R-A-M-P
This helpful apologetics acrostic is presented in a concise, informative way in the gospel tract, “Got Life?” by Dr. Frank Harber (http://www.gotlifeministries.com/). The letters stand for RESURRECTION, ARCHEOLOGY, MIRACLES, AND PROPHECIES.
To better appreciate archeology, think about this:
“God kept two copies of the historic records of His special dealing with and revelation to man. One was the Bible….The other was written in the ruined remains and in strange languages of those lands from whence the Bible came.”1
It is interesting that God kept two of His special records hidden until just the right time in time.
1. The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the spring of 1947, at the time just before Israel was to become a nation. If discovered sooner, her enemies might have destroyed the precious writings.
2. The Rosetta Stone was discovered during the time that Napoleon’s French army was in control of Egypt. Otherwise, it could have been lost to the world. It was a key to unlocking the early civilizations of Egypt.
In 1887 a Bedouin woman was digging in the mound of Tell el-Amarna on the east banks of the Nile in Egypt, looking for rich soil for her garden. She found inscribed tablets mostly written in Babylonian cuneiform,
even though they came from various countries, [this discovery] indicates that the Babylonian cuneiform was the one general system of writing readily understood by almost all the people of Bible Lands during that particular period [1413-1358 B.C.], and perhaps long before and after it. Thus Biblical characters could converse rather freely with the various peoples as they moved from country to country, just as depicted in the Bible.2
Since the world in 1887 had sufficient communication, travel, and wealth to accommodate extensive research, capable men and women from England, Germany, France, the United States, and other countries answered the call to excavate city mounds.
Now, after more than one hundred and sixty-five years of topographical and archaeological research, it can be rightfully said that the large army of learned men have pooled their efforts and picked up the threads of ancient life from a thousand city mounds and woven them into a pattern which agrees almost perfectly with the lives and recorded deeds of Bible characters.
Thousands of “outside” evidences which give satisfying corroboration of Scripture narratives for Jews and Christians have come to light in crucial periods when the bolstering of faith everywhere has been all-important.3
We can trace the providential hand of God in preserving the scriptures throughout generations in order to provide them for us today. Equally providential is how God always provided a patient scholar and one or more benefactors to enable the scholar to do his task when a discovery was made. Two notable examples are (1) the Rosetta Stone and (2) the Behistun Inscription.
THE ROSETTA STONE – A Frenchman, Jean Champollion, worked twenty-three years to translate the three languages on the stone while his older brother supported him. The stone was a key to unlocking secrets of ancient Egypt.
THE BEHISTUN INSCRIPTION – Since the trilingual inscription was on the cliff side of the Zagaros mountains (SW of Hamadan, Persia), an English military officer labored for four years in a suspended cage just to copy the inscription. Then he worked eighteen years to complete the decipherment of the three languages—old Persian cuneiform, Elamite (Susian), and Babylonian cuneiform. (Perhaps the British military funded his living expenses.) “With these three keys, Rawlinson and other learned men could and did unlock the treasured secrets of the vanished civilizations of Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia—lands whose people played important roles in the unfolding dramas of the Bible.”4
The inscription (dating about 515 BC) told of the exploits of Darius the Great. The Behistun Inscription is to cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone is to Egyptian hieroglyphs: the document most crucial in the decipherment of a previously lost script. It is located in the Kermanshah Province of Iran.5 The British Museum has also helped fund some of the exploration.
1 “Introduction,” Archeological Supplement of the Thompson Chain Reference Bible, prepared by G. Frederick Owen, D.D., Ed. D., p. 309.
2Ibid, p. 310.
3Ibid.
4Ibid.
5http://www.crystalinks.com/cyrustablets.html, accessed 5/9/17.
Below: (1) The Behistun Inscription in modern Iran. (2) Dottie in British Museum in London, England, Nov., 2008, (thanks to arrangements by Charles) next to Rosetta Stone display. When I was a Spanish teacher, I used to use Rosetta Stone example to introduce verb endings in Spanish as key to unlocking the Spanish language.