Digging Into Bible Archaeology
299 | Geektober | “The Stele Dan”
Dig Into the World Beneath the Word
Grab your fedoras and trowels — Geektober rolls on! This week, we’re stepping into our archaeological time machine to dig up five game-changing artifacts that pull back the curtain on the world of the Bible. Why does reading ancient Canaanite myths from the lost city of Ugarit change how we understand Psalm 29? What can a smashed stone monument teach us about a pagan king spinning his military defeat into ancient propaganda? How does an Assyrian emperor’s boast about trapping Hezekiah “like a bird in a cage” accidentally verify the miraculous biblical account in Isaiah? What does an ancient Persian cylinder say about God using an unlikely ruler to bring His people home? And what was it like to unroll two tiny, 2,600-year-old silver scrolls carrying the exact priestly blessing we speak at the end of every episode? Join us as we explore how broken pottery, carved stone prisms, and ancient inscriptions anchor our faith in real-world history!
Takeaways
The Big Idea: Archaeology can help us “time travel” to understand the Bible’s world better.
This Week's Challenge: Read the Priestly Blessing in Numbers 6:22–27 every morning this week, taking a moment to remember that these ancient words of peace and protection are anchored in thousands of years of God’s proven faithfulness.
Helpful Links
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Welcome to Geektober
Ryan: The one that mentions the house of David, I think, is the Dan Stele, and I can't help but think of Stele Dan every time.
Bryan: Well, hello everyone. And welcome to the Bible geeks podcast. I'm Bryan Schiele.
Ryan: I'm Ryan Joy.
Bryan: And thanks so much everyone for tuning in, you know, from ancient myths buried in a lost city to a King's monument smashed into pieces.
in this geektober episode, we are digging into five archeological discoveries. All
Ryan: We'll hear an emperor boasting that he trapped Hezekiah like a bird and talk about tiny silver scrolls carrying a blessing that we say every episode. Artifacts like these help us hear the Bible's world, recognize God's work in history, and encounter familiar words in surprising new ways.
Why Archaeology Matters
Bryan: right, so we're back for another Bible Geektober episode. I feel like on the last conversation, I was sort of getting a download from your brain about some things that you had put together for that spiritual beings class. I was just struck by how much I was thinking about that conversation after it all happened. And it's going to be another one of those because you just got done teaching a class on Bible archaeology that just fits so perfectly into a Bible Geektober conversation. What is this class that you taught and why on earth was Bible archaeology on the docket?
Ryan: Well, it was another one of these one-offs that we, for the summer, just did these six different single class offerings at different classrooms. And so this was just a little taster bite of archeology. And
Bryan: How many people did you put to sleep in this class?
Did everybody
Ryan: was actually a nice, engaged conversation with a pretty full side classroom where we went through 10 different game changers in biblical archeology, which we're not gonna try to do that much of a tour of things.
In fact, we're gonna just step right over the big 900 pound gorilla of the conversation, the heavyweight champion of archeology finds here with the Dead Sea Scrolls and move past those because that's a whole conversation.
Bryan: Sea Scrolls, although we did sort of talk somewhat around those in our last Geektober last year. Yeah,
Ryan: yeah, I think manuscripts, or I can't remember what we were talking about, but
Bryan: scribal traditions and things like that. So there are more discoveries, there are more archaeological finds that we're going to get into here in our conversation, and I'm excited about this because I'm coming in green here,
But having a side class and a discussion about these things in smaller formats, I think is super cool. So hence Geektober. Bring it, bring it on.
Ryan: let's just start with something.
Dream Artifact Wishlist
Ryan: Let's just start pie in the sky and just imagine you could have any artifact uncovered, anything you could, you could just sit there and watch them dig it up and study something as it gets uncovered. What artifact would you want to have us find?
Bryan: I mean, a lot of this kind of pulls from, you know, Indiana Jones kind of stuff like the Ark of the Covenant probably would be pretty exciting to unearth
Ryan: As long as you're not a Nazi, 'cause that'll melt your face.
Bryan: and read.
Ryan: yeah.
