Interview
Dr. Robert Cargill
Editor of BAR
BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGY REVIEW MAGAZINE
Ron Way:
Hello everyone. My name is Ron Way. I'm going to be your host today on AuthorTalk, Rising Light Media, and what a show we have for you. Foremost is the discovery announced by our guest in his magazine last week of the actual signature seal from the Prophet Isaiah. It was found, get this folks, literally within feet of the earlier discovered seal of the King Hezekiah. What are the odds? It has been buried for almost 3,000 years, and today you're going to hear all about it. Folks, you're in for a rare treat.
I'm interviewing a very talented man, Dr. Robert Cargill, who is the editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review Magazine, known as BAR, B-A-R. Dr. Cargill has so many credits to his name that if I tried to list them, I'd have no time for an interview. Yet, I will make a humble attempt to list just enough of them to impress you and make you sit up and listen to the amazing story this man is about to tell you. Dr. Cargill is an archeologist and an author. His latest being, The Cities That Built the Bible. He has also authored a 3D virtual reality reconstruction of the archeological remains of Qumran, near where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered entitled, Qumran Through (Real) Time. He has hosted television shows, appeared on ABC, CNN, Discovery, The History Channel, and Nat Geo. Okay, you get the picture now? Let's meet the man. Welcome to AuthorTalk. Robert, how are you?
Robert Cargill:
Doing well, Ron. Thanks for having me.
Ron Way:
Oh, it's my pleasure. I know that I have more questions than we'll have time for, but I have to start with the headliner. The Isaiah signature seal, which is part of a two parts issue that your magazine is putting out, Biblical Archaeology Review. If you'll allow me, I want to take this piecemeal. I want to explore this discovery sequentially. Let's set the stage for our folks and tell them about how amazing the finding of this little clay seal is because this clay seal brings to life some of the biblical stories and characters from the Old Testament.
The bible records in 2 Kings that King Hezekiah trusted the Prophet Isaiah's counsel to protect Jerusalem from the Assyrian siege. For those of us who are not familiar with the Old Testament, can you tell us who the prophet Isaiah was and how he fit into the history of Israel, and then I'll ask you about the archeology of it all.
Robert Cargill:
Sure. The Prophet Isaiah is one of, if not the most popular or well-known of the Hebrew writing prophets. There's Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Those guys are pretty popular, but Isaiah is quoted more times in the New Testament than any other prophet, and there are more copies of Isaiah's writings among the Dead Sea Scrolls than all of the other prophetic texts combined. So, this was an incredibly popular prophet, and according to the biblical tradition ... Again, we don't have any at least prior to this discovery, and again we have to talk about whether or not this is the signature of the Prophet Isaiah, but we don't have any archeology prior to this. All we have is the biblical tradition and according to that biblical text, it shows that the King Hezekiah relied heavily on the Prophet Isaiah for counsel and this was not unique.
We know that kings often relied on prophets as senior advisers, as counselors. We know that for instance, King David had the Prophet Nathan. Now, Nathan wasn't necessarily a writing prophet, but he was the court prophet. He worked there in the court and David would go to him and ask him questions, and remember the stories how Nathan revealed to David that God knew about what he had done with Bathsheba, etc., etc.
Ron Way:
Right.
Robert Cargill:
When crises occurred, the king could go to his secretaries, and he could go to his scribes, and he could go to all of his counselors, but what he could also do is call on the prophet and of course, the most famous prophet at this time according to the bible was Isaiah. So, a lot of the text that we have especially in Isaiah 36 through 39 and the parallel text in 2 Kings 18 through 20, are these problems that Jerusalem and Hezekiah was having with Assyrians. They would come in and threaten to sack Jerusalem, and then the text says that Hezekiah paid him off once.
Then, they came back again and encircled the city, and this time he didn't know what to do and he prays to God, and the text says that Isaiah responded and said basically don't surrender, and he sent a prophecy. So from the text, from the biblical text, what we appear to have is Hezekiah relied on Isaiah like a court prophet. That doesn't mean that Isaiah was only in the court like say Nathan was. Isaiah appeared to be able to come and go. He was a prophet that wandered the countryside, but let's say he had walked-in privileges. He was an adviser to the king and that was the relationship. He was a trusted adviser to King Hezekiah, and he was incredibly popular at the time.
