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.

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Transcript

NARRATOR: Tel Zayit is a small site on the southwestern border of ancient Israel that dates back to biblical times. Since 1999, Ron Tappy has been excavating here.

It was the last day of what had been a typical dig season.

RON TAPPY: As I was taking aerial photographs from the cherry picker, a volunteer notified his square supervisor that he thought he had seen some interesting marks, scratches, possibly letters incised in a stone.

NARRATOR: Letters would be a rare find, so when he kneeled to look at the marks, Tappy got the surprise of a lifetime.

RON TAPPY: As I bent down over the stone, I immediately saw very clear, very distinct letters.

NARRATOR: Tappy excavated the rock and brought it back to his lab at the nearby kibbutz. It was only then that he realized he had more than a simple inscription.

RON TAPPY: Aleph, bet, gimmel, dalet...I realized that this inscription represented an abecedary, that is to say, not a text narrative but the letters of the Semitic alphabet written out in their correct order. Nun, pe and ayin are difficult to read but they're out here.

NARRATOR: This ancient script is an early form of the Hebrew alphabet.

KYLE MCCARTER: What was found was not a random scratching of two or three letters, it was the full alphabet. Everything about it says that this is the ancestor of the Hebrew script.

NARRATOR: The Tel Zayit abecedary is the earliest Hebrew alphabet ever discovered. It dates to about 1000 B.C., making it possible that writing the Hebrew Bible could have already started by this time. To discover the most ancient text in the Bible, scholars examine the Hebrew spelling, grammar and vocabulary.

KYLE MCCARTER: The Hebrew Bible is a collection of literature written over about a thousand years, and, as with any other language, Hebrew, naturally, changed quite a bit over those thousand years. The same would be true of English. I'm speaking English of the 21st century, and if I were living in Elizabethan times, the words I choose, the syntax I use would be quite different.

NARRATOR: Scholars examine the Bible in its original Hebrew in search of the most archaic language, and therefore the oldest passages. They find it in Exodus, the second book of the Bible.

VOICEOVER (Reading from the Bible, "Revised Standard Version," Exodus 15:4) Pharaoh's chariots and his army He cast into the sea. His picked officers are drowned in the Red Sea.

NARRATOR: This passage, known as the "Song of the Sea," is the climactic scene of Exodus, the story of the Israelites enslavement in Egypt and how Moses leads them to freedom. In all of the Bible, no single event is mentioned more times than the Exodus.

With the development of ancient Hebrew script, the "Song of the Sea" could have been written by 1000 B.C., the time of Tappy's alphabet. But it was probably recited as a poem long before the beginning of Hebrew writing.

LAWRENCE STAGER (Harvard University): It's very likely that it was a kind of story, told in poetic form, that you might tell around the campfire. Just as our poems are easier to remember, generally, than prose accounts, so we generally think that the poetry is orally passed on from one to another, long before they commit things to writing.

NARRATOR: Because the poetry in Exodus is so ancient, is it possible the story has some historical core?

Here, in the eastern Nile Delta of Egypt, in a surreal landscape of fallen monuments and tumbled masonry, archaeologists have uncovered a lost city. Inscribed on monuments throughout the site is the name of Ramesses II, one of the most powerful Egyptian rulers. It is Ramesses who is traditionally known as the pharaoh of the Exodus.

Ancient Egyptian texts call the city Pi-Ramesse, or House of Ramesses, a name that resonates with the biblical story of Exodus.

MICHAEL COOGAN: The only specific item mentioned in the Exodus story that we can probably connect with non-biblical material is the cities that the Hebrews were ordered to build, and they are named Pithom and Ramesses.

NARRATOR: Scholars agree that the biblical city Ramesses is the ancient Egyptian city Pi-Ramesse. Its ruins are here in present-day Tanis.

MANFRED BIETAK (Austrian Academy of Sciences): Most of the Egyptologists identified Pi-Ramesse, the Ramesses town, with Tanis, because here you have an abundance of Ramesside monuments.

NARRATOR: This convergence between archaeology and the Bible provides a timeframe for the Exodus. It could not have happened before Ramesses became king, around 1275 B.C., and it could not have happened after 1208 B.C., when the stele of pharaoh Merneptah, Ramesses the Second's son, specifically locates the Israelites in Canaan.

The Bible says the Israelites leave Egypt in a mass migration, 600,000 men and their families, and then wander in the desert for 40 years. But even assuming the Bible is exaggerating, in a hundred years of searching, archaeologists have not yet found evidence of migration that can be linked to the Exodus.

WILLIAM DEVER: No excavated site gives us any information about the route of the wandering through the wilderness. And Exodus is simply not attested anywhere.

NARRATOR: Any historical or archaeological confirmation of the Exodus remains elusive. Yet scholars have discovered that all four groups of biblical writers contributed to some part of the Exodus story.

Perhaps it is for the same reason its message remains powerful to this day: its inspiring theme of freedom.

CAROL MEYERS: Freedom is a compelling notion, and that is one of the ways that we can understand the story of the Exodus: from being controlled by others to controlling oneself, the idea of a change from domination to autonomy. These are very powerful ideas that resonate in the human spirit, and the exodus gives narrative reality to those ideas.