The Eric Metaxas Show - Steven Collins

Episode Date: February 17, 2024

Dr. Steven Collins details the discovery of biblical Sodom. 

Folks, welcome to the Eric Metaxus show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m. Investments.com. That's legacy p.m. Investments.com. Welcome to the Eric Metaxis show. Did you ever see the movie The Blobs starring Steve McQueen? The blood-curdling prep of the blob. Well, way back when Eric had a small part in that film, but they had to cut his scene because the blob was supposed to eat them. But he kept spitting him up. Oh, the whole thing was just a disaster. Anyway, here's the guy who's not always that easy to digest. Eric Mattaxas!

Hey there, folks, this is the Eric Mataxis show. We are going to play a special Socrates in the studio event with Stephen Collins. Don't forget to go to Socrates in the City Plus.com and subscribe. Welcome to the first edition of Socrates. in the stockyards. Can I say that? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Thank you. You've been a great audience. Good night. Actually, we have done Socrates in Fort Worth several times before. But the weird thing is that last year, when we did the Socrates and the city event in Houston, it was scheduled on October 12th,

which just happens, it happened last year, to be my wedding anniversary. Yes, yes. It's a bummer. It's a bummer that I've got to work on my wedding anniversary. What's that all about? But this year, and this is really freaky, this has to be God, because we think of the odds, right?

But this year, October 12th, which is today, is also our wedding anniversary. It's like when you do the math, that's just crazy. But I do want to say to my lovely wife, happy anniversary, baby. 27 years. They say the first 27 years are the toughest, because it's been hell, hasn't it? It's been hell.

But they say the first 27 years is the toughest. So from here on in, it's like smooth sailing, honey. It's going to be good. It's going to be at least in my mind. It's going to be perfect. Okay, so a couple of things before we begin. First of all, So this is the Fort Worth Club, and we're thrilled to be here back at the Fort Worth Club. I forgot that the Fort Worth Club has an affiliation with Will Rogers.

Some of you are old enough to get that reference. The American comedian humorist Will Rogers, right? But he hung out at this club. This was his club. We did an event in Seattle at the Arctic Club, and Sophie Tucker was hanging out at that club. a little different from Wool Rogers, but both comedians, both people that I value. And if you don't, I don't care. I just want to mention that.

My guest tonight, the reason I wrote my book is Atheism Dead, and there are copies of it. I think it's the only book we have here of mine and Dr. Collins' book. But the reason I wrote it is because I was in Albuquerque, and somebody said to me, have you met Dr. Stephen Collins? He's the archaeologist who discovered biblical Sodom. and I said, wait a minute. Are you serious? Like that sounds, you know, do you hear a lot of stuff? And I looked into it, and I think it might be true.

So we're going to discuss that tonight. But people make a lot of claims about a lot of stuff. For example, a year and a half ago, we had somebody at Socrates in the city, an elderly gent in his mid-80s, who claimed to my face that he had flown to the moon. Yeah. And that he had walked on its surface and drove a dune buggy around.

And I thought, what do you think? I'm like an idiot? Like a babe in the woods, I'm going to buy your story. Sir, I'm no babe in the woods, folks, okay? Have you ever seen a babe in the woods? It will freak you out because how did it get there, right? But I looked into it. his story, and it turned out

it was true. And you can watch that at our Soxies and City site, sarktuncaddean city.com, or at a YouTube channel, but he actually had walked on the moon. The funny thing is when you interview somebody who's walked on the moon, literally, you're not really

interested in his other credentials. You know what I mean? It's like, what's his CV? Where do you go to school? What books does he publish? Who cares? He walked on the moon, like, that's it. Well, that's basically how I feel about my guest today. Who cares about all the other stuff that Dr. Stephen Collins has done? He's an archaeologist who, I can tell you, without any question,

has made one of the greatest discoveries in the history of archaeology. And it's real, it's true. It's not really debatable. frankly, it's not at all debatable. I mean, some people think, like, whether the earth is flat is debatable. If you're one of those people, don't talk to me later because I don't have any patience for that stuff.

