Is there any confirmation of Biblical events from written sources
outside the Bible?
The most documented Biblical event is the
world-wide flood described in Genesis 6-9. A number of Babylonian documents
have been discovered which describe the same flood. The Sumerian King List, for
example, lists kings who reigned for long periods of time. Then a great flood
came. Following the flood, Sumerian kings ruled for much shorter periods of
time. This is the same pattern found in the Bible. Men had long life spans
before the flood and shorter life spans after the flood. There are more than 16
fragments and one nearly complete copy of the Sumerian King List found at
different places at different times. The first fragment was discovered in the
temple library at Nippur, Iraq,
at the turn of the century and was published in 1906. The most complete copy,
the Weld-Blundell prism, was purchased on the antiquities market shortly after
World War I and is now in the Ashmolean
Museum in Oxford,
England. The 11th tablet
of the Gilgamesh Epic speaks of an ark, animals taken on the ark, birds sent
out during the course of the flood, the ark landing on a mountain, and a
sacrifice offered after the ark landed.
The Story of Adapa
tells of a test for immortality involving food, similar to the story of Adam
and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
Sumerian tablets record the confusion of
language as we have in the Biblical account of the Tower of Babel
(Genesis 11:1-9). There was a golden age when all mankind spoke the same language.
Speech was then confused by the god Enki, lord of
wisdom. The Babylonians had a similar account in which the gods destroyed a
temple tower and "scattered them abroad and made strange their
speech."
Other examples of extra-Biblical
confirmation of Biblical events:
- Campaign into Israel
by Pharaoh Shishak (1 Kings 14:25-26), recorded on the walls of the Temple
of Amun
in Thebes, Egypt.
- Revolt of Moab
against Israel
(2 Kings 1:1; 3:4-27), recorded on the Mesha
Inscription.
- Fall of Samaria
(2 Kings 17:3-6, 24; 18:9-11) to Sargon II, king of Assyria,
as recorded on his palace walls.
- Defeat of Ashdod
by Sargon II (Isaiah 20:1), as recorded on his palace walls.
- Campaign of the Assyrian king Sennacherib against Judah
(2 Kings 18:13-16), as recorded
on the Taylor Prism.
- Siege of Lachish
by Sennacherib (2 Kings 18:14,
17), as recorded on the Lachish
reliefs.
- Assassination of Sennacherib by his own sons (2 Kings
19:37), as recorded in the
annals of his son Esarhaddon.
- Fall of Nineveh
as predicted by the prophets Nahum and Zephaniah (2:13-15), recorded on the Tablet of Nabopolasar.
- Fall of Jerusalem
to Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon
(2 Kings 24:10-14), as recorded in the Babylonian Chronicles.
- Captivity of Jehoiachin,
king of Judah,
in Babylon (2 Kings 24:15-16),
as recorded on the Babylonian Ration Records.
- Fall of Babylon
to the Medes and Persians (Daniel 5:30-31),
as recorded on the Cyrus Cylinder.
- Freeing of captives in Babylon
by Cyrus the Great (Ezra 1:1-4; 6:3-4), as recorded on the Cyrus Cylinder.
- The existence of Jesus Christ as recorded by
Josephus, Suetonius, Thallus, Pliny
the Younger, the Talmud, and Lucian.
- Forcing Jews to leave Rome
during the reign of Claudius (A.D. 41-54) (Acts 18:2), as recorded by
Suetonius.