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

MICHAEL COOGAN: In the ancient world, if your country was destroyed by another country, it meant that their gods were more powerful than your god. And the natural thing to do is to worship the more powerful god, but the survivors continued to worship Yahweh and struggled to understand how this could have happened.

PETER MACHINIST: They resort first to a standard form of explanation, which is found elsewhere in the ancient Near East: "We must have done something wrong to incur the wrath of our God."

WILLIAM DEVER: It's out of this that comes the reflection that polytheism was our downfall; there is, after all, only one God.

NARRATOR: The Israelites abandon the folly of polytheism, monotheism triumphs, and the archaeological evidence proves it.

EPHRAIM STERN (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem): Before the destruction of the First Temple, wherever we dig, in whatever part of the Judean country, we find sanctuaries, and, more often, we find hundreds and thousands of figurines, even in Jerusalem itself.

NARRATOR: But after the destruction there are none.

EPHRAIM STERN: We are speaking about thousands before and nothing—completely nothing at all—after.

LEE LEVINE: Monotheism is well-ensconced, firmly ensconced, so something major happened which is very hard to trace. But that was a searing experience, that time in the exile.

NARRATOR: Through the experience of the exile and writing the Bible, the concept of God, as it is known today, is born.

KYLE MCCARTER: In a way, P created something that was much greater, because it was greater than any individual land or kingdom. It was a kind of universal religion based on a creator god, not just a god of a single nation, but the God of the world, the God of the universe.

CAROL MEYERS: This moves Yahweh into the realm of being a universal deity who has the power to affect what happens in the whole universe. This makes the god of ancient Israel the universal God of the world that resonates with people—at least in Jewish, Christian and Muslim tradition—to this very day.

NARRATOR: In 539 B.C., the Babylonian empire is toppled by the Persians. As written in the Bible, Yahweh, in his new role as the one invisible God, orchestrates a new exodus. Among one group of returning exiles is the prophet Ezra. Back in Jerusalem, he gives a public reading of the newly written Torah to reestablish the covenant.

VOICEOVER (Reading from the Bible "Revised Standard Version," Nehemiah 8:1–3): All the people gathered together...They told the scribe Ezra to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord had given to Israel...He read from it...from early morning until midday...and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law.

ERIC MEYERS: To me, it's one of the most moving moments in the whole Bible. Ezra returns with the Bible in his hand, so we have the feeling that the process begun in the exile is finally finished, and Ezra has a copy.

NARRATOR: The scrolls that chronicle the Israelites' relationship with their god is now the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, a sacred text for over three billion people. Through its writing, an ancient cult becomes a modern religion, and the Israelite deity, Yahweh, transforms into the God of the three great monotheistic religions.

Through its teachings, the Bible established a code of morality and justice, aspirations that resonate through the ages. More than fact or fiction, at the intersection of science and scriptures, is a story that began over 3,000 years ago and continues to this day.

On NOVA's Bible's Buried Secrets Web site, share your thoughts on the program, ask questions of biblical scholars, explore a timeline of archeology and more. Find it on PBS.org.

Major funding for NOVA is provided by the following:

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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.

Major funding for NOVA is also provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by PBS viewers like you. Thank you.

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