But that's kind of how I feel about the discovery of biblical stuff. When you look into the details, you know, when you really look into it, you realize there's no question. There's no question. You know, there's always going to be scholars, detractors, and stuff. Because there are some weird things, right?

Like, you know, at some level, at 1900 BC level, they discovered, you know, like a GI Joe and some rock'em-sockham robots, you know. And like a lot of people say, I think it might be the 1970s, you know. But we're going to ask him about those discoveries. It is really just an amazing privilege for me to have in this room at this Socti's in the city event

the great Dr. Stephen Collins. Your story is so fascinating, and I don't know where to begin, except I think, at the beginning. You, let me ask you some really pedestrian questions first. When did you know that you wanted to be an archaeologist? High school. Really? Yeah. I don't know why they offered it.

They offered it in high school? Where do you go to high school? Sandy High School in Albuquerque. Give him a shout-out. They offered an elective in anthropology and archaeology, and I took it, and I went, wow. Okay, so then you went to college and you studied in college? Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. It seems to me that anybody who goes into the field of archaeology would have to have in the back of his mind the dream that he would make some astonishing discovery.

was that in your mind? No. No. No. You're saying, I'm wrong. Yeah. When you go into archaeology, you just, you like archaeology. You like the process.

You like what's happening. You like discovering things, but you really don't know what's in the ground. You don't know what's out there. So you really don't have a particular thing in mind. Now, that might happen along the way. Yeah. which eventually did for me. Yeah.

But going in, not particularly. You're just like the subject, and it's not rocket scientists. Oh, no, most archaeologists are very dumb. I've met them. I've met them. It's really nothing. I always tell my wife, archaeology is, like, easier than gardening. I cannot remember the names of all those plants.

Okay. But, you know, it's just, it's cut and dried, it's simple. Because I've read your book, and I failed to mention, you and your co-writer wrote a book about the discovery of biblical Sodom and called Discovering the City of Sodom. Is that the title, right? And it is particularly well written, I have to say. I don't say that about a lot of books,

but it's not just an amazing story, but it's well written. But in getting to know you, I realize that you really are, I hate to embarrass people. Actually, I love to embarrass people, but you really are brilliant. You're not just some guy that, you know, digs around and finds stuff, You really are an extraordinary scholar. And I know that. But the story of how you came to do this excavation,

I want you to tell that story. So we'll go back to, what was it, 1996? That's right. When in 1996 was it? I was leading a tour, a study tour. I had Sodom and Gomorrah on the itinerary. because there was a site toward the south end of the Dead Sea over on the Jordan side of the Rift Valley

that many scholars, including myself, generally accepted as the site of Sodom, a little site called Babadra and an associate site called Numira that was Sodom and Gomorrah for a lot of people, and I didn't have a problem with that. In fact, in I think 1993, I was in a documentary that aired on CBS, I think,

and touting Babadrath is part of the team, touting Baba draw as soddle. Spreading the lies. Yes. How do you feel? Well, I feel great. One of the reasons I believe I feel better is because I take Balance of Nature's fruits and veggies in a capsule.

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You're going to love this free new tool they've added. legacy pm investments.com, legacy pm investments.com. Check it out. You mentioned in your book that it was because of the work of a very eminent biblical archaeologist named Albright, that it was pretty much established like this is, this is biblical Sodom on the southern part of the... There was actually a shift. Back in the 19th century, virtually every single explorer scholar who went to that area. And many of the, of them were Christians and they had a Bible in their spare time. And they were British surveyors and, you know, a lot of time military surveyors and, you know, they're getting the lay of the land.

And, but many of them in their spare time went around on horseback with a Bible over their saddle horn looking for biblical places following the text. And virtually all of them, except for one, but almost all of them, the famous ones, and Thompson and Condor and Wilson and so many others, they put Sodom at the northeast of the Dead Sea. In the 19th century? In the 19th century. The northeast part of the Dead Sea. Right. Okay.

