Faith and Archaeology—A Brief History to the Present

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“Can archaeology prove the Bible true?” is no longer a question field archaeologists in the ancient Near East even ask. Instead they ask sociological questions, economic questions, anthropological questions about ancient societies. In the end, the data they unearth may illuminate our understanding of the Bible, but this is not the archaeologist’s primary focus.

This has not always been the case. For about 50 years—from about 1920 to nearly 1970—the Bible, rather than the nature of the archaeological data, directed the kinds of questions archaeologists asked. Theology and archaeology were often intertwined. Leading scholars struggled not only over whether archaeology proved the Bible true, but also over how archaeology should relate to the Bible—in short, what kind of questions archaeologists should ask.

Our story begins with a man who was not an archaeologist at all, the great German Biblical scholar and Semitist, Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918). Wellhausen contended that the Pentateuch (the five books of Moses) was not written by Moses and was not even a single document; it was instead the product of at least four different sources, or strands of authorship, that varied widely as to time of composition. Wellhausen also believed that the Pentateuchal narratives contained no real historical underpinning. Wellhausen’s view on the composition of the Pentateuch, now widely accepted by modern critics in a more nuanced form, has become known as the Documentary Hypothesis, with the four sources identified by the letters J, E, P and D for the Yahwist (Jahwist in German), the Elohist, the priestly code and the Deuteronomist.^a

When William Foxwell Albright, then a recent graduate of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, arrived in Palestine shortly after World War I, the man who was to become the world’s greatest Biblical archaeologist agreed with many of Wellhausen’s contentions. Albright later characterized his own theological position in 1920 as one of “extreme radicalism”;¹ that is, he was on the other end of the spectrum from those who accepted the Bible as literally true. Albright shared Wellhausen’s dismissal of any historical content in the Pentateuch.

Albright’s exposure to the burgeoning archaeological field work in Palestine soon changed his views. In a report on the excavations at Ashkelon, Albright noted the recovery of Philistine pottery, thus supporting the Biblical story of Philistine occupation of the site.² Looking to the future, Albright expected “more discoveries to confute the skeptic and delight the scholar’s heart.”³ After looking at the Danish excavations at Shiloh, Albright reported on “archaeological confirmation of the statements of the Bible.”⁴ In 1924 Albright wrote a report on his annual horseback trip to various archaeological sites:

“There is an interesting fact which came home to me more vividly this trip than ever before: many of the towns in southern Judah and Simeon were not occupied after the Exile. This process was quite as disastrous as it is portrayed in the Old Testament and the views … that the drastic sweep made of the population of Judah at this time is a fancy of post-exilic scribes must be rejected. The present writer once subscribed to this view but has since been forced to abandon it because of the pressure of archaeological facts.”⁵

The “archaeological facts” on which Albright relied consisted almost entirely of pottery sherds. In Jerusalem, Albright had access to pottery collections from numerous excavations, as well as pottery collected on his annual survey trips with the American School of Oriental Research. In addition, he himself conducted a small-scale excavation of Tell el-Ful, which he identified as King Saul’s capital fortress at Gibeah.

But it was his excavation at Tell Beit Mirsim, 11 miles southwest of Jerusalem, that established Albright’s credentials as a pottery expert. The first publication of this excavation⁶ dealt exclusively with the pottery. His aim—in large part successful—was to produce a closely dated body of pottery that could function as a chronological typology for southern Palestine. The site he chose, Tell Beit Mirsim, was a fortunate one—for the archaeologist, if 055not for the site’s ancient inhabitants: The settlement had been repeatedly destroyed. This left the various strata—layers of occupation—relatively easy to discern. Tell-wide layers of ash and burnt brick provided horizontal separations between the pottery of the various phases. Thus, Albright could be confident of the relative chronological sequence of the pottery.

