Original subtitles

This time on The Bible Rules, we will lead you back thousands of years to

ancient practices from the shocking.

The reality, well, it happens.

To the unusual.

It turns out that the God of Israel likes barbecue.

We'll discover the perils of being a tourist.

When you travel, you are in great danger.

The dire consequences of idol worship.

Moral of the story, do not worship golden idols.

What was the ancient world really like?

The answer may be hidden in thousands of rules and commandments in the Bible.

Some are shocking.

Some mysterious.

All reveal lost details about the world that was.

The past is now.

The Bible. The world's best -selling book.

Everyone's heard of its Ten Commandments, but it actually contains

laws, rules, and commands.

These were the rules its authors lived by, and they provide an unexpected

to the ancient path.

In biblical times, the world could be a chaotic place.

Communing with the gods was a means by which people made sense of life's

mysteries, creating order amidst the chaos.

Our first Bible rule concerns an essential spiritual tool for

the divine.

A tool not just for the Israelites, but also for many other ancient cultures.

Altars. The altar was the most direct conduit to God. It was a place that

you were able to share a meal with him.

And the altar of the Hebrew God had to be built according to very specific

instructions.

But if you make for me an altar of stone, do not build it of hewn stones.

For if you use a chisel upon it, you profane it.

You shall not go up by steps to my altar, so that your nakedness may not be

exposed on it.

In other words, if you're going to make an altar out of stone, don't make it out

of cut stones.

And also, don't walk up the altar, because your private parts would then be

visible to the steps.

The first thing this rule reveals is that the ancient Israelites didn't wear

underwear beneath their tunic.

But why would a brief flash of naked flesh have been considered offensive to

God?

We see over and over again that the things that defile the holy have to do

sex and have to do with death.

And in the case of exposed genitals of the priest, it may simply be that it's

considered inappropriate, too closely related to sex in a space that's been

aside for the sacred.

So, no naked bodies or exposed genitals in a holy environment, not even for the

briefest of seconds.

But what about these hewn stones?

which basically means any carved stone.

Why did the Bible specifically want uncarved stones for altars?

Surprisingly, the answer may be related to warfare.

The problem with taking a chisel to a stone that will be used as an altar is

that the chisel would be made of iron, and because it's a metal used in

and in warfare, it's inappropriate for use for holy vessels.

But while the design specs of a Hebrew altar were unique, their function was

not. In fact, altars were prolific throughout the ancient world.

When you're talking about finding altars archaeologically, they do come in all

shapes and sizes. And you do have them in all places. You know, roadside

altars in houses, altars in shrines, altars in temples.

But just how were other ancient cultures using altars to worship their gods?

An altar is where you perform a sacrifice.

It would have a flat surface on which you could sacrifice either an animal or

cakes, wine, honey, whatever the offering was going to be.

While the altars of the Bible differed in design from others in the ancient

world, they still served as the primary vehicle for Israelites to communicate

with their God.

And just like their neighbors, they not only prayed on their altar, they used it

as a grill.

You're supposed to cut up the meat to offer to God, and then you burn it on

altar, and the smell goes up to him.

It turns out that the God of Israel likes barbecue.

He likes the smell of roasting meat. He likes the crackling fat on the fire.

The ancients believed that butchering animals at the altar gave them a direct

line of contact to the divine. However, this was not the only way that people

communicated with their gods.

Outside of Israel, and most notably in Greece, there were specific people who

served as divine portals to the gods.

They were called oracles. The oracle functioned as a seat of wisdom.

and a kind of transmission point between mortals and the gods.

There were oracles all over the ancient world, from Egypt to Assyria to Greece,

and belief in them stretched back millennia.

Oracles are fascinating.

They seem so foreign to us. People always wonder, how was that viable?

How were they not discredited by just being false?

For a small fee, people could go to an oracle and ask for insight about their

lives and future.

Questions like, should I become a farmer, or is my slave stealing from me?

they would be answered.

But there was a process to get your question in.

These are big operations, and so you have a hierarchy and a bureaucracy.

You've got priests, you've got sub -priests. You have to go and get a

to have your question presented.

