hi guys. I'm thinking, I'm guessing that we are live. Um, sometimes when you start it, it doesn't look like it started, but I think it is. I got the green light, so I'm going to go ahead and welcome you guys. Thank you so much for joining with us for our live broadcast/slash webinar for exploring the archaeology of the book of Isaiah. So, I'm really excited that you're with us tonight, and I have got a really, a lot of really amazing stuff to share with you tonight. So, um, without further ado, I'm going to go ahead and jump into it. Uh, first of all, thank you for joining with us again, uh, for our ongoing series in biblical archaeology, in which we're exploring the world of archaeology, um, and the Bible through this lecture series that we're doing. We're calling the epic archaeology live webinars, and so tonight is, uh, going to be about the book of Isaiah, which is, uh, one of the most amazing prophets in the Old Testament. I think you'll agree, um, Isaiah is just

contains not just one but many truly remarkable and amazing verses that, uh, as Christians, we all adore and cherish, and they are very near and dear to our faith, uh, but we're going to be exploring, uh, the archaeology and the history behind this remarkable book. So, um, so I'm gonna go ahead and do a share screen, so just hang on for one second, and we'll go ahead and get started. So, um, again, thank you for being with us, and um, hopefully you can see this, and we'll go ahead and get started with tonight's presentation. Tonight is the book of Isaiah, exploring the archaeology and the history of the book of Isaiah. So, to start us off with tonight, what I thought we would do is to start out with a few verses that are very, um, important for our faith as Christians. Now, even though Isaiah is in the Old Testament, it's an Old Testament Jewish prophet in the Hebrew Scriptures. As Christians, we hold the book of Isaiah as sacred as well, and there are really, and I just picked a

few there are, of course, many, many others, but you may have a favorite verses that you know. But, of course, the one that many people know is the Emmanuel prophecy, written in Isaiah chapter 7, verse 14, where Isaiah says that, Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall call his name Emmanuel. Isaiah 7:14. We're going to unpack that tonight a little bit further in more detail. And then, of course, the other one, and I don't know what's happening about seven down there, that Isaiah 9:6-7, but this is another very famous from the government of the Messiah. For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace, there will be no end upon the throne of David and over his

kingdom to order it and establish it with judgment and justice from that time forward and forever. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this. Another really amazing verse, and of course the verse continues to go on and talk about more things. So anyway, just really remarkable. I know you have some favorites as well. This is another one, the reign of Messiah. This is another one that a lot of people get mixed up. They think, you know, you see in a lot of Christian imagery the wolf, or excuse me, the lion laying down with the lamb, but it's actually the wolf lying down with the lamb. And this is from the book of Isaiah, chapter 11, verses 1 through 6. And the prophet Isaiah says, There shall come forth a rod from the stem of Jesse, and the branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the

lord, his delight is in the fear of the lord, and he shall not judge by the sight of his eyes, nor decide by the hearing of his ears. But with righteousness, he shall judge the poor and decide equality for the meek of the earth. He shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips, he shall slay the wicked. Righteousness shall be the belt of his loins, and faithfulness the belt of his waist. The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the fatling together. I don't know, there's a lot of misspellings in here, uh, and a little child shall lead them. Isaiah 11:1 and 6. And of course, this verse many people know, most people know, very famous, and I only picked just a few verses because the whole thing is just truly remarkable. In fact, uh, it actually begins, I believe, this whole section begins in chapter 52, toward the end of 52.

