Subtitles section Play video
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NARRATOR: God is dead...
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or so it must have seemed
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to the ancestors of the Jews in 586 B.C.
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Jerusalem and the temple to their god are in flames
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The nation of Israel founded by King David is wiped out
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WILLIAM DEVER: It would have seemed to have been the end,
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but it was rather the beginning
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NARRATOR: For out of the crucible of destruction
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emerges a sacred book: the Bible...
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and an idea that will change the world:
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the belief in one God
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¶ ¶
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THOMAS CAHILL: This is a new idea
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It was an idea that nobody had ever had before
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LEE LEVINE: Monotheism is well-ensconced,
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so something major happened which is very hard to trace
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NARRATOR: Now a provocative new story
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from discoveries deep within the Earth and the Bible
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EILAT MAZAR: We wanted to examine the possibility
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that the remains of King David's palace are here
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DEVER: We can actually see vivid evidence here of a destruction
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AMNON BEN-TOR: Question number one: Who did it?
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NARRATOR: An archaeological detective story puzzles together clues
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to the mystery of who wrote the Bible, when and why
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And it was very clear
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it was some kind of a tiny scroll
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I immediately saw very clear, very distinct letters
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This is the ancestor of the Hebrew script
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NARRATOR: And from out of the Earth
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emerge thousands of idols that suggest God had a wife
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We just found this exceptional clay figurine
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showing a fertility goddess
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NARRATOR: Powerful evidence sheds new light on how one people,
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alone among ancient cultures,
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finally turn their back on idol worship
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to find their one God
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This makes the god of ancient Israel
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the universal god of the world that resonates with people,
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at least in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim tradition
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to this very day.
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(thunder crashes)
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NARRATOR: Now science and scripture converge to create
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a powerful new story of an ancient people,
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God and the Bible
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Up next on NOVA "The Bible's Buried Secrets"
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Captioning sponsored by EXXONMOBIL
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DAVID H. KOCH
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the HOWARD HUGHES MEDICAL INSTITUTE
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the CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING
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and VIEWERS LIKE YOU
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Major funding for NOVA is provided by the following: NARRATOR: Near the banks of the Nile in southern Egypt in 1896,
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British archaeologist Flinders Petrie leads an excavation
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in Thebes, the ancient city of the dead
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Here, he unearths one of the most important discoveries
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in biblical archaeology
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(worker yelling)
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From beneath the sand appears
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the corner of a royal monument, carved in stone
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Dedicated in honor of Pharaoh Merneptah,
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son of Ramesses the Great,
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it became known as the Merneptah Stele
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Today it is in the Cairo Museum
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DONALD REDFORD: This stele is
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what the Egyptians would have called a "triumph stele,"
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a victory stele commemorating victory over foreign peoples
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NARRATOR: Most of the hieroglyphic inscription celebrates
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Merneptah's triumph over Libya, his enemy to the West
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But almost as an afterthought, he mentions his conquest
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of people to the East in just two lines
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REDFORD: The text reads,
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"Ashkelon has been brought captive
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"Gezer has been taken captive
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"Yanoam in the North Jordan Valley has been seized
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Israel has been shorn, its seed no longer exists"
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NARRATOR: History proves the pharaoh's confident boast to be wrong
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Rather than marking their annihilation,
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Merneptah's Stele announces the entrance
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onto the world stage of a people named Israel
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REDFORD: This is priceless evidence
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for the presence of an ethnical group called Israel
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in the central highlands of southern Canaan
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NARRATOR: The well-established Egyptian chronology
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gives the date as 1208 B.C.
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Merneptah's Stele is powerful evidence
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that a people called the Israelites are living in Canaan,
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in what today includes Israel and Palestine
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over 3,000 years ago
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The ancient Israelites are best known through familiar stories
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that chronicle their history
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Abraham and Isaac...
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(thunder crashes)
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Moses and the Ten Commandments...
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David and Goliath
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It is the ancient Israelites who write the Bible
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(reading aloud)
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Through writing the Hebrew Bible,
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the beliefs of the ancient Israelites survive
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to become Judaism, one of the world's oldest
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continuously practiced religions
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And it is the Jews who give the world an astounding legacy:
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the belief in one God
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¶ ¶
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This belief will become the foundation
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of two other great monotheistic religions:
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Christianity...
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and Islam
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Often called the Old Testament,
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to distinguish it from the New Testament,
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which described the events of early Christianity,
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today the Hebrew Bible and a belief in one God
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are woven into the very fabric of world culture
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But in ancient times, all people from the Egyptians
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to the Greeks to the Babylonians,
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worshipped many gods, usually in the form of idols
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How did the Israelites, alone among ancient peoples,
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discover the concept of one god?
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(man chanting)
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How did they come up with an idea
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that so profoundly changed the world?
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Now archaeologists and biblical scholars are arriving
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at a new synthesis that promises to reveal
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not only fresh historical insights,
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but a deeper meaning
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of what the authors of the Bible wanted to convey
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They start by digging into the earth...