Once your question was put to the Oracle, she would have a vision in

A recent discovery at the Shrine of Delphi, located in central Greece, has

scientists to speculate that these visions may have even had a basis in

reality.

Delphi, we've recently discovered in 2002 that there was a hidden fault,

or two, I think, faults that meet underneath the temple. And we have

therefore, for the release of gases, possibly methane, which would be

hallucinogenic. So it's so satisfying for the modern mind to assume that

a chemical basis for the vision.

After receiving her vision, the Oracle would provide an answer to the

petitioner's question.

But sometimes those answers could be misinterpreted.

The year is 546 B .C.

The place, the kingdom of Lydia.

King Croesus of Lydia is worried about a rival king, Cyrus of Persia,

threatening his kingdom.

He consults an Oracle and asks if he should invade Persia and take Cyrus head

on. The Oracle replies, If you do so, you will destroy a great empire.

And this is a good example because of the ambiguity of the reply.

And so he assumes that he's going to destroy a great empire, but it turns out

that that great empire is his own.

Croesus misinterprets the Oracle's prediction to devastating effect.

He goes to war with Persia and loses his own kingdom.

Oracle could be ambiguous, and it's a good thing they were, because if they're

ambiguous, then they're never wrong.

The gods neither tell the truth nor tell lies.

They speak in signs.

They tell us things that leave us in the position still to interpret.

Whether through oracles or altars, man's attempt to communicate with God often

provided ambiguous answers, allowing room for interpretation.

But while some divine messages are mysterious, many Bible commands are so

specific that their message is hard to miss, like this next one, which leads

little to the imagination.

If a woman approaches any animal and has sexual relations with it, you shall

kill the woman and the animal.

They shall be put to death.

Their blood is upon them.

In other words, women cannot have sex with animals.

And if anyone catches a woman doing it, she should be killed.

The animal, too.

But was bestiality so prevalent in the ancient world that the Bible needed to

have a rule about it?

It doesn't mean that it was widely practiced. It just means that there's a

preventing people from practicing it. There's one other ancient law collection

that has a lot of prohibitions on sex with animals, and that is the Hittite

laws. There's a great big passage about exactly which animals you can't have sex

with and the terrible punishments that happen if you do.

Other than that, ancient law collections don't seem to care.

So why did the Israelites feel they needed to lay this law down?

Bestiality, well, you know, it happens. We know it happens. But it's not really

the path we want to follow.

It's setting a boundary between what's acceptable sexual practice and what

isn't.

And for the Israelites, bestiality certainly lay outside the bounds of

But as we'll discover elsewhere in the ancient world, it was regarded a little

differently. These are the figures who also engage in sex with donkeys.

The Bible rules open a portal on the ancient world and the traditions and

practices of its people.

Many rules still resonate with us today, but others hint at behavior which we

might find more unusual.

Bestiality is clearly a matter that the writers of the Bible did not take

lightly. But do we have any evidence that it was actually practiced in the

ancient world?

There were certainly stories from Greece suggesting that bestiality was on the

ancient mind. In one legend, Circe, a goddess of magic, transforms a few

unsuspecting Greeks into pigs. And their king, Odysseus, wants to save them and

turn them back into human form. And the pig argues, you human beings, you screw

anything.

But you'll never find an animal wanting to sleep with a human being unless it's

been forced.

Most animals would be embarrassed by the amount of sex that human beings have.

We have sex when the female is not ovulating. We have sex when she's

pregnant. We have sex when she's lactating. We have sex when women are

postmenopausal. In our case, it's not focused on reproduction at all.

Reproduction is an occasional byproduct of human sexual interaction.

The Greeks recognized the existence of bestiality, but they considered it the

bad habit of a particular mythological being.

Satyrs, for example, right? Part man, part beast. They always have

disproportionately huge phalluses. And these are the figures who also engage in

sex with donkeys and so on.

So, what's appropriate for an especially well -endowed half man, half beast is

not appropriate for a human being.

Seders are the very embodiment of man and beast, and they represent the

unacceptable, the extreme, the indulgence of impulses well beyond the

Greek moderation and control.

