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Nehemia: Here’s an incredible document. This is a letter that was written at Arad, in Paleo-Hebrew. It was excavated by the archeologists, and it mentions Beit Yehovah, “The House of Yehovah”. It is the oldest reference in a written document of the House of Yehovah, but it’s almost certainly not talking about the Temple in Jerusalem; it’s talking about this “high place” that we just saw.

I’m in the Israel Museum in front of a treasure that was found in a cave in the Judean Desert, and it’s dated to the Chalcolithic Period. It wasn’t far from Ein Gedi, and you can see here they have what are called mace heads. These were put on a staff, and you could smash someone on the head with it as a weapon. But in this case, it was probably symbolic, and it was the symbol of authority that belonged to a statue of a god, and there’s numerous mace heads here. There’s also maces over here. You can see here that normally the mace head was made of some kind of material that would fall apart over time, like wood, but in this case, they’re made of copper. This is called the Chalcolithic Period because it’s the Stone Age, but they also knew how to make copper; not bronze yet, but copper.

Down here is the mat that they found it in, which is unbelievable, because this is, they say, something like 6,000 years old. And here you have a piece of mat material that survived in the Judean Desert.

You also have these crowns which were probably the crowns of different gods. This must have come from a sanctuary, from a temple. Now, there is a temple nearby, the temple of Ein Gedi, and the theory is that there’s some kind of invasion, and somebody grabbed all the things from the temple, a priest, and put it in this mat and hid it in the cave intending to come back. But he never came back because he was killed or taken captive.

Well, we actually have a story in the Tanakh about something like this happening, specifically where Ein Gedi was attacked in Genesis 14. It talks about the four kings and the five kings. The four kings invade from Babylon, they attack the five kings, and it says one of the places they attacked was Ein Gedi. And it’s very possible that when this event happened, that somebody, a priest in Ein Gedi, gathered up all of the items to hide them in a cave from the four kings, and they never came back and died.

Look at some of these other items they have here. Here we have ax heads, and again these are symbolic ax heads. You wouldn’t be cutting a tree with that, but that was probably an ax head or an ax that was in the hands of a god, or a deity, of some statue.

You have some other items here; this is a pretty nasty mace head with little spikes. And here you have one with that looks like a beak and little knobs on it, and you'll see that on other things from this period. You actually see the knobs on tops of these maces as well. And look how many maces there are; these are made of copper. This would be the modern equivalent of billions of dollars in value because copper was very expensive and very valuable. It probably took generations for people to donate these numerous artifacts to the temple, and then during this one invasion they took it and put it in a cave, and we found it thousands of years later.

Here you have, also from the Chalcolithic Period, which is, again, the Copper Stone Age, you have these little altars. And the altar has a nose on it; they’re very similar to what we saw from the treasure cave, where we saw the mace heads that had the noses on them. And here you can see the noses, so it’s sort of an anthropomorphic altar that you wouldn’t burn an animal on. But you might put some flour on here, and maybe some incense, and maybe pour some libations on here.

These are little offering altars that were probably in people's houses. We hear about this in the Tanakh, that the Canaanites were these idolaters that worshiped on top of every hill and under every leafy tree, and here you see these early Canaanites, Proto-Canaanites... Here you can see it really looks like a face, right there it’s more abstract. Here you can see a little altar that looks like a face.

Now this next part is not for the children, because here we have a goddess, and the goddess is holding a vessel on her head that was used to churn butter. What they would do is pour some sort of milk, probably goat's milk, based on what we’re going to see in a minute, into the churning container, but it would pass through because it was pottery, into the other part of the goddess… and I won’t say any more than that.

Here we have a goat which was also used for offerings, and this is the idolatry of the early Canaanites. So, it was probably goat’s milk because this is a goat, and those are sort of cups that would hold the goat milk, and they would probably bring this as an offering. They'd come to the temple, and they’d pour some milk, or something like milk, butter or yogurt, into the top of there as an offering, and it would go inside of the god, the god would consume it.

Now, what’s really cool is they found that in the 20th century there were people still using the same type of churns. Remember the one we saw on the head of the goddess? So here you have one that’s been found in archeology, but here’s a picture of a modern 20th century person still using one of these churns. They would move it back and forth and it would, I guess, remove the heavier parts of the milk from the lighter parts and produce butter or maybe even yogurt.

Now, here we have ossuaries; ossuaries are bone boxes from the same Chalcolithic Period. Now what’s really interesting is there’s only two periods in the history of Israel where they used ossuaries. An ossuary was a bone box where you put the body when somebody died, to decay. It would take about a year, and then you’d come to collect their bones and perform what’s called secondary burial. And the secondary burial, you’d take the bones and put them in the ossuary, the bone box.

