While digging up our back yard to plant a new lawn, we made a fun discovery. It was a toy plastic army soldier, left there for years after our boys played “Army” with it.
CC Image courtesy of Davidd on Flickr
Many wonderful discoveries have been found by digging in the ground. The discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 is perhaps the best known archaeological discovery of all time.
God has given us abundant evidence which we can unearth that prove the reliability of the Bible. Biblical archeology is the study of past civilizations in the Holy Land through excavation.
In Scripture we have voluminous details about past human life and activities (names, places, practices, events, dates, etc.). Archeologists unearth artifacts and then compare them with what is recorded in the Bible.
After many decades of study, it has been found that the Bible is reliable in detail and description of history, historical location, culture and dates.
When there have been contradictions and further discoveries are made, biblical critics have been found incorrect and the Bible has remained credible.
Here are three instances where seeming evidence has challenged the Bible but archaeology has confirmed that the Bible is reliable:
1) Moses Could Write – Critics Said He Could Not
a) THE ACCUSATION: Skeptics claimed that Moses could not have written any of the Bible, including the Ten Commandments; “Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant – the Ten Commandments.” (Exodus 34:28) Critics were sure that writing didn’t exist in Moses day.
b) THE ANSWER FROM ARCHAELOGY: Our understanding of history was incomplete. New discoveries made in Ur and other places prove writing was well developed hundreds of years before even Abraham’s time and he lived decades prior to Moses.
2) Daniel Knew Who the King Was – Critics Said He Didn’t
a) THE ACCUSATION: Daniel wrote that the last king of Babylon was Belshazzar and was reigning when the writing on the wall occurred that decreed the end of his reign. Bible skeptics found other sources that stated that the last king of Babylon was Nabonidus.
b) THE ANSWER FROM ARCHAELOGY: Archeologists found four clay cylinders from Nabonidus’ reign. They indicated that both Nabonidus and Belshazzar had reigned jointly. Nabonidus had ruled in the countryside and Belshazzar had ruled in the capital city. The Bible was proven accurate again.
3) Luke Was A Remarkably Accurate Historian – Critics Claimed He Wasn’t
a) THE ACCUSATION: Sir William Ramsay, an archeologist from the upper class of Great Britain, held a PhD from Oxford, was an atheist and the son of atheists. He decided to disprove the accuracy of the Bible writer Luke who authored the Book of Acts.
b) THE ANSWER FROM ARCHAELOGY: After studying in the Holy Land and writing many books over a 25 year period, Ramsay found hundreds of archeological proofs that validated the Book of Acts. He declared Luke accurate down to the last detail.
Eventually the accuracy of the Scriptures Ramsay had tried to discredit convinced him of the truth of the Bible. He shocked the world when he stated that he himself had become a Christian.
The bottom line: You can trust the Bible as the historically accurate Word of God.