The Fight for History
In the Holy Land, archaeology itself is a battleground. Will the Bible win out?
Hotly contesting the minimalists is a broad mix of scholars who find compelling reasons to affirm the basic historical veracity of the Bible even though many do not believe it to be 100 percent accurate. In his new book, What Did the Biblical Writers Know & When Did They Know It?, University of Arizona Prof. William G. Dever argues that archaeology has established a "context for many of the narratives in the Hebrew Bible," making them "not just stories arising out of later Judaism's identity crisis" but "part of the history of a real people." Answering the question raised by his book's title, Dever says the biblical writers "knew a lot, and they knew it early." Minimalists, adds James K. Hoffmeier, a professor of Old Testament, ancient Near Eastern history, and archaeology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, hold the Bible to an unreasonable standard, insisting that it "has to be substantiated by archaeological evidence" in order to be considered true. "They hold the Bible as guilty until proven innocent," he says.
Hoffmeier, Dever, and others assail the minimalists as being ideologically driven--aiming, says Dever, not "merely to rewrite the history" of biblical Israel, but "to abolish [the history] altogether." Intended or not, it is a position many see as eroding modern Israel's historic claim to the land, a claim the Israelis have worked hard to buttress archaeologically since becoming a state in 1948. "Archaeology," Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review, observes in the History Channel program, "was a way of establishing for the early Zionists at that time their roots in the land."
The stakes were raised when the Palestinian Authority, attempting to provide a counterweight, established its own archaeological agency soon after the signing of the 1993 peace accord. "They wanted to immediately start telling a story, start digging, start figuring out their past," Amy Dockser Marcus, author of The View From Nebo, tells the History Channel. "The Palestinians said, `Well, it worked for the Israelis, maybe it can work for us.' " Both sides, she says, are "trying to somehow edge the other side out of the story."
AGE OF THE PATRIARCHS. Though few scholars think archaeology of the Holy Land can ever be fully extricated from Middle East politics, many insist that it will continue to illuminate the major epochs of Israel's past, beginning at the beginning: The Bible traces Israel's origins to Abraham, a Mesopotamian nomad who God promises would be the "ancestor of a multitude of nations" and would inherit the land of Canaan as "a perpetual holding." Through his progeny would come the 12 tribes of Israel that would emerge from Egyptian bondage to occupy the Promised Land. (Arabs also trace their ancestry to Abraham through his first-born son, Ishmael.)
But modern archaeology has found nothing from the Middle Bronze Age (2000-1500 B.C.) directly associated with Abraham or his offspring, leading even such Bible defenders as Dever to conclude that "all respectable archaeologists have given up hope" of proving the patriarchs' existence. The purpose of the story, Dever says, is not to relate history but to tell "a universal story about faith as risk--daring to set out for a Promised Land." Is the story true? "Of course it is," says Dever, "whether literally or not."
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