Two periods of history, one is the Chalcolithic Period, which is the early, early Proto-Canaanite Period, or Pre-Canaanite Period, and the other one is the Second Temple Period, and they’re separated by thousands of years. Now, the ossuaries in the time of the Chalcolithic Period were made of pottery, in the Second Temple Period they were made of stone.

Now, what you can see on some of these ossuaries is the same thing we saw on some of the statues and some of the treasure items, and we also saw them on the altars. You see their little noses? Little knobs and noses, that these also represent what a house looks like. This is a replica of a house. You put the body into the house when you find that someone’s dead. And what you can see here is they have these roofs, which are sort of a thatched kind of thing. The roof is a triangle on the top and you have the little poles sticking out from the ends to hold up the roof, the rafters.

Here we have, again from the same period, some pottery offering altars. You saw before we had them made of stone, and these were for offerings. You’d put some kind of an offering here, not a whole animal sacrifice, but some flour, maybe some blood, or some libation. Who knows?

And here you have some more houses. These weren’t for bones obviously; these were probably brought to the temple as an offering to the god, or maybe they put it in somebody's grave so they would have a house in the afterlife.

We are past the Chalcolithic Period, and we are in the full-blown Canaanite Period. This is Early Bronze stuff. Here we have what’s called the Arad House, and what’s really cool is this is what a house looks like. It’s a pottery representation of a house, and they were actually bigger than real houses. But what’s interesting is we have the Alef-Bet, and the letter Bet means “house”, and I was wondering if Bets look anything like a house? Even the really old Paleo-Hebrew, what’s called Proto-Sinaitic, before the Paleo-Hebrew, Proto-Sinaitic Bet that is sort of a rectangle or a square with a little hole on one end. That’s what a house looks like; it was a one room structure. Many houses in that period had one room, and you can see it here in the Arad House. That’s what a house was like. And there you have the delet, which is the letter, Dalet.

Now, we've got some other interesting things here. This is actually one of my favorite things in the museum; this is called the Arad Stele. The Arad Stele is a piece of stone that was found also in Arad, just like in the other spot, also from the Early Bronze Period, and it depicts the god Dumuzi, who is also known in Hebrew as Tammuz. Tammuz was a god of grain, and the idea of Tammuz was that the grain cycle in the Land of Israel, throughout the Middle East, is that in the winter… I grew up in Chicago, where in the winter everything dies and comes back to life in the summer. In the Middle East it’s the opposite; everything comes to life in the winter because it rains. In the summer it’s dry and everything dies.

So, here you see the god alive, standing up with his hands raised, and then the god is dead. And what the ancients believed, the religion of Tammuz, of Dumuzi, what they believed is that this life and death of the god carried over into the life cycle of grain. And so, the death of the god actually brought life to the world. When you went to harvest your crops, you cut your crop because Dumuzi, Tammuz, had died for you and that brought you sustenance for the rest of the year. But he didn’t remain dead, because when it started to rain in the winter, Tammuz rose from the dead, and that they saw as a resurrection. And it was a cycle, they believed, of this death and resurrection every year that carried over into the religion of Ba’al as well.

You actually have this great scene in the Book of Ezekiel where it says Ezekiel is taken into the Temple in Jerusalem and he sees the women weeping over Tammuz. Why were they weeping over Tammuz? Because Tammuz had died for them, to bring them life, and they were actually sad about the death of their god, but they knew he would rise again in the winter, come back to life in a resurrection. And this was the cycle of many ancient deities, of a death and resurrection. It wasn’t just a one-time death and resurrection; it was an annual cycle. And then they would celebrate his birth. When would they celebrate his birth, the birth of their god? In the winter. And this goes back to the Early Bronze Period. You can see this from Arad, according to the archeologists, 5,000 years ago, 3000 BCE.

I love this archeological find, it’s called the Kfar Monash Hoard. There was a farmer in northwestern Israel. He was out in his field, and he was plowing, and he pulled up all of these bronze implements. Remember, before we saw copper; now this is actually bronze. Now, what are these? They’re obviously scales, but what they’re missing is holes. So how did they connect the scales for the armor? And the theory is that they had a vest, and the vest had little pockets in it, of leather, and they would stick the little pieces of bronze into the vest, and that was the protection. It was actually double protection, because the leather provided some protection as well. It was sort of a layering.

And it’s interesting, because in the Israeli army one of the things they do is they have what is called a shach’patz, which is a vest, and you stick a plate of ceramic in it. So, the ceramic isn’t actually attached to you, it’s inside the pocket of the vest. So, there were little pockets that held these, we believe, that held these pieces of scale.

