Welcome to Meridian Magazine's Come Follow Me podcast. We are Scott and Maureen Proctor, and we are delighted to be with you today.

We're going to be studying Numbers, chapters 11 through 14, and chapters 20 through 24 and 27.

Now, this is the only opportunity we have to study the book of numbers

in the Come Follow Me curriculum. I was thinking, Maureen, about something that we have seen a number

of times in Israel that is one of the most exciting things I think that's ever been discovered.

It's called the priestly blessing. And it is located in the sixth

chapter of Numbers, verses 24 through 26. But the thing that was fun about this is archaeologist

Gabriel Barcai working in the southern part of the Valley of Hinole just south of Jerusalem. He

didn't have any budget at all,

so he was employing 12 and 13-year-old boys to work with him. One of the boys' names was Nathan,

and he had a hammer that he just happened to find. Professor Barcai was saying, would you kind of

go on your way, maybe go over in that tomb over there and just work a little bit?

And he didn't realize the boy had a hammer. So he got kind of bored and he started pounding on the floor of this tomb.

And he broke a hole in it and he brought a perfectly preserved pot over to the archaeologist,

and they found that there was this repository of all these sacred items.

One of them was the priestly blessing from numbers,

and it was 2,800 years old.

So it became, as is to this day, as far as I understand, the oldest

scriptural text that we have. It dates to 800 BC, and it's so exciting because oftentimes

they will have it on display in the Israel Museum, and we've seen it a number of times. The verse is,

The Lord bless thee and keep thee. He recognized these verses, I'm sure. The Lord make his face to shine upon thee and be gracious

unto thee. The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee and give thee peace. We're all familiar with this,

...