Is the Bible Scientifically and Historically Accurate?

Do you know how George Washington died? He bled to death. Worse yet, his doctors bled him to death. What a case for malpractice lawyers to sink their teeth into!

But wait! In old George's time, it was common practice to bleed a patient to "get rid of the bad blood." Even barbers were often called on to bleed a person. That's the reason why barber poles are red and white. The red represents blood and the white represents bandages.

That was the science of the time. It was the best they knew how to do. But if they had consulted the Bible, they would have seen the answer was there all along.

The Bible says, in Leviticus 17:14 (in part), "The life of every creature is its blood." Yet the great scientists of the time bled a patient, when a transfusion would have been more in order.

I'm not Jewish, so I don't claim to know a lot about the Jewish religion. But the Old Testament is full of Jewish law and health practices. While some of them seem like only rituals, there was a scientific reason behind them, and God instituted those rituals for a purpose.

Take the matter of hand washing and other ceremonial cleansing rituals. At the time the Bible was written, scientists knew nothing of germs. God did. That's why He instituted those rituals. By following them, a person could avoid getting sick by bacterial contamination, without possessing the vast amount of scientific knowledge that men would "discover" centuries later.

Even as late as the early 20th century, most methods of sanitation were seldom practiced. I've been told that when a doctor moved to a small town near us some time in the 1930's or 40's, people laughed at him because of his "obsession" with hand washing. Now we are not only taught to wash our hands, but have germicidal hand washing products to take with us wherever we go. In third world countries, as well as our own, many lives could be saved by following God's simple rules of sanitation.

The Bible also gave specific instructions on how and what to eat. The Jews still follow those instructions through their "kosher" food. I haven't done the research, but I'd be willing to bet that as a group, they enjoy much better health than most of the rest of us who eat whatever we want. As one who has tried to eat healthy foods, I become more and more frustrated as the experts disagree and even change their opinions on what is healthy.

As late as 1492, most people still thought the world was flat. The ancient Egyptians thought the earth was supported by pillars. The Greeks thought the world was carried on the back of a giant named Atlas. And the Hindus actually believed the earth was resting on the backs of gigantic elephants. Opinions vary as to their concept of the shape of the world. While they may have been partly accurate in their thinking, they were also very wrong. But that was the science of the day--wrong.

In Job 26:7, Job says that God suspends the earth over nothing. In Isaiah 40:22, the prophet described the earth as a circle. So, in short, the Bible says the earth is a sphere, suspended by nothing. Yet it was centuries before scientists learned or acknowledged that fact.

Did you know that people used to think it would be possible to count the stars? Hipparchus, an astronomer and scientist who lived about 150 years before Christ, set out to count the stars. When he reached 1,022, he thought he had done it. His count was considered accurate for 250 years.

Then Ptolemy came along and did a count of his own. He was happy to prove Hipparchus wrong. There were not 1,022 stars--there were actually 1,056.

It was another 1300 years before a young medical student named Galileo invented a crude telescope and saw far beyond what could be seen with the naked eye. He observed that there are hundreds of billions of stars--so many that only a fool would ever try to count them.

In Jeremiah 33:22, God told Jeremiah that he would make the descendants of David "as countless as the stars in the sky." God knew, and the Bible revealed from the start, such facts that scientists did not discover for centuries.

In every generation, there have been people who put their faith in science rather than in the God of the Bible. Each generation has thought they had finally reached the ultimate in knowledge, and each generation's efforts to disprove the Bible have failed.

The Bible has also been proven to be accurate historically. In the late 1800's, a Dr. S.R. Driver scoffed at the idea that Moses had written the first five books of the Bible, known as the Pentateuch. He claimed that in the time that Moses was supposed to have lived, men didn't know how to write.

Others agreed with his opinion of the Bible until one day in northern Egypt, a woman who was spading up her garden unearthed some clay tablets. Scientists and historians determined that they were tablets used for correspondence. They had been written by and sent from people in Egypt to people in what we now call the Holy Land, centuries before Moses was born. People in that day not only knew how to write, but were so advanced that they had a postal system that allowed them to send letters back and forth between each other. So Moses was indeed capable of writing the Pentateuch. And that proves the opinion of another educated man wrong.

The book of Daniel (chapter 5) tells about King Belshazzar, scripturally known as the last king of Babylon, who saw a hand (sans body) writing on the wall during a feast he had for a thousand of his lords and ladies. He even had the audacity to use silver and gold goblets that he had stolen from the temple of God at Jerusalem. This handwriting told him he had been weighed and found wanting, and that his reign was quickly coming to an end. That very night he was killed and the Medes took over the kingdom.

Scolars would laugh and say that was a fabrication. They say it never happened, "Because we have the records of ancient Babylonia and we know that Nabonitus, not Belshazzar, was the last king of Babylon."

Archeologists have since found a cylinder bearing the name of Belshazzar. More records were found that showed the historians were right when they said Nabonitus was the last king of Babylon. But they were wrong when they said Belshazzar was not the last king of Babylon. The records revealed that Nabonitus and Belshazzar were father and son and had ruled together, at the same time.

If they hadn't found the cylinder with Belshazzar's name on it, would the Bible be any less true? Someday maybe people will catch up with the Bible. Maybe not. As the late Adrian Rogers said, "If a historian or scientist has a good word to say about the Bible,it shouldn't give you any more faith in the Bible, just a little more faith in the scientist or the historian."

Science is always changing. The Bible always has and always will stand the test of time, just as it was written.