In the dry sands of Bible lands through the long centuries have been preserved thousands of testimonials of the past, preserved only to be dug up now to refute the specious arguments of those who are bent on defaming and destroying the Bible.

[Signs of the Times, February 18, 1930, The Story of Our Bible, Part 9, pp. 8-10]

Skepticism, modernism, materialism, rationalism, atheism-these are the words that define the present tendency in the religious field. The modern mind has discarded any principle of external authority. The early chapters of Genesis are merely folklore and patriarchal legend to the modernist. It is claimed that the historical portions of the Bible, and especially of the New Testament, are full of blunders. The higher critic feels at liberty to reject any part of these writings that his own consciousness does not approve of, and to amend other parts to accord with his judgment of what the writer ought to have written, so that one radical iconoclast will allow only five sayings of Jesus as being authentic. Thus it happens that a goodly number who have not discovered the sure foundation of faith have been disturbed by serious doubts and questionings.SITI February 18, 1930, page 8.1

It is worthy, of special note, as indicating God’s care for His own, that during the very time when such serious charges have been formulated against the Scriptures, such discoveries in the East have rewarded the search of loyal investigators as have testified in no uncertain tones to the absolute reliability of these ancient writings. “It must be accounted a wonderful providence of God that, at a time when so much is being said and done to discredit the Old Testament, so marvelous a series of discoveries, bearing directly on matters contained in its pages should have been made.... There is today a mass of material available for the illustration and confirmation of Holy Scripture for which we cannot be sufficiently grateful.”-James Orr. “There are those who believe with firm faith that, for these days of skepticism and of merciless and conscienceless historic criticism, the lands have been kept almost in their original condition that the testimony of the modern skeptical traveler may (perhaps unintentionally on his part, but necessarily) corroborate the teachings of the Bible. Have the mummy wrappings of Mohammedan domination held the Far East unchanged through the centuries that, in these days of doubt, the hills of Canaan, the plains of Egypt, and the ruins of Mesopotamia might lift their voices in solemn attestation to the divine truthfulness of the sacred historians?”-F. H. Vincent.SITI February 18, 1930, page 8.2

THE BIBLE CORROBORATED

The spade of the archaeologist has added a wonderfully instructive chapter to the story of the Bible, to which I must now give some attention. This phase of the story is most interesting. Many of the buried cities of Asia have been uncovered; written records that date from the time of Abraham, and even earlier, have been discovered and deciphered; an almost indefinite number of documents of various kinds, which clearly reflect the life of New Testament times, have been dug cut of the sand in different places; inscriptions in a variety of languages, some of them in cuneiform characters, have been brought to light; and the habits and customs of ancient peoples have been so fully delineated as to furnish much additional light for the correct interpretation of the writings of prophets and apostles who employed the terms and the illustrations familiar to those with whom they associated in daily life. “The Bible at its face value is being corroborated wherever archaeology immediately and definitely touches it. To illustrate this statement fully would be to cite every definite piece of archaeological evidence in the Biblical field of scientific research during the last one hundred years.”—M. G. Kyle. While this is true of the Scriptures as a whole, it is emphatically true of the New Testament. “It is a most suggestive fact that while these unrivaled discoveries of the monuments and inscriptions of the ancient world have in scores of instances cast discredit upon the accuracy of classical historians and ancient writers, they have served only to put in clearer light the remarkable knowledge and scrupulous exactness of the New Testament writers.”—Cobern.SITI February 18, 1930, page 8.3

I hardly need to state here that it will be quite impossible, within the limited space allotted to this series of articles, to make even a brief reference to each of the many expeditions to the East that have been made under the auspices of different national governments and scientific societies of the world during the last century, or even to summarize the results of their most valuable investigations, so far as they have a bearing upon the making and the transmitting to us of the Bible. They have touched so many phases of Bible history from Genesis to Revelation; they have confirmed so many references, both direct and indirect, to the manners and customs of the various nations of antiquity; and they have testified in so many ways both to the reliability and to the time of writing of so many of the books of the Bible, that I am at a loss to determine just what portion of this great field I should attempt to cover. I can only make an honest effort to present some of the most significant features of this really and seriously thrilling subject.SITI February 18, 1930, page 8.4

