A is for Alphabet, Artist, and Ahab
Emily: Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and as promised we are continuing our discussion of ancient Phoenician culture.
We said we would cover the alphabet, as they are often credited with one of the earliest alphabets, especially phonetic alphabets – in fact, the word ‘phonetic’ comes from Phoenicia, interestingly enough – and the Punic Wars. We’re probably not going to talk too much about the Punic Wars because we’ll get to that when we get to Rome, but we do have some other history and biblical prophecy to wrap in.
Let’s start with the alphabet. This holds a special charm for me. When I was a kid I would open up my dictionary and see all the different forms of the letters. When you turn to the Bs and the As and whatever letter, it showed me, “Here’s what the Greek equivalent is. Here’s what the Arabic equivalent is.” The Phoenician was always the most interesting to me. I don’t know why.
Greg: Before we turn this over to Rachel to do that, let me add my childhood experience. It must have been the ’68 World Series or so, and our teacher brought the television into the classroom to watch the World Series all day long. And not being interested in such things, I pulled out the World Book Encyclopedia, which was aimed at children mostly in those days.
The first entry for every letter was on that letter. They showed you what they thought was the development of the alphabet from Egyptian hieroglyphics or Phoenician and Greek to the Roman alphabet. As memory serves me, that was the order they put things in. So I spent a lot of time looking at that and copying that, and now Rachel is going to talk to us about what she’s discovered about alphabetic origins.
Rachel: I did a little bit more digging and was thinking it didn’t really make sense theologically to me that we would find the first alphabetical form of writing among Phoenicians, and we would then see God’s people learn from them after the time of Solomon, to be able to write in that type of writing.
What you had before with hieroglyphics and cuneiform and what we see even today in Chinese writing and Japanese writing is you tend to have a lot of symbols that are for single words or for parts of words, so you end up needing to learn 1,000 or couple thousand symbols to actually be able to read and write, versus an alphabet.
Emily: Like pictographic.
Rachel: Right, pictographic, or some of them are still just symbols but it’s like, “This is the symbol for this prefix. You have to learn this prefix symbol.” With an alphabet you learn, depending on the alphabet, 22-26 letters and you can suddenly write everything, which is why it’s considered a huge technological innovation and is essential if you’re going to be writing a lot of different things and even needing new words and things like that.
What we tend to see in older writing in cuneiform and hieroglyphics is that most of those words and writings were for the elite, meaning it was for administrative recording or for magic spells. So if you think, “Well, then how did the parts of the book of Genesis and then the whole Torah, how did they write that?” because we believe that was definitely before the time of Solomon. What would have been available, according to modern scholarship, would basically be Egyptian hieroglyphics, which is not what we believe Moses wrote in. We believe he wrote in Hebrew. Some people will say, “Oh, you’re crazy. Moses just knew Egyptian and that’s what he wrote in, or he didn’t write it at all.” That’s the more common consensus.
But when you start to look behind the outward layer of scholarship you can find a number of Bible-believing scholars who have looked deeper and have actually found that there are some older inscriptions that they date from the Middle Kingdom of Egypt – that would put them towards 1700-1800 BC – that are clearly an early alphabet. They’re based upon hieroglyphic symbols, but they’re not using them the same way. They’re using them as letters. If you start to look at them and what they pictorially represent, you can see how they would potentially correspond to Hebrew words. A little wave that looks like water corresponds to the M letter, which in Hebrew is ma’im, the word for water. There have been scholars that have started looking at that.
Others say, “No, it can’t possibly be. That’s just a nice made-up story,” because it doesn’t fit their worldview. But what it seems to show is that there are early examples of an alphabet that predates the Phoenician alphabet, that currently gets the credit as the first one. That then developed over about 800 years to eventually become what we know as the Phoenician alphabet.
When you see the Phoenician alphabet appearances – and there’s only a couple of them early on – you also start to see what they call old Hebrew. Those two are really, really similar when they start around 900 BC, and then the Phoenician alphabet significantly changes over time, whereas the Hebrew alphabet seems to stay mostly the same. Whatever they were based on, Hebrew was much more similar to versus Phoenician.
