Archaeology and Biblical Interpretation

John R. Bartlett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134768707
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The contributors in this book use the most recent research in key areas - the early settlements of Israel, early Israelite religion, Qumran, Jerusalem, early Christian churches - to show that ancient writings and modern archaeology can illuminate each other, but only when used with professional care. The essays represent a new generation of archaeologists and historians, with new social, political and religious concerns who draw a fresh and vital picture of the emergence of ancient Israel.

1
WHAT HAS ARCHAEOLOGYL TO DO WITH THE BIBLE – OR VICE VERSA?

John R. Bartlett

INTRODUCTION

I must begin by saying something about the nature of the Bible, and the nature of archaeology, which will at least reveal my starting point. Like all other written books, including other holy books, the Bible is in the first place (whatever value we set upon it) a human artefact, with a human history. It is the product of many different human minds of varying ability, written by human hands of varied powers of co-ordination, copied and recopied by scribes of varied intelligence, printed and bound by craftsmen of varying standards of skill, read and interpreted by Jews and Christians and agnostics and atheists of differing hermeneutical approaches. It is also a book of very varied origins and contents. It is an anthology containing ancient Jewish laws, legends, myths, hymns, songs, love lyrics, proverbs, prophecies, stories, biographies, histories, letters, visions, philosophical reflection and so on, written at different times between, let us say, the eighth century BCE and the early second century of this era. Its many authors wrote to meet the needs of their own times rather than our own. The historians among them wrote history as they saw it, and they presented the past of Israel in terms designed to meet their own political or religious agenda, not our agenda. Divine inspiration may have led them to write better than they knew, but nevertheless they were writing as human beings for their own human situation, and could not have known what use later generations might make of their work or what interpretations they might put on it. And their work is itself part of history, and the historical books of the Bible are part of ancient historiography, to be read and studied alongside other ancient writings and other evidence of that past. And among that ‘other’ evidence is, of course, what we loosely call ‘archaeology’.

‘Archaeology’ was once a general term referring to study of the past; so Josephus entitled his twenty-volume history of the Jews ‘The archaeology of the Jews’. Archaeology now popularly describes the activity of those who excavate ancient sites. The best definition is perhaps that of R. J. Braidwood: ‘the study of things men made and did, in order that their whole way of life may be understood’ (in Archaeologists and What They Do (New York 1960), quoted in Daniel 1967: 17). This is not mere antiquarianism, but an intellectual enquiry into human experience. The professional archaeologist, using a wide range of techniques, studies systematically the material remains of the past and thus contributes to the general historical task along with other scholars who study the literary, inscriptional, artistic or other recorded evidence. The archaeological evidence from the ancient states of Israel and Judah and the ancient writings enshrined in our modern Bible are perhaps the two most important sources for the history of the people of ancient Israel and of the early Christian church; but evidence both archaeological and literary from the ancient surrounding nations – Egypt, Syria, Babylonia, Assyria and the Graeco-Roman world – must not be ignored. Correct assessment of the relative value of evidence from these different sources is the concern of the historian, but correct assessment has always been difficult; the literary scholar has not always understood the limitations of the archaeological evidence, and the archaeologist has not always understood the complexities of the literary evidence. Further, the biblical student and the archaeologist do not always share the same historical aims (let alone theological presuppositions). And some recent scholars would say that archaeology and literary sources simply do not meet, and cannot be synthesised; they are like apples and oranges, two completely different species. Axel Knauf argues that you have to know the history (from artefactual sources) before you can interpret the documents (1991: 26–64); T. L. Thompson argues that you have to establish an independent narrative of ancient Palestine as the context from which the text might speak (1991: 65–92); while J. M. Miller argues contrarily that you cannot interpret the artefacts without the written sources (1991: 93–102). The struggle continues, and we will return to it.

