Abstract

All excavation is destruction… Excavation, however well executed, without adequate publication is wanton destruction.

Dr Kathleen M Kenyon, Beginning in Archaeology

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Saturday, 6 September 2008

Early Palestinian Archaeology

Biblical archaeology has long been compromised in the eyes of field archaeologists by its association with a fundamentalist approach that seeks to demonstrate, through the evidence provided by archaeology, the historical reliability or truth of the bible.

Roger Moorey (Ed), Kathleen Kenyon
The Bible and Recent Archaeology (1987)

Edward Robinson (1794-1863) was the first of the US biblicist archaeologists. He began the US tradition of archaeologists undertaking their work only to further an interest in the bible, but trained as a teacher of mathematics and Greek before turning to theology and Hebrew. He wrote in 1838:

As in the case of most of my countrymen, especially in New England, the scenes of the bible had made a deep impression upon my mind from the earliest childhood, and afterwards in riper years, this feeling had grown into a strong desire to visit in person the places so remarkable in the history of the human race.

Sir Henry Layard (1817-94), the pioneer of Assyrian archaeology, was training in law but abandoned it in 1839 to seek treasure in the east, setting out for Ceylon, but finding it before he got there, in Iraq by the Tigris river. Sir Stratford Canning, British Ambassador to the Ottomon Empire, enlisted Layard as a spy in Iraq in 1842. For his part, Layard, in 1846, seems to have persuaded Canning that a useful cover for his activities would be as an antiquarian looking for the remains of Assyria. Like all the early enthusiasts, Layard was an amateur treasure seeker who dug whereaver he fancied, or could get permission from the Turks, with no concern for the object being dug over, ignorant of the value of small finds, and looking mainly for stone monuments, buildings and valuables, but unable to notice the mudbrick walls he vigorously had dug away, unless they had stone or glazed tiles stuck into them.

F De Saulcy, a Frenchman, began the habit of digging holes in the Holy Land when he obtained a permit from the Ottoman administrator to investiugate the tombs of the Kings in Jerusalem, which he had surveyed in 1851. He moved around a lot of earth and identified the tombs as being from the time of David, about 1000 BC. They were actually from the Roman period a millennium later.

The British Palestinian Research Fund, founded under the patronage of the Anglican Church, sponsored excavations by Charles Warren in 1867. Warren was a military man, a captain in the Royal Engineers, so was a perfect archaeologist of the times. He explained his technique:

The system adopted in excavating at Jerusalem was that ordinarily used in military mining. Therefore, it is unnecessary to describe the details, as these can be obtained in any book of reference.

The debris accumulated by the temple platform must have been a veritable treasure. Warren dug it all away without a second thought, no method of examining any of it, let alone sifting it or checking the stratification of the tipped scree over the centuries. Though, even if he had done it, he had no clue about dating any of it anyway. He dated Tell el-Ful, thought by Albright to have been Saul’s fortress at Gibeah, and certainly very ancient, to the time of the crusades. Tell es-Sultan, the mound of ancient Jericho, going back 8000 or 10,000 years was simply a natural hill, he thought.

In 1870, the Palestinian Exploration Society was founded in New York…

…for the illustration and defense of the bible. Modern skepticism assails the bible at the point of reality, the question of fact. Hence whatever goes to verify the bible history as real, in time, in place and in circumstances, is a refutation of unbelief.

The trouble for Christians is the corollory of this objective—whatever falsifies the bible must uphold unbelief, and this is what Christians refuse to accept. So, the evidence collected by archaeology from the outset had to be selective.

A schoolboy discovered an inscription cut into the rock in a channel leading to the Pool of Siloam in Jerusalem in 1880. Cleaned up and copied in 1881, it was cut out of its place in 1891, without authority, apparently, but was quickly seized by the Turks for the Ottomon museum in Istanbul. The surviving part of it has no name associated with it, but it was ascribed to Hezekiah from passages in the bible (2 Chr 32:4,30).

In 1887, peasants digging for nitrogen rich earth for use as fertilizer at Tell el-Amarna on the right bank of the Nile about 200 miles south of Cairo uncovered some baked clay tablets. They were the diplomatic correspondence of Amenophis III and his successor Amenophis IV (Akhnaten) written in the diplomatic language of the time, Akkadian cuneiform. 1887 is not in the Dark Ages, but the experts of the time could not be bothered with dross like clay tablets, and showed little interest in them, not even bothering to try to read any of them to see what they might be. It was one of the many acts of negligence of Victorian antiquarians so often admired but mainly interested in treasure and significant finds. Eventually, scholars in museums in London and Berlin came across them, read some of them, and realized their importance. By then only a few hundred remained. The rest, an unknown number were lost forever.

The brilliant French scholar, J F Champollion, who was the first to read Egyptian glyphs was also the first to notice Shoshenq’s list of the Palestinian cities he had subdued cut into the walls of the temple of Karnak. Thus began the identification of Shoshenq with the biblical Shishak.

E A Wallis Budge, another famous Egyptologist, said that the newspapers were so interested in the archaeological discoveries being made in the nineteenth century that Basil Cooper. a reporter for a national newspaper, used to visit the British Museum every week to hear of any new discoveries. The interest was, of course, in whether the discoveries upheld the bible, especially in the higher critical views put forward by J Wellhausen (1844-1918).

A H Sayce (1846-1933) was Professor of Assyriology at Oxford from 1891-1919, his experience being in the dead languages of the ancient near eastern civilizations. He was an ordained clergyman of the Anglican Church. Sayce wrote many popular books meant to refute Wellhausen and the higher critics of the bible, at least so far as the interested layman was concerned. These arguments, often dubious or nebulous at the time, are still repeated by Christian apologists today! Among the funniest is the putative accusation of the biblical critics that no one could write at the time of Moses. Whether this calumny was invented by Sayce or not, he took it up, quoting the el-Amarna letters as a refutation of the allegation. The interested layman apparently was not to know that the ancient Egyptians could write even though the Rosetta trilingual stone had been found a century before in 1799. Though the Rosetta stone itself was only from the Greek period in Egypt, it provided the key to the hieroglyphs that had decorated temples and tombs for the previous 3000 years and that J F Champollion had deciphered by 1824. No one, then, could doubt after 1824, even if they had doubted before, that the people of ancient civilizations could write, so where had Sayce got his allegation from? It must have been a typical straw man, intended by a Christian apologist to show the critics of the bible as idiots. It shows that Christian apologists are the real idiots. If there is any doubt about literacy in the myth of the exodus, it is whether mud brick making slaves could or would write an historical account of their mass break out.

Sir W M Ramsay (1851-1939), often cited by believers for his admiration of Luke as a historian, was trained in classical languages, and earned a crust as a professor of humanities at the university of Aberdeen. He traced the footsteps of Paul, the apostle, and wrote several best selling travelogues about his journeys, making his reputation, and thus Luke’s. Perhaps Ramsay, like most believers, was peeved by some people being churlish about Luke and Paul, but somebody spread Christianity into Asia Minor, and so journeys like those described in the bible must have been undertaken by someone, even if they were Hellenized Jewish pilgrims returning home from Jerusalem. Two could have been called Luke and Paul as easily as any other names, but the fact that such journeys were undertaken and the descriptions of them seem to be confirmed by Ramsay’s observations, does not vouchsafe the miraculous escapes and such like adventures related in them.

