Science and the Historicity of the Bible - Sir Colin Humphreys

Let me start by just asking this question, does it matter if the Bible is reliable? And I think it does, because two reasons really. One is that Christianity and also the Jewish faith, they have their roots in history, right? We don't believe some vague, airy-fairy set of beliefs. Our beliefs are rooted in history. And that's why the Bible matters, because the Bible tells us, or purports to tell us, about the history of Israel and then the history of Jesus. Some people call it his story that the Bible talks about. But many people, of course, are very skeptical of what the Bible says, and so we need to ask this question, is the Old Testament purely fiction, which a number of people believe, or is it a fictional matrix with a bit of history embedded in, or is it a major historical content? And clearly, the Old Testament isn't all history. The Book of Psalms isn't all history, although it may contain history. And it's not written like a modern history book. A modern history book tends to have the chronology there, and then the history's built around that. But the Old Testament contains, if we read the Old Testament, a lot of history. And the question is, is this reliable history? Is it a record reliable? And of course, the person who we believe, if we're Christians, has revealed God to us the most is Jesus, this is the greatest revelation of God to us. But nearly all we know about Jesus is from the Bible. And so again, is the Bible record reliable? So these are questions which Christians should ask, and of course, non-Christians should ask as well. They're key questions for our faith. So I've looked at a number of books on the reliability of the Bible, and most of them, they're largely personal convictions which are fine for Christians, but perhaps not quite so fine for non-Christians. So for example, you read books on the reliability of the Bible, and you read, why should we trust the Old Testament? And the answer usually given is because Jesus quoted extensively from the Old Testament, as he did, and Jesus quotes with authority, and so Jesus clearly believed this to be the word of God, and therefore, we should believe it to be the word of God. And of course, for Christians, that's a good argument. But for non-Christians, it probably isn't a good argument. And so what I try to do is to look at the evidence, and particularly if there's any scientific evidence we can bring to bear, because theologians are often not aware of the scientific evidence, so if we try and bring that in as well. And what I decided to do is something maybe a bit different. I'm going to look at three case studies, and I picked them out to be, I think, particularly challenging, and that's why I personally have had an interest in them. And so we're going to look at the story of Joseph in the book of Genesis, and see if that seems to be reliable. And then I want to look at the crossing of the River Jordan, and see if that seems to be historically reliable. I'm going to look at this remarkable and puzzling passage in the book of Joshua, that Joshua prayed for the sun to stand still, and the sun stood still, so the Israelites could beat their enemies, and also the day was extended, so it'd give them enough time to beat their enemies. So we'll have a look at that. Things I'm not going to talk about, the Star of Bethlehem, because there just isn't time, but I have published on this, and about the Gospels, I'm also not going to talk about that, because again, that would just take too long. There's not time to fit that into the time available. I have looked at apparent discrepancies in the four Gospels about the last week of Jesus, and given possible solutions to these apparent discrepancies, and I wrote some book on that called The Mystery of the Last Supper. So what I want to do is to just look at these Old Testament challenges, and as we'll see, many modern scholars, they really question their historicity, and in fact, many modern scholars, they're much more willing to believe ancient Egyptian literature, or ancient Babylonian literature, than they are ancient Biblical literature, so we'll have a look at that. So to start, this is the story of Joseph, and it's really, when I wrote this talk just very recently, I was amazed to see myself how much of Genesis, the story of Joseph, occupies, right? Chapters 30 to 50, 40% of the book of Genesis, and I've just put up here on this slide just a few details. There are many, many more. It's a very, very detailed story, so let's have a look at it, and let's see why historians and Biblical scholars question it. So Joseph, you may remember, he was Jacob's favorite son, and he wasn't the firstborn, so this is highly unusual. In the ancient world, not only ancient Israel, also Egypt, ancient Babylon, the firstborn son was always a favorite, so this is really unusual. He wasn't a favorite. He was born late in life to Joseph, and you may know that there was this famous coat of many colors, and probably not a brilliant translation, but he had this very ornamental coat, which was probably very rare and very valuable, and his brothers were very jealous of him because of the favoritism his father showed him, and so when they got the opportunity, they sold him for a slave, and they sold him for 20 shekels of silver is what the Book of Genesis says, and then he was taken to Egypt, and he was sold to an Egyptian official called Potiphar, and he was obviously a very handsome, well, I say obviously, probably a very handsome man, a young man, a strong man, and his wife, this is Potiphar's wife, tried to seduce Joseph, and Joseph said, no, you're a married woman. I'm not gonna be seduced by you, and she tried several times, and then she got extremely annoyed that he rejected her advances, and so she said to her husband and others, Joseph has tried to seduce me, and so Joseph was unjustly thrown into jail is what the story says, and when he was in jail, he met the cup bearer of Pharaoh, and the cup bearer of Pharaoh had been put in jail by Pharaoh for doing something wrong, and the cup bearer had a dream, a very unusual dream, and he said to Joseph, I had this unusual dream. I've got no idea what it means, and Joseph interpreted the dream for him, so the cup bearer was very impressed, and then the cup bearer was released. He went back to the Pharaoh, and Pharaoh had this unusual dream, and it's something, a story some of you will know, that he dreamt that out of the Nile came seven cows, and they were very sleek cows. They were very fit, very well-fed cows, and they were followed by seven scraggy, scrawny, lean cows, and the lean cows ate these very well-nourished other seven cows, and Pharaoh asked all the wise men in Egypt to interpret this dream, and he wasn't happy with any of the