and goes all the way into 53. It's the man of sorrows theme in the book of Isaiah. Now keep in mind this was written 700 years before Christ was born. And Isaiah the prophet says this about Messiah, about the one who's going to come to Israel, again written before it happened. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from him. He was despised, and we did not esteem him. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. Yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement for our peace was upon him, and by his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray, and we have turned everyone to his own way. And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. And of course it

goes on to describe the messiah in great detail as the suffering servant written again 700 years before Christ was born. In one of my favorite episodes in the gospels, Jesus, at the very beginning of his ministry, goes to Nazareth. He's right at the very beginning of his ministry, and he goes to the synagogue. As the custom goes, he gets the temple Torah scroll, and he opens up to guess where. It just so happens that the temple scroll is in the book of Isaiah, so he can read from anywhere. This is something you would do as a rabbi. You had the right, when you were, of course, of age, to pick up the scroll and to read from the scroll and to comment on it. So, in Luke chapter 4, the gospel writer Luke records this really, really amazing episode in the life of Christ. It says, And he was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and when he had opened the scroll, he found the place where it is written.

and this is what he says, and he read this: The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who were oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. And then the text says, Then he closed the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down, and the eyes of all who were in the synagogue were fixed on him. And then the text goes on, and it says this: And he began to say to them, 'Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.' So all bore witness to him and marveled at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth. And they said, Is this not Joseph's son? So right at the very beginning of Jesus' ministry, Jesus himself quotes from the book of Isaiah. So the book of Isaiah is important not only for Jews and in their witness in understanding their faith in you.

know 700 years before Christ, but also we believe as Christians that the book of Isaiah is a divinely inspired book that is grounded in history. And tonight we're going to look at the remarkable historical reliability of the book of Isaiah. So, um, this is what we're gonna do. This is sort of our plan tonight. Um, what we're gonna do is um, uh, we're gonna look at the literary structure and the textual evidence for the book of Isaiah, and then we're going to look at the historical context in the last days of Judah, because the book of Isaiah was written in the last days of Judah, and we'll get into that here in a moment. And then we're going to look at some archaeological discoveries as they relate to the book of Isaiah. So that's sort of our game plan for tonight, and uh, hope and pray that uh, you are uh, inspired and encouraged by this really amazing evidence that we're going to be looking at in detail tonight. Um, so I apologize in advance because

there's going to be a lot of. I'm going to be throwing a lot of information out there, and it's going to sort of be like drinking from a fire hydrant. But hopefully, it's not overwhelming, and I will. We'll have fun in the process. So, the literary structure of the book of Isaiah. Now, for time's sake, because we don't have time to dig into it, let me just say that when you look at the structure of the book of Isaiah, in some ways, it's very simple. If you look at it in a very broad context, you can really break it down into two main sections. The early part, chapters 1 through 39, have to do with Isaiah's warning of judgment, specifically for Jerusalem. He was warning Jerusalem that they were going down the same road that their brothers in the north were going down, and so it was a warning to Jerusalem, but it was also a message of hope. And then in chapters 40 through 66,

he uh he begins to unpack uh the messiah and the hope that God is going to send an anointed one who is going to bring Israel into their land and bless them and bring in this everlasting kingdom. So that's the main two. We'll look at that here at a moment, but just let me just uh kind of go through here and show you. We're not going to spend too much time on it. Let me. Sorry about that um and uh this is sort of my again. This is not a set thing. Different scholars divide it in different ways. You may you know you have a commentary. It may divide in different ways, but this is sort of a to give you kind of an idea just as an overview because it is broken down into 66 chapters. Interestingly, of course, the original book of Isaiah did not have the chapter, obviously chapter and verse divisions, but um when the scholars uh did apply the uh chapters to it, it sort of does fit. It's sort of like people even said the book of Isaiah.

