Sometimes
I wish I’d become an archaeologist. Imagine discovering something like, oh, I
don’t know, Naboth’s vineyard from 1 Kings.
Here at
BreakPoint, we love to tell you about the ways that archaeology is confirming
the biblical narrative, and, judging by the response, you love to hear about
it.
Well, the
latest discovery is one of the coolest yet. It’s possible confirmation of one
of the most memorable stories in the Bible: Ahab and Naboth’s vineyard.
First
Kings 21 tells the story of Naboth the Jezreelite who had the misfortune to own
a vineyard near king Ahab’s palace.
Ahab
coveted Naboth’s vineyard and offered to either buy it outright or exchange it
for what he deemed a “better vineyard.” When Naboth, in keeping with the Law of
Moses, refused, Ahab sulked, “lay down on his bed and turned away his face and
would eat no food.” You gotta chuckle at Ahab’s reaction. My goodness.
At any
rate, his Phoenician wife, Jezebel, then hatches a successful plot to kill
Naboth and seize his land. But their triumph is short-lived: Elijah pronounces
God’s judgment on them and their dynasty, which will end in a gruesome fashion.
Since
2012, a team led by Norma Franklin of the University of Haifa and Jennie
Ebeling of the University of Evansville in Indiana have led an excavation in
the Jezreel Valley, which lies south of our Lord’s native south Galilee.
It’s a region that figures prominently in the Bible, especially the Old Testament. It’s where Gideon defeated the Midianites and the Amalekites in the book of Judges. It’s where Meggido, from which we get the word “Armageddon,” is located.
And it’s
the site of the vineyard Ahab coveted.
Five
years ago, Franklin and her colleagues, using what’s known as “LiDAR,” a
surveying “method that measures distance to a target by illuminating that
target with a pulsed laser light,” discovered “several features that had
remained hidden for centuries.” These features suggested the presence of an
“early winery installation.”
Excavation
revealed “several wine and olive presses, including the largest ancient
winepress in Israel found to date.” They also found “over 100 bottle-shaped
pits carved into the bedrock,” which Dr. Franklin theorizes were used to store
wine.
How did
they know where to look in the first place? Well, they used the biblical text
itself. Writing in Biblical Archeology Review, Franklin said that the details
provided in the account of Naboth and the subsequent fall of Ahab’s dynasty at
the hands of Jehu provided “valuable information regarding the vineyard’s
location.”
In fact,
it was the correspondence between the physical evidence and the biblical
account that led Franklin and her colleagues to ask if they found evidence of
Naboth’s vineyard.
Her
answer is a lightly-qualified “yes.” As she told Breaking Israel News, “the
story as described in the Bible quite probably could have occurred here in the
Jezreel.”
Stories
like this should not come as a surprise. A year ago, John Stonestreet told you
about evidence that lent historical credence to the Bible’s account of Jehu and
the fall of Ahab’s dynasty: a toilet used to desecrate what the Bible calls
“the high places.” As 2 Kings 10:27 says, Jehu “demolished the pillar of Baal,
and destroyed the temple of Baal, and made it a latrine to this day.”
As we
never tire of telling you, “the Bible is the best-attested book of antiquity.
Nothing else comes close. That’s as it should be because our faith is firmly
rooted in history, not some “once upon a time.”
And
that’s something we can say with complete certainty.
Source: http://www.breakpoint.org/2017/10/discovering-naboths-vineyard/
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