Eden, Babel, Sodom & Lost Cities of the Bible Found

Like, are these actual places-- - There's two rivers that are real rivers. It's between the Tigris and the Euphrates. - Sodom and Gomorrah, you find a settlement that didn't just burn, it melted. - Have we found Noah's Ark? - This is a rock from Jericho. So I had my hand on the wall, and so immediately, I just went, can I put it in my pocket? That's from like, 3,500 years ago. - This is a huge discovery, because it shows that the scripture was basically maintained almost 100% over 1200 years, which is miraculous. If this all really happened, there's gotta be evidence. So when I read through the Bible, there are so many different places. - You read through the Bible? - Things. - I do. - That's good. I mean, it's an important piece of my job too. - To change your life. - And so, there's so many different places in it, and I'm thinking like, yeah, Garden of Eden, you got Babylon, Jericho. - You got an chronological order here. - Yeah, I mean, I think about big, like, the ark. You know, there's so many pieces that feel like-- - The Ark with the animals. - The Ark with the animals. - Oh, you ever been to that thing? You ever been to the Ark experience?

- I have not. - It's expensive. - That's probably why I haven't been there. - I think I'm gonna say it enough times that maybe someone will send me a ticket. - A free pass to Kentucky. - It's like 100 bucks. - Yeah, it's more than Hershey Park. - So, outside of the cost of the tickets, there are a lot of these places, a lot of these things. And it begs the question, like, what's real? And, you know, it's hard not to swim in those questions 'cause it's like, I'm hearing about some pretty epic things. I'm hearing about walls of Jericho falling, breaking down. I'm hearing about these empires and like these things that they did, the Tower of Babel. Right, they're building this tower to try to get the heaven. And like, I wanna know, is this real? Like, are these actual places, is it myth? Is the Bible just like, hey, it's just a cool story, but you're not supposed to find it anywhere. Or have we found some of this stuff? Like, is archeology actually supporting some of what the Bible says? Do we got any of that? - Well, I mean, we live in an age where anything's possible, but that anything's true, which means nothing's true. I mean, it's like, how do you weed out what's true, not what's not true? I mean, what have you heard about?

We talked about like finding the Garden of Eden. Yeah, well, you gotta read the Bible well, you know? And when I hear the Garden of Eden, like the point of that story is theological, that God came down to earth, lived with humans. And so there's not a lot of evidence that we can find the Garden of Eden. There's two rivers that are real rivers that are described, it's between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Tigris, Euphrates and Mesopotamian and Gison. So yeah, we got like a general region that the Garden of Eden would have been in, but the point of the story is that man sinned and God banned them from the Garden of Eden. So wherever that is, we're not gonna find that place 'cause we can't go back there. And so at a certain point, it's like, there's no evidence for that, or at least not like great evidence. We're probably not gonna find that place, but that's also not the point of that story. Well, I mean, like, so there are a group of people that say like they found it in a Persian Gulf, right? Yeah. And then there's another group of people like, "No, no, no, it's over here in Mount Ararat." Maybe it's in Armenia. And so what are they, I mean, do they sell tickets? Like, what are you supposed to do, like line up and be like, take pictures?

But they're doing what I wanna do, which is like, I wanna see if I can, can I find it? Yeah. I mean, you read it in the Bible plainly. It looks, you know, of course, the purpose of the Bible is teaching us that relationship with God, teaching us about that theology, but it's still describing a place. Yeah. And so it's like, I feel like very, very human to say, where is the point? So you're saying, like, if you can show me that it was real, then I'm gonna believe it. I mean, I think that's a question a lot of people will ask and want to know. I think it helps. Is it, I know that there's an element of faith, but when I, you see something, like, and you find evidence, like archeology, evidence, like, of something that was real, absolutely. It's supporting, like, oh, wow, the Bible talked about it and it matched what I dug up out of the earth is absolutely gonna help someone and help me strengthen my faith. And so even, like, you mentioned, like, Garden of Eden between two rivers, I feel like we're gonna Google a lot because there's a ton of stuff that, what does Google say? Can we Google, like, where the location of Eden is, like, on a map, what that would look like? Yeah, pull up a picture of the map for us.

And maybe we'll find it right now. We've got a question mark. Yeah, question mark, question mark. That's a huge area. Where are we right now, Adam, in general? Yeah, so, well, I mean, you got two options on this map. You got it at the top of the Feral Crescent or down below. Both of them between the Euphrates River, those are so far apart. Both of those places are, like, the size of New Jersey. Well, Eden, I think if you, like, if you read the, Book of Genesis, Eden is, like, a region. And then the Garden is inside that region and it's on a mountain. Right. And so God is on the mountain with Adam and Eve. But also, like, the story ends with them being banned from the Garden and there's angels there, like, representing, you can't come back here. And then there's a flood. And then there's all those theories of, like, - Yeah, well, I mean, that's another, yeah. Potentially, I don't know. It was a spiritual, it's where the spiritual world like intertwined with the physical. So I don't know what that means. - So to help you, I think a little bit in terms of your question, or not so much you, but like representing people having, you know, questions about like tower babble's great,

great example, tower babble, everybody's like, "Well, this is it, we found the tower babble." It was funny. I was putting this into just like a little AI just to like get some, you know, raw data. It's just a little AI, yeah, lowercase, yeah. - Just to screw, no, it's clawed, actually clawed. I was like, "Tell me, what would a people say, you know, about Babylon?" And like the very first thing was like, "We found it." (laughing) - Oh wow. - What are you talking about? - But, so I guess what I would say is that there are some of these things between Genesis one and like 10, one at 11, everything's kind of like prehistory. It's like from a long time ago. And they kind of admit that, that there's nothing really up until about the time of Abraham, we're talking about a specific person, a specific place. These are all like very broad categories that come from a collective memory, a collective consciousness of like the ancient world, right? - So describe that a little more. So you're saying prehistory, like how would I have known that one through 10 wasn't, isn't considered history versus-- - Well, it's all considered history. Like I think these things actually happen,

but there's no like, you know, an Abraham, you can see like this is what happened, this guy in this place at this time. And that's where it's rooted. And we start with like a family, where we follow them becomes basically Israel, right? But before then, you have these kind of very broad brush type of things like, oh, and then there was the Tower of Babel. Now, the Tower of Babel, everybody wants to find out where the Tower of Babel is. There's like probably thousands of very large towers that were built back then. And people will say like, we found one with foundations that are so much bigger, that's the size of New York City, you know, so, which is fascinating to look into. - Because I want the size of New York City. - I was just thinking about it. - I don't know about that. - Yeah. - That would be wild. - That would be wild. - But like the Tower of Babel is described as a tower and you don't get more details. But zigrots, we're like, that's very common. - And we find towers all over the place, right? - Yeah, pull up a picture of a zig rot maybe. But it's like, actually, it's behind. Look at that. This is kind of an example. - It totally looks like Star Wars.

- It's like stepped buildings. So they're building steps all the way up. And the idea is like, we'll commune with God. It's like Chichen Itza. You never go to Cancun? You ever been to Cancun? - I haven't happened to Cancun, no. - You never been to Cancun? - I've never been either. - Guys, you gotta go to Cancun. So I went to Cancun and like an hour south of there, you can go to this place called Chichen Itza, which looks a lot like this and it has all these steps. It's like a mini pyramid. I would say mini. I mean, it was big. Back then, you could actually walk on those steps up to the top. - That's cool. - And it was cool, I got to go. - Now you can't 'cause someone fell and they're like, "Well, because someone fell, we can't have a lawsuit." No, nobody can go up the steps anymore, which is really sad. - It could be fun anymore. - But the whole reason we're gonna babble is this. Maybe we'll find the foundations someday of the size of New York City. But what's fascinating about babble in terms of, we know the story is that men got together, they said, "Let's build something.

"Let's reach up into the heavens. "Nothing can stop us. "We're gonna unite and really, "the whole idea is almost like hubris. "We're gonna unite. "We're gonna do whatever we want to "and even God can't stop us. "We're gonna build this giant tower "and God confuses their language, destroys the tower, "and sends them into utter confusion "so they can't even agree with each other anymore. "They don't even know what's going on "because of the different languages." What's fascinating is most, I would say most scholars currently linguists, and I love languages. Languages are really, really interesting to me. I think there's a lot of evidence out there that says we all come from one particular language. They call it the proto-Indo-European language. Now, within the Western traditions, there's something that unites all of us. The further back you go in history, it's like a tree where it's like going back to one trunk. That to me speaks a little bit more about like, "Oh, well, maybe this is true." That we all descend from one common root. Now, the problem is that you've got like African languages, you got Asian languages that don't fit into that one root, but there hasn't been enough time to study those languages,

and a lot of those languages were written down until recently. So I think over time, what it's gonna show us is that all of these languages converge to one mother tongue, which is exactly what Babylon is telling us, or Babel, the tower of Babel is telling us. - And that's also saying there's more than one way to find evidence around what the story is saying. It's like ultimately, we're wondering is that like, hey, is this supporting the Bible? Our beliefs, the basis, our beliefs. One can be what we're talking about today, like actual findings, like from the ground. And you're saying, hey, but like Babel, well, we might not be able to find that piece. Also is pointing to evidence that like the story is real, talking about it all the time. - Yeah, can I add, this is a quick Jesus side note for the Tower of Babel. In Genesis one to 11, I think you got to just ask like what, really the whole Bible, but what's it in here for? Like what is the purpose of this story? How does it tie into the larger storyline of scripture pointing to Jesus? And what I love about the Tower of Babel is it's the third of three falls in Genesis one to 11. Genesis three is the fall of mankind, individually, Adam and Eve. And then Genesis six, you see like an angelic fall.