Ron Way:
It's a story we've all heard especially as children. We were reading these bible stories about this, and it's kind of an interesting thing. I picked on a keyword that you said he ... What did he send or wrote this prophecy, and I'll get to that in a little while?
Robert Cargill:
That's right. You recall that in Isaiah 37, 2 Kings 19, when the Assyrians besieged Jerusalem ... Obviously, Hezekiah did something that the Assyrians didn't like. He rebelled. He quit paying tribute.
Ron Way:
Right.
Robert Cargill:
Hezekiah for all of his good deeds that the bible credit to him, he was basically a vassal of the Assyrians, until one day he decided to rebel. He quit paying tribute. He said, "We're going to be independent." Of course, the Assyrians don't like it when you do that. So, they sent the army. They besieged the city. You have this almost comical exchange between the Rabshakeh, the representative of the Assyrian army leader down below, and you got the representatives of King Hezekiah up inside the Jerusalem city walls, and they're basically saying you need to surrender.
Ron Way: Yelling at each other.
Robert Cargill:
They're saying, "Yeah, we're going to kill you." Then, you have this one funny thing where Hezekiah's counselors up there say, "Please don't speak in Hebrew. You're scaring all the people. Speak in Aramaic. We can understand that." The Rabshakeh's like, "Of course. We want to speak in Hebrew. We're trying to scare your people. We want you to surrender," right?
Ron Way: :
Right.
Robert Cargill:
So, we have that episode and it's during that episode that he tells them, "We're coming for you," and Hezekiah has a decision to make. They send him the surrender letter, and Hezekiah either has to surrender to Assyria or he's got to withstand it and face the consequences, which is the Assyrians will come in and sack the city. So, he takes the surrender letter and lays it out on the altar and prays to God, and the text says that Isaiah sent to King Hezekiah. It doesn't say that he came. It doesn't say that he came, and he couldn't get in because the city is under siege. So, the idea was that Isaiah probably wrote out some kind of response.
Ron Way:
Here's where we're going to get the seal, but you're going a little fast to paint this complete picture because you are an archeologist and that's what the whole magazine's about is, the archeology discover these fascinating stories, but it's very difficult to prove them extra biblical.
Robert Cargill:
That's right.
Ron Way:
What they're trying to do in archeology is prove, disprove, in a way explore the same timeframe. Now, I want to take you if you would be kind enough, I know where it was found and it's fascinating. Most Christians know about the Temple Mount. You've all heard of it because that's where King Herod's temple. This is way before that where Jesus taught, overturn the money changers, etc., but now we want to go back even further, some 700 years even further back in time to the first temple period.
Bob, you're an archeologist. Give us a bird's eye tour of the ridge line running down from the Temple Mount, which is there today if you go to Jerusalem through the original City of David, King David. Then, tell us all about the general archeological excavations that has been going on there, really for some decades now.
Robert Cargill:
Sure. Jerusalem, modern old city Jerusalem is essentially two hills. There's the western hill, what is today called Mount Zion, which is interesting because in antiquity at the time of let's say David, Solomon, Hezekiah, the eastern hill was called Mt. Zion, but today if you get in Tel Aviv Airport, you say, "Take me to Mt. Zion," they'll take you to the western hill. There's the western hill and then there's the eastern hill, which is called today the City of David. Jerusalem was basically the City of David. It was that eastern hill, and the City of David is controversial today because it is on the eastern side of what we call the Green Line, the 1947 borders that drawn by the UN. So, this would make it part of East Jerusalem that was then taken by Jerusalem during the Six-Day War. [crosstalk 00:10:42]
Ron Way:
Taken by the Israelis, yes.
Robert Cargill:
By the Israelis. I'm sorry, by the Israelis during the Six Days War. So, there are many obviously Arabs, Palestinians, but also many Israelis, also many Americans who sympathized with the Palestinians, with the Arabs who say, "Hey, the Israeli shouldn't be digging in the City of David because that's technically part of the West Bank, or what would be Palestine, or East Jerusalem." Then, there's those who say, "Well, no. Israel took that in a battle and they control it, and they're going to excavate it." So, anything that comes out of this region, the City of David is controversial.
Ron Way:
Right.
Robert Cargill:
When you overlay on top of that, the fact that some of these digs are ... I would be careful, are outsourced if you will to organizations that have shall we say Zionist overtones?
