in the book of numbers while these Sensational claims are exciting the reality is these translations have been heavily criticized and the texts likely don't say Moses at all the Hebrew name Moses comes from the Egyptian word Messi meaning to give birth and has S as its middle letter however translators who found Moses in the Sinai inscriptions have mistaken a letter for The Phoenician s sound when it is actually a sin adic th letter as in thin so if the word is a name it's probably math which means twin in ugaritic the scholar Dr Aaron Wilson Wright has demonstrated that these Sensational Moses translations rely on restoring words that aren't in the inscription and inventing new meanings for other words so she proposes the the following translation o returner those who tell people about Marth a beloved of the lady the lady is the Egyptian goddess hathur this is a common expression among the Sinai inscriptions another text Sinai 351 reads beloved of the lady are those who tell people about math the minor and extractor and still another 349 calls Mart the chief of miners it appears these inscriptions commemorate a mining official possibly named MTH and offer blessings from hathur the texts make no reference to Moses snakes or Miracles but they are a fascinating example of writing in the world's oldest alphabet and Scholars are continuing to work on deciphering them okay so maybe those inscriptions don't refer to Moses but there's lots of other evidence for the Exodus right well no in recent years several popular doc mentaries have come out which claim to go through lots of evidence for the Exodus but in each case the evidence presented is extremely flimsy and has not been verified by any actual experts so for this topic I'm going to let a real archaeologist raven d Silva from the channel dig it with Raven explain further she has a new book coming out called the other ancient civilizations decoding archaeology less celebrated cultures which I'll leave a link to in the description over to you Raven two Stone pillars flank the Gulf of Alaba in the Red Sea supposedly they were erected by King Solomon to commemorate the crossing of the Red Sea by the Hebrews after they were freed by Moses but are these pillars actual archaological evidence of this biblical event let's get into it in 1978 Ron Wyatt an American nurse anesthetist and amateur archaeologist who claimed to have made over 100 biblical archaeological discoveries found a red granite pillar at the Egyptian side of the gulf at Noba according to his report it was found on its side in the water itself but today you can find it on the side of a road erected in concrete about 500 ft away from the beach Wyatt said that there was supposedly an inscription or there should have been an inscription on this pillar that had since been eroded away and he also said that it was of Hebrew or pH origin and dated to around 3,000 years old I tried to look at this pillar and date it off of the photos and biblical documentaries that are out there but there aren't really many very detailed highquality images of this pillar so it's it's really difficult to do so I can't tell you how old it is with any confidence but looking at the design of this pillar I don't know about you but it looks very nondescript to me that means it could be from anywhere or any time throughout history to be honest unless we get a closer look at it and do some actual scientific research on it the pillar doesn't have a capital so that also doesn't really help in its identification and what I think of Phoenician pillar I think of this Ron Wyatt himself did not do any scientific studies on it from what I've seen because there are no peer-reviewed papers out there to actually talk about any of his discoveries so again there's nothing firmly documenting it anywhere saying that it was from 3,000 years ago and it is of this design in 1984 Wyatt claimed that he found a second pillar directly opposite newba on the opposite side of the gulf in Saudi Arabia it was apparently immediately removed by Saudi authorities but it was apparently inscribed with the following words on it Yahweh Pharaoh misraim or Egypt Moses death water Solomon and Edom in what context whyatt didn't say he also didn't mention any fragments of words or other words that maybe were you know connecting words or sentence words and he didn't mention like the placement of the words or what context there's no rubbing of the words or any photographic evidence of the words so it all just seems very convenient and keyword themed it's almost like he was doing SEO for a pillar there's that extra layer of convenience as well because it was a mysterious pillar that was found and then it was swiftly taken away immediately only to have like a plaque in Saudi Arabia marking where it was and that's literally the only physical remains that we have is this like little commemorative P plaque on the other side of the Red Sea if Wyatt had taken any sort of photos of the pillar or again inscriptions anything like that then we could maybe talk about its legitimacy and a little bit more of the dating and its connection to the one in NOA but until then you know it's one of those things where the jury's out and you won't be able to convince me until I see some hard scientific evidence I also quickly want to point out that King Solomon supposedly erected these pillars 400 years after the Red Sea Crossing apparently happened even if he did erect these pillars that doesn't actually mean that the crossing of the Red Sea happened people erect religious monuments all the time and if it was so long after it happened happed it doesn't actually confirm that this event took place what I do find interesting is that Ron and his sons found and photographed supposed Coral encrusted Chariot pieces at the bottom of the Red Sea as well as chariot wheels and Bones belonging to both humans and horses apparently some of the wood that they found had gold gilding on it but it was too deteriorated and fragile to actually be removed from the water for any further scientific study