Recently, Joe Cathey posted his list of the “top five archaeological finds for [the study of the] Hebrew Bible,” and then Jim Davila suggested some additions to Joe’s list. Just a little bit earlier, Eric Welch pointed to the latest issue of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary’s Contact magazine; this issue focuses on “biblical archaeology” and includes Walter C. Kaiser’s list of “The Top 15 Fnds from Biblical Archaeology.” All of this took me back down memory lane to 2001, when Stone-Campbell Journal published an article by Keith Schoville listing his “Top Ten Discoveries of the Twentieth Century Related to the Biblical World.” Wow, it’s almost like a sideshow at a carnival.

Joe—whose list, unlike those propounded by, say, David Letterman, starts with what he considers the most important—begins his list with the Tel Dan stele. The Tel Dan stele also makes Kaiser’s and Schoville’s lists. I’m not going to attempt my own “ranking,” but I do think the Tel Dan stele is very important. I am persuaded that the reading “House of David” is correct for ביתדוד on the Tel Dan stele, and that this constitutes evidence that a 9th century Aramean king regarded someone named “David” to be the founder of a ruling dynasty in a kingdom that was distinct from Israel (under the influence of biblical terminology, we would call that kingdom “Judah”). This is really striking evidence in favor of the actual historical existence of King David (though not of any specific biblical stories about him, except that his descendants or dynasty continued to rule). It also, however, troubles the water around the biblical stories of Jehu’s rebellion. In any case, it definitely belongs on these “top n” lists.

Joe’s second entry is the Merneptah stele, the inscription of which boasts of Merneptah’s victory over a people-group named “Israel” living in the Palestinian highlands c. 1210 or so BCE. This stela doesn’t appear on Schoville’s or Kaiser’s lists (but remember that their lists try to treat the whole Christian Bible, not just the Hebrew Bible; also, Schoville limits himself to 20th-century discoveries, and the Merneptah stele was discovered in 1896), and Jim Davila suggests removing it from Joe’s list if the list is to be confined to five items. I don’t think we should read too much into Merneptah’s mention of “Israel,” but I don’t think we should read too little into it either. Merneptah’s boast testifies to the existence of some group that he called “Israel.” I think, taking the Merneptah stele along with the new Iron Age highlands settlements and those settlements’ demonstrable cultural continuity with the later Iron Age kingdom of Israel (here I am strongly influened by both Dever and Finkelstein), that Merneptah’s “Israel” does indeed represent the progenitors of the kingdom of Israel. I also agree with the common, though by no means universal, understanding that Merneptah’s boast to have “laid waste” to Israel (“its seed is not”) is a hyperbolic claim in keeping with the general tendencies of victory stelae. (I don’t think the argument that Israel’s “seed” is its grain supply has much persuasive force.) If all this is correct, however, it seems passing strange that the biblical writers didn’t bother to mention Merneptah’s campaign in Canaan in any form we can recognize.

Joe’s third item, the Mesha stele, also fails to make Schonville’s top ten or Kaiser’s top fifteen. I’m not sure why Kaiser passes over the Mesha stele—perhaps just because it is relatively familiar—and since it was discovered in 1868 it doesn’t qualify for Schnoville’s 20th-century focus. The Mesha stele is really a perfect example of how archaeology and epigraphy can be double-edged swords for those trying to use archaeology to corroborate the historicity of the Bible. The Mesha stele seems to be independent confirmation of the general contours of the battle described in 2 Kings 3 between Moab and a multi-national coalition of Israel, Judah, and Edom. However, the stele seems to tell a different story in the details, especially when it comes to assigning “victory” in the battle. The Mesha stele also gives us a very little bit—but more than we might otherwise have—of a non-Israelite, non-Judean perspective on the early Omride dynasty and its international influence. Moreover, let’s not neglect the fact—of special importance to Bible readers who (like me) are somewhat troubled by the divinely-commanded genocide in the book of Joshua—that the Mesha stele shows that the idea of a divinely-commanded genocide (the ḥerem or “ban”) was by no means unique to Israel, but that Moabites attributed similar commands to Chemosh.

Fourth on Joe’s list is the Siloam tunnel inscription, which again doesn’t make Schonville’s list because it was discovered in the 19th century. Kaiser also excludes the Siloam tunnel inscription, though it seems to me that the Siloam tunnel inscription has a better claim to a “top 15″ slot than the Roman-era Pool of Siloam itself, which Kaiser does include (again, maybe this is just because we’ve known about the Siloam tunnel inscription for 125 years, and the Siloam pool excavations are quite recent). The Siloam tunnel inscription is fascinating for many reasons, both historical and linguistic. It seems to give independent confirmation of the biblical stories and sermons (in Isaiah) about King Hezekiah’s water-system projects on the eve of Assyrian invasion around 701 BCE. The Siloam tunnel inscription is also, for a text inscribed for all practical purposes on the inside wall of a water pipe, relatively long, and is thus exceedingly helpful to paleographers and Hebraists in getting a glimpse of Hebrew as it was written (by construction workers rather than scribes) at the end of the eighth century BCE.

Last place on Joe’s list goes to Sennacherib’s accounts of his siege of Jerusalem. The text is extant in multiple copies, of which I believe the oldest is the Rassam cylinder which dates (by its own text) to the month of Iyar in 700 BCE (the picture is of a different copy, the Tayor prism, if I’m not mistaken). Joe cites 2 Kings 18:13-19:37; Isaiah 36-37; 2 Chronicles 32:1-22—the biblical stories of the same events—and scoffs at anyone who “can’t see history here” (my paraphrase). In truth I don’t know of too many “minimalists” who doubt that Sennacherib besieged Jerusalem in 701 BCE and that the texts cited preserve (though perhaps in a distorted fashion) some memory of those events. Yet the striking convergences between the Rassam cylinder text and the biblical stories, as important as these convergences are, should not be emphasized to the point that the divergences between the accounts is overlooked. Naturally, a lot of the differences can be attributed to royal “spin” on Sennacherib’s part (or by his PR agents who crafted the text), but it remains the case that Sennacherib attributes his army’s withdrawal from Jerusalem to tribute paid by Hezekiah, the book of Isaiah attributes Sennacherib’s withdrawal to a divine smiting of 185,000 Assyrian soldiers (with no mention of tribute), while 2 Kings mentions both the miracle and the tribute and almost seems to imply two separate sieges. Again, the details present us with a kind of two-edged sword, while the overall picture of Sennacherib besieging Jerusalem while Hezekiah was king but withdrawing without taking the city are attested in both sources and ought to be considered as solid as any historical information from 2700 years ago could be.

Of the making of lists there is no end, but I have to go to a meeting in about twenty minutes, so the making of this post must now come to an end. Coming soon: the items on Schnoville’s and Kaiser’s lists that didn’t make Joe’s.