Dever’s “Sermon on the Mound”

054

William G. Dever, the world’s leading academic opponent of the term “Biblical archaeology,” has now declared the age of the “New Biblical Archaeology”—and his support of it.

Dever, the excavator of the Solomonic gate at Biblical Gezer, former director of the William F. Albright School of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem and the leading candidate for the prestigious and coveted presidency of the American Schools of Oriental Research (he is now its second vice-president), has long urged that the term “Biblical archaeology” be “abandoned” as no longer useful.^a According to Dever, “Biblical archaeology” represents an historical fossil, a movement of the decades of the 1930s to the 1960s spearheaded by Dever’s teachers whose theological bias fatally flawed their work.

Today’s archaeologists should refer to their field as “Syro-Palestinian archaeology” and to themselves as “Syro-Palestinian archaeologists,” Dever has argued.

Speaking to an overflow audience at the recent Annual Meeting in Atlanta,^b however, Dever came out in favor of the term “New Biblical Archaeology.” Presumably, its practitioners would be known as “New Biblical archaeologists.”

The New Biblical Archaeology, according to Dever, envisages a dialogue between archaeology and “the many disciplines that characterize the best of current Biblical scholarship.”

In a moving peroration with which he ended his talk, Dever declared, “If that is the ‘New Biblical Archaeology,’ I’m all for it! And you can quote me on that, Hershel!”—referring to BAR editor Hershel Shanks, who has defended the term “Biblical archaeology” in a series of articles.^c

Although admitting that he still preferred the term “Syro-Palestinian archaeology,” Dever stated, “Today I propose a bold, timely move beyond the inquest into the death of ‘Biblical archaeology,’ toward a new agenda for archaeology and Biblical studies.”

Dever illustrated the potential of his “New Biblical Archaeology” with a case study that was both brilliant and disappointing. The study involved the fundamental question of the emergence of Israel during “the so-called ‘Conquest and Settlement’ period of the late 13th to 11th centuries B.C.” Dever’s case study concluded that “there was no real Exodus, there was no real wilderness wandering, and there was no sojourn at Kadesh-Barnea” before the Israelites entered the land of Canaan. The Bible is, in this regard, groundless and wrong!

Dever’s conclusions were based on archaeological data that characterize the transition from the Late Bronze Age period (c. 1550–1200 B.C.) to Iron Age I (1200–1000 B.C.).

It has long been recognized that the Israelite tribes emerged in Canaan in the transitional period from the Late Bronze Age to Iron Age I. Iron I was the period of the Judges, in Biblical terms. At the end of Iron I, the Israelite monarchy was instituted; King David’s reign commenced in about 1000 B.C.

Iron I—late 13th–12th centuries B.C.—saw the establishment of hundreds of small unwalled villages, mostly in the central hill country, but also as far north as the Galilee and as far south as the Negev. These villages were established for the most part on previously unoccupied hilltop sites, rather than on sites that had been occupied in the Late Bronze Age. This occupation represented a shift, says Dever, to a decentralized settlement pattern.

The population of these villages varied from about 30 to about 300. Their houses—Dever calls them “peasant farmhouses”—had a distinctive architecture well-known to archaeologists as the “four-room house.” It consists of three parallel long-rooms and a fourth room across one end, forming a rectangle. The center long room may have been an open courtyard (or more probably roofed), separated from the side rooms by walls consisting of pillars or piers with rubble fill in between the piers. Any of the rooms could be subdivided without changing the basic structure.

Most of the houses had bell-shaped, lime-plastered cisterns dug into the rock for water storage. Underground silos were dug for dry storage. Elaborate terraces supported by stone walls were created on the hillsides to provide flat areas to farm.

From these long-known archaeological data, Dever drew a number of significant socioeconomic conclusions:

“The economy of these Iron I villages was largely self-sufficient, based mainly on 055small-scale but intensive terrace farming, with some admixture of livestock herding and primitive ‘cottage industry.’ A few trade items, however, principally ceramics [pottery], indicate that these villages were not totally isolated, but had limited contact with the Canaanite urban centers some distance away.”

