Come, Ye disconsolate

 By Thomas Moore

Come, ye disconsolate, where’er ye languish,
Come to the mercy seat, fervently kneel.
Here bring your wounded hearts, here tell your anguish;
Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.

Joy of the desolate, light of the straying,
Hope of the penitent, fadeless and pure!
Here speaks the Comforter, tenderly saying,
“Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot cure.”

Here see the Bread of Life, see waters flowing
Forth from the throne of God, pure from above.
Come to the feast of love; come, ever knowing
Earth has no sorrow but heaven can remove.

What is Success?

 What is Success?
--By Bessie Anderson Stanley
Her poem was written in 1904 for a contest held in Brown Book Magazine,by George Livingston Richards Co. of Boston, Massachusetts Mrs. Stanley, of Lincoln, Kansas, submitted the words in the form of an essay, rather than as a poem. The competition was to answer the question "What is success?" in 100 words or less. Mrs. Stanley won the first prize of $250.

Written in verse form, it reads:

He has achieved success
who has lived well,
laughed often,
and loved much;

who has enjoyed the trust of pure women,
the respect of intelligent men and
the love of little children;

who has filled his niche and accomplished his task;
who has left the world better than he found it
whether by an improved poppy,
a perfect poem or a rescued soul;

who has never lacked appreciation of Earth's beauty
or failed to express it;

who has always looked for the best in others and
given them the best he had;

whose life was an inspiration;
whose memory a benediction.

Archaeology and the Old Testament - Part 3

The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III

Assyria, in northern Mesopotamia played only a minor role in history until the beginning of the first millennium BC. The Assyrians began their rise toward becoming the greatest power the Near East had ever seen. In 876 BC, Assurnasirpal II (883-859 BC) led the Assyrian army west into Syria while Omri (885 - 874 BC) was king of Israel. The Assyrians did not advance beyond Syria but they must have learned of Omri because since that point they referred to the kings of Israel as being from the “house of Omri.” Shalmaneser III took the throne of Assyria in 858 BC when Ahab was in his last years as king of Israel and he was on the battlefield nearly every year of his reign. In 841 BC, Shalmaneser III marched west when Jehu had just begun his reign over Israel (841 – 814 BC). Then the Assyrian army moved southwest to Mount Carmel, where the annals say they received tribute from Tyre, Sidon, and Jehu, the “son of Omri.” Here is an event in the reign of an Israelite king which is only recorded extra-biblically.

Jehu’s tribute is commemorated on what we call today the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser. On this obelisk Jehu is shown kneeling before Shalmaneser III, and the text lists the gifts he paid to placate the Assyrians. The Bible implies that though Jehu had a relatively long reign, he was never a particularly strong ruler and the Black Obelisk supports this impression. The Black Obelisk is made of fine-grained black limestone streaked with white and this was discovered at Nimrud (ancient Calah) by Austin Henry Layard in 1846. Layard was responsible for the first archaeological excavation at Nimrud, unearthing finds beneath the mound at the site, including a pair of colossal winged bulls from the time of Shalmaneser III and the great wall panels from the palaces of Tiglath-pileser III and Ashurnasirpal II.

The obelisk is shaped like a ziggurat with its top narrowing in steps and on each of its four sides are five panels that contain relief drawings depicting various individuals bringing their tribute to the king. The main text of the inscription is written above and below the groupings of panels while above each panel is a brief epigraph describing the scene in the panel. The inscription begins with an invocation of the various Mesopotamian gods and a list of the royal name and descriptive phrases for Shalmaneser III. It also boasts of the major military conquests and subjugations of the reign of Shalmaneser and lists them year by year from the first year through his thirty-first year. Since the last listing is for his thirty-first year, or 828 BC, the obelisk was likely written in 828 or 827 BC.