THE REVELATION OF BIBLE LANDS

The revelation of the work of God in redemption is embedded in the history of various countries and peoples. “There are the ‘Bible lands,’ the arena upon which the God of history, of providence, and of redemption, specially displayed His power and grace. The great primary revelation of His dealings with men is embodied in the Hebrew literature. These Bible lands have yielded to us a secondary revelation. It is subordinate, indeed, to the first, but it is richly supplementary and illustrative. It is the province of Oriental archaeology to deal with the peoples and countries and languages of the Bible so as to bring out their true relations to Bible teaching. They were formerly regarded as the mere framework of the picture. Now we are learning that they make up its groundwork, its coloring, and its perspective. They embrace, in a word, what is material in the revelation apart from what is spiritual and ideal. And these elements the outward and the inward are to us inseparable, as they were in their evolution mutually involved and interwoven.”-McCurdy.SITI February 18, 1930, page 8.5

I presume it is well known to my readers that one of the achievements of the so-called higher criticism is to resolve the patriarchs of the Old Testament into mere tribal personifications, whatever may be meant by that expression. This may be satisfactory enough to the titled scholars who sit in their studies and evolve their theories to discredit the Bible, but they cannot silence the cylinders, the tablets, and the papyri, which bear unequivocal testimony to the historical character of these very men. “A name Abe-ramu, almost the same as Abraham, appears on a contract tablet of the second reign before Hammurabi. Other contract tablets of that age exhibit the names Jacob and Jacob-el.SITI February 18, 1930, page 9.1

JACOB AND JOSEPH VOUCHED FOR

“The names Jacob-el and Joseph-el appear on a monument of Thothmes III of Egypt (about 1500 b. c.) as place names in Palestine. In other ways the whole period has been lifted up into new and commanding importance. It is generally accepted that the Hammurabi of the inscriptions is no other than the Amraphel of Genesis 14:1; and the discovery of the Code of this able ruler has given his name an éclat it can never again lose. The discovery was made at Susa in January, 1902, and the Code itself, the most complete and finished of any in antiquity, shows the height of civilization to which the Babylonia of Abraham’s day had attained.”-James Orr.SITI February 18, 1930, page 9.2

Among the many documents that throw a helpful light upon the Biblical records are the so-called Tel-el-Amarna letters. These were discovered in 1888 at Tel-el-Amarna in Egypt, about 180 miles south of Cairo, and consist of “letters and dispatches written wholly in the Babylonian script and language.” “When the more than three hundred tablets came into the hands of museum officials in Berlin, London, and Cairo, a glance speedily revealed their character. They were letters from monarchs of western Asia, like Kadashman-Kharbe, king of Babylonia; Ashuruballit, king of Assyria; and Tush-ratta, king of Mitanni, to Amenophis III, or Amenophis IV, kings of Egypt, or they were dispatches from various governors or princes in Syria or Palestine, Philistia, or Phoenicia to these same Egyptian kings whom they had acknowledged as lawful rulers or suzerains over their territories. The importance of these documents was recognized at once, and the minute study to which they have been subjected has only confirmed the first estimate of their value.... The Tel-el-Amarna letters prove that the invasions which were destined to break the Syrian provinces of Egypt into pieces had already begun. A large number of governors were making constant appeals to the king for aid against enemies who threatened the very existence of the Egyptian dominion in Asia. The two enemies most dreaded were the Khatti, that is the Hittites, and the Khabiri. The former are the same people who find frequent mention in the Egyptian inscriptions of a later period under the name of Kheta.... These Khabiri may indeed have been related to the stock which has come to bear the name ‘Hebrew’ exclusively for us, but there is no positive proof of this.”—R. W. Rogers.SITI February 18, 1930, page 9.3