That's where they put it. And they put it there. Why? Because they follow the text. Genesis 13 is the verbal map. It's very detailed. It will take you to the side of Sodom. It's what I call a primary text.

It is specifically written consciously by the author to take the reader to the side of Sodom. Okay. So in the 19th century, they didn't know where it was, but they thought it's around here someplace where it would have been around here if it's discoverable. What happened in the 20th century? Well, the shift was that one of those guys, just one that I can find, Edward Robinson, who was another 19th century explorer scholar, went to the Holy Land for a few months and went to the south end of the Dead Sea.

He wasn't particularly a Bible scholar, but went to the south end of the Dead Sea and decided it looked like a place God would have destroyed. So we spun his own little etiological legend from the look of the place, and for some odd reason... Because it looked like a place God would destroy. Albright looked at Robinson's work and picked up on it and touted it as probably right. But yet Albright never ever in any of his writings does any textual analysis on Genesis 13, 1 through 12. Never touches the geography. which is weird because Albright was a pretty respectable guy. Brilliant, genius, actually.

Yeah. And so when Albright did that, he knew that every site like Babadra and Numira and all the sites in the southern part of the Dead Sea, he knew that all of those belonged to what's called the early Bronze Age and were all out of business by 2,400 BC at least, which everybody knew was hundreds and hundreds of years before any possible time of So 700 years too early. Too early for Abraham. But he just kind of... Well, he said, here's what he said.

Maybe, science is never good when you start with a maybe and end with a maybe. Right? Maybe when the event occurred, there was an earthquake and the cities were actually just directly south of the Dead Sea, sitting on the rift, sitting on the fault zone, and somehow possibly an earthquake happened, and the ground sank, and the dead sea water flowed in over them and covered that shallow southern,

what became the shallow southern basin of the dead sea. Well, everybody took his protege, G.E. Wright, picked up on that. He spread that rumor, and everybody spread that rumor. And the problem was, is, well, for Albright, but he's long gone by now. But 20 years ago, the dead sea levels began to drop. And now today there's no water in the shallow southern basin other than what they pump in there in the evaporative pans

to get the minerals. But archaeologists went down there and looked around. There's no pottery. There's nothing. Nothing there. In fact, it's kind of a crazy idea that Albright had. Had he looked at the topography, he would have realized that it's a terrible place to build a building a lot.

town or even put a village because every time it rains, the area fills up with water. It's a sump. It is the lowest spot on the face of the earth, after all. Literally. Literally. And so not a good place. Nobody ever lived there. Every archaeologist now 100% knows that nobody ever lived in that area at the very, very south into the Dead Sea. We know that today. We know that today, but he didn't know it then. But in 1924, when Albright makes this announcement or whatever, nobody knew

this, and it was just a nice idea. And people, I'm really fascinated. It's one of the themes of my book is atheism, how information travels or how bad ideas you get stuck on a bad idea and people are stuck on it for 100 years or whatever. That's

kind of what happened here, isn't it? Yes. And it wasn't that everybody went that way. It's that Albright had so much, let me give you an example. There's a famous five-volume Bible Encyclopedia. Published by Zondervant, you probably know that publisher. If you look up the article on Sodom,

the writer is making a beautiful case. He's going through Genesis 13. He's making a beautiful case for a northern Sodom. And I'm going, yes, right. Yes, perfect. And then he says, but I'm not an archaeologist. And W.F. Albright is, the greatest archaeologist, and he puts Sodom at the south into the Dead Sea, so I suppose I have to defer to him. And I'm going, no, you don't. And so, by the way, if you go to Zohar, which is a related town, just over, you know, to the Z volume of that encyclopedia, and you look up Zah, that writer makes a beautiful case for northern Sodom and sticks to his. guns. Okay, but we have to go back in time. So in the 20th century, most people accepted Albright's

conclusion that if Sodom existed, it's on the southern part of the Dead Sea. So even you in 1993 kind of bought that. But then in 1996, you go over there and what happens? Well, we were, I think, Spending the night in Bersheva in Israel before we're going down, cross over it a lot, you know, to Akaba. And so we're there. So I know the next day we're going to head over to this traditional site. And so I thought, okay, I'm just going to brush up on the story. So I get the Bible out and I read through the story.

