A Carved Stone Block Upends Assumptions About Ancient Judaism

BEIT SHEMESH, Israel — The carved stone block is about the size of an occasional table. It has held its secrets for two millenniums. Whoever engraved its enigmatic symbols was apparently depicting the ancient Jewish temples.

But what makes the stone such a rare find in biblical archaeology, according to scholars, is that when it was carved, the Second Temple still stood in Jerusalem for the carver to see. The stone is a kind of ancient snapshot.

And it is upending some long-held scholarly assumptions about ancient synagogues and their relationship with the Temple, a center of Jewish pilgrimage and considered the holiest place of worship for Jews, during a crucial period, when Judaism was on the cusp of the Christian era.

Continue reading at New York Times.

Ben Witherington comments on the unearthing of a huge temple complex and its relevance to Genesis:

This temple lies west of the Biblical plain called Haran and is only 20 miles from the Syrian border. This places it right in the fertile crescent which begins below modern day Iraq, includings the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and winds its way north through Syria and into eastern Turkey.  This is the world not only of Genesis, but of the great Anatolian civilization of the Hittites (yes those Hittites as in Uriah the Hittite—husband of Bathsheba)… Klaus Schmidt and his team of Kurdish diggers have uncovered an enormous temple complex that pre-dates the Great Pyramids by some 7,000 years and Stonehenge by at least 6,000 years!… After 12 years of hard work, Schmidt has found at least four temple complexes. The radar scans of the area indicate there is a huge amount more to uncover here. And Schmidt has a thesis about this temple complex—here is a short excerpt from the Newsweek article on this:

“Schmidt’s thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city.”

The importance of this find for Biblical thinking is this—the Bible says that from the outset, human beings were created in God’s image. Human beings were religious creatures from Day One. Archaeologists and sociologists have long dismissed this theory saying organized religion comes much later in the game than the beginning of civilization and city building. As Ian Holder director of Stanford’s prestigous archaeology program says— this is a game changer. Indeed, it changes everything experts in the Neolithic era have been thinking. Schmidt is saying that religion is the cause of civilization, not the result of it. Towns were built to be near the Temple complex. Agriculture was undertaken to feed those living there and supply the temple complex, and so on. The first instincts of humans were to put religion first. Maybe there is more to that Genesis story than some have been willing to think or admit. Maybe human beings are inherently homo religiosis.

Schmidt says that about half of the 50 stones thus far unearthed have carvings on them—half. This makes this site very different from Stonehenge. While we have lots of animal carvings on these stones, and a few abstract symbols what you also find is human hands and arms—the T shape stones seem in some cases to be representations of humans praying, “In the Bible it talks about how God created man in his image,” says Johns Hopkins archeologist Glenn Schwartz. Göbekli Tepe “is the first time you can see humans with that idea, that they resemble gods.” This site pre-dates the earliest Biblical ruins, of Jericho, by 1,000 years or more.

Why have we not heard of this before now?Several reasons. First, because it is so huge and so significant that it will change all the textbooks on such matters, and archaeologists have been wanting to be sure of the dating and significance and nature of the site.  The site was actually found by an American in the 1960s, but it was so huge he didn’t know what to make of it. Schmidt also almost walked away when he realized the enormity of what lay under the ground. He knew he would have to spend the rest of his life digging if he stayed. And he has done so. Only 5% of this site has thus far been dug. This will make the dig at Pompeii look tiny. Whatever civilization was founded here, it ended abruptly about 8,000 B.C. and in fact the site was deliberately buried then. Many of the massive stones have been found in place, still standing upright where they had been originally placed. The site was not destroyed, it was buried.  There is much more to be done here, but suffice it to say, that religion and art are at the very heart of this temple complex. And that tell us a lot about the nature of primitive humans—a lot like what Genesis tells us as well.

A commenter asked if it was possible that these temples were buried during the flood. Witherington replied: “Yes indeed. It is way, way underground, and this is one of those regions in which geologists have found evidence of a huge regional flood. The very fact that this whole thing is found in situ, with the stones standing shows it was not destroyed by human beings.”

I guess we will just have to disagree on the size of the “region.”

My friend Matt has been blogging about how postmodernism, with its openness to narrative, is a great opportunity for the gospel. But evangelicals need to sort themselves out first. Otherwise, to the world, they are just a bunch of Patsys. Patsy Biscoes that is.

The big problem is the fact that many evangelicals plainly do not believe the “stories” in the Bible. Compromised with the world’s academia, they lose any real authority to share these “stories” with any gravity whatsoever. Can you imagine any of the patriarchs sharing “stories” around the fire and qualifying it with “but this is just a true myth.” No wonder evangelicalism is a laughing stock to its vocal, “enlightened” opponents.

Then we have the gooey emergents on the other end, who love stories but whether or not they have any basis in reality is irrelevant.

Gnostics on the right. Gnostics on the left. Western Christianity is given the status of ideology and nothing more. And yet God still works in it by His Spirit. “Lord, forgive our arrogant, apostate, vaccillating, intellectualised, world-pleasing unbelief. It must be a stink in your nostrils.”

