Major funding for "The Bible's Buried Secrets" is provided by The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, and the Righteous Persons Foundation.





Additional funding for this program is provided by the Skirball Foundation and by The Solow Art and Architecture Foundation.

Not seeing video enhancements such as chapter navigation and caption controls? Visit this iTunes support page from Apple for a solution.

The Bible's Buried Secrets homepage | NOVA homepage

Transcript

NARRATOR: Near the banks of the Nile, in southern Egypt, in 1896, British archaeologist Flinders Petrie, leads an excavation in Thebes, the ancient city of the dead. Here, he unearths one of the most important discoveries in biblical archaeology. From beneath the sand, appears the corner of a royal monument, carved in stone.

Dedicated in honor of Pharaoh Merneptah, son of Ramesses the Great, it became known as the Merneptah Stele. Today it is in the Cairo Museum.

DONALD REDFORD (Pennsylvania State University): This stele is what the ancient Egyptians would have called a triumph stele, a victory stele, commemorating victory over foreign peoples.

NARRATOR: Most of the hieroglyphic inscription celebrates Merneptah's triumph over Libya, his enemy to the West, but almost as an afterthought, he mentions his conquest of people to the East, in just two lines.

DONALD REDFORD: The text reads, "Ashkelon has been brought captive. Gezer has been taken captive. Yanoam in the north Jordan Valley has been seized, Israel has been shorn. Its seed no longer exists."

NARRATOR: History proves the pharaoh's confident boast to be wrong. Rather than marking their annihilation, Merneptah's Stele announces the entrance onto the world stage of a people named Israel.

DONALD REDFORD: This is priceless evidence for the presence of an ethnical group called Israel in the central highlands of southern Canaan.

NARRATOR: The well-established Egyptian chronology gives the date as 1208 B.C. Merneptah's Stele is powerful evidence that a people called the Israelites are living in Canaan, in what today includes Israel and Palestine, over 3,000 years ago.

The ancient Israelites are best known through familiar stories that chronicle their history: Abraham and Isaac, Moses and the Ten Commandments, David and Goliath.

It is the ancient Israelites who write the Bible. Through writing the Hebrew Bible, the beliefs of the ancient Israelites survive to become Judaism, one of the world's oldest continuously-practiced religions. And it is the Jews who give the world an astounding legacy, the belief in one God.

This belief will become the foundation of two other great monotheistic religions, Christianity and Islam.

Often called the Old Testament, to distinguish it from the New Testament, which describes the events of early Christianity, today the Hebrew Bible and a belief in one God are woven into the very fabric of world culture. But in ancient times, all people, from the Egyptians to the Greeks to the Babylonians, worshipped many gods, usually in the form of idols. How did the Israelites, alone among ancient peoples, discover the concept of one god? How did they come up with an idea that so profoundly changed the world?

Now, archaeologists and biblical scholars are arriving at a new synthesis that promises to reveal not only fresh historical insights but a deeper meaning of what the authors of the Bible wanted to convey.

They start by digging into the Earth and the Bible.

WILLIAM DEVER: You cannot afford to ignore the biblical text, especially if you can isolate a kind of kernel of truth behind these stories and then you have the archaeological data. Now what happens when text and artifact seem to point in the same direction? Then, I think, we are on a very sound ground, historically.

NARRATOR: Scholars search for intersections between science and scripture. The earliest is the victory stele of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah, from 1208 B.C. Both the stele and the Bible place a people called the Israelites in the hill country of Canaan, which includes modern-day Israel and Palestine. It is here, between two of history's greatest empires, that Israel's story will unfold.