Describing his trip in 2022, and his 1997 book “The Stones Cry out” that it produced, Dinesh D’Souza told American Family Radio biblical archeology is an overlooked topic for a couple of reasons. One reason is many church pastors are not familiar with archaeology, so it’s rarely mentioned in churches and church sermons.
“Second, the archeological community is mostly secular,” D’Souza observed. “Those guys want to think of themselves as being like, ‘We're scientists. We don't confirm the Bible.’”
For those two reasons, there is a gap between Christianity and archeology. That gap has existed for a long time, the author and filmmaker said, even though the pace of new discoveries has accelerated, and the findings under the dirt should be exciting for Christian believers.
“And so, it's like God is speaking back through the stones,” D’Zousa told show host Jenna Ellis. “But there's sort of nobody, or very few people, who are actually hearing the message.”
The pioneers of biblical archeology
The very first archaeology quests in the Holy Land trace back to the 1800s. That is when Bible scholar Edward Robinson began mapping Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside to identify and confirm ancient sites mentioned in the Bible.
Sir William Flinders Petrie, who followed Robinson in the 1880s, was an English university professor and a trained surveyor. He was also an expert on Egypt and is credited with finding a granite tablet from Pharaoh Merneptah, which mentions ancient Israel. He also pioneered preserving ancient pottery fragments and using them for dating time periods.
Behind Petrie came William Albright, the son of missionaries, who became a scholar of ancient texts. Albright took Robinson’s maps and Petrie’s expertise on pottery dating to conduct his first dig at Tell Beit Mirsim, a mound in the southern hills of Judea, beginning in 1926. It was there that Albright unearthed well-preserved pottery fragments, in layers and layers of dirt, which were used to document the Bronze Age and Iron Age. He is now known as the “father” of biblical archeology.
Bible history: Abraham to Acts
Describing the field of biblical archeology, Ellis said many Christian believers look at the Bible for its salvation message through Jesus, and its revelations about our Creator, but the history in its pages is often overlooked.
“I mean, it gives an account from literally ‘in the beginning, God,’ from the moment of creation, all the way until the end of all things,” Ellis said.
God could have chosen a far different way to make Himself known to mankind, D’Souza said.
“But interestingly, God didn't do that,” he said. “God chooses a particular people, in a particular place, at a particular time, and the Bible is a very specific unfolding through history.”
Going back to Abraham, D’Souza says that time period is roughly 2,000 B.C. The very first church is described in Jerusalem in the Book of Acts, he said, so that time period for biblical archeology stretches across 2,000 years of human history in Israel.
“So think about it: The Bible is the only text that is capable of withstanding the most skeptical, withering scientific investigation. And that's worth keeping in mind,” he said.
