Eric Welch (on his blog “Revelee”) has pointed to the online publication of the latest issue of Contact, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary’s “ministry magazine.” The them of the Winter 2005/2006 issue is “biblical archaeology.” While trolling through the issue and setting up links for iTanakh, I decided to go ahead and read through several of the articles. Not surprisingly, perhaps, I have some comments and reactions to register.

First up is John Sailhamer’s article “Archaeology and the Reliablity of the Old Testament.” It’s only four pages long (pp. 7-10)and written for an educated but nonspecialist audience (like all articles in the magazine), so the article needs to be evaluated with realistic expectations appropriate to the genre.

Let’s begin with the photographs. The cover page of the article (which contains only the title and byline) has a nice photo of an unidentified scroll (I don’t recognize it). Page 8 features four photographs captioned “Examples of ancient inscriptions,” but some of these are out of place in an article on the Old Testament. From left to right, the four photographs show the TBWH (Tobiah) inscription from Iraq el-Amir (sometimes spelled Araq el-Emir), the Gezer calendar, part of the Gallio inscription, and the Greek-language Roman-era inscription from Herod’s temple warning Gentiles to stay out. Of these, only the TBWH inscription and the Gezer calendar have any claim to be relevant to the Old Testament. The others belong to the Roman era and shed no light whatsoever on the Old Testament, which is supposed to be the focus of this essay. In the article itself, Sailhamer refers to other artifacts, like the Merneptah stela. Why were irrelevant Roman-era inscriptions used to illustrate an article that is supposed to be about the Old Testament?

In the opening paragraph of the article, Sailhamer tells readers that “What is at stake in [Biblical Philology and Textual Criticism] is nothing less than the historical and scientific grounds for the claim of all Christians that the Bible is a faithful and reliable witness to its original texts and the historical events they record” (p. 8). Sailhamer’s attempt here to speak for “all Christians” disconcerts me a bit and overreaches the facts. There are plenty of Christians who don’t “claim … that the Bible is a faithful and reliable witness to … the historical events [that its original texts] record.” If you’ve taken a few turns around the blogosphere or read much in the realm of scholarly reconstructions of ancient Israelite history, you’ve run across some of them. Of course, there’s also the problem of determining which of the “events” the Bible “records” are in fact “historical,” but that’s an entirely separate discussion. My point here is that there is no inherent, automatic, or necessary link between pledging one’s life to God through Christ and affirming that this or that narrative in the Old Testament is historically accurate.

In the second paragraph, Sailhamer writes that “Philologists …. demonstrat[e] that the Bible we hold in our hands today is the same Bible penned centuries before the birth of Christ.” That strikes me as a serious overstatement. Speaking of “the Bible” being “penned” might imply that the composition of the Old Testament was a single, unified, one-time project, which of course it wasn’t, even by the most traditional and “conservative” estimates of the date and authorship of the various Old Testament materials (nobody imagines, for example, that Moses wrote the book of Ezra, or that a single poet wrote everything in the book of Psalms). Sailhamer’s phrasing also obscures the difficulties we have in reconstructing the canonical processes that led to the divergent canons of the Tanakh and the classic Septuagint codices—and the debates and ambiguities over the time frames within which these canons gelled. Most seriously, however, this paragraph obscures important differences between text-types, and gives a false impression that all Bibles since “centuries before the birth of Christ” have been pretty much the same, allowing of course for translation into different languages. That, however, simply isn’t the case. One needs only to compare the books of Daniel and Esther in Catholic and Protestant Old Testaments to realize this. Acquaintance with the Samaritan Pentateuch or the Septuagint form of the book of Jeremiah only underscores this point. “The Bible we”—whoever we are, and it matters much whether we are Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, etc.—”hold in our hands today” is a translation of one of the available text-types or, even more often, a translation of an eclectic, reconstructed text that does not in fact fully represent any single extant manuscript.

