or so it must have seemed

to the ancestors of the Jews in 586 B.C.

Jerusalem and the temple to their god are in flames

The nation of Israel founded by King David is wiped out

WILLIAM DEVER: It would have seemed to have been the end,

but it was rather the beginning

NARRATOR: For out of the crucible of destruction

emerges a sacred book: the Bible...

and an idea that will change the world:

the belief in one God

¶ ¶

THOMAS CAHILL: This is a new idea

It was an idea that nobody had ever had before

LEE LEVINE: Monotheism is well-ensconced,

so something major happened which is very hard to trace

NARRATOR: Now a provocative new story

from discoveries deep within the Earth and the Bible

EILAT MAZAR: We wanted to examine the possibility

that the remains of King David's palace are here

DEVER: We can actually see vivid evidence here of a destruction

AMNON BEN-TOR: Question number one: Who did it?

NARRATOR: An archaeological detective story puzzles together clues

to the mystery of who wrote the Bible, when and why

And it was very clear

it was some kind of a tiny scroll

I immediately saw very clear, very distinct letters

This is the ancestor of the Hebrew script

NARRATOR: And from out of the Earth

emerge thousands of idols that suggest God had a wife

We just found this exceptional clay figurine

showing a fertility goddess

NARRATOR: Powerful evidence sheds new light on how one people,

alone among ancient cultures,

finally turn their back on idol worship

to find their one God

This makes the god of ancient Israel

the universal god of the world that resonates with people,

at least in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim tradition

to this very day.

(thunder crashes)

NARRATOR: Now science and scripture converge to create

a powerful new story of an ancient people,

God and the Bible

Up next on NOVA "The Bible's Buried Secrets"

Captioning sponsored by EXXONMOBIL

DAVID H. KOCH

the HOWARD HUGHES MEDICAL INSTITUTE

the CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING

and VIEWERS LIKE YOU

Major funding for NOVA is provided by the following: NARRATOR: Near the banks of the Nile in southern Egypt in 1896,

British archaeologist Flinders Petrie leads an excavation

in Thebes, the ancient city of the dead

Here, he unearths one of the most important discoveries

in biblical archaeology

(worker yelling)

From beneath the sand appears

the corner of a royal monument, carved in stone

Dedicated in honor of Pharaoh Merneptah,

son of Ramesses the Great,

it became known as the Merneptah Stele

Today it is in the Cairo Museum

DONALD REDFORD: This stele is

what the Egyptians would have called a "triumph stele,"

a victory stele commemorating victory over foreign peoples

NARRATOR: Most of the hieroglyphic inscription celebrates

Merneptah's triumph over Libya, his enemy to the West

But almost as an afterthought, he mentions his conquest

of people to the East in just two lines

REDFORD: The text reads,

"Ashkelon has been brought captive

"Gezer has been taken captive

"Yanoam in the North Jordan Valley has been seized

Israel has been shorn, its seed no longer exists"

NARRATOR: History proves the pharaoh's confident boast to be wrong

Rather than marking their annihilation,

Merneptah's Stele announces the entrance

onto the world stage of a people named Israel

REDFORD: This is priceless evidence

for the presence of an ethnical group called Israel

in the central highlands of southern Canaan

NARRATOR: The well-established Egyptian chronology

gives the date as 1208 B.C.

Merneptah's Stele is powerful evidence

that a people called the Israelites are living in Canaan,

in what today includes Israel and Palestine

over 3,000 years ago

The ancient Israelites are best known through familiar stories

that chronicle their history

Abraham and Isaac...

(thunder crashes)

Moses and the Ten Commandments...

David and Goliath

It is the ancient Israelites who write the Bible

(reading aloud)

Through writing the Hebrew Bible,

the beliefs of the ancient Israelites survive

to become Judaism, one of the world's oldest

continuously practiced religions

And it is the Jews who give the world an astounding legacy:

the belief in one God

¶ ¶

This belief will become the foundation

of two other great monotheistic religions:

Christianity...

and Islam

Often called the Old Testament,

to distinguish it from the New Testament,

which described the events of early Christianity,

today the Hebrew Bible and a belief in one God

are woven into the very fabric of world culture

But in ancient times, all people from the Egyptians

to the Greeks to the Babylonians,

worshipped many gods, usually in the form of idols

How did the Israelites, alone among ancient peoples,

discover the concept of one god?

(man chanting)

How did they come up with an idea

that so profoundly changed the world?