And then here you have these weapons, and this was invaluable. This was an entire military unit of all these weapons, a king's ransom, and it was just out there in the field, probably because there was an invasion and they lost, and someone hid it there.

Now, here we have a section that in the Israel Museum they call the Religion of Canaan, and you see some really interesting things. Let’s look over here. We see a statue here of a man standing on a bull and he has a circle on his chest with a plus symbol, and this is the statue of Ba’al. Ba’al, one of his attributes, one of his characteristics, was the bull, and what they would do is they would have these different symbols that would represent the god. So, you have a man standing on a bull, or you can have a man standing on a bull with a plus inside of a circle. Sometimes you just had the plus, and this symbol everybody knew in the ancient world, was the symbol of Ba’al. You don’t need the man; you don’t need the bull. You can have those; you can have just the bull. But in this case, you have the plus, and what it probably was, was a sun symbol. You have a circle, the light coming from different directions which represent the sun. So, he was a storm god, but he was also represented by the sun.

And here you have a beautiful, beautiful, maybe in a historical sense but also abominable; you have a statue that was found inside Tel Dan. Tel Dan is the most northern city in Israel, and inside the gate they found these standing stones. These standing stones are mentioned in Deuteronomy. It says, "Don’t make for yourself a matzevah." A matzevah is a “standing stone”. And here you have these little standing stones, and they were part of a temple that was inside the gate.

It’s really interesting, in Deuteronomy it also talks about this. It says, "Don’t bring the sacrifices in one of your gates, but only in the place Yehovah commanded you". And we usually translate “gates” there as “cities”. But every city had a gate, multiple gates sometimes, and inside the gates there was a court and there was often a temple.

You read about that in the story of Josiah, that after he gets the idols out of the Temple in Jerusalem, he then tears down the “high place” that was built inside the city gate. So here inside the city gate there was a little temple, and there you can see the hands are raised. They’re raised up to what? To the bull representing Ba’al, and inside the horns of the bull you see the sun disc. Sometimes it’s the plus symbol which represents the raising sun; here it’s the sun disc inside the horns of the bull, very clearly a representation of Ba’al. And the hands are raised in prayer. In the Tanakh we hear about raising hands in prayer, in worship, and here they raise their hands in worship and prayer to Ba’al inside the ancient city of Dan.

Here we’ve got some little statues. This is Ashtoreth, also known as Astarte. It’s actually a mold that they were able to cast using the ancient work, and she’s a fertility goddess needless to say, based on the way she’s represented here.

We’ve got some Ba’al representations, the bull. Here we have the plus, but not just a plus, you can see the light coming from different directions here.

This is really cool here because we’ve got these snakes, and these were used for worship. These were idols. In Hebrew it’s a pun, the word "snake". So, this idol is a pun, it’s a visual pun. So, nachash is “snake” and nachoshet is “bronze” or “copper”. So, nachash ha’nachoshet is “the copper snake”.

We have in the Tanakh, in the Torah, a mention of the copper snake. And it may have looked something like this, the snake that was put on a pole. And most people lose sight of that story. It’s in the Book of Numbers, but the next time we hear about it is in the time of King Hezekiah. And we’re told that from all the time, from Moses until Hezekiah… remember, the original copper snake was made by Moses, and they would look upon it and they would be healed. Well, after the time of Moses they began to bring incense to it and burn incense to it and worship it. It was a symbol that God had made for the people, for a specific purpose, and instead what they did is they worshiped it.

And so, we’re told that Hezekiah took the nechushtam, the copper snake, and he ground it into a powder, into dust, and he destroyed it. Because even though it was this relic that went back to the time of Moses, and of great historical significance, it had become a snare for the people, an idol. And it may have looked something like this. There’s a gold one too. That’s a cobra; that’s more of an Egyptian thing.

Here we have some little incense altars, and the incense they put on it is modern, to show you how it was used. But they would put a little incense on it, and you could burn it. They’re made of metal, and you'd come to the temple, your idolatrous temple, and you'd put a little incense on it and burn it to your pagan god.

Now, this is something that’s new at the museum, and we’re told here that it is a decorative jug from a place called Yehud. Yehud is near the airport, near Ben Gurion Airport, 18th to 16th century BCE, and it’s called “The Thinker from Yehud”. I think he might be on the toilet. I don’t know, I’m just saying.