They are very confessional organizations that want to ... That very openly talk about, "Let's make this part of town Jewish again. Let's take this back for Israel." That makes it even more controversial because now you're not just looking at political, now you're looking at ethnic and religious. So, you've got all of those tensions, but that's what's going on, on this eastern hill. So, you start at the bottom of the hill where the Kidron Valley and Gehinnom Valley, Gehenna come together, and then this would have been where the people lived. Of course, as with most places in antiquity as you worked up the hill, you get towards the palace where the king would live. Of course on the acropolis, on the top of the hill, you have the temple.
So, for those of your listeners who have been to Jerusalem, seen pictures, we always see Herod the Great's big Temple Mount, that big retaining wall that he built up there. Imagine that not being there and where the Dome of the Rock now sits, that being a very small temple. That would have been the temple. Then just down below that to the south in what we call the Ophel, so just outside the Herodian Temple Mount walls, that would have been the royal palace complex. It's there that this little seal and the Hezekiah seal were discovered in this palace complex not too far from the temple.
Ron Way:
This of course, leading up to discovery of those two different seals. It come from the same time period and they're discovered ... This is amazing part. They were discovered different timeframe for archeologically for you guys, modern archeologist discovered them two different time periods, but one of few years ago, but this one is just discovered about 10 feet from where they discovered the King Hezekiah's, right?
Robert Cargill:
Right. So, they were ... The Hezekiah seal and the purported Isaiah seal are discovered about 10 feet away from each other in this Ophel excavation by Dr. Eilat Mazar of Hebrew University, and she's been digging there for a decade at least. She found these two seals in 2009 and has been researching them ever since. She announced the Hezekiah seal in 2015, and then just announced with us this controversial and yet very fascinating seal that may be the seal impression of Isaiah the prophet.
Ron Way:
Are these from the palace area where ... The 10 feet apart, is that in where the old palace used to be?
Robert Cargill:
Yeah. It would be in what we would call the palace complex.
Ron Way:
Okay.
Robert Cargill:
So, if you think about the White House, it's not necessarily the residence, but it's in the larger ... the complex there. Dr. Mazar thinks it's outside of what she calls the royal bakery, which would have been where you would bring in kind of the central shipping and receiving where you would bring in goods and materials. It's not the mail room. It's where they're doing some cooking. It's where they're bringing in lots of goods that would have been sealed.
Ron Way:
Got it.
Robert Cargill:
She found lots of seals. She found a couple dozen seals. Seal, pardon me, I keep saying seals. She keep found a couple dozen seal impressions in this area, and among them are the Hezekiah seal impression and the Isaiah seal impression.
Ron Way:
Now, it starts to come together because as you said, let's assume that Hezekiah is sending his prophecy or maybe several of them for what we know this great prophecy. He had the seal that was being delivered for him, am I right? Then, he would have had the seal. The seal of those days was something that guaranteed that it came from him. Is that right?
Robert Cargill:
Yeah. If Isaiah's not inside of Jerusalem when the city is put under siege, and Hezekiah says basically, "What do I do? Should I surrender?" which he's done in the past. Should I pay off the Assyrians and give them what they want and live to fight another day, or should I stand up and fight? That's what he's basically asking. Should I give in to the Assyrians or should I stand up and fight? How was Isaiah who's not in the city going to get a message to him and how are you going to be able to authenticate that message?
So, the idea is that Isaiah would write a prophecy, or have it inscribed, or have his assistant write it down for him, and then they have to smuggle it into the ... They have to get it into the city. How would you know that this came from Isaiah? Well, he would use his ID. He would use his seal to impress on the clay. That's how you would know that this is his impression. Of course, we're speculating that it happened to be a writing. It could have been that Isaiah was paying a tax. It could have been Isaiah was buying something to eat, and he used his seal to create an impression that served as a receipt. People used seals and seal impressions for all kinds of things.
The idea is, however it came about, we clearly had the seal impression that's got the name Yesha’yahu. That's got the name Isaiah on it. The question is, the big 10,000-dollar question is, is this the seal impression of that Isaiah, of Isaiah the Prophet, or is it the seal impression of another Isaiah?
Ron Way:
Right, but let me ask you in this part that bothered me.
Robert Cargill:
Right.