On pp. 8-9, Sailhamer discusses the discovery of the Ras Shamra tablets and the contributions of Ugaritic to Semitic philology in general and Hebrew philology in particular. According to Sailhamer, comparison of the Ugaritic texts to biblical texts shows that “the biblical texts have preserved a very ancient form of the language of that period.” In other words, Sailhamer suggests that the Ugaritic texts show that “the language of the Bible” belongs to the Bronze Age. Among those who would strongly disagree with this conclusion are W. Schiedewind, who argues forcefully from Hebrew evidence in How the Bible Became a Book that the eighth and seventh centuries (the later Iron Age) are where the biblical texts are most linguistically at home. (Schniedewind’s arguments have been among the most significant in forcing me to re-evaluate my own tendency to date not only the editing/collection, but also the composition, of most of the Pentateuch in the Persian era, though that re-evaulation is far from complete.)

Sailhamer’s discussion of the Dead Sea Srolls biblical manuscripts (p. 9) claims that “The similarity between these ancient manuscripts and our more recent Hebrew texts shows that the scribes who copied and handled them were as cautious and exacting as modern biblical scholars.” Knowing how many mistakes I, a “modern biblical scholar,” have made in my work doesn’t make the analogy all that comforting. Seriously, though, the question that Sailhamer neither asks nor answers is what the differences between the Dead Sea Scrolls and medieval Hebrew manuscripts show—never mind the preservation of at least five different text-types at Qumran (briefly, [proto-]Masoretic type, Septuagintal type, Samaritan type [in the Pentateuch], uniquely Qumran type, and “unaligned”—see James VanderKam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today [Eerdmans, 1994], following Emmanuel Tov).

The remainder of Sailhamer’s article seems to be an argument against “minimalism.” In this section, Sailhamer both “diagnoses” the causes of “minimalism” and seeks to argue against some “minimalist” ideas. Sailhamer structures this part of the essay with four “observations” on “minimalism,” which I’ll take up one at a time.

“1. The increasingly negative tone of some historians and archaeologists is not the result of new findings or new discoveries at the ancient biblical sites.” I think this observation is a “mixed bag.” Sailhamer is entirely correct to say that there hasn’t been any sort of “smoking gun” found that would suggest that the biblical narratives are, on the whole, fictional. Sailhamer suggests that in fact the trend is the other direction, and that “new” archaeological discoveries tend to support the historicity of the biblical narratives. That statement, of course, would need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, and one of the things that disturbs me about biblical scholarship today and especially of media popularizations of archaeological digs is the making of generalizations unwarranted by the artifacts. In this article, Sailhamer cites the Tel Dan stele as “establish[ing] that David was a real historical figure.” There is considerable debate on that point, though I happen to agree that Sailhamer has it right. However, it bothers me when scholars trot out the Tel Dan stele as proof of David’s historicity while omitting (suppressing?) the fact that the inscription, thus read, also involves an Aramean king claiming to have killed a king of Israel and a king of the House of David (Judah) in battle—an incident that the Bible doesn’t attest. Indeed, the specific kings seem to be J(eh)oram of Israel and Ahaziah of Judah, but the Bible credits Jehu with killing them in battle. “New” discoveries (the Tel Dan stele was uncovered ten years ago) do not uniformly confirm or contradict the biblical versions of events. Instead, the relationship between them is often a “both/and”; the Tel Dan stele seems to confirm that David, J(eh)oram, and Ahaziah were real people, but it also challenges the historical accuracy of the biblical story of Jehu’s rebellion.

“2. The increasingly negative tone of some historians and archaeologists is also not the result of showing that past discoveries of archaeologists were in error.” Again, this statement is partially true and partially misleading. There has been considerable debate—on both “minimalist” and “maximalist” ends of the spectrum—over earlier archaeologists’ interpretations of their data. There are at least two major understandings of the typological chronology of Syro-Palestinian pottery, for example, and some scholars still argue about the merits of various datings of the mid-Bronze Age Jericho (i.e., Garstang’s date c. 1400 vs. Kenyon’s date c. 1600-1500). As support for his observation, Sailhamer cites the Merneptah stela—leaving me incredulous, because the interpretation of the Merneptah stela has been quite contentious in recent years. On the stele, Merneptah (or, I should probably say, Merneptah’s publicist) claims to have defeated, among other enemies, a people group called “Israel,” living in Canaan right at the end of the 1200s BCE. Many interpreters—myself included—think that Merneptah’s “Israel” was (or at least has a good chance to have been) culturally continous with the people who later occupied the kingdom of Israel (late eleventh-late eighth century BCE on the biblical timeline, attested for the ninth and eighth centuries in Assyrian inscriptions). However, this position is not universally accepted, and just within the last few years at least one article in a leading scholary journal (Hjelm and Thompson in JSOT, 2002) has argued (unconvincingly, in my opinion) for a significantly different interpretation of Merneptah’s reference to “Israel.” Perhaps the emphasis in Sailhamer’s observation should be on the word “showing“; Sailhamer would no doubt be quite right to say that he has been unconvinced by attempts to “reinterpret” inscriptions like Merneptah’s victory stela, but readers who infer from Sailhamer’s comment that challenges have been either nonexistent or ridiculously weak would be drawing an inaccurate conclusion.

