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Uncovering the Bible’s Hidden Backstory: Archaeology brings Scripture to life.
Amanda Hope Haley makes biblical archaeology accessible and faith-affirming, showing how archaeological discoveries deepen our understanding of Scripture rather than disproving it.
• Harvard-educated biblical archaeologist specializing in Iron Age history
• Biblical archaeology contextualizes Scripture by helping modern readers understand ancient cultural settings
• Archaeological discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls provide crucial third perspectives on biblical text discrepancies
• David wasn't a weak child but a skilled warrior proficient with tactical sling weapons
• Goliath was likely about six-and-a-half feet tall according to the oldest reliable texts
• Understanding your Bible's translation sources provides important interpretive context
• Archaeological evidence consistently confirms biblical descriptions of places, cultures and artifacts
• Faith requires trusting God with what we cannot see or comprehend
Amanda's book "Stones Still Speak" releases September 23rd. You can find her podcast "The Red-Haired Archaeologist" wherever you listen to podcasts, and connect with her on social media at Amanda Hope Haley.
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Well, I am excited to have this conversation with Amanda Hope Haley. She is an author of a new book called Stones Still Speak. We'll tell you what that means. She studied biblical archaeology and she has her degree from Harvard. So I'm going to be honest with you. I received a message from her publicist who said who Amanda was and what her book was.
Speaker 1:I've talked a lot on this podcast. I love the Bible. I read it every day, but ultimately, a biblical archaeology really felt academically challenging to me. So I'm telling you this right now, so that you're going to hang and stick with this podcast, because I said, okay, stephanie, you could learn something new. Go ahead, read the book and I'll tell you what.
Speaker 1:I read the book. I loved it Every chapter. I went down and told my poor husband everything I'd learned. It is fascinating. She has made it interesting, easy to understand, and I so want everyone else to hear this and to buy her book, because if you love the Bible, it is going to make it so much more relevant for you. Let me also say that biblical archaeology or at least what Amanda's talking about she is not trying to prove or disprove the Bible, okay, so let's put that out there right now. She describes it as wanting to contextualize the Bible and that's what we're going to talk about today and she has tons of great examples and really interesting stories, and I don't think any of us will look at the Bible in quite the same way after we've read her book. So, amanda, thank you so much for joining us. I would love for you to tell us a little bit about yourself, what your background is and why you wrote this book.
Speaker 2:And how I ended up doing this crazy thing. Right from Tennessee of all places. I actually grew up in Middle Tennessee, born and raised here, and I was going to church from a really young age. I will say that really, scripture got a hold of my heart very, very early and when I was in high school I went to a church that really encouraged young people to do a quiet time. That's what we called it back in the 90s.
Speaker 2:I don't know if everyone still uses those terms anymore, that's what I use, that's what you say, Okay, but I mean, I was that kid who followed instructions really well, and so I was reading my Bible and I kind of I've got to a point where I noticed I was reading some things that didn't always match what I was hearing at church, necessarily, and at the same time a lot of my friends were going down to the front on Sunday morning and dedicating their lives to the ministry. And I look back now and realize I think I was feeling that pull, but I grew up in a tradition that frowned on women doing anything like that, and so I think that's where my journey took a different direction. I do think God was pulling me toward what I'm doing now, but I ended up pursuing it academically because I felt like I couldn't do it through seminary or something like that. It was also not something that I planned. I went to undergrad, I went to a place called Rhodes College, which is a Presbyterian school, and I was going to go into international law. That was the plan. But you're required to take so many Bible courses while you're there, and the first time I took just an intro class to biblical archaeology. I fell in love with it. I had a great professor who got me a full scholarship to go dig that summer at a site called Tel Rehov. Sadly that ended up falling through because the second intifada was happening at that time. But I stuck with it. I stuck with my studies and then when I finished undergrad, my own professors were themselves Harvard graduates and they encouraged me to pursue more studies. And so I ended up at Harvard with a man named Lawrence Stager as my advisor and he really focused in on Philistine culture at least he did at that point in his career and so at that time I dug at Ashkelon. I really focused in on the Iron Age, and so the Iron Age, if you're thinking about it biblically, that's like Samuel and Kings, it's those historical books.
