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We come now to a most disturbing but telling matter regarding one of the Bible’s critics altering records and tampering with a most important body of evidence. This evidence, if made public, would have greatly exonerated the Biblical record in the public’s eyes, and the Bible - particularly in its earlier Books - would by no means have suffered the derogation and ridicule that it has undergone for the past 125 years or so.

I refer in particular to the Amarna Tablets and the very strong witness that they bear to the records contained in the Books of Joshua and Judges. The Biblical names that those Tablets bear have been deliberately expunged and altered so that they are now unrecognisable in any of the modern translations, and the chief culprit behind this nefarious deed is [Jorgen] Knudtzon, a Norwegian scholar who first arranged the order of the Tablets so that they could not be made to correspond with the order of events laid out in Joshua and Judges, and who set the text of their transliteration that has become the standard of reference since it was first published more than 100 years ago.1

What follows is the nature of the fraud.

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[Morris] Jastrow, Jr., was no friend of the Old Testament, and wherever he could, he would deride and dismiss it. But on this occasion at least, he was honest enough to publish the fact that the Amarna Tablets contained names within them that appeared also in the Bible, the appearance of the names greatly exonerating the historical reliability of its Books. But was Jastrow the only scholar around who had discovered these facts? By no means. He was accompanied by Scheil;4 Winckler and Abel.5 There were others, of course, and they all independently read in the Tablets of the men of Judah - ameluti ia-u-du - and of the armed men or warriors of Judah – ameluti sabe ia-u-du.6

The importance of the reading ia-u-du is seen in the fact that the very same name is found in the Assyrian inscriptions of Sargon, Sennacherib and Esarhaddon.7 Like the Amarna Tablets themselves, these Assyrian inscriptions are written in Akkadian, and in all instances ia-u-du refers to the people or men of Judah.

So how is it then that one can search in vain for the name of Judah in any of the later translations of the Tablets? Well, as I said, it is all down to the fraudulent alteration of the Tablets’ readings that was carried out by [Jorgen] Knudtzon, and here’s how he did it. He took the reading ia-u-du, and changed it without warrant to su-u-du.8 This he translated into German as Sudu-Leute,9 (Sudu-people), thus entirely expunging the name of Judah. English translations have since rendered su-u-du as Suteans, defined by Moran as: “... name of an ancient tribe that by the Amarna period had acquired a more general sense and designated roaming and often dangerous bands.”10 But was Knudtzon’s substitution of su-u-du for ia-u-du deliberate or incidental? It was deliberate, and here’s how we know. To begin with, Knudtzon was clearly irritated by the reading ia-u-du and the corroboration that this lent to the Biblical record, for as a footnote to his reading su- for ia-, he put: “Oder zu; nicht ia!” – “Or zu; not ia!”11 The exclamation mark betrays Knudtzon’s irritation at the reading ia-u-du, even though that had been the standard reading given independently by every competent scholar before him. Moreover, the sign for ia- appears eight times in the surviving text of EA 169 - (twelve times in Jastrow’s reconstruction) - and Knudtzon had been perfectly happy to give ia- as its reading on six of those occasions. Yet, when it comes to the word ia-u-du, he changes his reading of ia- to su- so as to alter the word to su-u-du, thus concealing the name of Judah and its corroboration of both the Books of Joshua and Judges.

This is because the reading, which had the Amarna Tablets speaking of the men of Judah, did not marry well at all with his thoroughly modernist paradigm, and it therefore had to be rejected in favour of an invention of his own, the ‘Sudu-Leute’ – or ‘Sudu-people.’ This phrase was perpetuated by Mercer in his 1939 two-volume English translation of Knudtzon’s edition,12 and so it has passed into the realm of academe with uncritical acceptance. But the designation is false – utterly false. It was, and still is, a criminal and fraudulent alteration of the text. Knudtzon was also responsible for expunging the all-important name of Jericho from the Amarna Tablets.

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Had his substitution of su- for ia- been truly an innocent error, then he would have read the sign ia- as su- on the other six occasions of its appearance in the text (which would have given him a problem or two in translation!). But its occurrences only when the sign appears for the name of Judah is systematic, and is therefore deliberate. This was an act of fraud. Thousands, if not millions, have been deceived by the fraud over the past 100 years or so, and this, as far as I am aware, is the first occasion on which this particular fraud has been brought to light.

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I have been critically investigating the Books of the Bible for nigh fifty years now, and I never cease to be astonished at their accuracy. Even their unlikeliest statements turn out to be unnervingly accurate when they are investigated in any depth. Witness the account of Ehud bolting that door on the inside from the outside as he left the room (see Chapter Three above).

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The critics will always steer clear of the microscopic evidence because that is something which will always reveal their lie. They will denigrate the Scriptures in a more general sense, casting doubt upon this or that statement, and there they will leave it, confident that the public would never question their white-coat status as professors of this or doctors of that. Their commentaries on the Bible - which always seem to cost many times the price of the Bible they’re commenting on - will carry the imprimatur of this or that university, and thus the public will be deceived, never thinking to examine what the critics have been claiming all these years. The sad thing is that I don’t suppose for one moment that the deception will ever cease. Not this side of Eternity anyway.