Oxford Bible Atlas Quotes

“Gen. 10: 15–19 suggests that Canaan was thought to stretch from Gaza in the south, beyond Sidon, as far north as Hamath, i.e. almost as far north as Ugarit. But another description of the boundaries of Canaan (Num. 34: 2–12) places its northern limit considerably further south at Lebo-Hamath (Lebweh).”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“Nineveh was destroyed by the Medes and Babylonians in 612. (The fall of Nineveh provides the background to the Book of Nahum.) Ashuruballit assumed control over what remained of Assyria in Haran, but Haran too was captured by the Medes and Babylonians in 610 and the might of Assyria was ended.”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“WHAT CAN BE EXPECTED OF ‘BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY’? The question is an important one, because sometimes exaggerated claims have been made, of the ‘archaeology proves (or disproves) the Bible’ type. It is perhaps because archaeology has been thought to be more ‘scientific’ than other critical, exegetical, and theological approaches that words like ‘proof’ have been used. But it is essential to bear in mind that there is often as much interpretation involved in the understanding of an archaeological discovery as there is in the understanding of a biblical passage. The ancient identity of a site may be unknown or uncertain. A piece of ancient writing may be fragmentary, difficult to read or translate, and even if the translation is clear the precise significance may not be. The purpose or function of an artefact or structure may not always be easily or correctly understood.”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“The Prism of Sennacherib, containing the annals of the king, including the account of his attack on Jerusalem in 701 BCE, in the time of Hezekiah.”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“The Mesha Stele, also known as the Moabite Stone, inscribed with a Moabite version of the events described in 2 Kgs. 3. A cast taken before it was broken has enabled missing text to be reconstructed.”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“Extra-biblical texts and the Bible The rich variety of types of written material from the ancient Near East enables the world from which the Bible emerged and in which the Bible is set to be seen in clearer focus. Much attention has been paid to the myths and legends of the Mesopotamians and the Canaanites, not least because of the Bible’s own suggestion that the people of Israel and Judah emerged from Mesopotamian ancestry, settled among Canaanites, and were exiled in Babylon. But the mythology of other ancient peoples such as the Egyptians and the Hittites, now known as a result of archaeological activity,”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“The Codex Sinaiticus, dating from the 4th century CE, was so-called because it was found at the Monastery of St Catharine in the Sinai peninsula in 1844. It was written on parchment in Greek uncial (capital) letters. The codex originally contained the text of the Septuagint, the New Testament, and a number of Deutero-canonical works, though now some 300 pages are missing from the Septuagint section. It has made an important contribution to the study of the text of the Bible.”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“Inside ‘Hezekiah’s Tunnel’ in Jerusalem was the famous ‘Siloam Inscription’ describing the tunnel’s construction (see ‘Jerusalem in the 1st Millennium BCE’). Approximately contemporary was the inscription carved into the lintel of a rock-cut tomb at Silwan (Siloam), overlooking the Kidron valley and Jerusalem. The damaged inscription suggested that the tomb was that of someone whose name ended-yahu (usually anglicized as-iah in personal names) and who was (literally) ‘over the house’, that is, a steward. In Isaiah 22: 15–16, this precise description (NRSV ‘master of the household’) is used of the royal steward Shebna, who is criticized for ‘cutting a tomb on the height’.”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“In recent years, the application of archaeozoology (the study of animal remains) and palaeoethnobotany (the study of botanical remains–including palynology, the analysis of pollen grains in soil) has begun to make an increasing impact on the study of the ancient Near East in general and the Levant in particular. They shed light, for example, on the ancient environments, the domestication of plants and animals, diet, various cultural practices, and even such things as trade (showing, for example, whether wood used for building was local or imported). Of particular interest for the study of the Bible has been evidence for the domestication of and the eating of the pig, in view of the biblical prohibitions (for example, Lev. 11: 7). Evidence suggests that, after the Middle Bronze Age, apart from its use by the Philistines, the eating of the pig was not common until the Hellenistic period. The”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“Burials from the Middle Paleolithic period were in pits, with the body in a contracted position. From the Natufian culture come contracted burials but also burials involving just the skull. In the Neolithic period, burials were sometimes made beneath the floors of houses. From this period come the famous plastered skulls from Jericho (see below on ‘Human, animal, and plant remains’). A”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“The successive layers of occupation are known as ‘strata’. The careful digging of trenches or, more frequently recently, square ‘sections’ enables the successive strata of an occupied site to be examined and a relative chronology produced. The careful preservation of the baulks (the soil left between trenches or sections) allows the charting of the vertical ‘wall’ and the checking of the stratigraphy. (The development of this technique is associated particularly with Kathleen Kenyon.)”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“The site of the earliest city was well protected by the valleys to the east, south, and west, and seems to have been strongly fortified. Indeed, the biblical account of its capture by David suggests that the previous inhabitants, the Jebusites, considered it to be inviolable and defensible by ‘even the blind and the lame’ (2 Sam. 5: 6).”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“It was under Simon, one of the brothers and successors of Judas Maccabeus, and his successor, John Hyrcanus, that the Jews achieved relative freedom from Seleucid domination.”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“The relationship between the careers of Ezra and Nehemiah is problematic. The biblical writers seem to suggest that Ezra arrived first in 458, followed by Nehemiah in 445/ 444, and that for a period they were active at the same time. But there are problems with such an understanding, and a possible solution is that Ezra arrived in 398 and needed to repeat or reinforce some of Nehemiah’s earlier reforms.”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“Psalm 137 suggests that some who lived ‘by the rivers of Babylon’ were subjected to torment by their captors.”