Archaeological Views: Digging a Hole and Telling a Tale

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In the July/August 2011 issue of BAR, Hershel Shanks’s First Person dealt with Ronny Reich’s new book, Excavating the City of David.^a In Reich’s book he commented on Eilat Mazar’s excavations, also in the City of David, where she claims to have found King David’s palace.^b Reich objected to Mazar predicting that she would find David’s palace and then conducting an excavation in which she claimed to have located exactly what she set out to find.

The controversy between Reich and Mazar, while characterized by Shanks as one over scientific method, may be characterized from another point of view. When I excavated with the late archaeologist and Biblical scholar Anson Rainey at Tel Beer Sheva, he used to say, “Archaeology is the science of digging a hole and the art of telling a tale.” I think the argument between Reich and Mazar is more about art than science.

Reich and Mazar probably agree on how to “dig a hole,” that is, how to scientifically excavate an ancient site. Their dispute appears to be more about “telling a tale,” that is, how they make sense of—and communicate—their discoveries. In telling that tale, archaeologists like Reich and Mazar have to figure out how archaeological and Biblical evidence relate to each other. In general, archaeologists and historians have approached the relationship in three ways:

1. Archaeology as corroboration of the Bible. In the early years of excavations in the Holy Land, during the first half of the 20th century, archaeologists made specific efforts to corroborate the Biblical text. Excavators were looking for a witness to the narratives featuring Abraham, Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon and the later kings of Israel and Judah.

Occasionally, the archaeological evidence did seem to support the Biblical narratives. For example, the Iron Age city gates found at Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer were thought by many to be the same fortifications attributed to Solomon in 1 Kings 9:15.^c Other archaeological evidence, however, appeared to contradict the Biblical account. Kathleen Kenyon’s excavations at Jericho, for example, found that the site was not even occupied during the Late Bronze Age, when the Israelites, led by Joshua, were supposed to have conquered the city.^d In truth, most of the archaeological evidence—potsherds, garbage pits and house fragments—seemed irrelevant to any Biblical concerns at all.

2. Archaeology as context for the Bible. By the second half of the 20th century, archaeologists sought a second way of integrating the Biblical and archaeological evidence. Though they admitted that much of their evidence did not corroborate the Bible, they insisted archaeology could provide a context for its stories. They took on the task of filling in the background while leaving the foreground to the Bible. The traditional narratives told of heroic events, but they did not tell us where David slept every night or what he ate when he woke up in the morning. Architectural remains at sites all over Israel, while usually not providing information about David or any other specific Biblical personality, revealed what a typical Israelite house looked like, and the bones and seeds recovered from those same sites showed what was consumed and cooked in Biblical homes.

3. Archaeology tells its own story. By the end of the 20th century, rather than viewing their work as providing a context for Biblical traditions, archaeologists wanted to tell their own stories of the past. Their discoveries and findings provided the story and the Bible provided the background.

For instance, the “story” of the rise of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel from a scattering of simple villages to a more centralized urban society has been the focus of much research in the past 20 years. Archaeologists, using primarily the evidence from surveys and excavations, have constructed a narrative wherein a population shift at the beginning of the Iron Age created an explosion of villages throughout the Galilee, the Negev and the hill countries of Judah 071 and Samaria. Out of this decidedly rural village culture, there eventually arose urban centers like Jerusalem, Samaria, Tel Beer Sheva and Lachish. For the most part, this “story” relies on ruins and potsherds to drive the narrative.

It is interesting to note, however, that these archaeological stories are often populated with references to the Bible. The Iron Age I villagers, rather than being anonymous, are given Biblical names such as Israelites or Amalekites, while the urban development of the early monarchy is seen through references to Israel’s first kings, Saul and David. It is a story born of rigorous scholarly effort, a story of a social process rather than an epic populated by heroes, but it is no less a story, and even a Biblical one in some measure.

This brings us back to the dispute between Eilat Mazar and Ronny Reich. At least as described by Shanks, Mazar wanted to tell a Biblical story corroborated by what she would find in the ground. Reich was more interested in telling an archaeological story with some ancillary help from the Bible. Given identical evidence, Reich and Mazar could end up telling two very different stories, depending on how they read together the archaeological and Biblical evidence. Their debate has a long history and is not about science. It is about how to piece together the Biblical and archaeological evidence to create a narrative.

Writing history is never easy. It may be especially difficult when the historian is faced with fragmentary archaeological remains on the one hand, and a rich and sacred textual tradition on the other. How to read those two sources of evidence together to create a history is not self-evident.

In the July/August 2011 issue of BAR, Hershel Shanks’s First Person dealt with Ronny Reich’s new book, Excavating the City of David.a In Reich’s book he commented on Eilat Mazar’s excavations, also in the City of David, where she claims to have found King David’s palace.b Reich objected to Mazar predicting that she would find David’s palace and then conducting an excavation in which she claimed to have located exactly what she set out to find. The controversy between Reich and Mazar, while characterized by Shanks as one over scientific method, may be characterized from another point of view. […]