Albright’s publication of the Tell Beit Mirsim pottery is a classic.⁷ He enthusiastically researched all possible parallels and created a ceramic typology that is basic even today. In the words of G. Ernest Wright, about whom we will hear later in this article, with Tell Beit Mirsim, Albright “took the discipline [of archaeology] out of the mists of oral tradition.”⁸ Using both photographs and drawings, Albright presented the pottery according to the sequence principles previously elucidated by the British archaeologist, Sir William Flinders Petrie.^b Albright thus successfully established a well-ordered pottery sequence for the Middle Bronze Age (2000–1550 B.C.E.), the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 B.C.E.) and the Iron Age (1200–586 B.C.E.)

Establishing a pottery sequence was not, however, an end in itself. Albright wanted this information to date the periods of habitation and destruction of various tells. With that ability, Albright could answer questions of Biblical history; he could ground Biblical studies in what he perceived as the objective data of archaeology.

Throughout the 1920s, Albright continually reassessed his position on issues relating to the Bible. By 1931 he presented the results of his rethinking in a series of lectures.⁹ The purpose of his archaeological research, he said, was to refine archaeology’s ability to aid Biblical studies. According to this model, Biblical archaeology is the process of constructing a Biblical theory upon the reality of archaeology. Palestinian archaeology, in short, was merely a field adjunct to this process of constructing a theory as to the nature and historicity of Biblical text.

As a result of his research, Albright drew up an explicit agenda for Biblical archaeology;¹⁰ it was, in fact, a program of research designed to counter the Wellhausen school of Biblical criticism. “The theory of Wellhausen will not bear the test of archaeological examination,” Albright wrote in 1932.¹¹ Albright proposed three areas of inquiry to demonstrate the failure of the Wellhausen reconstruction: The first was an examination of the patriarchal period, which Albright placed in the early Middle Bronze Age; Wellhausen, on the other hand, did not believe the patriarchs were historical figures. The second topic involved Biblical law; Wellhausen contended it was a very late development, the last material to be added to the Pentateuch, with no connection to pre-Exilic material. This was a topic, Albright recognized, that would have to be argued without the benefit of archaeological excavations. The final area to be examined was the archaeological evidence of the Babylonian Exile and the return of the exiles. Some critical scholars questioned whether there had actually been a Babylonian conquest of any severity or duration. This was an issue that would yield to archaeological investigation.

Albright’s defense of the Bible led to accusations that he was a closet fundamentalist. In a 1934 discussion, Albright complained that “two American reviewers have alluded to the writer’s supposed tendency to fundamentalism.”¹² Albright did sound a bit like a fundamentalist when he discussed the impact of archaeological research on the Bible—for example, in statements like this: “Discovery after discovery has established the accuracy of innumerable details, and has brought increased recognition of the Bible as a source of history.”¹³ On the other hand, Albright correctly rejected the accusation. In the book that had led to the accusation, he had concluded that archaeology “does not support either the extreme radical school of Biblical Scholars or the ultraconservative wing.”¹⁴ Indeed, he had specifically disagreed with a basic tenet of fundamentalism—that is, verbal inspiration: “The theory of verbal inspiration—sometimes mis-called a doctrine—has been proved erroneous.”¹⁵ Albright accepted the view that the Pentateuch had been written down over a long period of time and incorporated a variety of sources. Nevertheless, he believed that it contained much that was of historical value. He thus placed himself solidly in the middle of the theological spectrum.

Although Albright strongly supported the basic historicity of the Bible, he did not draw any theological lessons from this. Albright was more concerned with what archaeology tells us about ourselves than what it tells us about God. In rescuing the Hebrew Bible from Wellhausen, Albright wanted to make the Hebrew Scriptures a usable and valid resource to gain new insights into ancient life. He approached the Bible primarily as an archaeologist and Orientalist. Conversely, however, he allowed Biblical studies to set the agenda for archaeology. But he only asked questions that were in essence historical—for example, when and by whom was this city destroyed? Thus, Albright dealt only with questions that were answerable with demonstrable data. He did not deal with questions of faith. He was determined to be ever the scientist.

A certain naiveté characterized Albright on this issue, however. Whether he intended it or not, his attempt to ground Biblical studies in science had an enormous theological impact. This became obvious only when G. Ernest Wright at Harvard took the final step, extending Albright’s synthesis to its ultimate theological conclusion.

But first, let’s flesh out the situation during the period between the two World Wars.