Sir Flinders Petrie

Sir Flinders Petrie (1863-1942) was a giant of Egyptian archaeology, though utterly untrained, who worked in Palestine too. Petrie had been impressed by A L E Pitt-Rivers, who formulated the first sound principles of archeology from his excavations on the estate he inherited in Wessex in 1880. Pitt-Rivers noted that every detail should be recorded so that when new data permitted new hypotheses, the old accounts could be checked for any relevant finds. It took over half a century before most biblicists began to take notice, and, arguably, some still do not.

Surprisingly, Petrie was cavalier in his methods up to his death, though he was well aware of the sound general principles of archaeology, and he professed them, including the importance of careful excavating and documentating every detail. Among his merits were that he excavated because he genuinely wanted to find out about the past, and so planned his work carefully, and published what he discovered promptly, something that many supposedly meticulous modernists often do not do, making their efforts worse than worthless. All they have done is trashed a site to no purpose when they fail to publish. Maybe that is their intention! Systematic and precise excavating, and accurate and prompt reporting amount to the formulation of scientific archaeology.

Petrie, however, had a bad influence on Palestine after he excavated at Tell el-Hesi near ancient Lachish. Methods he had devised for Egyptian cemetaries were utterly inadequate for a multi-stratified tell. He did not observe and follow the natural lines of the strata, but simply cut down in arbitrary horizontal slices thus mixing up the periods. He also had the belief that debris accumulated at much the same rate throughout time so that dating was merely a question of depth. He was not the only one to think it, but science is based on observation, not on prior assumptions, something that it took these archaeologists a long time to learn.

Petrie returned to Egypt, leaving the excavation of Tell el-Hesi in the hands of F J Bliss, an American who was the son of a Presbyterian missionary. Petrie had been restricted to modest cuts on the slopes of the tell, but Bliss was bolder, cutting out a large wedge in the north west quarter of the mound, removing a third of it! It was such a gross act, and unmistakeable, it became famous, being known as “Bliss’s slice”. Bliss followed Petrie in excavating by slicing off arbitrary horizontal layers with no regard for historical strata.

Petrie revisited Palestine as an old man in 1926. In these dotage years, Petrie assaulted Tell Jammeh (1926-27), Tell Farah South (1928-30), Tell en-Ajjul (1930-34) and Petra (1935-37). In 1954, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, in Archaeology of the Earth, felt obliged to point out Petrie’s failings. Though he—and most archaeologists—admired Petrie for his pioneering work, he was highly critical of him. The methods he used, Wheeler wrote, belonged “technically to the infancy of archaeology”. They were “obsolete more than a century ago”. Bad practices Petrie had followed included poor supervision of native workers, so he had no idea what they might have spoiled inadvertantly out of ignorance, or pocketed for private sale on the antiquities market—these were poor men. He had no regard for strata or even symbolic levels such as floors, so that “walls are suspended in section as if in a vacuum”. Nor did he record adequately where finds had been when they were found, bearing in mind the location in plan and in level.

It is abundantly apparent that, between the technical standards of Petrie and those of his older contemporary, Pitt-Rivers, there yawned a gulf into which two generations of Near eastern archaeologists have plunged…

Sir Mortimer Wheeler

One wonders what this two generations of bible spouting gardeners have actually destroyed. Moreover, Petrie had that same fondness of others for extending dates backwards in time that has plagued Egyptology and Assyriology, not to mention Palestinian dating. Petrie dated second millennium objects no less than a thousand years too old, placing them in the mid-third millennium.

An Irish archaeologist got to Palestine in 1898, R A S Macalister. Funded by the Palestine Exploration Fund, he excavated Tell el-Jazar (ancient Gezer) from 1902-08:

The Gezer excavations suffered from the worst practices of the time.

P R S Moorey, A Century of Biblical Archaeology

The digging was done by 200 labourers directly supervised by an Egyptian ganger with only Macalister having any training in overall control. The method he used was to dig a trench down to bedrock, forty feet down, and forty feet wide, right across the tell. He had no concern for stratigraphy, no proper recording, and no concern to relate the finds to each other or their situation in the tell. He wrote:

The exact spot in a mound where any ordinary object chanced to lie is not generally of great importance.

Having dug out the first trench in his search for its valuables, he then dug out another identical to it, using the first for the spoil from the next, and so on, like a gardener digging a row of potatoes on a rather grander scale, until he had dug across the whole tell. Macalister’s objective was to “turn over the whole mound”, and so he did. His aim was to find a royal palace, but he was not adequately trained and certainly his staff were not, and he had no feeling for history or the importance and delicacy of archaeology. He recorded eight strata which mean nothing being quite arbitrary and confused, and wrote no detail about which area or even which trench he found the objects he turned up. The most famous of these, the Gezer calendar might as well have been found in his dustbin for whatever dating he was able to give it. The only merit Macalister had was that he quickly published his work.

The Parker expedition in Jerusalem, in 1911, was described as a “treasure hunt”. The Palestinian Exploration Fund also sponsored T E Lawrence and C L Woolley in a survey of the wilderness of Zin, in 1914, as a cover for military reconnaissance. The journey took six weeks and professed to discover something about Solomon’s trade routes, an imaginary conclusion to a fake study. No doubt the intelligence was useful in defeating the Turks.

Germans began the excavation of Tell es-Mutesellin (Megiddo) in 1903. The method was again a massive trench twenty feet wide cut across the tell. By 1905, it had been widened to thirty feet. There was no concern for stratigraphy, but G Schumacher, trained in technical drawing, did try to produce good plans, the trouble being that his notes and drawings were lost! E Sellin, another German, produced the first professional report of an excavation in 1913, Jericho, but with faulty pottery sequences, and a faulty chronology, based as it was on Sellin’s determination that two destropyed walls were the ones described in the bible as those destroyed respectively by Joshua and Hiel!

Curiously, some of the best standards were those of the Catholic Dominican Ecole Biblique founded in 1890. Moorey describes its approach as distinct from the norms of Catholic scholarship in that it was both skeptical and liberal in its interpretations. Its findings were published in Revue Biblique.

F W Albright

Then the American School for Oriental Study and Research was established in 1900…

…to prosecute biblical, linguistic, archaeological, historical and other kindred studies and researches… [in the] Holy Land.

Now it was that W F Albright came on to the Palestinian archaeological scene. Albright, the son of a Protestant missionary to Chile, of German background, was vice-President and a trustee of the American Schools of Oriental Research for over 30 years, and for almost forty years was editor of their bulletin, the scholarly journal, BASOR, so he had a strong and influential position throughout his working life. His wife weas a Catholic convert whose confessor in Palestine was Father Vincent of the Ecole Biblique, giving Albright close links with the Dominicans too. Commenting on what he found when he arrived in Palestine, he wrote:

The date given by Sellin and Watzinger for Jericho, those given by Bliss and Macalister for the mounds of Shephelah, by Macalister for Gezer and by Mackenzie for Beth Shamesh do not agree at all and the attempt to base a synthesis on their chronology resulted, of course, in chaos. Moreover, most of the excavators failed to define the stratigraphy of their site and thus left its archaeological history hazy and indefinite, with a chronology which was usually nebulous where correct and often clear cut where it has since proved wrong.