interpretations, and the cup bearer then said to Pharaoh, I now remember when I was in jail, I met someone called Joseph, and he interpreted my dream. Why don't you ask Joseph to interpret your dream? So Pharaoh gets Joseph out of jail, tells him this dream, and Joseph interprets it, and he says this dream means that you'll have seven years of magnificent harvest followed by seven years of famine, and Pharaoh says, well, that's terrible. If there's seven years of famine, no one's going to survive. Lots of people are going to die. What shall we do? And Joseph says to Pharaoh, what you need to do is to, when you have the seven years of plenty, build big barns and store all this grain in it so that you're prepared for the seven years of famine, so you stock seven years worth of grain for when the famine comes, and Pharaoh is convinced this is the right interpretation. He's so impressed, he makes Joseph his second-in-command, and Joseph then does exactly this, and the story continues. It's a very, very detailed story. Now, what do we make of this story? Well, these are two very distinguished historians and biblical scholars. This is Redford, who says that Joseph's story shows all the hallmarks of a composition that's a construction, if you like, a story, a sort of fairy story, rather than a record. That's in his book, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times, and Ahlstrom says that Joseph's story is not history, just as, for instance, Shakespeare wrote about Richard III, a biblical writer, composed a story about Joseph and his brothers in Egypt. So it's a composition. It's like Shakespeare writing about Richard III, and this is just widely believed by a lot of biblical scholars, and certainly people who are historians and not Christians. So why do they think it's a myth? Well, there are good reasons for thinking this, and the first reason is it's inconceivable. If you know about ancient Egypt, the pharaohs were all-powerful, and it seems inconceivable an Egyptian pharaoh would appoint a non-Egyptian as their second-in-command, so that's the first reason, which appears to be a good reason, and then the next reason is it's believed the story, widely believed the story's written at least 1,000 years after the supposed events, so someone writing 1,000 years later, can they really get the story right? There's no internet, right? No typewriters for these sort of records. Can they really get the details of these stories correct, or even the main points? So can it be accurate after 1,000 years? And then the third reason for not believing it is that a seven-year famine in Egypt is highly improbable, and the reason for this is that Egypt owns its wealth to the regular flooding of the River Nile, and the Nile would flood year after year after year, and occasionally, it wouldn't flood to the same level, and in fact, the priests of the temple, they were wonderful tax gatherers. They had something called nihilometers. You can go to Egypt, it seems today, and they taxed according to the level of the River Nile, so we have some records over some periods of time, and they collected taxes, and about one year in 10, the Nile didn't flood properly, and that seems to have been a sort of random event when the snow wasn't very great on the mountains at the source of the Nile, so the chances of two consecutive years of there being the Nile not flooding was about one in 100, three consecutive years, one in 1,000, so seven years about famine, extremely improbable, so these are good reasons, which we need to take into account, and I just put up here, if you look at what many evangelical Christians do, and many evangelical Christians are in this room, they tend to ignore these criticisms, and I think that's probably the wrong approach, and I think you should look at these criticisms and take them seriously and engage with them, so that's what we're gonna try to do with this, and let's see if science can help, so I got quite interested in this a number of years ago, and a key question, of course, is if Joseph was a historical character, when did he live? And we wrote a paper on this, I wrote with someone called Bob White, who's very involved with Christians in science, and it was published in a geology paper as well as Science and Christian Belief, and so we supported this argument to start with, that a seven-year famine in Egypt was highly unlikely because of the regularity of the flooding of the River Nile, so if we discount that, then how can we account for a seven-year famine? And we could only think of one reason for a famine of that duration, and it's interesting that the Bible says it wasn't just in Egypt, this famine, it was in the neighboring lands, so the reason we could think of was a massive volcanic eruption, and what happens in a massive volcanic eruption is that the temperature's lowered, that there's dust in the sky, the sun is darkened, so you don't get much sunlight, a lot of acid comes out of the volcano, which comes down as acid rain, and that destroys the seed and so on, and the biggest volcanic eruption, going back for at least 10,000 years, was in 1628 B.C., it's believed to have been Santorini, but that's not totally certain, but we know there's a massive volcanic eruption then because of tree rings, so there's a tree ring record, it's called dendrochronology, so every year you get tree rings, annual rings, and when there's a famine, then the tree rings are exceptionally narrow, and 1628 B.C., the tree rings are exceptionally narrow, and in fact, we know this is a massive volcanic eruption because they are actually narrow for about seven years in the tree ring record, and then you can look at ice records, so you take cores through ice in Greenland, and you see these sulfur deposits, which come from the volcanic eruption, and this date of 1628, it's an accurate date to within a year because you can count back the annual tree rings, and we know that the volcanic ash from this eruption fell on Egypt because we've got traces of the volcanic ash that people have found, so very tentatively, so this is very tentative, and you build the story up, very tentatively, we say, what happens if this seven-year famine was due to this volcanic eruption, which we know was in 1628 B.C.? What is interesting is, in 1628 B.C., there were pharaohs in Egypt, which were foreign pharaohs, it was conquered by a foreign country, and it was called the Hyksos Kings, there were six of them, and they reigned from about, it's on the board here on the screen, 1648 to 1540 B.C., and they were hated afterwards by the Egyptians who, the Egyptians conquered them afterwards, they destroyed all their records, but we know those were the Hyksos Kings, and what we can say is, although it's extremely unlikely that an Egyptian pharaoh would appoint Joseph as a deputy, it