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THE BIBLE UNEARTHED: THE MAKING OF A RELIGION -- ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY & SCREENCAP GALLERY |
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but has an "S" shape outline,
they went like this, and met here. They could have cut one next to the other, and one above the other -- two types of errors -- and they avoided both of them. And we still don't have an adequate explanation of how this was done.
[Israel Finkelstein] But we have the inscription of the two groups working with the axes and hewing the rock, and then they meet, and the great moment when they hear each other.
[Narrator] Carved into the rock, this inscription in ancient Hebrew, commemorates the meeting of the two teams.
The Bible, IT SEEMS, also refers to this event in the Book of Kings.
[Neil Asher Silberman, Centre for Archaeological Research -- ENAME] This ancient Hebrew inscription is really one of the most important pieces of evidence we have for the rise of Judah as a kingdom.
So it represents both the engineering that was possible by the kingdom, and also the attempt by the kingdom to record that act in an official way, in an official inscription. And so this really brings us to a time when the kingdom was centralized, when Jerusalem was a city, was administered by royal officials that had the power and the level of literacy to record their achievements in their history.
[Narrator] In this way, a tiny kingdom lost in the hills of Judah, became A GENUINE STATE IN A VERY SHORT PERIOD OF TIME.
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