Albright’s criticism was fully justified and he helped to make the business of Palestinian archaeology more professional, but his words were a hostage to fortune. Over the next half century, Albright forged a synthesis of general approval among biblicists, because it was clear cut and supported the bible. The trouble was that it too “proved wrong”.

Revealingly, he criticized a British book called The Archaeology of the Holy Land (1916) as causing confusion by “including material really belonging to several different archaeological phases” such as post-exilic really being pre-exilic. Doubtless an early book like this was in error, but what is shocking is that Albright used this judgement to re-date much later material to earlier phases, and post-exilic, meaning Persian material, to pre-exilic, meaning into the Babylonian or even the Assyrian periods. It meant that the Persian period almost disappeared, and the Babylonians were followed in history by the Greeks and Romans in Palestine. Worse was that pottery chronologies were similarly misdated, yet were widely used as standards, and the whole mess is only now slowly being sorted out by more honest modern archaeologists. Wellhousen had realized that the Persians had founded Judaism, but, as Albright disagreed profoundly with his thesis, it is a moot point how cynical Albright’s redating of the Persians out of Palestinian history was.

Between the world wars, Albright and the school he created were supreme in Palestinian archaeology, yet, as Moorey says “premature or immature conclusions were drawn from the necessarily restricted range of information” on offer, and “simple archaeological answers to complez biblical questions” were sought and offered.

Ingenious hypotheses based on a minimal sample of the archaeological evidence all too easily appeared to be persuasive solutions to long debated biblical issues.

P R S Moorey, A Century of Biblical Archaeology

Essentially, the evidence was interpreted to fit the bible by sliding the archaeological dates two or three hundred years into the past, thereby creating a “Persian Gulf”, the absence of strata assigned to the Persian period. It simultaneously removed any evidence for Wellhausen and made possible impossible civilisations like those of David and Solomon, because 200 years after they were supposed to be, small kingdoms had actually formed, whereas nothing much besides sheep existed at their presumed time in the Palestinian hills. No one thought it odd because no one was interested in the Persian period, and they had excellent reasons not to be. It was when Judaism actually began! It also gave an excuse for clearing tells of their most recent layers to get straight to the ones that mattered, dated as Babylonian and Assyrian when they were really Persian. If anything, it was the Babylonian period that did not exist in the strata because, as the bible says, the country was reduced to subsistence, and the Babylonians never needed much of a military or administrative presence. Moreover, the Persians of the time when Yehud was set up as a temple state were Babylonian Persians. The Persian kings had moved their capital to Babylon and had adopted Babylonian culture. It was why the confusion had arisen, but no reason why it should have been perpetuated. That was pure biblical dogma.

At Megiddo, P L O Guy (1885-1952), who had trained under Woolley, discovered “Solomon’s stables” near the summit of the tell. Then a solid city wall and a gateway were assigned to Solomon too, then a tunnel cut in rock down to a spring. Guy was a careful worker who advocated the practice of giving locus numbers to important excavated features such as rooms and courtyards, and promoted the use of photography to record progress. He was moving another stage towards proper archaeological methodology. As a result, he was replaced! His progress was too slow for his paymasters. The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago who were in charge of the project funded by John Rockefeller, Jnr had Guy replaced by G Loud.

Loud had built his reputation on a grand project, the excavation of of Sargon’s palace at Khorsabad, so he was less inclined to pussyfoot with the minutiae like Guy. He began with no messing about by cutting the customary trench through the mound down to bedrock, then cut a series of test trenches elsewhere so that he could cherry pick the best prospects. He selected a Bronze Age temple and palace which, sure enough, yielded many choice and cult objects, including ivories. Loud was good at room clearing, but not at careful unpicking of tell strata. Having dated a room, whatever was in it was of that date, with no or negligible allowance for intrusions such as graves and rubbish pits dug into it at a later time. His report weas delayed by the war until 1948.

W F Badè, a professor of Semitic languages and Old Testamant literature, retrained as an archaeologist and tackled Tell en-Nasbeh (Mizpah). His method was to clear the whole 8 acre tell! His report did not appear until 1947, after his death, written by a colleague. The report does show an attention to small objects, but neglected their context and failed to understand the dating significance of pottery sherds. Seal impressions, some mentioning “servant of the king” and probably Persian, were dated from the bible to the Babylonian occupation.

J L Starkey (1895-1938), who ended up murdered, was a good archaeologist who discovered the so-called “Lachish letters” when he excavated Tell ed-Duweir. Described as written in “Old Testament” Hebrew at the time of Nebuchadnezzar’s invasion of Judah, and apparently relating closely to the Book of Jeremiah in the bible, they were probably written in the Persian period around 450 BC, about 150 years later, just about the time Nehemiah set up the temple state for the Persians. Starkey identified level II as about 600 BC, and level III as 586 BC, but Olga Tufnell, who wrote the report after Starkey was killed by bandits, dated the levels even earlier based on ceramic sequences. The trouble with that is that the pottery sequences were assigned to dates 200-300 years too early anyway. It illustrates the utter circularity of biblicist practices. Palestinian dates were guessed from the bible, and pottery was dated from the guesses, then used to date other finds apparently independently, but actually on a scale set in the first place from the biblical guesses!

Most recent archaeology at Tell ed-Duweir by D Ussishkin revealed a Rameses III scarab in the destruction layer, dating it to 1194-1163 BC. Thereafter, it was unoccupied for a time before emerging as a substantial fortress which was later destroyed by an earthquake. A Large city grew again, only to be destroyed by a fire, assumed to have been the work of the Assyrians in 701 BC. The smaller town that followed was destroyed by the Babylonians before it was briefly re-occupied by the Persians. Or was it the Persians that had done the original damage and rebuilt the city?

The Albright School

W F Albright (1891-1971) was self taught as an archaeologist. His aim was an integrated history of the Ancient Near East into which the biblical account could be set, an assumption that the biblical account was real history and therefore could be fitted into a real integrated history of the region. Albright could not understand the scientific basics needed to elucidate what we can about history, or if he ever could, he abandoned them. The evidence has to speak for itself and not be forced to speak with the voice of a book, or set of books of unknown provenance. Inevitably, what Albright and his school did was to alter the evidence to fit the bible. There is no need to suppose these biblicists necessarily did it cynically, although it cannot be excluded. From their absolute belief in the bible as God speaking, they thought it proper to fit the facts into a scheme fixed by unknown authors many centuries ago.

So, destruction layers in cities mentioned in the bible were uncritically assigned to the biblical events, and dated by the guesses of the theologians as to when they happened, mainly depending on the bible’s internal details and chronology. Monumental buildings were assigned to suitable biblical kings like Solomon, again dated from the biblical chronology. Pottery found on the sites of these old destruction layers and fortresses were dated as simultaneous, so that carefully crafted ceramic sequences, dated from the bible, in fact, were built to date other less certain finds. The bible was ultimately prescribing the dates of everything found, directly or indirectly. No wonder the Albright school seemd to get a consistent story—it was entirely circular, but few had the nous or courage to question it until the 80s. Believers were gloating that God had had scotched the skeptics with science. He had triumphed, something you might have thought God could have done quite easily had he set His mind to it.