is rather likely that a Hyksos King, who was not an Egyptian, would appoint a non-Egyptian as their deputy. So we can see that the timing of the, this particular timing of this period of history where the Hyksos, these foreign kings were ruling Egypt, fits very nicely into Joseph's story. Now I should also say, if you look at the biblical record of dates, this date of 1628 B.C. for Joseph is an extremely plausible date. So these are the foreign kings, which we've just said, and it's really, it's totally plausible that this foreign Hyksos pharaoh would have appointed Joseph his deputy. And now I think we come to, let's just have a look to start with, dating the Genesis text, let's take on this argument about, you know, written about 1,000 years after the event. So one point is, how do we date the text in Genesis, or any ancient text? And the first thing is, it is extremely difficult. And one thing you do is to look at the language in the text, because language develops over time, and you compare it with other texts that you can date. And the problem is, there are extremely few other Hebrew texts outside the Old Testament at that sort of date, so it is very difficult. But there's various scholars. Alan Millard is a scholar I've got huge confidence in. He was professor of Hebrew and Ancient Semitic Languages at University of Liverpool. He dates the Hebrew of the Genesis text to between 700 and 600 B.C. So it is about, that Hebrew is about 1,000 years after the events we're talking about. Other people date it later than that. We know that the Hebrew text, the whole Hebrew text, must have been there by the third century B.C., because Hebrew scholars, Jewish scholars in Alexandria translated the Greek Bible into the, translated the Hebrew Bible into the Greek Bible, called the Septuagint, at that time. But then a lot of those Hebrew manuscripts have subsequently been lost. But then we know they must have existed at that time. So this is the problem. If Joseph was alive in 1628 B.C., and the text of Genesis, I'll say 600 B.C., that's 1,000 years gap after the events recorded. But what we've done in this process, we've dated the language of the earliest Hebrew Genesis text we have, but that doesn't mean that's when they were written. And why it doesn't mean that's when they were written is that there were scribes who were trained to copy and reproduce things really accurately over time. And all they would do, they would update the language. So it's rather like modern Bibles. Modern Bibles, the translation of the Bible in 100 years time will use the English in 100 years time. And so, and scribes would translate faithfully, but update the grammar so people would understand it. And so, if we have something that we find and the language is, say, 600 B.C., that means that was the last updating of the scribes. But it could have been considerably earlier the original text. And so, and you'll know that traditionally Moses is one of the authors of the first five books of the Bible. And I don't see any reason to doubt that he was an author. There may well have been other authors as well contributing, but I don't see any reason to doubt that. And I've just quoted here from what Kenneth Kitchen says in his book called On the Reliability of the Old Testament. And he says, consider Moses writing a papyrus on skins, et cetera. Copies of originals would have been recopied, modernizing outdated grammatical forms and spellings, a process universal in the ancient Near East. So not just Hebrew documents, Jewish, Egypt documents, Babylonian documents, and so on. And he says, experienced scribes were able to transmit very accurate copies of work for centuries. And so, as I said, the earliest texts of Genesis have a language you can date to, say, 600 B.C. The lost original text may be much older. And I'll just give an example of a book I've got at home. So I have at home a book called William Shakespeare, The Complete Works. And I opened it up, and it says inside, Tudor edition, first published 1951. And so, but we know Shakespeare didn't write it in 1951. And how do we know? Because the language is earlier than 1951, and we know that Shakespeare lived earlier than that. But these were edited at that later date. And how do you find out when Shakespeare wrote them? Well, by trying to compare the language he used with other things, and by dating Shakespeare himself. But you may well be thinking, quite rightly, this is just speculation, that there were earlier texts than 600 B.C. Well, interestingly, I think the next slide will show, it's probably not just speculation. And okay, the next slide doesn't show this. So this slide, the next slide after this one will. This just says, suppose you find a text of Genesis, and an ancient library, and the library was put up there in three B.C. And Hebrew and spelling, you know, you can take it to 700 B.C., but it might have been revised and updated, and it's just standard practice. Now, this is the key thing, and this is the argument, which should be much better known, because it's a very nice argument. It was from Ken Kitchen, who's this great specialist, professor of Egyptology. And what Kenneth Kitchen has shown is that the price of slaves was subject to inflation. Nearly everything is, right? You know the price of a loaf of bread is subject to inflation. You know that butter's going up in price, bread's going up in price. Almost everything is, right? Silicon chips come down in price, a great exception. And in the ancient world, potato chips go up in price, silicon chips come down. In the ancient world, the price of slaves went up over time. And Kenneth Kitchen has shown that not only in the Bible, but also in Egypt and in Babylonia, the price of slaves was actually much the same. And we have a record from these three countries of what it was. And this is the record, which you can find in ancient texts. So in this period, 1700, 1600 B.C., the price was 20 shekels of silver. 1400, 1300 B.C., it was 30 shekels of silver. 700 B.C., 50 shekels of silver. 