Historical Books Introduction (Part 1)

Joshua — Steve Gregg

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Historical Books Introduction (Part 2)

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Historical Books Introduction (Part 1)

JoshuaSteve Gregg

This series of lectures by Steve Gregg delves into the historical books of the Old Testament, which provide insight into the origins, traditions, and major events in the lives of the Jewish people. Despite some differences in opinion regarding which books belong in the canon, Gregg emphasizes the importance of the prophetic tradition and the role of historical facts in these texts. Through examining sources like the Moabite stone and Babylonian Chronicle, Gregg argues that these books are compilations of historical facts and not solely religious texts.

Transcript

The Historical Books of the Old Testament The Historical Books of the Old Testament There were some Jews who only accepted the Torah and not the rest of the Old Testament. The Sadducees, for example, at least professed to only accept the Torah. The Torah was considered the most important scriptures they had.

Different Jews had different opinions about what other books belonged in their canon, but they all included the Torah because the Torah was essentially the foundational documents of the nation of Israel and also the world itself if you include the book of Genesis to that. So, there's obviously history in the Torah. You've got the history of the creation of heaven and earth and the call of Abraham and the stories of Isaac and Jacob and Joseph.

Then the Hebrews go down into Egypt and they're slaves there. Then God raises up Moses and Moses leads the children of Israel out. They wander for 40 years in the wilderness and that's how they end up at the end of Deuteronomy.

But since those books already have another label, namely Torah or law, they are not counted among what we call the historical books of the Old Testament although that's not to reflect negatively on our opinion of them being historically correct. The historical books pick up with the book after that, Joshua, which is Joshua's and Moses' successor to lead the children of Israel. Then there's the period of the Judges.

At the end of a long period, several centuries, where Israel had judges, they changed over to a monarchy and they had a king. Originally Saul, then David, and then David's son Solomon. Now, when Solomon died, his son Rehoboam took over but the kingdom divided.

There was a rebellion and there were 12 tribes in Israel. Ten of them defected from David's family dynasty and started their own kingdom to the north called Israel. The two tribes remained loyal to David's dynasty in the south, Judah, which was David's own tribe, and Benjamin, which was a very small and rather inconsequential tribe much of the time.

Those two tribes in the south made up the kingdom of Judah. From the time of Rehoboam, Solomon's son, until the end of Old Testament history, the nation of Israel was divided into two kingdoms, at least as long as they endured. The northern kingdom only lasted a little longer than 100 and something years, or 200 or whatever.

Frank, how long was it? Okay, you don't got it either. I guess it was a little over 200 because they were destroyed in 722 BC by the Assyrians and they started around 900 BC, so about 200 and something years. The southern kingdom of Judah lasted longer and finally was taken into captivity by the Babylonians in the year 586 BC.

Spent about 70 years there and some of them came back to Israel and repopulated and rebuilt the city of Jerusalem and the temple which had been destroyed by the Babylonians. When they did, they were led by a man named Zerubbabel and a priest named Joshua, not the same Joshua that's in the book of Joshua. This is now hundreds of years later.

A remnant of the Jewish people came back from the Babylonian captivity and the stories that are found in Ezra and Nehemiah and even Esther belong to that time. The Babylonian captivity is called the exile and the time before that was called pre-exilic or exilic and the time after was called post-exilic. We've got nine pre-exilic books of history and we have three post-exilic books.

The dividing point is the 70 year captivity in Babylon, the exile. The books before that are Joshua and Judges and Ruth and then you've got 1st and 2nd Samuel which originally were only one book of Samuel. They were divided when the Septuagint was translated a few centuries before Christ but in the Hebrew Bible there was really only one book of Samuel and then there was one book of Kings that's been divided into two.

We have 1st and 2nd Kings and then there was one book of Chronicles in the Hebrew Bible but it was divided into two so we've got 1st and 2nd Samuel, 1st and 2nd Kings, 1st and 2nd Chronicles. It makes six books for us, only three in the Hebrew Bible and then those preceded by Joshua, Judges and Ruth make the nine pre-exilic books. At the end of the book of 2nd Kings which parallels 2nd Chronicles by the way, there's parallel material there, the Jews go off into exile and then when you come to Ezra it's the end of the exile.

Ezra and Nehemiah and Esther are the post-exilic books. So that's what the historical books are and I want to take this session to just give an introduction to the historical books as a whole before we actually get into any one of them individually. The Hebrew Bible canon is divided differently from that of the Septuagint and you might as well now know what the word Septuagint means if you're not already familiar with it.

The word Septuagint is Greek and it comes from the word seventy. That word sept you recognize as related to seven. I'm not sure why it should be when September is our ninth month but actually September was originally the seventh month in the calendar year and that's why it was called September but sept is for seven or seventy.

