Attacks on the veracity of the Bible down through the centuries have been commonplace. Perhaps one of the areas where historians have leveled their harshest criticisms is in the area of the existence of ancient biblical cities and tribes. As I shared in an earlier devotion entitled, “Nineveh and Biblical Archaeology,” up until Nineveh’s archaeological discovery in 1847 by Henry Layard, historians mocked the Bible as historically inaccurate since except for the Bible, there was no mention of a city called Nineveh from any external sources to the Bible.
Well, another example of how archaeology has come to the aide in defense of the Bible concerns the nation of the Hittites. The website, Got Questions, shared the following observation: “The critics reasoned that, since they had no archaeological evidence of a Hittite civilization, it must never have existed, and the Bible must perforce be wrong. However, many archaeological discoveries, beginning in 1876, have since proved that the Hittites were a powerful people in the 15th and 16th centuries B.C.”1
In fact, the Bible mentions the Hittite civilization approximately 50 times. One such example can be found in (2 Samuel 11:6): “So David sent this word to Joab: ‘Send me Uriah the Hittite.’ And Joab sent him to David.” The Hittites were adversaries to the Jewish nation for centuries. They were also one of the nations that the children of Israel needed to conquer when entering the promised land.2
Up until the beginning of the twentieth century only the Bible mentioned that the nation of the Hittites existed. Historians were quick to use archaeology against the Bible since this discipline had completed failed to find any evidence of their existence. All this changed in the year 1906.
Apologetics Press gives us the details: “However, the year 1906 saw many people changing their minds about both the Hittites and the Bible. An archaeologist, Hugo Winckler, visited a city in Turkey named Boghaz-Koy. Upon excavating portions of the city, he found a breathtaking number of human artifacts – including five temples, many sculptures, and a fortified castle. But more important, he found a huge storeroom filled with over 10,000 clay tablets. After completing the difficult task of deciphering the tablets, it was announced to the world that the Hittites had been found.”3
In fact, we know today that the Hittites were indeed very real people and once again the Bible has proven to be fact, not fiction. Thanks to this and other archaeological finds we have amassed so much information on the Hittite civilization that you can now earn a PhD in Hittitology from the University of Chicago. Archaeology and the Bible have long been friends in establishing that the Bible is indeed a first-rate book of history!
1 Got Questions, https://www.gotquestions.org/Hittites.html
2 Apologetics Press, http://www.apologeticspress.org/APContent.aspx?category=13&article=888
3 Apologetics Press, http://www.apologeticspress.org/APContent.aspx?category=13&article=888