Bryan: Absolutely. Yes. So probably would be careful while opening it if that was a possibility, if it was still closed for some reason. But I would say probably the Ark of the Covenant, although maybe option B would be the other Ark, maybe the actual Ark.
Ryan: yeah, Noah's Ark, that would be cool.
Bryan: That would be also pretty cool. What about you?
What do you want to find?
Ryan: yeah, I don't know. I was thinking it'd be cool if we could find one of the signatures, you know, one of the original, the autographs, the, what is it, whatever it's called, the original documents
that would be kind of cool. But I think one of the interesting things to think about is what would it affect if we found one of the two Arks, right, or
Bryan: Yeah.
Ryan: one of the original, you know, manuscripts or whatever?
Like, would that change how we view the Bible? Would that really radically shift what we think? Mm.
Bryan: like you said, an original signature, original document, handwritten by Paul, for example, just depending on like the contents of it, that might shift, you know, what we understand about the tradition of handing the words down and the scribal traditions that we kind of talked about last year.
Like the Dead Sea Scrolls did, obviously, had some information, insight that we gained from it. I don't think it rocked anybody's faith in serious ways, but maybe shored it up for sure. That's probably where I would go, is just the confidence, you know, supposed confidence that we would have, depending on what it was, that like, yeah, see? See? I told you so. It was right there all along, you know? I don't know. But it hopefully would not be anything that would be overly controversial.
Probably would be handled very carefully, like the Dead Sea Scrolls were when they discovered those. Just really slow and methodical in bringing out the details of those things.
Truth and Time Travel
Ryan: Well, one of the things that's cool about truth is it has this natural, organic advantage when you're making a case that's based in the truth. And like, truth and facts and science are pro-Bible, right? Like, whatever we find, ultimately, it's not gonna rock our faith because we're just trying to understand the truth and what is God trying to convey?
And we shouldn't need some new discovery to establish something that Jesus' resurrection already established and so many other things. But like you said, sometimes it's nice to be able to say, hey, all these scholars were saying this wasn't true, but here's the fact, now we've established it. See, the Bible was supported. That's kinda nice to have. And I'm gonna put together a blog article that has some things about the house of David being established and about the first reference we have of Israel as a nation and a people group.
And these are things that people said, oh, there's no basis for that. And then we have now some artifacts that help us establish it. It didn't change my view. I wasn't wondering, was there really a historical figure named David and was that, you know, I already believed that, but it's nice to be able to support it. But maybe more than that is the way, like you said about the Dead Sea Scrolls, these things can help us to get a window into the world of the Bible.
And what is the context of this particular genre or of this particular cultural activity that they had or what have you. And so that's where most of the things we're gonna talk about today come in. We're gonna look at five different, almost like a little time machines that can help us move back. We're gonna do some time travelers today and let ourselves see what these different things reveal to us and open up as we, you know, interpret the Bible faithfully.
Ugarit and Canaanite Myths
Bryan: So yeah, one of the cool things about truth is that we don't have to shore it up. So let's think about some things that basically point us back to the truth being upheld that we read about in the Bible, and some of these windows into the Bible's world. The first one I think that you've got for us is where I thought you'd be starting this with. If not the Dead Sea Scrolls, are we talking about the Ugaritic texts and things like that? Explain what that is and what on earth is going on when we talk about all of these myths and things that we read about.
Ryan: Yeah, so there's this ancient city that we have found all kinds of like thousands of texts from this city called Ugarit that have all these different Canaanite ideas, things about their culture, but especially a lot of pagan myths, a lot of the Canaanite myths about characters like false gods and mythologies that we read about quite a bit in the Bible because these are the false doctrines of Elijah's day.
This is what he is battling. This is the conversation that Israel is engaging with all of their neighbors and the counter-cultural force against what God is trying to have his people do. Our stories about Baal and stories about these different gods and now with these findings, we have insight into what kind of stories the people around Israel were telling, which these are their neighbors, so they're hearing these stories, just like we hear the stories of our neighbors.