Yet is there another level to this rule? Another reason why it may have been

written? Tuberculosis, influenza, smallpox, all these things came from

domesticated animals living in close proximity to human beings. The diseases

that were particularly harsh on people like the Israelites who were wandering

around were diseases that had what we call an animal reservoir, which is to

say... If humans didn't have it, the animals could carry it. And if you're

talking about diseases that don't get transferred primarily human to human,

which would be typhoid, certainly trichinosa, then you're talking about

that humans are getting from the animals that they live with.

One last possibility. This Bible rule, as many others, may have been written to

emphasize the difference between the Israelites and other ancient peoples who

did practice bestiality.

Through this law, the Israelites are setting themselves apart from the

of neighboring cultures.

And this next rule underscores just how much the Hebrew God disapproved of the

customs of Israel's neighbors.

The portal is about to open again.

You shall not make for yourself an idol. You shall not bow down to them or

worship them. For I, the Lord, am a jealous God.

In other words, don't pray to any statue or image, whatever it may depict or

form it may take.

I am your one true God, and you are only to worship me.

Before we can decode this Bible rule, we need to answer a few questions.

What actually was an idol in the ancient world?

And if the Israelites weren't worshiping them, who was?

We can think of an idol as...

A statue? It comes from a Greek word meaning an image. Idols were sometimes

models of the way they imagined a god acting. There were idols of war gods

like Baal, who was raising his club or spear to strike someone with. They had

details painted onto them. Evidence suggests that certain images felt

real to those who saw them. So real, they could inspire a physical response.

The eyes were important because you wanted to be able to make eye contact

it often. Just as you look at the gods, the gods are looking at you through

those eyes.

Right across the ancient world, from Canaan to Greece to Rome, Egypt or

people worshipped many different gods.

For every sphere of life, war, love, death.

There were different gods who needed to be worshipped and appeased. And if you

wanted to summon the presence of a specific god, you took some wood or

made a statue.

So were the statues themselves worshipped as gods?

So what did the Greeks, well the Romans, think when they made statues of gods?

That there's something beyond it, something greater, something more noble.

The statues were prayed to and, as we'll soon see, given lots of special

attention. But if a statue wasn't seen as the god itself, then what was it?

A surprising modern example may help us to answer that question.

I have an illustration that has struck me.

I used to take my children to the Santa in a department store.

Now, what did they think?

Did they think this was the real Santa?

What about the 15 skinny Salvation Army Santas outside?

Or did my children and did all children really know that this is a stand

-in for Santa? It's that a certain ritual context endows this

image, this representation with significance. That's my sense of how

understood their statues.

They were symbols.

But we know of one statue in the ancient world that was more than just a symbol.

We have a statue of Aphrodite, who is Venus. In antiquity, it's said to have

been the first time that Aphrodite was sculpted in the nude, which became a

tourist attraction.

Now, one guy fell in love with it.

But how do you go about courting a statue?

He hid himself in the temple at night, and the next day a stain was discovered

on the thigh of the goddess or thereabouts. So what's going on in the

this guy who has this relationship to the statue? Does he think the stone

is Aphrodite? Does he think it's just a model of Aphrodite?

Thousands of years later, it's impossible to know definitively what

people felt about their statues.

But history makes clear they were treated as almost human. They dressed

idols and they fed their idols and they paraded their idols around.

To praise God, to thank God, to ask for forgiveness, to get atonement, you feed

him. So why would the Hebrews have rebelled against the worship of these

-lifelike images?

One clue may be found in modern science.

Today, digital animators are constantly working to reproduce the human image on

screen. But they encounter a problem when the images they create are too

Humans feel uncomfortable looking at an image when it's not an exact replica,

but it's close to it.

And this is called the uncanny valley.

The uncanny valley is a scientific hypothesis which suggests that humans

strong aversion to images that are too eerily lifelike.

There is this area when the image is almost like human, around 96, 97

% human.

That makes people very uncomfortable.

People repel against it. It was just like human.

But there is something really wrong.

Perhaps that is the root of the threat from idols.

So it is possible that there was something about these quasi -lifelike

of gods that just didn't sit right with the ancient Hebrews.