And then there's a communal fall in the Tower of Babel where all of humanity unites and then falls. And all these things get reversed when Jesus comes. Jesus's death on the cross reverses the individual fall on Genesis three. Jesus's death also defeats the principalities and powers of darkness, the angelic fall. And then you see at Pentecost in Acts one to, like you see everyone speaking in the tongues that they do not know and tongues of fire falling upon people. And this is an example of the reversal of the Tower of Babel where like because of their sin, they were all separated in languages and then God's bringing them back together. So cool. - That's good. - How like the New Testament, the Old Testament are so intricately connected. And I think it's important to know, 'cause this is kind of setting up, setting the stage for it is that first Genesis one through 10, all of that, saying it's prehistory. Also saying, you already said it. We're not saying it's not, didn't really happen. Not really, it did really happen. How they talked about what really happened seemed to have shifted a little bit. And then even like the narrative of like Abraham and history, it just shifted how they were talking about the history. And what I'm hearing you say Adam is like, that's an important piece of ancient literature.

It's like you are talking about something real. It's just, how are you talking about it? And there's a lot of like, that sounds very like, you know, like this like poetic connection between what a Genesis is saying and then how Jesus fulfilled that. Like that's beautiful. Like how they're describing something real and how they're making this connection. - Well again, and during that first 11 chapters of Genesis, they have so much rich content in there that is shared among all these different civilizations outside of Israel. You know, like you see a flood story in every culture, South America, Central America, Asian cultures, African cultures, they're all there. So there's a shared consciousness. And that's the same way that like when I'm thinking about Babel, the fact that we all speak different languages, half the world's population right now can trace it back to one single parent language, which is insane. I mean, that would point, you know, the fact that what we read in Genesis is accurate. - Yeah, wow. So, Garden of Eden, Babylon, both part of that early section. Are there, so as we go further in Genesis, do we have more like that we can pull from, more archeological evidence of different stories

that happen later in Genesis? - Well, I think your question is like, so are we, what's the Bible's track record? You know, when it comes to like, did this stuff really happen? And I think the Bible's track record is very, very good. In fact, it was funny because probably in the late 1800s or so early 1900s, there were a lot, there was a lot of stuff going on late 1800s, early 1900s. You've got the theory of evolution, which is starting to take hold, take ground. Geology was really booming. You know, we're starting to think, okay, well, maybe there's a lot older than we think. And putting those two things together, we started applying some of these methods and ideas to the Bible itself and saying, well, maybe it's just like any other book. And because of that, we started looking for some evidence. Okay, is there any evidence for some of these people groups that the Bible talks about in the Old Testament, like the Hittites, the Jebusites, the parasites? And there weren't, you know, there wasn't any evidence it seemed like at the time for these people groups. So we're like, well, maybe this is just stuff that's made up. And so for a while, it seemed like, man, the Bible is getting a black eye here because there are no Hittites that they was kind of purported to be some kind of myth.

And then, bam, early 1900s, it revealed there was a vast imperial capital of the Hittites. There were thousands, I mean, thousands of cuneiform tablets that had showed up detailing the Hittite Empire. - Wow. - And so, these are things where we found. - Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Can we see what they look like? Like, what is this, like these? - Yeah, if you got up some like Hittite tablets. - Yeah, look at that. - Oh, wow. - So again, in the late 1800s, people were saying like, oh, this is all just stuff that, you know, it's like fairy tales. People made up, it all sounds like fairy tales. - Hittite, what's a Hittite? And so, all of a sudden, you find these civilizations, the Jebusites, the parasites, it was all mockery, you know? - Yeah. - And then, all of a sudden, they're finding these wedge-like characters, cuneiform tablets, where they just take like soft clay and they take a stylus and they're like, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, and that's how they would write what I use in my iPad, the stylus. - Totally, yeah. Just like that. - Yeah, exactly.

'Cause they had a lot of, you know, ancient technology. - Yeah, this was their iPad. - Yeah. Use it once. But yeah, so you see thousands of those things. Wow. That's cool. And that's where it was kind of like, so there were a series of skirmishes that went on in the archaeology world. Through the late 1800s and early 1900s, there was King Sargon. They're like Sargon. We've never even heard of a Sargon. There's no way there could be a Sargon. So they doubted the existence of it. And again, in the 1800s, they found his palace, of course, the bad. So look up Sargon. Yeah, look, Sargon's got like some, you can go to the British Museum. And then go to-- Wait, where is Sargon? I see you in the Bible? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You've got Sargon. You've got Sargon. You've got chalmonies or the fifth. Are these a series or Babylonia? Babylonia. Well, a series of Babylon from Syria to Babylon.

And then eventually Persia came in and took over at some point. And you got the Greeks and the Romans and took over later. But in the same way we have evidence about Greeks and Romans, we used to not have a whole lot of evidence about this guy named Sargon. Interesting. Where does he pop up? You said he's names in the Bible. Isaiah and any of the-- When you're talking about how Assyria and Babylon impacted the Jews during the exile, there's a whole lot of these guys' names that show up in the Bible that people were saying, like, never seen this guy before. And of course, they find him. Belchasar, the last great king of Babylon. The skeptical claim was that, well, we only know this guy named Abonodus, okay? So they actually discovered the Babylonian records revealed that Belchasar was the co-regent during that time. So again, over and over again. I actually got a picture of the pool of Siloam from my-- I personally, I won with a group of people too. Pool of Siloam is so cool. Didn't they just-- So the pool of Siloam, as I recall, it's like 2004 when they discovered it. Very recently. So for a long time, people were saying it's in the Bible, but it's not real.

I think it's in John 9, perhaps where it's referenced, and then they found it, like 20 years ago. Which is so cool, because that means there's still stuff in the Bible that's going to be discovered. Totally. There has yet to be. And see, this is what I'm trying to establish. The track record of the Bible is like, oh, this is false. Oh, we're wrong. Yeah. That was false. Oh, we're wrong. Well, archaeology is new. Like, in the last 200 years, it's a brand new science. So it's like still kind of getting started. And there's tons of stuff that hasn't been-- Yeah, well, don't get all sympathetic about archaeology, because other ones are blaming us for not having a-- Yeah, that's kind of true. But no, but they like, it's kind of like, there's tons of undiscovered things that are still like yet to be found. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can I tell you a quick diatribe about this guy that I learned about? Diatribe away. So like, back when archaeology was first getting started

in like the 1800s, it was like the Wild West. There's this guy named Heinrich Schlemann. Can we pull up Heinrich Schlemann? Heinrich Schlemann. This is in Bible related, but it's super-- It's a good German name. It's super interesting. He-- I expect to see him with like a pretzel in his hand. Yeah, so this guy's like a-- He was like a millionaire at the time and he was really interested in archaeology. He wanted to find the city of Troy, you know, from like the Odyssey and the Alien. Yeah, yeah. And which is a real place, but people were like, "No, probably not." It looks a little softer than I thought. Pull up Heinrich Schlemann's wife, actually. So he finds Troy, and then he finds a bunch of artifacts from-- Pull-- actually go back to the other photo, the one with her-- So they found the artifacts, and his wife would wear them out in public. Oh, wow. These are like ancient jewels from ancient Greece. Oh, wow. And it was just the wild west. They could do whatever they want. He used dynamite to do his work there

and blew up a bunch of the evidence from the city. Like, just destroyed it. That's a hard one. Yeah, kind of crazy, but-- Sounds like a Heinrich. The reason I think it's interesting is like, that's like how archaeology started, and that was only like 150 years ago. That was happening. So it's just like, who knows what will happen. Who knows what he blew up? No, I think he blew up the actual, like, the evidence. He thought it was deeper, but he blew up the Troy that he was looking for. Yeah. He was saying he accidentally blew up the evidence. So he's not pictured him in there just like a bad man. Like, only I will see this. No, no, no, no. No, he's like, I'm going to get to the real stuff, and he blew up the stuff that he was going after. And then he would like-- He would give names to like the stuff that he would find from just-- he would like, ah, this looks like something from this story. And then he would just give the jewels that name. It was really interesting. Yep. Anyways. Yep.

So Poula Saloma is just a great example of how they said-- even as late as 2000, they're like, well, this is a theological invention. It didn't really exist. And man, it's there. When I went, they were still uncovering it. And I got to sit like around the Poula Saloma. It's big. And it's like, well, since the Bible talks about it being in a certain location, we didn't find it in the location. We just figured it was myth. But it was true. L'chiche is a place or actually a series of-- they call them a straka where they're like shards of pottery that bear record to a historical event, the Assyrian conquest in 2 Kings. 2 Kings 18 and 19 talks about-- Syria and Babylon and took the Israelites into exile. And again, these are accounts that we thought, "Well, maybe they're just kind of like made up." And especially, this is a big deal, especially for this episode. The thought was during the exile, when the Jews are taken into exile up into Assyrian and to Babylon, the effort was to brainwash them. Those are the new names, teach them the new religion, have them forget all about Yahweh. And so the really like stubborn priests got together and said, "Look, we are not going to forget the word that's been given to us. We're not going to forget Moses. We're going to forget the prophets." These guys memorized the Old Testament.

So they wrote it down and they met weekly to guard that. They said, "Let's build a fence around Torah because they are not going to brainwash this out of us." Before we get our word synagogue, it's Sunagagas, which means like meeting. And it was a weekly meeting. That's why we still have synagogue today, a weekly meeting to remember the texts and the stories of the Old Testament. So the leading kind of theory among historians was that these people got together and they said, "We've got to preserve the Jewish way of life, so let's make up these stories." And so that was the theory for a long time, is that these stories all come from like 6, 700 B.C. and they're just people that made up a bunch of stuff. They made up David, they made up Solomon, they made up Moses, they made up the Exodus because we don't have any evidence for them. That's a huge piece to what was happening in the 1800s and 1900s that this is just like a creative theological imagination. What? You're talking about the Bible was, you've seen the Old Testament. That's the theory that the Old Testament was just made up and they're starting to look at, "Well it looks like in these parts he uses a different name for God and these parts there's a different name for God so maybe they're just bringing together a whole bunch of folklore, stitching it together and the reason they were doing that was to preserve the Jewish way of life and so that people would have heroes to look forward to. They would be like, "Hey, be like David, be like Moses when he led us." So this was all stuff that wasn't historical, it was like theological creativity. So that was the theory, right? So the stuff that we're going to look at the rest of this as we go through this episode together, we're going to show that that actually was a really bad theory, that actually these things actually did happen and these stories predate the exile. So I hope that makes sense. Does that make sense?

