Archeology, the domain of those who specialize in digging up stones, broken pottery, charred timbers, and the like, must be carefully evaluated, as must any discipline, in order to avoid mistaking the stones of personal opinion and subjective impression for the bread of solidly established archeological re search. This series of three articles will attempt to help the reader to distinguish between speculative, sensational claims made in behalf of archeology, and responsible, scientific findings.
Before illustrating the strengths and limitations of Biblical archeology, it will be helpful to know a little of its historical background. For most scholars of the past century, Biblical archeology was limited to the study of everyday life in ancient Israel, based mainly on the direct study of the Bible itself. C. F. Keil's Manual of Biblical Archeology (English translation, 1887, 1888) is typical of this approach.
Keil gave his attention to only a few of the ancient monuments, such as some walls and a tower in Jerusalem and the tombs of the patriarchs in Hebron. Among the few non-Palestinian Jewish antiquities he recognized were some Jewish coins from the Maccabean period and the triumphal Arch of Titus in Rome. Professor Keil knew, firsthand, little if anything of the inscriptions from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, to say nothing of the Moabite Stone and the Siloam inscription!
Napoleon's expedition to the Near East in 1799 and reports by the staff of scholars who accompanied the French Army eventually gave impetus to the first modern scientific research in the Holy Land—the 1838 field trip of Ed ward Robinson and Eli Smith to Sinai, Edom, and southern and central Palestine. These men recorded dozens of Biblical names still preserved in Arabic form.
Several decades later, the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) fielded its survey of western Palestine, conducted by a team of British Army engineers, whose principal officers were C. R. Conder and H. H. Kitchener (of later military fame). A map of twenty-four large sheets, scaled one inch to a mile, resulted. Three volumes of memoirs (1881-1888) dis cussed the visible monuments and inscriptions in each district under the heading "Archeology."
For Conder and Kitchener, archeology was just that—visible remains of human activity. There was little thought of underground exploration except for the innovative researches by their col league, Charles Warren, around the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and the work of another PEF representative, G. Clermont-Ganneau, who through historical analysis and field sleuthing discovered Biblical Gezer.
The major emphasis, however, was on visible remains. Conder felt he had found a Biblical town whenever he could map the Arab village of the same name. He scoffed at the growing belief that the real Old Testament cities were situated on the flat-topped mounds with steep, sloping sides that could be found throughout Palestine. Conder thought these tells (the Arabic/Hebrew term applied to these mounds) were the sites of ancient brick factories! In 1890 Flinders Petrie demonstrated that a tell was actually the accumulation of debris from an ancient city, which had been built, destroyed, and then rebuilt on the same site.
The ensuing decades have seen great advances in excavating techniques. Re fined methods of surveying, recording, and analyzing finds have been developed. The 1920's and 1930's saw the publication of W. F. Albright's systematic classification of pottery according to stratum-by-stratum excavation at Tell Belt Mirsim.
More extensive materials of the same type came from the University of Chicago expedition to Megiddo. As Flinders Petrie had guessed, pottery shapes and styles became a key to relative chronology. Gradually, a vast body of information about the buildings, utensils, and even the daily foods of the ancient Canaanites and Israelites has been accumulating in libraries and museums.
C. F. Keil would doubtless be amazed and delighted with the host of new source materials for studying the every day life of ancient Israel. Just as surely, he might observe a harmful trend: discovered objects have sometimes led to neglect or distortion of the familiar written sources. An 'artifact—a pot, seal, wall, gate, or tool—seems so much more objective than the analysis of a historical text. But is it? Perhaps in recent years archeology has matured sufficiently to acknowledge its limitations. We have the opportunity to help the Christian layman reassess what he has read and heard and to separate the stones from the bread.
(To be continued.)
