Major Prophets

  • Bible Trivia: How a Text Is Dated

    Twelve questions on the methods behind every date you have read for a biblical book — manuscripts, internal limits, and the circular argument almost everybody makes.

  • Bible Trivia: Egypt and the Bible

    Twelve questions on the state that ruled Canaan for centuries and left the earliest surviving mention of Israel — and on what its records never say.

  • Bible Trivia: Babylon and the Exile

    Twelve questions on the empire that took Jerusalem, the deportations, and the return — including the parts where the biblical numbers disagree with each other.

  • Bible Trivia: Assyria and the Bible

    Twelve questions on the empire that ended the northern kingdom and besieged the southern one — with every answer worked through against the Assyrian records themselves.

  • The Lachish letters and the last days of Judah

    Judaean soldiers wrote to each other on broken pottery while the Babylonian army closed in. One of them reports that he can no longer see the signals from Azekah. Jeremiah names Azekah and Lachish as the last two cities holding…

  • Belshazzar and the fall of Babylon

    For centuries Belshazzar was the standard example of a biblical invention: no such king appears in any Babylonian list. Then the tablets were read. He existed — and almost everything else Daniel 5 says about him does not hold.

  • Bible Trivia: Miracles in the Bible

    Twelve questions on the miracle accounts, at three levels — including the honest one about why a campaign leaves tablets and ruins while an event outside ordinary causation leaves neither.

  • Bible Trivia: The Temple

    Twelve questions on the temple: who built it, who rebuilt it, what the prophets said about it, and why the first temple has left no direct archaeological record at all.

  • The fall of Jerusalem, 597 BCE

    A Babylonian clerk dated the capture of Jerusalem to the day. 2 Kings 24 describes the same event. They agree on almost everything that can be compared — and the numbers that disagree are inside the Bible, not between it…

  • Bible Trivia: Jerusalem

    Twelve questions on Jerusalem: who took it and when, why 597 BCE is a date and 587 is a dispute, and what the ground can and cannot tell us about the temple.