New technology—particularly the mastery and extension of terrace agriculture to exploit the cleared hillsides; the gradually increasing use of such iron implements as plow points; lime-plastered cisterns which, while long known, were widely adopted to solve the problem of summer water shortage in the hill-country—supported the new villages.

“The social structure of these small Iron I villages appears to have been much more ‘egalitarian’ and less stratified than the urban cities of the Late Bronze Age, with no indications of a hierarchically ranked social order. Thus, there were no ‘elite’ residences or palaces, no public or administrative structures in these villages, not even sanctuaries or temples.”

“The general picture,” Dever concludes, “is of a simple, agrarian, cohesive society, probably kin-based. The villages were in relatively close proximity; they were apparently organized for internal cooperation, but had little need for defense from external pressures.”

This represents a shift “from the ‘state level’ organization of the Late Bronze Age to a ‘tribal level’” in Iron I.

Iron I pottery forms generally followed the Canaanite forms of the Late Bronze Age (although a few new forms were introduced and the so-called collar rim store jar became increasingly popular). Similarly, the cisterns, four-room houses and terrace agriculture represent adaptations of older, non-Israelite cultural elements. In combination, however, they produced “a distinctive new social order,” although reflecting “a rather strong continuity with Late Bronze Age Canaan.”

On the next higher level of abstraction, Dever concluded that these Iron I sites were early Israelite villages—“the first such external evidence [of the existence of the Israelites] we have found.” In short, these Iron I villages represent not only a “distinctive new social order,” but also, “in all probability, a new ethnic identity”—the Israelites! “I believe we may safely conclude that these new Iron I sites represent the first definitive archaeological evidence we have had of one phase of the Israelite settlement in Palestine. I believe that these are the very early Israelite villages described typically in the Book of Judges.”

Next, Dever concludes that “there is no evidence whatsoever in the material culture that would indicate that these Iron I villagers originated outside Palestine, not even in Transjordan, much less in Egypt or the Sinai. There is nothing in the material remains to suggest that these were ‘pastoral nomads settling down.’ On the contrary, they appear to have been skilled and well-adapted peasant farmers, long familiar with local conditions in Canaan.”

Steadily climbing the ladder of abstraction, Dever next finds a basis in this evidence for choosing among the three currently proposed “models” of Israel’s emergence in Canaan. The first is the “conquest model”: The Israelites took possession of the land by conquering major fortified cities in Canaan. The second is the “peaceful infiltration” model, according to which the Israelites came into the land and peacefully settled previously unoccupied sites. The third model is the “peasants’ revolt” theory, which proposes an internal revolt of peasants against the feudal Canaanite urban overlords.

Dever “prefers” the “peasant revolt” model:

“The new archaeological data are most nearly compatible with the ‘peasants’ revolt’ model,” he declared. “As developed most recently by [Norman] Gottwald,^d this view holds that early Israel came into existence as a radical ‘liberation movement’ among depressed peasants in the Canaanite countryside, i.e., an ‘egalitarian rebellion’ against the imperial, hierarchically stratided social order of the Late Bronze Age urban city-states.”

This conclusion creates for Dever “a radical disjunction” between “the archaeologists’ ‘social evolution’” explanation of Israel’s emergence and “the witness of the main strand of the Biblical tradition.”

“The problem is easy enough to state: The central events in Israel’s proclamation of faith—the Exodus from Egypt, the wilderness wandering, the forcible penetration of the Israelite tribes from Transjordan, the miraculous deliverance of the fortified Canaanite cities into the hand of Joshua and his troops and, above all, the gift of the land—didn’t really happen that way at all, as indeed both the current models of archaeology and Biblical scholars suggest. … There is no real history behind Israel’s ‘salvation history’.”

The apparent contradictions between archaeology and Biblical tradition do not, according to Dever, eliminate the possibility of a dialogue between the archaeologist and the Biblical scholar, although a definitive solution to the contradictions facing them seems unlikely. For Dever, it is this dialogue that constitutes the “New Biblical Archaeology,” although it is clear that for Dever the “external data” supplied by archaeology is “a more ‘objective witness’ than the Biblical texts.”

The ground rules for the dialogue which comprises the “New Biblical Archaeology” are thus established; “It is the archaeological data—not the textual data—that may be primary.” “The relatively young discipline of Syro-Palestinian archaeology [is thus] potentially one of critical scholarship’s most powerful tools.”

