Welcome to episode twenty-eight of New Creation Conversations. In today’s conversation I am joined by a former colleague from my days at Azusa Pacific University – Dr. Bob Mullins. Bob is an alum of Southern California College, a Master’s degree from Fuller Seminary, did Graduate work at Jerusalem University College and completed his PhD at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Bob came to APU after spending a number of years in Israel. His interests encompass the fields of archaeology, history, geography, and biblical studies in an effort to better understand the ancient Near Eastern world of the Bible. Bob has served on a number of archaeological excavations, but in the last ten years he has been co-leading (with a team from Hebrew University) an excavation project at Abel Beth Maacah, an ancient city mentioned two or three times in the Bible that existed in the northern part of Israel just 1.2 miles south of the border with Lebanon.

I got to know Bob well serving on faculty together at APU, but my son Noah and I also had the privilege of traveling with Dr. Mullins to Israel with a group of supporters from the university to explore the Holy Land, but also to get to spend a day seeing and participating in the early stages of the dig at Abel Beth Maacah. In our conversation, Bob and I talk about the exciting things he and the team have discovered over the last decade working on this dig project, we talk about what we learn from biblical archaeology that adds to our faith, and we talk about his work on The Atlas of the Biblical World (published by Fortress Press) and why time and place matter so much in our study of the Scriptures.