The Septuagint is a translation of the Old Testament that was begun in the third century BC. Now let me make that clearer. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew.

Every book in the Old Testament was written in Hebrew with the exception of a few chapters in Daniel and in Ezra I believe that were written in Aramaic which is very similar to Hebrew. Aramaic was a language that the Jews began to adopt in place of Hebrew during the period after the exile when other cultures began to have more dominance in the area. Aramaic is a Semitic language also very similar to Hebrew.

But there's only a few chapters. Half of Daniel, six out of the twelve chapters in Daniel are written in Aramaic and a few chapters in Ezra I believe are written in Aramaic and apart from that the rest of the Old Testament is written in Hebrew. About 285 years before Christ a group of 70 scholars as the story goes in Alexandria, Egypt, Jewish rabbis, Jewish scholars decided that the Greek language was becoming so prominent throughout the empire that there ought to be a Greek translation of the Old Testament Scriptures.

Alexander the Great had conquered the Mediterranean world prior to this time but not much prior, about 50 years earlier. The whole world had succumbed to the conquest of Alexander the Great and one of the things he did in the conquered territories was to make Koine Greek the official language of the entire empire. By the time these Alexandrian Jews in Egypt were living they had seen most of the empire now speaking just Greek and probably a lot of the Jews weren't even really able to read Hebrew so much anymore because Greek was used much more commonly.

So they decided that the Old Testament should be translated into Greek and that Greek translation which was made almost three centuries before Christ was called the Septuagint. Now when they made the Septuagint they made some changes to the Old Testament. First of all they included some books that don't really belong to the Old Testament.

In addition to the Old Testament books they included in the Septuagint quite a few apocryphal books. The word apocryphal means hidden for some reason but we use the word to mean not official, not canonical, not recognized. You may know that the Roman Catholic Bible has more books in its Old Testament than Protestant Bibles have.

That's because the Catholic Bible includes these apocryphal books. Why do they? Well one reason they say they do is because they're in the Septuagint. When the Jews translated the Old Testament into Greek they also translated the apocryphal books.

But that doesn't mean that the Jews considered all these books to be scripture. It's just that they began to translate a sacred library into Greek which first included their scriptures and then continued on to other edifying texts including what we now call the apocryphal books. The Roman Catholic Church and the early church for that matter seemed to accept these apocryphal books as scripture because the Septuagint was the Bible that they used.

It was Martin Luther actually who argued for the exclusion of these apocryphal books from our Bible based on the fact that the Hebrews interestingly did not seem to recognize the apocryphal books. Josephus, who was a Hebrew historian contemporary with the apostles he told what the accepted Hebrew books of the canon were and they are the same ones as our 39 Old Testament books. Also another Jew contemporary with Paul who lived in Alexandria, Menaphilo he also identified the same books that we have in our Protestant Bible as the Old Testament.

So it would appear that the Jews both in Alexandria where the Septuagint was translated by the way and also in Palestine where Josephus was they accepted the same Old Testament we have in our Protestant Bible. They didn't accept more or fewer books than we have. But the Septuagint included more books.

Interestingly though it included more books than the Catholic Bible has. The Catholic Bible accepts some but not all of the apocryphal books that are in the Septuagint. So we don't have to worry too much about that but that's one thing that you find in the Septuagint different than the Hebrew Bible.

There's more books in the Septuagint and more than are in our Old Testament. But another thing they did is that they broke up some of the larger books into two. Like I said there was a book of Samuel they broke it into first and second Samuel.

There was one book of what we call Kings they broke it up into first and second Kings. Actually they had it different. What we call first Samuel they called first Kings.

They had four books of Kings. First and second Samuel and first and second Kings to them were first, second, third and fourth Kings. Or kingdoms.

First kingdoms, second kingdoms were what we would call first and second Samuel. Third kingdoms, fourth kingdoms were what we call first and second Kings. That's just how they named them.

It doesn't matter much but just so you know. Also they arranged the books in the Septuagint like we have them in our Bible. That is more or less the Torah and the historical books as they are now in our Bible.

Followed by the wisdom and poetry books, Psalms, Proverbs and the rest. Followed by the prophets. But that's not how they found it in the Hebrew Bible.

In the Hebrew Bible they had the law which is the five books. Then they had what they called the former prophets and then the latter prophets. Now what they called the latter prophets, what the Hebrew Bible called the latter prophets, what we call the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel.

They didn't include Daniel there. They had him in another category called the writings. They called the twelve, the minor prophets.