is like a miniature Bible. It starts out with warnings of judgment and hope, and then at the end, it ends up with Christ coming again and establishing His kingdom on earth. So, it is sort of like a miniature Bible in a sense, but chapters 1-39, of course, the judgment and hope for Jerusalem, and then, of course, one of the most famous episodes in that first section is Isaiah chapter 6, what is called Isaiah's temple vision of God. In Isaiah chapter six, verse one, it says, In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting up on His throne, high and exalted, and the train of His robe filled the temple. We'll look at that here in a moment. Chapters 40 through 49, announcements of a future hope and forgiveness. So, intermingled throughout the book, there's warning, and then there's also a message of hope as well. So, as hard-headed as the Jews were in Judea and also in Israel, God was also going

to remember the covenant that he had made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and also to David as well. So, uh, so he's this has nothing to do with Israel, uh, earning their salvation, but it's the it's the it's an indication of the grace of God. And then chapters 50 through 55, Messiah fulfills God's mission to be the servant to the nations. And then, of course, in that section, of course, we just read it, a section of that chapter 53, God's Messiah will suffer, die, and live again. And then chapters 56 through 66, the last 10 chapters, God's servants will inherit God's eternal, glorious kingdom, in which Isaiah sort of unpacks in a in a sort of a poetic way. Um, so that's uh, that's kind of a a very rough idea of the uh, of a more detailed breakdown. Uh, but let me give you the uh, what most critical scholars, in fact, uh, most critical scholars hold that the book of Isaiah was

actually written by two or more authors. And of course, I mentioned this earlier. It's two main sections: chapters 1-39, judgment and hope for Jerusalem, was written by one author. And then chapters 40 through 66, which intermingles hope and deliverance, was written very likely by multiple authors according to critical scholarship. Years ago, when I was in Dallas, Texas, I was with Josh McDowell and some other scholars. We were there looking at some really remarkable manuscripts that were purchased by the Green family. And it was a lot of other apologists that were there, Frank Turek and Nabil Qureshi was there. And it was just, I was just, I couldn't believe I was there. But what's interesting about this is that in this, in these manuscripts, obviously, you know, you're looking at a copy of the original manuscript. And we heard lectures from Dr. Daniel Wallace of Dallas Seminary and some other really great scholars. But obviously, we're going to talk about

this tonight the dead sea scrolls were discovered in 1947, and the isaiah scroll was found in its complete form. And there were no, there's no divisions between the first section and the last section, which means that it was copied down very, very accurately. So this is where we want, I want to introduce something to you. You may or may not have heard of it. It's a group of scribes or ancient scribes, scholars, call them mazzarets. And well, how do they relate to the book of isaiah? Well, I'll explain this here in a moment. The mazzarettes were a group of Jewish scholar scribes who designed a system of notes and signs to preserve the text of the Hebrew Bible because they wanted to be very meticulous about copying scripture. So they introduced a very, very careful way of writing it down. And if they got one, the legend goes, if they got one word wrong in a text, they would actually count the individual letters in the text.

and there would be a colophon at the bottom of the manuscript that actually had the word and number count of the words and letters on the text, and they had to be counted, and if they were wrong, they would throw the whole thing away. So, uh, there may be a little truth in that. Um, so a Masoretic text is a distinctive Hebrew text type that came to be identified with a 10th-century manuscript via a rabbi by the name of Rabbi Aaron ben Asher. And so, this was, uh, up until the days of scrolls were discovered, the Masoretic text was the earliest known text of the book of Isaiah, and we're talking about the 10th century A.D. So, we're talking about like a thousand A.D. Okay, that was, uh, before the Dead Sea Scrolls. That was the earliest text that we had, and it was a Masoretic text. It was very, you know, it, it, the, the copy, the book of Isaiah that you're reading your Bible.

and that Mesoretic text is, I mean, they're very, very, uh, there's no, no, very little, uh, distinction between those two, and so it's a very, very good tradition. But, um, so the Masoretes will come out. The Masoretes worked very hard to assure that the 39 books of the Hebrew Bible were maintained in all of their purity. So, so, whenever you hear about the Masoretic text or the MT, as it's called, this is a textual tradition in which Jewish scribes, beginning about, uh, 500 BC, all the way up to about, probably during the time of the first century, I'm not, I'm not positive on the dates, but I know it's about 500 BC, all the way up to about the time of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, maybe longer even. But in any case, uh, it is a tradition that, uh, it's a scribal tradition that tries to maintain textual purity of the copies. Okay, so again, the oldest and most complete manuscript from the Mesuret