Bryan: thinking through some of these texts. I mean, it's like, okay, is it important for us to study these other surrounding myths at the time? Like, maybe not necessarily, but when you're trying to think about the context, like you were just saying a little bit ago, the context of the world that people were in is so important when really understanding, like, why would the writer of Genesis really write the creation story in the way that he did? Why would all of the ways that the flood narrative plays out, why would that have been important to say it that way? And when you start to see some of these surrounding myths and some of these surrounding stories from these texts that we read about in other places, then you start to get a picture of God is a God who's different from these other false gods.
God is a very different kind of deity than what would have been familiar at the time in some of their surrounding neighbors. So while their neighbors are afraid of their God or they're living in fear of the just carelessness of these false gods that they serve, our God, the true God, is loving and caring and speaks with just a word the creation into being, whereas these other gods have to battle it out and it's through violence and all of these terrible things that their gods have "created" what they've created, and they don't care about you anyway. But our God cares about us and loves us. And so I just feel like the context is what some of these texts really help shore up. And for me, it's really enlightening just to see all of the comparisons between what they would have been used to at the time and some of these writings.
Ryan: so helpful if somebody were to hear. Our podcasts end up being so littered with references of last time you were talking about "Star Wars" and "Force Ghosts" and somebody 2,000 years from now might be like, "What in the world? I thought they were talking about the Bible. Is this something that's true?" And, you know, like all kinds of things, pop culture references and whatever. And these are the pop culture references of the day, right, in a way, even though this is a false mythology.
And so, yeah, it's helpful for us whenever they're taught, for instance, Psalm 29 uses all this language that would be Baal language about, you know, this is the God who's over the waters of the sea and he's bringing the storms. And, you know, this is the storm and fertility God, Baal, and it's, you know, some people have even wondered if this was originally like a Baal text that the psalmist, I think it's David, but I'm not sure, that the psalmist took, and
Bryan: yeah. It's a Psalm of David.
Ryan: it's the Psalm of David, so that David took and said, "No, let me tell you about the real God."
But either way, he takes it and he takes their language and their stories and the Baal cycle and all of this and makes it about what is real and says, "Here, let me position the reality." And so that's really helpful. The Ugaritic texts also help us with Hebrew language, words that only appear, you know, a few times in the Old Testament, and we don't have other references, and then we find this sister language
Bryan: yeah.
Ryan: that helps us define what that word meant and, you know, all kinds of other things.
But that's our first item is, it shows us that archeology can help us enter the religious world of ancient Canaan and start to just kind of have a little more context for what the Bible might be doing in a particular text.
Bryan: I am deeply, like, wanting to have a conversation about the original biblical Hebrew at this point.
I'm reading a few things that just are eye opening to me of, like, the limited use of vocabulary in biblical Hebrew versus what probably was going on at the time, like what the language would have been spoken may have had many more words and many more phrasings and all kinds of slang and things like that just that didn't show up in the original biblical Hebrew. This is a total topic. That's a tangent from where we're headed here. But just super cool, like, yes, of course, context matters. And some of these archaeological finds can
Mesha Stele Rival History
Bryan: help us establish that. Okay, we're going to the Mesha Stele, which is this stone object, stele,
Steely Dan.
Ryan: that shows us, yes, actually, there is one. The one that mentions the house of David, I think, is the Dan Stele, and I can't help but think of Stele Dan every time.
Anyway, but what this one does is it shows us the other side of the story in a really cool and interesting way. And so, like, the question is, what can we learn by hearing just a different side of a Bible story where we have, in 2 Kings, the story of how Moab was defeated, and then
the true story of the event from the spiritual perspective is about God's relationship with his people, and when they're faithful and when they're not. But this stele tells the story of how Moab is, and their king, Mesha, is so great, but
It's like reading the aftermath reporting of, like, an Ohio State-Michigan game on two different blogs, one a fan site from Ohio State and one a fan site of Michigan. And so, same facts, but they're interpreting it differently, right? And they're telling the story differently. And surprise, surprise, you know, like, the Mesha Steely makes Mesha look good.