But while the uncanny valley theory may provide some explanation as to the

Bible's prohibition against idol worship, the larger question still

Why did the ancient Hebrews object so strenuously to the common way of

worshipping the gods?

Why did they even care?

Well, as we're about to discover, they certainly didn't want to risk offending

their own God, as its punishments could be cruel and unusual.

God strikes the entire population of Philistines with hemorrhoids.

Our investigation into the rules of the Bible has uncovered compelling evidence

of idol worship in the ancient world. From Greece to Babylon, it seems

was doing it.

But the Israelites were set on breaking the trend.

How are we different from the people who are around us? Well, we don't worship

images. You worship images. Our God doesn't need an image. We have another

of communicating with that deity. That defines us as who we are. Don't worship

like the other people do. Don't worship their gods because they are engraved in

image form.

But there's even more to this rule. It's the beginning of a major shift in the

ancient world.

A total shake -up in the relationship between God, man, and nature.

Nature wasn't now God's everywhere and inhabiting everything, as many other

Greek philosophers thought. It wasn't that God existed in the universe. God

existed beyond the universe.

And when God left the universe to become the transcendent deity of the Hebrews,

he abandoned the natural world.

God abandoning the natural world meant he could no longer be contained in man

-made objects.

So idols became, for the Israelites, obsolete.

Anybody who worshipped an idol was not any longer worshipping an animated,

God -filled entity.

No, they were worshipping mere rock, and this was ridiculous.

In moving the Israelites away from worshiping mere statues, this Bible rule

provided a better understanding of the new God, who, according to the last line

in this rule, is extremely jealous of his own people.

What did that word mean in the ancient world? And how did this jealous God

when the rule was broken?

The jealous God. It means kind of passionate and intense.

How jealous could this God be?

Just ask the Philistines.

The Philistines have stolen the Ark of the Covenant, and the Philistines are

idol worshippers, worshipping golden idols throughout their society. And God

gets very angry, and in 1 Samuel 5, verse 9, God strikes the entire

of Philistines with hemorrhoids.

After the point that they get struck with these hemorrhoids, they go to their

priests and say, how can we get rid of these? And the answer comes, you need to

make little golden versions of the hemorrhoids, just like your idols.

Put them on a cart with the Ark of the Covenant and send it back to the

Israelites, and then you'll be healed.

Moral of the story, do not worship golden idols.

Idol worship could bring down a destructive fury and was not tolerated

Hebrew God, even when practiced by foreigners.

But this was not the only kind of behavior that incurred God's wrath.

And this next rule demonstrates that the foreigners weren't always the bad guys.

Whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets

and say, even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off against

you.

Translated, do not put up with inhospitable people.

In the ancient world, people were constantly at odds, fighting for land

territory with their neighbors.

So why would hospitality to strangers have been so important to the writers of

the Bible?

The treatment of the stranger goes to the core of what biblical rules and what

biblical laws are really about.

In Deuteronomy, God says, you were once strangers in the foreign land.

Don't forget it.

Being a good host wasn't just important to the writers of the Bible. It was a

principle valued right across the ancient world.

This idea of hospitality, an idea that we find not only within the Bible, but

throughout the whole Mediterranean, that hospitality and infractions of

hospitality are punished in drastic ways.

In the ancient world, when you traveled, you were in great danger.

Everyone who traveled depended on a code of hospitality.

The key to understanding this rule may lie in one of the most infamous stories

in the Bible.

The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Arguably two of the most famous cities in the Bible, Sodom and Gomorrah have

been associated with sexual sin for centuries. But it turns out that the

story isn't really about sex at all. I would suggest it's not about homosexual

relations or sodomy or anything of the sort.

It's really about hospitality.

And this is how the story goes.

God has heard some bad things about Sodom and Gomorrah, so he decides to

two of his angels to investigate.

They go to visit the home of Abraham's relative, Lot, who lives in the town of

Sodom. These angels went to Lot's house, and while they were in the house, the

men of Sodom surrounded the house and said, Send out the visitors who came to

your house so that we may know them.

In the Bible, to know someone is often used as a euphemism for sex.

