Hebrew Voices #167 – Ancient Idolatry at the Israel Museum

Transcript

Hebrew Voices #167 – Ancient Idolatry at the Israel Museum

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

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.