This was my very first moment, the aha moment, more or less. But anyway, I read the text to brush up on the story. I read through it. And I was very tired. Genesis 13. Genesis 13. It's night. In fact, I read Genesis 13 through 19.

And I got to the end of it and I thought, I must, I was tired. We'd been touring all day. I must be sleep reading. You ever sleep read? Were you reading? And all of a sudden you realize the last three paragraphs you have no idea what it said. So I said, okay, so I sort of woke myself up, sat up real tall and read through it three more times. I read through that text four times, and when I got to the end of it, I closed the Bible and I said to myself,

not only is there nothing in this text that would locate Sodom toward the south of the Dead Sea, everything clearly locates it north and east of the Dead Sea. And I couldn't get past it. But we were now just starting to excavate up in the West Bank at a site called Curbit El Mahatir. and we had just started. I didn't need a project. Didn't need to do this. But I thought, I thought someday, if life sort of settles down and gets boring,

I'm going to come back to this point. Because this is really bugging me. Why did I think it was toward the south? Why did everybody think it's toward the south? I want to know where it was. Now, I always tell people, I didn't care if it's north, south, east, west, and central park. I don't care where it is. It doesn't matter to me.

I have no dog in this fight. Why would I care? It's just that all of a sudden the text and what people thought weren't dancing. It wasn't happening for me. And you knew that Genesis is reliable, and so you're going to, if you're going to dig, you're going to dig where Genesis says it is. I mean, the Bible is the only place that really mentioned Sodom. So you have to go with the text. Well, what does the text actually say?

say there's a lot of information embedded in that text that gives you geographical clues. It's very, very clear. So I took my, by the way, that night I reached over, got my itinerary, Sodom and Gamora. I put big question marks over the top of it. And I had to fess up to the folks as I got them onto the site and was lecturing that... The next day. Yesterday, early in the day yesterday, I would have said this with Sodom. Today, I'm not sure at all because the text doesn't seem to go.

It's a nice site. You know, look around, have fun, but I'm really thinking it's not here anymore. Right. Wow. Mike Lindell and MyPillow employees want to thank my listeners for all your continued support. To thank you, they're having an overstock clearance sale right now for the best prices ever when you use promo code Eric. And you get free shipping for the entire order. Get 50% off the MyPillow 2.0 and the brand new flannel sheets that just arrived and won't last long.

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So, all right, so you have this moment in 1996, but you're busy, you're a busy archaeologist. When do you get to begin to, test this theory? What year did you think maybe I can look into this? Well, we were excavating at Kherbert al-Macheteer up until 2000. So we had a summer of 2000. We had a season there, and the Intifada, by the end of the season, I mean, we were listening to the Israeli gunships shooting at Ramallah just a couple of hills away. And so the Intifada was heating up. And that really killed the project for the next several years.

Yeah. So we were done. Yeah. So that winter, so here's an archaeologist, and I've been used to, I've been digging at Petsida, I've been digging at Kursi, I've been digging here and there, and now at Makotter, and now I've got nothing. What are we going to do? We need an excavation project. What's happening? And then I thought, ah, the Sodom issue, I need to write a paper. I need to write up my research on this, so I put in, it was just the right time of year. So I put in to present a paper at the Near East Archaeological Society the next November. And I knew if I didn't do that.

I could be pushed off. I'd find something else to do or I'd get busy and forget about it. No, I said, I'm going to do this. It's bothering me. I want to do it. So I did it. And I presented that paper. And afterwards, I remember, after I got through,

I remember Edwin Yamauchi, Professor at University of Miami, Ohio. notable scholar, especially on Persia, everybody else just kind of shuffling around. And I noticed that Dr. Yamauchi was making his way through the crowd like a salmon going upstream. And he's making his way to me. And I think, he's going to hit me. He's going to clobber me.

