Transcription
So in today's video, we're going to look at one of the greatest archaeological finds of all time. We're going to go to the place it was discovered, and we're going to talk to the archaeologists that discovered it.
This great archaeological discovery was found in the country of Israel, in the city of Jerusalem, at a site called Ketef Hinnom. From ancient Jerusalem, Ketef Hinnom lies to the Southwest, just across the Valley of Ben Hinnom. Beginning in the 7th century BC, Ketef Hinnom was used as a burial ground with several rock-cut tombs.
At Ketef Hinnom, I met up with Israeli archaeologist Dr. Gabriel Barkai to learn firsthand about the famous discovery he made while excavating the site in 1979.
"Would you consider this one of the most important archaeological finds overall in this country?"
"Listen, even if I would not be involved with it, I would say it is one of the most important discoveries in biblical archaeology."
So in ancient times, the dead were buried with valuable grave goods, but this made them a target later in history for grave robbers. And so, even though there are thousands of tombs around Jerusalem, it's the great frustration of archaeologists that when they discover and excavate a tomb, they don't find anything valuable in it because it's been robbed out in antiquity. So it is the ultimate dream of archaeologists, including Dr. Barkai, to find an untouched tomb that's never been robbed out in antiquity.
In 1979, Barkai's team excavated tomb number 25 at Ketef Hinnom. This tomb had been greatly damaged by later stone cutters. All that was left was the floor of the tomb and a chamber underneath the floor called a repository.
"Okay, so let me draw this out for you. We have the bedrock coming down like this. We have a vertical face, perfect place to carve out a tomb. And so, so, uh, tomb number 25, you have the chamber itself carved out and the entrance here. And then inside of it, you have burial benches. These are for laying out the bodies of the dead. Below that burial bench, we have another entrance to another chamber that I'll put in a dotted line. That is underneath the tomb itself. And archaeologists call this the repository chamber. And so, uh, the dead are laid out in the tomb. And this, we got to keep in mind, this is a family tomb that's used generationally for centuries. And so, as later burials come in, those earlier burials, they're collected, the grave goods with them, the bones, and they're put in this repository chamber."
"So let me make sure that it's clear. So the bodies are laid out right here?"
"Yeah, they lay there for one year and they decompose, and then the bones are collected from those and then they're put down in here, the repository, in order to make room for the next year, for the next generation."
"How many, how many bones did you find in here? How many from how many people?"
"About 95 individuals."
"And so then later in history, what happens is stone cutters come in, they start cutting away this, uh, this stone. And this happens to, to the point where, uh, the whole tomb number 25 is greatly damaged. And so all that remains is the burial benches and, uh, the rip and the floor of the tomb, and then the repository chamber underneath that floor."
We can understand what tomb number 25 originally looked like by comparing it to another Jerusalem tomb from this same time period, the Kingdom of Judah, that has been preserved. Notice the rock ceiling and walls enclosing the burial benches and the opening of the repository below. All this highlighted in red is missing from tomb number 25 at Ketef Hinnom. Here I am lying on the burial bench in the preserved tomb, and then with two friends on the burial bench of what is left of tomb number 25.
So, as soil accumulated over the top of this, and Barkai's, uh, excavation team dug down, what they found was just, uh, all that remained of the tomb, the lower part of it, the floor and the burial benches and the entrance to the repository chamber. Uh, they were excited. There was hope. Maybe this would be the exception. Maybe as they excavated this repository chamber, they would find something of value. But as they removed the soil and the typical bones and pottery shards from this repository chamber, they didn't find anything of value.
"When I first went into the repository, I was disappointed. Uh, I saw something which looked like a rock surface, which would be the floor of the repository. If had some earth accumulated on it, it had some stones accumulated on it, and nothing else."
So among the volunteers that year were a group of children from an archaeological club, and one of them was a young boy named Nathan, who, it seems, had a particular talent in annoying Dr. Barkai.
"We worked here with children. Among them, there was a kid who was especially a nagging type. He had the ugly habit of always pulling my shirt from behind. And when I would turn around, he would ask me a silly question."
"I looked into the repository and saw that the floor is visible. I said to myself, 'Well, it is looted, as all the other repositories in the other caves.' But I had an idea. This is the place to put little Nathan. I thought that for a while, I'm not going to see him, and that's an advantage. So he was asked to clean the place and prepare it for photography. He was own, he was bored. He had lots of equipment with him, and not half an hour passed that I was far away, and I feel my shirt being pulled from behind. When I turned around, I see him standing with two, uh, pottery vessels in his hands, almost complete, dating back to the First Temple period."
That was against all the instructions. If he finds something, he had to call somebody over, one of the supervisors. But what happened is that, uh, I was ready to suffocate him on the spot. In any case, we came back, and, uh, I found out that he made the discovery of my life.
So here's what happened. At some point in the ancient past, possibly through an earthquake, the ceiling of the repository chamber had collapsed down and formed a false floor that sealed off the valuable contents of the chamber. And so this tricked the tomb robbers who came in and thought that there was nothing valuable in this chamber. And then later, it also tricked the archaeologists. And so it remained this way until Nathan came into the tomb with his tools and doing what boys do, he ended up punching a hole in the false floor.
So I can only imagine what must have been going through his mind when he looked down through this hole and saw all these intact pottery vessels. And that is when little Nathan came in and began his, uh, destructive activity, which led to the discovery that the layer of rock which I thought to be the floor, uh, actually was not the floor, but a layer that got unpeeled or exfoliated from the ceiling and it buried underneath it the very rich contents of this repository.