Interestingly there were twelve minor prophets and they called them the twelve. We have the twelve apostles and there were twelve patriarchs, a significant number. They had the law.

They had the prophets which was Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the twelve, the minor prophets. And they had what they called the writings in the Hebrew Bible. Books like Ruth and Esther and Chronicles which we call historical books.

Those were in the writings in the Hebrew Bible. They didn't include those in the same category we do. Daniel which we have among our prophets they had in the writings.

There were certain books that they categorized differently in the Septuagint and which we now follow. We follow the Septuagint in our arrangement. But in the Hebrew Bible the books that we're studying here called the historical books.

Most of them were what the Jews called the former prophets. And what we call the prophets most of them they called the latter prophets. Is that important to know? Not necessarily.

You could live your whole life and be a good Christian without knowing any of that. But just so that the vocabulary is familiar to you if it happens to slip out of my mouth or anywhere else you happen to hear people discuss the Old Testament knowledgeably. All right.

Now so the books that we call historical books we are speaking about Joshua through Esther. Like I said nine pre-exilic, three post-exilic. Interestingly when you look at the minor prophets I've just mentioned 12 books.

There are 12 minor prophets. Nine of those are pre-exilic and three of those are post-exilic. So they divide up similarly but there's not an exact one to one correspondence by any means.

Now I've told you how the history divides up of Israel that is covered in these books. It's Roman numeral two in your notes. The first period of the historical books is the time of the conquest of Palestine and its existence as what's called an infiction.

Now I bet you never heard that word before and you might never hear it again except here. I'm going to say it again. Infiction.

Now you've heard it twice. What's an infiction? It's actually a term that's usually used for a Greek. It later can be used for a Greek coalition of tribes that were a loose coalition rather than a nation.

Maybe a little bit like we might have if the states in our union were not all joined by the federal government. If we had the 50 states or 48 states in North America and they didn't have the federal government churning them then we would have sort of a culturally similar group of states probably would be somewhat cooperative with each other and there would be a lot of families that were divided between them. There would be a sense of brotherhood between them but there wouldn't be a political joining of them.

And that's what Israel was at first. When Joshua took the children of Israel into the land and divided it up they were an infiction, a group of sort of a loose coalition of 12 tribes. They didn't have a central government.

They didn't have a national military. They didn't have a king. No one was expected to be accountable to anyone else of them.

Twice or actually three times in Judges there was no king in Israel in those days. And so that's what Israel was for their first 355 years if I calculate it. There was about 25 years of the conquests covered in Joshua and the book of Judges covers about 330 years if I've got it figured.

So about 355 years Israel's infiction-y days covered in Joshua and Judges. And Ruth belongs to that period too. The opening words in the book of Ruth say in the days when the Judges reigned.

So you know it belongs to the Judges period. But then you've got Samuel and Kings. Now early in Samuel, in 1 Samuel, you've still got the infiction.

You've still got a judge. The priest there is the judge, Eli. Samuel sort of moves into that position.

He becomes sort of priest slash judge. Although he was not a Levite. He somehow functioned as a priest as well as a judge.

But Samuel is considered to be the last of the judges. And he's also called the kingmaker because it was in his day in 1 Samuel 8 that the people of Israel said we're tired of this loose coalition of tribes. We want to have a federal government.

We want to have a king to govern us all together. Make us a strong nation like the other nations have. And so Samuel was not pleased with that.

Neither was God, by the way. But God decided to give them their request. And so a king was set up, Saul.

And this began the monarchy period. Saul reigned for 40 years. He died and his successor David reigned for 40 years.

Interestingly enough, David's successor Solomon also reigned for 40 years. It sounds almost too neat to be true. But what's interesting is when you read the book of Judges, if you've done that recently, you notice all the judges reigned for 40 years except for a few who reigned for 80.

But you almost begin to think, is this an artificial way of speaking about a lifetime? Or is this literal? I mean, did God literally, providentially limit the reign of a king or a judge to 40 years? It doesn't seem like it was a year more or a year less in any of those cases. After Solomon's reign, though, of 40 years, his sons and successors didn't reign for even amounts of time. And none of them reigned for 40 years, I don't believe.

So you've got the monarchy period. It starts in 1 Samuel 8, and it goes on through Samuel and Kings to the time of the exile, the Babylonian servitude. That whole period of monarchy then is 510 years.

About 120 years under the first three kings, 40 years each. And then under their successors after the monarchy divided, it was another 390 years. Then you have the 70-year captivity.

And then you have the restoration period, and that's going to be covered in Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther. The period that Ezra covers is about 69 years, probably from about 536 to 467 B.C. The period of Nehemiah's story seems to be about 13 years from 455 to 442 B.C. And Esther, who was married to the Persian monarch of the time, Hatshepsut Areses, whose name is Verses, that took place between 519 and 508 B.C. in all likelihood about 11 years. And so that's the actual time frame we're talking about.