Speaker 2:The reason this field is actually called biblical archaeology as opposed to say, if you're studying archaeology of the Egyptians, it's Egyptology, or of the Assyrians, it's Assyriology the reason it's called biblical archaeology is because the Bible, and specifically those books, Samuel and Kings those are the written records of the ancient nation of Israel, and so that's why the field is called that. It's because of those written records and really ancient Israel. One thing that is there's a lot that's unique about it, but one thing that is unique about it and one thing that I, as someone who has studied archaeology and works in this space, one thing that I hope we really find in the future, are more written documents from that time period, Because ancient Israel pretty much what's in the Hebrew Bible I'm talking about the Old Testament, not the New Testament, but really what's there. That's pretty much all we have from a written perspective of records from Israel, Whereas you look at Egypt, every single building is covered in all sorts of records. The same thing Assyriology. Looking at the ancient Babylonians, there are hundreds of thousands of written records everywhere. And so Israel, for their written record, we just have what's in the Bible, which is so small compared to what we have from other cultures, and I think that's part of the reason I also fell in love with biblical theology, because as a young adult, I loved scripture.
Speaker 2:I had a deep relationship with God, but I wanted to know more about it, and really the best way I think that we can do that, that we can see the ancient world, is actually look at what's coming out of the ground, so that we can look at those items, or maybe not even those objects, but also what happened in cities, looking at destruction, layers, those kinds of things, and we can figure out when events happened and it helps us to understand the Hebrew Bible itself better. So that's my passion is all of that and then wanting to impart that to people who haven't been exposed to the materials that I have.
Speaker 1:Well, and what I think is so fascinating? First of all, you have to buy this book because there's way more in this book than we can possibly talk about today, and the details and the. It's so interesting. So I'm going to grab out just a couple of things that jumped out at me that I want people to hear right now you talk about. You know, we live in the United States, we've been here. What 250 years. Indigenous people were here much earlier, but let's say our history that we pay attention to might be 250 years. That is nothing in the ancient world. So could you please give a little color, tell that story that you told? You just referred to layers of destruction. I'm just going to tip you off and I want you to explain this. Where it was when the 20 layers, remember, are you talking about Megiddo?
Speaker 1:Okay, yes, there you go. Now listen to this, people. This is what archaeologists discover. So you talked about how one city, would you know, be there for whatever period of time, but then something would happen, like maybe a plague or a flood or a famine, and so the entire city would relocate and that city would sit empty for hundreds of years, perhaps enough time for the natural elements to cover it all up, and then another city would come along and settle there, and it would go on and on and on over thousands and thousands of years. And so when you discovered this, you discovered a site that actually had 20 layers of 20 cities. Not you in particular, but archaeologists discovered. Tell us about that and what we learned from that.
Speaker 2:Well, I think the one you're referencing probably is Tel Megiddo, and if you want to think about it in the Bible, tel Megiddo was an administrative city for King Solomon. He goes and he does massive fortifications during his reign to Hazor, gezer, and Megiddo was an administrative city for King Solomon. He goes and he does massive fortifications during his reign to Hazor, gezer and Megiddo and at that time it's full of stables. We can see during that layer that it was a strong military city. In the New Testament, some of your listeners may be more familiar with it as Armageddon, which is essentially the Hebrew word Har-Mageddon, mountain of Megiddo. It coming through transliteration and in the Greek becomes Armageddon. That matters because this city of Megiddo.
Speaker 2:You go back to Egyptian records. The first recorded battle in history happened at Megiddo and then, of course, according to the Book of Revelation, the penultimate battle in history will happen there, at Megiddo. Well, the site itself is located on a naturally high area. It's near water sources. At later parts in its development it was on trade routes, and so there were all of these reasons that people in the ancient world would have selected this spot to build a city, and we see this for a lot of ancient cities. And so those first people who came there, they're like okay, we can defend ourselves easily, be it from animals or later, conquering armies, we have access to water, we have access to, eventually, trade of other people. So there are inherent properties of a site that draw humans to it. And then, as you were, so people build, and initially sites that were built obviously would have been smaller.