The angry mob at Lot's door wants to rape the divine guests.

And Lot said, you can't do that. These people are my guests.

But here are my two virgin daughters.

Take them and do whatever you want with them.

But the men of Sodom don't want to accept the counteroffer. They only want

divine strangers for that very reason.

Because they're strangers.

What the men of Sodom wanted to do was to rape the two men who had come to

house. But I don't think it was because of their sexual orientation.

It's a question of inhospitality. The gender of the victim is not the

point. The sin of the people of Sodom is this.

overt hostility, this overt aggression, this lack of welcoming to strangers.

The ancient Hebrews had to treat strangers with respect, or else the

consequences could be dire.

But how did strangers regard the Hebrews?

As we're about to discover, for most of the ancient world, the Israelites were

thought to be more than a little eccentric.

People felt sorry for the Jews because they only had one God. What kind of

worldview was that?

Investigating the Bible rules sheds light on how the ancients thought and

principles they shared, such as the importance of being a good host.

But while God expected you to treat your foreign guests with respect, he

certainly didn't want you to behave like them.

You shall not follow the practices of the nation that I am driving out before

you. Because they did all these things, I abhorred them.

In other words, disregard all the practices you see your neighbors doing.

how they behave, and you're not going to mimic them.

But what exactly were they doing that the Hebrew God found so objectionable?

From Greece to Egypt, Rome to Babylon, people worshipped multiple gods.

The Israelites were commanded to do things differently, to worship just one

This practice was called monotheism.

There only is one God, and all the other gods are frauds or impostors.

It's certainly true that the idea of worshipping one God is a real oddity in

ancient world. People felt sorry for the Jews because they only had one God.

What kind of worldview is that?

However, there's some evidence which suggests that maybe the Israelites

the first monotheists.

There may have been a precedent in Egypt.

Akhenaten was a pharaoh in the 14th century BCE who eradicated

the worship of all other gods in Egypt, focusing worship on the Aten,

the sun disk.

Abandoning the worship of all the traditional gods in favor of just one

a revolutionary move, and Akhenaten's decision to only worship the sun god

caused great turmoil.

Some scholars have even speculated that this radical religious shift in Egypt

could have inspired one of the most important Jewish prophets, none other

Moses himself.

It's interesting that there's this experiment with monotheism in Egypt and

then we have the development of monotheism in ancient Israel.

After that? Akhenaten is living at about 1350 BC.

Moses is probably about 1250 or 1200 BC.

So that's not to say that there wasn't something going on. But a direct link is

impossible to prove, at least right now through archaeology.

So it's possible Moses would have heard about Akhenaten and maybe even been

influenced by his decision to worship only one god.

However, there's a key distinction between the worship of Aten and Jewish

monotheism.

Akhenaten's idea is close to what we would call monotheism, but is a little

different in that only Akhenaten and his family could actually worship the Aten,

and all of the other Egyptians were to worship him and the Aten through him.

So really, that's two gods, Aten the sun disk and Akhenaten the pharaoh. By

commanding his people to worship God through him, Akhenaten may have really

been pulling off a monumental power play. In making Aten the only god and

himself the only person that could directly worship, Akhenaten made himself

in charge of religion.

Now, he was already in charge of government.

He was already in charge of the army, and now he's in charge of religion.

I actually think he was a very, very smart, cunning diplomat.

Ultimately, Akhenaten's new religion was very different from what eventually

became the Jewish faith.

And as there's no definitive evidence to suggest otherwise, scholars still

believe that true monotheism began with the ancient Hebrews.

From small beginnings, monotheism has now become the most common form of

in the world.

practiced by countless believers across numerous faiths.

But it wasn't just their neighbors' religious practices that the Israelites

to reject.

It turns out that the food they ate was also an issue.

The dietary laws of the Israelites are the opposite of the dietary laws of the

Egyptians. So you have to ask yourself the question, why would a people who

spent 300 years in Egypt reject the dietary laws of the very country they

lived in?

The answer to this question gets at the core reason for not just this rule, but

why many Bible rules were written.

