Tall tales

Every year on the tour earnest customers come up to us and ask, "When are you going to show us the Ark of the Covenant?" After the tour we receive indignant letters saying, "Why didn't you take us to Sodom and Gomorrah? We have just attended a presentation by someone who claims to have discovered the sites of these cities." While the faith of these people in our intimate knowledge of the archaeological sites in the Middle East is touching, we are forced to disappoint them, for these things just do not exist.

Among certain fundamentalist Christian circles there are men going around claiming to have found all sorts of wonderful things. Rather in the manner of good old Saint Helena, mother of Constantine, if there is something mentioned in the Bible, they possess the uncanny ability to go out and find it! Unfortunately at the crucial moment their camera always breaks down or the film is confiscated or the photographs are out of focus, and so absolute hard proof of their discoveries is always lacking - and needless to say, no proper reports have ever been published in reputable journals about their wonderful finds.

Among the amazing objects found are:

Sodom and Gomorrah near Masada
False: we go there every year and there is nothing to be seen, no four lane highway to accommodate the crowds of tourists, no parked coaches, no signs pointing to this new tourist attraction, nothing.Click here to read a recent Diggings article on this claim.

Noah's Ark in Turkey
False: properly conducted excavations some years ago, sponsored by television presenter George Vandeman, proved that this is a natural geological formation.

The Ark of the Covenant in a cave under Gordon's Calvary
False: the only cave there is being used by an Arab as a banana store. The idea that the Israelis could mount clandestine excavations under a Muslim cemetery in the Muslim part of Jerusalem is laughable: remember the fuss when they merely opened up a new entrance to the Temple mount excavations? Two days of rioting and several deaths. The Garden Tomb authorities closely monitored the digging done by Ron Wyatt and are categorical that nothing was found. They have now (2006) invited the Israeli authorities to excavate at the site where Wyatt dug in the hope of putting these ridiculous stories to rest.

The wheels off pharaoh's chariots in the Red Sea
False: the alleged discovery site is in the Gulf of Aqaba, nowhere near any of the feasible places where the Children of Israel could have crossed the Red Sea. Recently I recorded a film at the alleged find site which you can view by clicking here.

An inscription by Solomon identifying Mount Sinai
False: I am lost for words on this one, even though a whole book has been written on the subject. It's all good cloak and dagger stuff, with Saudi police chasing the intrepid explorers, the remains of sacrifices, the pedastal for the Golden Calf and goodness knows what else. Just a pity they didn't look harder; they missed finding the Ten Commandments writen by the finger of God which Moses threw away in disgust when he saw his people cavorting around the Golden Calf.

As indicated elsewhere, nearly all the Diggings staff are Christians and no one would be happier than ourselves to have such evidence to confirm the Bible story, but we prefer facts to fallacies any day.

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Ten Commmandments Since writing this page, I have been informed that one of these individuals now claims to have discovered the Ten Commandments. Allegedly the pieces were carefully gathered up by one of the Israelites, handed down through the generations until the Exile but then, unaccountably, left behind in Mesopotamia when the Jews returned to Palestine. No doubt he also found a clay tablet giving the name of the tidy individual who gathered up the fragments, together with his e-mail address and bank acount details.

You can just see it, can't you! Fierce Babylonian soldiers at the door, herding the family out for the long trek into exile and the desperate family loading themselves down with a collection of broken stones rather than food, clothing or money. Any sensible refugee in those circumstances would bury the stones in the backyard where they could be retrieved at a future date. I really don't know whether to laugh or cry at the thought that there are people who believe this stuff! Certainly no one has found so many holy sites so easily since St Helena visited the Holy Land in the fourth century AD.