It does. It does. So they're just working with what they know at the time. Is this the evidence? We feel what we have. This is what we think it means. So you're saying, since then, what are some of the big pieces that changed that thinking? Yep. That's what I'm asking you. Oh, I thought you were just saying like, "Yeah, well I am stating that but also asking something." So what were some of the big pieces that really overturned that, like, "Oh wow, this is true." Well, I mean, we start off with that whole track record of talking about it. And I think Lakeesh is a great example of it where it talks about the Assyrian conquest and that it is preserved in these pottery shards showing that people like Synacrib, they're like, "Oh, this guy's just made up." But they actually show it outside the Bible, like, "Oh, there was a guy named Synacrib." Wow. That guy's like, "Sargon, took a latholezer, Shalmanezer." What is it? What is the word? Cakesh. Lucky. Lucky. Lucky. Lucky. Yeah. I was watching Tyler try to spell that on Google when it was really entertaining. L-A-C-H-I-S-C-H. You were close.

You were close. So close. There it is. Yeah. He ended up with something very different. Yeah, so they find this stuff and it's like, "Wow, what the heck?" So when you, like- So wait, I'm sorry, is this- This is Lequiche right here? What is actually Lequiche pottery that- Lequiche are like a series of what they call a stalker. They're like shards of clay. Okay. Yeah. And you can see, like, reliefs in them. And then they detail all kinds of historical events that actually back up what we see in the Bible. Isn't that crazy, though? That is really cool. So, for example, you have Sodom and Gomorrah, great, I don't know, stories. The story from the Old Testament, where anybody wants to take any up on that detail, what Sodom and Gomorrah was. Tell the story. Tell the story. I mean, I'm propin' it up there. Horribly sinful, wicked place. And the story is actually, I mean, I picture like a movie, you know? And Abraham's like, "Hey, I want to try to save the people of this city." And I mean, it's- Abraham, I say it right? Yeah. I have to question myself. I want to save the people of this city if I can find someone righteous. And they're like, "He whittles it down to, like, one righteous person in this city can't

find it." Right, right. So, like, the story is really intense and kind of epic in, like, a, you know, sad kind absolutely destroying Sodom and Gomorrah. And so you read a story like that. And I absolutely think to myself like finding any evidence of that would be really, really total epic story of like raining down fire and brimstone. And this is exactly the kind of stuff that they're like, oh, okay, well, this is all indented, you know? This is the stuff that they made up during the exile just to give people like, it feels like a movie. It feels like today, someone would make up a story like that. I think of Dune, do you know what I mean? Like doesn't have the same like landscape as Dune. - Yeah, epic music. - Yeah. - You know, and like, and it is like Dune's day kind of feel. - It's, yeah. - And it is, you read the stories and you are like, wow. - Christopher Nolan and who's the guy, Hans Zimmer. Is it Hans Zimmer? - Hans Zimmer has done a lot of stuff. Was it him for that? - That's amazing. That lady is like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that is the vibe. - Yeah, so that's what we're talking about. So they actually have excavated in this area called Telhamam and Telhamam, we're not 100% sure. This is exactly where,

'cause it's hard to find exactly where, or not Jericho, where Sodom and Gomorrah might be. But they found in this place called Telhamam, it's in the Jordan Valley, a destruction layer. And it might even have pictures of it. Now, there's a big story behind this. So it's really interesting. Telhamam exists, it's like, if you sift through like layers of like destruction, if you go back to about 1650 BC, kind of like the middle Bronze Age, you find collapsed walls, burned material, ash, fragments of pottery, mud brick. But what's so interesting about this particular area, and this was a paper that was put out in about 2021, it reported that there was a catastrophic event that happened in this area. So much so, like it was so, the high temperatures exceeded like 2000 degrees, much higher than just like something burning. - Almost like a nuclear bomb, right? - Yeah. - They see the same stuff there that you would see if like someone dropped a nuclear bomb. - Yeah, yeah, stuff like crystallized, you know? It was just like, it was so impacting what happened. And of course, in that area, there's a lot of, by two men, there's like what we would call fire and brimstone. There was a lot of fire, there was a lot of brimstone in this particular area. What's interesting though, is that these guys

came up with this report, and their conclusion was that there was an air burst, or something that came out of the sky like a meteor, that came over the area and burst apart, over top of this settlement. And so there's no impact crater or anything, so that's why they think that this thing exploded and completely combust, and that's why you see such devastating heat in this particular area. Now, that raised some big red flags from some people, and they actually went through and looked at how they did their research, and they had a print of retraction on this particular article. And the sad part is, is that people hear, okay, well, they retracted the research, but they didn't retract all the research, they just retracted the portion of it that said this had to be some kind of meteor type of thing. But you still have a huge burn layer, lots of ash, and intense heat, like unexplainably hot combustion, like something happening. Like fire falling from the sky. Exactly, yeah. But you can't say, I mean, at this point, at least, it's very strongly contested and retracted that it was some kind of air burst, there was some kind of meteor that burst over time. Scientists can't say it. No, I can say it.

Yeah, I'm not a scientist. Well, I think we need to be cautious about this and say the thing we do know is that there was an intense destruction layer that showed intense heat, and the claim that there is this meteor, we're not so sure about that, but we know, just like the Bible said, this place burned and burned royally. And I think that the, so scientifically, what you're saying, totally, like respectful to like, what do we actually know scientifically? I think like, the piece is like, hey, we're comparing it to the Bible. So we're saying, hey, if we believe this is a real, historical event, this happened, that's biblically the piece that we know. And then scientifically is when it's almost like, I mean, I think there can be joy and fun in that too. It's saying like, oh, then what can we really scientifically prove now? And so I think that there's like kind of both, right? We know the Bible's Bible story, but we're also trying to get as close as scientifically possible. Well, again, it's like, so if these guys are saying, well, this was just stuff they made up. These are like nursery tales, nursery rhymes, you know, like folklore or whatever, but you find a settlement that didn't just burn, it melted, okay, that, and it's in the area.

And in the time that was reported, that fire came out of the sky and consumed this place. - And you know what I'm thinking about? Like think about how long ago this was. - Yeah. - This is, you said 1600 BC. - Yeah. - So 17th century. That is from now, 3,700 years ago. - Yeah. 5,700 AD? - Sounds right. - That's just so far away. And yeah, we're still able to go back and find evidence of this stuff. I think later we'll talk about Tel Dan, probably, but we have like, there's an uncovered city with a gate from that same time period. It's just wild to me that we can still find this stuff. It's like-- - And now some of it is like the desert's a great place to preserve a lot of this stuff. - Yeah, but it's also a great place to erase a lot of stuff too. 'Cause a lot of this stuff was written down on like sheepskin, you know, and it's like, okay, I can't see that anymore, it's organic, you know, it falls apart. - Yeah, wow. - This is a great example too, you've been to Israel? - Yeah. - Okay, you've been to Jericho. - Yeah. - But you never got one of these.

- I did not even think to grab a rock from Jericho. - Okay, so here's my story, here's my story. If we can bring up that picture of, I think it's Jericho one. So this is, you stand on a bridge, you go to this settlement, you pay your money, you pay your ticket, everybody's happy to take your money, but as soon as you go in, you're on your own. You know, it's just kind of like, yeah, we don't care. So we went in and there's this like bridge and you look down and that is essentially like Jericho. Those are the walls of Jericho, which is crazy to think like Jericho, the walls came tumbling out, it's right there. So you stand on this bridge and you look over it and they have this little sign next to it and shows how there are different, like Jericho is one of the oldest cities in the world. And so they showed layers, like this is where it was, like 4,000 BC, this is where it was, this is where it was. And in the layer that they think was the time of the exodus, the walls are like, there's like nothing, which makes sense because the walls fell down. - Right, I'm looking at this and I'm just walking around. I'm just walking around, I'm walking around, walking around. And I noticed it's starting to go down. And as it's going down, I'm just talking to a friend of mine, Nate. And we're just like, wow, this is really cool. And it keeps going down. And we're not paying attention 'cause we're just talking.

And we're going around the back of it and it's going down and it's going down. And I hit the next picture here. All of a sudden, I look up and I see, I touch the walls and I'm like, oh, wow, this, this seems like, do you see where we were before? The bridge? - Yeah, that's cool. - We're not supposed to be there. We walked into Jericho. We were in Jericho, like I was in Jericho, so I'm standing there and this is a rock from Jericho. This is like a brick from Jericho. I'm standing right where those like potato rocks are right there. - That's cool. - So are you going to get a court summons in the mail? - Probably. - After you're in the mail. - Especially now. - Especially now. But I'm standing there and I'm looking up at everybody and they're like, John, what are you doing down there? And I'm like, I don't know. So I have my hand on the wall. And so immediately I just went, and I put it in my pocket and that's how that piece of Jericho. - That's really cool. - And that's the Jericho wall right there. - Wow, that is really cool. - Isn't that crazy? So yeah, maybe we'll put that on, you know, and just like show a picture of it later. But the reason I'm bringing that up though is that it's another example.

Like Jericho's another example of how the Jews probably made all this up during the exile. It's a fanciful story walking around the outside of a place, the walls fall down, that sort of thing. - So back in the 1950s, they did excavations on this. And that's why we have all these, you know, they dug down and they kind of did some really great research on this. Kathleen, Kathleen, or Catherine? Catherine, Catherine Kenyon. Kathleen, Kathleen Kenyon. I'll just get this mixed up back and forth. She did some great work. She actually like invented stratigraphy. You know, she's so, she was so methodical, so good. As far as I understand, she was a believer. She was a person that was just super sharp. And so she spent years digging down through and trying to figure out like, okay, so where was Jericho? You know, what were the different settlements of Jericho? And what she concluded, she concluded that the air, that strip, when it was supposedly been when Jericho was invaded by the Israelites coming in, that that actually doesn't line up with the biblical record. And her conclusion was that it was actually a wasteland, probably about 100 years before the Israelites came into the land. And so her conclusion would be that it probably like the exodus and what happened in terms of conquest maybe happened about a couple hundred years later, which caused some problematic concern. Yeah, I mean, the people were like, whoa, what does this mean?