This thing here is cool, because we have an ivory slab that has decorations on it. And the palace of the Kingdom of Israel in Samaria was referred to as Beit Ha’shenhav, “The House of Ivory.” And the prophets actually referred to this…or Beit Ha’shevi, they referred to this in a derogatory way. You've decorated your ivory houses and God's saying, “You’ve sinned, and I’m going to destroy those houses.”

Well, when they excavated at the ancient site of Nineveh in northern Iraq, which was the capital of Assyria, they actually found many of these ivory slabs. And they had Hebrew writing on the back. You would have two pieces that fit together, and at the point they fit together there was an Alef on one and an Alef on the other. And the next scene had a Bet on the end and a Bet on the piece that fit together, and they were written in Paleo-Hebrew. And there’s no question whatsoever that those were taken from the royal palace of the King of Israel as war booty by the King of Assyria.

So here we’re looking at… the Canaanites were wonderful merchants. In fact, in the Tanakh, in the Hebrew Bible, the word “cna’ani”, “Canaanite”, can mean someone who’s from Canaan or from a Canaanite tribe, or it could also mean someone who’s a merchant. And here you can see what their merchant ships looked like. It’s a drawing of course, a modern drawing.

Here are anchors that held their ships. We found these at archeological sites. These are real anchors. And then you see ingots, and ingots are really interesting because we hear about Abraham buying the Cave of the Patriarchs for 400 shekels of silver, and it talks about the silver of the merchants. These weren’t coins; these were ingots of silver. Probably not as big as that, but they would take the ingots and they would weigh them on a scale. And when you got 400 shekels, that was a weight of silver. That was the 400 shekels, not 400 coins of silver.

And we find millions of these pots. I remember studying archeology in the 90’s for my bachelor's degree and wondering why is the bottom of the pot not flat? That seems so inconvenient. You put the jar down and it falls over! And the reason is they kept them in the hull of the ship. In the hull of the ship, in the hold, you don’t want them to be flat because you want to maximize the number you could put in where the sides of the ship aren’t flat. They’re angled like that, and so it was more efficient, and so you had to dig a hole. Once you got that into your house you would dig a hole in the ground and stick it in the hole. It was designed for the ships.

Now, here you have items found in Israel, and these are very typical types of pots that you would find in Cyprus and the Aegean, and you find these all over Israel. And it shows the amount of trade that was going on. I mean, the Canaanites were amazing merchants. They were such great merchants they established merchant colonies all the way in the Western Mediterranean. One of the most famous cities in the Western Mediterranean is Marseille, which was founded by the Canaanites. Another ancient city that was founded by the Canaanites was Carthage. Carthage was actually originally known as New Tyre; Tyre, or Tzur is a city on the coast of Lebanon to this day, but it was a major player in the Canaanite merchant field.

We today refer to them as the Phoeniceans, but that’s the Greek name. Phoenicia means “Land of Purple”. They didn’t call themselves Phoenicians, they called themselves Canaanites. And that’s why you go to look at Carthaginian history and you see the names of Carthage sound very much like Hebrew names. You have Hannibal; Hannibal was Chaniba’al, “the beloved of Baal”. The same as the name Chana’anyahu, which is honoring Ba’al. And you’ll read these Carthaginian inscriptions, and you’ll see melech, and Baal, and all these Hebrew words. They’re not actually Hebrew, they’re Canaanite, which is very similar to Hebrew.

But they did merchant activities all over the Mediterranean… And… oh, this is a really cool thing! This is a blue ingot which is turquoise, and it was used to put on the eyes of women when they would make themselves up. And the Hebrew word that appears in the Tanakh, it's in the Book of Ezekiel, is the word kachol, it’s a verb, and it means to put stuff on your eyes. We have a word in English “kohl,” K-O-H-L, and that actually also refers to a sort of eyeshadow, but originally it referred to this blue eyeshadow which was extracted from turquoise mines.

I’ve actually heard this explanation that tekhelet, the word for ztiztit, isn’t just “blue,” it’s a specific shade of blue, or a specific type of blue made from a specific material. That’s not correct, because part of the argument is, “Well kachol means blue and tekhelet is made from a specific material,” but that’s not right. Kachol in the Tanach is a verb, and it means specifically “turquoise”, which is more like a bluish green. So, I’m not sure that’s actually turquoise; it’s some kind of blue ingot that was used for decoration. Turquoise was extracted from mines in Sinai, and that’s where they found some of the earliest Hebrew writing, Hebrew-like writing, which is called Proto-Sinaitic, in the turquoise mines. Semitic slaves for sure, possibly even Hebrew slaves, were working in these mines.