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“Available sources make it possible to glean a limited amount of information about the Jews in exile in Babylon. As already noted, references have been found in Babylonian sources to Jehoiachin and his family, and these suggest that provision was made for the exiled king (cf. 2 Kgs. 25: 27–30).”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“The Babylonian armies continued to undertake campaigns in the upper Euphrates region, reaching as far as Nisibis. In 610, with the help of the Medes and Scythians, they took Haran. The Egyptians had sought to make common cause with the retreating remnants of Assyria, and they made a combined attempt to recapture Haran in 609, but were unsuccessful. (This was the context of the death of King Josiah of Judah as he sought to prevent pharaoh Neco’s advance; see ‘The Kingdom of Judah’.)”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“Sargon was succeeded by Sennacherib, who continued to exert pressure on Judah. In 701 he invaded and claims to have captured almost all the fortified cities of Judah. It is possible, though not universally accepted, that this invasion is reflected in the graphic verses of Isaiah 10: 27–32 which record a king of Assyria gradually getting closer and closer to Jerusalem. Starting”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“Moses is credited with establishing the boundaries of the land of Canaan which the remainder of the Israelites were to occupy (Num. 34: 1–12). But the biblical account suggests that Moses did not enter that land. He is depicted as having climbed up from the Plains of Moab to ‘Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah’ from where he was able to view the whole of the land, summarized as including Gilead and as far as Dan, Naphtali, the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, Judah as far as the Mediterranean (the ‘Western Sea’), the Negeb, and the Valley of Jericho (that is, the Jordan valley) as far as Zoar (Deut. 34: 1–3).”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“The origins of the Jewish Diaspora were, of course, centuries earlier. Exiles were taken from Judah to Babylon by Nebuchadrezzar at the beginning of the 6th century BCE. Some Jews had fled to Egypt after the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon (Jer. 43: 4–7, and see Jer. 44: 1 where mention is made of Jews living at Migdol, Tahpanhes, Memphis, and in the land of Pathros). Aramaic papyri from Elephantine at Syene (Aswan) in Upper Egypt provide insights into the life and religion of a Jewish community of the Egyptian Diaspora of the 5th and early 4th centuries BCE.”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“Herod’s status was that of client king. There were many such rulers in the Roman Empire, including Cleopatra who ruled in Egypt as a client queen. Such rulers reigned with Rome’s approval, and they were appointed or replaced and their territories enlarged or reduced at Rome’s pleasure. Herod’s”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“In 63 BCE, Pompey besieged the Temple in Jerusalem, eventually breaking in on the Day of Atonement. It is said that some 12,000 Jews fell at that time. Jerusalem and Judea came under the power of Rome and a number of free cities were established: Gadara, Hippos, Scythopolis, Gaza, Joppa, Dor, and Strato’s Tower. In”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“In its account of the early days of the Maccabean revolt, 1 Maccabees 2: 42 records that Mattathias and his followers were joined by a company of Hasidim. This was a group, which emerged or became prominent at this time, of faithful Jews who were opposed to Hellenization. It is possible that both the Pharisees and the Essenes emerged from among the number of the Hasidim. It was during the period of Hasmonean rule that a person known as the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’may have led a group of people, probably Essenes, into the Judean desert and established the community at Qumran—on the north-west shore of the Dead Sea—which is associated with the ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’.”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“However, when the child-king Ptolemy V came to the throne in Egypt, Anti-ochus was presented with another opportunity, and this time he was successful in taking over Palestine from Egypt (Dan. 11: 15–16). In fear of Rome, Antiochus III married his daughter Cleopatra to Ptolemy at Raphia (Dan. 11: 17). An attempted foray into Greece was thwarted by Rome, and he was defeated at Magnesia ‘ad Sipylum’ (in Asia Minor) by the Roman general Scipio (Dan. 11: 18–19).”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“All this was due in no small measure to the emergence in the ancient Near East of systems of writing (see on ‘Writing Systems’). Thanks to the Sumerians’ development of the cuneiform script to record their language, it is possible to know something of their stories of creation and flood which seem to have provided the pattern for other later accounts from widely scattered areas of the ancient Near East.”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“The ‘Gezer Calendar’: inscribed on limestone, this is possibly the oldest known piece of Hebrew writing, dating from about the 10th century BCE.”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“The other major south–north route of the region was the ‘King’s Highway’ (Num. 20: 17; 21: 22), which led from the Gulf of Aqaba, though the hill country of Edom, Moab, and Ammon into Gilead, and thence towards Damascus.”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“Further south again, and to the east of the Dead Sea, lies Moab, through which flows the River Arnon. The biblical narrative records that Moab was known as a sheep-breeding centre (2 Kgs. 3: 4), and the Book of Ruth opens with a reference to people of Judah seeking refuge there in time of famine (Ruth 1: 1). Separated from Moab by the valley of the Zered and south of the Dead Sea is the rugged region of Edom.”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“The Wadi Qilt: the old road from Jerusalem to Jericho, the setting of the parable of the Good Samaritan, ran through this area.”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas

“In addition to proselytes, there were those who were attracted to Judaism but who were reluctant to take on the full rigour of the Jewish law. Those described in the New Testament as ‘God-fearers’ (see Acts 10: 2; 13: 16, 26) or the ‘devout’ (see Acts 13: 43; 17: 4, 17) probably belonged to this category. They believed in the God of the Jews and attended the synagogues. The Hellenized Jews of the Diaspora, the proselytes, and the God-fearers were regarded by Paul as the most likely to be converted to Christianity, and it is likely that the proselytes and in particular the God-fearers were most responsive, since they welcomed release from what they regarded as the burden of the Jewish law.”
― Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas