Ancient Sources

A major way of establishing the reliability of a witness or source is to corroborate it by the testimony of other sources. This is easier said than done, when corroborating people, places, and events from 3,000 years ago. But through three decades of painstaking research Dr. Lawrence Mykytiuk has been able to do just that.

Through inscriptions from outside of the Bible, but written during Bible times, Mykytiuk has been able to confirm at least 55 people in the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible) and at least 30 in the New Testament. Most of these inscriptions were written during the lifetimes of the people in the Bible to whom they refer and relate them to historical events.

This historical evidence, though relatively small compared to other evidences for the historical reliability of the Bible, is disproportionately significant, because these confirmations, established by applying rigorous criteria, are clear and direct.

I could hardly take my eyes off of it. Slowly, silently, my lips formed the word: Wow.

As a graduate student, I had just run across a picture of a Hebrew inscription that referred by name to a king in the Bible: Hezekiah. He lived in the 700s BC. According to the article I was reading, it came from Hezekiah’s time. (Ancient inscriptions are writings usually found on hard surfaces such as stone or in hardened clay.)

His name was in tiny writing impressed into a lump of clay the size of a fingernail, called a bulla (“BULL-ah”). The impression was made by a hard seal, typically made of stone, with letters carved in it, perhaps set in a signet ring. Many ancient seals were made of lovely, semiprecious stones of various colors, often used as jewelry.