Albright was a keen advocate of typology, but the types cannot be dated properly unless the anchor points are secure. Without them, typology gives a floating sequence not an absolute one. By ignoring the very period when the bible was founded—the Persian period—and dating most Persian artefacts to the Babylonians and Assyrians, the Albrightian dating scheme was automatically set back in time by about 200 years, and this error was propagated backwards in time through the Iron Age, only getting relieved at the juncture with the Bronze Age. So, as a rule of thumb, artefacts were attributed to Solomon that were actually at least 200 years younger. The eighth century became the tenth century. Later archaeologists, such as Israel Finkelstein began to notice the error, and the biblical minimalists, ready to think more out of the biblical box, realised that the history of Israel actually began with Omri in the ninth century, not Saul in the eleventh.

Albright gained his archaeological experience from 1922 excavating Tell es-Ful, which he thought was Saul’s fortress of Gibeah. No evidence that it was has ever been found. Albright used a careful systematic method, carefully recording each object found, but paid no regard to the strata in the tell, as he later admitted when his methods were compared with Kenyon’s:

We do not claim to have anticipated the Wheeler-Kenyon technique, but merely to have employed stratigraphic evidence in a similar but cruder way.

W F Albright, 1964

He was observant of small finds but made little or no attempt to distinguish the natural strata of the deposits, the importance of which is as a minimum that they automatically sequence and relate finds, and so give a dating order even if it is not absolute. At least one has the knowledge that any anchor find that turns up will be properly dated in the sequence and the whole of it can then be nailed down with some assurance. Instead, Albright depended on his, subjective chronological scale of ceramic sherds. And that was based on the bible. Otherwise, he excavated buildings as he found them. P W Lapp (1930-1970), who drowned young, excavated Tell el-Ful anew in 1964, and described Albright’s method:

Of the Palestinian pottery published, for example, as from stratum X of the early twelfth century BC, vary little comes from an empirically observed and excavated layer (or group of contemporary layers) delimited by plan and located in section. Much of the pottery cannot be so precisely located on a three dimensional basis because recording was not that thoroughgoing and excavation did not proceed layer by layer. Often what appears as stratum X pottery is no more than pottery from arbitrary levels of an excavation that fit accepted typological canons for the date assigned to the stratum.

P W Lapp, 1970

Albright founded his archaeological school as director of the excavation of Bethel (Beitin), from 1934, where he trained Bright, Wright and Pritchard, and was assisted by J L Kelso of the Pittsburgh-Xenia Theological Seminary. W G Dever criticized Kelso’s work in 1970, noting a disregard for stratigraphy, and a failure to separate description and interpretation, something which biblical believers find it virtually impossible to do. Their biblical preconceptions dispose them to their biblical interpretation of material evidence as, with God’s affirmation, the bible is known to be true! Albright was particularly keen on proving, from archaeology, the validity of the journeys of Abraham and Moses in the biblical record.

G E Wright was one of Albright’s most famous students. His view was that:

Archaeology’s role was to expose the historical basis of the Judaeao-Christian faith, to demonstrate how revelation has come through history.

P R S Moorey, A Century of Biblical Archaeology

C E Carter (The Emergence of Yehud, in a note) says P Lapp and P Paar separately criticized J Pritchard’s management of the excavations at el-Jib (Gibeon) for “obscuring stratigraphic data, misinterpreting the data gathered from the dig, and failing both to clean and to publish important pottery”. Another of Albright’s students was N Glueck (1901-1971), an American Jew Trained at the Cincinnati Hebrew Union College. He was ordained a rabbi in 1923. Glueck became, according to Albright himself, a master of “the obscure art of dating Palestinian pottery by use of its many typological differences”. From surveys in Jordan, Glueck dated the exodus on the basis of finding pots he decided were made by Ammonites, Edomites and Moabites in the thirteenth century:

Had the exodus through southern Transjordan taken place before the thirteenth century BC, the Israelites would have found neither Edomites and Moabites who would have given or withheld permission to traverse their territories.

N Glueck, 1934

A German explorer travelling with Bedouin in Arabia in 1932-34 noticed the remains of ancient copper mining in the Arabah south of the Dead Sea but North of Aqaba. Glueck checked it out and decided that here were king Solomon’s mines, which he thought, after a two year excavation, had been in use from Solomon’s tenth century reign up until the fifth century. G D Practico.in 1985, reassessed the work, dating the mines at the earliest to the eighth century. Of Solomon, there was no trace.

The Israeli archaeologist, B Rothenberg, also examined the ancient copper processing region at Timna to the west of the Arabah in a study extending from 1959 to 1970. A shrine was dedicated to the goddess Hathor, who seemed to have been favoured by the miners here just as she was at Serabit and Khadim in Sinai. Objects found could be related to the lists of Egyptian kings, dating them to the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC. Thereafter, they were abandoned for a thousand years, so they also could not have been king Solomon’s mines, as Glueck had labeled the nearby workings at Tell el-Khaleifeh.

Proving Abraham

Important discoveries were made outside of Palestine at Ur, Mari, Nuzi and Ugarit, that had a bearing on the bible, notably in Albright’s hobby horse of the migration of Abraham. The archaeologists involved, though not so self-selectively committed to biblical truth as those working in Palestine still depended for funding on maintaining an academic, and often a public interest, and that often meant finding biblical connexions.

C L Woolley excavated Ur. He was the son of a clergyman who had thought about following his father’s profession, and always remained keen on the bible for illustrative stories and comparisons in his popular articles, and he uncritically regarded the Jewish scriptures as an historical source, no less than did the Reverend Professor Sayce. Woolley excavated Tell el-Mukayyar, known since 1854 to have been the Sumerian city of Ur (Urim). The immediate assumption was that this was the biblical Ur of the Chaldees, from which Abraham departed on his patriarchal travels. It seems certain that it is not, and Urfa in Turkey is, but Woolley never doubted it.

Sure enough, Woolley was soon describing features in the sediments as being of “the age of Abraham”, Abraham being taken as a God-given truth to measure his discoveries by. The trouble with the “God-given” hypothesis is that God did not make it clear what age Abraham had lived in! Nor had He made it clear that the Sumerian town of Urim was the Ur He meant when He sent His Word via the Inept Ghost, or whether it was some place else. Such facts do not matter, however, to biblicists, who know these things. What it shows is how unscientific believers are, and how they cannot be trusted with precious matters like archaeology, whether their dishonesty is intentional or merely incidental to their belief. In 1936, Woolley wrote a book about his work, but it might as well have been fiction.

Every critical issue of chronology, history and topography was prejudged in favour of biblical tradition.

P R S Moorey, A Century of Biblical Archaeology

Woolley’s place in the affections of believers is that he discovered “The Flood” in the earth! Yes, that is Noah’s biblical flood. A thick deposit of mud in the fifth millennium was judged to have been a widespread flood in southern Iraq, that had been so memorable that it had given rise to legends and eventually found its way into the bible. So said Woolley in 1929. Not that there is anything wrong with the idea that such a flood could have given rise to legends, and that these have been preserved, but it is not a flood anything like Noah’s. A flood that is only local to Iraq was not three miles deep and did not kill off everything in the world except a man and a few of his relatives, as the biblical one did.