While the dominant school was that associated with Albright, this was by no means the only one. A school of Biblical archaeology apologetics used archaeological discoveries to defend a conservative, even fundamentalist view of Scripture. The leading figure in this movement was Melvin Grove Kyle of Xenia Seminary in Ohio. Kyle and like-minded archaeologists tried to use archaeology 056to support an inerrant, literal interpretation of the Bible. For these scholars, a literal reading of the Bible became their interpretive guide for archaeology. According to this view, archaeological results are not subject to interpretation; since God is a god of history, archaeology will always provide evidence of the trustworthiness of the Bible. Kyle shared the common fundamentalist view of science as a collection of concrete facts not subject to theory or interpretation. In effect, Kyle reversed Albright’s approach, which used archaeology to interpret the Bible. Kyle used the Bible to interpret archaeology. Although Kyle and Albright had their theological differences, they nevertheless worked together in friendship. Kyle accompanied Albright on his 1924 survey of the Dead Sea Valley and even raised funds for Albright’s Tell Beit Mirsim excavation.

Kyle’s brand of apologetic archaeology continued for a time even after World War II. Joseph P. Free of Wheaton College, who excavated the Biblical site of Dothan, regarded himself as a fundamentalist. He died before publishing any real report, however, so we cannot know how his theology would have influenced his interpretation of the site.

Another leading archaeological figure associated with a conservative view, Nelson Glueck, was an ordained rabbi who worked with Albright at Tell Beit Mirsim. Like Albright, Glueck became a pottery specialist. But he made his outstanding mark with his archaeological surveys, mapping hundreds of sites.

Glueck took a very positive view of Scripture. He made the famous (or infamous) statement, “It may be categorically stated that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference.”¹⁶

The theological opponents of fundamentalism also had their archaeological auxiliary, including Chester C. McCown, one of Albright’s successors as director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, and two leaders of the Megiddo excavations, William C. Graham and Herbert G. May. McCown published his views in the Ladder of Progress in Palestine.¹⁷ He believed that the archaeological record demonstrated the validity of the liberal theological understanding of history advancing towards perfection.

Albright’s Biblical archaeology clearly had theological overtones, but no specific theological stance. G. Ernest Wright in the period after the Second World War took the “scientific” construct of Albright’s Biblical archaeology and made it the support structure for a positivist theological understanding known as the Biblical Theology Movement.

Wright had worked actively in both theology and archaeology. One of his students has characterized Wright’s career as “schizophrenic”;¹⁸ he oscillated between the two fields. In fact, Wright’s theology and his archaeology interacted.

Wright’s theology focused on the revelation of God through history. Wright insisted on the unity of history and the Biblical witness. Archaeologically he searched for the historical reality underlying the Biblical record. This theme received its classic treatment in God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital, where Wright defined Biblical theology as a “defensible entity of its own kind, it is a theology of recital or proclamation of the acts of God, together with the inferences drawn from them.”¹⁹ The “acts of God” occur in a specific historical context. “Biblical 057Theology is the confessional result of the redemptive acts of God in a particular history, because history is the chief medium of revelation.” For Wright, the knowledge of God was “an inference from what actually happened in history”; therefore, “history is the revelation of God.”²⁰

Wright was aware of the problems this might cause: “We today insist that facts should be verifiable but in Biblical history the primary meaning seen in events, and many matters which are considered events, are [sic] not verifiable.”²¹ Yet only through history can faith find its goal.

Wright recognized that faith is not verifiable by archaeology. Nevertheless it could be enhanced by the reliability of the archaeological record.

If God is known through history, then any aid to further understanding the history of Israel is actually an aid to the understanding of God. This justified archaeology for Wright—to better understand the “mighty acts of God.”

Before Wright returned to field archaeology in 1956, he was highly optimistic about the assistance archaeology could provide for the verification of Scripture.