tradition is the is a is a a scroll called the linograd b19a that dates to about a thousand eight to a thousand nine a d. So that is until ta-da, that's me uh in qumran in the dead sea. Uh, I was there back in 2014 and uh, as you see, as you can see on the slide there, I was certainly containing my excitement about being there. But um, uh, these really remarkable things were discovered in the caves behind me uh, there on the banks of the dead sea and uh, I took some uh, hiking all the way up into the area where they found the dead sea scrolls. It was really amazing place and uh, it's, there's no, I mean, it's, it's really a desert like in the true sense of the term. There's really no grass anywhere and so this is actually from where I was standing looking back at this. It's a place called wadi kumron and essentially what a wadi is, it's a dry riverbed. It might get rain maybe once or

twice a year, you can see there in the bottom of the hill, there's a sort of dry wash riverbed. But on the left of that, you can see sort of a cliff, and there's sort of a cave in the side of the cliff. Well, there's the cave. This is actually known as Cave Four at Wadi Qumran, and there were about 10, and now I believe 11 caves that have been discovered, and about 800 manuscripts. And, uh, so the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered there on the banks of the Dead Sea. Now, they were located right near a place, uh, an archaeological ruin called Kerbet Qumran, and the word kerbet in Arabic means ruin. So, a kerbet, that's different than a tell, because in a tell, what you have is an archaeological site that's built up over a mound of time, but a kerbet is a ruin that's sort of sitting on the surface. So, right there, uh, near Wadi Qumran, you've got Kerbet Qumran. That's what

gets named and uh we believe i believe the scholars that i read and follow and study and i think that most people believe that uh this uh this place here was actually um a uh the dwelling place of a a sect of jews that lived back in the time of the second temple period called the essenes and you can see there sort of in the middle of the screen there's some stairs going down in the ground that's actually a mcvote which is a ritual purity we know that the jews practiced ritual purity in the second temple period and then the archaeologists that excavated there also found uh rooms containing ink wells and large tables and benches so so this is sort of the scenes we're sort of like a monastic community and we believe that around the time of the destruction of jerusalem around 70 a.d or probably before that the essenes uh of course they had they they copied manuscripts and uh they've likely took not only the manuscripts that they had

there's also some conjecture that they also took some of the manuscripts that were actually in Jerusalem, and they hid them there in the caves near Wadi Qumran. And so, and there's a sort of an aerial photograph. It's actually interesting because the place of Qumran is actually modeled on Jerusalem. So when you go and you look at an aerial view of Qumran, it was modeled on the city of Jerusalem. The reason why that is the case is because the Essenes had believed that, of course, there were other groups of Jews at the time. There were the Herodians. These were a group of Jews who actually believed that Herod, believe it or not, Herod was the Messiah. That's the Herodians. And then you've got, of course, the Pharisees and the Sadducees. But the Essenes believed that all of them were corrupt, and they had basically were in the back pocket of the Romans in that they were had gotten

away from the Torah, so they went and lived separately, and they lived like monks right there on the banks of the Dead Sea, near the wilderness, in the Judean wilderness. And so they built this sort of a monastic community that looked like a model of Jerusalem. So the Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered in the winter-spring of 1946-1947 when a Bedouin boy entered Cave One, what is now called Cave One in Wadi Qumran. He discovered a row of tall cylindrical ceramic jars covered with bowl-shaped lids. Most of them were empty, but some of them contained scrolls. There is a story that I've not been able to confirm one way or the other, and I asked, I think I asked Jodi Magnus about this, who is a professor at UNC Chapel Hill and an expert in this Second Temple period. In fact, she's excavated right there near Qumran at Masada. And anyway, the story is that this