In any case, the following year another flood was discovered, but dated more recently to around 2,800 BC. The more recent flood was more likely to have been the one remembered, if such a flood gave rise to the myth of Noah. Then, another flood, even more recent was discovered and associated with Shuruppak, the kingdom linked in Assyrian tradition with Gilgamesh of whose sagas the flood was an episode. Moreover, Assyria is higher and further from the coast, so, if this were a flood likely to suggest the Noah legend, it could be argued it was of more suitable proportions than a flood in the lowlands around Ur! Plainly they were not the same flood because their dates were many years apart, and Ur has no deep flood deposits corresponding with the other two events.

Of course, Iraq is an arid land that depends upon the supply of water from its two great rivers and their tributaries for irrigation, and in exceptional years serious floods can be expected. They would not be expected to be world wide and three miles deep. Deep mud deposits could more likely be evidence that the excavator was digging into an ancient channel of the river itself, and the river had changed course at some later stage. It is hardly uncommon on flood plains. Alternatively, the mud could have been where water was diverted from the river into a permanent lake as a reed and fish resource for the nearby city. The lake silted up and was abandoned to become a part of the town. Any such explanation is possible, and a careful examination could probably distinguish between them, but a Noah’s flood is not possible, though it will not deter believers. They enjoy believing impossible things.

Nuzi, an ancient town in Assyria, yielded archives of 4000 baked clay tablets dated to 1350 BC. Albright and the biblicists again quickly seized on them to back up the biblical stories of Abraham. Now the great patriarch was dated to the mid second millennium rather than the third or early second, as many had previously thought. The records seemed to be suitable in that they were records of family arrangements and contracts, though, since they were carefully preserved in a central archive, they were civic matters and not purely private one which would have been kept privately. Moreover, the trouble with private contracts is that they do not have to conform with any particular pattern, but simply had to be agreed by the parties. Even so, custom would be likely to prevail, but unless some elements of the contracts were repeated, it is not certain from such records what was what.

More serious is that in conservative societies that changed only slowly, the same habits and customs could and did prevail for a long time. It means that any identities between what was found in the archives and what is recorded in the patriarchal narratives cannot be used for dating purposes at all, except to say that they signify the ANE in the millennia BC. They can tell us no more than we already know about the stories of Abraham. If we knew when the Abrahamic stories were composed, then the comparisons might be useful to see how the family contracts were changing, if at all.

Albright was also keen on the hoard of tablets found at Mari, also in Mesopotamia, but on the Euphrates not the Tigris. The argument became the now popular one of the historic kernel:

The patriarchal narratives have an historic nucleus throughout.

W F Albright, 1960

To say there is an historic kernel is not saying much, when all is said and done. No one seems to be arguing that the bible is science fiction. Almost any fictional story you pick necessarily has an historic kernel in that it is set in an historical period, even though nothing in it ever happened. The patriarchal stories therefore have historic elements in them, no one will deny. The problem is knowing what they are, and what is simply plausible props and scenery. It is set in a generalized time and place familiar to those made to travel from Mesopotamia to Yehud to set up the temple state. Interpreted that way, as an allegory of the Persian colonization of Yehud, more will be had from the patriarchal narratives than trying to set them in the second or third millennia. Either way, it is a long way from verifying the bible.

The director of the excavations at Mari was happy enough that connexions were being made with the Abrahamic myth. A Parrot (1901-80), the son of a Lutheran clergyman, had himself wanted to be a pastor but instead learned archaeology from the Ecole Biblique. Parrot, like Sayce and Woolley, was a keen populariser, and, needless to say, exploited the bible to the utmost. He did for French readers what the Albright school was doing for Americans, confirming their biblical prejudices with a minimum of contradictory or even relevant information.

Kenyon

G A Reisner (1867-1942), a German Egyptologist, had been involved in Samaria and brought some much needed early expertise and insight into archaeology. He recognized how important proper training was, proper supervision of the work, and careful recording of the finds. He appreciated that tells were stratified and that the actual strata could be used to identify and label the objects found in them. Moreover, he saw that the strata were not horizontal but at angles and inclines, and so could not be dug out in horizontal slices. He also noted that pits were often dug through preceding layers, but had to be dated by objects found in the infill. It was all admirable, except for one failing… his report was not published until 1924, over a decade after the fieldwork, and his colleague, C S Fisher failed to use Reisner’s advanced methods later when supervising work at Megiddo. Slowness of publication remains a bane of Palestinian archaeology. American archaeologists dug into Tell Tayinet, publishing, in 1971, a report of work done nearly forty years earlier. A remarkable amount of excavation is never published.

Archaeology did not get fully professional in Palestine until Kathleen Kenyon (1906-1978) demonstrated the use of the Wheeler-Kenyon method in her excavation of Samaria. Kenyon perfected the technique excavating at St Albans (Roman Verulamium) under the guidance of Sir Mortimer Wheeler, and she used the same method excavating Samaria. The method was strictly stratigraphical. The successive layers of debris were carefully removed along their natural bed-lines or strata. Each historical phase and its related objects was revealed and recorded on the spot by careful drawings, photographs and written records. At St Albans it had allowed Kenyon to recover the plan of the city gate even though most of it had been robbed out leaving nothing but infilled holes. Reisner had dated the stone towers of the acropolis at Samaria to the Israelites before 700 BC, but Kenyon showed them to be Hellenistic—after 300 BC! A street of columns dated to the Herodian period in the first century BC was dated in the Roman period around 150 years later.

Kenyon’s excavation of Samaria was also controversial because she attributed the stone buildings she found to Omri and Ahab, though others, on the basis of pottery typology, dated them, needless to say, to Solomon. She refuted the idea with these words:

The British method was followed, by which pottery and other finds ascribed to a structural period are those actually associated with the building operation, from the foundation trenches, floor make up and so on.

The footings might easily include earlier material turned up by the labourers building the structure, if the ground was not virgin, but Kenyon explained that the terminus ante quem was determined by the most recent of any dateable finds in the footings. The most recent stuff will have been dropped by the builders unless they were unnaturally tidy workers. Kenyon went on to say the method used in most ANE sites was not the British method, adding the criticism:

The material assigned to a stratum is that above its floors. There are two objections to this. In the absence of any published sections observed and drawn in the field (as distinct from schmatic ones built up from a collection of theodolite levels) at Hazor, there is no means of telling whether the objects are from one or more occupation levels, from destruction debris or from subsequent robber destruction.

Kenyon then turned to Jericho. In 1926, C Watzinger had found that “in the time of Joshua, Jericho was a heap of ruins on which stood a few isolated huts”. It annoyed J Garstang who cut test trenches at Hazor and Ai, and re-opened the site at Jericho to prove him wrong. Only a year later, Garstang declared (Joshua and Judges) that all three sites were flourishing around 1400 BC, putatively an appropriate time for the conquest of Canaan on the biblical chronology that identifies the Israelite exodus of the bible with the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt after 1560 BC.