I must also mention—and disabuse my readers of—Sailhamer’s over-enthusiastic assessment of the value of the Merneptah stela. He writes, “There could not be a stronger proof of the accuracy of the Bible than this inscription.” That is an extreme overstatement. I do think—and I think that Sailhamer thinks—that the Merneptah stela attests to the existence, in Canaan c. 1200 BCE, of a people group called “Israel.” The Bible makes the same attestation. On this the biblical and nonbiblical evidence converge, and I agree with Bill Dever that when this happens, we should say so. However—and this is the point that needs to be stressed in light of Sailhamer’s article—the Merneptah stela attests nothing else that the Bible says of Israel. The Merneptah stela mentions no biblical characters (in fact, no individual Israelites at all) and no biblical events. The Merneptah stela doesn’t “prove” the accuracy of any biblical claim except—maybe (I think so, but others disagree)—that a people group called (by the Egyptians, and we presume by themselves) “Israel” lived in Palestine around 1200 BCE. Tellingly, Merneptah mentions this group only to claim that he “laid waste” to it (or its food supply, on what I consider to be a less likely reading). “Laid waste” is probably royal overstatement and braggadoccio, to a degree, but there must have been some sort of victory—even if a relatively minor one—to have been exaggerated. The Bible, however, says nothing about any such confrontation with the Egyptians. In fact, Egyptians are totally missing from the books of Joshua and Judges. I do think the Merneptah stela is important, and valuable, and that it attests to Israel’s presence in Canaan in the early Iron Age—but by no means does the Merneptah stela “pro[ve] the accuracy of the Bible,” as Sailhamer would have it. To be quite frank, I see this kind of overstatement of the evidence as a primary reason why “minimalism” exists at all, and why we need it—to provide a counterbalance to those who want to claim that the letters ysr’el scratched on a rock “pro[ve] the accuracy of the Bible.”

“3. The increasingly negative tone of some historians is the result of a fundamental shift in the way biblical history is conducted.” Sailhamer claims that “minimalists” discount the biblical record a priori and that they really ought to evaluate the “biblical” and “secular” versions of events “against the evidence.” His example is the treatment of “monumental structures from the 10th Century B.C.” He does not say which “monumental structures” he’s talking about, but I assume he means the city gates from Gezer, Megiddo, and Hazor, or possibly the famous “stables.” These are guesses, but plausible ones, about what he might have in mind. Sailhamer writes, “Without the biblical picture by which to evaluate the archaeological remains, these monumental structures could also be dated to the 9th Century and hence, to the time after David and Solomon.” There are two important things to be said about this example. First, Sailhamer’s way of stating his case does not in fact follow his own advice to evaluate both biblical narratives and any alternative proposed narratives against “the evidence.” Rather, he betrays a tendency to make the evidence conform to the biblical text. He plainly states that without the biblical text to guide the interpretation of the archaeology, these “monumental structures” might easily belong to the ninth century. Part of what “minimalists” have been arguing all along is that the archaeological evidence ought to be allowed to “speak for itself,” and Sailhamer seems to say the same thing, but then he seems to “take it back” when he presents his example.