What all this means, taking the bottom line, is that rather than saying, “Oh, there was this other alphabet or other language that we don’t know about that appeared in the Sinai and then in Canaan in the time when the people of God would have been conquering the land and when Moses would have been writing his books. Instead of saying this was some other language that we don’t know about, if we take the Bible seriously it’s more likely that that was actually the early form of Hebrew that they wrote in.
Emily: Occam’s Razor is on our side here.
Rachel: Right, because they’re the ones that would have been most using alphabets like that at the time, particularly with the coming of Moses, who now has so many things to write down. God keeps saying, “Write this in the book. Write this in the book. Record this. The people need this.”
Also our theology should tell us that God will provide a means for his people to keep a record of his Word. He won’t leave them with no means of recording what he said, because we know that oral traditions are not very reliable.
A lot of modern scholarship is saying, “Oh, the Bible is not reliable because they had no way to write it down. It must not have been written down till like 400 BC, so of course the exodus has been highly inflated and exaggerated,” and blah blah blah.
Emily: This is just hilarious because of how many times God commands his people to read aloud the law, which you can only do if it’s been written down.
Rachel: That’s one of the other funny things. They say, “Oh, they were all illiterate so they couldn’t have written these things down, and nobody could have read them because they were illiterate.” Maybe a lot of the people were, but that’s why you read out loud. Everyone didn’t have a copy to read at home.
It’s interesting as you delve deeper to find the ways in the alphabet that God actually provided first for his people, and then others like the Phoenicians seem to have benefited from the wealth of God’s people as they had more contact with them around the time of David and Solomon. That’s called common grace. That is where the Phoenician alphabet seems to get its start. It’s first known historical representation is on a sarcophagus of a Hiram, who’s the father of Hiram.
It's just kind of an interesting way to see both that if you take the evidential approach but also the theological approach, the two things do meet to show that God provides for his people.
Emily: And it just goes to show how your assumptions can very much determine the outcome of your research.
Rachel: That’s what was so funny. I was watching a video and this man was looking into the evidence and he’d bring it back to the scholars that denied the truth of the Bible, and they would just say, “No, that can’t possibly be. No, that’s just a nice story. No, no…” but they would never actually be able to historically prove that these people were wrong. They would just say, “No, that can’t be. It doesn’t fit.”
Greg: That was excellent, Rachel. A couple things sort of as back-filler. Adam wrote a book. It’s called the Book of Adam. It is more or less chapters 2, 3, and I think 4 of Genesis, the Book of the Generations of Adam or the Book of Adam. A book implies writing and, as you said, not in hieroglyphics or some other pictographic form.
Now, the tower of Babel probably changed things because now people speaking many different languages would not find it so easy to tie those languages to the alphabet they knew, and thus we can expect after Babel to see the nations trying to regain a way of writing. But as you’ve pointed out, the practical uses are state bureaucracy, magic, and to a much lesser degree sales, because that can largely be numbers with a few tick marks to tell you what you’re selling. You don’t need a lot, but magic and bureaucratic instructions tend to require something.
Remember, hieroglyphics were called hieroglyphics because hiero- means priestly and -glyphic means writing. When people looked at it they said, “This is obviously a priestly code that tells us of magical things. Even though we can’t read it we will assume that’s what it is.”
Another reason that hieroglyphics could not have been used for writing scripture is that originally, at least to a large extent, it was pictographic and so if you wanted to speak of God you would draw a picture of God. There’s a fundamental problem with the second commandment right there.
Emily: That’s not how God wants to be represented.
Greg: God does not want to be represented in pictures. He communicates through language, and Jesus is the eternal Word of God, not the eternal picture of God. It’s true that scripture does use image, but it complements and redefines that by telling us what is the image? God is Spirit. He reveals himself in his Word, in his Son, and his Son speaks to us in words, so we should expect that what happened after Babel was very similar to what we’re seeing today, this argument over whether or not God, truth, and reality is best communicated through pictures and images or whether it’s best communicated through words.
