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: The worship of the ancient Israelites bears little resemblance to Judaism today. It centered around the Temple, built by David's son Solomon, and seen as Yahweh's earthly dwelling. To understand how the ancient Israelites worshipped their god, scholars must discover what the Temple looked like and how it functioned. But, although archaeologists know where its remains should be, it is impossible to dig there. It lies under the third holiest site in Islam, which includes the Dome of the Rock.

Not a stone of Solomon's Temple has ever been excavated, but the Bible offers a remarkably detailed description.

VOICEOVER (Reading from the Bible "Revised Standard Version," First Kings 6:2, 23 and 28): The house which King Solomon built for YHWH was 60 cubits long, 20 cubits wide and 30 cubits high. In the inner sanctuary he made two cherubim...each 10 cubits high. He overlaid the cherubim with gold.

NARRATOR: The Bible's description suggests a floor plan for Solomon's Temple, and it is strikingly similar to temples built by neighboring peoples who worship many gods. The closest in appearance is a temple hundreds of miles to the north of Jerusalem, at Ain Dara, in modern-day Syria. They have similar dimensions and the same basic floor plan. Guarding both temples are sphinxes or "cherubim," as the Bible calls them. Unique to the temple at Ain Dara are the enormous footprints of the god who lived here. They mark his progress as he strode to his throne in the innermost sanctuary.

LAWRENCE STAGER: If we take the details that we find of Solomon's Temple in the Book of Kings and compare it with the Ain Dara temple, we can piece together a fairly good picture, I think, of what this temple might have looked like in the age of Solomon.

NARRATOR: Now it is possible to reconstruct, with some confidence, how Solomon's Temple may have looked and how the ancient Israelites worshipped their god.

JOAN BRANHAM: Out front was an enormous altar. Beyond that was a porch area that led into the inside of the Temple. There was a room, the holy place, and then beyond that the most sacred room, the holy of holies where tradition says the Ark of the Covenant held the tablets of the law. And this room was considered to be the most sacred site on Earth, because it is the room where God's presence could be found.

NARRATOR: And the ancient Israelites believed their god demanded a very specific form of worship. Evidence of this survives today, on Mount Gerizim, in Palestine. The Samaritans, who live here, claim direct descent from the ancient tribes of Israel. According to their tradition, for over 2,500 years, they have been practicing the ancient Israelite form of worship, animal sacrifice.

JOAN BRANHAM: The primary function is to make a connection between our mundane world and the divine world, and the means, for the ancient Israelites, is embodied in blood. Blood is the most sacred substance on the altar, and blood is the substance that embodies life. So it is the most precious substance in the human world.

NARRATOR: But while the priests were offering sacrifice to Yahweh in the Temple, many Israelites were not as loyal. At Tel Rehov, archaeologists are digging at an Israelite house that illuminates the religious practices of its ancient inhabitants.

AMIHAI MAZAR: Well, we just found this beautiful, exceptional clay figurine showing a goddess, a fertility goddess that was worshipped here in Israel. Here, in this case, she is shown holding a baby.

NARRATOR: Who is this fertility goddess? And what is a pagan idol doing in an Israelite home? Dramatic evidence as to her possible identity first surfaced in 1968. Bill Dever was carrying out salvage excavations in tombs in southern Israel, when a local brought him an inscription that had been robbed from one of them.

WILLIAM DEVER: When I got home and brushed it off, I thought I was going to have a heart attack. Executed in clear eighth-century script, it's a tomb inscription, and it gives the name of the deceased, and it says, "Blessed may X be by Yahweh"—that's good biblical Hebrew, but it says—"by Yahweh and his Asherah." And Asherah is the name of the old Canaanite mother goddess.

NARRATOR: More inscriptions associating Yahweh and Asherah have been discovered and thousands of figurines unearthed, throughout Israel.

Many scholars believe this is the face of Asherah.

Dever concludes God had a wife. Even hundreds of years after the Israelites rise from their Canaanite pagan roots, monotheism has still not completely taken hold.

WILLIAM DEVER: This is awkward for some people, the notion that Israelite religion was not exclusively monotheistic. But we know, now, that it wasn't.

NARRATOR: The Bible admits the Israelites continue to worship Asherah and other Canaanite gods, such as Baal. In fact, the prophets, holy men speaking in the name of God, consistently rail against breaking the covenant made with Moses to worship only Yahweh.

VOICEOVER (Reading from the Bible "Revised Standard Version," Hosea 11:2): The more I called them, the more they went from me; they kept sacrificing to the Baals and offering incense to idols.

MICHAEL COOGAN: The Israelites had made a contract with God. If they kept it, God would reward them. If they broke it, he would punish them. He would punish them by using foreign powers as his instruments.

NARRATOR: Events seem to fulfill the prophets' dire predictions. Soon after Solomon's death, the 10 northern tribes rebel and form the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Then a powerful new enemy storms out of Mesopotamia to create the largest empire the Near East had ever known, the Assyrians.

PETER MACHINIST: The Assyrians were the overpowering military force, and Israel and Judah, the two states that the Bible talks about as the states making up the people Israel, fell under the sway of the Assyrian juggernaut.

NARRATOR: Numerous Assyrian texts and reliefs vividly document their domination of Israel and Judah.