And so for a long time, there was debate over just some of what she, 'cause she catalogued everything that she brought up. And so basically when you go into these places and you look around and you dig out some things and you pick out shards of things and you put things together and all of a sudden you got pottery. And then you start seeing where people buried people and you notice that they put certain insignias on their burial tombs and you know, like, or, you know, they're sarcophagus and so there's telltale things. you know, that sort of thing. What she did find was that the walls were knocked down, which is interesting 'cause some people could say, well, the walls were already down, that it was just in disrepair, or that the walls actually came down. And they did see that the walls had kind of fallen outward. Now, it's hard to tell because it's kind of on an incline. It's hard to tell whether it should kind of like dribble down or whether that was from the actual impact. But they find things that are really interesting, like one of the walls, the North wall was standing, which is kind of what the Bible tells us with Rahab, like she was untouched. - Oh, wow, that's actually great. I've never heard that before. - Yeah, really interesting. And then they'll just clarify that. And the story that Rahab was untouched, just like maybe add that piece. - Yeah, Rahab was untouched.

She lived on the North side of the city and she was on the outside of the wall. And the walls falling outward matters too, right? That's, does the Bible describe the walls falling outward? - Or is it? - They say that they ran up over the wall, over the rubble, into the city. - And you would think if someone knocked the walls down, they'd probably knock them in, I guess. - I don't know. I'm thinking of Lord of the Rings, I guess. - 'Cause you can't take too much out of it because it's on an incline. - Yeah, I guess that's true. - But they did find a storage of winter wheat, which actually shows that this place was taken over during the spring, which is exactly when it claims to have been taken over. - Oh, dang, wow. - Now, the thing is, looking at that, you can say like, "Okay, well then, we were off." You know, the timing was off. But there have been people that have gone back in and looked at her results 'cause she catalogued it so well. And they're re-apprasing some of her work. Bryant Wood, there was a guy named Nyger, I think. Nyger was looking at this in the '90s. And some of the things that they came up with, which are kind of interesting, they're showing that maybe she was looking in not just the wrong parts of the city,

but also at the wrong pottery. And that she was looking for a certain Cypriot pottery that was supposed to be evident and it wasn't there. But actually she may have been looking in the wrong part of the city for something like that. So to simplify it, it's a major oversimplification. - She's one of the walls, by the way. Just a big note of this over here. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Which, again, they're wondering if that's the Rahab's career in House House was, yeah. - Again, these are like questions that are like, that's fascinating. The things that line up the way the Bible talks about them having lined up is kind of cool. And then having looked at some of her results afterwards, there are some really good academics that are saying, "Hey, I think we got this wrong." And in fact, it does line up with the biblical timeline. So I guess what I'm saying is that I went through and talked about like the Hittites, the Jebusites, the parasites, Sargon, like all these people, Belchazar. We've had a long tradition of saying like, okay, you guys said this was wrong, but actually the track record shows were true. Are these two areas like Jericho and, or were we just talking about them one before? - Starting them one more. - We're still working the details on it now, but I'm pretty sure that in the long run,

we're gonna look back and be like, "Okay, well, those line up as well." - Yeah, and these are the kind of things where you want the answers quickly, but thinking, I'm a very impatient person. The idea of digging a site like that. And I feel like, I don't know where I've seen this, maybe on the History Channel and the background, but they got their little brushes and they're brushing it. And they're probably trying to not do what Heinrich did. And blow up the evidence Heinrich, classic Heinrich. And they're trying to like dust off the pieces, probably dig around the wall carefully. Like the amount of time just to unveil another layer of the city or whatever they're finding. I mean, this is not stuff we get answers to quickly. - You're more like me, you just put your hand against the wall and just rip off it off. - That's why you can't be in that field. - You would pop a hunk. - You would just take it home. - I got proof. Okay, so. - It's a lot quicker than using toothbrushes. - Yeah. - But it just shows that that evidence doesn't come, doesn't come quickly. There's a lot of work involved. - And it's not an exact thing. Like they're still figuring stuff out

as they go back to it. - That's from like 3,500 years ago. - That's wild. - Isn't that crazy? - I feel like archeology is like highly contested too. Well, one, because that's how you make money and you gotta have new ideas and new experiences. But also there's just people, you know? They're like us. We all have presuppositional biases. We enter thinking this can't be because it's supernatural or I want this to be because I believe in the Bible. And so you just kind of have to hold it like this. I feel like all that stuff is like, yeah, you know, just take it with a grain of salt. A grain of the wall of Jericho. - Nice, yes, nice, nice. - So when we talk about archeology, I think I love to share like my top five. You know what I mean? Like there's some really cool-- - Five of like findings? - I think. I mean, these aren't like the best lists ever. But I mean, in my mind, like these things stick out to me. - This is like a David Letterman top five. So it won't be funny. - No, no, no, no. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, that would not be good. No, I think the one we all know is Dead Sea Scrolls.

- Yeah. - So anybody wanna like just tee off on that? - I can say what I know. I remember when I was in Israel, Palestine, like visiting, we went to Qumran, which is where they found these scrolls in a cave. It was actually like a shepherd boy. He was like throwing rocks up into the caves and he hit like a piece of pottery and so we went up to look at it. There were a bunch of scrolls from like the second century BC in there. And they were like scrolls of scripture. So like ancient Hebrew scripture. And before that, the earliest manuscripts that we had of the Old Testament were like, I think 10th century AD or 11th century AD? - Yeah, that was a respect. - So this is like 1200 years earlier than the earliest they had. And I think similar to what we were saying about archeology, at the time people were saying, well, there's no evidence that scripture hasn't been changed, it's been adjusted and retrained. - You can think of it. - The time of Moses is 1500 ish, right BC. The earliest manuscript, complete manuscript we have, I mean, we had pieces and whatever, but the complete Masoret manuscript is from 1100, 1200 or 10, 10, 1200, 1200 was 1100 AD? - Masoretics I think so. - Yeah, yeah.

- But I think, so we've talked about this on our other podcast from last season about the Bible being true. If you want a deep dive, you can go there. But the idea was this is a huge discovery because it shows that the scripture was basically maintained almost a hundred percent over 1200 years, which is miraculous for me. It seems insane that that's possible. - Right, and the weird story about that is this, is that see you had people that found us in 1947, 1948, and they're picking out these pieces. I don't know if you can show pictures of this. I think I have pictures on my list there of, yeah, look, they're like flakes, you know, like. That one went with the dark, it was like that. - That you're piecing together and you're trying to figure out, no, a lot of it, you could roll it out and look at it, but there were just parts of it that you wanted to be really sure that you didn't like, this stuff is brittle, you know? So you gotta give them time, right? 1947 comes and goes, 1948, 1949, 1950. I'm figuring a couple of years into it, maybe 1955, let's hear something, we don't hear anything. This team of people that is working on this, 1960 comes and goes, we don't have anything. 1970 comes and goes, we don't hear anything. 1980 comes and goes. And finally, people were like, yeah,

you gotta show us something here, like what's going on? So they finally release it. And see, this is where a lot of academics that followed this way of thinking of like, oh, a lot of this is religious imagination, people made up stuff, you know, there's no way that it's really true. And they were thinking, man, it'll be nice to get our hands on something that's 1100 years earlier, 1200 years earlier, and show that something like Jonah was just like a fish story. You know, it's just like, oh, I caught a fish. And now it's like, I was swallowed by a fish. - Right, like the game of telephone. - Yeah. - Yeah, like over time, it like got more fanciful in rage. - Right, right. So they're looking at their chops. They're like, man, this is really gonna show this. But the fact that I kept going on and on and on and on, made people go like, I wonder what they found. And so I don't wanna overstate the entry here, but there were definitely people who are like, do show us what you got. And so they finally release it and we find that nothing has changed. Now, I should say nothing statistically, you know, like 99% of the text is completely unchanged. Now words changed. There are maybe some differences.

I know that like the difference between describing the height of Goliath. - Goliath, yeah. - Yeah, that was different. Does it, instead of saying like God said, let there be light, was it like, you know, God was an alien, you know? It wasn't anything like that. - Yeah, nothing theologically significant. - Yeah, yeah, which is fascinating to me. The guy who headed the project, Giza Vermish, not a Bible thumper, not anything like that. In the, I have the book in my office, in the intro to the Dead Sea Scrolls, he's like, we've never seen anything like this. - Wow. - You know, this is unherald. I mean, unparalleled in the ancient world. - Huge discovery. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah, that's awesome. - That's number one. - Ah, yeah, I mean, like that's a huge one. But again, because so many people know it, that's like my number five. So hopefully-- - Oh, it's number five. - Yeah, that's number five. - Okay, number four. - Well, I mean, in terms of weight, it's probably number one. But just because everybody's heard about it, I don't know. Tell Dan, talk about tell Dan.

- Yeah, I can talk about tell Dan because when I visited, I got to go there. Super cool, it's in the north part of Israel. It's like a, now it's like a nature preserve, I think. So you can like, there's a beautiful little river and stuff. But, you know, we can pull up a picture of tell Dan. - I have something, I have a picture to tell Dan. - Yeah, maybe just pull one up, that'll give us a visual of it. But there's been a couple of things there. There's a steely there that we can talk about that was really significant. But then there's also the gate. I would love to see a picture of that gate. Yeah, right there, the, you can see it actually, it's the middle one. So they call this Abraham's gate. This is from, this is like from the city. - Whoa. - So this is during the time that Abraham would have been alive and there's still a gate standing wild, I mean, it was underneath the ground and they like dug down to it. - That's crazy. - But this would have been like, you know, one of the other people groups around the area had built that city. And it's, there's even described in, man, I can't remember where it is. Is it in judges, I guess, probably?