Ron Way:
When I saw the seal and incidentally you've got it ... It's right on the website here just where you're listening. You can see a picture of it and of course you can get the magazine, and hopefully you'll subscribe to it because this is where you're going to see it, not only this month but the next issue also, second part two. Here's what bothers me. Would it have been unusual or braggadocios really to sign a letter to any other document that way? I mean, that would be like me introducing because it says, "The prophet." It doesn't say just Ron Way, be like me saying, "I'm signing this thing, Ron Way the Prophet, which is kind of ..." Wow! I mean, would he really have said that in history? That's a title I would expect to be bestowed on people by others, not themselves saying I am.
Robert Cargill:
Right. It's a good question because when I was first sent this article, the story how we at Biblical Archaeology Review got the story. We wrote Dr. Mazar who's a good friend of Hershel Shanks. Again, this special double issue is essentially a festschrift for Hershel who retired, and I took his role as editor of the magazine. So, we put together a special issue and asked all of his friends, many major archeologists in Israel to write a couple of reflections. So, if you get the issue, you'll go through there and you'll read these funny stories. Some of them tease Hershel a little bit, or tell a funny story of Hershel, what he meant to the field of biblical archeology.
When we called Eilat Mazar, she said, "Boy, did you call on a good day. How about if I give you something we were going to publish somewhere else? What if we give to you and that's my gift to Hershel?" She told me what it was and I said, "Yes, please. We'd be happy to book with that." So, we just happened to call on the right day and she sent it to me, and I'm a natural skeptic. I'm an archeologist. I'm a scientist. I saw this and I'm like, "No, this can't be." Right?
Ron Way:
Right.
Robert Cargill:
So, I started reading through it. It's very clear, and by the way, everything that I'm saying now she says in the article. So, I applaud Dr. Mazar for taking her time. She didn't run out, hold a press conference and sell tickets. She didn't say, "We found the seal impression of Isaiah the prophet. She says everything in the article that I'm saying right now. She says, "It's very clear that the name is Yesha’yahu. It's very clear that it's Isaiah. Nobody seriously doubts that it says Isaiah. The question is what's the name on the bottom register, the bottom line says. What you can see are three letters: Nun, which is an N, a Bet, which is a B or V, and then a Yodh, which is an I or a Y.
So, you've got the first three letters of the word prophet, navi. The question is, is there an Alef? In the left-hand side there, appears to be broken, or smudged, or something. So, the question is, was there originally an Alef to the left of that word? If there was, then you very clearly got Isaiah Prophet, which would have been the name Isaiah, and you got his title, prophet, which was what would be what you would expect someone who has walk-in privileges, a counselor to the king. That's what you would expect a seal to say, his name and his title.
Ron Way:
So, it really was a title in the royal court. He was the royal prophet. Is that what you say?
Robert Cargill:
It wasn't necessarily the royal prophet. He was a prophet. You raise another question, very, very interesting question is we have a version, the Bible, the app that says, "At this time, prophets weren't called navis, they were called roehs. They were called seers," but we do at this time begin to see the word navi appear. So, the word navi is beginning to appear about this time. So the question is, we're they using the word navi, and if they were, is this the title being granted him? Then of course, the question then is how do you spell navi? Do you spell it with the Yodh or not, because at this time as well in the Hebrew language and this is a little bit of a technical thing.
Ron Way:
Right.
Robert Cargill:
There are certain letters that can serve as vowels, and early in Hebrew you don't have them, or either very, very rare; and later in Hebrew, they're incredibly common. We call them matres lectionis or plain a vowels, vowel letters. Right around this 8th, 7th century is when they begin to appear a little more frequently in inscriptions. So, you're at this transitional period where we're missing the Alef at the end. If it's there, we might have the seal of Isaiah prophet, and if but it's not there and you do have this letter Yodh there, so the question is if it's not Isaiah the prophet, who is it?
That's what scholars are debating, and let me just say this. I'm incredibly proud of Biblical Archeology Review, of the article that Dr. Mazar wrote and of the way we publish this. We didn't declare that we had found Isaiah's seal or signature. We asked the question, is this what this is? Then, we went through and we said, "Here are the reasons why it could be, and then here, all the technical reasons why it might not be." Then, we said at the end, "We're not sure."
What I've been very pleased with is, all of these scholars, these luminaries, these very, very prominent scholars of Hebrew language, Hebrew Bible or Semitics, Northwest Semitic languages have been on Facebook, and on blogs, and have been debating all of these very technical issues based on an article published in BAR.
Ron Way:
Right.