400 B.C., 100 shekels of silver. So what price is said in the Genesis record? Says Joseph was sold for 20 shekels of silver. So the point is this, if this document was actually written in 700 B.C., then wouldn't they have said he was sold for 50 shekels of silver? How could they have known that it was 20 shekels of silver way back in time? So it's really quite a powerful argument, I think, that the original text or the oral tradition or whatever, which was faithfully transmitted, takes you back to the real price of slaves in 1700 to 1600 B.C., which is when the Hypsos pharaohs were reigning and when there was this massive volcanic eruption, which would have caused a major famine. So I think this is now, the whole story now becomes consistent. And if the story was invented and first written in 700 B.C., then 50 shekels of silver would have been used. So this suggests, I think, the original story really does play back to that date and has been faithfully transmitted by scribes who just updated the language. But again, this really strongly suggests this is a faithful historical record. So this, I think, repeats those main points. Is the story of Joseph historical? Well, we know there was a famine of about seven years from the tree rings. They show that there's this exceptionally narrow tree ring growth for about that period of time in 1628 B.C. And this was a time of the Hypsos pharaohs. Joseph was sold as a slave for 20 shekels of silver. If the story had been invented. So I think that Joseph's story actually shows all the hallmarks of being historical, the original text being copied faithfully by scribes over the centuries, who not only did this with biblical text, but with standard practice throughout the ancient Near East, on Texan, Egypt, and Babylon, and so on. So, and a bit like modern Bible translation. So I think we can say reasonable plausibility, this is a historical document. Right, this is another story. This does appear. Some of you may have heard this before, because you've heard me speak about the Exodus. So this is the second example, crossing the River Jordan. This is the last miracle in the Exodus story when the Israelites go into their promised land of Canaan, recorded in the biblical book of Joshua. And this is what the book of Joshua says. It's a very simple succinct account. Now it's two verses in the book of Joshua. Now the Jordan and flood were doing harvest. And as soon as the feet of the priest touched the water's edge, the water from upstream of the Jordan stopped flowing. It piled up in a heap a great distance away at a town called Adam in the vicinity of Sarasin. While the water flowing down to the Sea of the Araba, that's the Dead Sea, was completely cut off. And the Israelites crossed over opposite Jericho. Now, you can picture the scene. The Israelites are on one side of the River Jordan. The Jordan's not flowing normally because it's in flood. So it's a particular barrier. We'll see a photograph of the Jordan later. You'll just see what a barrier it would have been. And they're on one side of the Jordan. They can see on the other side the land of Canaan, which in modern terms is modern Israel and modern Palestine. Israel plus Palestine is ancient Canaan. And they've waited 40 years, about 40 years, to get to their promised land. And they can see it, but the situation looks hopeless because there's this rushing torrent of water separating them from Canaan. And then suddenly, this river stops flowing. And it's just supposed to be an amazing sight. And the river stops flowing, and so they can cross. And they cross over in triumph. It's like someone has a big tap, and they've just turned the tap off, and the water stops flowing. And so the question is, is this story historical or not? And most people, and again, most biblical scholars, think it's a legend because it seems unbelievable. And again, that's not an unreasonable reaction, right? It really does seem to be an unbelievable story. It seems like a children's story. So some of you may have been to Israel, and you may have seen the River Jordan. And you know it's extremely narrow now. And the reason is that since about 1940, both the state of Israel and the state of Jordan have taken huge amounts of water from the River Jordan for irrigation purposes, and so it's very narrow. And when I saw the River Jordan, I just thought, why didn't they swim across? So a lot of water's been taken for irrigation purposes. But if you go back before 1940, it really was a wide river, and it's particularly wide in spring because the snow on Mount Hermon melts, and that's the source of the Jordan, and the floodwater comes down in a rushing torrent. And this next slide, if the slides are okay, they are okay for this slide. So this is a picture taken in the 19th century of the Jordanian flood. You can just see it's a huge barrier. And there was an expedition, yeah, to the Jordan in the 19th century, and the Jordanian flood was described as being half a mile wide, right? So it's a massive barrier. They couldn't swim across. It was flowing very rapidly. So that's the river that the Israelites crossed. That's the river that stopped flowing. So can it be true? It does sound implausible and implausible. So there's a strange detail of the story, and we have to say to start with, is it historical fiction? It comes across as being, the writer wants to be factual because he identifies very carefully a lot of places. But what did the writer intend? And what did his audience have thought he meant? Now, there's this very curious detail in this account of the crossing of Jordan. And this is a curious detail, that if the story had been invented, I think the writer would have said that the priests came up to the edge of the River Jordan, and as their feet touched the River Jordan, it's the water piled up by their feet. It doesn't say that. It says the water piled up a great distance away. And that's really strange because the writer's saying the miracle didn't happen where they were. It happened somewhere else. It happened a great distance away. And he's paying us then to point out where it was. He said a great distance away at a place called Adam. And in case you don't know where that is, it's in the district of Zarethon. So he really tries to pinpoint where this miracle occurred, but it wasn't where the Israelites were. And again, if this story had been invented and made up, I think the writer almost certainly would have said the miracle happened where the priests were. It would be much more, in a sense, dramatic to have said that. And I think you could say, how did the writer know? Well, I think these people like us, we're inquisitive. And if, let's say, this had happened to us, we marched across, the leader might have said, this is a remarkable event, let's see where it happened. And he would have sent some of his troops to go upstream, said, you know, John and Jones, go upstream and find out what's happened. And then they went upstream, they went to this place called Adam, and they saw where the river had stopped flowing. And that's where they came back and said, it stopped flowing at this place called Adam. And Joshua and Mary said, where's Adam? They said it's in the vicinity of Zarethon. So it all got written down. So the water, the miracle occurred elsewhere. Well, can we find out where this happened now? And can we find out what happened? So, as I've said before, there's a careful attention to the text, to the geography. We're told that the Israelites didn't just cross the Jordan, they crossed the Jordan opposite Jericho. And we're told where the