He was the Jewish high priest from 18-36 A.D., the time when Jesus was sentenced to death upon the cross. As it says in Matthew 26:3-4, “Then the chief priests and the elders of the people assembled in the palace of the high priest, whose name was Caiaphas, and they plotted to arrest Jesus in some sly way and kill him.” In 1990, at Jerusalem in Israel, the tomb of high priest Caiaphas was uncovered. All of these discoveries prove the existence of historical figures that were once thought by some to be fictional. These discoveries are a major part in proving the reliability and validity of the Bible itself.Still more evidence exists to prove the Bible in a very similar way. Archeological evidence not only proves the existence of people, but also of places and events that exist within the covers of the Holy Bible alone. The Temple of Ashtoroth is one of those places. Ashtoroth was a female deity known to the Canaanites as the Goddess of War and Fertility (NIV). Another recent discovery in Beth Shan uncovered the ruins of several temples. One of the temples, from the twelfth century B.C., was dedicated to Ashtaroth. Archeologists are almost certain that this temple is that which is referred to in 1 Samuel 31:10 where after King Saul’s death his soldiers put his armor (Sheler). “They put his armor in the temple of the Ashtoreths and fastened his body to the wall of Beth Shan” (NIV). Another place, this time a city, is Hazor, Israel. Archeologist Amnon Ben-Tor, during excavations in Israel, exposed remnants of an entire city. Hazor, as it is mentioned in the Bible, is an ancient Canaanite royal city (Sheler). Ben-Tor and his team of excavators found indications that the city was, “…destroyed by a terrible fire, and its Canaanite and Egyptian statues destroyed, in the late second millennium B.C.” (Sheler 3). These discoveries support the Biblical account which is found in the boo...
