The Bible Decoded

How should we interpret the Bible in light of the latest biblical research and archaeology? This book tells the story of how technologies are transforming our understanding of the Bible and the cultures that created it.

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How should we interpret the Bible in light of the latest biblical research and archaeology? One day in the Spring of 2009, an exhausted technician realized he had made a colossal mistake. Part of a team of archaeologists, mathematicians, physicists who were on a high-tech quest to unlock a millennia-old secret, concealed in a few written documents from the First Temple Period (1000-587 B.C.E.), he had been tasked with photographing pottery fragments from a Judahite fortress in Arad, in the Negev desert. But as he looked at the photographs, he saw that he had mistakenly photographed the wrong side of the shards—the side that appears to be blank. Staring at the infrared images he had taken, Michael jumped from his chair: the seemingly blank shard in fact had four lines of what looked like graffiti. Suddenly, archaeologists across the Holy Land where able to identify vast amounts of writing. This led to the realization that literacy in ancient Israel was far more extensive than anyone had imagined—a finding that suggests that part of the Bible was probably already composed in the eighth century B.C.E., at about the same time, scholars believe, that Homer's Iliad was compiled. This discovery in the Negev was only one of many vital findings made possible by applying the latest scientific methods in Biblical research. Ancient DNA, geo-archaeology, residue analysis, radiocarbon, and climate analysis has considerably changed what we know about the past. As a result, the Biblical narratives are being revaluated. This book will tell the story of how those and other technologies are transforming our understanding of the Bible and the cultures that created it.