images of these finds were shown to Dr nasif Muhammad Hassan the director of Egyptian Antiquities at the time though whenever I Google his name only biblical websites come up so but Dr Hassan claimed that one of the wheels was from the 18th Dynasty apparently this is the only time that an eight spoked wheel was used in ancient Egypt which does include the reign of remesy II I'm not an expert in Egyptian chariots so I'm can't tell you like how many spokes were used for the Wheels throughout all of Egyptian history but I can show you an image of Ramsey II in a chariot when he was fighting the Hittites overall there's just a lot of speculation and looking at something that could fit and making a claim without any sort of scientific evidence to back you up also I'm sorry you can't look at this Coral formation and immediately claim that it's an entire ancient set of chariot wheels still attached to its axle all of the overlays on these bits of Coral supposedly marking out all of the spokes on a wheel are just wild to me I'm not an underwater archaeologist but this just looks it just doesn't look right doesn't look right at all apparently a human femur that Ron Wyatt found in the Red Sea was tested at Stockholm University and it was determined that it came from a man about 165 to 17 cm tall but from what I saw there was no documentation stating actually how old it it was so again it could have just been it could just be a bone it might have just been a bone that was in the sea from someone else at any other point in history contrary to some beliefs Archaeology is in fact a science and we don't make any conclusions unless there is irrefutable evidence that has been checked multiple times by varying methods so until there are proper archaeological tests surveys excavations to me theill of Solomon will remain simply a pillar in my eyes and all of the coral remains underneath the water will simply be a rich biodiverse home for sea life so yeah this all boils down to how archaeology actually works in the real world you can't just say oh I found this thing but oops I didn't take photos and now it's gone or I think these fuzzy photos kind of look like Wheels but no expert has ever seem bothered to take a closer look at them even though the government of Egypt makes lots of money off tourism and is usually more than willing to examine just about anything if they think it is legitimate so the bottom line is major discoveries are always reported in peer reviewed journals so that other experts can chime in and either debate things or verify things they are not announced via commercially made documentaries this General principle can be applied to lots more ridiculous claims that biblical literalists make such as that this structure in Turkey is Noah's Arc or that this statue is Joseph because it comes from around the right time and place and the figure appears to be wearing a multicolored coat but just because something seems to fit the biblical narrative it doesn't automatically mean that it does okay so when it comes to Moses and the Exodus story The there is currently no archaeological evidence that points to a person like the Bible describes or an event like the Bible describes now that doesn't mean that there was definitely no Moses likee person probably the story is based on something but it's safe to assume that the biblical version of Moses and the Exodus is more literature than it is literal history but what about the three Patriarchs Abraham Isaac and Jacob when it comes to them there's a flame out there that goes far beyond just finding their names etched into stones in this case some people believe that we actually know their precise burial place Muslims in particular believe that at this site in Hebron known as the Cave of the Patriarchs lay not only the actual bones of Abraham Isaac and Jacob but of Adam and Eve as well I'll let the useful charts animator swish raymon who also hosts the Islamic history History Channel Al mukama explain in 638 CE the Holy Land came under the control of the youngest of the three abrahamic religions Islam the rashidun caliphate under K Omar conquered cities like Jerusalem Gaza and Hebron which marked the transfer of the biblical holy sites many of which are holy to Muslims Jews and Christians to Muslims while the caliphate didn't persecute religious minorities and even protected many of their sacred sites such as the Church of the Holy Seiler many other sites were converted to the Islamic tradition and made into mosques among these newly islamized mosques was the ibraimi mosque which was previously a Byzantine era Basilica enclosed in a herodian era complex this complex was built shortly before the birth of Jesus on top of a cave known as the Cave of the Patriarchs it's called that because according to the traditions of Judaism Christianity and Islam this is where the Patriarchs and their wives are buried it's said that the patriarch Abraham known as ibraim in Islam bought this cave when his wife Sarah passed away then Abraham his son Isaac and Isaac's son Jacob were buried along with their wives Sarah Rebecca and Leia respectively According to some sources Adam and Eve are buried there as well the complex that we see today was built by King Herod the Great of Judea shortly before Jesus was born however Josephus who wrote so much about herod's construction projects doesn't give him credit for the complex in 2020 a paper was published that mentioned Pottery found at the site from multiple cities that dated as far back as the 8th Century BCE this puts the site as a location that was visited by people maybe from all over the Holy Land as far back as during the days of the kingdom of Judah the Babylonian exile was still some two centuries in the future at this point what we know as Judaism today which is in fact rabic Judaism didn't exist in its current form at all however while the 8th Century BCE is quite far back it's still around 1,000 years after Abraham is supposed to have lived which is around 1800 BCE or so now according to the vast majority of academic Scholars