Dever’s paper, although valuable, requires a number of qualifying comments.

It is significant that Dever, the preeminent field archaeologist, places no reliance whatever on his own very extensive field work. He is engaging in what his teacher G. Ernest Wright called “armchair archaeology.” Nothing Dever says requires him to be able to trim a balk, trace a floor or even interpret a section.

These comments might be unremarkable with regard to anyone but Dever. They are worthy of note in his case, however, because of his insistence on defining—or confining—the designations archaeology and archaeologist to field archaeology and field archaeologists.

Next, very little in Dever’s analysis depends on what he has called the “new archaeology.” “New archaeology” is the term Dever uses to distance himself from his predecessors, on whose shoulders he nevertheless stands. But strangely absent from Dever’s analysis is any reference to the modern scientific technologies that supposedly characterize the “new 056archaeology”—such as neutron activation analysis, magnetometry, remote sensing, thermoluminescence, paleozoology, paleobotany, ethno-archaeology or even computers. This is not in the slightest to denigrate these important and welcome new shafts in the archaeologist’s quiver; but they are adjuncts to, not replacements of, older archaeological techniques. And, as Dever’s analysis demonstrates, the desiderata produced by these older techniques may often be decisive, especially in the analysis of the more overarching questions that face the historian of antiquity.^e

There is a natural tendency to become enamoured of the new, young girl on the block. No one has succumbed to the attractions of the new techniques, no one has fallen more head over heels in love with them, than Dever. Yet when it comes to fathering a baby—his analysis of Israel’s emergence in Canaan—Dever returns to the old reliable. When he gets serious, he becomes sensible.

In short, there is not as much new here as Dever thinks there is. Just as Dever finds a basic continuity between the pottery of the Late Bronze Age and Iron I, there is a basic continuity between the “old” archaeology and the “new” archaeology. There is no need to kill our fathers.

Not long ago (1980) Dever declared that William F. Albright was “not an archaeologist.^f. But in fact Dever’s presentation relies principally on an almost Albrightian analysis of settlement patterns, the architecture of the houses in the Iron I villages, the increased frequency of cisterns, terraces and iron implements and continuity in ceramic typologies.

All this sounds very much like the “old archaeology.” What is new is the result of recent field work, particularly new surveys in Israel that have identified the hundreds of Iron I villages (and their absence in the Late Bronze Age) on which Dever principally relies. Nelson Glueck pioneered the archaeological survey in the 1930s. There is nothing new in surveys, although survey methodology has vastly improved and there is a new appreciation of the importance of archaeological surveys.

Moreover, Albright himself emphasized the technologies that appeared to him to have been introduced in Iron I—especially lime-plastered cisterns and iron implements.^g What is new is that recent field work has given us a more complete and more nuanced picture of these phenomena—for instance, limestone plaster was not invented in Iron I (indeed, it was known in the seventh millennium B.C. at ‘Ain Ghazal), but was, for some unknown reason, much more widely adopted in Iron I.

If there is something new about Dever’s analysis of Israel’s emergence in Canaan, it is in the application of an anthropological model to the archaeological data. This is a major—and salutary—emphasis in the “new archaeology.”

But in Dever’s hands, it is simplistic, and his conclusions go far beyond the evidence. He ignores data that do not fit his thesis—like the Late Bronze destruction of Hazor and the subsequent settlement of the site by peasant squatters. At other sites, such as Shiloh, an Iron I Israelite settlement succeeds a Late Bronze Age settlement.

All we really know is that a flock of new peasant hilltop villages were established by the Israelites in Iron I, just as is indicated in the Book of Judges. But can we conclude because of the continuity of Canaanite pottery forms that there was no immigration from outside? Indeed, several Israeli scholars have been tracing the movement and growth of these villages, which may support an immigration hypothesis.

And how do we know that when the peasants moved to these villages, they revolted against their urban overlords, as Dever suggests. Why couldn’t there have been a peaceful emigration from Late Bronze Age cities? Or an immigration in which the newcomers adopted the local material culture?

And if the emerging Israelites all came from Canaanite urban cities, how did they learn to terrace the hills and build lime-plastered cisterns? And if they didn’t all come from Late Bronze Age cities, where did they come from?