Like, is that a shocker? You know, this is how this tends to go. But, you know, it's kind of interesting to hear. It's like a weird corroboration of the events, but from the totally opposite interpretation of the events.
Bryan: Yeah. Not not like conflicting reports, but like and this is actually another one of these things that I find super faith building about the way the Bible paints some of these great pictures.
Some of these stories is the Bible is not afraid oftentimes to call out the sins or the struggles or the failures of the faults of the leadership. and to read in some way like the other side of the conflict being spun the way I think I would want to do that makes a lot of sense to me that like that's not the way the Bible deals with teaching about the things that are going on.
It's very raw and accurate in even the gory details, but you know at the time I can see what you're saying. Like it corroborates it and also I think highlights the fact that this is the way that you would write the Bible if the Bible was written by human hands just purely and solely. You would not include the really bad stuff about your own history, which the Bible is full of. Absolutely.
Ryan: You know, hold that thought, because the next item we're gonna talk about does the exact same thing that you're talking about. But I just wanted to note, you know, it's like the Indiana Jones thing.
Sometimes the story of finding these artifacts is half of the fun of studying a biblical archeology. And because, you know, there's a whole second story to, there's the story that it unveils and uncovers for us of like when the artifact was in the life of, you know, humans at some point. But then there's this other story and with this stele, there were stories of it that were around. Somebody had heard about this from, you know, the villages in that area.
And so this, I think it was some kind of a minister that was trying to get access to it. And then a local chief as like an act of defiance against the empire at the time took and broke this stone, this precious artifact and shattered it into a million pieces and it was like all over. But right before he did, one of the locals there did a, it's called a squeeze, but you know, like when you put over like a cemetery stone or something, you put over it a piece of paper
and do the thing where you rub it, yeah, rub the, yeah.
And so they were able to fully construct the text, reconstruct the text of it
Bryan: Oh, that's so cool.
Ryan: yeah. So anyway,
Sennacherib and Hezekiah
Ryan: There is this finding and there's one of these Sennacherib prisms that's in Chicago that I'm hoping to go see here this year.
But there's several of these. I think there's three different ones in different places. But it's this stone prism that tells the story of Sennacherib, the emperor, the king of Assyria's victories. And what is really interesting is how it sheds light, in some ways by omission, on one of the most interesting historical biblical accounts of a battle. And that's the one where Hezekiah is surrounded. Remember
Bryan: yeah. With the rabshaka. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Ryan: Yes, so he's surrounded.
And I love Isaiah's account in Isaiah 36 and 37. It's also in 2 Kings. But in context of what Isaiah is doing, Hezekiah goes and he pleads at the altar. And what are they gonna do? They're surrounded by over 100,000 of Assyrius men. And what the Bible tells us is that the angel of the Lord took them all
Bryan: Yeah.
Ryan: And Sennacherib doesn't tell it that way. But you know what?
Of course not. But you know what he doesn't do? Unlike every other city, he doesn't say, "I defeated that city." He doesn't avoid mentioning that city, the city of Jerusalem. He said he trapped Hezekiah like a bird in a cage. So what that tells us is all of these other cities, and there's a nearby city, Lachish, that he did defeat and he does talk about.
And we have some other information about that. There's reliefs and different things that show us that defeat. And this is how he treats rebellious kings, is he does not leave any of them. He defeats, he deposes.
And so what does this tell us? What should we take from this that we know historically Hezekiah stayed in power? And this king tells the story in his own propaganda piece that he did not defeat Hezekiah.
Bryan: thinking about these kind of all around the same time period, we have a lot of writing. We have a lot of details from the surrounding nations and especially as, you know, Judah and Israel were interacting with a lot of these other foreign nations and battling them and things like that.
Of course, you're going to probably hear both sides of it. You're going to accidentally tune in to the other team's reporting and be listening on their side to think about like, how did they see this? And what are they reporting about this? It's not just, you know, the biblical story reporting only Israel or Judah's account of it. There's other stuff going on out there.
Cyrus Cylinder and Return
Ryan: our next one takes us a little further down the story.
