Hebrew Voices #168 – Israelite Archaeology at the Israel Museum

Transcript

Hebrew Voices #168 - Israelite Archaeology 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 we have one of my favorite objects in the museum; it’s on the cover of a book I wrote. This is the Seat of Moses.

This is a replica of something that is now at the British Museum. It was found in Iraq, in the palace of the Assyrian kings, and it portrays the Battle of Lachish, which is a really important scene in history. Number one, because it's mentioned in the Tanakh, but it’s also described in Assyrian art, and it’s described in Assyrian written texts. It’s mentioned in the Tanakh, and we have Hebrew written texts that were found on-site in the area of Lachish, the Lachish letters, that describe some of the events surrounding this battle as well.

And we have another source, which is the archeological excavation of the site itself. For example, here, we see a siege ramp; the Assyrians were masters in siege warfare. You can see the siege ramp, and they’re shooting arrows, and we’ve got a battering ram, and when they excavated, they found giant arrows and the siege ramp. They actually found in an archeological excavation the siege ramp, it’s described in different sources, and so it's really a beautiful dovetailing of all these different types of information, art and written documents from both the Israelite and Assyrian sides as well as what’s in the Tanakh.

What they did in the Assyrian art is they’re showing several scenes at once, all… it's called relief, and again, this is a replica; the original is in the British Museum. Here, we see the siege on the city, but then after the siege is over, they’re taking more booty and they’re taking captives. They’re taking slaves of the Judean people who were captured.

You can see there are people who they weren't really happy with, and they're executing them. And you see people bowing down before either the king of Assyria or one of his generals.

And then here, you have three people being crucified, and the way they’re crucified is what we would actually call impalement, but in Hebrew, it's the same word. You can see what they did, and the Assyrians were masters of this. They were infamous for doing this.

One of the most important things in this museum, one of my favorite things, I wrote a book about it, are the two silver scrolls found at Ketef Hinnom, what today is known as Bible Hill. They have written on them the Priestly Blessing from Numbers 6:24-26. And why are they written on these tiny little silver scrolls? One of them is significantly smaller than the other, and the reason they were written on these silver scrolls was probably as an amulet. It was probably some superstition that they believed that the Priestly Blessing would protect the person in the afterlife. There's certainly no reason to put a biblical text in a grave. That doesn’t even make sense from a Torah perspective, but this is what they did, and it's today the oldest preserved copy of any biblical text we have.