For some people, the Bible looks as though it should be a history book, but serious scholars recognize that it is a collection of oral traditions: metaphors which might serve as guides to community morality as well as containing entertaining stories. The context of oral traditions means that there is interplay between the person telling the story and those listening. The physical, social, and cultural context—gathered around a family hearth, drinking beer with coworkers, a religious ceremony—also influence the meaning of the stories. The process of writing the stories was an action that began many centuries after the stories first entered into the oral tradition and were removed from their context. Over time the stories were revised and rewritten for new audiences and different cultural and religious contexts.
For those who understand the transition from oral traditions to written traditions, there are a number of questions which emerge:
- What was the cultural context in which the story originated? The cultural context includes things such as religion (animistic, polytheistic, shamanistic), community (band, village, town, city), economics (hunting and gathering, agricultural, pastoral), and so on.
- Was the story created originally as an imaginative, creative endeavor, or to what extent was it based on real events, real people, and real locations? To the extent that the story reflects reality, there should be physical evidence.
In searching for answers to these and other questions, researchers turn to archaeology, or more specifically to a sub-discipline of archaeology which is often called biblical archaeology.
Some Background
Archaeology is simply the scientific study of the past based on material culture—that is, the features, artifacts, and other things that humans leave behind. In Europe, archaeology grew out of, and is still closely allied with, the study of the Classics (the literature of ancient Greece and Rome). During the nineteenth century, a number of European and American scholars began to use some of the methods of the emerging fields of archaeology and geography in studying the ancient world of Palestine, Syria, and Jordon (the lands mentioned in the Bible).
One of the earliest attempts to gather hard data regarding biblical stories came about in 1838 when Edward Robinson (American Congregationalist minister, biblical scholar, faculty member of Union Theological Seminary in New York, and explorer) and Eli Smith (American missionary; fluent in Arabic) toured Palestine. In his book Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction, Eric Cline writes:
“Their goal was to identify as many sites mentioned in the Bible as possible—in other words, to create a historical (and biblical) geography of Palestine. They did so primarily by matching modern Arabic names to ancient Hebrew names, so that, for instance, they identified modern Beitan as ancient Bethel.”
Robinson and Smith published their findings in three volumes in which they claimed to have identified 100 biblical sites. Eric Cline writes:
“Robinson’s identifications were not always completely accurate, of course, nor did he succeed in locating all of the ancient sites for which he was searching.”
By the middle of the nineteenth century, a number of European scholars had concluded that in order to understand the Bible, an understanding of the geography of the region was required. In 1865, the British-based Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) was founded with Queen Victoria as its patron. In his book Archaeologists: Explorers of the Human Past, Brian Fagan writes:
“Its objective was to find traces of events and peoples mentioned in the Scriptures.”
In 1867, the PEF sent Captain Charles Warren (1840-1927) and a detachment of Royal Engineers to Jerusalem to excavate under the Haram esh Sharif, a walled compound which held some shrines sacred to Islam. Warren and his team sank 27 shafts and built tunnels to map the topography of the biblical Jerusalem. Brian Fagan writes:
“Warren’s Jerusalem discoveries provided the first framework for biblical archaeology.”
During the late nineteenth-century, a number of British Egyptologists sought to use the archaeological findings in Egypt to verify stories in the Bible. Part of the goal was to counter the ideas of evolution and biblical criticism. David Gange, in an article in The Historical Journal, writes:
“Egyptologists therefore went to Egypt not just to find records of biblical events, but in search of the highly developed written culture that they were certain must exist, and would therefore offer a serious setback to the claims of evolutionists and biblical critics.”
David Gange goes on to report:
“…Egypt yielded little of the unequivocal biblical evidence that Egyptologists had been certain they would find.”
In 1890, the PEF expanded its efforts in archaeology by hiring William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942), a well-known Egyptologist who had done pioneering work in excavating using the method of stratigraphy. Flinders Petri excavated the city mound of Tell el-Hesi in southern Israel. Using samples of pottery from the different layers in the tell and using some of the Egyptian artifacts found in the layers for cross-dating, he was able to create a chronology of the site.
Biblical Archaeology as a Discipline
Biblical archaeology as a distinct sub-discipline of archaeology emerged through the efforts of William Foxwell Albright (1891-1971) who began working in the region in the 1920s. Considered to be the “dean of biblical archaeology,” Albright was a devout Methodist who insisted that the Bible was essentially correct from a historical point of view, and that archaeology could be used to prove the correctness of the Bible. Eric Cline writes:
“In conducting his research, Albright relied upon a combination of archaeological excavation, textual analysis, and biblical exegesis (a close reading of the text), which is an approach that many still use today.”
Today, biblical archaeology is a sub-discipline which focuses primarily on the geographic region of modern Israel, Jordan, and the Sinai—in other words, the lands of the Bible. Leona Glidden Running, in an entry in The Oxford Companion to Archaeology, writes: “
As director of the American School of Oriental Research (now the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research) Albright established the modern discipline of Biblical Archaeology, in which the realia of ancient Near Eastern material culture were used to illustrate and deepen scholarly understanding of the biblical text.”
In her Encyclopedic Dictionary of Archaeology, Barbara Kipfer defines biblical archaeology as the
“branch of historical archaeology devoted to the discovery and investigation of the places and artifacts recorded by the Bible and to the study of Biblical times and documents.”