It's not in 2 Kings. We're now in the return after the departure, after Babylon takes Judah away and defeats them. And this is the Cyrus cylinder, which, you know, if you read Ezra 1, 1 to 4, or, you know, I love going back to Isaiah, what Isaiah says about Cyrus. Here is a really interesting individual, a pagan king of Persia that shows us God's providence behind an emperor and behind an empire. And so this cylinder, which,
has this same kind of a declaration that Ezra and Isaiah prophesize will happen, which is that in a totally different policy than Babylon had or Assyria had, Cyrus sends back the people, the, you know, Judeans as well as other peoples to their homeland.
He restores a lot of things. He supports the efforts to, you know, for them to rebuild their temple. And God calls him, in Isaiah, his anointed. I mean, no more a sacred title, right, than his anointed. He calls him a shepherd and God has a purpose for this pagan emperor. And he is using him for his purposes to reestablish his people, you know, preserve the line of Christ, all of this, so that whenever the time comes for Jesus, you know, 400 years later or so, all of this is established.
And it's just really interesting to see this storyline in, again, an object supported as the same thing as being stated, the same, really, like I said, strange policy, you know, in a way, like the opposite of what everybody has been doing in this cylinder.
Bryan: And then there's these, I don't know why, like, you know, you talk about the stele and then the cylinder, like, what are people writing on back at these times? Like, come on now, everything is like a very strange format of, you know, I guess we post online now, but back then, I suppose if you were, if you were in the know, you would write on some sort of, you know, column or a big piece of, you know, stone or I don't know, whatever. Like, go back to the old days of writing more
permanently somehow.
Ryan: give me a stone to write on. Give me a, you know, it's interesting, you bring up, like, email and stuff, and there's another finding called the Amarna
Bryan: Tell me somebody sent an email back in ancient times. I'm ready.
Ryan: It's, it is, it is like, they're on, you know, they're tablets, but it's all of these documents that, basically, it feels like you're reading, like, a royal Canaanite inbox, or email inbox. It's all of their correspondence, and
Bryan: I wonder how much spam they got.
Silver Scroll Blessing
Ryan: Yes, yeah, right?
Anyway, so, that really brings us to where I wanted to close us off, because this takes us to where we close every episode, which is with your blessing, and then an offering of shalom, which comes from where, Bryan?
Bryan: yes. So we're talking about the Hanam here in our last discussion. Yes, the priestly blessing here, may the Lord bless you and keep you. But the episode is not over, so don't, don't turn it off yet.
Ryan: Don't turn it off yet, but, yeah, so, these are tiny little pieces of silver that, you know, very delicately were unrolled, and it might be our earliest copies of, you know, any text from the Hebrew Bible, and so, it's just really interesting little things that could be carried with someone, and what a cool thing to carry with you, this priestly blessing that, of course, the priests would put the name of the Lord over the people with these words, this prayer for grace and peace, and for God's face to shine on them, and, you know, like, it just helps you see how important these exact same words that are so precious to us that we've chosen to, you know, close almost 300 episodes, but, of course, it's more important to us than even that.
It's these words that are how we want to call down God's name on and his blessing on all the people we love and on all the world, these things that have given us hope and strength. It's been doing this for, you know, thousands and thousands of years, and so people have taken the words and, you know, just kept them with them. I think that's so cool.
Bryan: I feel like this, you know, since number six, when this blessing was given, and, you know, with all of the ornate imagery that we see, you know, keeping the, the scriptures like attached to your garments, or like put into bruntlets, you know, like, like boxes on your head, or, you know, all kinds of things that they would do to, you know, make and integrate the Word of God into their person into their service and, and worship like that.
I mean, the fact that you're running across some of these artifacts that represent probably what people were doing at that time is probably is not surprising. I think you would imagine that that that should show up somewhere, these intricate little details that they might have woven into their garments or worn on their persons or things like that. But the fact that it's the blessing, the fact that it's actually the words, I mean, what do you really want to be thinking about more often than being a priest of God? That's what our job was supposed to be. That's what the children of Israel's job was always supposed to be, was to be a priest of God. And now I believe that's what our job in the church is today to be a priest of God, most high in this world. And just remembering those words is super helpful. But the fact that it is an archaeological discovery is just a bonus, I think, for sure.