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and the Bible
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DEVER: You cannot afford to ignore biblical text,
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especially if you can isolate a kind of kernel of truth
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behind these stories,
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and then you have the archaeological data
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Now, what happens when text and artifact seem to point
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in the same direction?
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Then I think we are on a very sound ground historically
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NARRATOR: Scholars search for intersections
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between science and scripture
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The earliest is the victory stele
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of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah from 1208 B.C.
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Both the stele and the Bible place a people
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called the Israelites in the hill country of Canaan,
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which includes modern-day Israel and Palestine
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It is here, between two of history's greatest empires,
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that Israel's story will unfold
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PETER MACHINIST: The way to understand Israel's relationship
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to the superpowers Egypt and Mesopotamia on either side
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is to understand its own sense of its fragility as a people
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The primary way in which the Bible looks at the origins
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of Israel is as a people coming to settle in the land of Israel
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It's not indigenous
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It's not a native state
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NARRATOR: The Hebrew Bible is full of stories of Israel's origins
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The first is Abraham,
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who leaves Mesopotamia with his family
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and journeys to the Promised Land, Canaan
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READER: "The Lord said to Abraham,
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'Go forth from your native land, and from your father's house,
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'to the land that I will show you
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'I will make of you a great nation
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'And I will bless you
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I will make your name great"
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"Genesis 12:1 and 2"
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NARRATOR: According to the Bible,
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this promise establishes the covenant,
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a sacred contract between God and Abraham
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To mark the covenant, Abraham and all males are circumcised
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His descendants will be God's chosen people
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They will be fruitful, multiply, and inhabit all the land
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between Egypt and Mesopotamia
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In return, Abraham and his people,
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who will become the Israelites, must worship a single God
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This is a new idea
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NARRATOR: It is hard to appreciate today
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how radical an idea this must have been
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in a world dominated by polytheism--
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the worship of many gods and idols
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The Abraham narrative is part
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of the first book of the Bible, Genesis,
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along with Noah and the Flood, and Adam and Eve
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Though they convey a powerful message,
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to date, there is no archaeology or text
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outside of the Bible to corroborate them
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DAVID ILAN: The farther back you go in the biblical text,
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the more difficult it is to find historical material in it
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The patriarchs go back to Genesis
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Genesis is, for the most part,
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a compilation of myths, creation stories, things like that
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And to find a historical core there is very difficult
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NARRATOR: This absence of historical evidence leads scholars
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to take a different approach to reading the biblical narrative
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They look beyond our modern notion of fact or fiction
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to ask why the Bible was written in the first place
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DEVER: There is no word for "history" in the Hebrew Bible
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The biblical writers were telling stories
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They were good historians, and they could tell it
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the way it was when they wanted to,
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but their objective was always something far beyond that
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NARRATOR: So what was their objective?
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To find out, scholars must uncover
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who wrote the Bible and when
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READER: "And the Lord said to Moses, 'Write down these words,
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'for, in accordance with these words,
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I make a covenant with you and with Israel"
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"Exodus 34:27"
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NARRATOR: The traditional belief
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is that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible--
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Genesis: The story of creation
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Exodus: Deliverance from slavery to the Promised Land
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Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy:
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Laws of morality and observance
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Still read to this day, together they form the Torah,
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often called the Five Books of Moses
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MICHAEL COOGAN: The view that Moses had personally written down
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the first five books of the Bible
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was virtually unchallenged until the 17th century
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There were a few questions raised about this
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For example, the very end of the last book of the Torah,
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the Book of Deuteronomy,
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describes the death and burial of Moses
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And so some rabbi said,
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"Well, Moses couldn't have written those words himself
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because he was dead and was being buried"
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NARRATOR: And, digging deeper into the text,
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there are even more discrepancies
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COOGAN: For example, how many of each species of animal
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is Noah supposed to bring into the ark?
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One text says two-- a pair of every kind of animal
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Another text says seven pair of the clean animals,
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and only two of the unclean animals
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NARRATOR: In one chapter, the Bible says
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the flood lasts for 40 days and 40 nights
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But, in the next, it says 150 days
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To see if the floodwaters have subsided,
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Noah sends out a dove
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But, in the previous sentence, he sends a raven
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There are two complete versions of the flood story
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interwoven on the same page
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Many similar discrepancies throughout its pages suggest
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that the Bible has more than one writer
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In fact, within the first five books of the Bible,
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scholars have identified the hand
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of at least four different groups of scribes writing
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over several hundred years
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This theory is called the Documentary Hypothesis
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COOGAN: One way of thinking about it is, as a kind of anthology
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that was made over the course of many centuries
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by different people adding to it,
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subtracting from it, and so forth
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NARRATOR: But when did the process of writing the Bible begin?
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Tel Zayit is a small site
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on the southwestern border of ancient Israel
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that dates back to biblical times
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Since 1999, Ron Tappy has been excavating here