The following is an excerpt from Gary North's Introduction to his book Leviticus: An Economic Commentary [a "Reader's Digest" version of his longer four-volume commentary, Boundaries and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Leviticus], on the extent of world trade before the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Modern man thinks of cross-oceanic trade as a recent phenomenon. It isn't. It goes back to the era of Abraham, at least. Abraham's home-business was also a missionary endeavor, and Abraham had thousands of people in his "household" (Genesis 14:14). Missionary activity was to be a part of this trade.
Jesus said the Pharisees "travel land and sea to win one proselyte" (Matthew 23:15). This had been going on for centuries. Biblical Law secured the rights of both Israelites and non-Israelites. Nations around the world wanted to do business with Jews because Jews did not oppress them.
There were traders from Northern Europe operating in North America in the early second millennium B.C.: Abraham's era. Inscriptions of one of these visits were discovered in the 1950's in Ontario, Canada.(4) It should therefore surprise no one that Jews were trading in North America as early as Jesus' time, and perhaps centuries earlier. There is evidence -- automatically dismissed as fraudulent ("forgery") by establishment scholars(5) -- that someone brought the message of God's Ten Commandments to the American southwest before the time of Jesus, possibly centuries before. I refer to the inscription, written in a Hebrew "stick" script,(6) which records the decalogue. It was written on a boulder weighing 80 tons, located 30 miles southwest of Albuquerque, New Mexico, near the town of Los Lunas.(7) The script (alphabet) dates from the twelfth century B.C.(8) Professor Robert Pfeiffer of Harvard University's Semitic Museum first translated the inscription in 1948.(9) A more recent translation than Pfeiffer's reads:
I [am] Yahve your God who brought you out of the land of the two Egypts out of the house of bondages. You shall not have other [foreign] gods in place of [me]. You shall not make for yourself molded or carved idols. You shall not lift up your voice to connect the name of Yahve in hate. Remember you [the] day Sabbath to make it holy. Honor your father and your mother to make long your existence upon the land which Yahve your God gave to you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery or idolatry. You shall not steal or deceive. You shall not bear witness against your neighbor testimony for a bribe. You shall not covet [the] wife of your neighbor and all which belongs to your neighbor.(10)
It mentions two Egypts, an obvious reference to the two regions of Egypt, upper (close to the head of the Nile) and lower (close to the Mediterranean).(11) As to when the inscription was made, George Morehouse, a mining engineer, has estimated that this could have taken place as recently as 500 years ago and as far back as two millennia.(12) A "revisionist" who has studied the inscription in detail believes that the text may be from the era of the Septuagint, i.e., over a century before the birth of Jesus -- surely no comfort for conventional textbook authors. The stone's tenth commandment prohibiting covetousness mentions the wife before property, a feature of the Septuagint text.(13) (The problem with this revisionist argument is that this "Septuagint" structuring of the text is also found in Deuteronomy 5:21.)
Evidence of the ancient world's advanced tools, maps,(14) international trade, and highly sophisticated astronomical and observational science(15) never gets into college-level world history textbooks. The evidence is automatically rejected or downplayed by conventional -- and woefully uninformed -- historians because it breaks with the familiar tenets of cultural evolution. Time is supposed to bring science, technology, and cultural advance. Cultural evolution, not cultural devolution, is supposed to be mankind's legacy to future generations. The thought that international trade across the oceans existed five centuries before Columbus, let alone five centuries before David,(16) is an affront to cultural evolutionists.
This is probably why a book like Patrick Huyghe's Columbus Was Last (1992) had to be published by an obscure New York company, Hyperion, which allowed it to go out of print within a year. It also explains why there is so little awareness regarding amateur archeologist Emilio Estrada's 1957 discovery of buried Japanese pottery on the coast of Ecuador: Japan's Jomon-era stone-age pottery.(17) Scholars do not want to face the obvious question: How did it get there? And why are there artistic similarities between the China's Shang dynasty and the Mesoamerica Olmec culture -- large cats (sometimes without their lower jaws), the dragon, and the use of jade -- which overlapped each other from the fifteenth to the twelfth centuries, B.C.?(18) Why were the implements and techniques used by the Mayans to make bark paper five centuries before Christ so similar to the implements and techniques used by the Chou dynasty in the same era? Of 121 individual traits, the two systems shared 91, half of which were non-essential, and the other half, while essential, had alternative approaches available.(19) Why didn't the Mesoamerican techniques match papermaking techniques used by cultures in other parts of America?(20) Why do Mayan stone art works after 500 B.C. shift from earlier forms to match Asian art forms of the same era?(21)
Meanwhile, at the other end of the hemisphere, slate technologies have been discovered in burial sites of the ancient Red Paint (red ochre) People in Maine and Labrador. These artifacts match slate technologies in Scandinavia. The era of conjunction was some 4,000 years ago.(22) Huyghe writes: "The principal deterrent to the notion of historical contact is the widespread belief that ancient man was incapable of making ocean voyages in primitive boats. But there is certainly no doubt that Europeans had oceangoing watercraft quite early. Bronze Age rock carvings in Europe show plank-built ships were sailing Atlantic coastal waters more than 4,000 years ago."(23)
How many people know that the Carthaginians were sending trading ships to North America in the late fourth century B.C.? Throughout the eastern United States, Carthaginian coins from the 325 B.C. era have been discovered near navigable rivers and off the Atlantic coast.(24) Beginning in the late eighteenth century, farmers in New England started digging up hoards of Roman coins.(25)
Few people know that numerous commercial bronze replicas of Assyrian deities have been discovered in Cuenca, Ecuador. The Phoenicians were producing these replicas on Cyprus as early as 600 B.C. Carthage, an offshoot of Phoenecia, exported them to barbarian peoples.(26) We know that after 300 B.C., Carthage began to mint electrum coins: mostly gold, but with some silver. Where did Carthage get the gold? These fake deities in South America are evidence that Carthage imported gold from South America through the sale of these replicas.(27) These trips would also explain where Carthage got the pine lumber for building huge warships(28) until the end of the First Punic War with Rome in 241 B.C.(29) (In that war, 264-41 B.C., Carthage lost 334 of these giant ships.)(30) Barry Fell speculates that before the defeat, they had brought trees as ballast from North America, which is why we discover bronze coins there. They bought lumber from the Indians.(31) After 241 B.C., Carthaginian trade with the Americas ceased.