In the earlier days one of the favorite reasons for impugning the historical accuracy of the Scriptures was because it mentioned Belshazzar as one of the rulers of Babylon. The critics loudly asserted that there was no such person, and the mythical character of the whole book of Daniel was consequently assumed. But alas for the critics! “In 1854 Sir H. C. Rawlinson discovered the name of Bel-sarra-uzur-’O Bel, defend the king’-in an inscription belonging to the first year of Nabonidos which had been discovered in the ruins of the temple of the Moon-god at Muqayyar or Ur. Here Nabonidos calls him his ‘first-born son.’ In the contracts and similar documents there are frequent references to Belshazzar, who is sometimes entitled simply ‘the son of the king.’”-Encyclopedia Britannica. Thus does archaeology put to shame the critics.SITI February 18, 1930, page 9.4

THE TESTIMONY OF STONE

I need merely to mention the Moabite stone, discovered in 1868 in Diban (the Dibon of the Old Testament) in Moab. “This inscription consists of thirty-four lines (the last two being undecipherable), and was written by Mesha king of Moab, to commemorate his successful revolt from the yoke of Israel, recorded in 2 Kings 1:1 and chapter 3.... The writing is in the ancient Hebrew characters.... The inscription is proved to be genuine by the Bible account, the two throwing light on each other.”-E. W. Bullinger. The discovery of the cylinders of Nabonidos, the father of Belshazzar, and of the cylinder of Cyrus, which gives his own account of the capture of Babylon, testify to the historicity of the book of Daniel. These and many other more ancient inscriptions now in the hands of archaeologists have finally and absolutely destroyed the unwarranted assumption on the part of some of the higher critics that the art of writing was unknown in the time of Abraham and even in the time of Moses, and that as a consequence the larger part of the Old Testament was of post-exile origin. “First Egyptology, then Assyriology, showed that the art of writing in the ancient East, so far from being of modern growth, was of vast antiquity, and that the two great powers which divided the civilized world between them were each emphatically a nation of scribes and readers. Centuries before Abraham was born Egypt and Babylonia were alike full of schools and libraries, of teachers and pupils, of poets and prose writers, and of the literary works which they had composed.”-A. H. Sayce.SITI February 18, 1930, page 9.5

THE SPADE SHATTERS EVOLUTION

A favorite field in which the Biblical critics have found abundant opportunity for the development of their modernistic theories is the application of the evolutionary hypothesis to the solution of religious and historical questions connected with the most ancient times. Of course this has led them to deny the historicity of large portions of the Holy Scriptures, and to rearrange the order of ancient events to suit their own ideas of how they ought to have occurred according to the standards of this scientific age. But the matter-of-fact spade has ruthlessly shattered their baseless conclusions. “In fact, the whole application of a supposed law of evolution to the religious and secular history of the ancient Oriental world is founded on what we now know to have been a huge mistake. The Mosaic age, instead of coming at the dawn of ancient Oriental culture, really belongs to the evening of its decay. The Hebrew legislator was surrounded on all sides by the influences of a decadent civilization. Religious systems and ideas had followed one another for centuries; the ideas had been pursued to their logical conclusions, and the systems had been worked out in a variety of forms. In Egypt and Babylonia alike there was degeneracy rather than progress, retrogression rather than development. The actual condition of the Oriental world in the age of Moses, as it has been revealed to us by archaeology, leaves little room for the particular kind of evolution of which the ‘higher criticism’ has dreamed.”-A. H. Sayce.SITI February 18, 1930, page 9.6

A large number of volumes have been written which contain the results of modern discoveries in the ancient East bearing testimony to the exactness and the trustworthiness of the Old Testament alone, but I can bring to the attention of my readers only the few examples which I have cited. I shall next turn to the New Testament field for the significance of modern research in Bible lands.SITI February 18, 1930, page 10.1

February 11, 1930

February 25, 1930