WAXAHACHIE—Churches have been guilty of teaching half-truths, a real-life Indiana Jones told First Baptist Church in Waxahachie. But archeology can help clarify the intended meaning of some scriptural texts.
Scott Stripling, provost and professor of biblical archaeology and church history at The Bible Seminary in Katy, directs the Associates for Biblical Research’s excavations—the largest archeological dig in Israel—at the ancient region of Shiloh. Shiloh is where the Ark of the Covenant was kept until David brought it to Jerusalem.
Churches don’t mean to teach incomplete understandings of Scripture, Stripling said. However, the Bible was written in primarily Hebrew and Greek, and now American Christians read it in English. So, sometimes some of the meaning gets lost, he noted.
He highlighted biblical texts to consider alongside the context he has gained through archeological research—and a basic understanding of the flora and fauna of the Holy Land—to understand better what might have been meant in the passages.
A tale of two trees
Jeremiah 17:6-8 is a tale of two trees, Stripling explained. One, which is not growing with God, is not capable of seeing the good and never will realize it’s thriving even if it is. The other, with God, grows healthy and strong. One is “a tree of death” and the other “a tree of life,” he said.
“And we get to choose from which tree we eat,” he continued.
But English translations of the Bible have a word in verse 6 translated as “bush,” “tree” or “shrub,” when the Hebrew word is “arara.” An arara is not just any bush or shrub, though. It is a specific bush, abundant in the region.
The fruit of the arara looks pretty on the outside, like a cross between a mango and a grapefruit, but when squeezed, it turns to dust and a milky sap of poison, he said. The Bedouin people still use the sap to make their arrows more deadly to hunt hyena, Stripling said.
“Jeremiah wasn’t just saying you’ll be any shrub, or any bush, or any tree, if you turn your heart away from the Lord. You’re going to be this specific shrub, right here, this bush, an arara.”
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He explained Jeremiah’s audience would have known what he meant and thought of the arara, which looks delicious, but when squeezed contains nothing but dust and death.
“Your outward appearance has nothing to do with your standing with God,” Stripling continued. Jeremiah makes it clear when “we begin to think it does, we are the ones that have turned our hearts away from the Lord.”
Stripling contrasted the death plant, arara, to the pomegranate, also prolific in the area, which his team has verified played a prominent role through their excavations in the location which they believe to be the Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant was kept for three centuries.
Scripture speaks of attaching pomegranates to the robes of the priests who entered, and ceramic miniature pomegranate fruits are among the artifacts recovered there.
Only pomegranates, not figs, grapes or dates, were allowed in the Holy of Holies.
Stripling gave some ideas about why that might be, but concluded the pomegranate represented a life-giving tree to Jeremiah’s audience. It represented God’s ability to breathe on a person and “make you a productive member of the kingdom of God. Do we eat from the tree of death or of the tree of life? It all depends on the inclination of our hearts,” Stripling said.
Archeology doesn’t change Scripture in any way. Rather, Stripling stated: “What it does is it illuminates it. It sets it into a context so that we understand it here and now, the way that they understood it then and there.”
Silver coins
The archeologist turned to a familiar parable of Jesus, in Luke 15:8-10, about a woman and her 10 silver coins. He pointed out the significance of the coins being silver, a detail often overlooked because the value of the silver coins is not well understood in today’s context.
The 10 silver coins demonstrate she’s a woman of wealth, each coin being worth about two week’s income.
“So, that means she’s got five months of income, on hand, in the bank, so to speak. That’s what financial planners tell you today, you should have at all times in the bank,” in case you run into an unexpected financial challenge.
Bronze coins were ubiquitous. Stripling said 99.5 percent of the coins they find daily in their excavations are bronze. But these silver coins were quite rare, making up, along with gold coins, the other 0.5 percent.
As verse 10 indicates, losing one and finding it again was cause for great celebration.
The point of the parable is this: “You are the coin. You’re the thing of great value that the Son of Man is searching for, because he wants a relationship with you.”
Jesus uses this story—along with the parable of the shepherd leaving 99 sheep to find the one that is lost, before it, and the prodigal son, after it—to demonstrate there is no acceptable amount of “shrinkage” or “lost collateral or inventory” in the business God is running, Stripling said.
Shedding further archeological light on these silver coins, or shekels, Stripling highlighted their high level of purity at 91 percent, when the average purity of silver in the first century was 80 percent.
He explained these coins were the only currency accepted to pay the Temple tax, which is why there were money changers at the Temple.
The problem with these coins being the currency of the Temple, Stripling said, is that on them was the image of the Roman god Melqart. “A pagan, Roman god adorns the only coin accepted in the Jerusalem Temple in the first century in the time of Jesus.”
The religious leaders were willing to overlook the commandment against images because it was 91 percent silver, Stripling said. “No wonder Jesus had a problem with the money changers.”
He cares not if a church “sells tacos in the foyer,” but “if you sacrifice your heartfelt beliefs for economic gain. And that’s what was going on in the first century.”
Stripling also discussed Matthew 19:23 and Luke 7:36-38, challenging common beliefs about the passages with archeological discoveries.
A popular speaker and author, Stripling serves on the board of directors for the Near East Archaeological Society. His books are available on Amazon, and he provided archeological commentary for a forthcoming reprint of the Open Study Bible.
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