"I have this, uh, incredible urge to tug on the back of your shirt."
And amazingly, Dr. Barkai got what he'd hoped for, what he dreamed of, and that is the discovery of a tomb chamber that had never been touched, that had never been robbed out in antiquity. It finds, uh, represent the only repository which was found intact to be known in Jerusalem to date. Inside this single chamber, we had more than one thousand objects.
So then they started excavating the repository chamber. So we have this layer system within the repository chamber, with the layers at the bottom being the earliest, and the layers at the top being the latest.
"I want to see where exactly."
"Say, oh wow, that is deep. Uh, you have a foothold right here to the left."
"Yeah, okay. Dr. Barkai, yeah. So where, where in here did you find those?"
"Close to the bottom, and then in the inner side, the inside back, all the way back here. The order usually is that people take stuff from, uh, the benches, they put it into the mouth of the repository, and it accumulates near the mouths of the repository, and then they come and move it inwards, and the new load comes in through the entrance. So whatever is close to the bottom and close to the innermost part is the earliest."
So in the back of the repository chamber, down at the bottom layer, right next to the true rock floor, the excavators found two small metal objects. These two items were plaques of silver rolled up like scrolls. Essentially, they are two small silver scrolls. It was a plaque of silver which was rolled around itself about six times, and when it was unrolled, it was, uh, showing, uh, to be covered densely with ancient Hebrew characters. It was inscribed 9, 18 lines of writing in minuscule Hebrew characters.
The first word which I deciphered at the opening was the name of the Lord. This is the private name of God, which appears whenever the English version has the word "the Lord" in the Hebrew Bible. This is the unpronounceable Tetragrammaton, the secret name of God in the Bible. In Second Kings 21:4, Yahweh says, "In Jerusalem I will put my name," and in verse 7, Yahweh declares, "In Jerusalem I will put my name forever." So now, amazingly, the name Yahweh has been found archaeologically in an excavation in the city that bears his name for the first time. We have, uh, the owner of the temple, the dweller of the Temple of Jerusalem, found in Jerusalem itself. They later on, we discovered that there are several more appearances of the name of the Lord on that piece of silver.
Not only was there Hebrew writing on these silver scrolls from Ketef Hinnom, but it was realized that what was written on them comes directly from the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. Both of them had versions of the Priestly Benediction, which is mentioned in the Book of Numbers, Chapter 6, verses 24 to 26. The first silver scroll reads, "May Yahweh bless you and keep you. May Yahweh shine his face upon you and be gracious to you." And the smaller scroll is translated, "May Yahweh bless you and keep you. May Yahweh shine his face upon you and give you peace."
And more than that, the burial customs and the comparative material you have is very clearly evident of the First Temple period, beyond any doubt. The history of Jerusalem is often broken into two time periods: the First Temple period and the Second Temple period. The First Temple period begins when Solomon builds the temple in Jerusalem in the 10th century BC, and it is destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC, which brings the First Temple period to an end. The Second Temple period begins when Zerubbabel rebuilds the temple in Jerusalem, and it is destroyed by the Romans in AD 70.
So the Hebrew in the Second Temple period looks different than the earlier Hebrew that's used in the First Temple period. So if we use the name Yahweh as an example, in the Hebrew of the Second Temple period, God's name looks like this. But on the silver scrolls from Ketef Hinnom, it looks like this. The difference is a later form of Hebrew used in the Second Temple period, where the Hebrew found at Ketef Hinnom is an earlier form from the First Temple period. And so this is why the silver scrolls are dated to the First Temple period, and more specifically to the 7th century BC.
This, uh, discovery is of the earliest biblical verses ever discovered. They predate the very famous Dead Sea Scrolls by several centuries. So these are the earliest biblical verses. They date back to the 7th century BC, to the time of Prophet Jeremiah, to the time of the Davidic dynasty, to the time that the First Temple of Solomon was still standing in Jerusalem.
And so it's really touching to hear Dr. Barkai's story and to realize how deeply significant it is to him personally, this discovery he made in 1979.
"It is very interesting because it closes a personal circle for me. I was born in, uh, an impossible time, an impossible place, during World War II. I was born in the ghetto of Budapest, Hungary. And the early years of mine passed there. And I remember the first Hebrew words of my father blessing me every Friday with his hands upon my head, saying, 'The Lord bless thee and keep thee.' These are the first Hebrew words which I remembered. And here I am, uh, 30 years later, discovering those words from the time of Prophet Jeremiah. This closes a personal circle for me, and it is an amazing discovery, and a very significant discovery for biblical studies, for archaeology, for the history of Jerusalem, and for various other fields."
To dig deeper, you can order a copy of my book, which has been a number one bestseller in archaeology. Just click the link in the description below this video.
"And when you first picked that, that, um, that scroll up, did you know what it was? Did you know it was a scroll, or you didn't know?"
"I did not. I did not. But I suspected that it might be of importance. And I said, uh, to Judy Headley, who found it, I said, 'This might be of importance.' But I, I couldn't never even dream that it would include the earliest biblical verses known all around the world."
So now you know that the oldest biblical verses that have ever been found through archaeology were found on scrolls, but they were silver scrolls, not scrolls made of animal skins. And they weren't found down by the Dead Sea, but in Jerusalem. And they didn't date to the second century BC, which many of the Dead Sea Scrolls do, but much earlier than that, to the 7th century BC. And this makes them one of the great archaeological discoveries of all time.
If you like this video, please give it a like. Subscribe to the channel, and you'll want to watch this other video where I travel to Sudan to see another inscription that is the oldest mention of the name Yahweh. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.