Speaker 2:And then something happens For some reason people leave. In the case of Megiddo, oftentimes it was war. When war comes in and cities get burned, these really thick destruction layers are left, just these layers of ash, which on a human level are very tragic, but for the archaeologists they're really helpful because in the case of a place like Megiddo, you can look at those layers and you can then also compare it to other sites in the area and, from the context clues of everything around, figure out which war that was in a lot of cases, and start to build a timeline, not just for that particular city but in conjunction with everything that's around it. And so you have the written records. But then you also have what we call material culture.
Speaker 2:What's in there? You put those things together and those start to give us a picture of what the ancient world looked like, which I find very, very exciting. So, megiddo of all the tells that are in Israel and it is still being actively dug today I mean, it's been part of active excavations during peacetime for over 100 years they are still uncovering more layers it's a really beautiful example of a tell. There's one image that I love to share with people, like on social media, and it's where the tell has been cut.
Speaker 1:What is a tell.
Speaker 2:That is exactly what you were describing. So when those first people come and they build their homes eventually and then they leave, the earth takes back over, everything maybe starts to fall, grass comes in, everything gets covered over, and then the next group of people come and, for all those reasons I just explained, they say this would be a great place for us to put our city or put our home. And then they do it again, and so the process just keeps repeating and repeating, and what happens geologically is all of those newer cities over time begin to compress the layers that are before them and those lower layers will start to spread out, and so you end up with a mound, and tell simply means mound. That's it.
Speaker 2:One thing about archaeologists we are not super creative with the things that we title. If there's a hole that had a post in it, we call it a post hole, that kind of thing. So a tell simply means a mound. But yeah, it's an artificial mound, though that was created as a result of human civilization and not just natural ecological processes or something like that.
Speaker 1:So in modern day sometimes you call this a sinkhole. It shows up on your driveway. It's like oh, all of a sudden, 30 years later you're too young to know this, amanda, but you buy a house and then, 30 years later, your driveway sinks in. What was that? That's where they put all the waste from construction, and it hasn't compressed my parents' house did have that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, yeah, anyway. So I'm going to ask you this question. You've already started, but you talked a lot in this book about how this book's purpose is not to disprove. It is actually to deepen your faith. And you'll read her book. She is a faithful Christian. She's not looking for proof because she believes in faith, and she's certainly not looking for disproof. But you said you're seeking to contextualize scripture. So for those of us who didn't go to Harvard, could you please kind of elaborate what do you mean by contextualizing scripture?
Speaker 2:That means taking scripture and understanding it in the way that it is written, and there are lots of aspects to that. So we want to understand scripture from its original context I hate to use that word. We want to understand it in its original placement. What was happening at the time? Who were the people who were writing it? We want to know about the text itself, and that has to do with the circumstances that created it at the time. We also want to understand what the world was like at the time, because often ancient texts they're written the way that we write books today. They will have metaphors in them that maybe don't make sense to us.
Speaker 2:This one pops into my mind in the book of Ruth when she uncovers Boaz's feet. That is a euphemism. That is a metaphor for something that doesn't directly translate into English, and so when you learn more about the ancient cultures of the time, it also tends to unlock the languages, and there are places in the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament, where there are words that are used that literally appear nowhere else in written scripture, and so translators for years and decades, centuries, have attempted to do the best translations they possibly can, but some of these words that we don't know what they mean, like, for instance, nephilim. That's a pretty good one. Guesses were made early on as to what it would mean. Well, as archaeology has uncovered more as more documents have been found from other languages that maybe impacted the Hebrew at the time those sorts of things it actually helps translators to unlock the meaning of the word, almost in the way the Rosetta Stone worked for unlocking Egyptian hieroglyphics and heretic. That was on there.
Speaker 2:So all of this is necessary, not for changing scripture. Scripture itself does not change, but we sitting here in 2025 have two and three thousand years worth of time and culture that we need to be able to get through in order to understand scripture in its original setting, the way that it was. So it's not that we're trying to change scripture. It's that we're trying to get back and understand it the way it was originally meant.