Where they talk about visiting Dan and how eventually the tribe of Dan takes over this city and like, it becomes an Israelite town. Yeah, it's not Proverbs. I don't know where, we could find it. But that's just super significant that it's still there. And they also found it a Steely, which is like a gravestone type thing. We still use them today. But it describes the house of David. - Yeah. - And that matters because up until that point, they had said David was a fictional character. - Yes. - And then we have evidence that David's not fictional. Like they knew of him at that time. - No, I sat in a class. I sat in a class at Penn State University, Dr. Gary Knaupers, saying, we don't have any archeological evidence for the existence of David. And I remember raising my hand and being like, whoa, wait a second. And of course I'm in a class of like 200 people that don't really want to take the class. Everything else was taken up. I'm the one who loved it, part of my major, you know? And everybody's like, shut up. I just want to get a move on from this class. And so I'm raising my hand and I'm arguing back

and forth with him. And I remember he was a tall guy. And so like, as we were walking down the hall, I'm like trying to match his stride. I'm like, yeah, but you don't understand. Like there's all kinds of like, there's all kinds of ancient artifacts that refer to like the house of Abram, the house of David. You know, nope, yeah, there's very common names back then and whatever. And it's funny 'cause I was like back in the 90s, early 90s. I think it was 93. That's when they discovered Tildan. These inscriptions about David. And it's so funny to like see how everything I was taught in college. Most things I was saying, I'm overstating. Most things I was taught in college that really contributed and said like, there's no way the Bible is accurate on this or that. All of those things have been completely unturned upside down. In fact, there was biblical archeology review about 10 years ago. They called them the four horsemen of the apocalypse. These four guys that talked about this very theory about how everything was made up in the Bible. And they had their faces on the cover saying like, these guys were wrong. And I just wanted to send that to my professors

and be like, ah, what's up? - But you didn't. - No, because you're gentle and humble of hard hands. - That's true. - In your mind, you did it. - In your mind, I did it for you. - But that's really cool. 'Cause it's just, I know you got more. It's just showing already. This is like, this is like the live action stuff. 'Cause in a lot of ways, like I hold the Bible and it's complete, you know, in my hands growing up. And it's like, ah, I always had that. This is like the live action discoveries that are happening. Where it's like, we're trying to take the Bible and say what's the evidence and that's active. There's 100, 200, 300 years from now and more. What more are we gonna know? That right now we're like, oh, we don't have that right now. But it's like, it's really cool to think like what's already happened and what's gonna keep happening. - And you gotta understand too, and I'm not religion bashing at all. Like, it was one of my majors was religious studies. So I really appreciate like, I think there's a lot we can learn from a lot of different religions. So I really, I'm not just saying that, I really do. But there's a substantive difference, archeologically with Judeo-Christianity than any other religion out there.

I read the Song of the Gods, Ramayana. And when you're reading the Ramayana and you hear that, Lakshmi and Sita, you know, they jump on some monkeys and they jump 14 miles over to the island of the monkey people. Anybody reading that realizes, okay, this is, you know, an allegory, we're not gonna find remains of this particular thing. When we go through those kind of ancestral rights with Enshintoism, Taoism is just kind of a philosophy, you know, so you're not gonna dig up stuff about it. The Bible is just so unique in that it follows the story of a people. - Real people. - Yeah. - Yeah. - And real places, real time. And so that's why I'm like, it's funny because no one publishes books on the historical inaccuracies of Hinduism. No one's study, you know, studies, well, you know, the problems with Confucianism are this archeologically. It's Christianity and Judaism because it's kind of like, we're making the claim that this actually happened. This is real. And so I just want people to know that like, man, there's a lot you can root yourself in. And obviously, it's gonna have to come down to faith, but there's so much you can root yourself in this, stuff that really happened. - It's not, yeah, it's faith,

but it's not without good reason. - Yeah, not blind faith. Number three would be Mari, the Mari documents, early second millennium. - How do you spell that? Let's pull it. - M-A-R-I. What's really interesting about these particular tablets, this is so cool. This is like one of my favorites. If you read, now I'm not gonna know where the heck it's from. Joseph gets sold into slavery, right? - Yeah. - Wherever that's from. - Genesis 20 something? - Yeah, he gets sold into slavery and he gets sold, the whole story is that his brothers throw him in a pit, the older brother comes and rescues him out of the pit and they see a bunch of slave traders coming by, they sell him into slavery. They sell him in slavery, is it Genesis 37? - Genesis 37. - Yeah. They pulled him out in a pit and they went and they sold him for 20 pieces of silver. So now, again, you got to understand this, think about this. This happened around the early second millennium BC. Okay, so it's 4,000 years ago, right?

The exile that happened, we're talking to like six, 500 BC, okay, it's 1,500 years later. Now think about this, the prevailing theory among academics is that, well, we used to be, that everything was all made up during that exile. Stuff about Joseph, not real. Just the collective imagination, theological imagination, a bunch of people held an exile, right? - Like once they got removed from Israel, went to Babylon, they were like, "Oh, we're gonna lose our identity. "We need to write down a bunch of fake stuff about ourselves." - Let's pull together all of our folklore. Let's pull together all of the stories that we've had and they're not really real but we need an identity. That was the theory. - I still see those TikToks that say that. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is huge, this is a blast. This is like putting dynamite. Was I got a Heinrich, what? - Heinrich Schlemen, Schlemen, Schlemen. - Heinrich Schlemen is like putting that detonating charge right underneath that theory 'cause this blows it out of the water. Because in this story, it talks about 20 shekels of silver, where do they get that price from? How do they, do they Google it? Hey, let's go back and make this really authentic. We're gonna go back to the second millennium BC and find out how much it was.

They couldn't, it was impossible. But when you pull up these Mari documents, there were certain references there and receipt records that show the actual cost of a slave is 20 shekels of silver. And that goes up and down, okay? It went up to 30 during like the mid part of the first millennium. It goes down, it goes up and based on a variety of factors, but there's no way if you were inventing this in the exile that you could have matched it that perfectly. - Wow, so they, yeah, so they pulled an ancient document essentially that just confirmed that whoever was writing this story is just pulling from what actually happened. - Yeah. - Not just making something up because how can you make that up? - Yeah. - How can you hit like dead on? - Or no, hey, no one will fact check me on this. I could just kind of pick a number that seems reasonable and this is like, this is the fact check, but it's like confirmed. - Yeah. I mean, there are people that write stuff today that are academics that make stuff up and they get flagged all the time. - Yes. - And they've got all this technology at their fingertips. - Wow. - Yeah, that's pretty well.

- That's very cool. You wanna go on one more? - Yeah. - There's two more, aren't there? - Yeah, yeah. - What's the next one? I don't know if you wanna talk more about that, Mari. - Oh no, I mean, the other thing I was thinking about though, with Joseph, I think we have storehouses that we've found from that time period. I mean, we can pull those up in Egypt. There's like, we have, you can go visit them, I'm pretty sure, but like during the story of Joseph, there's seven years of famine and Joseph builds storehouses to store grain. - Yeah. - Yeah, maybe that's, that might be an example of them. The ones I've seen look a little bit, it's like a tell, the one that I've seen. That top left photo, I think actually kind of gets out of it. - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that one right there. Yeah, so a tell, by the way, is what we've been talking about. It's like the strata. So it's like, I think it's destroyed, build, build, build. They just go on top. And it eventually becomes like a mountain. But yeah, they've discovered the storehouses in Egypt

and they seem to date back to the same time that Joseph was there and it aligns with the biblical account, which is just really cool. - That is cool. - Yeah. - And it is like that, that is a wrestle for, for people when you look at the story, is it's so, because it's is history, right? But people mix it with myth 'cause they're like, what's the evidence? So the Israelite people, that's significant that they left Egypt, you know, and they were brought, or they went into the wilderness, right? And then they find their land and then they're exiled to Babylon, all this stuff. And so it does, it forces that question of like how, if this all really happened, there's gotta be evidence. - Yeah. - There's gotta be something. - And there's a ton of it. - Yeah, and it sounds, but it sounds like that's not always how it was. - Right, right. - That like maybe that's being more, there's more and more proof, more and more evidence that's coming out to say, hey, hold on, like, we're drawing this conclusion that we didn't find something that must not be real.

- Well, yeah, I mean, the last couple hundred years, but when you think about this, what if it were not the case? What if it were the opposite? What if we never found the titans? We never found Jebusites. Oh, in fact, they mentioned it's like 50 shackles of silver and it was only 20 and nothing lines up. There was never a settlement in Jericho. There was never this. There was never the, like, that would be a whole different story. Just think of how the track record that the Bible has garnered with relation to, like, all of these questions. Man, that's-- - Yeah. - But it seems that-- - It's pretty impressive. - And it sounds like, on the flip of that, is there are times that it doesn't line up. Like you said, that was later actually corrected. - Right. - But it's almost like, when we're thinking about the Bible and we're using archeology to actually inform us and it should be believe this or not, we seems like we just had to be careful that when something new pops up on Google to say, okay, hold on, this is probably like, you said, out of, like, someone wants to push this out to make, just be real, to make some money on this, to like, see the first ones that get some clicks.

And we just have to be-- - We've found the Garden of Eden. - Yeah. - The Ark of the Covenant has been discovered. - Yes. - And it's like, that's where, like, you said, the measured responsive. That's why, like, you think about, like, science and, like, the order of proving something is helpful to say, okay, have we actually gone through the steps to prove-- - So, I have a semi-theory. It's like a-- - Oh, we need the John's theory music. - It's like a meh-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah. - Are we just gonna do our theories now? This is awesome. - It's a mid-range theory, okay? So, my mid-range theory is that God has kept some of these things completely occluded from us, because what we do to it-- - Mm. - I have a picture of Peter's house when I was there. - It's in Capernaum or a-- - Yeah. - Well, along Sea of Gala. - Yeah, Peter's there. Okay, so-- - This is Peter's house? - That's just-- - Yeah, actually, it is inside of there. - I see that spaceship. - Yeah, that is huge. Do you see how it has pillars and everything? They built it over top of Peter's house. Take it in the next picture, look at this. That's Peter's house. - Oh, wow. - They built this rocket ship over top of Peter's house so we can no longer see the light of day. You can't walk through it.