DEVELOPMENT OF ARCHAEOLOGY IN
RELATION TO BIBLICAL STUDIES

It is in fact hard to say when archaeological observation relating to biblical material began. For example, the ancient writer who noted the contemporary ruins of the ancient city of Ai (Josh 8:28) had an archaeologist’s eye. So perhaps did Helena, wife of the emperor Constantine, who in 326 CE visited Palestine and founded basilicas at sites associated with Christ’s life and death (but for her motivation, see Hunt 1982: 22–49), and the Bordeaux Pilgrim, who in 333 CE distinguished between the modern Jericho and the earlier city of Jericho by Elisha’s fountain (Wilkinson 1971: 153–63 [160–1]). From the Byzantine age to the time of the Crusades, most western travellers to the Holy Land were pilgrims, interested in locating places associated with Christ or other famous biblical figures. Particularly important were the early fourth-century onomastikon of Eusebius (a gazetteer of biblical place names), the early fifth-century travelogue of the Spanish nun Egeria (Wilkinson 1971: 89–147), a mine of topographical information, and the sixth-century mosaic map of the Holy Land on the floor of a church in Madeba, east of the Dead Sea (Jenkins 1930; Avi-Yonah 1954; Wilken 1992: 174–81). These all reveal minds that were not simply pietistic; whatever the travellers’ motivations, it will not do to deny the presence of academic observation before the Renaissance (Peters 1985; Wilkinson 1977). The tenth-century Islamic scholar, Mukaddasi, and the late twelfth-century Jewish rabbi, Benjamin of Tudela in Spain, and others, explored and described Palestine with critical eyes, but their works were not known in the west, and so did not influence western scholarship, until much later. The Crusades renewed western interest in the geography and topography of the Holy Land, at least among the participants and pilgrims who followed in their wake; such pilgrims did not travel as archaeologists, but their writings frequently show that they were not unobservant or without concern for historical detail (see, for example, North 1979: 93–110).

A whole series of papers might be written about the development of western intellectual and scientific interest in the Holy Land from the Crusades to the nineteenth century, and about the progression of travellers, some more curious and discerning than others, who began to observe and report the material remains of earlier ages, but that is not our object here. The nineteenth century is a major study in itself (cf. Ben-Arieh 1979), but there is no time to pursue it in this paper. The nineteenth century saw the dramatic expansion of archaeological and biblical study. This expansion owed much to political and economic factors such as the quest for a land route from the eastern Mediterranean to India, the imperial designs of Napoleon (whose surveyors mapped Palestine), the arrival of the steam ship and the steam locomotive, the development of photography and of a cheaper printing technology, and the growth of education for all. In an era when the Protestant churches set a high premium on biblical knowledge and Sunday Schools flourished, there was increasing interest in biblical geography, biblical peoples and their customs, and a ready market for the hundreds of books, especially illustrated books, published on Palestinian travel (see Searight 1979; Ben-Arieh 1979; Silberman 1982; North 1979).

Probably the most important contribution for biblical scholars and archaeologists alike was Edward Robinson’s Biblical Researches in Palestine (1841, 1856). With Eli Smith, a Protestant missionary and fluent Arabist, Robinson travelled the length and breadth of Palestine in 1838–9 and 1852 in order to locate places mentioned in the Bible. He based many of his identifications on the modern Arabic place-names, which, he argued, preserved the Semitic name from biblical times. Albrecht Alt later commented that ‘in Robinson’s footnotes are forever buried the errors of many generations’ (Alt 1939: 374). Robinson had his limitations – he did not recognise that the tells which dotted the Palestinian plains were not natural hillocks but the remains of city mounds – and he was occasionally wrong, but his work is the foundation of all biblical toponymy and is still an essential reference work.

By 1850 the initial European exploration of Palestine and Transjordan had been achieved; there remained the accurate surveying and the excavation of important biblical sites. First Jerusalem (1865), then Sinai (1868–9), then the whole of western Palestine (1871–7) were surveyed by British army engineers. An important step was the foundation in 1865 of the Palestine Exploration Fund, whose aim was the scientific investigation of ‘the Archaeology, Geography, Geology and Natural History of Palestine’ (Besant 1886; Watson 1915; cf. PEQ 100, 1965: 1–2; Hodson 1993: 6–8). Although at first heavily supported and subscribed to by church leaders, the Fund kept to its scientific aims and flourishes still, especially through its journal, Palestine Exploration Quarterly. A younger sister, the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, was founded in 1919, modelled on similar schools in Rome and Athens (Auld 1993: 23– 6). In France, Germany, America, Israel and elsewhere, similar societies and journals appeared: for example, the first institute of the American Schools of Oriental Research was founded in Jerusalem in 1900 (King 1992: 186–8; 1988: 15–35; 1993: 13–16), followed shortly by its Bulletin. In Germany a number of important societies arose, of which the two most important, the Deutsches evangelisches Institut für Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes (1900) and the Deutscher Verein für Erforschung Palästinas (1877) produced the Palästina-Jahrbuch and the Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina- Vereins respectively (Weippert and Weippert 1988: 87–9; Strobel 1993: 17–19). The French Dominicans established the Ecole biblique (1890) and its journal, Revue biblique, in 1891 (Benoit 1988: 63–86; Puech 1993: 9–12). In Israel, the Israel Exploration Society (formerly the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society, founded 1914) has produced the Israel Exploration Journal from 1951 (Mazar 1988: 109–14).