Of particular interest is the record of his conquest during the eighteenth year of his reign when he had crossed the Euphrates for the sixteenth time. When Hazael of Damascus attacked, Shalmaneser took away from him 1,121 of his chariots, 470 of his cavalry together with his camp. Hazael was the king of Aram (modern day Syria) from 842 to 810 BC. It was Hazael who was a thorn in the side of Israel during the reigns of Jehoram, Jehu, and Jehoahaz. It was during the reign of Jehoram, Hazael murdered Ben-Hadad and fulfilled Elisha’s prophetic word regarding torment of the Israelites: “You will set fire to their fortified places, kill their young men with the sword, dash their little children to the ground, and rip open their pregnant women” (2 Kings 8:12). During the days of Jehu, the Lord used Hazael to reduce the size and importance of Israel as “Hazael overpowered the Israelites throughout their territory east of the Jordan in all the land of Gilead (the region of Gad, Reuben, and Manasseh) from Aroer by the Arnon gorge through Gilead to Bashan (2 Kings 10:32-33). Also, during the reign of Jehoahaz, Hazael continued his assault on the Israelites and as 2 Kings mentions, it was only the mercy of God that prevented Hazael from decimating Israel a hundred years prior to the time when they would ultimately fall in 722 BC.

The payment of tribute to Shalmaneser by Jehu, King of Israel is depicted in the row of panels second from the top on each side of the obelisk. One side of the panel depicts Shalmaneser beneath a parasol along with four other Assyrians accepting the tribute from Jehu who is prostrating himself on the ground before the king. The panels on the other three sides depict two Assyrian officials receiving the tribute from a total of thirteen Israelite tribute bearers. The tribute bearers wear “long garments with fringed cloaks over them, shoes with upturned toes, soft, pointed caps” and the inscription on the panel reads “I received the tribute of Jehu (Ia-u-a) (the man) of Bit-Humri: silver, gold, a golden bowl, a golden goblet, golden cups, golden buckets, tin, a staff of the king’s hand, (and) javelins.” The identification of Jehu, as “man of Omri” is incorrect because Jehu was not a descendant of Omri but was responsible for bringing the Omri dynasty to an end. But the Assyrians frequently referred to the rulers of a country by the name of the dynasty that was in control at the time of their first encounter with that country. So, Jehu is referred by them as “house of Omri” because the Omride dynasty had previously been the ruling dynasty. As it turns out, King Sargon of Assyria who deported the residents of Israel is also mentioned in the archaeological records.

Archaeology and the Old Testament - Part 2

Tel Dan Stele

On July 21, 1993, an archaeological team from the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem was doing excavations at the site of the ancient city of Dan, located at the foot of Mount Hermon in northern Israel. The team led by Avraham Biran had been toiling since early morning, sifting debris in a stone paved plaza outside what had been the city’s main gate. One of the surveyors discovered a flattened basalt stone protruding from the ground with what seemed to be Aramaic letters engraved into its surface. This stone fragment, known as fragment A, was determined to be part of a larger stele that had been smashed in antiquity. In June of the following year, the members of the team found two more inscribed stone fragments, designated B1 and B2. All the three stone fragments belonged to the same monument. Fragment B2 can be joined to the bottom of B1 and together they seem to be the left side of a portion of the stele, while fragment A is the right side. There is a gap between fragments B1 and B2. There are a few intervening letters or words missing for fragment A. B1 and B2 contain eight partial lines of text while fragment A contains thirteen partial lines. The inscription is written in Aramaic and is clearly legible with almost all words separated by a dot between the words.

The archaeological site where the city of Dan was located was inhabited at least since the fifth millennium BC and sometime during the fourth millennium the site seems to have been abandoned for nearly a thousand years after which it was settled once more during the third millennium BC. One of the most impressive remains from this period uncovered by archaeologists is a triple-arched, mud brick gate. There is also archaeological evidence that points to the destruction of the city during the twelfth century BC – destruction that was possibly related to the conquest of the area by the Israelite tribe of Dan which is mentioned in Joshua 19:40-48 and Judges 18. Around the middle of the eleventh century, the city was destroyed again but was soon rebuilt. During the ninth century, according to 1 Kings 15:16-20, Ben Hadad, King of Aram-Damascus invaded Israel and among the cities he conquered was Dan. The city recovered but it continued to face threats from Ben-Hadad and his successor Hazael until the beginning of the eighth century when the Arameans were defeated by the Assyrians. When Assyria conquered the northern kingdom of Israel in the latter half of the eighth century BC, the city of Dan fell to the Assyrians, as evidenced by a destruction layer caused by fire dated to the second half of the eighth century.