You know why they built over it? Because in the middle of it, you can go down and there's a glass floor and you can look at everything. And the idea is that it's a sacred space and so they wanna be in that same sacred space as Peter's house. So instead of like maybe putting it together and see how you can like, you could have walked through it. And maybe they don't want me to walk through it 'cause I take a look. - Yeah, 'cause people can't just shoot at it. - They're watching out for the Johns. - Yeah, I mean like two weeks later it'd be gone. - But what you're saying is they've like basically built like a temple over top of this item. And if we had evidence of everything that we would do that everywhere. - I wonder if God's like, okay, I'm gonna hide that garden. - And it would take the focus off of what really is. - I really like the garden. I don't wanna build my spaceship over top of it. - Yeah, semi-theory. - I'm track with, I thought it was gonna be a theory about like aliens or something like Indiana Jones. - Well, that is a spaceship. - That is a spaceship, you're right. - Yeah, that's true. - Like what the heck, show that picture again? That monstrosity, like who, the one that's far back out,

yeah. Which by the way to me, the fact that we have that house is insane because that was 2,000 years ago. - Yeah. - And Peter was just a fisherman. - Yeah. - But it was preserved because the ancient, like the Christians were like, we wanna take care of this. - Dude, now I'm reading a mark where it's like, and immediately when he came out of the house, he went into Peter's house. - Yeah. - And it literally is like 20 feet. - You can see it, bro. - Yeah, it's like 20 feet. - And so we, I'm trying to keep this in order in my head. So if I'm thinking about the Israelites, you know, and evidence of them and where they were geographically. So of what you've listed so far, maybe we're getting to it, what pieces have shown what areas they've been in? Like we've seen some, like, is there proof of them being in Egypt? Is there proof of them being in Babylon and anywhere in between? And is that, maybe we've already touched on some of them, you just gotta remind me, or are there other pieces that help with that? - Yeah, there's not, I mean, like, the desert can be a great place to preserve things that are well-preserved and then it can be a horrible place to like lose things forever, especially nomads, nomads that are going from one place to another,

pick up their stuff and go, and they don't waste anything. You know, like, they're not gonna leave a whole bunch of stuff behind. And if you can make use of every little thing, you're gonna make use of every little thing. So you're just not gonna have a whole lot of evidence of stuff. We have linguistic evidence of things, you know, like, Semitic peoples were in this area when Egypt refers to the Hapiru. These are like Semitic peoples that are a nuisance between them and Assyria. And oftentimes they would raid their commercial vehicles going back and forth. And so they call them Hapiru. For a while there was a question of whether or not Hapiru and Hebrew are a mixture. So there's linguistic evidence that these people were there. how the Nile turned to blood. And it's more almost like apocalyptic, so it's not referring especially to, but what's interesting is that there's that verbiage, or there's that language that may have come from the Passover event or the times of the plagues. - One thing I think about with the Egypt thing, in particular is Egyptians were really good historians. They took great records of stuff that was going on, but you also would only write down the things that were positive for your people. And the story of the Exodus is really not good if you're in Egyptian. So it makes sense to me that they weren't like

trying to highlight the fact that all that stuff happened. - That never happens in the other time in life, right? - Yeah, they say history's written by the victor. So yeah, but I think like, well, it kind of makes sense to me that they're not gonna be like, oh yeah, these slaves revolted and then they got away from us like, and that happened and that's awesome. - Yeah, that makes sense, in the desert, just some pieces with this make sense, but wouldn't we find like, 'cause there's a lot of people that, how many Israelites were in the desert? Like what do we know about that? - It's hard to tell because sometimes that word for the way they count it up and clan are similar. - Okay. - So is there a range of what we think it could have been? - What do you think? - Well, I mean, it says like up to two million, but so that's possible. God does supernatural things. And we've see evidence of that all the time, but it could also be way, way, way smaller than that. Like in the thousands, tens of thousands somewhere in that range, if it's clan instead of people. - Interesting. - Okay, and you gotta understand too, there's a different tone, I guess, when people talk about things in the ancient Near East,

sometimes it's acceptable to embellish in terms of the number of things that you can, and so it's not necessarily like they're lying, but they're just like, man, it was huge. And there's great examples of that. I wish I had notes, but like Assyrian kings doing that when they talk about their conquests, talking about like, yeah, there was like almost like unbelievably high numbers. And then like, I think of this one example, I wish I had, we wouldn't be able to search for it probably, but a king says, I brought and killed 48,000 soldiers from this other village or whatever. And then his son comes along, and he doubles that number exactly. And he says it was 96,000. Or maybe I'm thinking 24 or 48, whatever it was. It was like very clearly allegorical. And that's how they thought about numbers back then. - Right, right. - Different than us, which is sometimes hard to map yourself onto that. - Well, no, sometimes we're like, yeah, we beat them by like a cajillion. - That's true. But I think we're like so focused on like literalities, that if it's not literal, then we're like, well, it's not true, but that's just not how they thought. - Yeah, when 99% of the people didn't write stuff down or read stuff, or the spoken word is much different. - So a couple more questions about these Israelites.

I think this, again, I'm sitting on this one 'cause I feel like this is a big one. This is like God's people. And like, we're trying to figure out what do we know. There might be pieces we'll know in the future. We don't know now. So we're talking about the amount, like I'm looking at Exodus 12, 37 through 38. It just says, hey, there were about 600,000 men, plus all the women and children, a rabble of non-Israelites went with them, along with great flocks and herds of livestock. And so again, unless, you know, I'm misunderstanding how it's counting here, but it seems like there could be a lot, a lot of people, wouldn't they even at least find bones from animals, from humans? Like, is that, should that still be out there? That people could kind of like dig through? Is that truly, the desert just absolutely consumes that stuff? - I mean, maybe, maybe. Also, they're probably boiling bones using, they're using everything that they could. - Boil bones. - Yeah, man, bone broth soup, baby. - The bones, they boil them, the bones will go away. - Well, I mean, the Jews would probably keep the bones. They would transport the bones to different places and buy land and get rid of them. - Do actual burials then?

- Yeah, yeah. - So it's not people that were honored for sure. So it seems like this group wouldn't just be haphazardly leaving like dead bodies. Like, I was person died, it's a lot of work to carry this person. - No. - Think about it though, like, you're traversing the desert. You're grumpy in this story. - I mean, would you do that with your mom? - If it may be not. - You know, your mom dies, be like, well. - Depends on how hungry I was. - It's nice knowing her. - Gotta go. - Yeah. - I mean, I think that's a good point. I just think there is the mass scale of it causes me to feel like, what was just left at some point? You know, like just be here. - You're like Ralphie in the schoolyard in Christmas story. It's like the bell rang, I gotta go. Your mom's dead, but I gotta go. - I'm trapped in a desert, man. I'm hungry, I'm grumpy, you know? Like, I'm not getting along with my family. Little sisters just kind of staying in the desert. - Wow, you're vicious, man. - That's just how it's gonna be this time. - Yeah, so there's, - What about the Red Sea, like the crossing of the Red Sea?

Like is that any evidence that we have of that happening? - There are people that have talked about where we've crossed and they theorize that it's closer up to, and so the Reed Sea, that it's Yamsoof which means like the Reed Sea, that it's more of a reedy type of very high. And it was a flooded time that it wasn't like a vast ocean. - Right, but Tyler, you were pulling something up, there's a wheel, a chariot wheel discovered in 1978. - Oh yeah, that's, that's more, yeah. - I don't know anything about that, is this fake news? - It is fake news. - Okay, yeah. - This is, this is, so hey, here's a live example, all right, of some memeery going on. - Our producer Tyler, he's very interested in this stuff, so he can supply us with some real, some real interesting items. - Who's that guy that was real famous? Was it Randy or Ryan, what's the guy's name that was debunked? - We were just talking about it. - Round Wyatt. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Nice guy, real nice guy, maybe, maybe just misled. - He found Noah's Ark, have we found Noah's Ark? - No. - No. - So that's all fake news, like what we've heard about. - So far, I mean, like everything that we've tried to investigate either is turned out to be not true or fabricated.

- So, but it seems like there's some, there is some like, honesty in this where, like the Noah's Ark thing, for example, it's like, we'd love to be able to conclusively say we found that. - You know, we've taken-- - But when you've taken it-- - We've just opened ourselves up to like people sending us emails. No, no, really, look at this link. - Yeah, Tyler's doing it for us right now. - What's funny about all this stuff is like, on both sides, you could like fall off the edge, you know what I mean? Of like, well, all this is clearly made up because we don't have this piece of evidence. Or I'm gonna find this piece of evidence and hear something that doesn't totally fit, but I'm gonna shove it in there, you know? - Well, speaking of evidence, and it's really interesting 'cause for a long time, I said to myself, man, God, why didn't you rise from the dead during the video age? So that we could have video testimony. So that way we don't have to like witness to it, we can just press play. And that's funny 'cause that would have only worked for about 40 years in the TV era. Because now-- - For AI. - Yeah, 'cause now it's like, oh, it's AI.