So the earliest part of this story in Joshua begins about 1451 B.C., when Joshua takes over. And the last part ends about 442 B.C., which is almost exactly a thousand years. So that's the length of time we're going to cover in the 12 books that we're going to study as the historical books.

Now, when you read these stories, the authors make it very clear that they're not the first to write on their subject matter. They often make reference to other writings that they are aware of, perhaps that they're using as sources, that at least, you know, for additional reading, you can look up this book, they say. Now, the books that they name are not in existence anymore.

But these books themselves bear testimony to a lot of written material covering the period by Jewish writers, apparently, that was available to earlier generations that is not available to us now. We don't have these books anymore. Now, the first one mentioned is in Joshua 10.13, and that's the book of Jasher.

Now, some people say we do have the book of Jasher now, because you can go to a book store and buy the book of Jasher, or you can see it online. The problem is we have no reason to believe it's the same book of Jasher that Joshua is referring to. It appeared, I think, in the 1800s as a publication, and its authenticity is definitely open to question.

So, although there's a mention of a book of Jasher in the book of Joshua, and there is a book of Jasher available for sale today, it's probably not the same one. We have record of the book of Jasher in the book of Joshua 10.13. It says, So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the people had revenge upon their enemies. It says, Is this not written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of the heaven, and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day.

So, the writer of Joshua says, this might sound like I'm making this up. The sun stood still for a day, you might think I'm making that up. I'm not, it's in the book of Jasher 2. We've got a second testimony on that, the witness of 2 is true.

And so, he appeals to another document that was apparently known in his time, that also independently recorded that event. And so that's sort of a parallel source of information mentioned. Now later on, none of these others that are mentioned are known to us today.

They're all gone now, but I've given you a long list. There's a book mentioned in 1 Kings 11 called the book of the Acts of Solomon. That is referred to by the author of Kings as, you know, there's more on this subject from this book, if you want to look it up kind of stuff.

But we don't have those books, so we can't look it up. So the biblical books we have are the only sources we have for this information. But there's mention of the book of the Acts of Solomon, the book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel, the book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah, the book of the Kings of Israel, the account of the Chronicles of the King David, the book of Samuel the seer, the book of Nathan the prophet, the book of Gad the seer, the prophecy of Ahijah the Shilonite, visions of Edo the seer, the book of Shemaiah the prophet and of Edo the seer, the annals of the prophet Edo, the book of the kings of Judah and Israel, the book of Jehu the son of Hemani, the annals of the book of the kings, the book of the kings of Israel and Judah, the saints of Hosei, in the Septuagint it's called the saints of the seers, the laments, the book of the Chronicles, the book of the records of the Chronicles, the book of Chronicles of Kings of Media and Persia.

Now I've given you references for all those, I'm sure you don't need to look those up, they're all just places where the author of a biblical book says, you can get more on this subject from such and such a book, which obviously was an available book at the time, but isn't now. It's just interesting because if you say, well how did these people get their information? Apparently, I mean we believe the biblical books were inspired of course, but to say they were inspired doesn't mean they went into a trance and there was automatic writing going on. I mean the inspired writers also had to learn to speak Hebrew the way anyone else does, had to write and had to think and had to research, I mean they had to check their facts like anyone else.

God, we believe, directed them in their writing, but not in such a way that they didn't have other sources they consulted and so forth. We can see that. I mean Luke's a good example of that.

Luke begins his gospel by saying that many before him had endeavored to lay out the same material he's writing. He said, I've had comprehensive information about this from the beginning and I've decided to write an orderly account of it. He obviously says that he's seen other written material, he's done research, he's talked to the eyewitnesses he said.

So, even though a book is a biblical book, it doesn't mean that the authors didn't have any sources of information, especially historical information. They didn't just get it in a vision or something, you know, something about what happened in the past. Even the book of Genesis, which is written by Moses, we believe, or at least it's part of the Mosaic, you know, library.

It tells history that was before Moses was born, hundreds of years before Moses was born, thousands even. And yet, there's evidence within the book of Genesis that Moses was compiling records that earlier family members like Abraham and Jacob and, you know, others in the record had actually, they'd actually preserved their own family stories in writing and they got passed down so Moses combined them into the book of Genesis. But apparently, even they were written from sources because you find in Genesis 11 times, references to the genealogy of or the book of the generations of so and so.

And that each time that appears, that's usually thought by scholars to be a reference to a written document that was passed down from the person's name. And so, Noah and his sons and so forth apparently wrote their own stories. And they were passed down and Moses in his day put them together all together into what we have the book of Genesis.