Speaker 2:Because those readers at the time, they would have known what those metaphors were, these stories that they were hearing. They were stories from their own culture, from their own people. They understood off the bat what it meant for a man to be a firstborn son. It was obviously known he was going to get a double inheritance. More was expected of him than his younger brothers, those sorts of things. It has taken us time to get back to that, so that we can read scripture with clear eyes and get as close to the original meaning as we possibly can and for me, as someone who is a person of faith, also getting as close to what God was attempting to give to us through His Word at the time Right right, it's about understanding the character of God better and it's about getting closer to God.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's what we all want, a couple of things. So maybe every single listener knows this stuff, but I have heard these words, but I really didn't understand why they were meaningful. So could you briefly tell us Rosetta Stone when it was discovered and what did it do for us? And then, similarly, I'd like you to tell us, in the same way, that's the Dead Sea Scrolls. So Rosetta Stone and the Dead Sea Scrolls, similar in what it unlocked for us.
Speaker 2:The Rosetta Stone was actually found by Napoleon's army when he was in Egypt trying to conquer it at the time. It's Ptolemy, I believe it's Ptolemy II. It is a really boring government document, basically explaining something that nobody cares anything about, but what's important is that it has. It has the Greek in it, and then it also had the Egyptian heretic, which is like like cursive sort of, and then it also had the hieroglyphics. Up until that time, the translation for those Egyptian languages had been lost, and so, because it had a language that was known at the time, translators were able to go to it, and I mean it took years. This wasn't like a quick thing, but they were able to go there and figure out and unlock ancient Egyptian language, and so now Egyptologists can go into all of these temples and tombs and read all of the papyrus documents that were left behind and actually know what they say, thanks to the Rosetta Stone. Similarly you didn't ask about this, but I'll throw it in because nobody's heard of it there's the Bayestan inscription, which is in Iran. It was commissioned by Darius the Great, who, that is, the Persian emperor who put into motion Cyrus's plan to allow the Jews to return after the destruction of Jerusalem in 586. And this inscription it's up on the side of a mountain and it's his explanation for how he came to power in Persia. Same thing it had Old Babylonian on it, and it ended up being what helped people understand cuneiform. And so now we can read ancient Assyrian texts and ancient well, basically all the Mesopotamian texts, because we had that there. That's one thing that's actually helpful about all these ancient empires is when pharaohs or emperors whatever you want to call them whenever they were trying to get messages out to their conquered people, they would sometimes put them out in multiple languages, and so, yay, that makes it easier for us today to be able to get back and recover some of those lost languages that were lost.
Speaker 2:The Dead Sea Scrolls are a little bit different. The Dead Sea Scrolls were first found in 1948. The story goes that a Bedouin goat herd was looking for a missing goat and he was up in the caves that overlooked Qumran. And the story goes, he threw a pebble into a darkened cave, I guess hoping to rustle up the animal or something, and he heard pottery crack. And so he comes back with some of his brothers and they look and they found these jars that were stuffed with scrolls. Over time they ended up selling them on the antiquities market. This is long before anything like that was regulated. They ended up selling them on the antiquities market.
Speaker 2:One professor in Jerusalem recognized right off the bat that these were super important and thankfully he gathered up a lot of them and it took until the 1990s for any sorts of translations to actually get published. So we now have them. There's a fabulous site. If you just Google Dead Sea Scrolls, you can find them. You can see the images of the scrolls. The translations are there. You can learn all about them. It's really a great site.
Speaker 2:But the reason that they are important to the Bible reader is because, prior to their discovery, when you look at the Old Testament the Old Testament as we have it today the translations that we have are based on two collected manuscripts. One's called the Septuagint, which is Greek, one is called the Masoretic Text, which is Hebrew. The Masoretic Text is a thousand years newer than the Greek translation and in the places in the Bible where the two texts disagree about something for hundreds of years, translators would debate was more lost in translation to the Greek or was more lost over an additional thousand years of copying, and the default answer for most translations, up until really until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, was to follow the Hebrew, because it was in the Hebrew. One example of where this happened, where there's a discrepancy, is with the height of Goliath, and this ends up having really huge implications to the way that we interpret the story. But according to the Septuagint, he was about six and a half feet tall, still really big, strong guy but then, according to the Masoretic text, he was approaching 10 feet tall. Well, so which one is it? We get the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are in Hebrew, but they're as old as the Septuagint.
Speaker 2:In a lot of cases, and in almost every case where there's a discrepancy, the Dead Sea Scrolls agree with the Greek, and so this is something that translators needed all of this time, so that we essentially have a third rail and anytime there's a discrepancy we can lean on that.
