While browsing through the publishers’ exhibits at the SBL meeting yesterday, I overheard an interesting conversation. Two men were interacting with a woman who was representing a publisher. I heard the woman say something like, “If it wasn’t around 1400, then when would you put it?” “In the early 1200s,” one of the men replied. “So I ask you again,” the woman said, “What difference do those 200 years really make? It didn’t stop the exodus from happening; it didn’t stop Jesus from coming …” Clearly, they were talking about the date of the exodus. My interest piqued, I circled around later to find out what product the group was discussing.

The woman, a representative of the Zondervan publishing company, was promoting Zondervan’s new Archaeological Study Bible. For the moment, I’ll set aside my absolute shock and dismay that someone promoting an “archaeological study Bible”—any of the three words could be emphasized—saw no importance to a two-hundred-year variance in the dating of the exodus (granting the occurrence of such an event, at least for the sake of argument). Zondervan was distributing “samplers” of the Archaeological Study Bible in cute little burlap sacks with שְׁלֹחַ מֵאַדְמַת הַקּׄדֶשׁ, i.e., “Sent from the Holy Land,” stamped on them. Inside is a slick brochure, with a reproduction of the treatment of Genesis 1:1-18:5 from the Archaeological Study Bible. The back of the brochure contains a promotional DVD that I haven’t yet watched. I haven’t read every word of the sampler carefully, but I looked at a few points of interest. First, let me say that the Archaeological Study Bible looks absolutely beautiful. The presentation is gorgeous, four-color, with very nice photographs. Sadly, I can’t gush like that about the content. The looks are a seduction, but the content is, shall we say, not anywhere near as attractive.

Here are some of the items that caught my attention:

In the “About this Bible” preface, Zondervan (I’ll attribute all this to the publisher, since no other attribution is present, although I understand that Walter Kaiser, Jr. was a major force behind the Bible) tells readers, “a careful study of the world of the Bible enhances our confidence in [the Bible's] historical accuracy and in its distinctiveness as the Word of God.” That simply isn’t so. Archaeology has been a double-edged sword in the examination of the historicity of various biblical narratives. Some biblical narratives find useful, even remarkable corrobration in the archaeological record; others do not, and may even be resisted or contravened by the archaeological remains. No one blanket statement will suffice on this matter. The preface continues: “Set against the astonishing variety of cultures that made up the Biblical world, the unity of the message of the Bible is remarkable.” One might justly say that the unification of the messages of the Bible into a single canon is indeed a remarkable achievement, but to speak of “the unity of the message of the Bible is going quite too far. The scholarly debates in the twentieth century over whether one could specify a “center” for Old Testament theology send this point home with undeniable force. Yet again, the next sentence in the preface: “The writers of Scripture spoke [sic] in diverse times and places, but they were inspired by one changeless Spirit.” Never mind the sloppy interchange between literary and oral expression, which I take just to be idiomatic but flag here nonetheless. The entire latter part of the sentence is a theological claim loaded with unstated presuppositions. While I personally affirm the inspiration of scripture (given the privelege of defining precisely what that means when I affirm it), that is a theological affirmation, not an historical one, and certainly not one to be touted in a so-called Archaeological Study Bible, as artifacts and inscriptions will never be able to corroborate such an ineffable claim as “inspiration.”

In the introduction to the book of Genesis, Zondervan rightly notes that “Genesis is, strictly speaking, an anonymous work.” The Archaeological Study Bible nevertheless goes on to advocate for Mosaic authorship of Genesis (although he might, Zondervan admits, have used sources). The timeline on the bottom of p. 2 dates Abraham’s life c. 2166-1991 B.C. (sic; no BCEs here), Isaac’s to 2066-1886, Jacob 2006-1859, and Joseph 1915-1805. The writing of the book of Genesis is placed on the timeline at 1446-1406 B.C., which corresponds to Zondervan’s dating of the “wilderness wanderings” period. There are so many problems with this that it’s hard to know where to begin. I’ll mention the two that stand out the most. First, the idea of dating the patriarchs’ lives so accurately is, frankly, rather audacious. Second, the choice for the date of c. 1446 BCE for the exodus (if there was one) flies in the face of the best scholarship on this issue. If there was an historical exodus, the strongest case can be made for it to have happened early in the reign of Ramses II, in the early 1200s BCE. This, of course, is what the two gentlemen mentioned above were trying to tell Zondervan’s representative when I overheard their conversation.