Garstang’s date was based on the solid evidence of Amenophis III scarabs. Thereafter, the city remained in ruins until the time of king Hiel, Garstang reckoned. In dating Ai, Garstang depended upon Albright’s pottery sequences, typically, in the biblical period, dated high. Judith Marguet-Krause, however, showed that pottery Albright had dated to the LBA was uncharacteristically dated too low. She proved that Ai was not occupied from 2200 BC until about 1000 BC. Faced with unquestionable facts, biblicists find unbiblical excuses, and so they did—the tell was the wrong one, it was not Ai, or the Holy Ghost was its usual slack self and meant Ai to be Bethel nearby, or Ai was in ruins all right but they served as a temporary fortress for the Canaanites. H H Rowley came up with another tactic of believers—when the facts are unpalatable, just ignore them:

Since the case of Ai is an equal embarrassment to every view of Exodus and cannot be integrated at present into any synthesis of biblical and non-biblical material, it must be left out of account.

H H Rowley, The Schweich Lectures, 1948

Garstang was trained as a mathematician, and, though experienced at archaeology, he had not bothered about the special methods of tell excavation already pointed out by Reisner, nor the availability of techniques appropriate to such stratified sites like the Wheeler-Kenyon one. He did not even properly use the pottery sequences that Albright was plugging as a reliable dating method, tendentious as it was. Even Rabbi N Glueck, of the Albright school, criticized Garstang’s methods as no way to proceed, according to P J King.

Kenyon agreed with Watzinger and Garstang that the glacis (the plastered base slope meant to make it hard for attackers to get to the wall) and the encircling city wall at Jericho were of Middle Bronze II about 1500 BC. The layer beneath she assigned to Early Bronze III (c 2500 BC). After 1500 BC, there was no architectural or pottery evidence of any substantial town, but only of residual occupation. She even checked the scree in the slopes of the tell for any evidence that top layers had been eroded off. There was none. Kenyon was sure that after 1500 BC, Jericho was not a walled city. It was an unwalled village and remained like that until after 1300 BC. Garstang was wrong to see any evidence of an attack and destruction of the city around 1400 BC. After 1300 BC the site was abandoned all together for 200 years.

Perhaps, Kenyon’s advantage was that she was never trained in biblical studies, though she was an observant Anglican Christian. She did not doubt that the bible was an historical document in the sense of being a record of old traditions, but she never thought of it as a fundamentalist does. She recognized that tradition could distort a true record of past events.

Archaeologists took up the Wheeler-Kenyon method, especially the international teams working in Jordan, but some American and Israeli teams in Israel stuck to the less rigorous methods of Albright, preferring general excavations of planned areas and refinements of ceramic typologies. Dever criticized the more thorough technique as too slow and tedious. The lack of patience was because these people were less interested in discovering what was going on as proving the bible. They wanted significant finds, not sherds. Not that even Wheeler and Kenyon thought their careful method had to be used always. They argued that “there was no single right way to excavate, though there were many wrong ones”.

It is undoubtedly true that because the Wheeler-Kenyon method is so labour intensive, well trained teams of specialists are needed to do it full justice. But archaeology is a method of destructive testing of history. It destroys the evidence, so that, if it is to be used to discover about our past it must be done properly, selectively and as least destructively as possible, which means leaving as much of a site as possible untouched for future generations with more advanced technology and skills to explore it, not shovelling a whole ancient city into a dump. Most biblicists have been happy to destroy, knowing it has the merit of stopping anyone from using the evidence to disprove the bible.

Israeli Archaeologists

Following on the consolidation of the modern state of Israel, a new generation of Israeli scholars came into the archaeology of Palestine. sadly, many of them did so with their own politico-religious prejudices based on the Jewish scriptures being some sort of basis for their occupation of the land of Palestine. In that respect, it served as an excellent justification because it is one of the purposes for which the scriptures were compiled in the first place, by the Persian chancellery to offer the colonists of Yehud a religious and historic basis for the colonization. Some, though, remained objective and respectful that the imperatives of science should not be steamrollered by politics.

Y Yadin (1917-84) with I Dunayevski (1906-68) excavated Hazor from 1955 using Albright’s method of digging up large areas, relating buildings and floors to each other architecturally, and with no particular observation or recording of the stratification detail. The sections published were drawn schematically from surveying the buildings revealed, and so show nothing of the deposits and debris that had accumulated between and around them. Even G E Wright, after a visit to the site, wrote:

Its procedure was beautifully organized. I learned much from it, though I found myself wishing that Miss Kenyon’s methods were more seriously taken.

G E Wright, Shechem, the Biography of a Biblical City, 1965

In Egyptian sources, such as the el-Amarna letters, Hazor was the biggest, most significant city in Canaan, but the archaeology shows it was destroyed and never regained its former size or prominence. Yadin saw Joshua and the Israelites in this destruction, and dated it to the thirteenth century BC. Not everyone is so sure. Yadin, in an article on Hazor, in Archaeology and Old Testament Study (Ed D Winton-Thomas, 1967) perfectly illustrates the danger of using the Jewish scriptures, although he thinks the opposite:

The possibility of identifying the structures and finds from Stratum X with Solomon is not only a good example of how the Old Testament data can play an important role in field archaeology in the Holy Land, but, and this is more important, it enables us now to fix the pottery sequence of the first centuries of the first millennium BC with much greater accuracy.

It should end any doubt that the ceramic sequences used for dating everywhere in Palestinian archaeology are tied to the bible initially, and so automatically date everything else according to the internal chronology of the bible, and not on the basis of anything objective. It makes the refusal of those experts to use the stratigraphic methods of Wheeler and Kenyon, laborious as they are, seem perverse if accurate history is what they are truly interested in. It obviously is not. It is so perverse that it looks like a deliberate choice to prevent their own presumptions of biblical veracity being challenged and instead confirmed by chicanery. Kenyon’s ceramic chronology based on her work at Samaria was low, whereas the Hazor chronology, based on the pottery sequence worked out by Y Aharoni and R Amiran, was high—to match the mythical Solomon!

Aharoni was responsible for realizing that a large amount of important data had been lost in past work through the practice of scrubbing potsherds to clean them so as to type them more easily. He realized that an unknown number of these sherds could have been ostraca, and the scrubbing had removed any writing they bore. He introduced a new precaution of dipping the sherds into water first, and then inspecting them closely for inscriptions before scrubbing them thoroughly when they had none. Aharoni always referred to the bible but did not follow it slavishly, accepting, for example, Alt’s notion of peaceful settlement and not the Joshua conquest romance of the bible. On this hypothesis, the Israelites were people who settled on the maginal lands that were becoming more viable as the climate ameliorated at the Bronze and Iron Age boundary, after the long “Mycenaean” drought. Alt’s hypothesis of the settlement is now preferred to Albright’s. Joshua’a stories are old Jewish superman stories meant to tickle the tummy of the Ptolemaic Egyptian allies in Canaan in the third century BC. From extensive survey data, I Finkelstein identifies the settlers as local people, not mainly intruders from outside.

B Mazar was another Israeli archaeologist. Excavating west of the temple platform in Jerusalem from 1968, he used earth moving tractors to clear 300,000 cubic meters of debris. It revealed important architecture such as the remains of Robinson’s arch, but two thousand years of occupation were just removed. What examination was made of all this debris? Any? Or was it just discarded as irrelevant to the Israelis. The royal portico and hidden entrances to the temple were revealed, but at what cost? In simultaneous work, N Avigad showed that the western hill of Jerusalem was occupied and even protected by walls by about 700 BC. Avigad published quickly, but in popular form lacking essential detail according to Roger Moorey.