Roman trade replaced it.(32) Paintings of Roman-Iberian coins appear on cave walls in Arkansas and as far west as Castle Gardens, near Moneta ("money"), Wyoming.(33) There were Iberian-based banks all across North America in the time of Jesus. These contacts continued, and they left traces. "In 1933, an astonished Mexican archeologist excavated a terra-cotta head of a Roman figurine of the third century A.D. from an undisturbed ancient grave sealed under the Calixtlahuaca pyramid, thirty-five miles southwest of Mexico City."(34)
The Carthaginians and Romans were late-comers. The Scandinavians were trading in North America during the Bronze Age, possibly as early as 1700 B.C.(35) -- the era of Joseph in Egypt. A visiting Norwegian sailor-king left an account of one of these visits in what is now called Petroglyph Park in Peterborough, Ontario, in Canada. He had an inscription chiseled into rock, written in a nearly universal alphabet of the ancient world, ogam consaine,(36) and another alphabet, equally universal, Tifinag, an alphabet still employed by the Tuaregs, a Berber tribe in North Africa. The Norse inscription was accompanied by a comment written by an Algonquin Indian scribe in a script common among the pre-Roman Basques, but using a form of the Algonquin language still understood.(37) The inscription was discovered in 1954.(38)
This same Basque script was also employed by the Cree Indians well into the nineteenth century. It was not known to be related to Basque until Fell transliterated into Latin consonants a document written in this "Indian" script. The document had been sent to him by a Basque etymologist who had been unable to decipher it. When it was transliterated, the Basque scholar recognized it as a pre-Roman dialect of the Basque tongue, one which was still in use in the medieval period.(39) Some of the words are virtually the same in both the Algonquin and ancient Basque tongues.(40) (Fell also reads Greek, Latin, German, French, Danish, and Gaelic; he has a working knowledge of Sanskrit, Kufic Arabic, and several Asian and African languages.)(41)
A thousand years before the birth of Jesus, Celtic traders(42) were serving as missionaries in North America, bringing the stories of their gods across the continent: central and Western Canada, and as far south as Nevada and California. The petroglyphs of this era reproduce Norse gods whose names are in ogam.(43) Needless to say, none of this information has moved into college history textbooks. Textbooks include only certain kinds of texts. Textbook authors dismiss all such petroglyph evidence as "forgeries" -- the same way they dismiss the texts of the Bible that challenge their concept of chronology. But this is beginning to change. A few academic specialists are beginning to admit that there is something of value in Fell's work.(44) We can therefore predict the traditional three stages of academic surrender: 1) "It isn't true." 2) "It's true, but so what?" 3) "We always knew it was true." As of the final decade of the twentieth century, we are still in stage one.
If Celtic traders were able bring their gods to North America, so were Jewish traders. God expected them to do this. To some extent, they did, as the Los Lunas stone indicates. But they did not do it on a scale that matched the Celts. The requirement that they return for Passover each year must have inhibited their journeys. This was a barrier to world evangelism. It was a temporary barrier. Israel's old wineskins would inevitably be broken because the geographical boundaries of the Mosaic law would eventually be broken if God's law was obeyed. Population growth would have seen to that. So would the cost of journeying to Jerusalem, especially for international Jewish traders. But even if the Mosaic law was disobeyed, those wineskins would be broken. This is what took place definitively with Jesus' ministry, progressively with the establishment of the church, and finally in A.D. 70.(45) The fire on God's earthly altar was extinguished forever.
When, sixty years later, Bar Kochba revolted, the Romans crushed the revolt in 135. There is a continuing stream of archeological discoveries indicating that some of the survivors fled to Tennessee and Kentucky. An early find in Bat Creek, Tennessee by Smithsonian field assistant John Emmert in 1889 is a five-inch stone inscribed with eight Hebrew characters. The significance of this was denied by the Smithsonian's curator, who claimed this was Cherokee syllabic script. As the saying goes, "Nice try, but no cigar" -- he had read it upside-down. Over half a century later, Hebrew scholars turned it right-side up and discovered these consonants: LYHWD. In the early 1970's, Brandeis University's Hebraicist Cyrus H. Gordon identified the era of the style of these letters: Bar Kochba's. He translated the phrase: "A comet for the Jews," which was a standard phrase during the revolt. Similar coin finds from this era had been made in Kentucky, which Gordon believed had not been faked.(46)
Needless to say, none of this is in the textbooks. Neither will you find a reference to the massive 1,375-page two-volume bibliography Pre-Columbian Contacts with the Americas Across the Oceans, which contains over 5,500 entries.(47) For those of you who want to spend a lifetime following the trails into and out of America, here is the place to start.
International Trade Before Columbus