As you said, the whole history of the Old Testament is “Read these words. Every seventh year read this law. Say these words when you come to worship God. Hear the Word of the Lord,” over and over again. So those are just some things. If anybody out there is a budding linguistic or phonetician and wants to start studying language in the light of God’s Word, these are just some things to think about. We haven’t exhausted it by any means, and no doubt there are many questions to answer, but these are good starting points.
Now, you mentioned Hiram and that brings us to…Hiram. In your case it was Hiram son of Hiram, right? So two kings?
Rachel: A Hiram who is father to Hiram. I believe Hiram is the one who knew David, then Hiram his son is the one that works with Solomon – so very similar.
Greg: What part does this play in scripture? We’re told that Hiram, one of them, was always a lover of David so this may have been the son as the father was going into retirement. I don’t know the details here, but he heard that Solomon had come to the throne and Solomon sent him a message that said, “First of all, we need cedars.”
We talked last time about the importance of the cedars of Lebanon. “If you guys can cut down the cedars and ship them down the coast to Joppa, we’ll pick them up there. We’ll use them in construction of the temple to the Great God. That would be wonderful,” and Hiram says, “That’s a good deal.”
Solomon then says, “And have you got somebody who knows a lot about craftsmanship and metallurgy and all of that kind of thing?” and Hiram says, “I do. His name is Hiram,” no relation apparently – a half-Phoenician, half-Israelite of the tribe of Dan.
Emily: Although that would be really funny if he was talking about himself.
Rachel: “Yes, it’s me.”
Greg: In passing, just because I can’t refrain, the whole Masonic system of symbols is built upon the legend they’ve created of Hiram, the architect. Remember the Free Masonry revels in architectural figures. The story they tell is that this Hiram knew the great mysteries of God and they were wrapped up in the architecture of the temple, and that three of his men came and said, “We want to know the secrets.” He refused to give them, they killed him, and that became the beginning of the Masonic oaths, Masonic symbols, Masonic imagery and all that. We’ll come back to that in a few years when we get to the Enlightenment and the repercussions of it, but I’m just throwing that out now.
For now the one thing I think we should note is that when Solomon and Hiram have concluded their dealings, Hiram praises the Lord God for giving Solomon to Israel, such a wise king. Solomon has made a league with him, which strongly suggests – since this was before Solomon’s fall, apparently – that Hiram actually became a God-fearer, that he acknowledged Jehovah as the God of the universe, at least set him above all his little petty gods and was more than willing to swear in his name. So here we have the Phoenicians providing a tremendous service to God’s people, providing not only the raw materials for the temple, but providing the oversight and craftsmanship to build the whole thing.
I think the other thing we have to say to counterbalance that is that David had received the floor plan for the temple by revelation, by prophecy and vision. Hiram didn’t get to decide what the temple would look like. Hiram did not get to look around and say, “Well, what do Phoenician, Egyptian, and Babylonian temples look like? Let’s do that.” He had been told, “This is the basic floor plan. Now you can make it pretty. You can make it elegant. You can make it something that strives to be worthy of the God who made the universe.”
There’s something here about God’s common grace, taking the wealth of even wicked nations and pouring it into the kingdom of God, but God’s people still have God’s word as a guide for what has to happen.
Emily: And the gifts of the Spirit also. When we look back at the building of the tabernacle, the artisans and the people who made all the decorative things, the Spirit of God gave them that gift, that skill and that wisdom. I think that’s very relevant to the common grace conversation too, that just as the Noahic covenant was based on this blood sacrifice pointing to Jesus, the gift of artisanship is from the Spirit of God.
Greg: Yes. Jesus is the Savior of all men, especially those who believe. God gives gifts to all people for the sake of his Son and for the sake of the church, and here we have a prime example. He doesn’t say, “You’re a bunch of pagans, get out of here.”