Critics of the Biblicists

G E Wright knew the Wheeler-Kenyon method but chose to use Albright’s less rigorous approach, although he had ambitions of selectively introducing bits of the Wheeler-Kenyon technique into Albright’s to improve it. This ambition showed he had failed to understand the basis of the Wheeler-Kenyon method—stratigraphy. He continued to use the schematic diagrams of Albright rather than actually dissecting the layers to see what was in them. Wright was an unabashed biblicist, declaring:

Biblical theology and biblical archaeoiology must go hand in hand if we are to comprehend the bible’s meaning.

G E Wright, Biblical Archaeology, 1957

Not surprisingly, the steadily growing band of professional archaeologists, free of any clerical calling or commitment, thought it proved that Wright was not objective, whereas suspicious theologians did not trust the fact that he put history on a par with God’s revelation! J J Finkelstein, a Jewish professor of Semitic languages in the university of California questioned the aim of people like Wright and Glueck, who thought archaeology could prove the bible. Glueck was more flamboyant—or stupid—about his aims, and so was a better target than Wright and Albright who werer more circumspect in print. Glueck had, for example, made the famous statement that ignorant apologists still quote half a century later:

It may be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference.

N Glueck, Rivers in the Desert, 1959

Nothing can controvert plausible fictions any more than you controvert belief in fairies or their Christian equivalent, angels. But this is true only in the sense that most archaeology cannot controvert anything—it is dumb! Ancient texts unearthed by archaeologists can controvert the bible, but most archaeology is an accumulation of data that have to be interpreted to tell a story. Some of these stories do controvert the bible, but believers can always argue that these are just theories, just as they say about evolution, a theory so well established after 150 years that it is now essentially a law. The shysters of the Albright school have been able to get away with such specious statements for thirty years because no one had the nerve to challenge them. That is why Finkelstein’s critique of Glueck’s casuistry was so important. He reworded Glueck’s aphorism as:

Every contradiction between archaeological evidence and the biblical text must be harmonized to uphold the veracity of scripture.

J J Finkelstein

Wright therefter had to contend with the inference that he was neither objective nor scientific, and Glueck, in his book, The Jordan River (1968) specifically denied that archeology was proving the bible. This is what the internet Christians have conveniently forgotten.

The Dutchman, H J Franken, also started to join in with the critics about this time:

If an archaeologist accepts uncritically the biblical evidence as a principle of explanation of archaeological finds, dates these finds from the biblical evidence, or provides dates for biblical events having first used such evidence for identification and explanation of archaeological features, it becomes utterly impossible after a while to unravel the arguments, to see what is concluded from which evidences, or to find out how much of it is based on circular reasoning.

H J Franken, 1976

Put even more bluntly, Franken is declaring biblicist reasoning circular when they say they have confirmed the bible, having identified archaeological features from the bible, then used the bible to date them. Earlier he had used the curious events of Genesis 14:15 as a case in point. How did Glueck date this event to the end of Middle Bronze Age I? What was his evidence? Or was it just a bible based guess? That is precisely what it was. No one knows still what historical events Genesis 14:15 refers to, if anything. If no one knows what it was, how can anyone date it? The archaeological table of conventional periods in time has been established based on evidence and reason, and to that extent is scientific, so by labelling a biblical event with an archaeological period, it gets a spurious historicity. That might please the flocks, but they are again being duped by the professional religionists.

The great German exegetes, A Alt and his student M Noth, were consistently skeptical of the American school led by Albright. Alt wrote, just before World War II:

Not every destruction that happened to a Canaanite place in the time of the Israelite conquest need to be the result of the conquest, not every conquest the work of the Israelites.

A Alt 1939

Later, in his History of Israel (UK edition, 1960), Noth observed that “the fact that an event can be shown to have been possible is no proof that it actually occurred”, a blunt rebuke to the believers who always speak of the “plausibility” of the bible and giving it “the benefit of the doubt”. Noth goes on to say that any illumination of a legend by archaeology does not alter the purpose of the written tradition. It might throw light on its ultimate sources, but its purpose was still not to record objective history, and so it cannot be relied upon to have done so. Indeed, as soon as its aim is not to record history, there can be no benefit of the doubt. The text has to be doubted over everything that is not central to its known purpose. It is communicating its own message. The response of the American school then is reminiscent of its response in recent years to the challenge of the biblical minimalists. It was intemperate and abusive.

Not only is Noth unable to rely on the Hexateuch traditions for the writing of Israel’s early history, he is unable to fill the void thus created by an appeal to the archaeological evidence. Indeed, he exhibits a nihilism regarding archaeology that virtually denies it to speak to the point at all.

J Bright, Early Israel in Recent History Writing, 1956

Alt and Noth were accused of disparaging the archaeological evidence, but plainly they were not challenging the archaeology, but the tendentious interpretations of Albright and his disciples. The accusation of nihilism follows that already made by Albright himself in 1939, and now virtually an identity mark of the panicking back-to-the-wall biblicist. Some of the American school, like Dever, gave ground to have a sounder base for defence, but eventually they too came out with the same slanders, and spoken more vehemently still. Crooks and cheats are being exposed, and they are as sensitive to that as they are to their attempt to preserve the inerrant Word. But there is nothing they can do about it, except cheat all the more, so meanwhile they call their detractors names. “Suffer the little children to come to me”, said the Christian God, so they all behave like spoilt brats.

Slandering a critic serves to please your own acolytes, and detract attention pro tem from the weight of the criticism, but ultimately the slanderer is displaying their lack of arguments. Biblicists have steadily been losing the arguments since 1960, but only because of the absurd fundamentalism that many of them espouse. More moderate Christians are bemused or amused by it all. They quite happily accept that even a sacred book written through the agency of human beings is not perfect, has all the characteristics of any other human text of its time, and yet can still carry an important message inspired by God. The atheist and naturalist cannot accept any such thing, but plenty of Christians can. For them, then, the archaeology cannot disprove the bible, but simply show what they already know—it is not perfect.

Circumspect biblicists seem to be in the moderate category of Christians, while still seeming to find the bible confirmed even when only a “kernel” of it is. Bright used the kernel argument in his popular History of Israel (1960). The scriptural stories contained an “appreciable nucleus of historical fact”. What is not cited by Christian apologists is his parallel confession:

In spite of all the amazing evidence that archaeology has brought, not one single item in the entire Hexateuch tradition has been proved true in the strict sense of the word. Archaeology cannot bring that sort of proof.

J Bright, Early Israel in Recent History Writing, 1956

The question is not: does archaeology prove the biblical tradition? but where is the balance of probability in the matter? That is, indeed, the area in which the historian usually labours. He weighs the evidence, and does not brush aside the more probable for the less probable.

J Bright, Early Israel in Recent History Writing, 1956

This last sentence denies the basis of Christianity, which brushes aside every probable historical explanation of the life, death and supposed resurrection of the founder of Christian belief in favour of not only improbable ones but often impossible ones which are then “explained” as miracles! Even so, Bright is right to state it because it is true, though his views on what archaeology can do is remarkably negative. When C Clermont-Ganneau found an old stone built into the wall of a school near the site of the Jerusalem temple, he proved a passage in Acts (Acts 21:28) as being historical. It was the stone from the temple inscribed with the warning that gentiles were forbidden from entering the inner courts. Not that it was something that anyone doubted, but here was the very warning itself.

