Palestine Potsherds

From 970 B. C., when Solomon built the first Temple at Jerusalem, until 606 B. C. when the Babylonian captivity of the Jews began, was a period of war, decay idolatry in Palestine. King Solomon had created an Israelitish state, but he turned apostate. God's judgment on his sins was that the kingdom should be rent into Israel on the north and Judah on the south. Some good kings followed Solomon, and the great Prophets Elijah Elisha, Isaiah and Jeremiah thundered God's words at the children of Israel. But the age was full of such bad characters as Jezebel, Jeroboam, Ahab and Manasseh.*

According to Jewish tradition, Jeremiah himself wrote the history of this period in the Old Testament's two Books of Kings. A theocratic account emphasizing God's participation in the affairs of his children, Kings has had little corroboration in the findings of modern archeologists. Along with most other Old Testament books, it was challenged a few decades ago by the development of "higher criticism," which held that such histories were written centuries after the events took place, or at least were copies of copies of old histories. But last week diggers in Palestine found something that seemed to uphold Kings, flout the higher critics.

For more than a year an expedition headed by Dr. J. L. Starkey of Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, London, has been working at Tel ad-Duwair, southwest of Jerusalem. Anciently called Lachish, this site was a fortress in the Kingdom of Judah. Nebuchadnezzar stormed it when he invaded Palestine. Earlier, King Sennacherib of Assyria stopped there before he swept down like the wolf on the fold and before the Lord, through Isaiah, said: "I will send a blast upon him" and killed his 185,000 troops (II Kings, 19: 7, 35). What Dr. Starkey found at Lachish last week were twelve scraps of pottery, apparently from the archives of the city, dating from the time of the Book of Kings and containing the names of many a person mentioned therein. Amazingly, the potsherds seemed to be inscribed in ink. Even more amazingly, they were written in ancient Hebrew--first important ones yet discovered in that tongue, which was outmoded even in the time of Christ, who spoke Aramaic. Some words on the 2,500-year-old potsherds were spelled exactly as they are in the Masoretic Text (present-day Hebrew Scriptures).

* Or Manasses, made newsworthy last fortnight by Father Coughlin, who declared that Bernard Baruch got his middle name (Mannes) from him. Most Biblical scholars dismiss as mythical Father Coughlin's story of Manasseh having Isaiah sawed in twain.

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