Now later in the Restoration time when God’s people are rebuilding the temple, the neighboring pagans come, pretending to be God-fearers, and say, “Let us help you!” and Zerubbabel and Joshua say, “No way, man, because we know your motives. You’re not wanting to help us, you’re wanting to get a hand on the wheel here and run things, and we’re not going to do this. This is our calling before God.” It’s two things that might seem similar, but in fact the saints involved saw them as very different sorts of things.
From there we begin blitzing through Old Testament history, through Solomon’s fall and through the divided kingdom. In the northern kingdom where Jeroboam has set up the worship of golden calves we see a number of dynasties come and go rather quickly, none of them lasting more than four generations because God says that he visits the iniquity of idolators to the third and fourth generation of them who hate him, until we come to a man named Omri, who shows up in secular records and inscriptions.
He buys a hill and calls it Samaria, after the owner, whose name is Shemer. And Omri has a son named Ahab. Now Samaria has become the capital of northern Israel. Ahab not only worships golden calves, but this is what the text of scripture says about him –
And it came to pass, as if it had been a light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, that he took to wife Jezebel the daughter of Ethbaal king of the Zidonians, and went and served Baal, and worshipped him. And he reared up an altar for Baal in the house of Baal, which he had built in Samaria. And Ahab made a grove and Ahab did more to provoke the LORD God of Israel to anger than all the kings of Israel that were before him.
And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the inhabitants of Gilead, said unto Ahab, As the LORD God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.
That’s one of the great story lines of the Old Testament, confrontation between Elijah on the one hand and Ahab and the prophets of Baal on the other.
There are a couple things to note – “As if it had been a light thing to walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat.” Jeroboam’s sins were setting up golden calves and saying, “This is Jehovah. This is Yahweh. This is the God that brought you out of Egypt.”
He did not claim to be introducing a new God. He claimed that he was simply giving them a friendlier more comfortable way to access the God they already knew, and he was tweaking some ceremonies and some rites here and there. Later on in the minor prophets we find the Israelites, the northern kingdom, patting themselves on the back because they do the third year tithe and they do the peace offerings. They do everything right except they’re worshiping through calves, so Israel by and large did not perceive itself as being guilty of Class 1 idolatry, that is forsaking Jehovah. And it wasn’t really Class 2 idolatry because they knew the cows weren’t really Jehovah. They were just reminders and helpers and that.
However, it did amount to Jeroboam kicking out all the faithful pastors, all the Levites, who then fled to Judea, and installing very corrupt religious leaders in the north. That’s how things had been going with every king who had come to the throne in the north. They supported the system, except for the one who lived a week and didn’t have time.
But Ahab takes it more than a step further when he introduces Baal worship. He marries Jezebel, and you can hear the name ‘bel’ at the end. She’s the daughter of Ethbaal. We know Ethbaal also from secular records. He was a high priest in Zidon or Tyre – the two were closely related – who had assassinated the king and taken the throne.
These were the lessons that Jezebel learned while watching. “If you are faithful to Baal, you make sure that the leader of the Baal cult is in control, because that will cement control and power.” So when she comes to Israel and is married there, that’s the lesson she brings with her.
Someplace in America in the 18th or more likely 19th century the phrase “painted Jezebel” came along because when Jezebel confronts the one who will wreak justice upon her, Jehu, she paints her eyes and such, as if the great crime here is using make-up. No, she was a queen and she was getting ready to the very end to present herself as a queen even in the face of these ruffians who were coming to take her rightful kingdom from her. She played the hand straight from her point of view. The problem is her point of view was anti-God, vicious, and thoroughly self-seeking in terms of power.
We read this from 1 Kings 16 and into 17. As that chapter goes on, she tried to exterminate all the prophets of the Lord, either drive them out or kill them. If the steward of her own household had not intervened and hidden 100 of them, they all except Elijah would have been dead. Elijah was hidden by God himself.
One of you mentioned last time that Phoenicia was presented oftentimes as a tolerant religion?
Rachel: Right, that they allowed all other religions into their religion. It reminds me very much of today. All things are tolerated except Christianity, because we say no to everything else.