Speaker 2:It's still different manuscripts that say different things. This is why it is critical that we, as English speakers and English readers, when we use our Bible translations, we make sure we have translations that are really transparent and let us know where translators have made choices in their translation, and that would be one of them. And so if your Bible says most still follow the Masoretic text, most will still say that he was six cubits in a span as opposed to four cubits in a span. But make sure you have that asterisk there taking you down to the bottom and telling you that the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls both say that it was four cubits and a span. That's why the Dead Sea Scrolls are great they help us understand the development of Scripture better and have stronger translations, which then ultimately impacts what we get out of the Scripture itself.
Speaker 1:Well, that's right, and so here's how it hit me.
Speaker 1:We're not questioning the authenticity or the authority of scripture because, we're talking about the scripture that was written in the Jewish language, in the Greek language at that time. So we all have experienced the telephone game. We all know that, through different voices and different hands, that things change over time. So getting as far back as possible is closer and closer to what the original authors wrote, who were inspired by God. We believe that. So here's what hit me as just you know, your garden variety Christian, when you look at the story of David and Goliath, you have this Sunday school story and this is what Amanda talks about throughout her book. We have so many talk about the telephone game. We have so many distortions of these stories because they're entertaining, or we've got movies about it that have perhaps distorted and embellished and fictionalized some things. We have the Sunday school book, so you've got David and Goliath. You've got David, this little young boy with like a regular slingshot, and you have Goliath, this huge giant of 10 feet tall. And how amazing is that? Well, now there's a message there, which this is where Amanda and I are really going to talk in detail next.
Speaker 1:But I'm just going to tell you that our pastor talks quite a bit about people who are seekers, people who are coming to church, or maybe they're just thinking about what is this God thing? I'd like to learn more about it. But then they get tripped up by Old Testament stories, primarily starting there. What is this David and Goliath thing? No, this whole thing can't be true. What is this Jonah and Goliath thing? No, this whole thing can't be true. What is this Jonah and the whale thing? Really, A whale ate a man? I don't believe it. What is this Adam and Eve thing? Forget it. So they throw everything out.
Speaker 1:Now our pastor completely believes in the Old Testament. It's all one story. He believes. But he has said don't get tripped up on those stories. What we're looking at is, at least for me, the key is the resurrection. Look at that event. Do you believe that Jesus rose from the dead or not? That's really the question. And if you can get to that with a leap of faith because we weren't there right. But if you can get to that, then you know what. We're going to go back and we're going to understand what God was saying in those Old Testament stories. But don't let them get in the way of accepting Christ and what his proof was. You know, 500 witnesses or whatever it was. Everyone has to come to that themselves, but I do think it's you're super helpful. So now let's let's talk specifically about the David and Goliath story and what you think the text, what really happened there.
Speaker 2:I will start with the sort of the world's interpretation of it, and I think especially now as we're going into football season. You know, every Sunday afternoons my husband watching the commentators are talking about the weaker versus the stronger and it's a David versus Goliath event. You know, we hear this all the time and the world's interpretation of that is, as you said, scrawny little weakling versus mythical giant. God creates a miracle. The text itself doesn't say anything about a miracle. The text itself. Now that we understand the development of the text, it is more likely that Goliath himself was six and a half feet tall. Again, yes, big, strong guy, but not a mythical giant. There was nothing magical happening there. Giants have not been found archaeologically, period full stop. Anything you have seen online is an absolute fake. So take that out of it and then actually read the text.
Speaker 2:And one thing that I think is key to unlocking these stories, as we're taught, is broadening out where we read them. We need to start earlier and we need to finish later, and that is key to understanding David and Goliath, because that is just one little part of the story of why God chose David to be king of Israel. It's not. We focus on what seems to be the wow moment, but that is just a bump in the road. You look at David, and David is a youngest son and so, by definition, like many of the leaders, that God chose to rise up as a youngest son. Nobody expected anything out of him. He spent his young life as a shepherd and I think we see images of like you know, a little sheep slung around his shoulder, and we think that this is, oh, a peaceful, gentle thing. But it absolutely was not. This was a very physically demanding job. Not only is he moving miles and miles and miles every day following flocks, but he's also actively protecting them from animals. And when David goes and he speaks to Saul prior to engaging Goliath, he essentially gives Saul his resume, and this is something that we gloss over, because he says to Saul hey, put me in coach, if you will, because I have killed a lion with my bare hands, I have killed a bear with my bare hands, I am strong, I am skilled with the sling.
