Dossiers
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What Romans wrote about Christians
Two Roman officials, writing sixty years apart, mention Christians in passing while explaining something else. Neither is sympathetic and neither is trying to prove anything — which is exactly what makes the two passages worth more than their length.
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The earliest mention of Israel
An Egyptian victory monument from around 1208 BCE lists the peoples of Canaan that Pharaoh claims to have crushed. One of them is Israel. It is the oldest surviving occurrence of the name — and it is used to prove…
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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…
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Who took Samaria
Two Assyrian kings are credited with ending the kingdom of Israel, and one of them credited himself. The Bible sides with the other. This is a case where the external record disagrees with itself and the biblical text is a…
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Mesha of Moab and 2 Kings 3
A Moabite king had his side of the story carved in stone. The Bible has the other. They agree that Israel dominated Moab and that Moab broke free — and each ends the story where it looks best.
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Jehu on the Black Obelisk
The most reproduced image in biblical archaeology is captioned as a portrait of a king of Israel bowing to Assyria. The epigraph above it does name Jehu. The figure below it may not be him at all.
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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.
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Ahab at Qarqar, 853 BCE
An Assyrian monument names Ahab the Israelite in a coalition at a battle the Bible never mentions. It is the earliest external record of any king of Israel — and the two accounts are silent about each other’s main events.
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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…
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Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem, 701 BCE
Two accounts of one campaign, written by the two sides, both surviving. They agree on the king, the cities, Lachish and the gold. They disagree on the silver and on how it ended — and the biblical text itself records…