Greg: We’re so unreasonable and all that.
Emily: It’s also kind of the syncretism that we see historically in the Roman Catholic church. You can have all your Latin American traditional religions. You just have to put saints’ names on them.
Rachel: Yes, you just turn the moon into Mary and that sort of thing.
Greg: And that’s something of what Elijah was about. He appears out of nowhere. He confronts Ahab and says, “It’s not going to rain until I say so.” This is important because remember Baal is the god of the storms, rain, thunder, lightning. So if Baal should be able to do anything, it should be to give showers, and for 3-1/2 years it ain’t happening. The land is going dry and Ahab and his steward have to go out and look for places where there’s some grass to keep the horses alive – not the people. Ahab knows that when a land is starving it’s open to invasion. He needs to keep his war machine up and running.
It's at this point that Elijah reveals himself and demands a challenge, a confrontation, he himself against the prophets of Baal. That’s the latter part of chapter 17.
Emily: That’s a callback to the gods of Egypt and the showdown with the 10 plagues, which I don’t think we really covered in depth, how the individual plagues called out Egyptian deities.
Greg: We didn’t a whole lot. Yes, turning the Nile into blood is an attack against Osiris, the god of death and resurrection. Smiting the sun black, that’s Ra and Horus, the sun gods. The land to lice, that’s Isis, the fertility of the land. My favorite is the multiplication of frogs. That’s an attack on Haqet, the frog-headed goddess who controlled the multiplying of frogs. She couldn’t even manage that one.
The text actually at some points does explicitly say that God was waging war, bringing judgement upon all the gods of Egypt, both in their hypothetical theological form but also in terms of the animals that were worshiped as incarnations of these animals. A lot of them just flat-out died when the plagues hit the animals, so all of that’s going on.
Meanwhile back here, going into chapter 18, Elijah says, “We’re going to Mount Carmel and we’re going to have a contest there.” Now a couple things – Carmel is the bottom of Lebanon. That’s Baal’s backyard. “So you want to see how powerful Baal is? Let’s go play in Baal’s backyard. Carmel is a mountain. It’s near the clouds. We’ll give you home court advantage on that one. Let’s make it really easy for Baal.
“Furthermore, I’m the only one of the prophets of the Lord left,” as far as he knew at that point, “but you have 450 prophets of Baal and 400 prophets of Asherah of the groves.” That doesn’t include any prophets of the calves that apparently were left out of this one because that wasn’t the issue. So the odds are not quite 1 against 1,000 but it’s getting up there.
And then, just to make the thing interesting, he says, “And let’s douse the sacrifices with water.” Actually, no, he does that for himself. He makes it ‘hard’ for Jehovah. All he says to them is, “You go first.” So home court advantage, Baal’s backyard, it’s a mountain, you’ve got a whole lot more of you, you get to go first, and all you have to do is produce fire from heaven. This is Baal’s stock and trade. This is what he’s supposed to be able to do. He hadn’t done it for 3-1/2 years but hey, maybe he’s been busy.
Emily: It’s also not a naturalistic approach to the challenge to say, “You go first.” You’d think they would set them up side-by-side and say, “Whichever one gets it first,” but that’s not what he does.
Greg: “No, you can have lots of time.” They started at the time of the morning sacrifice and they go to the time of the evening sacrifice, so that’s from someplace like 9 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon. We all love the part where around noon he starts mocking them, because some things are worthy of mockery. He says, as the King James renders it –
Cry aloud, for he is a god. Either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth and must be awaked.
“He’s turned aside” is a euphemism for he’s going to the bathroom. This is not polite. He’s mocking this would-be god very openly. Meanwhile the prophets of Baal are doing what prophets of Baal do. They are cutting themselves and letting the blood flow to shock nature into giving an unusual response, instantaneous rain, and nothing is happening.
This continues until the time of the evening offering around 3:00 when Elijah finally says, “Okay, that’s enough. You’re done. Move.” He goes and finds an old altar to the Lord that had been torn down, consisting of 12 stones testifying to the unity of the nation, which has been divided by the golden calves and now by Baal worship.