Robert Cargill:
Going back and forth, and if we can do that with every ... We can't do with every issue, but if we can do that with Biblical Archaeology Review. If we can get rid of all the sensationalism that you see in the media, we can get rid of all of the, "Hey, we found the nails of the cross," and "Hey, we found this and that, Noah's Ark and stuff." If we can ask real archeological questions, "We found this thing. It appears to say this. Here are the reasons why it might. Here are the reasons why it might not. What do you think?" If we can inform the public and inform the readers like you do with your listeners on your show that I think we're doing a public service in the pages of Biblical Archaeology Review, and that's what we did with this article.
Ron Way:
Well, that's his opinion. Now, I'll tell you that I think the odds are that it is. What are the odds that you would have a seal 10 feet away from the king's seal with a person that is associated with the king and it's Bob Smith instead, instead of Bob the prophet that we all know about and talk about it. The odds are for me are just overwhelming, but people can draw their own. That's what the beauty of this magazine is folks. Before we run out of time, and I got to tell you, we're over time. So, I'm going to run over time. It's my fault because I can't stop you. I just can't. I'm listening to you.
So, before we run out of total time the one I get cut off, would you talk about your magazine just other than this article? Just tell them what we find in this, month after month, year after year about the Dead Sea Scrolls. If it wasn't for you, we wouldn't know about them. I know that you aren't the scholars that translated them, and or the ones that took the pictures that got snuck out. I interviewed them at the time, but my God, in Qumran, you did a digital version. I don't even know what that's about. I never heard that until I read the magazine.
Robert Cargill:
Right.
Ron Way:
I want to know about that. I have so many questions. Okay, just pick one.
Robert Cargill:
Sure. So, about 42 years ago, Hershel Shanks founded Biblical Archaeology Review and the reason he did so, was he found that there was a need for the public to be informed about archeological news coming out of Israel, and Lebanon, and Jordan, and Egypt, and the Greater Near East, but of the areas that are associated with the Bible and archeology. The public doesn't always understand. They're not specialists. They're not technical. They don't read eight languages, and they didn't spend 12 years in grad school. They want to know reliable, credible information, not stuff that's being sensationalized and pushed for purposes of selling books and tickets. Let's put it that way.
Ron Way:
Right.
Robert Cargill:
So, what Hershel started doing was he put together Biblical Archaeology Review, and he got the guys, the men and women who were actually excavating these sites to say, "Hey, write me a publicly accessible summary of what you're doing. What are you doing? What are you looking for? Why is this significant?" So, archeologists in the Near East began sending him articles with really good pictures and this is the one thing. This is what attracted me to BAR when I was in grad schools. If I needed a photograph of something, I would go to BAR because colored pictures are expensive and journals won't really print them.
Ron Way:
Oh, I steal your photos online all the time.
Robert Cargill:
That's right. Colored photos, and especially if you're a teacher, or if you're teaching a Bible study, or if you want an illustration, this is the place to go. You go to the Biblical Archaeology Society archive, to our library, and you can sign up. You can subscribe, and you can get all the photos we've ever had on any of the magazines. You can download them. You can use them in your Bible study, in your PowerPoint, your book club, whatever you want to do. Hershel found this niche. He found this need that people wanted. They wanted good credible archeological information from the people actually doing the digging, but that they could understand.
That was Hershel's ... That's what gained him the trust of his readers was, he was giving them good information that they could understand, and he wasn't in the guild. Here's one of the big differences between Hershel and me. I'm a professor at the University of Iowa. I have my PhD and my three master's degrees, and Hershel was a lawyer. So, Hershel wasn't a scholar, and he was very proud of this. He says I'm not an archaeologist. I'm not a scholar. I'm a journalist. I'm a lawyer. I want you to ... I'm going to investigate things, and when he didn't get an answer that he liked, he would go ask someone else and that bugs certain scholars.
Ron Way:
Right.
Robert Cargill:
So, he rubs some people the wrong way but he wanted answers, and when he didn't get an answer he liked, he kept pushing, and he kept pushing. Of course, one of the articles in this latest issue is by Marty Abegg about the role, the significant role that Hershel Shanks played in liberating the Dead Sea Scrolls and making them publicly available for study, because up until that point they were very, very hard to get access to.
Ron Way:
And the State of Israel sued him.
