Originally posted Saturday, March 26, 5:47 PM. Updated. MOUNT EBAL, ISRAEL. The oldest occurrence of the name of God, in the letters YHWH, appears to have been found that may force archaeologists to accept the existence of the cult of YHWH possibly as far back as less than a century after the Exodus, some time after 1500 B.C.E., nearly 800 years prior to their previous estimates. The 2 cm x 2 cm folded-lead “curse tablet” (or defixio) amulet was found by Dr. Scott Stripling and his team at Joshua's altar on Mount Ebal in a mound of archaeological debris that was originally dry-sifted between 1983-1989. This find confirms Deuteronomy 11:29 which indicates that Mount Ebal is a place of curses. A Times of Israel article by Amanda Borschel-Dan says that Haifa University Prof. Gershon Galil assisted [with Stripling] in deciphering the hidden internal text of the folded lead tablet using [multi-spectral] scans carried out in Prague at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The ...

Determining the author of Hebrews is a matter of internal and historical evidence. The book, All Scriptures is Inspired of God and Beneficial (1990), published by Jehovah's Witnesses, says this about the evidence of Paul's authorship of the book of Hebrews: The internal evidence of the book is all in support of Paul’s writership. The writer was in Italy and was associated with Timothy. These facts fit Paul. (Heb. 13:23, 24) Furthermore, the doctrine is typical of Paul, though the arguments are presented from a Jewish viewpoint, designed to appeal to the strictly Hebrew congregation to which the letter was addressed. On this point Clarke’s Commentary, Volume 6, page 681, says concerning Hebrews: “That it was written to Jews, naturally such, the whole structure of the epistle proves. Had it been written to the Gentiles, not one in ten thousand of them could have comprehended the argument, because unacquainted with the Jewish system; the knowledge of which the writer of this ep...