Second—and this is very important—Sailhamer implies that “minimalists” date the “monumental structures” to the 9th century only because they have chosen in advance to discount the biblical texts’ historicity. That simply isn’t true. Let’s continue to assume that by “monumental structures” Sailhamer is referring to the six-chambered gates at Megiddo, Gezer, and Hazor, or at least let’s take them as a test case at any rate. On the “maximalist” end of the spectrum, a number of authors have linked these six-chambered gates to 1 Kings 9:15, where Solomon is said to have “built … the wall of Jerusalem, Hazor, Megiddo, Gezer,” and so on. To cite but one example from folk shifted more toward the “minimalist” end of the spectrum, Finkelstein and Silberman doubt that these “monumental structures” belong to the tenth century. But the reasons they cite relate to stratigraphy (the vertical relationship of the gates and their connected wall to the ashlar palaces), pottery distribution (the similarity of the pottery in the ashlar palace layer of Megiddo to the nearby Jezreel enclosure, dated on other grounds to the ninth century), and architectural (the ashlar palaces at Megiddo and the palace and royal acropolis at Samaria were built using similar techniques). Of course, it is possible that Finkelstein and Silberman are incorrect about any number of things, but what is clear is that their dating of the six-chambered gates to the late ninth century or later is based on their interpretation of the archaeological evidence, not on an a priori rejection of biblical testimony (which, by the way, does not say that Solomon constructed six-chambered gates at Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer, only that he “built”—perhaps “fortified,” or something less grand—these cities.

“4. … What the new historians and archaeologists are often saying is that their evidence sometimes contradicts what earlier archaeologists said about the Bible. Put this way, it is not a question of the historical reliability of the Bible as much as it is a question of the historical reliability of the work of earlier archaeologists. The question is not so much whether the Bible is true as it is whether the dominant theories of great biblical archaeologists were true.” Again, Sailhamer’s statement is both accurate and inaccurate. It is certainly the case that a number of archaeologists, historians, and biblical scholars today question the conclusions of “giants” like W. F. Albright. Yet the trend in re-evaluating earlier archaeologists’ conclusions is not generally toward confirmation of the biblical narratives, as Sailhamer implies. Sailhamer’s own parade example comes from Albright himself. According to Sailhamer, Albright and his followers “unanimously assumed that Israel’s exodus from Egypt occurred during the time of the 19th Dynasty of Egypt under the reign of Ramesis II” (sic). This dating of the exodus to the thirteenth century BCE conflicted with archaeological datings of the collapse of Jericho’s mud-brick wall to the 15th (Garstang) or 16th (Kenyon) centuries BCE. “If they had followed the biblical chronology, however,” Sailhamer writes, “it would have placed the exodus in the time of the 18th Dynasty, more than a century earlier and at roughly the time of the destruction of Jericho.” (“Roughly the time,” by the way, here means “in the same century as.”) Sailhamer is referring, of course, to the rather facile taking of “480 years” in 1 Kings 6:1 as a sober, literal date, rather than as a mathematically-derived figure constructed from multiplying twelve, the paradigmatic number of the tribes of Israel, by forty years, the paradigmatic figure for the length of a generation. Sailhamer conveniently omits the fact that the description in the book of Exodus fits the Ramesside era rather better than the fifteenth-century date (though it fits the thirteenth century only loosely) and, even more to the archaeological point, the fact that if the Israelites stormed Canaan in the fifteenth century BCE, they somehow managed not to leave any unique trace of their own material culture for their first 150-200 years of occupancy (I’m referring, of course, to the flourishing of the hill country villages that have been characterized by Bill Dever as “proto-Israelite”).

As I wrote at the beginning of this post, Sailhamer’s article is only three pages long, and it is written for an educated but nonspecialist—that is, ministerial—audience. Even so, given his propensity throughout the article to tell only part of the archaeological story, it is jarring when he writes near the end of the article that “the new archaeologists (minimalists) are sometimes guilty of passing on their judgments about biblical history without considering all the evidence.” In the end, my problem with this article—and the reason I spent so much time blogging about it just here—is not that it is written from a “maximalist” point of view, but that it is downright misleading in a number of different ways. I keep trying to remind myself that Sailhamer’s word count was no doubt limited by the magazine’s editors, and that his audience is not composed of specialists—but when I get to that latter point, the omissions and mischaracterizations in the article trouble me all the more. In truth, I’m not a minimalist at heart. I believe a lot more of the biblical narrative than I can demonstrate. But one thing that absolutely gets my goat more than almost any other academic issue is when scholars (especially conservative scholars, since theologically I am on the conservative end of the spectrum) overstate the evidence and make vast, sweeping claims (see above on the Merneptah stela) that a sober, meticulous reading of the evidence, whether biblical or nonbiblical, simply doesn’t support.