So, we shouldn't think that because a book is inspired, that means that there was no literary effort or, you know, historiographical discipline involved in the putting together of these books. These people were responsible writers and historians so they used sources. Now, obviously a lot of things in the Old Testament are in our day considered to be historically unreliable.

By unbelievers in general, even by what we call liberal scholars, which is another name for unbelievers. Well, I mean, I won't say they don't believe in God, but they don't necessarily believe in the supernatural. And that's the problem, you know.

I mean, there are people who are not Christians who don't even believe in God, maybe. And their problem is not even the supernatural element in it. They just think there's old fables.

They just don't think there's anything reliable in the Old Testament. Liberal scholars often believe that the stories in the Old Testament are not reliable either. But in any case, people who say they're not reliable are usually going by essentially prejudice rather than anything like you could prove them wrong.

Archaeologically, all the archaeological finds that have come up have tended to confirm things the Bible has said. Now, the biblical stories can't be confirmed word for word from archaeology very often for the simple reason that they're telling stories about people and events that, you know, there's not monuments that record the promise God made to Abraham, for example. You can't find that etched in stone somewhere because it was never etched in stone.

But archaeologists do find all kinds of monuments and writings that confirm the broad outlines of Old Testament history. And one, I think, could probably conclude that if they could find enough, they could confirm everything in history as it's in the Bible. Because the biblical records, I believe, can be trusted.

One way we can see that is that they're not like ancient hero legends. Every hero in the Old Testament history has his feet of clay. Just like that statue that Nebuchadnezzar saw had feet of iron and clay.

Well, the heroes in the Bible have their feet of clay. They have their warts and all revealed. It's a funny thing because these are really their heroes.

David, hero. Solomon, hero. Hezekiah, he's a hero.

Josiah is a hero to the godly Jews who are recording this. But every one of these guys has something, a major flaw, at least one, recorded against them. And this is not the kind of thing, for example, that pagan historians usually recorded about their rulers and so forth.

In fact, they often could. It would be their life if they recorded them. Sometimes people say, well, how come we don't have any Egyptian records about the exodus of the Hebrews? Well, there's a good reason for that.

That was embarrassing to the pharaoh. The court historians said they're not going to talk about the time when the pharaoh was humiliated by a bunch of slaves and by their god. Pagan historians don't generally record the embarrassing or humiliating or shameful things of their heroes and their leaders.

However, every good guy, it seems like, every good guy in the historical books, his story gets told, but you don't get away from it until you find something wrong with him in there. And you really don't see a lot of embellishment. You see it told like somebody who's just got to tell you the truth about things, even though they'd rather not.

Because everyone would like to conceal their hero's warts, but they don't. I mean, the Bible is true, and so it doesn't hide those things. Bishop Alexander wrote, the Bible does not idealize people or events, but sternly and impartially evaluates everything, including great national heroes, thus helping the reader to learn from both good and bad examples.

It tells us what to do and what to avoid. That is, there are good examples that inspire us to do the right thing, but it also shows us things to avoid. David is an example of that.

Certainly one of the greatest heroes of Old Testament history, and yet some serious problems in his life that need to be avoided. The same writer said, the historical books provide excellent examples of God's providence by showing how he exalts and rewards the righteous for their virtue, has mercy on repentant sinners, while at the same time punishing stubborn sinners as their righteous judge. In biblical description, the individual lives and events, the reader is able to see the qualities of the great God, whose mercy is endless, whose wisdom is incomprehensible, whose power is infinite, and whose righteous judgment is inescapable.

No secular book about history is able to convey such spiritual perspective on events. And that's true. I mentioned apocryphal books of the Old Testament that we don't have in our Bible.

Some of them are historical in nature. For example, the book of 1 Maccabees. 1 Maccabees is a historical book.

It's in the Catholic Bible, and they believe it's a scripture. Protestants usually don't believe that Maccabees is a scripture, but most Protestant scholars agree that it's good history. It tells of a period of history that the scripture doesn't cover.

In the 2nd century BC, there was a revolt on the part of the Jews against their Syrian tyrant, an overlord. It was a guerrilla warfare they waged for three years until they drove the Syrians out. The Syrians had defiled the temple, so the Jews didn't use it for three years.

But at the end of this revolt, which was called the Maccabean Revolt, the Jewish Maccabeans drove out the Syrians and rededicated the temple. Today, the Jews still celebrate that every year. It's called Hanukkah.