James Jordan recently wrote:

“This is just plain sad. A few shards and fragments from the ancient world are blown up into a whole system of thought that contradicts the Bible, and evangelicals then buy into it. It may be time for serious Christians to pack it in as far as the evangelical scholarly world is concerned. We can learn from them here and there, just as we learn from Jews and liberals here and there. But unless it shapes up, the future does not lie with this compromised religion.” [1]

Telling stories when we ourselves are not sure of their validity is not the best way to share the faith. It is an embarrassment. It’s a good thing the pomos will go for the story regardless. We need the narratives, but we also need rigorous faith-filled scholarship. Patsy Biscoe’s faith puts the faith of many scholars to shame.

Matt comments:

That’s why I love Tom Wright. He hasn’t hidden behind the pulpit, nor retreated into the academy. he straddles both worlds with a vigorous Christ centered scholarship. he truly believes the narrative of the bible, and is concerned hold theology and history together, without it slipping into just mythology.

Better get a better metanarrative

Matt also writes concerning the relationship between modernism and postmodernism:

…the enemy of our enemy is our friend. Postmodernism declares that all such large stories — “metanarratives” — are destructive and enslaving, and must be deconstructed. The pomo attack on gospel-denying modernism is useful for us. Postmodernism is a necessary critique of modernity. But the current problem is that though the postmodern turn in philosophy and culture has sneered at the great modernist imperial dream, it hasn’t been able to shake it. We live in a time where modernity and postmodernity refer not so much to a datable chronological period but more to two different moods and controlling narratives. Our world is both modern and postmodern. And I don’t see this changing for sometime. We can not go back to being just modern. And could postmodernism survive without the thing is it critiquing? The two ideas have become utterly dependent on each other.

Modernism, like feminism and communism, simply replaced the old exploitation with a new exploitation. Postmodernism doesn’t even have this to offer. Postmodernism is not a system in itself. It is just a critique, which is why it can’t “shake off” modernism. Pomo is helpful in exposing the cracks in modernism so we can inject the gospel, the only true builder of cultures.

The foundation of modernism is evolution, and the currently popular history of “ancient man”. Until this is thrown out, Western Christianity is still stuck within a modernist metanarrative, and can only ever be a manmade ideology. [2]

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[1] James Jordan, Did God Speak Hebrew to Adam, Biblical Horizons #209.
[2] See also The Only True Foundation for Anthropology

“Yoder argues that from the time of the Babylonian captivity, the Jews developed a proto-”free church” model of community life. True in some respects. Jews didn’t have their own polity. But I’ve got doubts if that’s a fair characterization of Jews in and after the exile.

Why? The Bible for starters. Jews in exile are not isolated in their ghettos. They are seeking the peace of the city; Daniel, Nehemiah, Mordecai, Esther are the heroes of the time, and all fully integrated in imperial culture, whether Babylonian or Persian. They weren’t Amish.

Then there’s archeology. Jewish synagogues are everywhere in the Eastern Mediterranean, and they aren’t huddled off in some corner of the city. Some of them are right on the main drag.

If that’s right, it didn’t stay that way. Jews did retreat into more isolated communities over time. Which raises the question: What happened? Christian hostility to Jews is a big part of that story. But there’s perhaps something more fundamental: AD 70.

Robert Wilken wrote long ago that “the bond between Judaism and the Graeco-Roman culture was torn asunder by the Roman-Jewish wars. The epoch of Philo was the last in which the ideals of a brotherhood between Greeks and Jews could still be seriously envisaged.” AD 70 was the end of a world, the world that Jim Jordan calls the “oikoumene,” a cooperative between Jews and Gentiles that God set up at the time of the first fall of Jerusalem.

This has implications in several directions (perhaps). With regard to Yoder: The detached, free-church model comes late, not at the time of the exile. It’s a product of the Lord’s destruction of a unified Jew-and-Greco-Roman system. The “exilic” model that is found in the OT is a model that prominently includes Jews who are thoroughly engaged with the empire — even to the point of being civil servants, advisors, and prophets to the king.

More broadly: Wilken’s point challenges any simplistic Hebraic/Hellenistic dichotomy. Up until AD 70, there was no such dichotomy.

Finally, this also points to another of the ways in which AD 70 is the beginning of the Christian era. Through the Jewish wars, Judaism was isolated from Greco-Roman civilization, and gradually the church moved into the vacuum. As Tertullian claimed, the estrangement of Jews and Greeks meant that the church was the medium by which the antique wisdom and law of Judaism was brought into the Roman world.”

1. See James B. Jordan, The Handwriting on the Wall, for a full rundown on this important factor. Like so many things he has written or said in lectures, you might initially think it is odd, but then it plays out in the Bible hundreds of times and answers many niggling questions.

(Thanks to Dr Leithart for his kind permission to republish here. I actually asked him this time!)