Can you believe the Bible? And does it really matter? How can you be sure that the Bible is all it's cracked up to be? Join David Curry, a pastor, author, and worldwide traveler, as he shares his knowledge of many biblical places throughout the Middle East. He will take you on a journey through numerous archaeological finds that prove the validity of the biblical narrative, showing that you can believe what many have rejected. Welcome to the biblical wonders in the Middle East.
Here is your host, Pastor David Curry. Thank you for being with us in our presentation. Today we're going to go to the north of Iraq, a very interesting part of the Middle East.
In our presentations we've taken you through Persia, which is Iran. Today we've taken you to Iraq and gone down to Babylon, and now we're in the north of Iraq. I was there a few years ago and I purchased a ticket at the train station at Baghdad, which is the capital of Iraq.
I wanted to travel to Mosil, which is the second largest city in the country. The train was air conditioned and quite comfortable, and I was able to sleep much of the travel time of 10 hours. I really needed to have a good sleep, for I'd been traveling for many weeks and I really was tired.
But upon arriving at Mosul, I was fresh and I discovered that this was a large city, but having a very friendly people, I had much to do in the 14 hours that I was to be there. In one part of the city I discovered that there were many tables covered in beautiful materials that women were purchasing for dresses. The trouble is that you don't normally see these lovely dresses for when the women go out of their homes.
They cover their beautiful and colorful dresses with black burkers that cover everything but their eyes. These are much more common in the north of Iraq than what they were in the south. In Mosul there are literally hundreds of shops.
If you wish to purchase something like kitchen goods, then you go to an area where there are dozens of shops next to each other and selling kitchenware. On the other hand, if you wish to purchase a suit of clothes, then you go to another area where there are scores of shops selling suits or materials for suits. These will also have tailors who are making suits for their customers.
And you can get a tailor make a suit for you in just a couple of days. This is one of the things that happens in many countries of the world today. The Archaeological Museum in Mosul is not very big, but it contains many artifacts from Nineveh as well as other parts of Iraq.
Near the entrance to the door is this huge statue of the sun god Mithras, worshipped in a number of Middle East countries. It was Mithras who originally came from Persia and brought in the worship of Mithras on Sunday, there was a beautiful carved eagle from Hatra. Hatra is a very old city, and today is a heritage place, made so by UNESCO.
This city became a provincial capital about 200 years BC. The ruins of the city are some of the best preserved in the Middle East today. Unfortunately, the Islamic State did a lot to damage here, but fortunately, not as much as was first feared.
And today you can go there and see some very beautiful buildings built, very nicely architecturally. Well, the main reason we were in this northern area of Iraq was to see the old cities of Nineveh. To get there and to see the old city and other sites, we hired a taxi for the day.
It was so cheap, just four dinas, or less than $8 at that time. And this was for the whole day. Can you imagine just paying less than $8 for a whole day? We crossed over the Tigers River by way of a very long rickety bridge, and we are soon among the old ruins of some of the cities of old Nineveh.
A section of the main wall of the old city has been rebuilt, and I have to tell you that they've made a very good job of rebuilding. And to think that this is how old Nineveh was so many years ago. This gave us a very good idea of what the original wall must have been like.
Well, inside the walls, we first visited the old ruins of the palace of Ashebanopil. There's not very much left there today, because archaeologists have had a heyday of digging and found so many things there. He was an Assyrian king who loved to read, and consequently built a very large library of tablets to satisfy his thirst of knowledge.
Something like 20,000, can you imagine? 20,000 of these tablets are found in just one museum, the British Museum in London. Fortunately, some of our modern day archaeologists can read the tablets, thanks to Sir Henry Rawlinson, who we mentioned in our first presentation on Persia. He found the Behiston rock, deciphered the three languages on the rock.
And this has been a great blessing to our archaeologists ever since, because many of them can read cuneiform writings not only from Persia, but from other parts of the Middle East. Well, nearby to the palace of Azhabanapal was the archaeological site of the palace of Shalmaniza. He is mentioned in the Bible.
In the Second Book of Kings, chapter 17. As the Assyrian king who took captive the ten tribes of Israel, these people had rebelled against God for many centuries and worshipped gods of wooden stone. You can't imagine how people would do this.