Robert Cargill:
Well, one scholar sued him because among these scrolls that he had published was something that the scholar had been working on and won. The scholar won, and Hershel published an issue and put the guy's picture, and the guy's name, and said this guy is the victor. He sued me and he won, but the greater wall was that Hershel wanted to make sure that the public, that his readers had access to the truth, to the material that was coming out of Israel. I must admit, I benefited from that because I then turned around and wrote a dissertation on the archeology and on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Archeology of Qumran and the Scrolls. This was an entire field of study that was in part made possible by Hershel Shanks and Biblical Archaeology Review.
So, he's have this wonderful career. People have this love him or hate him opinion of him. His readers love him. A lot of scholars can't stand him, but that's because he, part of his role is being a thorn on the side of these archeologists, try to get them to publish in a timely fashion, but at the end of the day we, I think we can all appreciate what Hershel did for the public. He brought the news from Israel, from the Near East, from Jordan, from Egypt to the US, to their readers, to his readers in responsible fashion.
It's my hope as one who has training in this field to build on this legacy, to build on this foundation, and to continue to bring the next generation of archaeologists and scholars. My generation, I'm 45, to bring my generation of scholars, the next archeologists men and women, who are going to be excavating the Near East, and to get them to continue to provide these stories for Biblical Archaeology Review.
Ron Way:
It's an amazing story. Fortunately, I was there during all of that period and was talking about it on ABC at that time, interviewing some of the scholars that actually snuck out and published the photographs if you will, and then BAR put it out there for everybody to read in. You're right, he lost, but we're at the gain.
Robert Cargill:
That's right.
Ron Way:
We all got access to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Tell us just a bit about Qumran itself. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the caves that surrounded this area and that just to the west of the Dead Sea.
Robert Cargill:
Right.
Ron Way:
There was buildings there. Just two minutes, just give us a quick review of what was there and why, and how do we get a look at what you did?
Robert Cargill:
Sure. The Qumran is one of the more controversial sites in the Near East for a number of reasons, but one being that the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in these caves, the history of their discovery. How they were discovered is an entertaining story. Several people have written on it. I attempted my best to summarize it in my book Cities that Built the Bible. The site that was excavated was excavated by Roland de Vaux and Gerald Lankester Harding who was working for the Jordanian Antiquities Authority, and de Vaux was a Dominican monk. They began excavating this site and began interpreting it essentially as a monastery, right?
Ron Way:
Correct.
Robert Cargill:
He was a monk, and he was interpreting it with a language that he knew. Of course, you end up with this what we call the Qumran-Essene hypothesis that is that whoever it is, the people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls were the Essenes and they built Qumran. You had this hypothesis that from its earliest point was challenged by scholars. Scholars way back at the beginning were saying not necessarily, but this story was so popular that it grew, and grew, and grew until several different people in different periods of time challenged this story.
Now, the story is once again being challenged. I challenged it. Other scholars have challenged it over time. So, the question is back. Who wrote these things? Again I would say, I don't ever say that the Essenes wrote the scrolls. I think that they're the best candidates. I think, but I call them the Qumranites or the Qumran Sectarians, whoever it was that was responsible for writing the sectarian literature. The question is how does one interpret the archeological information of this, of Qumran? Scholars have debated it. Several prominent scholars have offered reconstructions.
I came along at a time that virtual reality was the new technology, so I attempted to apply a methodology of virtual reconstruction to the site. I did my best to apply good methods and to ... Then, I offered my own reconstruction and that's where people ... Some people love my reconstruction, some people hate it. Some people say, "Oh, this is good," and some people say, "No, you're dead wrong," and that's every archeologist's right to do so. I think what will live on out of my research is the fact that you can actually bring in virtual reality and 3D modeling to use it to test different reconstructions, to test different archeological theories. So, that's what I did my dissertation on back in 2008. From that, I got dragged into of course, the blood sport that is the archeology of Qumran-
Ron Way:
Yes.
Robert Cargill:
... which has led to ... As you read in the news last week, the Supreme Court turned down, declined to take up a case that involved some pretty nasty scholars behaving badly involving the Dead Sea Scrolls. [Lawrence Schiffman 00:36:30] always like to call it the curse of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Any scholar undertaking any sort of research on the Dead Sea Scrolls, there is this legacy of ... There's this long history of, it's half of it is comical and half of it very mean. When you mix it all together, you get this lawsuits, and there's trials, and that's what we get. The Dead Sea Scrolls, the most important archeological discovery of the last century.