Biblical archaeology is a part of Near Eastern Archaeology and some archaeologists feel that the designation Biblical Archaeology should be replaced with Syro-Palestinian Archaeology. Beginning about 1972, William G. Dever of the University of Arizona began to suggest that the designation “Syro-Palestinian archaeology” was a more accurate name. Eric Cline reports:
“Arguing that archaeologists were no longer primarily interested in proving or disproving the Bible, but were now using their methods to shed light on the various peoples and cultures of the ancient Near East, Dever went on a decades-long crusade to delete the words ‘biblical archaeology’ from the lexicon.”
While there are some people who think that Biblical Archaeology focuses on proving the literal readings of the Bible, this is not true. In the textbook Archaeology: The Science of the Human Past, Mark Sutton and Robert Yohe write:
“It has been demonstrated through scientific archaeology that many of the places, events, and people described in the Bible are, in fact, historical, while others may not be.”
In fact, archaeology raises more questions about the historicity of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament than it provides answers.
In an article in Smithsonian on the archaeology at Bethsaida, Ariel Sabar writes:
“Modern archaeologists working here, however, are less interested in ‘proving’ the Bible than in uncovering facts and context absent from the texts.”
This is similar to historical archaeology in North America which seeks to provide information not found in historical documents. Eric Cline writes:
“Most biblical archaeologists do not deliberately set out to either prove or disprove elements of the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament through archaeology. Instead, they investigate the material culture of the lands and time periods mentioned in the Bible, and the people, places, and events discussed in those ancient texts, in order to bring them to life and to reconstruct the culture and history of the region.”
Eric Cline broadly classifies biblical archaeologists into two groups: minimalists and maximalists. According to Eric Cline, the biblical minimalists
“suggest that much of the Hebrew Bible and the history of ancient Israel is essentially a fabrication by writers and scholars living in either the Persian period in the fifth century BCE, or the Hellenistic period in the third through first centuries BCE.”
This group of archaeologists feels that there is only minimal actual history and historical facts contained in the Bible. In his chapter in Year of Discovery, science writer Haim Watzman describes minimalists this way:
“Minimalists believe that the tales in the first five books of the Old Testament, called the Pentateuch, and the historical books of the Old Testament are fictions composed at a much later date than the events they claim to describe. In their view, the stories were meant to provide a mythical past for a Jewish people who achieved a national consciousness and unique theology only during the time of the Babylonian exile (586-438 B.C.) or perhaps even as late as the Hellenistic period (332-63 B.C.).”
Eric Cline also reports:
“One should be aware that on the other side of the spectrum are the so-called biblical maximalists who argue that the biblical stories are indeed both completely factual and historically correct, even if they cannot always be verified by archaeology.”
The goal of archaeology is not only to seek to understand the past and the changes which human societies have undergone, but to correct misconceptions about the past. Eric Cline writes:
“While biblical archaeologists working today are generally more interested in learning about details of daily life in the ancient biblical world than proving or disproving the accounts in the Bible, many lay people have these priorities reversed.”
While the Bible, like oral traditions in other regions, can provide some broad guidelines for research, the stories from the oral traditions are often very different from those told by the material remains. It should be kept in mind that the Bible was written by an elite, and that today’s archaeology focuses on the lives of ordinary people.
Egypt
Egypt is outside of the primary geographic region for biblical archaeology, but since Egypt is mentioned in some Biblical stories, some people feel that there should be archaeological evidence in Egypt to support the veracity of the Bible. Egyptologist Ian Shaw, in his book Ancient Egypt: A Very Short History, reports:
“There can be no doubting the presence of Greeks and Romans in Egypt, but attempts to correlate biblical narratives with the Egyptian textual and archaeological record have always been distinctly problematic.”
Shaw goes on to say:
“Since most of the events described in the Bible occurred several hundred years before the time that they were written down, it is extremely difficult to know when they are factual historical accounts and when they are purely allegorical or rhetorical in nature.”
In his book The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, Toby Wilkinson writes:
“Although Egypt is mentioned in the Old and New Testaments, attempts to corroborate these accounts through the study of ancient Egyptian texts or through archaeology have proved extremely difficult, inconclusive and controversial.”
Toby Wilkinson also reports:
“Stylistic connections between Egyptian and biblical texts indicate a common literary tradition across large parts of the ancient Near East, but little more.”
The Exodus account, for example, appears to be a mishmash of stories that probably originated in the expulsion of the Hyksos (the Asiatic kings who ruled Lower Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period). Many archaeologists have concluded that the Exodus story was simply a convenient use of folk tales to allow the Israelites to define themselves as a distinct nation. The story is mythical rather than historical. Ian Shaw reports:
“It is an irony of biblical archaeology that the more we investigate the texts and archaeological remains that link Egypt with the Bible, the less substantial and less convincing these kinds of connections appear to be.”
Associated with the Exodus story is the idea of Egyptian slavery and particularly the misconception that the pyramids were constructed with slave labor. Toby Wilkinson writes:
“Despite the popular (though entirely incorrect) notion that the pyramids were built by gangs of slaves, slavery was very rare in ancient Egypt before the Ptolemaic period.”
Religion 101/102
Religion 101/102 is a series of essays relating to various religious topics in which the definition of religion is not confined to Western religions nor to religions which are based on beliefs about gods. Religion 102 is an expansion of an earlier essay. More from this series—
Religion 102: Agnosticism
Religion 101: The Meaning of Ghosts
Religion 101: Ancestor Worship in Ancient Europe and the Arctic
Religion 201: Reincarnation
Religion 102: Naturalism
Religion 101: Ancestor Worship in the Americas
Religion 101: Human Sacrifice and High-Status Burials