The discovery of fragment A in 1993 created a sensation because of its reference to the “House of David.” Never before had the familiar name of Judah’s ancient warrior king, an important figure of the Hebrew Bible and according to the Christian Scriptures, an ancestor of Jesus, been found in the records of antiquity outside the Bible. For long, skeptical scholars had asserted that David was merely a legend who was invented much like the rest of Israel’s biblical history by Hebrew scribes shortly after Israel’s Babylonian exile. David and other heroes of the Hebrew Bible, according to these skeptics, were about as historical as King Arthur and there was no literary criterion for believing David to be more historical than Joshua, or Joshua to be more historical than Abraham or Abraham to be more historical than Adam.

This was the first time, however, that any reference to the royal name “David” or “House of David” had been found in any inscription or extra-biblical fragments. But a minority of scholars contended that Biran and his colleague Joseph Naveh, a paleographer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem who had helped decipher the inscription, had mistranslated the fragments. One skeptic asserted that the stele did not refer to David or his dynasty but to the house of Dod – probably a Canaanite god but no one has ever heard one by that name. Some even suggested that it was intended to signify a place rather than a person or a dynasty while others asserted without offering any evidence that the inscriptions were modern forgeries that had been planted at the Dan site. But in spite of these challenges, most scholars and archaeologists have concluded that “house of David” is the most plausible reading of the text. The discovery of two additional fragments (B1 and B2) of the stele added further credibility to Biran’s initial interpretation. Those pieces contained the names of two defeated monarchs: Jehoram, king of Israel, and Ahaziah, king of Judah, both of whom ruled in the middle of the ninth century BC. Some scholars now believe that the battle commemorated on the stele may have been described in 2 Chronicles 22:5 in which Ahaziah “went with Jehoram son of King Ahab of Israel to make war against King Hazael of Aram.”

Archaeology and the Old Testament - Part 1

Merneptah Stele

The Merneptah Stele (also known as Israel Stele) - a seven-and-one-half feet slab engraved with hieroglyphics - boasts of the Egyptian pharaoh’s conquest of Libyans and peoples in Palestine, including the Israelites. This is known to be the earliest reference to Israel in extra-biblical sources and demonstrates that as of 1230 BC, the Israelites were already living in the Promised Land. From the perspective of Egyptian history, the Merneptah Stele is rather insignificant but from the standpoint of biblical history, it is one of the most important objects ever discovered. It contains the first mention of Israel outside the Bible. It was found in 1896 by Sir Flinders Petrie in western Thebes, the stele remains an important document in uncovering the earliest origins of Israel. Today it can be found in the Egyptian Museum and is unlabeled as to its historic significance for the history of the Israelites. In the fifth year of his reign, Merneptah, the thirteenth son of Ramses II, began a major military campaign into Libya. Since he ruled for ten years, beginning in 1213 BC, Merneptah’s attack on Libya would have occurred in 1208 BC. His encounter with the people identified as “Israel” likely took place prior to that, perhaps between 1211 – 1208 BC.

The Merneptah Stele records not only the defeat of the Libyans but the close of this “Hymn of Victory” contains a cryptic passage that mentions a campaign even earlier in his reign: “Carried off is Ashkelon; seized upon in Gezer; Yanoam is made as that which does not exist; Israel is laid waste, his seed is not.” Alfred Hoerth explains that the south-to-north alignment of the three cities (Yanoam is located somewhere in Galilee) is sometimes thought to imply that the confrontation with Israel took place in the north of Palestine but others are doubtful if that would be a correct inference. A lot of attention has been paid to the determinatives (signs in the text that indicate the nature of the accompanying word) after each of the city names and Israel. The determinatives following Ashkelon, Gezer, and Yanoam indicate that they were city-states. However, the determinative for Israel is used for less settled people. Therefore, shortly before 1200 BC, an Egyptian scribe identified Israel as less politically established - a picture in keeping with the situation reflected in the first half of the period of the judges. Just as the Merneptah Stele reveals the earliest reference of Israel, the Tel Dan Stele affirms the historicity of Israel’s warrior king, David.

The Church

The church: "The only cooperative society in the world that exists for the benefit of its non-members."

~Archbishop William Temple

The Reasonable Man and the Unreasonable Man

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. --George Bernard Shaw