I have only glanced briefly at the beautifully framed sidebar on “Ancient Creation Narratives,” but in skimming it I got the distinct impression that Zondervan here emphasizes the distinctive features of Genesis 1. The sidebar on “The Location of Eden” seems a little more balanced, although I think the attempt to locate Eden on a map at all is misguided. In the sidebar on “Ancient Flood Narratives,” Zondervan makes the judicious statement that “most researchers believe that the Biblical account [of the flood] is not simply a modification of the Mesopotamian stories but one of several versions of a common story.” So far, so good, but then Zondervan makes—in the Archaeological Study Bible, remember—the thoroughly theological and utterly non-archaeological claim that “The differences [between the biblical flood story and Mesopotamian flood stories] can be attributed to the special revelation God gave the Biblical authors, including the writer of Genesis, by which he made known his plan of redemption. The other versions provide extrabiblical confirmation of the story of a great flood rather than demosntrating, as some have suggested, that the Biblical account is a myth.” On Genesis 6:1-4, a footnote refers to an article or sidebar entitled “Who Were the Nephilim?” but I couldn’t seem to find that article or sidebar in the sampler.

The one-page article on the Documentary Hypothesis really annoyed me for several reasons. I’m not a huge fan of the Documentary Hypothesis, truth be told. Yet I do understand its explanatory power, which garnered it a huge following among biblical scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the twenty-first. The first line of the sidebar, “Until fairly recently, a majority of scholars espoused the Documentary Hypothesis,” makes it sound like the majority of scholars have now abandoned the Documentary Hypothesis. I would say that, statistically speaking, this is a false impression. I’d guess that, if polled, a simple majority of biblical scholars would still buy some variation on Wellhausen’s Documentary Hypothesis. Zondervan then gives a brief summary of the hypothesis, giving one brief paragraph to each of the four classic sources (and, of course, using the term “pious fraud” to describe Deuteronomy). The first line of the second column shows how unbalanced the treatment is: “In refuting these arguments …” The editor(s) clearly believe that the Documentary Hypothesis needs to be refuted. Their refutations, by the way, are weak. They try to dismiss doublets and triplets as mere stylistic repetition. They also try to reword Exodus 6:2-3 to remove the problem of the patriarchs addressing God as “Yahweh” despite their supposedly not knowing that name, according to God’s statement in Exodus 6:2-3. The Hebrew text reads אני יהוה וארא אל אברהם אל יצחק ואל יעקב באל שדי יהוה ושמי יהוה לא נודעתי להם. (I hope your browser correctly rendered the line breaks.) The NIV, the text presented in the Archaeological Study Bible, correctly renders the statement as “I am [Yahweh]. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name [Yahweh] I did not make myself known to them.” The Documentary Hypothesis article in the Archaeological Study Bible, however, offers the following re-rendering: “I am [Yahweh]. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as God Almighty. And my name is [Yahweh]. Did I not make myself known to them?” I can see no syntactical justification for rendering לא נודעתי להם as a question, as Zondervan’s article here wishes to do. Here is an attempt to monkey around with the syntax and the plain sense of the text in order to achieve a rendering compatible with theological preconceptions. And it has not one single thing to do with archaeology, depsite its presence in this volume.

Edit: When I originally posted this item, I forgot to mention the very last line of the article on the Documentary Hypothesis. This last line is a mixture of cleverly stated fact, exaggeration, and bald disengenuity. Yes, I am saying—flat-out—that the final line of the Archaeological Study Bible‘s article on the Documentary Hypothesis is subtly deceptive. Here’s the line: “Many scholars today have abandoned the Documentary Hypothesis, agreeing that it is based on a faulty understanding of ancient Near Eastern literature and that it contributes nothing helpful to our understanding of the Pentateuch.” Now it’s true that a number of scholars today (I’m not sure how many there have to be to qualify as “many”) have abandoned the Documentary Hypothesis, though it is much more common for scholars to retain the Documentary Hypothesis in broad strokes and quibble over the details of the placement and extent of the various sources. At the highest level of abstraction, those scholars who have abandoned the Documentary Hypothesis do agree that it is “faulty,” but not all of them would cite the same features as “faults.” Zondervan here gives the impression of a false consensus. I think that very few scholars would actually say that the Documentary Hypothesis “contributes nothing helpful” (Zondervan’s words, my emphasis) to our understanding of the Pentateuch. But even if all these phrases be granted instead of nitpicked, the fact remains that the entire sentence—even if technically true—is misleading in its context. Remember that on p. 2, Zondervan weighs in for Mosaic authorship of Genesis, in the second half of the fifteenth century BCE. The Documentary Hypothesis article on p. 14 makes it sound like scholars have given up on the Documentary Hypothesis, but even if they have, the majority are not moving to an affirmation of Mosaic authorship in the 1440s BCE! The trend is in the other direction; those who are moving away from the Documentary Hypothesis are tending to argue that Wellhausen dated the materials too early, not too late.

Maybe the story of Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem (2 Kings 18-20) would have been a better choice for the sampler material.

The sampler goes on through chapter 18, but I just don’t have the heart to go on with this advance critique right now. Suffice to say that I won’t be purchasing a copy or adopting it for my classes. I would have to “unteach” too many things. Based on the sampler, I cannot recommend Bible, and recommend against any reliance on its editorial materials. (I’m no fan of the NIV text either, so there’s no reason for me to give the volume another look.) Visually, the Archaeological Study Bible is seductive, but I find it quite unsatisfactory and, truth be told, disturbing.