The Israelites wanted to define themselves from other cultures.

and went to great lengths to emphasize just how different they were from their

neighbors. And so how to stress that difference? One way is to have dietary

laws. For example, the Egyptians who ate pigs a lot, the Israelites would not

eat ham.

But these new laws weren't always popular.

If you'd been enjoying ham your whole life and one day a rule comes along

now forbids you from ever eating it again, you'd probably be a little

which is exactly how the early Israelites felt.

We hear the grousing on the part of the Israelites after marching around in the

desert for so long, where they miss the fish, they miss the pigs, they miss the

melons, they miss the grapes that were in Egypt and that are not in the, quote,

promised land.

As our investigation continues, we reveal what meaning the Bible

rules might have in outer space.

We can easily imagine that humans will have presence.

on some other world from where earth may not even be visible. We will have to

figure out what kind of rules we come up with.

We've opened a few portals to the ancient world and uncovered why the

were supposed to avoid idols, other gods, and ornate altars. But as we dig

deeper in our investigation into the rules of the Bible, we shift over into

New Testament.

Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances, for

is the will of God.

According to a Brandeis University study conducted in 2008, as many as 90 % of

Americans pray at least once a day, and as many as 50 % pray multiple times a

day. There are even people for whom praying takes up almost 100 % of their

Monks.

There are active monasteries all over the world, and much of their work is

prayer. There's a monk that I met on a recent trip to Egypt.

His name is Mercurius, and he eats modestly, and he preserves all of his

strength for his opportunity to pray.

He receives prayer requests from Facebook from all over the world.

He's 28 years old, and you have to ask this guy, how did this come to be?

Every day we share viral videos and comment on how big our nieces and

are getting.

But here's a monk using social media to carry out this Bible rule while also

putting his stamp on recent history in the Middle East.

And you have to ask this guy, you as a young person might have been part of

has been known to be known as the Arab Spring.

You could be part of this emancipation. And he said to me, without missing a

beat, I was a part of that.

I've been praying for this since I arrived.

This rule commands people to pray ceaselessly. We have no real evidence

prayers work at all, and yet people still pray every day.

There are a lot of experiments over the centuries to try and determine whether

prayer works.

And you end up with a whole mess of variables, which in science we would say

just doesn't support that prayer works. Somebody else might want to say, well,

it's very hard to disprove. In any case, I think that one of the things you have

to be grateful for, if prayer can in fact be shown to not particularly work,

that cursing probably doesn't work either.

To fully grasp the importance of prayer in the ancient world, and in our own

time, we'll need to step outside the Bible and into the pages of the Quran.

Muslims are supposed to pray five times a day, kneeling towards Mecca, a rule

that goes all the way back to the days of the Prophet Muhammad.

So in 2007, when the Malaysian space program sent up its first astronaut, a

natural question arose.

How is he going to pray?

International space station is close to about a couple of hundred miles up in

the orbit.

And it goes around 16 times around the Earth every day.

How are you going to find the direction to Mecca?

And so here is a fascinating case of modern day 21st century meets

the rules of 7th century.

And let's say you was even able to locate Mecca for a brief second. There

another hurdle, zero gravity.

How exactly do you kneel down and pray?

Now, in zero gravity, as you can imagine, that can be a bit of a

fact, you may probably go round and round.

The problem was so serious that an official conference was called to come

decision on how to pray properly while traveling through space.

And they said, well...

You try your best to find a place or to make a gesture as if you are

trying to place your forehead on the ground.

But if you can, they suggested that you can use motions of your eyelids to use

the different motions of prayers.

And if even you cannot do that, you can imagine praying

in your head.

When you think about it, traveling through space is just the beginning.

As the prospect of traveling to other planets becomes more real with each

passing day, it calls into question how we follow not just Bible rules, but any

rules written for this world.

Say, for example, if you're on Mars, Mecca is just all the way a dot in the

Do we still use the sunrise and sunset times of the planet Earth?

We will have to figure out what kind of rules we come up with.

As humans evolve and change, and as the distance between us and the period when

these rules were written grows, it calls into question why they came about in

the first place.

It's not like God thinks, I've got some rules, I need some people to fulfill

them. It's that God cares about people and the rules develop to serve the

people. It's not the rules that have survived intact from these centuries,

it is the spirit of the rules.

