The Fight for History
In the Holy Land, archaeology itself is a battleground. Will the Bible win out?
Truth shall spring out of the earth," the Psalmist wrote some 3,000 years ago, and for more than a century modern archaeology has worked feverishly to find it. From the fertile valley of the Euphrates to the desolate sands of the Sinai, the land of the Bible has been slowly yielding its buried secrets, illuminating the ancient civilizations that gave rise to three world religions. Some recent archaeological discoveries have shed light on the Scriptures themselves, offering valuable insights into the sacred texts and the people who wrote them. Others have bred new controversies by challenging some traditional views of history in a region torn by centuries-old religious animosity.
But reconstructing history from rocks and pottery shards is not an exact science, and is seldom easy even in the most peaceful of times. Now, with Middle East violence flaring in the background, the often arcane scholarly enterprise has been transformed into a high-stakes and highly politicized conflict over the reliability of the Bible, the reality of "ancient Israel," and the validity of competing historical claims to the land called Holy. Some scholars, for example, say there is no archaeological evidence of an Exodus from Egypt or of an Israelite conquest of Canaan--key events in the Bible that explain Israel's emergence in the Promised Land during the Late Bronze Age. Expunging those events from ancient history, some argue, would seriously weaken modern Israel's claims to a biblical birthright in the Middle East.
It is an international controversy pitting biblical minimalists--a relatively small but influential group of scholars who find little or no history recorded in the Scriptures--against those who consider the Bible a generally reliable window on the past. The debate has spawned dozens of books during the past decade, at least four in the past year alone, and is the subject of a two-hour documentary, Digging for the Truth: Archaeology and the Bible, premiering this week on the History Channel.
Both sides draw heavily upon sometimes equivocal archaeological data to support their views. The minimalists contend, among other things, that ancient Israel as described in the Bible never existed; that Abraham, Moses, and Kings David and Solomon are fictional characters of Hebrew mythology; that the entire Old Testament was composed in the middle of the first millennium B.C.--more than a thousand years after many of the events it purports to narrate--by religious leaders seeking to establish a pedigree for a people just released from exile. "Today we no longer have a history of Israel," declares Thomas L. Thompson, professor of Old Testament at the University of Copenhagen, in his 1999 book, The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel. Not only have the stories of Adam and Eve and Noah's flood "passed over into mythology," under the withering glare of modern scholarship, Thompson says, "but we can no longer talk about a time of the patriarchs," a united monarchy under David and Solomon, or the Hebrew prophets as historical realities. One prominent archaeologist, Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University, in a new book The Bible Unearthed, cowritten with historian Neil Asher Silberman, describes the biblical saga of Israel as "not a miraculous revelation but a brilliant product of the human imagination" compiled and shaped by Jerusalem priests after the Babylonian exile around 538 B.C.
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