This is the famous Tel Dan Inscription; it was written by one of the Aramean Kings in Aramaic. He was a King of Damascus, and he talks about here, in this inscription, about how he defeated the House of David, Beit David. And there you have one, two, three, four, five lines from the bottom, the second letter is a Bet, then a Yud and a Tav, and then Dalet-Vav-Dalet, “the House of David”. This was really important when it was found in the 90’s, because there were biblical scholars who claimed that David never existed; that he was like King Arthur, he was a figment of later imagination. And then they found the inscription about the House of David, and if there was a House of David there must have been a man named David.

It was in Arad in Southern Israel. We’ve seen other things from Arad, but here we have the temple, and it was destroyed by King Josiah. And what’s interesting is that we have the father and the mother goddess, but they don’t have a graven image. So, these people kind of knew a little bit about the Torah. You’re not supposed to have a graven image, and they said, “Okay, so we won’t have a face, we won’t have a body, but we’ve still got to honor God with a little altar. And He’s got a wife, we want to honor her too.” So, it’s a complete mix up and match up of idolatry.

And here’s an incredible document. This is a letter written at Arad in Paleo-Hebrew. It was excavated by the archeologists, and it mentions Beit Yehovah, “the House of Yehovah”. It is the oldest reference in a written document to the House of Yehovah, but it’s almost certainly not talking about the Temple in Jerusalem. It’s talking about this “high place” that we just saw.

And what we’re seeing here, by the way, is the actual stones that were moved, stone by stone, and re-erected here in the Israel Museum to show you exactly what it looked like. This isn’t an artistic representation; these are the actual stones from the House of Yehovah in Arad. And this is what the prophets call a “high place”. This was a forbidden temple outside of Jerusalem.

So, the earliest reference to the House of Yehovah, to the Temple… because in Hebrew it’s not called the temple, biblically it was called Beit Yehovah, the House of Yehovah, the earliest reference doesn’t refer to the Temple in Jerusalem, it refers to a forbidden temple, a “high place.” But the prophets rebuked the people for worshiping at… Let me read you what it says, this is the transcription.

It says, “El adoni Elyashiv, Yehovah yish'al le’shlomcha,” “To my lord, Elyashiv, may Yehovah ask about your peace,” “Ve’ata,” “And now,” “ten le’Shmariyahu,” “give Shmariyahu…” And then they’re asking for some supplies. “U’le’davar asher tzvitani shalom,” “And concerning the matter in which he commanded me, there’s peace for him,” “Beit Yehovah hu yoshev,” “he is sitting in the House of Yehovah.” Almost certainly referring, not to the Temple in Jerusalem but, to this “high place” that King Josiah later destroyed.

They had neighbors, and we know that each of the neighbors had one main god, that was their main god. They had lots of other gods, but there was one main god. The Ammonites had Molech, that was the god that some Israelites worshiped too, and they’d burn children to him. The Moabites had Chemosh. And we don’t actually hear in the Tanakh about the god of the Edomites, but we know his name from inscriptions. And this is the Edomite temple that was found in southern Israel, and you can see little statues to the Edomite god whose name was Qos, Kuf-Vav-Samech. You don’t hear about him in the Tanakh, but Qos was the god of the Edomites.

There’s this great story where they’re negotiating with the King of Ammon over territory that the Ammonites were claiming actually belongs to Moab, which is their cousins, and Yiftah, Jephthah, said to the King of the Ammonites, “If Chemosh gave you land, you’d think that’s your land. Well, Yehovah gave us this land,” and that was talking about this territory in Transjordan. Well, we don’t hear about the god of the Edomites, but we find in archeology the god Qos. There’s a husband and a wife, this is a common thing in the ancient world. Ba’al had several wives.

Here we have a Moabite inscription, an inscription that mentions the god of Moab, Chemosh, and it talks about them building and taking many captives. And it says, “I built this citadel for the royal house, and I built Beit Charosh with the captives of the Ammonites,” there was a war between Moab and Ammon. “I built for the reservoir a mighty gate, and the small cattle and the cattle… I carried here, and then I saw that they were weakened in every…” It doesn’t mention Chemosh, this one, we have other ones that mention Chemosh.

What’s interesting about this Ammonite inscription is that if you transcribe it into Modern Hebrew, it’s the same 22 letters, and if you transcribed it into Modern Hebrew and added vowels, I think a lot of Israelis would be able to read this. If you studied Biblical Hebrew, you could easily read this. So, the words are spelled a little bit differently, like they’ll have what’s called deficient spelling, and Hebrew tends to have more of a full spelling. But other than that, you could read this just like Biblical Hebrew. And the reason is that the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Edomites, the Israelites, were all related peoples.

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