Speaker 2:In the ancient world, slings were critical and Saul would have known this, because Saul himself was a Benjaminite and left-handed Benjaminites, which we read about in Joshua and Judges. They were tactical weapons and this particular tribe they would use a sling. And it says from a great distance they could shoot and hit a hair's breadth with complete accuracy and a lot of speed. There's a city called Lachish and there are there are reliefs about the siege of Lachish and it shows all of, in this case, assyrians all of the Assyrians. It's a picture of the battle and there's a line of slingers. They were called slingers. They were as important as men using their swords. They were as important as siege machines at the time. Being skilled with a sling was good for keeping the animals safe, but it was also good in war. It was utilized in war.
Speaker 2:So all of this, david comes to the field as someone who is strong, someone who is agile, someone who is talented, and we don't exactly know why Saul let him go be the person to go up against Goliath, but I think that has to be taken into consideration because it's in there. Maybe Saul was just tired of it, or maybe he actually thought he should bet on this guy. So David goes into battle, david uses his skills, he brings Goliath down and then what's the next thing that happens? Because we usually stop there. The next thing that happens is Saul made him a general in his army.
Speaker 2:David was no young weakling, he was a fully formed adult. He marries Michal, he comes into the palace and then he starts bringing all of the tribes together under himself, and so you have to see this event with Goliath as a way that God used to distinguish him as a man who could be a king, in spite of him not being an oldest born son, a first born son. It's just part of that story, but the larger narrative is God choosing the man after his own heart to be the person who really truly brings United Israel together under one leader.
Speaker 1:And now you see why I like this book. You just completely changed that story for me, without I mean you made it better it's. That's the whole point. This is not about disproving anything. This is really about understanding it better, and it's a much better story.
Speaker 2:You know, it wasn't that, he was a weakling.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right. So I have a lot of questions for you and we're almost out of time, but I'm going to go a little bit longer because I want to make sure that you all are paying attention. Here's my next question, really. So anyone who's listening to this might feel intimidated by the whole idea of diving into historical context of scripture. I mean, you've had years of training, so everything you just said to us I could never repeat, but I appreciate hearing it. But what about fast? Well, yeah, for us moving forward, what's a simple step we can take to read our Bibles with fresh eyes?
Speaker 2:You'll probably laugh at this, but, honestly, take a look at your translation and there are these really boring pages in the front that you have probably never even looked at. And in the front of your translation there should be I don't know maybe 10 to 15 pages explaining where the translation came from, and it will explain all that stuff that I said earlier about the Septuagint and the Masoretic text and, hopefully, the Dead Sea Scrolls. At this point, that should be in there too for recent printings of Bibles. So start there. Learn how the text developed at the time, learn who actually was doing the translation. That could matter, depending on what, exactly what faith tradition you come from.
Speaker 2:You know people are going to translate things based on their own experiences with the scripture. So get to know the book itself and then fight the urge to do what society is trying to push us all to do right now, and that is do things quickly, scroll through, you know, go through on your newsfeed and you know, oh, like an inspirational quote or something like that. We live in such a hurried society that wants to cut everything down into sound bites and admittedly, I also do this, but hopefully as a way of capturing people's attention so that they will read more and they will read deeper and they will read longer, and so make it a goal to maybe even just break up the stories differently so that you're seeing how David and Goliath fits within the context of simply what's around it. You don't have to have a complete understanding of the Iron Age and Philistine armor as it was, which, honestly, what is described in the Bible very much fits with Mycenaean style armor that they would have had at the time the weight, the materials, all of that stuff. It actually fits very well with what we found in the ground.
Speaker 2:You don't necessarily need to know all of that, but just maybe reading scripture differently than you have before and then just doing your best to put away all of the noise, to not think about Sunday afternoon football pundits and all miracles or that interpretation, but really try to go in there and consider the words and what they are saying. That's it. That's just. The best place to start is, I think, with Scripture itself and understanding your translation.
