Word: testamental
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...museum official called it "a world-class find." What makes the ancient but seemingly mundane receipt significant is that the book of Jeremiah in the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) mentions the exact same official - though under a different transliteration, Nebo-Sarsekim, and a different title, chief officer, as accompanying the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar when he marched against Jerusalem...
...that those parts of the Bible that include prolific historical detail are probably historically accurate. Minimalists tend to think that they were completed centuries after their alleged dates as propaganda for a later Jewish government. Jeremiah's story is one of the most vividly rendered lives in the Old Testament. His biography is accepted as fact by pious Jews and Christians, as are the book's details regarding the sack of Jerusalem, in which Nebo-Sarsekim reportedly participated, and the subsequent Jewish exile "by the rivers of Babylon," commemorated by the Book of Psalms and Bob Marley. Minimalists tend...
...Conservatives are calling the Nebo-Sarsekim tablet, stamped in cuneiform script, such a proof. Lawson Stone, a professor of Old Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, describes Nebo-Sarsekim's rank as roughly equivalent to Deputy Undersecretary of the Interior. "The logical assumption," he contends, "is that Jeremiah wasn't written by a later writer, but a person writing at the time. I don't know why a later writer trying to create a legendary basis for [a later Jewish regime] would want to make reference to a third-ranked Babylonian clerk. This argues that the document...
...However, Robert Coote, an Old Testament professor at the more liberal San Francisco Theological Seminary, disagrees. Most academics who regard Jeremiah as a polemic, he claims, would concede that it makes use of materials originally written in Nebuchadnezzar's age, so there is no reason for it not to include the name of a minor figure in his court. "The logical fallacy," says Coote, "is to say that this one corroboration makes the whole narrative true and accurate...
...Nonetheless, the passage is an important bridge to a larger - if extra-Biblical - argument. Unlike the Old Testament, the New is not overly concerned with the details of national governance. Partly because first-century Palestine was so firmly under the Roman heel, and partly because early Christianity was oriented toward citizenship in the Kingdom of God rather than of man, there's not much on how to drive down inflation or protect a border...