He's going to hit me with something out of left field. And he came up to me and he said, you're exactly right. And so at that moment I thought, You know, maybe I'm not totally crazy. And there's at least one of the scholar who thinks this is reasonable. And it went on from there. So when did you act on this?

Okay, you can do all the research you want, but eventually you've got to get on the ground. So I presented the paper in 2021 in November. But, that... 2001. 2001. Yeah. Yeah, because I... We had our season in 2020.

No, you mean 2000? Yes, sorry. 2000. This is over 20 years ago. Yes, I know. Just to be clear. 2000, you're right. Right.

So 2000, and then 2021, I presented a paper in November. 2001. But before 2001. Right. 22 years ago. Yes. 22 years ago. Yes.

but we went to Jordan first. Right. I mean, I had already basically written the paper. But Danette and I and a couple of our friends headed to Jordan because we needed to get on the ground. We had to get on the ground. Now part of the reason, you say this obviously in your book, that the consensus had gotten stuck on where it was

was because of the hostility, the tension between Jordan and Israel, from the 60s into the 90s, Americans were not going over into Jordan to do a lot of archaeology. So that had changed by the time 2001. Yeah, our site had, this huge archaeological site had never been excavated. Ever. Well, K. Prague did a small trench on the far end of it, way on the west, in 19.

89, 90. And she lost a local worker, lost, local worker lost a foot to a landmine. And so they stopped. Well, we come to find out that the whole western half of the tell was landmine during the, from 67 to 70. And so that's why archaeologists weren't going there. Okay, but so that, so nobody had been, do an archaeology in that area,

but this is the area that you're thinking, the text says if Saddam and Gomorrah can be found, they're in this neck of the woods. So you go there with the net in 2002, is it? In 2001. In the summer. And you, what do you do? What do you do at that point? Well, the first thing you do, as a scholar,

the first thing you do is you go to the library. There's a wonderful archaeological library at ACOR In Jordan. In Jordan. The Archaeological Center there. And so we just start pulling books, pulling survey reports,

because what was interesting is that on all the maps that I could get from American sources, Israeli sources, European sources, that side of the Jordan River, northeast of the Dead Sea, was blank.

It wasn't anything there. And I'm going, but the Bible tells me there's got to be something there. when we took off from the U.S. to head to Jordan, I had nothing. I had the biblical text that said this is where it's supposed to be. It should be right here. I have maps, archaeological maps, that are blank.

I'm going, okay, this is not boating very well. Well, we get to Acor, start looking at Jordanian surveys, multiple ones, people that have excavated in the region at other sites, smaller sites in the area, what did we find? 14 major archaeological sites. Well, we needed five, right? Sodom, Gomorrah, Adma, the Zoboyum,

the five cities of the plain. When we left the U.S., we had nothing. When we got through with our work at A-Corps, we had 14. Well, now we had the opposite problem. We had too many. Mike Lendell and MyPillow employees want to thank my listeners for all your continued support. To thank you, they're having an overstock clearance sale right now for the best prices ever when you use promo code Eric and you get free shipping for the entire order. Get 50% off the MyPillow 2.0 and the brand new flannel sheets that just arrived and won't last long.

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You can call 800-9783057. 800-9783057-3057. Use promo code, Eric. It would have been roughly the same story because your book came. What year did your book come out? 2013. 2013.

But it is amazing that you are now officially done. That you have done this 16 years. Where the easy part is done. Yeah. The fun and the easy part is done. Now, it's not that excavation is easy. There's a lot of pains. There's a lot of dealing with governments and agencies.