Speaker 1:One of the last things you said in your book. I always read the whole book, but it's interesting to me that so many books have some of the best quotes at the very end. So, everyone, you have to finish a book. You really do. But here's one of your quotes that I just loved, and it said a relationship with Jesus requires faith, and faith cannot be reasoned or manufactured. There's faith, and faith cannot be reasoned or manufactured.
Speaker 1:And then you go on to say you know, we are control freaks. We all want to know the answers and we want people to answer our questions. Or how about this? We all have to Google everything immediately. We can't go five seconds without knowing something. We have to Google it. Who's that actor? That's right. And then Amanda goes on to say but you know what God wants us to trust him with, what we cannot see or comprehend. So we're all going to get to a point where I don't have all of the information, we don't have all the pieces.
Speaker 1:As you said, even in archaeology, discovery is ongoing. You're never at the end of it, so you can't say, oh, now we know everything and it could change. But the important thing is we don't have to know everything. That's what I love. Now we see in a mirror dimly, then we'll see face to face. You don't have to know everything. Then we'll see face to face. You don't have to know everything, but it is affirming to me when we put this in the context of history and then archaeologists are saying, well, yeah, that city was there. Oh yeah, we found some ancient texts. Oh yeah, we found some. I mean, you got to read this, because there's even civilizations, thousands of years, who were writing pictures on clay tablets. That was their language, that was their alphabet, was pictures. And they have. You had a word for that, I can't remember it, but and they have. Yeah, they've been able to translate that and there are so many of those. There's a it was a British museum that has a whole bunch of those. I mean that they have my husband.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've got to go to that museum. Now, a whole bunch of those.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's my husband. We've got to go to that museum. Now I know what that is. Okay, that's the other thing. Next time you go to a museum, do a little Googling to find out what it is you're looking at, because it's probably a lot more amazing than you realize. I cannot believe. I've just wandered through the Egyptian sections like it was boring and now I need to go back. So thank you for making it interesting.
Speaker 2:Oh, you're welcome. You're welcome. I mean, I love this stuff. But, as you were saying, the awe and wonder is important, and there's so much in Scripture, especially in the New Testament. We're talking about miracles, and I say this in the book too, and I think you were alluding to it Miracles cannot be empirically proven, they cannot be contextualized or anything like that. And so, holding onto, what can we learn from history to understand scripture better, but also remembering that, when it comes to miracles, that is God making a conscious decision to change his own creation himself, and he's doing that for reasons that we may or may not understand at this point, and we don't know the mechanics of it. And that's okay, because we're not supposed to know everything right now. So search, but then be okay sitting with the I don't know, because you're gone.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. Well, how can people find you? Now tell us about your book, when it comes out and where people can find it, and then also tell them how they can find you. You're going to love her social media handle.
Speaker 2:So the book is Stone Still Speak. It comes out September 23rd. You can preorder it now and I'm at. If you just go to amandahopehaleycom, that'll get you to my website. I have a podcast called the Red-Haired Archaeologist.
Speaker 1:She has beautiful red hair, I think a little more auburn, and it's curly. It's like perfect straight hair. People like me just envy hair like hers.
Speaker 2:It's never the same two days in a row. It's its own source of frustration. But so you can find me there. It's on YouTube. It's also just wherever you get your podcasts. I like to talk about artifacts, how they help us contextualize scripture, and then on social media, I'm now at Amanda Hope Haley, so if you just search for that, you'll find it. I have got a really thriving group of readers on Facebook who ask questions and I answer them and I'm just so pleased with the people that I get to interact with. They are people I've never been able to meet but hopefully will one day, so that's a fun place. Or same content goes on to Instagram, but not as many people are over there, so it's more interactive on Facebook. But yeah, amanda I hope Haley, that'll bring up just about everything.
Speaker 1:Well, that's great. We'll have all of this in the show notes. I like people to hear it, just in case they don't go to show notes. It's been so nice to talk to you, so as we end here, I just want to remind everyone September 23rd, the book is out Stones Still Speak. You can find her at Amanda Hope Haley, everywhere on social media, and you could probably send her some questions, which I think is really neat because a lot of people don't take the time to interact with readers, so that's a real privilege If you can go to her Facebook page, follow it and interact with her and learn even more. Thank you so much for being with us.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you for having me, this was fun.
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