He has them dig a trench around the altar and then orders water poured on it. “Fill four barrels of water and pour it on the sacrifice, do a second time, do a third time – 12 barrels of water,” symbolic of what he’s asking for, again the 12-ness. He’s driving home the covenant apostasy of northern Israel.
Then he goes to God. Whereas the prophets of Baal have been saying, “Oh Baal hear us, oh Baal hear us, hear us Baal…” and you can imagine that going on for a long time, he simply has one repetition.
LORD God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Israel, let it be known this day that thou art God in Israel [that’s sovereignty], and that I am thy servant [that’s representation], and that I have done all these things at thy word [that’s stipulations]. Hear me, O LORD, hear me [one repetition because now he’s going to ask for sanctions], that this people may know that thou art the LORD God, and that thou hast turned their heart back again.
The question of continuity, of course, is the one that’s open. What will Israel do with this?
Fire falls from heaven, consumes the sacrifice, the stones, the water, and all the people shout, “The Lord, he is the God.” It’s a victory for the day. Elijah has the people corral all the prophets of Baal who are idolators on Israel’s soil and therefore their lives are forfeit and he executes them. He then prays for rain and God gives rain.
We all know the story of the little cloud rising like the size of a man’s hand that suddenly darkens the sky, and Elijah runs in the power of the Spirit of God all the way back to Jezreel ahead of Ahab’s chariot and it looks like a great day. Then Jezebel sends a little note to Elijah that says, “You are so dead,” and he runs from it.
That does not end the conflict there. It will be Elisha, Elijah’s successor, anointing a man named Jehu, a captain of Ahab’s host, to be the grand executioner not only of Ahab’s household and Jezebel, but also of all the Baal worshipers in Israel, and that ends that intrusion for now.
As we go on reading through the Old Testament histories, every now and then one of the kings of the north and even the kings of the south will continue to have this flirtation with this power religion, Baalism, because it’s about power. If you can get on the right side of Baal, then you are the guy with the power and everyone has to obey you and listen to you and do what you say.
This continues really until the captivity and we don’t see it come back in that form again, but it is a long-running contender with biblical faith through all of this.
Rachel: It’s interesting in the face of so much opposition that when Tyre and Sidon come to Israel they tend to bring destruction with them to the people as they try to take over, but we see multiple instances where Israelites go to Tyre and Sidon, for example Elijah going to Sidon as he’s running from Jezebel. Also we see later in the gospels where Jesus actually chooses to go and has an interaction with a Syrophoenician woman who he praises for the greatness of her faith because she understands the covenant and her place, but also the graciousness of God.
Most of what we see from Tyre and Sidon is very negative, and we’re going to look at some of their judgements from God, but there are these little glimpses of hope that even in the midst of this the Lord is, as we say, converting the nations and calling the nations to be blessed in Abraham.
The first of the judgements we see comes in Isaiah 23. We talked about Tyre as a merchant people so we can see where this comes up in their judgement.
The burden of Tyre. Howl, ye ships of Tarshis, for it is laid waste so that there is no house, no entering in. From the land of Chittim it is revealed to them. Be still, ye inhabitants of the isle; thou whom the merchants of Zidon, that pass over the sea, have replenished. And by great waters the seed of Sihor, the harvest of the river, is her revenue and she is a mart of nations.
Be thou ashamed, O Zidon, for the sea hath spoken, even the strength of the sea, saying, I travail not, nor bring forth children, neither do I nourish up young men, nor bring up virgins. As at the report concerning Egypt, so shall they be sorely pained at the report of Tyre.
Pass ye over to Tarshish; howl, ye inhabitants of the isle. Is this your joyous city, whose antiquity is of ancient days? Her own feet shall carry her afar off to sojourn.
And so it continues.
The LORD of hosts hath purposed it, to stain the pride of all glory, and to bring into contempt all the honourable of the earth. Pass through thy land as a river, O daughter of Tarshish. There is no more strength.