In biblical times, they call it the Feast of Dedication, because the Maccabeans drove out the Syrians and rededicated the temple, which had been defiled and had not been in use for three years. So, the Maccabean period was significant. In fact, in John 10, it mentions that one of the stories told about Jesus is that it was the Feast of Dedication, or Hanukkah.

Now, we don't have any reference in our canonical books, in our biblical books, about that revolt, because it happened at a later time, after the Old Testament books really kind of cut off. The history of it is told in the book of 1 Maccabees, and I don't know of any historical scholar that doubts that it happened just about the way it's recorded. I mean, basically, 1 Maccabees is considered to be a reliable historical book.

But why isn't it in our Bible? I mean, we look at 1 Kings. It's a historical book. We consider it reliable.

It's a sacred book about God working with Israel. Why don't we include Maccabees when we include Kings? The reason is, because there's no reason to believe Maccabees was inspired. Probably in this library, if you look around, you can find some historical books about the history of Korea, or the history of the church, or the history of lots of things.

But we don't want to put them in between the leather covers of our Bibles, because they're not inspired. Historians can write good history without being inspired. To be inspired, you have to be a prophet.

And the Maccabean books were written when there were no prophets. God did not send prophets to Israel for most of 400 years, in the period between Malachi and John the Baptist. And that's when the Maccabean Revolt took place.

Since there were no prophets throughout the history, we don't have any inspired books of it. Now, that doesn't mean it's not valuable to read the history. And Martin Luther, who argued for not including the apostle books in the Bible, he did say they are edifying reading, and every Christian should read them for edification.

So, I mean, the books are good, they're just not Bible. The books that are in our Bibles, the historical books, they're not just there because they're good history. They're definitely, like all historical records, they're selective.

No historian can write everything that happened in any given day. The things that are going on all over the place. A historian could never write a comprehensive history.

He has to select what he thinks is important to record. And that's going to be determined partly by what his purpose is in writing. What's he trying to get across? What's he trying to trace? What thread of history is he interested in? Well, every historian makes that decision for himself.

But we believe that the historical books were written by prophets who were inspired by God. And therefore, their selection of material and their ability to bring out the nuances of things are those which God himself led them to do. So we have like an inspired history.

Not that it's more accurate than another history would be that's not inspired. It's just more directed by the Holy Spirit. So that we have the information that we're supposed to have, that the Holy Spirit wants us to learn from.

It says in 2 Timothy 3, verse 16, that all Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for teaching and for reproof and for correction and for instruction in righteousness. So the Scriptures that Paul is talking about are the Old Testament Scriptures. They are inspired and they are there for our instruction and for our learning about righteousness and for our correction, he says.

So that's what we have in these books. Now, who wrote these books? In some cases, we're not sure. But there's good reason to believe they were written by prophets.

And as we look at each of these books, we'll say why. One exception would be possibly the post-exilic books. We're not told that Ezra, Nehemiah, or Esther were prophets.

But they were definitely God's chosen leaders and stood in the role that prophets like Moses and Joshua had been in previously and so their time as their counterparts. And we do know that God was speaking through them and using them and so forth. So we accept the authority of their writings too.

But the books of Kings are thought to have been written by Jeremiah. The books of Samuel, we're not sure who wrote the final form, but it seems to incorporate writings from Samuel, Nathan, and Gad. Samuel certainly didn't write the whole books of Samuel because he dies in 1 Samuel and there's a second Samuel too.

So there's someone else who supplied information. It's not really Samuel who wrote that whole book. But nonetheless, the Jews included these particular historical books because they believed they had prophetic authority.

They came from the prophetic tradition. The Jewish and the prophetic community produced these books. Now, there's been a lot of archaeological confirmation of incidental things in these books.

Like I said, you're never going to find archaeological confirmation of everything that's told. I mean, that Elijah stopped the rain for three and a half years and then prayed and the rain came. You're not going to find any ruins that can confirm that.

In fact, since Elijah probably was the source of that story, the writer probably had exclusive rights to it. There's probably no other historian who even wrote that story that we know of at the time. So we have to just take the Bible itself as the source of information for most of the details.

But it's nice to know that as the Middle East has been dug up by archaeologists for the past 200 years, it's been thoroughly pockmarked by archaeological digs, so they have found lots of things out. At least everything they have found has confirmed rather than disconfirmed something in the Bible. So that Nelson Gleck, the famous Jewish archaeologist, is quoted saying that no archaeological find has ever controverted a biblical reference.

That's a pretty sweeping statement. William Albright, the dean of biblical archaeology of an earlier generation, said that the broad contours of the history of the Old Testament have been confirmed by archaeological discovery. Now this man was not an evangelical Christian and neither was Nelson Gleck.

