We live in a time when people are always grasping for proof of the Bible’s historical accuracy, and God just pulled back the curtain on another ancient wonder, this time in the form of purple-stained pottery.
Historians recently unveiled a remarkable discovery at Tel Shiqmona, an archaeological site on Israel’s Mediterranean coast just south of Haifa.
As reported in the journal PLOS One, it’s “the only site in the Near East or around the Mediterranean – indeed, in the entire world – where a sequence of purple-dye workshops has been excavated and which has clear evidence for large-scale, sustained manufacture of purple dye and dyeing in a specialized facility for half a millennium, during the Iron Age.”
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Let that sink in: the only one.
This isn’t just historical trivia. It’s biblical confirmation. The production of purple dye, harvested painstakingly from crushed mollusks, wasn’t just an artisanal novelty—it was central to status, wealth, and even worship. Scripture points to this color repeatedly, from the humble merchant Lydia in Acts 16:14—“a dealer in purple cloth… The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message”—to the mocking of Jesus in Mark 15:17: “And they clothed him in a purple cloak.”
Tel Shiqmona predates David and Solomon by a century. That’s significant because it shows the infrastructure for this prized material existed before Israel’s golden age, anchoring biblical descriptions in material reality. The vats, the stained tools, the chemical analysis—all of it confirms what the Word had recorded millennia ago.
And it wasn’t glamorous. As archaeologist Golan Shalvi told New Scientist, “I imagine it as a very smelly place… I picture wool fleeces dyed in various shades drying outside and inside the buildings, which may have given the site a purplish-reddish-blue hue.”
No marble temples. No grand structures. Just the raw, gritty proof that what God said happened, did happen.
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This find reminds us that the Bible doesn’t need rewriting, it just needs rereading in light of the evidence God keeps revealing. Every dig in Israel seems to echo the truth of Scripture louder than before. The purple threads of history are not only symbolic of royalty but a bold banner that the King of kings has indeed walked among us.
And yes, He was clothed in purple.
James Lasher is staff writer for Charisma Media.
