GYC SE 2008: ReGeneration

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GYC Southeast

Michael Hasel: Archaeology, Science, the Bible--Crisis or Confidence

Michael Hasel

Moses, Egypt, and the Lie of the Serpent

Isaiah and the Assyrian Terrorist Threat

Gods and Goddesses in Ancient Israel

1 of the exciting things about archaeology is that you can not only see that the events described in the Bible actually took place, but you can also tangibly feel and see and experience for yourself in a three-dimensional way objects and the everyday life things that people experience day by day.

You know, the Bible talks a lot about God's acts in history, but it doesn't always describe the specifics of how people lived, How they worshipped.

We know how the temple in Jerusalem was designed, a very active description.

But what about the temples of the Canaanites?

What about these ancient worship practices?

And so there are big questions sometimes that can be answered because archaeology gives us tangible answers to the kinds of cooking pots that people used, everyday implements, what kind of houses they lived in, who they traded with, what they traded, and what their economic system was like.

And to me, that's very exciting because it puts us in touch with the past and in a way that, well, I think most of us like to see evidence.

We've grown up in a media-driven culture where to touch and to taste and to feel and to see, in particular, to hear, are all elements that we like to experience the world of the Bible with.

And what I often tell people as we take tours to the Middle East, as we go on excavations with students from Southern Adventist University and others as well, community people can be involved too, is that when you take these trips, the Bible comes to life in a way that it hasn't been alive before.

And during the Sabbath service, Sean Boonstra was speaking, and a lady who had just been with me to Turkey this past summer leaned to me and said, I will never read the book of Acts the same again.

You've walked in the places that Paul and the early missionaries went out to.

You visit Jerusalem and you now see the relationship between the Mount of Olives and the Garden of Gethsemane and you suddenly those places are real places.

They're not simply something you read about and that you've imagined in your own mind.

So archeology makes things tangible but it also makes things real.

Sometimes it's a little disappointing because we imagine things that we think are a certain way, and then we get there.

That's why a book is always more interesting to read than watching the movie afterwards, right?

Because we've imagined it a certain way, and when we see the movie, it's always a disappointment, because it's not the way we've imagined it.

I remember the first time I took some students across a boat on the Sea of Galilee.

And afterwards, I asked them, and some of them were absolutely blown away by the experience.

We actually stopped and turned off the engine in the middle of the sea.

And we cast in a net like Peter would have done years earlier when Jesus asked him to do so.

And I breathed a sigh of relief when no fish came up in the net.

And it was incredible to be out on that calm sea.

But afterwards, 1 of the students said, it's so small compared to what I imagined.

I saw some skyscrapers from the top of a dune 1 time from Chicago, only once in my life, and I grew up there my entire life.

So you have all kinds of imaginings of what things are like.

And 1 of the things that it does is it makes the ancient deities that the Bible describes real as well.

Today we're going to talk about the gods and goddesses of ancient Israel, ancient religion in Israel.

And as we do that, let's look at what the Bible says.

In the Old Testament, there are over 200 occurrences of 12 terms describing cultic images.

Were the Israelites supposed to worship these images?

In addition, Asherah or Asherim are mentioned another 40 times.

I don't know if any of you have ever heard of that deity, but she's mentioned in the Bible 40 times, okay?

Indicating that the writers and the prophets had a major issue at hand.

If something's mentioned in the Bible and condemned enough in the Bible, you know that it was a problem, right?

It wouldn't need to be condemned unless it was a problem.

Just like parents, if they have to say something over and over again.

You wouldn't have to say anything if it wasn't a problem.

Some scholars say it was an Asherah herself, but Asherah in the Bible could also refer to a wooden pole or image.

In fact, in some translations, most of the time when Asherah occurs in the Hebrew, it's simply translated as pole or wooden pole or something like that, or tree.

So it can mean either a goddess itself or in wooden pole, perhaps representing that goddess.

Here in Deuteronomy 7, the Israelites are told specifically not to worship the gods of Canaan.

You shall tear down their altars and smash their sacred pillars." What is Deuteronomy, by the way?

It's the message of Moses, of God through Moses, to the people of Israel just before they were what?

So this is his last message before his death.

And this is what God says to the Israelites, but thus you shall do to them, you shall tear down their altars and smash their sacred pillars and hew down their Asherim.

Im by the way is like an S at the end of a word, it's the plural in Hebrew, okay?

And burn down their graven images with fire for you are a what?

A holy people, a people set aside to the Lord your God.

The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for His own possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.

Israel, of course, was not supposed to be exclusivistic.

They were supposed to be a light to the rest of the nations, right, and share with them what God has shown them.

In Deuteronomy 16, so in this particular passage, Asherah is a kind of something that can be hewn down.

Here in this particular chapter in 16, you shall not plant for yourself an asherah.

Okay, have you ever planted an image of a God and has it grow?

Okay, so here again, it's referred to as a kind of a tree.

You shall not plant for yourself an asherah of any kind of what?

Tree beside the altar of the Lord your God, which you shall make for yourself.

So No tree dedicated to Asherah should be planted next to an altar intended for whom?

Judges chapter 6, we're just going to look at a few of these.

Take your father's bull and a second bull, 7 years old, and pull down the altar of Baal." Now, I always cringe a little bit when I hear it now.

It's really Baal in Hebrew, but that's okay.

Belongs to your father and cut down the asherah that is beside it.

So in this text in Judges, Baal and asherah were associated with each other.

And where on the 1 hand the altar of Baal was there, also an Asherah was...

They were told to cut down the Asherah that was beside it.

The Canaanites liked to worship on hilltops, in high places, right?

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Michael Hasel: Archaeology, Science, the Bible--Crisis or Confidence

Gods and Goddesses in Ancient Israel

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