But that part's finished. Now the hard part starts. The hard part and the expensive part of this whole thing is the analysis, the final publication, in getting other scholars involved to do cross studies and all of that. Okay, so I want to go back because you've done plenty. It's like so amazing to me. So you start actually excavating this unexcavated site,

which is amazing that you're talking about this gigantic city that was there for thousands of years, nobody ever excavated it. So you start in 2002, you start? 2005. It took five years of meeting at least twice a year with the Director General

of the Department of Antiquities to convince him to give us that permit. In Jordan. In Jordan. But you got it. We finally got it. Okay, so in 2005, you start. What year do you hit pay dirt

literally and figuratively? You don't go in, I mean, even though you have ideas in the back of your head, even biblical ideas in the back of your head, you don't just blow through stuff looking for... You're not Heinrich Schleiman. I mean, archaeology is you have to take everything seriously from the top, everything in the Iron Age, Roman period, the Iron Age going all the way down, layer by layer. You have to document everything because archaeology is technically as a destructive process. You're destroying the very thing you're studying, and you can't put it back. So if you can't reproduce everything in three dimensions with measurements and photographs and all that, then it's lost.

So everything has to be done. That's why it took 16 seasons, 16 years to, and we're still, we still have eight or nine or maybe a 10 years left of processing and publishing all of this stuff. But the year, you know, the sort of the inciting incident in the story, so to speak, is when you decide to do that, what do you call it, a test shaft? Yeah, I mean, there was a, I wanted to know what the stratigraphy looked like if we could possibly, you know, what are we looking at, layer-wise. And, of course, we tell the historical horizon that we're working in by the pottery. Yeah. The cultural or historical layer that we're dealing with is. in the pottery. So as we do, and that's what I do. That's one of my...

You're a ceramic typologist. Yeah, that's what I do. Right. So, the upper city has a swell, right? It has kind of two high points at the end and has a low spot right in the middle. So I thought, okay, let's put at least one quick probe, sandage, two by two meter, straight down just to see what's in this place. We're already as low as we can get to start. Let's see what's below. So you have, so so Sodom according to the biblical text, you would assume was destroyed around 1700 BCish. We thought post well it had to be

if it's associated with Abraham which obviously that's the story it has to be post 1800 for a whole litany of reasons one of which it's not unimportant one of which is that all the cities and towns mentioned in the Abrahamic narratives Hebron, Jerusalem, Dan, Shackham, Damascus, all of those cities were abandoned

and unoccupied entirely from about 2,500 BC down to about 1800 BC. There's nobody at Jerusalem between 2,500 and 1800 B.C. And all archaeologists know this. So you've got to have

in the story, you've got to have Melchizedag. You've got to have the King of Salem, the King of Jerusalem. So to get Melchizedek, a city, you have to go post-1800. It just makes sense. Okay, so as you're doing your layer-by-layer excavation, at some point you decide to kind of speed things up and do this test shaft. You said two meters by two meters. And so suddenly you're going faster now.

We went through about, I think, as I recall, about two, two-and-a-half meters of iron age. And we eventually, we now know, after all these years, that we have four basic Iron Age strata. But when we got down, as soon as we got down under the Iron Age, we got into this very ashy matrix. So what year roughly, we're talking around 1700 BC level. Yeah. So this is about the level.

The latter part of the Middle Bronze II period. Okay. So now you're in the time. when this destruction might have happened, and you actually discover ash. Yeah, we get down underneath the Iron Age, and all of a sudden the Iron Age stops, the pottery shifts to the Middle Bronze Age.

That's a 700-year jump. So we went from 1,000. The Iron Age starts up here, about 9th century, goes down to about 1,000 BC, and then we jump from 1,000 BC down to about back to about 1700 BC. So 700 years of no civilization on this spot.

Nothing there. Which is insane and strange. Because this is prime real estate. Why are there seven centuries with nobody living here? Right. Okay, so at the 1700 BC level, you find the Suden-S. Describe that.

And the moment that you're, was it a graduate student, that Yes. Tell the story. Tell the story. You come to this ash. How deep is the ash?