But over and over again in the Old Testament, you see how the tribes of Israel, even the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, went against God and worshipped other gods. Well, these people, the Ten tribes, were taken back to Nineveh as captives and then they were replaced in Israel by people from as far away as Babylon and other countries that the Syrian kings had conquered. King Shalmanesa was the ruler who did this.
After visiting his palace, we went to the ruins of the palace of Tiglath Peliza. He's also mentioned in the Bible, and he ruled before Shalmanesa. He is mentioned, that is, Tiglathpelisa is mentioned about six times at least in the book of Kings and Chronicles in the Bible.
It was a very great interest to me to visit these palaces and have those Bible records come alive. It's just wonderful to read through the Bible and then be able to visit these palaces, these places, these cities that are mentioned so often. Not very far away from these particular palaces, as I've mentioned already, was another very high mound, under which is the very old city of Kala, also mentioned in the book of Genesis.
In the Bible. We went to the top of this mound and could see the whole area that had been occupied 2700 years ago by the kings of the great nation of Assyria. But looking over them, it was really more of a wilderness, just as the Bible said it would become.
One of the things that I was pleased to see there was the large winged bulls which were fashioned out of stone by the Nineveites. There are still several very well kept samples in old Nineveh, but the best seem to be in the British Museum. It has an excellent section of old Syria.
And in this are displayed several of these very large winged bulls. The museum also contains reliefs of the kings of Assyria who were on chariots hunting lions with spears and arrows. At that time, there were plentiful lions roaming the wilderness.
Today there are none. The sad part about the history of archaeology in Assyria is the fact that the British and the French so often were at war with each other. At one time, the French had some of these large winged bulls and other exotic fines on a barge, floating them down to the Tigris River so they could move them by largest ship to the Louvre Museum in Paris.
Well, what happened? The British shot the barge with cannon and burned it up. Consequently, it sank along with its precious cargo. They went to the bottom of the Tigris River and are still lying somewhere there nearly 200 years later.
Nineveh is one of the first mentioned cities in the Bible. In Genesis ten and verse eleven, this city was built by Nimrod, who is called the mighty hunter before the Lord. Many people know of the city of Nineveh through the Bible story of the prophet Jonah.
He was asked by God to go and preach to that proud city. In Jonah one and verse two it says, arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their wickedness has come up before me. Here is called a great city at that time of Jonah.
It was larger than the city of Babylon, which we have talked about in our last episode of the biblical wonders in the Middle East. To walk around the walls of Nineveh in those days would take something like three days. Indeed, that was a very large city for that time, which was something like 700 years before Christ.
Jonah, the prophet didn't want to go there. And in the book of the Bible, called by his name, Jonah, we read that he brought a ticket to go in the opposite direction of Nineveh, way over to Spain. Can you imagine turning against God and going the opposite way? But he found that you can't run away from God.
The Lord brought a great wind on the Mediterranean Sea, so much so that the sailors thought that their boat was going to sink. Jonah admitted that he was the culprit and asked the sailors to throw him overboard. They were reluctant to do this because that would be the last they would hear of Jonah.
But it was then that God prepared a great fish to swallow him. He was thrown over. He stayed in the depths of the seas, it says, for three days and nights he prayed to God, who caused the fish to regurgitate him on what is known in Lebanon today at the Bay of Jonas.
He then traveled to Nineveh after God had asked him a second time to go to this great city. Before leaving Nineveh, we visited the mosque of Jonah. This also is on the old side of the city where Nineveh was built.
Normally you leave your shoes outside the mosque on the steps, but we didn't risk having them disappear while we were visiting in the mosque, so we carried them with us. On the way into the building, people offered us some yogurt, which we did not take due to the many flies also having a similar meal from the same vessels. Yogurt is very important to eat as you travel because it does settle the stomach, but does help to show us the friendliness of the local people wanting to give us some of their food.
The mosque floor was covered in lovely carpets and we went down steps to visit the tomb of Jonah. The Arabs say that this is the real tomb of the prophet, who didn't really want to preach the Ninevites at all. I can't vouch for the authenticity of this tomb, but it is possible that is the right burial place.
Before the mosque, an Assyrian church was built over the site. Many years before that church building, King Essahaddon, one of the greatest kings of Assyria and a grandson of Sargon, who we'll talk about in a moment, had built a part of his palace over the tomb. So it's quite possible that it is the original site of Jonah's burial place.