Isn't that wise though of God when you think about it? It's like, even video is not enough. It used to be, get a picture of it. And then it wasn't long before pictures were doctored, added to the black and whites of it, were changed and everything. But so we know that that's like a trick, you know? - So it's almost like we're gonna revert back to, to like there and see it with my eyes. - Well, what's to say that's not-- - What I guess the case I'm making is that, what's the wisest form of getting out this truth? - Testimony, so a person tells you, no, I saw this. And then you can either believe him or not believe him. You have to have faith, which is so fascinating. - Yeah, it's like I was ahead of his time. - Ahead of his time. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - He's ahead of all time, all time. That's next podcast, I think. - Yeah, right, yeah. - I got the Merneptistel, you call it Steely. - That's what I call, I don't know, but I could be totally wrong. I'm not an archeologist. - 1208, 13th century BC. - There's a really cool large stone that includes an inscription, an inscription to Israel. Now listen, what we've been talking about is this, we've been saying, this is our theory is that,

there are people that don't believe that, God is behind the Bible, that there's anything supernatural to it and that a bunch of people back in the exile got together and they pulled together all of these ideas and stories and folk tales and even threw in a little spice and pepper on top of that and cooked this thing because it really didn't happen. - Now, in those stories, you've got this guy and it's not Joseph, it's Jacob. Jacob wrestles with an angel, right? And so he wrestles with, and we turn it, it turns out that it's not just an angel, it's like the angel of the Lord, it's God himself. And in the middle of the night, God puts his hip out of socket and then he finds out, like, oh wow, I'm wrestling with God. Jacob puts God in a headlock and says, "You will bless me." And God, it sounds like we were our brother. - But how cool, I mean, this guy is amazing. And what's even cooler is that God isn't offended by that. He's just like, I love your spirit and you are, you got some guts. So I'm gonna change your name. You're not Yaakov, you're not deceiver anymore. You are now Israel, which means one who wrestles with God. So we know from that point on, it is now Israel and because he has sons and sons and sons and sons and it's a nation of Israel and that's what we're following, right? That is supposedly a whole big fabrication

of the exile, which happens 600, 500 BC. Okay, follow me. - Yep, follow him. Here's the Minerva Estella, right? - And what does it do? It lists the people of Israel. - And what year was this, the Estella? - 600 years earlier, which means it's coming from a tradition, right? It's an Egyptian recognition of the people of Israel. So most people are saying this probably went into like the 1300s of knowing about Israel. - Wow. Where is this? Where can I go to see this other than Google? - You mean in person? - Yeah. Yeah, like could I, it's in Cairo, Jim. I was just curious. - Let's go. - Yeah, let's go. Let's go there. One resource that's really helped me with a lot of stuff is there's a guy on YouTube. There's not everything on YouTube is good, but this guy's good. His name is Joel Kramer. He has a channel called Expedition Bible, something like that. Really interesting.

I heard about this recently, but I couldn't remember the context. But yeah, his stuff's super good. And there's another guy named Titus Kennedy, both of them. - That's cool. - Well, it's funny because like even there were people like really respected academics 20, 30 years ago, that were saying there's not only did Moses not write the Old Testament, not only is any of that, that it was fabricated in the exile, but that there wasn't even Hebrew back then. - Wow. - Oh, like the language? - Yeah. - Yeah. - So what does this tell you? It tells you as back as 1300 BC, there had to have at least been Hebrew. - Yeah. - And that this story comes from before 1300. - Yeah, crazy. - It had to have, which means again, like this stuff was actually compiled. Like this, and I don't have any problem with Mosaic authorship. I don't have any problem with saying like Moses brought these things together and either had a commissioned or he himself wrote it,

but it's obvious that it's coming from low about 1300 BC. - It sounds like everything we're finding is kind of pushing time back further. - Yeah. - And I guess for anyone who's a skeptic, like the goal post is sort of moving, like now it's another thing, not another thing. And there'll probably will always be another goal post like find this and then I'll believe, find this and I'll believe. - Right. And you notice, I just saw this comment online the other day talking about like the biblical text. So we're just talking about Dead Sea Scrolls where when those were discovered, how close did that push us? How close did that get? - Dead Sea Scrolls close to what? - Close to when they're actually, we believe they're actually written. Like how much closer did it move to-- - Oh, it depends 'cause the Old Testament was written over like 1200 years, but it took us back to 200 BC. - Okay. So 200 BC and then even New Testament, how close do we get to when we believe that actually happened in terms of what we have writings for the New Testament? - Like P-52 is like mid-150s, like 120-150s. - So like within 100 years.

- Within 100 years. And it's wild because the comments I was reading, this person was kind of pointing out, they're still a little inaccurate with the amount of time, but they're almost saying that this updated timeline was like, look at how much time, like this is this can't be real. And it feels like sometimes like, we gotta have a grander perspective on this, how insane it is that we're even that close. - Right. - Is anything else that close to stuff like this? - No. - And that's where, again, you could read a comment online and you could look at it and say, oh yeah, geez, 100 years. You're thinking about your life. You know, it's like, oh, wow, that's, there's no way. That would be reliable. But again, if you zoom out of your own experience and to consider all the facts, it's like, no, no, that is actually like a miracle in itself that we're even that close. - Right. - Tyler, can you pull up silver scroll? - There's, you just reminded me of something. This is a piece of scripture. I think it's from First or Second Kings or Samuel that they found in a tomb. It was like underneath a tomb.

It's from 700 BC. So it's not a full like scroll or anything like that, but it's a little chunk. And it has the name of Yahweh on it. Yeah, super crazy 'cause that like pushes you back even further. It's not like a full thing. But what's actually crazy is they found it, they were like tomb robbers like crazy back then. And they would bury people with their valuables. But what happened is the ceiling fell in this tomb and created like a false floor. So tomb robbers came in to try to steal the stuff. They were like, oh, nothing's here. Everything got taken already, but it was underneath. - Oh, wow. - So then when they discovered this recently. - Wow. - They found. - I'll do you one better, Rod Stripeling. I think it's Rod. Is it Scott Stripeling or Rod Stripeling? S-T-R-I-P-L-A-N-G, he's an archeologist. - That's a baseball player. - Put Stripeling and archeology. Strip, yeah, good. Archeology. - Scott. - Scott, Scott Stripeling. This is really hotly contested right now.

We're talking 1300 BC, he found a reference to Yahweh. - Oh, wow, 1300 BC. But it's contested because the people that have examined a pure review of it says that it's just a bunch of symbols. That they're not necessarily lined up in the configuration of Yahweh. But he found a cursed tablet that talks about Yahweh. - Yahweh is the name of God. - The name of God. - Yeah, the personal name of God. - Explain the significance of that. Why is it so important that that name is, but it also shows that God revealed that name earlier than what most people believe. Yeah, yeah, because the Bible is claiming that it was actually when God actually revealed that and people are saying no, no, no, it was made up later made up later part of a religious kind of idea that had actually they take more of almost like when you're evolving like this an evolved idea and it evolved to this, but actually what it shows it goes back to about the 13th century, you see that this was developed much earlier. That's very cool. I mean, that like kind of blows blows category. Do you see what I'm saying though? So like the thing is like you don't need to know all of this data. You can just walk away from this podcast going like, okay, I don't need to know that stuff, but at least I know that there are people that know that stuff that there's a great track record of the Bible. Yeah. And I think that's where, you know, because everyone's going to fall in different camp with interests and what you're going to dig into, you know, and like I've followed Jesus for a long time. And I have not, I'm like, I don't know much at all about this stuff. And it but I do take a lot of courage and or encouragement from people who are and then presenting these things. I might not be the one out there digging this up, but I appreciate seeing the evidence come out and seeing like they see their extraordinary claims. So extraordinary claims deserve extraordinary evidence, right? So Jesus claimed to arise from the dead. It's an extraordinary claim. Buddha the night before or the night of his death, he looked at his disciples and said, look, I'm not a God. Don't make me into one. And then he fell down in his rice.

And I think he was poisoned even. But he didn't make that extraordinary claim. And Christianity does. And that's why I think I get so much scrutiny. But what's fascinating is it stands up to a lot of it. You know, that that it's showing that it's stuff actually happened. Yeah. Want to hear one more? Yep. Give me one more. Give it. Second Kings 19. There's a story in which the people of Babylon come up and they're like, we're going to take your place. And so Assyria came and took like the northern kingdom and then it turned into Babylon came down and started taking sections and more and more. There's like a series of battles that took place that basically took over Israel. You've got Israel to the north due to the south. And part of their whole thing was to take the important people and bring them back to Babylon, brainwash them, re-educate them. And it was a scary thing, you know what I mean? Because like everybody he comes up to just this guy named Sinakarib, he is leading these armies down to Judah and they send this letter saying, hey, we're going to take you with us and it's not going to be a happy ride. You're not going to enjoy this. We're not going to Disneyland. And Hezekiah gets this letter and he's like, so he goes into the temple and he got to lays it up before God's like, God, please help. And God seems to answer and saying, look, I'm going to take care of you. Don't worry about it. In the Bible, it says that the angel of the Lord that night slew a bunch of his soldiers and then he went back to Nineveh, went back to Nineveh and he was assassinated, which is so interesting. Like, okay, so that's the Bible version of it. What we found, the Taylor Prism from 701 BC really interesting records the siege of Jerusalem just like the Bible says. And he mentions it like this, he says, Hezekiah was like a bird in a cage. So he mentions tribute taken from Hezekiah, but he does not report the capture, which every Stella, like every record back then reports the capture, you know, because that's part of the thing. Like I hold him up like a bird in a cage and then I came in and I spilled blood everywhere and I killed tens of thousands of people. But there's nothing of that just as he hold him up in a cage, took some tribute from him. So he omits all of that, which is a huge statement, right? Because anybody even a commander back then would have been like, so what happened? Yeah, you know, what's the deal? And it shows that there was actually a nanobite letter. It's called ABL 1091. From the Babylonian Chronicle, it reports that on January,

in January of 681 BC, he was brought back to Nineveh and his sons killed him and assassinated him. Which aligns with the biblical account? Yeah, yes. Isn't that wild? Crazy. That is wild. So, you know, you read the biblical county like, Oh, here we go again. God comes in and saves the day. But historically, that's exactly what happened. And so his brother, Naboo Shahruz, murdered his father, Sennacherib. And then he wanted to seize the throne. So the ABL, we had a picture of it, the 1091 letter. This is documents from the Sennacheribs people group. Like that was from the source data, right? Yeah, like they're giving it up. Because they could have also been like, which is fudge the detail a little bit. No, you captured - Yeah, but they kinda like the, so it's... this is what's about to happen. Oh, I'm gonna have to stop here. Yeah, let's stop here. And then a different document points out that he was assassinated. That's so wild. Isn't that crazy? That is really cool. That's a good one. Wow. Yeah, so I think looking at all these pieces, someone who's watching this and kind of processing through this, I think that we want to see this kind of evidence because it is, we want to be encouraged. We want to know, is this reasonable? That I believe this? 'Cause there's gonna be times we're gonna talk with someone and maybe we just don't know enough about it yet or we're still learning, growing in our faith.

