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: About two centuries pass after the Merneptah Stele places the Israelites in Canaan. Families grow into tribes; their population increases. Then about 1000 B.C., one of the Bible's larger than life figures emerges to unite the 12 tribes of Israel against a powerful new enemy.

VOICEOVER (Reading from the Bible "Revised Standard Version," First Samuel 17:49): David put his hand into the bag; he took out a stone and slung it. It struck the Philistine in the forehead; the stone sank into his forehead and he fell down on the ground.

NARRATOR: The Bible celebrates David as a shepherd boy who vanquishes the giant Goliath; a lover who lusts after forbidden fruits; and a poet who composes lyric psalms still recited today. Of all the names in the Hebrew Bible, none appears more than David.

Scriptures say David creates a kingdom that stretches from Egypt to Mesopotamia. He makes Jerusalem his royal capital. And in a new covenant, Yahweh promises that he and his descendents will rule forever. David's son Solomon builds the Temple where Yahweh, now the national God of Israel, will dwell for eternity.

The Kingdom of David and Solomon: one nation, united under one god, according to the Bible.

WILLIAM DEVER: Now, some skeptics, today, have argued that there was no such thing as a united monarchy. It's a later biblical construct and, particularly, a construct of modern scholarship. In short, there was no David. As one of the biblical revisionists have said, "David is no more historical than King Arthur."

NARRATOR: But then, in 1993, an amazing discovery literally shed new light on what the Bible calls ancient Israel's greatest king.

Gila Cook was finishing up some survey work with an assistant at Tel Dan, a biblical site in the far north of Israel, today. The excavation was headed by the eminent Israeli archaeologist, Avraham Biran. It was near the end of the day, and Cook was getting her last measurements, when she hears a yell from below.

GILA COOK (Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion, Jerusalem): And it was Biran, in his booming voice, yelling "Gila, let's go." And so I waved to him, "Hold it," and continued working.

NARRATOR: After being summoned by Biran a second time, Cook had her assistant load her up, and she started down the hill.

GILA COOK: So I get there, and I just drop my bag and drop the board, and I set my stuff down.

NARRATOR: But something catches her eye: a stone with what appeared to be random scratches, but was actually an ancient inscription. This time she yelled for Biran.

GILA COOK: And he looks at it, and he looks at me, and he says, "Oh my god!"

NARRATOR: Cook had found a fragment of a victory stele, written in Aramaic, an ancient language very similar to Hebrew. Dedicated by the king of Damascus or one of his generals, it celebrates the conquest of Israel, boasting, "I slew mighty kings who harnessed thousands of chariots and thousands of horsemen. I killed the king of the House of David."

Those words, "the House of David," make this a critical discovery. They are strong evidence that David really lived.

Unlike Genesis, the stories of Israel's kings move the biblical narrative out of the realm of legend and into the light of history.

WILLIAM DEVER: The later we come in time, the firmer ground we stand on. We have better sources, we have more written sources, we have more contemporary eyewitness sources.

NARRATOR: When the biblical chronology of Israel's kings can be cross-referenced with historical inscriptions, like the Tel Dan Stele, they can provide scholars with fairly reliable dates. King David is the earliest biblical figure confirmed by archaeology to be historical. And most scholars agree he lived around 1000 B.C., the 10th century.

Could any of the Bible have been written during David's reign? The earliest Hebrew alphabet discovered by Ron Tappy carved on a stone at Tel Zayit provides an enticing clue.

RON TAPPY: The stone was incised with this alphabet, the stone was then used to build the wall, and the structure itself suffered massive destruction by fire sometime near the end of the 10th century B.C.E.

NARRATOR: The find is even more significant because Tel Zayit was a biblical backwater, on the fringes of David's kingdom.

KYLE MCCARTER: Surely, if there was a scribe that could write this alphabet that far away, way out in the boondocks, at the extreme western boundary of the kingdom, surely if there is a scribe that could do that out there, there were scribes, much more sophisticated scribes, back in the capital.

NARRATOR: Could these scribes have been in the court of King David and his son Solomon? Could they have been the earliest biblical writers?

In the 18th century, German scholars uncovered a clue to who wrote the Bible, hidden in two different names for God.

MICHAEL COOGAN: According to one account, Abraham knew God by his intimate, personal name, conventionally pronounced Yahweh.

NARRATOR: Passages with the name Yahweh, which in German is spelled with a J, scholars refer to as J

MICHAEL COOGAN: But according to other accounts, Abraham knew God simply by the most common Hebrew word for God, which is Elohim.

NARRATOR: So the two different writers became known as E, for Elohim, and J, for Yahweh. Most likely based on poetry and songs passed down for generations, they both write a version of Israel's distant past, the stories of Abraham in the Promised Land, Moses and the Exodus.

MICHAEL COOGAN: The earliest of these sources is the one that is known as J, which many scholars dated to the 10th century B.C., the time of David and Solomon.

NARRATOR: And because the backdrop for J's version of events is the area around Jerusalem, it's likely he lived there, perhaps in the royal courts of David and Solomon.