You're looking at the heart of biblical Israel, along the route known as the way of the patriarchs.
This is ancient Shiloh, the place where the Bible says Joshua divided the promised land
between the 12 tribes and where the tabernacle of the Lord stood for more than 300 years.
Welcome to ancient Shiloh. This is the first capital of ancient Israel and it's a sacred
spot because the Mishkan was here, the tabernacle where people came to connect with God.
Scott Stripling directs the excavation here and along with dozens of volunteers, they're
digging into history.
We're dealing with real people, real places, real events. This is not mythology. The coins
that we excavated today, we're talking about coins of Herod the Great, Pontius Pilate,
Festus, Felix, Agrippa I, Agrippa II. The Bible talks about these people. We've got
the image right there.
That image includes a fortified wall built by the Canaanites. They're finding a treasure
trove of artifacts including coins and 2,000 pieces of pottery a day.
Now this one was from yesterday. It's been washed already so you see the same form right
out of the ground in yesterday and these are those handles from the stone vessels. Remember
Jesus' first miracle at Cana, they were stone jars full of water. That's that ritual purity
culture of the first century.
An archeologist looks at these shards as a fine timepiece.
Just like your great grandmother's pottery is different from your pottery that you're
using today and once we learn the pottery, then we can use it as our primary means of
dating.
Stripling says literally digging into the Bible can change your life.
You can read the Bible, you can walk the Bible but the ultimate is to dig the Bible. When
we actually get into the soil like these students from Lee University, they're literally it's
under their fingernails and in their nose and their mouth and their ears and they're
exposing this ancient culture. It becomes one with you and sort of like we came out
of the soil and as we dig into the soil, we connect with God and with each other I think
in a very important way.
I love getting my hands dirty. I love digging in the dirt. It's my favorite thing.
People from all ages man the dig with the main drivers being students like Abigail.
It's tiring and exhausting but it's really rewarding. It's exciting to find ancient things,
things that have been laying in the dirt just waiting for us for thousands of years.
She says the Bible comes alive in the dirt.
I read the Bible totally differently than I did before I came here and when I read the
Bible, I know the places, I know what's going on. I understand it more deeply especially
where previous archeologists have claimed that the archeology disproves the Bible but
when we dig here, we find that everything matches. You read it in the Bible, you dig
in the dirt and there it is.
Archeology doesn't set out to prove or disprove the Bible. What we want to do is to illuminate
the biblical text, the background of the text. So to set it in a real world culture to what
we call verisimilitude. So we get an ancient literary description. Now we have a material
culture that matches that. Chris, you're sitting where Samuel and Eli and Hannah and these
people that we have read about, they came just like us, needing answers, needing to
connect with God, needing forgiveness.
He says they dig into the past and find lessons for the present.
One of the faith lessons for us is that God is the potter and we're the clay and even
if our lives are broken like these vessels are, God told Jeremiah after he told him to
go to Shiloh and see what he had done, he told him to go to the potter's house and look
at a flawed vessel and see how the potter puts it back on the wheel and works out the
imperfections. So my faith lesson is this, that yes, we're imperfect, but if we'll allow
God, he wants to put us on his potter's wheel and he wants to make us a vessel of honor.
Stripling often cites Psalm 102 that says, O Zion, your servants take delight in its
stones and favor its dust.
Ultimately, Chris, if the Bible is true, then the God of the Bible has a moral claim on
our lives. And as we establish the veracity of the biblical text, I hope that everyone
watching will just think about that, that God loves us and he has a moral claim on our
lives.
Chris Mitchell, CBN News, Shiloh, biblical Samaria.