These are archaeologists who simply are experts in their field and they have mentioned that one writer said, and I don't remember who he was, he was an archaeologist in one of his books, he said more than one archaeologist has had his confidence in the Old Testament text increased by discoveries that he's made in Palestine. Because that just happens all the time. I don't know if this is a true story or not, but when I was in high school, I didn't go to Christian high school, my history tutor was not a Christian, in fact she was kind of anti-Christian, but she mentioned once, and I don't know where she got her information because I've not been able to confirm this anywhere, that one of our great oil families in the United States that made their fortune in oil did so because the founder of the family, or the oil in the family, actually was reading Genesis about the battle of the five kings under Chedulemer in Genesis chapter 14, and he read there that it says that these kings fell into tar pits, and this guy reading the Bible said tar pits where there's tar there's oil.

And so he got the mineral rights to drill there and his family became one of the most wealthy families in the country. I don't know who it was, DuPont or somebody. But anyway, that's not surprising because a lot of times archaeologists have used biblical references just to find things they're looking for.

The Bible says it should be around here, you know. They go look there and find it. So they haven't confirmed everything, they never will, but the archaeological finds in general of course tended to show that the biblical writers were not making up fables.

That's one of the great things about any religion based on the Bible, whether it's Judaism or Christianity, is that it can be checked. At least many parts of it can be checked. How would you want to check historically Hinduism? What's to check? Where are you going to find a blue god walking around the earth named Krishna? I mean, there's no one ever really ever saw him.

There's no interaction between him and anybody. For example, the historical kings of Israel and Judah, their names are found, some of them, in foreign archaeological monuments. Jesus, his story interacts with people like Pilate and Herod who are known historical characters from other sources.

The stories in the Bible are actually set in real historical settings with real known historical people. It sometimes plays a role in the story. Sometimes the people who are known from secular history play the minor role in the biblical story, but they're there.

Other religions don't really connect with history like the Bible does. That's one thing that's going to be the feature of the historical books is they connect with history. I've given you a list of some of the archaeological confirmations that have to do with things we'll read in the historical books.

The Babylonian Chronicle, as it is called, is a collection of clay tablets inscribed with Babylonian cuneiform text telling of events between 615 and 595 BC. They tell of Nebuchadnezzar's conquest of Palestine, which of course is recorded in the Books of Kings, and his receiving of tribute and his capture of Jerusalem and the deportation of King Jehoiachin, who is also known as Jeconiah. That story is found in 2 Kings 24, but the Babylonian Chronicle, which has been discovered, tells that story too and even mentions the deportation of King Jehoiachin.

The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III is a record of military victories of Shalmaneser, who is an Assyrian monarch, from 859 to 829 BC, prepared about 841 BC. It reports his conquering Jehu, king of Israel. It depicts Jehu bringing tribute and kissing Shalmaneser's foot.

That story is found in 2 Kings 17 and 18. The Cylinder of Cyrus is now displayed in the British Museum. This nine-inch cylinder is dated 538 BC.

It reports Cyrus' conquest of Nabonidus, who was the king of Babylon at the time he conquered Babylon, along with Belshazzar, and the capture of Babylon. It also tells how Cyrus returned captives to their homeland, as the Bible says in the book of Ezra. It says, I gathered all their former inhabitants and restored them to their homeland, Cyrus says in this cylinder, which is exactly what Ezra 1-4 has Cyrus saying also.

Hezekiah's Tunnel has been found. You can actually go see this in Israel now. You can actually walk in it.

It's full of water most of the time. It's a 1,748 foot long tunnel. It was constructed in approximately 701 BC, connecting Jerusalem's only fresh water source, the Gilead Spring, outside the city walls to the Siloam Pool inside the city.

Apparently to supply water for the city when it's under siege from outsiders. That tunnel is mentioned in 2 Kings 20 and 2 Chronicles 32-33. The Moabite Stone, or Moabite Stele, measures 2 by 3 feet, shaped like a tombstone.

This monument memorializes the military achievements of King Misha of Moab. Misha's revolt against Israel and Omri the King of Israel are named in it. That revolt of Misha of Moab and his relations with the Israelite nation are found in 1 Kings 16.

And 2 Kings 1-3. Sennacherib's Prism. This is a six-sided clay prism.

It records Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem. Sennacherib was the Assyrian who tried to conquer Jerusalem. Actually, the way the story is told in the Bible, he had his troops surrounding Jerusalem, and Jerusalem had no possibility of resisting except that Hezekiah the king went into the temple and prayed, and God sent deliverance.

The deliverance came in the form of an angel of the Lord went out and flew 185,000 Assyrians as they slept. That's not very fair. Tell them while they're asleep.