Another portal is about to open as we uncover what happens when a Bible rule

seriously and tragically misunderstood.

How somebody could be so disrespectful of what came before them is just

appalling to me.

In the ancient world, the Bible rules forbid a lot of behavior, but it wasn't

enough to describe what not to do.

This next rule goes one step further.

Break down their altars, smash their pillars, chew down their sacred poles,

burn their idols with fire.

In other words, here's how you deal with images of other gods and accessories of

other religions.

break their temples, and set their idols and icons on fire.

But do we have any actual evidence that this rule was followed?

We do have statues that are destroyed. For example, there are both Egyptian and

Canaanite statues that have the arms hacked off. But that's probably not

of a prohibition against the worship of such idols. It's more likely an

attacking, marauding force.

Wartime produced the greatest destruction of idols and other religious

paraphernalia. And while this rule might be tailored to the early Israelites, it

echoes the overall mindset of the ancient world.

Why was it so common to destroy a statue?

Well, in ancient warfare, when you conquered another and you did so because

god was leading you into war, you were also conquering the gods of that other

nation. And to demonstrate the superiority of your god, you smashed the

the gods of the defeated nation.

The way in which we understand and process images has changed drastically

the last 2 ,000 years.

And perhaps this evolution is the key to decoding this rule.

People began worshipping the idol.

as if it was the deity.

See, part of the limitation of religious iconography and art is we cannot

contain the divine.

We like to believe as though we can contain the divine at times. Whenever

have thought we've gotten too sure of that, they've said, destroy it.

The controversial nature of religious icons is still very much an issue in

today's world.

Religious imagery can be a source of tension between faiths, as one recent

from Afghanistan demonstrates.

During the 6th century, two monumental statues of Buddha were carved into the

side of a cliff in central Afghanistan.

They stood there for 1500 years until March 2001, when they were destroyed by

the Taliban.

As an archaeologist, watching the Buddhas being destroyed was just

heartbreaking. To have somebody could be so disrespectful of what came before

them is just appalling to me.

It is just shocking and a heartache to see the empty niches where those were.

And perhaps it's another example of the subtle difference between following the

spirit and not so much the letter of the rules.

You can make the analogy that the Taliban were destroying the idols much

Bible said to do so.

And they may have felt quite rightful and righteous in doing so. But in so

destroying them, they destroyed them for the rest of the world that may not and

probably doesn't have the same beliefs.

The rules of the Bible are often multidimensional.

Today, thousands of years after they were first written down, it can be

challenging for us to get to the heart of their intended meaning.

But for the Bible's original audience, the true intention of these rules was

more than apparent.

The language was not originally mystical, right? I mean, this was a

that was designed to communicate with people.

Certainly, it had poetry.

It had nuance.

But it was not designed to be a secret code to be cracked.

Yet even today, the Bible rules about false idols remain powerful and very

clear. In the ancient world, idols could be smashed, melted down.

They weren't lasting. They were ephemeral. And so people, I think, began

that why are we worshiping that which we ourselves can destroy?

An ancient story about Abraham may be the final word.

Abraham's father, Terah, is an idol salesman.

One day, Terach is going to the bank and he says to Abraham, OK, listen, you

watch the shop.

Terach goes out. Abraham picks up a big stick and smashes all the idols except

the one, the big one at the end.

Father comes back, is aghast and says, what happened?

And Abraham says, well, the big idol took that stick and smashed all the

idols. And Terach, Abraham's father, said an idol can't.

do that. And Abraham said, listen to yourself.

I mean, an idol doesn't have the power that you keep thinking it does.

Today, we may no longer worship the idols of Terah's shop, but there are

objects we do idolize.

Today we worship, we focus on things outside of the holy. We look at money

power. We look at fancy shoes and cars and houses. These are not entities

sources that can bring us peace bring us wisdom bring us the healing that we're

searching for and so abraham's simple lesson about the power that idols

still resonates with us even today it's like the old saying that doesn't matter

how many houses or fancy shoes or cars you put down in this life the size of

your funeral is always going to depend on the weather