Adam Abraham Isaac and Jacob are purely mythological characters and did not in fact exist since they didn't exist their burial sites didn't exist either however this didn't stop people from claiming to have found bones down there during the Islamic era it was forbidden to go into the caves below the complex as a form of respect for the Patriarchs however there was a brief period of of around the century the 12th century to be precise when the Holy Land was under Christian control after the first crusade during this period the caves were more accessible and a monk claimed to have found bones there although many sites around the world claim to be burial sites for various biblical and quranic figures there are even multiple places claiming to be the burial place of the same person so the whole thing isn't very scientific Okay so it's safe to say that the traceable activity at the cave of the patriarch site goes no further back than the Iron Age even though it supposedly contains the remains of people from the Bronze Age so unless someone opens the tombs and tests the supposed bones in there this site cannot be used as evidence for the existence of any biblical character and the same goes for the plethora of other sites most of which are Islamic which claim to hold the bones of other Biblical characters such as Abel Noah and Moses okay so I'm actually going to end this video on a positive note that's because there is one particular figure from the Bronze Age for whom we have lots of contemporary evidence for that might actually be mentioned by name in the Bible so this is not a central biblical character but rather a foreign figure that is maybe mentioned in passing in the biblical text in fact it's a Bronze Age figure whose name is is very well known hamurabi king of Babylon so obviously for this last segment I had to ask a serologist Dr Joshua Bowen from the channel digital hamurabi for his thoughts in Genesis 141 we read now in the days of amrel king of shinar Aria king of elisar kador laom king of alam and tal king of who are these Kings because Shar is known to be another name for the land of Babylonia in the Hebrew Bible this led Scholars to look for a Babylonian King with whom to identify the first king amrel in the late 19th century this king of Shar was identified as hamurabi assuming that the Acadian form of his name had been confused when brought into the Hebrew text however Scholars later moved away from this View a significant development came with the publication of three relatively late kuna form texts that were likely copied from earlier texts during the early first millennium BCE known as the spari tablets these texts describe Four Kings who fought against the city of Babylon in the late 19th century pinus The Scholar who published the tablets read the name of one of the Kings as Kor l Mal or kudor L Gamal and made a connection between this name and the kador laom of Genesis 14 this led to Scholars looking at the names of the other kings in the spartoi tablets to see if they could make other connections to those in Genesis 14 in the tablets the king of Babylonia was named iil Tutu and it was argued that this name referred to the Babylonian usurper Marduk appla Ida the name Marduk is written in Sumerian Amar utu and it was theorized that the writer of the biblical texts had at his disposal a shortened form of Marduk appla Ida's name which consisted of the Amar of Amar utu and apal thus Amar apal which found its way into the Hebrew text as amra fell recently in a monograph about the history of the city of Babylon Stephanie di presented the current opinions on this passage in an appendix entitled Genesis 14 1-16 and possible links with foreign rulers early in the reign of hamurabi there she notes that although Scholars abandoned the early notion that Genesis 14 referred to Kings from the time of hamurabi this has again come back to be a tenable position about the name Amel she writes either hamurabi with an unexplained suffix l or Amud P King of katna with the common misreading of the letter R for D possibly a confusion of the two names although researched in the last two decades particularly from material from the time of hamurabi at the city of Mari has moved Scholars back toward identifying the Genesis 4 names including amrel king of Shar with Kings from the time of hamurabi it would appear that we still do not possess enough information to draw definitive conclusions okay so that's a maybe and a very interesting one at that if the amrel mentioned in Genesis 14 is in fact a reference to the great king hamurabi of Babylon then that means that hamurabi is the oldest known historical figure mentioned by name in the Bible and it also means that we have verification for at least one Bronze Age person now it actually makes sense that Hammurabi's name in particular might have found its way into the Bible according to critical Scholars Genesis 14 was most likely written during the Babylonian captivity which took place following 586 BC being that hamurabi was one of the most famous Babylonian Kings of all time it's not hard to believe that the judahite scribes living in Babylon during the 500s might have heard about him and might have decided to work him into their nation's origin story so the conclusion is still that there is a huge difference when it comes to the Bronze Age parts of the Bible and the Iron Age Parts the names of the main characters from the Iron Age section are relatively easy to find in the archaeological record whereas the names of the main characters from the bronze AG section are not likewise the Iron Age Parts contain lots of references to foreign individuals who are known to be real historical people whereas the Bronze Age Parts have at best just two references okay so that was a look at the Bible and the Bronze Age special thanks to all my fellow YouTubers who helped with this video I've placed links to all of their channels in the description so if you're looking for some new channels to subscribe to I suggest you check them out thanks for watching [Music] [Music]