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In the prophecy of the virgin birth, Isaiah 7:14, the prophet Isaiah declares, “The Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.” This prophecy had an initial fulfillment during Isaiah’s day, but it ultimately refers to the birth of Jesus, as we see in Matthew 1:22–23: “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: ‘The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel’ (which means ‘God with us’).” This does not mean, however, that the Messiah’s actual given name would be Immanuel.

There are many “names” given to Jesus in the Old and New Testaments, and Immanuel is one of them. Isaiah elsewhere prophesied of the Messiah,....."

Excavations in Jerusalem have unearthed what may be the first extra-Biblical evidence of the prophet Isaiah. Just south of the Temple Mount, in the Ophel excavations, archaeologist Eilat Mazar and her team have discovered a small seal impression that reads “[belonging] to Isaiah nvy.” The upper portion of the impression is missing, and its left side is damaged. Reconstructing a few Hebrew letters in this damaged area would cause the impression to read, “[belonging] to Isaiah the prophet.”

If the reconstruction stands, this may be the signature of the Biblical prophet Isaiah—the figure we encounter in the Books of 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, and Isaiah. Eilat Mazar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced this exciting discovery ....

Bible believers often are confronted with the skeptical claim that the Old Testament text has been corrupted during its long history of transmission and translation. The claim is made that the thousands of years separating the autographa (original manuscripts) from the earliest existing Old Testament copies have resulted in an unreliable, untrustworthy text. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, has provided fresh evidence to counter this assertion.....

The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa) is one of the original seven Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in Qumran in 1947. It is the largest (734 cm) and best preserved of all the biblical scrolls, and the only one that is almost complete. The 54 columns contain all 66 chapters of the Hebrew version of the biblical Book of Isaiah. Dating from ca. 125 BCE, it is also one of the oldest of the Dead Sea Scrolls, some one thousand years older than the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible known to us before the scrolls' discovery.

The version of the text is generally in agreement with the Masoretic or traditional version codified in medieval codices, such as the Aleppo Codex, but it contains....

This Hebrew inscription dates back to the Israeli period (eighth century BCE) and was discovered by two children in 1880, a few meters from the southern exit of the tunnel known as “Hezekiah's Tunnel”.

This Hebrew inscription dates back to the Israeli period (eighth century BCE) and was discovered by two children in 1880 a few meters from the southern exit of the tunnel known as “Hezkiah’s Tunnel”. It is currently displayed in the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul, Turkey, and this is because it was discovered during the Ottoman rule. The inscription describes the dramatic moment of an encounter between the two groups of masons who worked on the tunnel. It was engraved in the rock close to the exit of the tunnel....

In this new series, we’ll be exploring biblical people using archaeological artifacts relating to their lives.  We’ll begin with a bioarchaeography of King Hezekiah.

Hezekiah reigned as King of Judah from 716 to 687 BC, after having ruled for approximately 13 years in a co-regency with his father Ahaz.1  In 2 Chronicles 29:1-2 we read, “Hezekiah began to reign when he was twenty-five years old, and he reigned twenty-nine years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Abijah the daughter of Zechariah.  And he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, according to all that David his father had done.”  He is, perhaps, best known for this religious reforms and for his stand against the Assyrian invasion of Judah by Sennacherib in 701 BC.....