water piled up in a heap at Adam, in the vicinity of Zarethon. We're told all these places are upstream from the Dead Sea. So if you look on a map now, as I have done, I've looked on a number of maps, and you won't find a place called Adam. And in a sense, that's not surprising, because most places which existed 3,000 years ago, either don't exist now at all, or if they do exist, their names have changed. Occasionally, and rarely, the name hasn't changed. So Jericho is called Jericho now, and it was called Jericho 3,000 years ago. But that's an exception. And names keep changing. So you may know in India, a place called Mumbai today was called Bombay some years ago. But even then, you can recognize Mumbai and Bombay have a linguistic similarity. And what sometimes happens is that when ancient Hebrew words change to modern Arabic words, there are certain linguistic rules, probably unwritten rules, which apply. And one rule is that if there's a breathing sound at the beginning of the word, that's dropped, but the consonants are usually retained. And ancient Jewish language was a consonantal language. It did not contain vowels. Only consonants were written. And if you thought of speaking it in your mind, you then inserted vowels in your mind, or if you said it to other people, you inserted vowels. And we're doing the same today with text messages on mobile phones. So if someone writes a text message, they put TXT in the message for text, and you know it should pronounce text, and not tixed or toxed or taxed. And that's what they did then. So they just inserted these vowels in the same sort of way. So where was Adam? Well, Adam would have been written as the Hebrew consonant for D, followed by the Hebrew consonant for M. It actually had this breathing sound in the front of it. And so if we want to look for ancient Adam on a modern map, we should look for a word which has these consonants which have been retained, the D and the M. And there is a place on a modern map, it's on all modern maps, and it's called Darmia, right? So there's a D and the M are retained, and this Arabic ending, Darmia, has been added at the end. And it's 70 miles north of Jericho on the River Jordan. And I put here, most scholars are agreed that ancient Adam is modern Darmia. And I haven't found a scholar who isn't agreed to this, so I think it is generally agreed by scholars. And this shows you a map of the situation. So it's a simplified map. So on the left-hand side is the Mediterranean Sea. And yes, it is your left, right? The Mediterranean Sea. And then you can see the Sea of Galilee at the top, and then the River Jordan comes down, and this is the Dead Sea at the bottom. And then you can see Jerusalem marked, and they crossed the River Jordan opposite Jericho. Jerusalem's marked, and Jericho's marked, crossed opposite Jericho. And upstream, you can see where modern Darmia is, and that was ancient Adam. So the geography fits very nicely what the Book of Joshua's described. And then this is where the science comes in. So this is where science can be really helpful in helping biblical interpretation in some cases. So this was a record of July 11th, 1927. There was an earthquake which shook Jericho, and buildings collapsed, and walls fell. And this was detected around the world, and it was 6.5 on the Richter scale. And just by comparison, there was this earthquake, many of you will remember, the Dreadful Earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2011, and that was 6.5 on the Richter scale. Yeah, and the earthquake in New Zealand was 6.3 on the Richter scale. So it's a very, it's a logarithmic scale, but it's a very similar magnitude earthquake. And why does it occur in Jericho? And it occurred because of slippage along what's called the Jericho Fault. So if you go back to the map, there are tectonic plates. So geology is very interesting in this whole region. There's a tectonic plate on the right-hand side of the River Jordan, there's a tectonic plate on the left-hand side of the River Jordan, and these two plates are rubbing together, and it's a complex motion, they're actually pulling apart, and also shearing up and down as well. And this gives rise to what's called the Great Rift Valley, which you can see from space. So this starts, I think, in Lebanon, it comes down through the Sea of Galilee, goes along the Jordan, through the Dead Sea, it then goes down the Gulf of Aqaba into the Red Sea, and then turns around into Ethiopia. And so that's where you get lots of earthquakes recorded in the Bible, because this whole region around Jerusalem is an earthquake-rich zone. So this was a clue of the earthquakes, and this happened in July the 11th, 1927. And this is what Professor Nuer, who's an expert in the geography of this region and the geology, he works at Stanford University, I wrote him a letter, he wrote to me, I said, can I quote your letter? He said, yes, you can. So this is what he wrote, he wrote, during the 1927 earthquake, several ground cracks appeared together with an outpouring of groundwater. This soil liquefaction phenomenon has been well-observed in earthquakes elsewhere. During the earthquake, mudslides occurred along the Jordan near Darmier, about 30 kilometers, that's 18 miles, north of Jericho. These temporarily stopped the river's flow. So in this earthquake, mudslides occurred at Darmier, which we know is ancient Adam, and they temporarily stopped the river's flow. The river had to build up behind the mudslide and either come over it or go around it, and that typically would take one to two days. And this is a photograph, not of the 1927 event, which stopped the river Jordan, this was a later event in 1957, which didn't stop the Jordan, but it almost did. You can see, Jordan's not very wide, because water's been taken by Israel and Jordan, but you can see the earthquake-induced mudslide and the river Jordan has just flowed around it. But you can well imagine a bigger earthquake-induced mudslide would have stopped the river Jordan totally. And then, Professor Newell wrote to me that this happened before 1927 on a number of occasions. He writes, Adam is now Darmier, the site of the 1927 mudslides which cut off the flow of the Jordan. Such cutoffs, lasting typically one to two days, having also been recorded in 1906, 1834, 1546, 1534, 1267, and 1160. Then he says, the stoppage of the Jordan is so typical of earthquakes in this region that little doubt should be left of the reality of such events in Joshua's time. So, is this crossing of the Jordan, is it historical? And what we've shown is that this story of the river Jordan stopping and then starting again some hours later, maybe a day later, it's far from being impossible because it's actually occurred. It's occurred a number of times in history. And we now know it's due to an