The first excavation in Palestine was F. de Saulcy’s investigation of the ‘Tombs of the Kings’ in 1863 (Ben-Arieh 1979: 175; Macalister 1925: 26–8). This turned out to be the family tomb of Queen Helena of Adiabene, a first-century convert to Judaism (Prag 1989: 272–4); excavation of a Jewish tomb gave some offence to Jews in Jerusalem. In 1867–8 Charles Warren, RE, dug shafts and tunnels to explore the Herodian temple platform of the Haram area, and he too met some opposition on religious grounds. Sensitivity to the feelings of the present has not always been the first thought of those who explore the past, and it remains important. Warren went on to excavate at Jericho (1868). One notes that the first excavations were directed, quite naturally, at famous biblical cities, and it was largely, though not entirely, the pull of these famous places which set the agenda and helped provide the public contributions which paid for the excavation.

The thing that captured the public imagination and changed the whole perspective on archaeology was the series of astonishing discoveries throughout the nineteenth century in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Scholarly study of Egypt really began with Napoleon’s expedition in 1799. Egypt, with its great pyramids and temples, was fun in itself, but for many it was important as the scene of the biblical Exodus, and much scholarly time was given to identifying the ‘store cities’, Pithom and Ramses, of Exodus 1:12 and to dating the Exodus and identifying ‘the Pharaoh of the Exodus’ (James 1982). The discovery of the fourteenth-century BCE Amarna Letters, written to the ruling Pharaoh from Canaan, with their reference to the military activity in Palestine of the habiru, who sounded suspiciously like the Hebrews, influenced scholarly debate on the date of the Exodus from the 1890s to the 1960s, by which time it was generally accepted that neither the equation of Hebrew with habiru nor the nature of the Exodus story was as simple as previously thought (see, for example, Albright 1966: 3–23; Bruce 1967: 3–20; Hayes and Miller 1977: 248–51; Miller and Hayes 1986: 54–79; Coote 1990: 33–93; Na’aman 1992: 174–81).

In Mesopotamia, the identification of Assyrian and Babylonian sites, with their dramatic carved monuments, by explorers and excavators like A. H. Layard (1817–94), and the decipherment of their inscriptions by scholars like Edward Hincks (1792–1866), H. C. Rawlinson (1810–95) and George Smith (1840–76), who discovered a tablet giving an account of a flood remarkably similar to the account in Genesis 6–9, stirred even greater popular enthusiasm. Interest was maintained by Leonard Woolley’s claim (1929) to have discovered evidence of the biblical flood at Ur, by the discovery of second-millennium BCE archives at Mari, Nuzi (1925–31) and elsewhere, by the discovery (1911–13) of Hittite records in north-central Turkey, by the discovery (1929) of Canaanite documents at Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast, and by the discovery in 1974 of a huge archive of third-millennium BCE texts from Tell Mardikh (ancient Ebla) in Syria. Such discoveries raised both public and scholarly interest in biblical history; but they illuminated the near-eastern background to the Bible rather than the Bible itself, and are now the concern primarily of specialists in these fields. When exploration of Egypt and Mesopotamia began, Egypt and Mesopotamia were known primarily from the Bible; as Egyptian and Mesopotamian archaeology progressed, Palestine, the land of Israel, began to be seen in the much wider context of the whole near east, and this changed fundamentally the way scholars began to look at ancient Israel. Ancient Israel, and the Bible, became part of a much larger scene.

ARCHAEOLOGY AND BIBLICAL STUDIES IN
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

A new era began with the work of Flinders Petrie at Tell el-Hesi in 1890 (Moorey 1991: 28–9; Drower 1985: 159–63). Petrie discovered from his examination of the mound of Tell el-Hesi, first, that tells were artificial, not natural mounds, formed by the accumulated strata of building debris over long periods of time; and, second, that each visible stratum of deposit contained its own distinctive types of pottery. Petrie produced a classified typology of the pottery taken from the different levels exposed on the mound. This gave a relative dating for the sequence of pottery, which could then be used as a...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• 1: WHAT HAS ARCHAEOLOGY TO DO WITH THE BIBLE – OR VICE VERSA?
• 2: ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE EMERGENCE OF EARLY ISRAEL
• 3: KUNTILLET CAJRUD AND THE HISTORY OF ISRAELITE RELIGION
• 4: THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF QUMRAN
• 5: THE TEMPLE MOUNT OF HEROD THE GREAT AT JERUSALEM
• 6: ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS
• 7: ON THE PILGRIM’S WAY TO THE HOLY CITY OF JERUSALEM