More importantly, how did the peasant farmers who settled these new villages become Israelites? What was the dynamic by which Israelite ethnicity emerged? In short, how did all these Canaanites become Israelites?

All this is not to say that the “peasant revolt” model has no useful insights to provide in explaining Israel’s emergence in Canaan in Iron I. It may. But it is clear that the archaeological data Dever cites do not require acceptance of the peasant revolt model, nor do they exclude significant peaceful infiltration and even some military confrontations. The situation is far more complicated than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Bill.^h

As if this were not enough, Dever makes a gargantuan leap beyond his meager archaeological evidence by finding in it implications for the Exodus and the wilderness sojourn. Why does he find it necessary—or helpful—to conclude from his analysis of Iron I villages that “there was no real Exodus and no real desert wandering”?

The only explanation seems to be that Dever finds some special delight in knocking the Bible, in demonstrating that it is wrong.

This leads him to create a confrontation that is not necessarily there. This is not to say that the Bible is literally accurate in every detail. No modern critical scholar would defend such an extreme position. But the tools of critical Biblical scholarship are becoming increasingly sophisticated so that we can more confidently lay bare substrata of text that have important historical implications.

Dever’s anti-Bible bias leads him not only to conclusions that, although they may be true, are unsupported by his evidence—“There was no real Exodus and no real 057desert wandering”—but it also leads him to a fundamental methodological error: For Dever, any collision he can identify between the archaeological evidence and the Biblical evidence requires him to reject the Biblical evidence. In Dever’s own words, “Archaeology really does supply independent ‘external data,’ and possibly a more objective witness than the Biblical texts, especially for Israel’s early history. Thus, it is the archaeological data—not the textual data—that may be primary.”

This reflects a gross failure to appreciate how little archaeological findings have yet been able to contribute to solving the major problems in Biblical history, such as the emergence of Israel. There is simply so much we don’t know.

Dever’s anti-Bible stance also fails to appreciate the contributions critical Biblical studies are making to our understanding of Israelite history. For example, at a session Dever did not attend, Frank Moore Cross of Harvard delivered a brilliant paper in which he uncovered from the text the early history of the tribe of Reuben, Jacob’s first born, on the east side of the Jordan and the suppressed rivalries there between the Aaronid priests and their Moses-ite challengers.

If the archaeological evidence were so overwhelming, perhaps then we could reject the history embedded in textual substrata, such as Cross so insightfully identified, but the archaeological evidence is far from overwhelming. As Cross observed, we have no difficulty accepting an Amorite invasion, an Aramean invasion and other such invasions despite a paucity of archaeological evidence, but some scholars have difficulty accepting an Israelite invasion despite the very considerable evidence for it.

A satisfactory explanation of Israel’s emergence in Canaan that rejects any incursion from outside Canaan must also explain how the Biblical traditions to the contrary developed. To brush these traditions aside as “pious frauds” will not do.

In short, despite Dever’s brilliant analysis of the Iron I hilltop villages,ⁱ he has failed to solve, or even to make a very significant contribution toward solving, the problem of Israel’s emergence in Canaan. His analysis of the primary archaeological data is superb as far as it goes, but it then makes immodest and unsupported claims. It asserts we are far closer to a real understanding of how ancient Israel emerged than we really are. And it vastly overrates the explanatory power of the archaeological evidence without any real appreciation for its limitations.

The path to understanding must be far more sensitive to the complexities of the major historical questions, far more respectful of the explanatory power of critical Biblical studies, and far more modest about the current state of our archaeological knowledge. This should be the agenda of the “New Biblical Archaeology.”

William G. Dever, the world’s leading academic opponent of the term “Biblical archaeology,” has now declared the age of the “New Biblical Archaeology”—and his support of it. Dever, the excavator of the Solomonic gate at Biblical Gezer, former director of the William F. Albright School of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem and the leading candidate for the prestigious and coveted presidency of the American Schools of Oriental Research (he is now its second vice-president), has long urged that the term “Biblical archaeology” be “abandoned” as no longer useful.a According to Dever, “Biblical archaeology” represents an historical fossil, a movement of […]