Now archaeologists and biblical scholars are arriving

at a new synthesis that promises to reveal

not only fresh historical insights,

but a deeper meaning

of what the authors of the Bible wanted to convey

They start by digging into the earth...

and the Bible

DEVER: You cannot afford to ignore biblical text,

especially if you can isolate a kind of kernel of truth

behind these stories,

and then you have the archaeological data

Now, what happens when text and artifact seem to point

in the same direction?

Then I think we are on a very sound ground historically

NARRATOR: Scholars search for intersections

between science and scripture

The earliest is the victory stele

of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah from 1208 B.C.

Both the stele and the Bible place a people

called the Israelites in the hill country of Canaan,

which includes modern-day Israel and Palestine

It is here, between two of history's greatest empires,

that Israel's story will unfold

PETER MACHINIST: The way to understand Israel's relationship

to the superpowers Egypt and Mesopotamia on either side

is to understand its own sense of its fragility as a people

The primary way in which the Bible looks at the origins

of Israel is as a people coming to settle in the land of Israel

It's not indigenous

It's not a native state

NARRATOR: The Hebrew Bible is full of stories of Israel's origins

The first is Abraham,

who leaves Mesopotamia with his family

and journeys to the Promised Land, Canaan

READER: "The Lord said to Abraham,

'Go forth from your native land, and from your father's house,

'to the land that I will show you

'I will make of you a great nation

'And I will bless you

I will make your name great"

"Genesis 12:1 and 2"

NARRATOR: According to the Bible,

this promise establishes the covenant,

a sacred contract between God and Abraham

To mark the covenant, Abraham and all males are circumcised

His descendants will be God's chosen people

They will be fruitful, multiply, and inhabit all the land

between Egypt and Mesopotamia

In return, Abraham and his people,

who will become the Israelites, must worship a single God

This is a new idea

NARRATOR: It is hard to appreciate today

how radical an idea this must have been

in a world dominated by polytheism--

the worship of many gods and idols

The Abraham narrative is part

of the first book of the Bible, Genesis,

along with Noah and the Flood, and Adam and Eve

Though they convey a powerful message,

to date, there is no archaeology or text

outside of the Bible to corroborate them

DAVID ILAN: The farther back you go in the biblical text,

the more difficult it is to find historical material in it

The patriarchs go back to Genesis

Genesis is, for the most part,

a compilation of myths, creation stories, things like that

And to find a historical core there is very difficult

NARRATOR: This absence of historical evidence leads scholars

to take a different approach to reading the biblical narrative

They look beyond our modern notion of fact or fiction

to ask why the Bible was written in the first place

DEVER: There is no word for "history" in the Hebrew Bible

The biblical writers were telling stories

They were good historians, and they could tell it

the way it was when they wanted to,

but their objective was always something far beyond that

NARRATOR: So what was their objective?

To find out, scholars must uncover

who wrote the Bible and when

READER: "And the Lord said to Moses, 'Write down these words,

'for, in accordance with these words,

I make a covenant with you and with Israel"

"Exodus 34:27"

NARRATOR: The traditional belief

is that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible--

Genesis: The story of creation

Exodus: Deliverance from slavery to the Promised Land

Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy:

Laws of morality and observance

Still read to this day, together they form the Torah,

often called the Five Books of Moses

MICHAEL COOGAN: The view that Moses had personally written down

the first five books of the Bible

was virtually unchallenged until the 17th century

There were a few questions raised about this

For example, the very end of the last book of the Torah,

the Book of Deuteronomy,

describes the death and burial of Moses

And so some rabbi said,

"Well, Moses couldn't have written those words himself

because he was dead and was being buried"

NARRATOR: And, digging deeper into the text,

there are even more discrepancies

COOGAN: For example, how many of each species of animal

is Noah supposed to bring into the ark?

One text says two-- a pair of every kind of animal

Another text says seven pair of the clean animals,

and only two of the unclean animals

NARRATOR: In one chapter, the Bible says

the flood lasts for 40 days and 40 nights

But, in the next, it says 150 days

To see if the floodwaters have subsided,

Noah sends out a dove

But, in the previous sentence, he sends a raven

There are two complete versions of the flood story

interwoven on the same page

Many similar discrepancies throughout its pages suggest

that the Bible has more than one writer

In fact, within the first five books of the Bible,

scholars have identified the hand

of at least four different groups of scribes writing

over several hundred years

This theory is called the Documentary Hypothesis

COOGAN: One way of thinking about it is, as a kind of anthology

that was made over the course of many centuries

by different people adding to it,

subtracting from it, and so forth

NARRATOR: But when did the process of writing the Bible begin?

Tel Zayit is a small site

on the southwestern border of ancient Israel

that dates back to biblical times

Since 1999, Ron Tappy has been excavating here