Ron Way:
Right.
Robert Cargill:
It changes the way we read the Bible.
Ron Way:
Absolutely.
Robert Cargill:
So it's important, and one of the most important things that Hershel Shanks did with Biblical Archaeology Review is help assist in bringing those scrolls to the public.
Ron Way:
Correct, and fascinating story it is. You didn't tell us, is your reconstruction available online anywhere?
Robert Cargill:
It has been in the past, and then websites move around and changed.
Ron Way:
Right. Well if it is, we'll communicate that in email and then I'll post it for everybody if you can find it.
Robert Cargill: Yeah. It used to be on UCLA's websites and they re-did all their websites, and I don't know if the link broke or whatever.
Okay. That sounds great. So, you can tell I'm very excited about this. I have been for two decades or more, almost three decades, and I want to tell everyone that Bob is the editor of the magazine again that I recommend that everyone should subscribe to. If you're at all interested in the Bible, the Holy Land, archeology, religion, I would tell you that I have been a subscriber since early 90's when I met the previous editor Hershel Shanks at a convention and interviewed him on the ABC show.
I switched to the tablet format, just they have it all. You can get a tablet format, which is the way I take the subscription, or you can get the old-fashioned kind in the mail. You can get your magazine, but in any case you should subscribe to it. It's not expensive and it's amazing. It's just amazing. That's all I can say. You're a nonprofit organization, right?
Robert Cargill:
We're a nonprofit and we take a non-denominational, nonsectarian approach and that was Hershel's ... He founded the magazine that way, and that's important to me as well. We're going to present the archeology to our readers, and then we present the biblical text to our readers, and we never tell anybody what to believe. What we do is we present the biblical text when they're relevant, and we present the archeology that was discovered, and then we allow our readers to take that information and use it as they see fit.
Ron Way:
I was going to ask you Bob to tell people how to subscribe, but the easiest way really is to look at the website that you're on right now listening to the interview, and click on the image of the magazine below to the left of the interview. It will take you right to the subscription page. There's another image below that even, where if you click you can get a free ebook. It's about the top ten biblical discoveries, right?
Robert Cargill:
That's right. You can go to biblicalarchaeology.org or you can click right there on the button. We have free ebooks. This issue, the latest issue, our festschrift to Herschel is actually available for a limited time for free to view online. So, if you go there and you click on the issue right now, you can actually read it, and if you like what you see, then you're welcome to go over and subscribe.
Ron Way:
Right. Absolutely, ladies and gentlemen. Bob, any last words to our listeners because we are fully into over 40, say four minutes. So, we've got a two-episode interview here, but any last minute words that you want to pass on to everybody before we quit?
Now, Ron, I just want to thank you for having me. Look, if your listeners are as smart as the questions that you've asked me today, then I commend you and your listeners. You've got a smart bunch of people here because what I gave you today, it was a rather technical assessment of what was discovered. So, you're asking all the right questions, and in the coming months, I think we'll find out a little bit more about whether or not this is the actual signature of Isaiah the prophet.
I can't wait, and yes, our listeners come from all over the world including some of the Arabic states too. Quite a few Muslims that listen as well, which is great because it gains inter-understanding between us, and that's what we really need folks.
Robert Cargill:
That's right, and that's important. That's an important part of what we do at Biblical Archaeology Review is we very much try to bring together all of the different peoples of the region, all of the different face of the region, and talk about the biblical lands and the archeology that's going on in them.
Ron Way:
That's correct. That's it folks for today, and I hope you enjoyed digging around with us in the past. I want to thank you, Robert Cargill, for being our guest today on AuthorTalk, Rising Light Media. I look forward to our next visit when we can talk more about your own book. Thank you, Robert.
Robert Cargill:
Hey Ron, thanks. It was great working with you. I look forward to it again.
Ron Way:
Thank you everyone, for listening to another fascinating interview here on AuthorTalk where you hear some of the brightest and most unusual authors of our time. Next week will be the start of a two-part series with the famous Biblical scholar, John Dominic Crossan. Don't miss it. While you are on the website right now, fill in your name and email address on the pop up that you see on the screen. Don't be annoyed, it goes away if you don't, but that way we can stay in touch, and we'll notify you each time that we post a new material on AuthorTalk so that you can hear another fascinating interview. Until then, this is Ron Way, your humble host, I remain faithfully yours.
