THE STONES CRY OUT: PATRIARCHS

This article—the second in a series of 12—is adapted from Dinesh D’Souza’s new book The Stones Cry Out which will be published this fall by Charisma Books. You can pre-order now by clicking the link in this article.

Biblical history really begins in detail with the story of Abraham and the patriarchs. It is the story of the beginnings of the Jewish people and the Israelite nation.

Who can forget this scene in Genesis 22: 2: “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”

The biblical story culminates in God’s promise to Abraham and his descendants that he will give them a land in perpetuity. This is God’s irrevocable promise, repeated many times throughout the Bible. Giving the land in perpetuity, by the way, is simply what it means to give a piece of land. If someone gives you a piece of land, it is in perpetuity, and you can leave it to your heirs. Land that is not given in perpetuity is not given at all.

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The patriarchs lived around four thousand years ago, in the period that archeologists call the Middle Bronze Age. They were nomads. They lived in caves and tents. They migrated in stages over long distances, never staying very long in one place, searching for water and grazing pastures for their herds. How can we expect to find any remnants of them? We can’t. We’d be very lucky if we could find anything.

The Bible tells us that Abraham’s family originally came from Ur, or Ur of the Chaldees, in ancient Mesopotamia. Abraham was then Abram—later God changed his name to Abraham.

In the 1920s, archeologist Leonard Wooley excavated Ur and found ruins of temples, two-storied residential houses with drainage systems, and a cemetery containing several royal tombs. The tombs contained golden weapons, helmets, daggers, swords and jewelry. Ur was a flourishing city before the time of Abraham, and moreover, archeologists have found tablets in Mesopotamia showing the use of names similar to Abram and Abraham.

Abraham’s family moved from Ur to the land that is now called Israel, then called Canaan. In Genesis 13:18 we learn that Abraham “went to live near the great trees of Mamre at Hebron, where he itched his tents. There he built an altar to the Lord.”

In the mid-to-late 1920s, archeologists excavated an ancient hill site near Hebron and found ancient pottery that they dated to 4,000 years ago. So who lived there? The German archeologist Evaristus Mader recognized that the location matched the biblical account.

Abraham didn’t live in Hebron, but near Hebron. He couldn’t live in the city, because he was a nomad with a large herd of animals. He needed a spot outside the city, with trees for shade and water. The Bible itself mentions “the great trees of Mamre,” and Mader and his team found the deep holes in the ground once occupied by those trees.

The site identified by Mader is, quite likely, Abraham’s campsite. This is where Abraham built his altar. This is where, according to the Bible, Abraham conversed with God. The location of Mamre, although excavated only in the twentieth century, has been recognized since ancient times to be holy ground.

King Herod is portrayed in the Bible as a bad guy. From what we know about him, he was. But he was also a great builder. This has earned him the title Herod the Great. Herod, who lived just before the time of Christ—he died sometime between 1 B.C. and 4 B.C.—built monumental walls that still surround the site of Mamre. Herod did this to please his Jewish subjects, because they knew the significance of this place.

A few centuries later, when the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, he commissioned four churches in the Holy Land. One of them was at Mamre, demonstrating how important this site is to Christianity.

And now we move, just a short distance away, to the the Tomb of the Patriarchs. This impressive construction is 2,000 years old. It was also built by Herod to preserve an ancient burial site. The original construction of the site, however, dates much further back.

We read in Genesis 23: 17-20 that Abraham purchased from Ephron the Hittite a burial cave at Machpelah. He bought it for his wife Sarah, who is buried there, but so was Abraham, and their son Isaac, Isaac’s wife Rebecca, and Isaac’s son Jacob and his wife Leah.

This shepherd’s cave, this burial site, is the only land that Abraham ever purchased in Israel. And this massive construction shows how Machpelah has been a venerated holy place for two thousand years and even before.

Both Mamre and Machpelah testify to the historicity of Abraham. But there’s another way to confirm the authenticity of the biblical narrative around the patriarchs.

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We find in the Bible some fairly detailed descriptions of unusual practices in this era: Abraham’s wife cannot get pregnant so with her permission he has a child with a concubine, that child has certain inheritance rights but not on the same level with a legitimate child that Abraham conceives later with his wife Sarah, parents convey inheritance rights through ritual blessings of their children, and so on.

We also find two types of covenants in the patriarchal era: covenants between people which are made on the basis of parity, and covenants between God and humans which takes the shape of a superior or king dealing with an inferior or a subject. These pacts involve some sort of ritual ratification, like the burning of bricks or the sacrifice of an animal.

These patriarchal practices are distinctive with regard to time. What I mean is that they do not recur in any subsequent biblical period. The Bible records a changing cultural landscape through various time periods, and the descriptions of one era are not interchangeable with those of another.

Archeologists working in Syria have uncovered the Mari Tablets, which are thousands of cuneiform writings dating to 1800-1750 BC, right around the time of Abraham. Other scholars working in Iraq have discovered the Nuzi Tablets, equally detailed and voluminous, dating to around 1500 BC. These writings illustrate practices during the patriarchal period or shortly thereafter that are strikingly similar to the biblical accounts of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Both Mari and Nuzi law distinguish between ordinary covenants among people and divine or royal covenants that take the shape of a superior dealing with an inferior. Nuzi law says that if a man is childless, he can adopt a son to become his heir and carry the family name. He can also get an heir by taking a slave for a wife.

The same law, however, states that if a son is subsequently born to the married couple, then the legal rights of the adopted son are null and void. According to Mari custom, treaties and covenants were confirmed by the killing of an ass.

The significance of the Mari and Nuzi tablets is to support the historicity of the biblical account. Moreover, they undermine the credibility of the skeptics and the so-called “minimalists.” These are the people who claim that the Bible was written long after the patriarchal period and therefore constitutes an embellished account of those events—if they occurred at all.

This can’t be right, because how would someone writing say in the sixth or third centuries BC—more than a thousand years later—know the precise customs and mores—including certain names and prices of products—of the patriarchal era? Even down to its details, the biblical account of the patriarchs closely corresponds to cross-cultural customs and practices that modern archeology has now been able to verify.

At least in this case—the first stop in our chronological journey--biblical archeology undercuts the skeptics and affirms the believers. Even while studying the very remote past, we find that those who trust the Bible are shown to be on firmer ground, and those who have dismissed the Bible are shown to be shortsighted.