“The Biblical scholar no longer bothers to ask whether archaeology proves the Bible. In the sense that the Biblical languages, the life and systems of its people are illuminated in innumerable ways by the archaeological discoveries, he knows that such a question is certainly to be answered in the affirmative.”²²

In the same year Wright said this, he began his excavations at Tell Balatah, Biblical Shechem. By this time archaeological methods had been revolutionized. The prophet of the new field methods was Kathleen Kenyon, a British archaeologist who had first worked in Palestine before World War II at Samaria. In 1952 she had begun reexcavating Tell es-Sultan, the Biblical site of Jericho. In the Jericho excavations, she introduced a field methodology she had learned from Sir Mortimer Wheeler in the late 1920s at Verulamium, a Roman site in Britain. Kenyon took the Wheeler method and applied it to a Near Eastern tell. “The method of excavation,” in this system, wrote Kenyon, consists of excavating a “series of squares, separated by balks which are left standing and which thus provide keys to the stratification.”²³ The goal was to gain a stratigraphic understanding of the site, not just the recovery of floor plans.

Wright decided to use the Kenyon methodology at Shechem. As a result he paid especially close attention to stratigraphy. He soon realized that the complex record of a tell site allows for many interpretations.²⁴ Stratigraphic questions could not be answered with a blanket principle. Each case had to be examined on its own merits. Without a guiding principle, individual interpretation comes to the forefront. Through this analytical process, Wright began to think that data and interpretation were more closely linked than he had previously been willing to accept. If this was true, then archaeological data were not the objective reality his Biblical archaeology assumed they would be.

The underpinnings of what might be called the Albright/Wright model of Biblical archaeology came under attack as early as the 1920s. The distinguished German scholar Martin Noth raised the fundamental question as to whether the archaeological evidence was truly external and objective. Noth wondered whether the interpretations of the data—the reality—that the Albright school accepted were not premised on a particular Biblical understanding that made them internal, not external, to Biblical study.²⁵ If this were true, Biblical archaeology, as understood by this school, was grounded on sand, not in realia.

Challenges to the theoretical basis of the Albright/Wright model of Biblical archaeology came from within its own ranks as well as from outside. One of the first to challenge Wright was Paul 058Lapp, a student of both Albright and Wright and an ordained clergyman as well as a pottery expert. In a series of lectures in 1965, Lapp emphasized that “History is ultimately a personal construction.”²⁶ Moreover, only a secular historian could produce an “objective” history of the Bible, he argued. And a secular scholar would not be, as his teacher Wright was, concerned with “God’s Great Acts”;²⁷ a secular scholar would not suffer from the same bias as a theologian. (Lapp evidently thought a secular scholar’s history would not be biased by a secular outlook; for Lapp, “objective” appears to have equaled “nontheological”; yet that choice is itself a theological one.)

Another prominent critic was Père Roland de Vaux, a French Dominican and director of the École Biblique in Jerusalem. In his own Biblical analysis, de Vaux utilized the social sciences, the techniques of Biblical criticism and archaeological data to explain the history of Israel. The Bible was central to his research, but it did not exclude other questions. De Vaux had few peers at synthetic interpretation. His general studies, with their broad database, trod a middle ground between the positivist approach of Albright and the more negative views of Noth.²⁸ (Adding to the quality of de Vaux’s work is his elegant style, which comes through even in translation.) In a famous 1970 article, entitled “On the Right and Wrong Uses of Archaeology,” de Vaux condemned attempts to “confirm” the Bible through archaeology.²⁹ De Vaux agreed with Wright that Israel’s faith is grounded in the interventions of God in history, but archaeology can only validate an event upon which the Biblical writer had already placed his interpretation; part of that interpretation was an understanding of that event as an act of God. De Vaux was willing to assume the veracity of the Biblical account: “Lack of archaeological evidence would not be sufficient in itself to cast doubt on the affirmations of the written witnesses.”³⁰ Even if the footprints of the Divine are hard to find, they are nevertheless there. De Vaux thus positioned himself between the Albright/Wright Biblical positivist school of archaeology and the negative outlook of Biblical criticism. “There should be no conflict between a well-established archaeological fact and a critically examined text,” he said.³¹

But what was a “well-established” archaeological fact and a “critically examined” text? De Vaux’s compromise allowed him to retain a basic faith in both the (archaeological) Hand and the (textual) Word of God, despite the obvious possibility of conflict.