And so he carries on.
The other place where we see the discussions of Tyre are in Ezekiel 26 and 28.
Son of man, because that Tyrus hath said against Jerusalem, Aha, she is broken that was the gates of the people: she is turned unto me: I shall be replenished, now she is laid waste. Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, O Tyrus, and will cause many nations to come up against thee, as the sea causeth his waves to come up. And they shall destroy the walls of Tyrus, and break down her towers. I will also scrape her dust from her, and make her like the top of a rock.
We see that attempt to again take advantage of the people of God, and the Lord’s response is to scrape her literally all the way to the ground where there is nothing left for a time, and all the glory of Tyre is brought to nothing as many different nations come.
Greg: As you read just a little bit further –
It shall be a place for the spreading of nets in the midst of the sea, for I have spoken it, saith the Lord GOD: and it shall become a spoil to the nations. And her daughters which are in the field shall be slain by the sword; and they shall know that I am the LORD. For thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will bring upon Tyrus Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon, a king of kings, from the north with horsesand with chariots and with horsemen and companies and much people.
Before we were recording I was making a big deal about this idea of the nations coming like waves – wave comes after wave. Tyre did not perish in a moment. Nebuchadnezzar came with his army and laid waste to it, but it rebuilt. They rebuilt on an island just a little way off the coast and it was flourishing quite nicely, thank you, until Alexander comes along. So we’ve gone from Nebuchadnezzar to the Persians to Alexander.
Alexander demands that Tyre surrender and they laugh at him. They taunt him. That’s not something you do to a would-be son of God, so he gets really upset and he orders his army to turn themselves into engineers and sweep the remains of old Tyre out into the ocean as a causeway to new Tyre, and then marches out there, takes the city and destroys it and, as Ezekiel tells us, it’s never rebuilt. Today it’s a place where people fish. It’s gone forever. So that’s a little bit of the judgement. It’s mentioned also I believe in Jeremiah, and I know in Zechariah.
I do appreciate especially you mentioning the Syrophoenician woman because yes, and we all know a young man who is Lebanese. If Joshua had destroyed all the Canaanites our dear friend wouldn’t be here. Instead he’s a godly man serving the Lord, so God’s grace continues and it’s greater than his cursing always. The death of Christ is so much more valuable than even the penalty our sins incurred so there’s a great deal to thank God for here on the eve of Resurrection Sunday.
One last thing about this. With the destruction of Tyre and Sidon we shift to Carthage, which was a colony far to the west on the coast of North Africa. According to legend and tradition, the founding queen was one Dido, who is the same Dido who gave aid and comfort to Aeneas after the destruction of Troy, so that begins to put things in perspective. Jezebel was her great-aunt so there are connections here.
The Carthaginians continued the Phoenician custom of being mariners, middlemen, and merchants going to the far corners of the earth, and we’ll talk more about this when we get to Rome. There are increasing hints, like large stashes of Carthaginian coins found in weird places and statuary that look like cheap imitations or cheap knock-offs of Babylonian and Assyrian products showing up in all kinds of places, like the Americas.
The suggestion by Professor Barry Fell of Harvard was this, and I’ll just throw it out there for now and we can come back and talk about it another time, that the Carthaginians not only discovered the tin islands (Britain) but they also managed to circumnavigate Africa. There are actually literary sources that speak of their trip and how the sun suddenly was on the wrong side of the equator as they sailed, which happens if you sail below it.
Emily: The wrong side, meaning the other side.
Greg: Yes. Also something left behind by Plutarch which describes a journey to something that from their point of view was furthest west. As you track the physical description you have these little islands outside Britain, then you have this bigger island, then you have this frozen sea, then you come to this land where Greek people settled for a while. This sounds like a trip to North America.
Barry Fell’s take on this is that the Carthaginians did develop some kind of regular trading route into the Americas. They would take their knock-off products that they had made cheaply and trade them to the local inhabitants for something they didn’t value as much – gold. And along the way as ballast they picked up timber because the Carthaginians didn’t have a lot of access to that. The Romans were keeping control of that, and they brought it back.