bedouin boy, uh, of course, was shepherding his goats and sheep, and he was looking for a lost sheep and thought he heard it in a cave. He threw a stone up in the cave, and he heard the crack of the jar lid. So, he climbed up the cave and actually found these jars. So, that's the interesting story. So, the bedouin removed seven complete scrolls from cave one, including, I believe, the complete Isaiah scroll. But interestingly, because the scrolls were written on parchment or animal hide, very likely lambskin, the Bedouins sold them to a cobbler, a guy who makes shoes in Bethlehem, a guy by the name of Kando. Now, Kando could not read the scrolls, but he thought that they were very likely ancient Syriac. And, uh, Kando was a Syrian Orthodox Christian, and so he actually offered them to the patriarch of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem, who purchased the scrolls, get this, for the total sum of 24 British pounds sterling. That's about a hundred dollars.

At that time, so can you imagine the Dead Sea Scrolls found in Cave One were bought for a hundred dollars. They didn't know what they had, you know, they're poor, and they didn't really know what they had. So, Kando offered these, the other scrolls, to an archaeologist, an Israeli biblical scholar at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem named Eleazar Lipa Sukenik. Now, interestingly, if you know anything about the history of biblical archaeology in Israel, Eliezer Sukenik was the father of a very famous Israeli archaeologist who was also a general named Yigael Yadin. And he was a military commander as well as an archaeologist, so he was a soldier and an archaeologist. That was his son. So, Sukenik actually traveled to Bethlehem and arranged to purchase the scrolls from Kando on the date was November the 29th, 1947. He was actually at Red Semthings where

He was actually discouraged from going into Bethlehem because it was Arab-occupied. He was Jewish. When he got on the bus to go into Bethlehem, he was the only non-Arab on the bus. And he went there, he bought the scrolls. November the 29th, 1947, the exact same day that the United Nations voted to establish the state of Israel. So, isn't that interesting? Really interesting irony there that I absolutely love. Eventually, all of the scrolls ended up from Qumran, ended up in Israel, and they are now in the possession of Israel, in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, at a place called the Shrine of the Book. And um, there is a picture of the uh, the on the right. He's of course older in this photograph um, but they were first discovered in 1947. His name is Muhammad al-Dib uh, and that name is interesting because it's Muhammad the wolf, and he is from the Ta'amura tribe, discovered uh, there in the Judean wilderness.

and uh he found the scrolls, including the complete Isaiah scroll. This is a photograph on the left there of uh Eleazar Kinnick from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who purchased the complete Isaiah scroll in 1948. And the threat, the scroll was so large, I believe if my memory serves me correctly, it's about 20 feet long. So, it's a very, very large complete scroll. Uh, it is in fact a replica, an exact replica is actually kept. They don't keep the real thing. They used to keep the real thing at the Shrine of the Book. I think there it is right there. It's actually, it used to be kept in this. This is actually bulletproof glass, and this whole thing actually is encased in concrete. And if there's a war, the whole thing can actually go down into this concrete shell and protect it from any kind of harm. But it's now kept in a very airtight vault to keep it from decaying. And I believe that the replicas there, they're in the Shrine of the Book in

Jerusalem. Some of you may have. If you've ever been to Jerusalem, you may have actually seen this complete scroll of Isaiah. So, what is the significance of the complete scroll of Isaiah for the book of Isaiah? Walter Kaiser, professor of Old Testament, says this: The state of purity in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls is nothing short of spectacular. For instance, in one complete Isaiah scroll, only three words exhibiting a different spelling were found. For a book that runs about 100 pages and 66 chapters in our English text, it's quite remarkable. So, in this entire text, what we have here is a text that dates to about the second or third century BC. So, we're talking about a thousand years older than the oldest Isaiah text that we had. So, contrary to critical scholars, the Isaiah scroll did not contain a break between chapters 39 and 40, indicating that the book had one author and that it was a complete literary unit. Quite awesome indeed. The text of Isaiah was essentially unchanged for a thousand years.