earthquake, indeed mudslide in the region. So, it is consistent with the book of Joshua saying the water piled up in a heap. It would have piled up in a heap behind this mudslide until it could get over the top. And the location of the heap of water is not nearby, as we've said, but the Bible says it was at Adam and we know that that's where this earthquake and these mudslides had occurred in recent times on a number of occasions. So, there's a lot of evidence to say the story is historical. And just before I finish that part of the story, I'd like to say, some people say that in giving this explanation, I'm explaining away or people believe I'm explaining away a miracle. And I'd like to say very strongly that that is not the case. The fact that you can explain how a miracle happened does not mean you explained it away. What you're saying is that God acted with and through the nature he created and that's one way God can perform miracles and it may be the normal way God performs miracles. He can, of course, break his own rules because a composer's free to break his own key signature in a piece of music. But, and God sometimes, I believe, does that. But on these occasions, he's not breaking his own rules. The miracle is that it happened at just the time the Israelites were there. If it had happened a month before or a month after, it would not have been recorded in the book of Joshua. Wouldn't be recorded anywhere, I think. So this is a miracle, it's a miracle of timing and it's a great lesson we can learn, I think, all of us, that God often works by timing. I think he works often by timing today. And you can ask, how did he achieve this miracle of timing? Maybe one way was that Joshua was so attuned to the mind of God. So maybe as Joshua was leading the Israelites, God was saying to him, hurry up a bit, Joshua. Or, you know, slow down a bit. And maybe that's how the timing was achieved. But Joshua, I think, was an agent of God in this. And I think that is a story that we can learn from today that if our minds are attuned to the mind of God, then we can be involved in these miracles of timing and be agents in these miracles of timing. Come to the last. It's interesting. There are some words missing from this. I'll check afterwards what's happened. But that just should say, did the sun stand still? This is what this should say. And this is sometimes, this event, and it's sometimes been called the most puzzling event in the Old Testament. And it's this passage in the book of Joshua which seems to say that the sun stood still and it's sometimes called the long day of Joshua. What the book of Joshua says is that Joshua prayed to God that the sun would stand still and that the moon would stop. And then later on, a few verses below that, it says that the sun did indeed stand still and the moon stopped until the Israelites could take vengeance on their enemies. So that's popped up there. And then the writer says there has been no day like it before or since. So nearly everyone, including quite evangelical biblical scholars, find this very hard to believe. And so you get a variety of explanations for this. But people say it stretches credibility to the limit. And I think if you read the text, it doesn't. And we'll see why in a moment. But if it is historical, then what the writer is saying is something very special happened in the sky because there has been no day like it before or since. And this was okay, written in the culture of the time, so we can say in his experience, there's been no day like it before or since. But that's a very important thing to say. Something really dramatic seems to have happened. I sometimes give talks on science religions and about one in three of these talks, people say to me, what's happened when the sun stood still? And I've always said, look, I'm sorry, I really don't know, but I'll think about it. And then I decided to think about it just earlier this year, again. And I decided to go back to what the Hebrew actually said, which, of course, is always a very good thing to do. And so the Hebrew for the sun standing still was a Hebrew word called dom, right? And this Hebrew word called dom, it actually is translated a number of ways in the Bible. It's sometimes translated as silent, it's sometimes translated as stood still, it's sometimes translated as stopped. And you have to say, what is meant if the sun was silent? Because if it's a cuckoo bird that's silent, it stops singing, right? It stops doing what it normally does. If the sun's silent, the sun doesn't normally make a noise, but what does the sun normally do? It shines. So if the sun's silent, does that mean the sun stops shining? And then you immediately think of an eclipse. And then I suggested this to Alan Millard, so I went back to Alan Millard, and I said, Alan, there's a possible interpretation of these words in Joshua that the sun stopped doing what it normally does, and it might have been an eclipse. And those of us who are scientists in the audience will know that we have many good ideas, and we find out that someone's thought of them before. So Alan Millard said to me, he said, what you say is perfectly fine from the Hebrew. He said it could mean that the sun didn't stop moving, it stopped shining. So that's a totally valid interpretation of Hebrew, but someone suggested this 100 years ago, and it's not a new thought, and that this person was a linguist who worked at Princeton University, and he actually went further than this, and what he said was actually very interesting. This linguist at Princeton University, he said this word dom, which is translated stood still in the Hebrew, or stopped, has the same root, again, the syllables, the consonants, as a Babylonian word, which is used in cuneiform texts to describe the astronomical event called eclipses. So this same root, the same word, same root in Babylonian terms is used to describe solar eclipses, and this scholar who is Robert Wilson in Princeton, he said it's a poor translation. It's a valid translation, this translation, but he said a better translation in light of the Babylonian is to say the sun was eclipsed. All English translation, the authorized version started by saying that the sun stood still, and all modern translations afforded it, the whole lot, I've looked at about 20, so they all say. Okay, let's look at the scientific problems first, right? So if we believe in an all-powerful God, then, and Christians here will believe in that, then we believe that God can do anything, and that is important, but it's equally important, I think, to say the key question is what could God do? It's what God did do, right? It's a key question to ask, and so let's try and look at that to see what God did, and so if you're a scientist, and even if you're not a scientist, what do you actually mean