Of course, angels outnumbered. 185,000 of them died in one night at the hand of an angel. And of course, the next morning, the few survivors that woke up decided it was not a good city to siege.

And they ceased to. Actually, the historian Herodotus talked about this story, that he says that mice ate the bowstrings of the Assyrians and caused them to leave. Thank you.

C.S. Lewis talks about this when he's talking about people's prejudice against the supernatural in the Bible. He talks about how he says that the book of Kings says that an angel killed the Assyrians, and Herodotus, the Greek historian, says that mice ate their bowstrings. He says the more intelligent man could be on the side of the Bible on that.

So the angels. Anyway, Sennacherib is the king who did that, who was besieging Jerusalem. It says that Sennacherib's prism has a record of his siege of Jerusalem, his conquest of 46 towns and villages of Judah, which are mentioned in 2 Kings 18-13.

It says that Sennacherib shut up Hezekiah like a caged bird in Jerusalem, which is pretty much agreeable with what it says in 2 Kings 19. Then we have Shishak's inscription. Inscribed on the wall of the courtyard of the temple in Thebes, this inscription lists a number of towns that Shishak conquered in Palestine.

Shishak ruled Egypt from about 945 to 924 B.C. The scripture tells of his invasion of Judah in Rehoboam's time, that's Solomon's son, so it goes way back. It shows that the record of this in 1 Kings 14-25, paralleled in Chronicles, has documentation that this invasion happened. Of course, these are not the main stories in some cases of the Old Testament, but they're incidental.

It shows that the Bible can be trusted even in its incidentals in many cases. It's like the discovery of the bricks in Pithom, where in Egypt, when the Jews were slaves in Egypt, they built cities for Pharaoh. In Exodus chapter 1 it says they built Ramesses in Pithom.

You might remember the story, how originally as slaves they were provided straw to make their mud bricks with, but when Pharaoh got upset with them for talking about freedom and worshipping God, he took away the straw that was provided, and said you need to make the same number of bricks. The Bible says they went out and plucked up grass and everything to use for straw, but they couldn't keep up with it. When Pithom, the city, was excavated, they found that the lower courses of the bricks all had finely cut straw in them.

The higher course of the bricks, higher on the wall, had grass pulled up by the roots, and the top bricks didn't have any straw or grass in them at all. Now what's interesting is that's just kind of an incidental point in Exodus. It's not the main point of the story at any point.

But even in the details, the Bible is correct, and we get those confirmations sort of like this. The Tel Dan Stele, this stele fragment is associated with King Hazel of Syria, mentioned in 2 Kings 8. In the late 8th century BC, it's about 12 inches tall, it contains a reference to the house or dynasty of David. Very important, because scholars, critical scholars, have often said David never existed.

They say David's more like a folk hero, sort of like a Gilgamesh type. You know, his story's too good to be true. For a long time they had a hard time confirming that David ever existed and so forth.

And here they find a piece of rock from Syria that mentions the house of David. And this goes back to the late 8th century BC. Still a couple centuries after David's time, but nonetheless, an early witness.

The Warren Shaft is a passageway from the Gion Spring, apparently to bring water inside the city walls when the Jebusites conquered or occupied Jerusalem. The shaft is probably the access route used by David's men, led by Joab, to invade and conquer Jerusalem. Mentioned in 2 Samuel 5. Now this shaft is an access shaft into Jerusalem.

When we get to the story of David's conquest of Jerusalem, he promised a reward to whoever of his people would conquer the city for him. And Joab led a group of men and they basically apprehended a Jebusite, one of the people who lived there, under threat of torture no doubt, that caused him to reveal that there was a water tunnel that they could get in. And they went up through this shaft to conquer Jerusalem.

That shaft has been discovered. So, unlike the pagan religions, which are built upon mythologies, the religion of Yahweh is built upon concrete historical figures and occurrences which interlink and interact with other known historical entities, persons and events. This is also the case with Christianity.

Both Judaism and Christianity are the faith systems that believe in the actual historical events that prove their authenticity. The historical books of the Old Testament have given testimony of those events. It's almost time to take a break.

Let me just quit with this quote from Thomas Holcomb, who wrote a commentary on the historical books. He said, So, the biblical account is first of all the record of the nation's encounter with God and the response of its people to that encounter. These books are therefore much more than a compilation of historical facts.

They offer inspiration, instruction in the ways of God, lifestyle models to follow and to avoid, extensive moral and spiritual lessons, and faith-building insights into God's faithfulness to his people. So, that's what we can expect to get out of the historical books as we study them. We're not done with our introduction to them, though.

There's another couple of pages of notes here, but we will take a break at this point, and then we'll come back and finish up our introduction to this body of literature.