And we don't want to feel like a fool. You know, and have someone be like, "Ah, just know it. "There's no evidence for this." Like, you don't want to feel like a fool and then you want to be educated enough, but we're never gonna know all the things. And kind of what we're seeing from here is there's a lot of different pieces more to come. Probably a bunch we didn't mention. Yep. Yeah, I only pick five. Right. I mean, there's a lot more. And we didn't go into the New Testament hardly at all, but there's even a lot more for the New Testament. Yeah. Oh yeah, you know what? I got a picture of Pontius Pilots. That was another thing. I'm glad you brought that up. So apparently that was a big thing for a while was, they thought Pontius Pilot was a fictitious kind of contrivance, you know, we gotta make this up to the plot. Try Jesus. Yeah, it'll make the plot go 'cause they didn't have any proof of him. So this is actually a facsimile that's in Israel, but it talks about him being in the position he was in and it mentions him by name Pontius Pilot.

And that was found in 1961. Wow. There's a lot more to find. Currently in the Near East, there's a lot happening, which kind of distracts from doing any archeology, which makes you wonder if there's a reason to that. Oh, interesting. You know what it could be. I mean, if you wanna talk about like conspiracy theories, what's the best way to keep any of this stuff coming to light, but to keep it in a constant state of war? Wow. Wow. Yeah. 'Cause what if we did find more stuff? Would it potentially lead to more people saying, wait a second. So this isn't like nursery rhyme, Mickey Mouse stuff? Yeah. And we have to remember, like we're talking, especially this episode, we're talking like factual, tangible things I can touch. But we just spent other episodes talking about spiritual warfare and we're acknowledging in this way and what we believe. Yes, there are things you can find that are evidence of this stuff really happening. But there's also a spiritual realm, spiritual warfare that is very, very real. I think there is something to keeping all of this buried. You know, that there's no way.

There's an intriguing amount of discord that happens in the Middle East that keeps a lot of this buried. 'Cause people will talk about like, oh, well, why don't we find the ark? You know, Noah's ark. Well, 'cause it's in like Turkey and Iran. Like in those areas where there's just a lot of people in the area that are probably like, what are you doing? And they've got like Kalishnikovs and they just wanna know what you're doing. And it doesn't build real well for an innocent archeologist. Yeah. And it's just acknowledging the reality. There is spiritual warfare. Like we're trying to find tangible stuff, but we know like my stuff we can't see. And so there's so much more, and that should be an encouraging thing to know that there's so much more we just haven't even found yet. Look at the track record so far and that should encourage us in our faith to say, I might not have all the answers I want right now, but there's still so many more than what we had before. And so John, I'm curious. So both of you have looked up so much of this stuff. So someone's thinking, there's stuff we just couldn't cover in here. There's more little nuggets, more pieces that would be fun for people to explore.

How can they find more nuggets? How do they know that it's legit and not AI, not me? Like what's the right way to research this? Yeah, what do you think? What do you go to in terms of finding a legitimate source? I think you got to ask other people in your community who believe what you believe, because you want to share values with people. If you just go on Reddit, you'll find anyone. It's what Michael Scott has this quote where he's like, "I love Wikipedia because anyone can edit Wikipedia and add anything, and so you know you're getting the best possible information." So that's probably not a great place to go to look for that kind of thing. But I think everyone has biases when they come into their information. So whether it's peer reviewed or not, academic or not, like everyone's entering with a biases. And so you want to seek truth, but you want to do it in a way that's well protected, I think. Is peer reviewed still better to look for though, compared to like just a random YouTube video? I think so. The process of peer review is that somebody publishes something and then it's sent around to a series of academics with no name and touch them at all. And they will flag it if they see something wrong with it and if it receives a flag, then it's not published.

Which I think it's fair, you know what I mean. It's human centered though, and that's the funny thing. And that's what scares me about the peer review process who's like, "Hey, I found Yahweh, 1300 BC." And he'll send it around to 10 random academics. If he happens to get six out of the 10 random academics that that doesn't compute for them, like, "No, that's not what I've been taught. There's no way that can happen. There's nothing supernatural." And all of those things, one of them is gonna flag it. And so now he's got a problem and he's not gonna get published. - Yeah, that's what you just have to take into account, like, everyone is operating on their own biases and they're gonna bring those into the way that... And in this world, most people do not believe that the Bible is true, that it's a supernatural account. - Right, right, right. - And so, yeah, you have to be aware of that. - Like, for example, one of the main reasons people say, "Well, oh, Mark was written early, probably in the '50s, '55 AD." Luke, there's no way it could have been written before then, because he mentions the destruction of Jerusalem and that happened in '70. So, there's no way he can prophesy it. So, it had to be after '70. And it's like, we're making a worldview assumption there, yeah.

Rather than looking at the data or the text, you know? So, you still deal with that. There's still like an anti-supernatural bias, which I understand. Like, you can't just be like, "Well, clouds are jumping over the moon," you know? But... - And so, that can make me feel like anything that we find. It's like, how do I know if it's actually trustworthy or not? - Yeah. - Are we saying that these other things you've listed are more trustworthy 'cause more eyes have been on them, there's just been more that's come out about them? Like, how do I know the difference? - Yeah, for me, it's like, if I go to YouTube and start saying, "So, what about the arc?" I'm gonna get all kinds of crazy people telling me all kinds of crazy stuff. And you know what's annoying? Sometimes you get like someone who's like 17 years old and they're like, "Let me tell you about the arc." Like, you don't even know how to spell the arc, okay? Like, what are you talking about? Like, and I don't know, that's rude. But like, how much have you actually lived? Have you been to the Middle East? Do you know what's going on? On the other side of the spectrum, you go to something like a biblical archeology review, which tends to be very, very guarded

about like what they endorse or, you know? So, if they are saying things like, "Oh, wow, so we found a Tel Dan evidence of David," then it's like someone who begrudgingly will acknowledge it. If they're acknowledging it, then you're like, "Okay, that's safe." It's like you go to the person that disagrees with you to look for an opinion about something, then you know you can value that opinion. If you're going with everybody that you agree with, it's kind of like, "Well, can I really value this information?" - It's like, has it been cross-examined? - Yeah, exactly. That there's evidences and there's inferences. And so like, we can, we all make assumptions based on what we found. Evidence is irrefutable, you know, you see that stuff. That's where I would say you don't want to be going on YouTube and watching some random video when it comes to evidence. But when it comes to the inferences, that's where you can let someone speak into it a little bit. - Is that a proverb that he who speaks first seems to be right until the cross-examination begins? - Nice, yeah. - It's like a very like, that's wisdom, that's right from the Bible. - Definitely from the Bible. - The book of wisdom, yes it is. - Very good, very good.

- And so you're saying like, "Yeah, like this seems right." And then that cross-examination, even someone that disagrees that says, "Ooh, this piece is legit." - Yeah. - Starts to bring a lot more validity to something that someone might look up online. - A great book that walks that line, I think, is evidence that demands a verdict by McDowell and his son, Josh and Sean. Because it includes a bunch of different things, it's a apologetics book, but it includes archeology as well. And I don't know, it's just like very, very solid, it's written from like a Christian perspective, but they do it in a fair way. That's cool, that's awesome. - And I would encourage everybody, if you can, at some point get over to Israel. - Yeah. - To see it face to face. I mean, it is weird. I remember standing at the, I guess it's the East entrance, I might be wrong, but the East entrance of the temple. And they're like, well, Jesus went right through here. And it's actually all bricked up at this point, like they've routed people around another wave, so you can't actually go through there. But it's like the poor person's gate, basically.

And there are three doors, you know, three archways. And as I'm standing there, I remember standing in front of the one archway and saying, right now in my life, there is a 33% chance that I'm standing exactly where Jesus walked. And then, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I went over to the next one, and it's like right now, I'm 66% sure. And then I stepped, I'm like, now I know 100%. I have walked exactly. - I only see two archways. - Yeah. - Are there three? - That's AI. (both laughing) - I just remember standing on three areas, there were like three platforms. - Maybe there's a third one, somewhere else that they're not back at. - It might have been like where they like, put you through, like on the steps or something. But I just remember standing in three particular areas and just saying like, I know. And I don't know if you felt like this, but you know, I went to Jerusalem, went to Masada, went all over Israel, but when we went to Galilee, oh, that was spooky. Like, I remember feeling like, and I know theologically this is off. That's a great way to start.

We jumped through. I know this is totally not right. But feeling, the way I felt there as I made my way through the different areas of Galilee, I felt like I wasn't worthy. You know what I mean? Like, I felt like almost like I shouldn't be here. You know, like, this is where Jesus was, you know? And I know I'd been made worthy by the blood of Jesus, but there was just something in me that was like, wow. So I love going to the beach. I read in the gospels where it's like, and Jesus retreated to the seashore, and I would go down that path in Capernaum to where the water was. And I'm like, this is what he did, you know? It's awesome. I want to go back, and instead of seeing all the sites, I just want to set up a hammock. I just want to set up a hammock in Capernaum and just live a day in Capernaum and just watch, you know? And just be like, this would have been his day off, you know? So cool. - That's awesome. Well, thank you guys for just everything, everything you're sharing, all this stuff that you're pulling out, 'cause it is encouraging. Encouraging to me. I hope it's encouraging those listening that, man, there's just so, there's so much evidence.

And it's exciting to think that we could do another podcast in the future with just more things that have been revealed over time. And so we should be encouraged by it in our faith, knowing this is very, like, there's so much behind this. And there's a lot of opportunities to go out and look for more, you know, look for good resources, but more opportunities to look for more. So guys, man, thanks so much for talking through this. Aliens, are there aliens out there? Does that conflict with the Bible? - I've seen a UFO. - You've seen a UFO? - Yeah, I have. I'll tell you guys the story. Could a demon masquerade as what we would call an alien? I feel like angels and demons are aliens. If this was off just a little bit, humans couldn't live here. Everything is perfectly designed, just right for humans to survive. From gravity to nuclear force to our climate. If there's life on other planets, it's a big deal. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]