by saying the sun stopped moving? So we see the sun going around the Earth, right? It actually goes around once every 24 hours, that's what we see, but actually what's happening is the sun's up there, and the Earth is rotating on its axis, right, once every 24 hours, and okay, and then a person on the equator, you can do the sums, person on the equator, there's a sun going around, if you're on the equator, he's actually going around at 1,000 miles an hour. Now he doesn't recognize this because the ground underneath him's going around at 1,000 miles an hour, and so everything's fine. Now we're not on the equator, we're a bit off the equator, and we're actually going around at 500 miles an hour, which is a remarkable thought because the ground underneath you's going around 500 miles an hour, and so you're static with regard to the ground underneath. So that's what happens, but if the Earth stops, then what happens then, we fly forward at 500 miles an hour, and it's like being, let's say you're on the roof rack of a car, and the car, okay, you're not usually on the roof rack of a car, but you're on top of a car, going along, you're holding on, and the car suddenly stops, you're thrown forward with the velocity that you had, the velocity of the car, and so we'd be thrown off at 500 miles an hour, and not only that, there'd be huge tsunamis worldwide, right, that the sea wouldn't stop moving because it can move, and so there'd be huge destruction of life, and that's never seen before, actually, and so you might expect there to be some other records of this, and some scientific evidence of this, and there is none, right, so this interpretation, scientifically, is extremely unlikely, and so that's why you say, can science help us out on this, and as we've seen, this is probably a poor biblical translation, which has happened ever since the authorized version, and if you then have an eclipse idea, yes, no destruction, no evidence of this. So this is what I've just been saying. Dawn means to be silenced, somewhat, dumb or still. If the sun is silent, it means it stops emitting. This other word used, amad, also means to stop. I asked Alan Millard, I've said all this before, right, so don't have to repeat it, and then this is what Robert Wilson said, and he said that the sun's still should be translated as the sun was eclipsed. So 100 years ago, someone followed up Robert Wilson's paper, and they said, it's a pity, but we can't do the calculations, we can't, you know, this event, whenever this happens, the 4,000 BC, 1,000 BC, and we can't do these calculations. So nothing happened, and so, okay, so the next thing to say is, where were Joshua and the Israelites when they observed this eclipse, and this eclipse, the sun stopping shining, the sun stopping, this occurred shortly after the Israelites had crossed the Jordan, and they had defeated Jericho, and again, I inquired Alan Millard, and he said it's almost certain in the same year, that's what the biblical record suggests, that they crossed the Jordan in the spring, when it was in flood, and this was probably in the autumn, that sort of time in the same year. So they were in Canaan when this happened, and fortunately, which is always nice to have independent evidence, we have independent evidence that the Israelites were in Canaan. This is sometimes called the Israelite stela, but officially, it's the Manetta stela. The Manetta was the son of Ramesses the Great, who was a famous pharaoh, Ramesses II of Egypt, he was his son, and there's a large great block which is called the Manetta stela, which is now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and the stela says it was carved in his fifth year, and he gives a list of the people he conquered in his first five years, it's like a praise to the great pharaoh Manetta, and in it, he said, he had a campaign in Canaan, in which he conquered the people of Israel. And it's quite interesting, the words he's used are quite precise in Egyptian terms, he doesn't say the state of Israel, because it wasn't yet established, he says the people of Israel. So they were still, you know, bit nomadic, and going around Canaan, but this is clear Egyptian evidence that they were in Canaan when he defeated them. So this shows that they must have been in Canaan by the fifth year of Manetta. So when was the fifth year of Manetta? Hopefully the next slide will show this right. So this is a quite recent scientific evidence that radiocarbon dating has been used to date the pharaohs in this Dynasty 19, which includes Remnus II and Manetta, and the radiocarbon dating shows with a 95% probability, it's a high probability, that the first year of his reign was the earliest possible date is 1231 BC, the latest possible date is 1207 BC. So if he defeated the Israelites in his first five years, then you can see, you add on five years to this period, this is the sort of period of time we're looking for if there was an eclipse. And so the question is, was there a solar eclipse in this period of time? Now, this should say, okay. Yeah, this should say that, again, because this was suggested by Robert Wilson, it's not my original idea, and someone called Sawyer, in 1972, did eclipse calculations, following up this idea it was an eclipse, and he says there were two solar eclipses. He took a huge period of time, from 1500 BC to 1050 BC, and in that period of time, there were just two solar eclipses, total eclipses, visible from Canaan, and these are the dates he has, 1157 and 1131 BC. But both of these dates are too late for the Israelites to have just entered Canaan. So if we just go back to this slide, this was the first possible year of the reign of Neptune, and if the Israelites were there in his first five years, then these dates are too late for them to enter Israel. And so biblical scholars have said this eclipse interpretation cannot be right, and so it sort of disappeared from their memory. And I then had a thought, well it is a new thought then, and that is, if you go to the ancient world, people didn't distinguish between total eclipses and annular eclipses. So in a total eclipse, the sun is just totally covered by the moon, in an annular eclipse, the moon is also, as it were, totally covering the distance to the sun, but it's slightly closer to the earth, and so it doesn't, slightly further from the earth, and so it doesn't, and you get a little ring called a ring of fire around, it's a very dramatic event. In modern astronomy, we distinguish between total, annular, and partial. In ancient astronomy, they had the same word for total and annular, and partial was a different word. So I thought, let's have a look at annular eclipses, and this should show us, okay, that's okay, that's fine. So this is, there's just one, there's one and one only annular eclipse, which is