The amazing fact about the story of Jonah is that from the king and all of his loyal subjects, even right down to the more lowly inhabitants. They changed and turned their hearts to the god of Jonah. Unfortunately, years later, they'd gone back to their old habits.
And when the prophet Zephaniah was asked by God to write predictions against several nations under inspiration, he also wrote against Nineveh. Let's notice what he wrote in Zephaniah 213 to 15. And I'm reading from the New Living translation.
It says, and the Lord will strike the northern lands with his fist, destroying the land of Assyria. He will make its great capital, Nineveh, a desolate wasteland, parched like a desert. This proud city will become a pasture for flocks and herds.
Notice that the proud city will become a pasture for flocks and herds. And then it goes on to say in verse 15, this is the boisterous city, once so secure. I am the greatest, it boasted, no other city can compare with me.
But now look how it has become an utter ruin, a haven for wild animals. This prediction of Zephaniah has been amazingly fulfilled. First, Nineveh would be a wasteland.
As we look over the palaces that I've just mentioned, it is truly a wasteland. So Zephaniah said this would be a wasteland. Then he said it would become a pasture for flocks and herds.
You know, I was thrilled to be able to take pictures of Bedouin young people looking after flocks of sheep and some cattle on the grasslands that had grown over the walls of nineor and inside the city itself. This was just as the prophet had predicted. You know, it would be like saying today that Sydney or London would be covered in grass and sheep and goats would be feeding and resting there.
We could hardly imagine that. And, you know, the people of Zephaniah's time could have not imagined Nineveh being such a waste. Then he says it was a proud city.
And he quotes the city saying, no other city can compare with me. They exclaim. When Sennacherib came up against King Hezekiah in Jerusalem, the Lord took over the battle.
King Sennacherib had said very clearly that he would take Jerusalem, but hezekiah trusted in the Lord. And the Lord dealt a great blow to king Sennacherib. 180,000 soldiers were killed overnight.
Sennacherib believed he could conquer Judah. And his men were so proud of their previous accomplishments. When they had conquered many nations, they thought Jerusalem would be a walkover.
But Sennacherib returned to Nineveh a broken man. And would you believe it? His sons killed him when he went to worship his gods in the local temple. They were proud people, but soon were destroyed by the Babylonians.
It's interesting to note that earlier the Assyrians had destroyed Babylon about two centuries before King Nebuchadnezzar. Soon after visiting through the archaeological sites of Nineveh, we went to a village about 15 km north of the old city. We traveled several kilometers.
When on the roadside we came across a group of Kurdish people. There were probably several families there, for there were about five men and five women and many children. We stopped and talked with them for a while and they allowed me to photograph the men and children, but not the women folks.
The ladies were dressed in lovely, colourful dresses, as were the children. This was very much unlike the women purchasing materials in Mosul. They were covered with their black virus.
One of the men was holding his little girl, who had a lovely scarf that covered her head as I was photographing them. All of a sudden she pulled the scarf off and her father was quite disturbed. But it was such a lovely natural act by a child.
Over the years, thousands of the Kurds have become Christians, and this is one of the many reasons why so many of them are persecuted today, and why the Arabs of Iraq, Syria and Turkey don't want them to settle in their lands. After meeting that group of friendly Kurds, we came to the village of Khosabad. The reason we had for coming here was to visit another palace.
The Bible mentions a king called Sargon in Isaiah 20 and verse one. However, unlike the other kings of Syria, archaeologists could not find any place in history for this king. There certainly was nothing in Nineveh.
Two centuries ago, critics of the Bible were very quick to say that Sargon must have just been a mythological figure. Finally, Botta, a French consul to Mosul, and an archaeologist, started digging at Corsebad and discovered Sargon's palace. Once again, the critics of the Bible have been found wanting.
You know, the British Museum has a very fine statue of Sargon which was also found in this very palace area. We can be assured that the scriptures inspired by God can be relied upon to give us the correct facts about history and the truth about God's love and grace. As we continue this series of talks on the Biblical Wonders in the Middle East, we'll discover over and over again how the archaeological discoveries confirm the accuracy of the Bible.
Yes, you can trust the Bible. Please look at our website. 3abnaustralia.org.au
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