In the 1968 Sprunt lectures at Union Theological Seminary, Wright worked out the theological implications of the loss of reality in archaeology. He was still convinced that archaeology could be a tool for the theologian: “If the Bible is the revelation of a new reality in a Near East time and place, why should not the historian’s tools be my ally?” But truth to tell, Wright had lost faith in the role of archaeology. His encounter with the actual state of the archaeological record had changed his views on the directness of the Hand of God in history. “God works in this world by mediate means,” he said. The verification of the “Acts of God” that Wright so confidently expected to find in his Shechem excavations was in fact unachievable: “The problem of the Scripture’s truth and validity cannot be solved,” he concluded. Thus, he abandoned his former positivist stance. “In the end, we can never measure this Biblical reality with reality itself, whether we attempt this measurement in the field of value or in the field of fact … God has not committed his truth to respond adequately to our tests.”³²

Wright had come full circle: His theology had originally provided the impetus for his archaeological research. Now, that same research forced him to abandon his theological stance as it related to archaeology.

In 1971, Wright responded to de Vaux’s article “On the Right and Wrong Uses of Archaeology,” with an article of his own entitled “What Archaeology Can and Cannot Do”: “Archaeological data can only speak in response to a question,” he admitted.³³ The interpretation of a fact is therefore an integral part of that fact. He concluded with a very un-Wrightian statement: “Ambiguity is a central component of history.”³⁴

Albright’s archaeological stance lacked an explicit theological base. Wright provided the linkage. Ironically, this, in the end, exposed its weakness. When the subjective nature of the archaeological record became apparent, the entire model came crashing down. The result has been a paradigm shift in Biblical archaeology that is still in the process of working itself out.

One of the major, if not the major, figures in working out a new model has been my dissertation advisor and personal friend, William G. Dever. It is not an easy job for a student to evaluate his mentor, but there is no way of avoiding it here. Dever is already well known to BAR readers.^c His career followed his own teacher, Ernest Wright. Dever attended Harvard to study under Wright the theologian, not Wright the archaeologist. Dever went to Shechem for his first season and fell under the spell of archaeology. Like Wright, Dever sought reality in the dirt, and when he didn’t find it, he turned his back on the Albright/Wright construct of Biblical archaeology. He became a strong advocate of an anthropologically oriented Syro-Palestinian archaeology. This is now the dominant paradigm in the field.

I believe Dever’s rejection of Biblical archaeology was initially a theological reaction. Like many new converts, Dever initially overstated his case, contending that objectivity was a problem only for theologians, that Biblical archaeology was a meaningless term and that the endeavor was amateurish in the extreme. Dever has since admitted that objectivity is a problem for any scholar, 059that the field standards of classical Biblical archaeologists were actually quite high and, most importantly, there is a place for a new Biblical archaeology.

When Wright’s students like Dever adopted secular Syro-Palestinian archaeology, no one was left to carry on in the old style. Questions of Biblical history are no longer of paramount interest to professional archaeologists. Today archaeology students are trained primarily in anthropology, not in Biblical studies. This is a potentially limiting trend because these students may be unable to incorporate Biblical data into the process of reconstructing life in ancient Palestine. Israeli archaeologists have not concerned themselves with the theological impact of archaeology. Their interest in the Bible is historical and, sometimes, political.

We have come full circle. The new Biblical archaeology advocated by Dever is a return to what was familiar at the turn of the century: an armchair endeavor that combines Biblical studies with archaeological evidence—a place inhabited hopefully by Biblically literate archaeologists and archaeologically literate Biblical scholars.

“Can archaeology prove the Bible true?” is no longer a question field archaeologists in the ancient Near East even ask. Instead they ask sociological questions, economic questions, anthropological questions about ancient societies. In the end, the data they unearth may illuminate our understanding of the Bible, but this is not the archaeologist’s primary focus. This has not always been the case. For about 50 years—from about 1920 to nearly 1970—the Bible, rather than the nature of the archaeological data, directed the kinds of questions archaeologists asked. Theology and archaeology were often intertwined. Leading scholars struggled not only over whether […]