quite nice, and that is 30th of October, 12,007 B.C., and this shows the eclipse track, and that's the Red Sea coming up from the bottom, and on the left hand, tributary going up to the top, as it were, is the Gulf of Suez, and the one going to the right hand side of it is the Gulf of Aqaba, and then that's, the land of Canaan is above that, and there's a tiny circle, you may be able to see, but that's a place called Azica, where they probably saw this eclipse from, and it's very central to the central track of this eclipse, and that's the only annular eclipse in the dates 1,250 to 1,050 B.C., 1,500, sorry, to 1,050 B.C., and this is what an annular eclipse looks like, so it's very dramatic. This was taken over New Mexico in 2012, and the sky's darkened, and you can see, dusk apparently falls because of the low level of light falling on the situation, so that's what it would have looked like. And then, so what about the long day of Joshua, because it does imply the day was lengthened, the sun did not hurry to set for about a whole day, and I will just point out to you, I'm just looking at my watch, will just point out to you that there's been a myth circulating for a long time, and sometimes people will come up to me, and they'll say, ah, the long day of Joshua was explained, there was a NASA scientist, and the NASA people wound back the calculations, they were trying to calculate four positions of the sun and the moon, they went back in time, and they found they went back to over 1,000 B.C., there was a missing day, and some scientist who knew his Bible, working at NASA said, I can explain this missing day, it's the long day of Joshua, and that was on the internet, very widespread, and it keeps reoccurring, and NASA's issued a statement to say it's totally untrue, so don't believe this error or myth, that I was called Harold Hill. There really was not a missing day, but if we look at this, if we look at the illumination on the ground, so this is a plot of the illumination of the ground, the intensity of light, plotted on a logarithmic scale, because that's how our eye responds to light, and if you plot that as a function of time of the eclipse, the solid curve is the illumination on the ground from the eclipse, and the lighter curve is if there wasn't an eclipse, and what you see is, at maximum time of the eclipse, then the illumination on the ground is actually 10 times less than if the eclipse hadn't have happened, and what's actually happening there, the illumination drops to the level of dusk, so this eclipse happened in the afternoon, and then dusk apparently set in, and we know from other observations that when you have an annular eclipse, or a total eclipse, both are fine for this, dusk apparently sets in, and the birds start to roost, and so out on the battlefield, they would have seen birds starting to roost, it would have appeared like dusk, it would have appeared that the day was ending, and they would have thought, we still haven't defeated our enemies, and then as the eclipse passed, the illumination increased, an extra daylight was provided, and it was as if there was another day, and so I believe that is what Joshua means by saying, if you go back and see what he says, that the sun did not hurry to set for about a whole day, and again Alan Miller said, a better translator says, as on a whole day, it was as if the sun hadn't set, so it was a double dusk, we had two dusks on that day, and I think this is a lamest description of what happened, and I think this explanation fits very well, so long day of Joshua, due to a double dusk day, the first dusk of the maximum of the eclipse, when the illumination on earth fell to dusk, that happened at 4.50 p.m., and then birds would have roosted, and then a light level rose, before there was a normal sunset at 5.38 p.m., so it would appear the day had been lengthened, so the people out on the battlefield, they didn't have watches remember, they looked at things like dusk, and this is just for interest, this is the appearance of the sun, from this place called Asica, where we think they were, at three minute intervals, so you see how the eclipse is at a maximum, roughly in the middle of this picture, and then as the eclipse passes, but just very dramatic observation, and you can well imagine Joshua, these are such, this is the only annual eclipse, in the period 1500 B.C. to 1050 B.C., really rare event, so Joshua saying there's been no day like it, before or since, so this is very recent work, so this was published in an astronomy journal, so it's a journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, I was keen to get the astronomers saying, this was a real eclipse, visible from Canaan, and so that's what they said, and what's very interesting is, I believe it's the oldest datable, solar eclipse recorded, a few people say there are Chinese records before this, but when astronomers look into this, they say they're not eclipse records at all, they just refer to some unusual, on some unusual sunset, or some unusual storm, so, and a great expert on ancient eclipses, called Richard Seaman has said, there is no recorded eclipse before 1000 B.C., so if this is accepted as an eclipse record, it is the oldest recorded solar eclipse, it enables I think to interpret correctly, this Book of Joshua statement, the sun stood still, and what's interesting is, that we can go back, and we can sort of triangulate this information, so we can say that, this occurred when the Israelites entered Canaan, in their first year, so this occurred in 1207 B.C., and that's when they entered Canaan, we can look at the record of Manetta, saying that he conquered them, within his first five years, and Ken Kitchen has analyzed the situation, to say it can't have been as years one or five, so it's years two, three or four, we can use a radiocarbon dating as well, and we can use all those three methods, and I believe that we can identify, the date of the reign of Manetta to within a year, and also his father Ramesses II to within a year, because the dates of their reigns are known, so, instead of doubting the historicity of the Bible on this, we can actually, if we accept the historicity of the Bible on this, we can actually improve the historicity, of Egyptian chronology, so it's an interesting consequence, I think of this, so we can actually improve the history eventually, so this is conclusions, so we've taken three, what I think are really very challenging passages, in the Old Testament, and I hope in these cases I've shown to you, I believe that the Bible record is reliable, and this really I think does raise our expectations, that the rest of the Bible is reliable, if it's reliable on these difficult events, it does really raise expectations, on some less difficult events, it's probably reliable as well.