From today’s Daily Telegraph:
The sound of unbridled joy seldom breaks the quiet of the British Museum’s great Arched Room, which holds its collection of 130,000 Assyrian cuneiform tablets, dating back 5,000 years.
But Michael Jursa, a visiting professor from Vienna, let out such a cry last Thursday. He had made what has been called the most important find in Biblical archaeology for 100 years, a discovery that supports the view that the historical books of the Old Testament are based on fact.
Searching for Babylonian financial accounts among the tablets, Prof Jursa suddenly came across a name he half remembered – Nabu-sharrussu-ukin, described there in a hand 2,500 years old, as “the chief eunuch” of Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon.
Prof Jursa, an Assyriologist, checked the Old Testament and there in chapter 39 of the Book of Jeremiah, he found, spelled differently, the same name – Nebo-Sarsekim.
Nebo-Sarsekim, according to Jeremiah, was Nebuchadnezzar II’s “chief officer” and was with him at the siege of Jerusalem in 587 BC, when the Babylonians overran the city.
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The small tablet, the size of “a packet of 10 cigarettes” according to Irving Finkel, a British Museum expert, is a bill of receipt acknowledging Nabu-sharrussu-ukin’s payment of 0.75 kg of gold to a temple in Babylon.
The tablet is dated to the 10th year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, 595BC, 12 years before the siege of Jerusalem.
Evidence from non-Biblical sources of people named in the Bible is not unknown, but Nabu-sharrussu-ukin would have been a relatively insignificant figure.
“This is a fantastic discovery, a world-class find,” Dr Finkel said yesterday. “If Nebo-Sarsekim existed, which other lesser figures in the Old Testament existed? A throwaway detail in the Old Testament turns out to be accurate and true. I think that it means that the whole of the narrative [of Jeremiah] takes on a new kind of power.”
Wow.
Wow.
This raises the question: what else is out there?
What is in the Vatican archives?
What other treasures are in the British Museum?
One thing is sure: if you do not look, you will not find. I believe that Jesus said that.
It is like the broken embalmed crocodile, from which came the earliest fragments of the book of John. Oops. And the Gospel of John had been dated much, much later.
We just have to look!
Look for comment from people over in England like Prof Kenneth kitchen or Prof Alan Millard, who swim against the tide on the historicity of the OT.
Interesting, but not groundbreaking. King Omri (1 Kings 16:16) is mentioned on the Mesha stele, a ninth century BC memorial set up by the Moabite King Mesha.
And analysis of the geneologies of Genesis 4 and 5 proves that the chiefs mentioned there are historical persons with a real kinship pattern.