This all went hunk-dory until the first Punic war when Carthage effectively lost her fleet and lost control of the Mediterranean and the Pillars of Heracles and her access to America. So America is forgot, these rich lands that they had kept secret are forgot, and Carthage has to shift from being a naval power to being a military power, as you look at the stories that surround the second Punic War. Those are the ones with Hannibal and the elephants and all that. Suddenly we’re not fighting in the ocean anymore, we’re fighting on land because for some reason lumber was no longer available.
Those are some things we can look at later when we get to Rome. I don’t vouch for all of it but I will recommend one of Professor Fell’s books here in just a moment.
Emily: Speaking of recommendations, why don’t you do that now?
Greg: I will do that now. Professor Barry Fell is a controversial figure in pre-Columbian American studies and I would not take everything he says as gospel. For one thing, he’s a translator of a form of written communication called Ogham and he has been challenged on his translations with some degree of convincing-ness. But when he records, “Look, this guy found these coins here,” that’s a different kind of evidence, or “These inscriptions were found here, and whether or not we agree on what they say, the language is a whole lot closer to Phoenician or Greek or something else than anything else we know, and it does not translate into any of the Indian dialects, except when the Indian dialects seem to rely heavily on Greek,” and these kinds of things.
I will recommend two of his books: America B.C.: Ancient Settlers in the New World and Saga America: A Startling New Theory on the Old World Settlement of America Before Columbus. Again, read with a grain of salt, but there’s enough in here I think that is worth the time if anybody wants to begin to get their feet wet in this stuff.
Particularly in Saga America, chapters 3 and 4 are about the Phoenicians and evidence of Phoenician activity in America. Most of it has nothing to do with inscriptions. Most of it has to do with coins and cultural artifacts.
Emily: Very good. I’m going to recommend something totally irrelevant, something that I thought I would never have as too extra, and that is a mini-fridge. With pregnancy, temperature is very important. I have a bubbly drink and as soon as it gets warm it’s no good anymore, which is annoying when you sleep upstairs and your fridge is downstairs. So just on a whim, my dear husband David, our producer, looked up on Amazon how much it was for a mini-fridge and they’re like $35. I was like, “What?” I never imagined that it would be so affordable. This is probably the most ‘extra’ thing I own, except for maybe the mug that has blue-tooth connectivity and keeps your drink hot.
Greg: Oh, you have one of those? My wife has been wanting one of those.
Emily: I hate how much I love it because it’s totally ‘extra’ and luxurious…and it’s amazing. So same concept, beverages at the right temperature. The mini-fridge is much cheaper than the mug that keeps your drink hot.
Greg: That’s what we heard. That’s why we haven’t bought one of those cups yet.
Emily: They do make great gifts if that’s in your gift budget. This little fridge is tiny, but I think we got it refurbished so it was very, very unbelievably affordable. That’s my recommendation. Rachel?
Rachel: I’m going to recommend the video from which I got a good bit of the information I shared on the alphabet. It’s another one in the series of videos called Patterns of Evidence made by Timothy Mahoney, and this one is called The Moses Controversy that came out in 2019. He dives into all of the evidence about alphabets and such things.
I initially thought it was going to be like did Moses exist, but the controversy is actually about did Moses really write the Torah, how could he have written the Torah, when was the Torah written, and all of that sort of thing.
Emily: Very good. Thank you both so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to our financial supporters. We appreciate you keeping the show rolling.
Dear Listener, if you would like to get in touch with us you can send us an email at haltingtowardzion@gmail.com. We’d love to hear from you. Thank you so much for listening.
SHOW NOTES
Scripture: I Kings 16-18, Isaiah 23, Ezekiel 26, 28
Recommendations:
Greg: America B.C.: Ancient Settlers in the New World and Saga America – Barry Fell
Emily: Get a mini-fridge for cold drinks wherever you want them.
Rachel: Patterns of Evidence: The Moses Controversy (DVD) – Timothy Mahoney