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| Illuminating Scripture |
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Most of what is known about Moab is written in the Bible and in a 2,800-year-old inscription discovered in 1868. On that 9th-century B.C. tablet of stone, Moab’s King Mesha boasts of his rebellion against Israel and Judah, a conflict also recounted in the Bible in the third chapter of the Book of 2 Kings. The ongoing excavation of Moabite cities is important because “it involves venturing into new territory,” says Weigl, a theologian and archaeologist who teaches Old Testament studies in CUA’s School of Theology and Religious Studies. “There hasn’t been much excavation of Moab, so it’s still mostly unknown.” The dig, in which Weigl acts as senior staff member and decipherer of ancient inscriptions, is sponsored by Wilfrid Laurier University of Waterloo, Ontario. So far what Weigl and his archaeologist colleagues have unearthed are the remains of a huge textile industry — remnants of wooden loom beams and hundreds of donut-shaped loom weights made of clay. That discovery seems to confirm the Bible, which says that King Mesha raised sheep and that, before Moab’s rebellion, the kingdom paid tribute to Israel with the wool from a hundred thousand rams (2 Kings 3:4). With a Ph.D. in biblical studies from the University of Vienna in Austria and additional study of ancient Near Eastern civilizations, Weigl pursues archaeology to better understand the world of the Bible — “to connect text and stone,” as he puts it. He gives an example of how archaeology sheds light on Scripture: “The Old Testament says that the elders of a city would convene in the city gate to decide legal cases. Without knowing what the city gates looked like, what their structure was, we would not really understand that idea. By excavating city gates, however, and seeing the benches in the rooms surrounding the city gate — benches which facilitated sitting down and having a discussion — we see how the biblical text links up with the material culture.” In the large Moabite city he helped to excavate last summer, the central passageway of the city gate was 45 feet long and housed six furnished rooms. As he excavates ancient ruins, Weigl thinks about the people who lived there and how similar they might have been to himself. “Sometimes I’m excavating the kitchen of a house and I think about what would happen if archaeologists would excavate my own kitchen in 3,000 years,” he muses. “If they found no texts, they would have to get to know me through what belonged to me, and that’s really exciting. They might form a misconception and rebuild me as a being I never was — or they might come to the right conclusions and learn about me.” The best part of archaeology, he says, is the thrill of never knowing what you’ll discover. The worst part is getting up at 3:30 a.m., “which you never get used to,” he says. The early rising is necessary to start excavating at 5 a.m. so that the digging can end at noon, before the greatest heat of the day. Weigl will continue the excavation of ancient Moab next summer from May 15 to June 30. |
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For each of the past three summers, Assistant Professor Michael Weigl has experienced the fulfillment of this prophecy firsthand, as he excavates the ancient kingdom of Moab, digging it up from the earth and “the very dust” of the nation of Jordan. Moab was a pagan adversary of Israel and Judah during the years chronicled in the Old Testament books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, approximately 1,000 B.C. to 587 B.C.