Admittedly, such finds are rare and fortuitous, but they show that archaeology can prove texts, subject to the normal precautionary caveats. Imagine that an old stele was found inscribed in the name of king Solomon, like the Assyrian and Egyptian stelae. It would silence minimalists at a stroke, providing it was found in a suitable context and not being peddled at some museum or collector’s door by an “antiquities dealer”. Archaeology can be powerful, and can prove things, though mostly it does not but rather establishes the norms of everyday life. Mostly, it adds little bits of information that change perspectives to small degrees, and rarely lead to a paradigm change.

P W Lapp was a professor of Old Testament and archaeology at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, hardly a man to be objective about his archaeology, one would imagine, and he was director of the American schools for a while before his premature death. His training as an archaeologist did not look particularly encouraging, his mentors being Albright and Wright, and his PhD being on a Roman ceramic chronology. For all that, he expressed a genuine appreciation of what archaeology was:

An ideal final archaeological report should make it possible for the reader to reconstruct the layers and associated structures and artifacts as they existed before excavation, but up to now this goal has not been approached even by the best archaeological publications.

P W Lapp, 1963

Too often a subjective interpretation, not based on empirical stratigraphic observation, is used to demonstrate the validity of another subjective interpretation. We assign close dates to a given group of pots on subjective typological grounds and go on to cite our own opiniuon as independent evidence for similarly dating a parallel group.

P W Lapp, 1970

He added that too much of Palestinian archaeology had involved ad hominem argumentation. It is hard to see how that will end as long as men with a fixed agenda called the bible treat legitimate criticism of them and their methods by proper scientists as some kind of blasphemy. Meanwhile, the phonies object to the scientists and the scientists object to the phonies. Lapp, trained as a phony, realized how phony it was, changed sides, and then was drowned.

It was a review of the work by the Dutchman, Franken, that gave Lapp a chance to voice his own criticisms, for Franken was already critical, and, in particular, wanted to clean up the pig’s ear that the American school had made of ceramic types. He aimed for a less subjective, more scientific basis for ceramic sequences, by analysis of the pots to determine how they were made and what of. The hypotheses that emerged about how different pots were made could be tested in the laboratory. Changing materials and firing methods were additionals factors for judging types, other than shape, style and decoration. Franken objected all together to the Albright school’s bible based methods:

An important reason that we still know so little is that Palestinian archaeology has built an enormous structure of archaeological “evidence” around the historicity of the Old Testament.

H J Franken, 1976

Franken was also scientific in that he taught there were few archaeological facts. Archaeology most often required interpretation, and that was, like science, a process of formulating hypotheses that could only then be progressed by honest testing, not by fixing. Franken himself made the famous discovery at Deir Alla of the eighth century plaster inscription in a strange dialect which referred to Balaam son of Beor, a name and patronymic that appears in the bible in the context of the exodus through Moab, supposedly some 500 or more years earlier. And the biblical Balaam came from Pitru in Mesopotamia (Num 22:5), although his assistance was sought by the Moabite king.

Father De Vaux of the Ecole Biblique, excavator of Qumran, in a tribute to Glueck, wrote shortly before he died:

Archaeology does not confirm the text, which is what it is, it can only confirm the interpretation which we give it.

R De Vaux, 1970

And there are two interpretations as a minimum, the right one and the wrong one.

The stake was driven into the heart of the Albright biblical homunculus by T L Thompson in 1974. Thompson devastatingly showed how Albright’s logic was entirely circular in his justification of the patriarchal narratives.

Archaeological materials should not be dated or evaluated on the basis of written texts which are independent of those materials. So, also written documents should not be interpreted on the bases of archaeological hypotheses.

T L Thompson, 1974

Albright had drawn evidence for the bible from external texts such as the execration texts, and those from Mari and Nuzi, but he had cherry picked passages that suited his contention of biblical historicity, while ignoring many more that suggested the opposite, or otherwise controverted his thesis. There can be no objection to comparing documents, but their purpose and origin in place and time must be considered, and comparisons must be fair and honest. If the comparisons are manifestly not fair and honest, what can be concluded about those who made them? Certainly, Thompson suffered by being black-balled by academic biblical departments for many years until he secured a place at the university of Copenhagen. J Van Seters independently did similar work coming to the same sort of conclusions.

In 1977, J M Miller, a biblical scholar and archaeologist, did the same for Albright’s ideas about a thirteenth century BC conquest as Thompson and Van Seters did for his patriarchal claims. Miller modestly said he was making “some methodological observations”:

What sort of conclusion is to be reached when carefully excavated evidence does not seem to meet the minumum requirements of the historical implications of the biblical texts? When, if ever, is it methodologically proper to deviate from the most natural interpretation of one in order to bring it in line with the other? Is it ever justifiable to take liberties with both the written and the artefactual evidence in order to achieve correlation? If so—and such procedure has been the order of the day in biblical archaeology—are there any objections based on circular argumentations?

J M Miller, 1977

J J Bimson, a biblicist, but not an archaeologist, joined in the attack on Albright, not surprisingly because he was interested in returning to the earlier Hyksos theory of the exodus which puts it 200 years earlier better matching the internal chronology of the bible, and also the date when the Asian kings of Egypt were expelled. It seems plain that this event is what the exodus romance was based on when it was composed by the Ptolemaic priests of Egypt around 300 BC. It is that much sought after “historic kernel” of it, but it actually bears little relationship to history, for all that.

What is relevant about Bimson’s return to the older idea is that, although much of the content of the Albright exodus and conquest argument could be retained, they had to be considerably set back in time, thereby showing Albright’s ceramic sequences were wrong. He thus exposed in his own way the circular reasoning used in Albright’s dating of pottery. N P Lemche, a leading minimalist, was also bluntly saying that destruction layers found in the excavation of Canaanite cities were dated to suit the myth of Joshua in the bible, allowing the archaeologists to claim the proof of the bible from the archaeology.

To judge by Moorey’s account of a century of biblical archaeology, physical methods of dating have never been used in Palestinian archaeology, just as they have not been adequately used in Egypt, even though many of the problems are precisely ones of dating. When Albright assigned Persian period artefacts to the Assyrians, he was making a difference of about 300 years, so that even for pottery, thermoluminescent dating, especially of assemblies or hoards of pottery would be a huge assistance, or even definitive enough since they can distinguish such a gap. The fact is that most of the biblicists, like the Egyptologists, will not use objective methods because they know they will not uphold their preconceptions. No doubt, any that have been done, and given a surprising date, will have been suppressed as wrong, just as they were by Egyptologists until they decided to stop using them all together. Let us make sure our history does not again get into the hands of Christian freebooters, shysters and grifters.

Further Reading

P R S Moorey, A Century of Biblical Archaeology, Lutterworth Press, Cambridge, 1991
It goes on today, Biblicist Archaeology in Edom

Appendix

Kathleen Kenyon’s Method

Kenyon’s method as illustrated in her book Beginning in Archaeology, 1971.

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