Image: The Altar of Mount Ebal (Joshua’s Altar) by Hoshvilim. CC BY-SA 4.0.
One of the important things to remember about Biblical archeology is that our modern understanding keeps changing as the earth keeps disgorging materials hidden for millennia, and new technologies allow us better to understand those discoveries. That’s the case with a Bronze Age tablet that reveals something consistent with one of the Bible’s oldest and most consequential narratives.
My father loved Werner Keller’s 1955 book, The Bible as History, about Biblical archeology. Although raised in an Orthodox orphanage (in Weimar and Nazi Berlin!), my father was not religious. He was, however, a historian, so he agreed completely with the last sentence in Keller’s introduction:
In view of the overwhelming mass of authentic and well-attested evidence now available, as I thought of the skeptical criticism which from the eighteenth century onwards would fain have demolished the Bible altogether, there kept hammering in my head this one sentence: “The Bible is right after all.”
Today leftists engage in an all-out war against Jews and Christians who hew to a Biblical narrative demanding morality, justice, and grace. Leftism’s belief system is premised on revering the amoral state, with its situational favoritism and police power.
Unfortunately for the leftists, archeology has just scored another one for the Bible’s historic accuracy.
Deuteronomy repeats the instructions that Moses, who was barred from entering the Promised Land, gave to Joshua, his successor. Chapter 11 explicitly states that the instructions are important because following them will bring God’s blessings to the Israelites while failing to do so will lead to God’s curses.
To hammer home the significance of this binary choice, Moses instructed Joshua to write on separate tablets the promise of a blessing and the threat of a curse. Then Joshua was to place the blessing on Mount Gerizim and the curse on Mount Ebal, the gateways from the Sinai to Israel:
26 See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse— 27 the blessing if you obey the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today; 28 the curse if you disobey the commands of the Lord your God and turn from the way that I command you today by following other gods, which you have not known. 29 When the Lord your God has brought you into the land you are entering to possess, you are to proclaim on Mount Gerizim the blessings, and on Mount Ebal the curses. (Deuteronomy Ch. 11.)
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