Well, we don't know yet, and we never did find out because, well, I'll tell you what happened in a minute, but we get down into this stuff, and we now know it as the MB2TDM. The Middle Bronze Age 2 Terminal Destruction Matrix. Okay, it's the, it's the, It's what's left over from the destruction of the city.

And we didn't know how deep it was. We now know it to be across the upper tail about a meter to a meter and a half deep. It's really, really thick and ugly. It's about 1,700 BC. You're digging down. You get to this level. And it's ash. And you can smell this.

Ash and other stuff you would expect to find maybe some other things, maybe some decomposed mud brick, because these cities are built of mud bricks. and they're not, their sun dried, so they would just melt in the rain. And so you would think, well, if there's 700 years here, and the city just became abandoned for some reason, all of this mud brick stuff should melt. And we should have mud brick to try this, you know, fairly deep. We didn't hit any of that. We hit into this destruction matrix.

What we eventually knew as the destruction matrix, but it's full of pieces of pottery, it's full of chunks of ash and carbonized wood and pieces of everything. everything you can imagine of buildings and bones. So suddenly you find that you, I love these terms, you call this the destruction matrix. You find this bizarre, I mean, let's be honest, this is a bizarre phenomenon. You're digging down and, you know, your city, city, civilization, civilization, then suddenly ash. And when you describe it, you say, what do they call it, the Quezon Art effect?

That's what we eventually, I didn't name it that one of the, One of our field supervisors said, you know, this is like the quiz. It's like somebody took the city, threw it into a blender, and hit the button, and just ground everything up. And here it is, all strewn together. Which is completely anomalous. This has never been seen. I mean, I dug through destruction layers before, but this was a little bit on the weird side. A little bit on the weird side?

It was a little odd. But at the time, we didn't know anything about it. this was our first experience with it. It's just, it's destruction stuff, and we knew that. Okay. And we weren't going to find out much. Well, I'll tell you what happened. About three or four days later, a rain happened.

And remember this is in the soil? It's in the low part. That trench filled up with water. And we couldn't go any deeper. But we got what we got from that. But once we got down into it, just a little bit, Carol Cobes, where's Carol? Is Carol in the room? Carol's in the room. There's there somewhere.

Carol, where? Where's Carol? There's Carol. That's the woman. She's down at the... Carol, I mention you in my book, is atheism dead. I'd like you to have a copy. No, it's great to know that you're here because, okay, describe this moment that Carol is down there. She's down there. It's like almost, it's like three meters almost, so she's down there. and she says to me, this is weird, you need to see this. And okay, so I got down in there, and I looked at this thing. And it's a piece of pottery, but it looked like glazed pottery.

It has a greenish. Okay, when was glazed pottery invented? 700 AD. AD. AD. So you got a problem. Yeah, Islamic pottery is the first laid pottery. It's like finding a G.I. Joe or Rackham Scy.

I'm robot. Game over. Game over. You found glazed pottery. It's 1700 BC. Glazed pottery is not invented until 700 AD. So you now realize, I think, we have a problem. Yeah, I'm thinking contamination.

How does this get here? What is a piece of, well, I can't say exactly what I said. Right. What is a piece of Islamic pottery doing three meters down in this? trench. Then then we picked it up and looked at it. Oh, it's middle bronze age potter. It's wheeled. Okay, hang on.

You're an expert. You're a ceramic typologist. You look at this thing, and you know in an instant this is a pithoi jar from, I mean, describe that, because you see it, you know exactly what you're looking at. This is 1700

BC. This is the neck of a pithoi. That's from the shoulder. Going on to the neck. Just starting the curve up to the net. And you know it is from 1700 BC. Yeah, I mean, it's consistent with the pottery that's in there with it. It's glazed.

Well, it's definitely got glass on it. And so we're looking at it going, that's just really strange. And so Gene Hall was there, who a volunteer that year, and he was part of the Manhattan Project. and was there at the Trinity site when they blew up the first atomic bomb. And he knew this stuff. Hey, this is Eric Mettaxas. For years, I've told you about Nutrametics, a professional supplement brand

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