Ryan: Yeah, and you bring up something interesting, which is, like, if we could have garments, if we could have, you know, so many things that all of the objects that they had, so many of them, you know, over time, we don't have, and so that's why these things are so precious, and so many of them are like rocks and clay and, you know,
Bryan: Things that last a little longer.
Ryan: through many, many years, and people think it's trash, and they, you know, it still ends up in our hands, and it is faith-building just to see little bits of an old world, even, you know, whenever it's not a find, but just to walk the Appian Way or to see, you know, certain things that, you know, hey, Paul walked on this, or, you know, this, you know, when we find little bits of information about what a, you know, what a Galilean synagogue would have looked like, and we start to uncover things and think about Jesus actually being there, and let us kind of embody and start to see this is a lived-in story that humans have walked through and God has revealed it to us, and now we are walking through this story of God's people.
It's just really helpful.
Resources and Wrap Up
Ryan: And, you know, I kind of want to, like, put a giant disclaimer over this whole episode about, like, I taught one class on it. This is not my area of expertise. I'm just a Bible geek, and so I find it interesting and fascinating and so cool to anything that intersects with the Bible like this, and thought it would be fun to talk about. But, you know, isn't it amazing how God has preserved things, most importantly, all of these manuscripts that give us his word exactly as he wants us to have it, but then all these other things that keep bubbling up.
It's an ongoing science that, you know, we keep learning more, and nothing's gonna change our basic understanding of who God is, but it can fill in little gaps and little questions and help us to see things a little bit clearer.
Bryan: this is like you say, we're nerds about this stuff, so we're going to talk about it here during a Bible Geektober episode. But, you know, if you really want to get deep into some of these things, there are a lot of resources out there. I've got like two coffee table books sitting right in front of me that are all Bible archaeology and atlases about Bible discoveries and things. AppianMedia.org, go check them out. They've got a lot of resources, podcast episodes. They do videos a lot from some of these archaeological digs. And there are so, so many more resources out there. Just some really cool things if you want to dig in a little bit deeper. But like you said, you know, the fact that we have these manuscripts, the fact that we have these proofs that our faith is not just, you know, based on nothing.
Like there are evidences out there that we just keep discovering and keep finding that show us that yes, our God did love us enough to leave us his word and lead his people in the ways that he said he did. And we can trust him. And I love
Ryan: amen, yeah. We can trust him. Even if something came that, you know, like started to shake your faith a little bit, like, you know, there was some discovery that seemed to point the opposite direction, eventually the truth will win out.
It's just over and over
Bryan: that. That is the thing about truth, right? The nice thing about truth is as you kicked off this episode. So yeah, I think it's cool. Just the time traveling we can do here. And thanks for walking us through that. I know you said you're going to have a blog post out about some of this stuff. I'd read that.
Numbers Six Blessing
Bryan: But maybe as a sort of closing, we can just read Numbers chapter six and this priestly blessing in its fullness, because so often we kind of abbreviate it as we close out our episodes. This is the blessing. The Lord spoke to Moses, speak to Abraham and his son saying thus, you shall bless the people of Israel. You shall say to them, the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. So they shall put my name upon the people of Israel and I will bless them. Such a cool, such a cool blessing there and a little, little pieces of silver to prove out that that's definitely something that they cared about too.
Ryan: Amen, yeah, I'm so glad you brought us back there. So let's let that be the sort of last word. I don't know, you probably have some closing matter to close us out with.
Next Week and Goodbye
Bryan: So this is our second Geektober episode on our third Geektober episode coming up next week. Uh, we're going to get into another episode on robots. We did it last year. We're going to do another one here in the upcoming, uh, episode all about
Ryan: episode, by the way, I just checked
Bryan: AI part one. We're going to have a discussion on our 300th episode. Uh, please stay tuned for that. Uh, we'll be back next week for that one. And until next episode, everyone may the Lord bless you and keep you.
Ryan: Hello,