from the earliest previous copy proving the reliability of the Masoretic text. So, the book that you have in your Bible of Isaiah is exactly very much like what the original scroll was in Qumran. So, it means that the copies are very, very accurate and that we can trust what the text says and that the book of Isaiah is, even by liberal standards, even if you don't hold to an 8th-century composition for the book of Isaiah, at minimum, it's at least 200 years before Christ. Of course, that's what the archaeologists—that's just a copy—but we know from the historical sources we're going to look at tonight that it actually is firmly grounded in the 8th century BC because of the history that we're going to look at right now. So, let's start out with a quote from a biblical chronologist by the name of Roger Young. I love what he says here. Is there so much—this is a whole rabbit trail we could

get into, but let me just say this: the Bible, he says, doesn't just contain chronological markers; he says it abounds in them. But unlike the sacred writings of most religions, there are 125 exact chronological markers for the four hundred and ten years from the first year of Solomon to the release of Jehoiachin from prison, plus numerous chronological clues of a more general nature. The precise markers include lengths of reign for the various monarchs, cross-synchronizations between the two Hebrew kingdoms, and year synchronisms to Assyrian and Babylonian kings whose times of reign can be calculated from extra-biblical sources. So what this means in English is this: that you know you can have any text, you can find any text, and we have a lot of manuscripts and text and historical inscriptions from the ancient world, but what's interesting about the Old Testament is it gives us precise king's names, and it'll say like in the fourth year or whatever, like Isaiah 6 says, in the year that king

Uzziah died. I saw the Lord sitting on His throne. So, or it'll mention a king by the name of Sennacherib or Tiglath-Pileser or whatever the case may be. And now we can go in the archaeological record to see if there are people that actually lived and existed at that time. In fact, in uh before uh archaeology in the 19th century in Iraq before they found Nineveh and excavated it, the only place where Sennacherib's name was mentioned was in the book of Isaiah. And then the archaeologist discovered this. So, we'll look at that. So, Isaiah gives us historical markers, right? Write it off in verse one. He says, This is verse one of the first chapter. The vision of Isaiah, the son of Amos, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem, the last days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah. So, Isaiah the prophet essentially uh ministered during the reign of four

Judean kings Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, and chapter six, verse one. Uh, the text tells us that in the year that it what. And let me, this goes back. The reason I want to mention this now is because we go back to the structure and why it's kind of odd, because he doesn't start out in the book chronologically. The first five chapters, first four or five chapters. Uh, he's dealing with, he's addressing the leaders in Jerusalem. Uh, the prophet Isaiah is, in fact, he calls him. Uh, the rulers of Sodom and Gomorrah. And I mean, he just, he just lays it down on the leadership in Jerusalem. But he doesn't start his ministry until the year that King Uzziah died. And so, in Isaiah chapter six, verse one, it says, In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of His robe filled the temple. Now, interestingly, uh, an archaeologist, the same archaeologist.

who recognized the Dead Sea Scrolls also recognized this because it was discovered in a Russian Orthodox monastery on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. And it's known as, get this, the King Uzziah tombstone. It's the tombstone of King Uzziah in the Old Testament. Again, identified first by Eleazar Sukenik of Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1931. The text is written in Aramaic, dated to approximately 30 to 70 A.D., about 700 years after the death of Uzziah. Now, what do we think is going on here? What we think is going on is it likely indicates that the physical remains of Uzziah were likely re-buried during the Second Temple period. And so, because of the style of the Aramaic, it was very popular in the first century, first-century Judea. So, but very likely, there's no reason to doubt that this is the same exact Uzziah that is mentioned in Isaiah chapter six. So, right out of the gate, we have

archaeological evidence for King Uzziah and the year that King His Eye died. The year that he died, the prophet Isaiah saw the Lord, had a vision of God in the temple, and that is where God called him to minister. Now before we get into

The Book of Isaiah & the Dead Sea Scrolls

The Book of Isaiah & the Dead Sea Scrolls

Scripts