Archaeological Views: Digging in the Holy Land—and in the Holy Book

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“The answers lie below,” said the voice over my shoulder.

It was my first season digging on a “tell” mound—back in 1960—and I was puzzling over a crude concentration of rocks poking up through the first surface my team had reached. What kind of installation could it be?

“If you dig deeper, you may figure it out.” The voice was Lawrence Toombs, senior archaeologist on the Shechem excavations. Following Larry’s advice, I put down a small probe alongside the rock formation and quickly had my answer: Later settlers had dug a deep pit from some building phase above that had been lost through erosion. They subsequently filled it in with rocks, and the muddy soil that then washed in among those stones was all that now held them together. That ancient pit fill was not very important, but the lesson I learned stayed with me through decades of digging.

Unfortunately, the successive layers of human use that make up a tell are sometimes confusingly intermixed. For the archaeologist, however, the initial feelings of frustration soon give way to the excitement of the quest and the satisfactions of sorting out those intrusive pits or successive wall phases.

The first summer I dug in the Middle East was also the year I began teaching college courses in Biblical studies in the Midwest. Initially I thought of those two involvements as quite separate disciplines, but I soon came to realize that both tasks were calling for a very similar intellectual approach and practical strategy. My summers devoted to archaeology actually complemented my “day job” of teaching. Digging through physical layers of Biblical history made it seem natural to approach the classroom study of the Bible by doing “textual archaeology.”

Working with Biblical texts also requires dealing with tightly interconnected layers of accumulated materials, reuses and recastings of earlier sources, sometimes resulting in conflicting passages or differing theological perspectives within the same book. Responsible exegesis, “reading out” from a text its meaning within its own context, would sometimes require digging down deeper to separate those earlier layers of tradition.

For many students this approach is initially difficult. They tend to arrive in the classroom with preconceived notions, not expecting to find layers of differing voices in the Bible, sometimes even resisting the idea of applying methods of analysis to sacred texts.

For that reason, I usually began my introductory courses with the account in 1 Samuel 8–12 of the crowning of Saul as Israel’s first king. These five chapters are replete with conflicting descriptions of Saul, of Samuel and of how Saul was chosen. When I suggested dividing the episodes in those chapters into separable segments, most of the students managed to recognize two or three coherent accounts told from different perspectives. Some even suggested which account seemed earlier or later than another. What was important was that they came to see that there are, in fact, parts of different earlier literary constructions in these chapters. They could also understand why later religious historians had cut-and-pasted these earlier sources together as they did in order to give God credit for choosing Saul while making wayward Israelites responsible for the hardships Israel would later suffer under their kings.

Lest students think that what we were doing was simply some unimportant academic parlor game or, worse, an irreverent tampering with scripture, I made certain that, early on, we would visit some passages that historically have been sadly misinterpreted and misused. One early example is Noah’s curse on Canaan in Genesis 9:25–27. For centuries, this passage was ripped out of its context and used to justify Christian nations’ institution of slavery, when the most basic probe below its surface reveals that it originated simply as an ancient etiology crafted to support a tribal group’s right to domination over their Canaanite neighbors.

As we then moved through the Bible from Genesis to the Book of Revelation, students would soon learn that even deeper below the layers of written text are the layers of a particular people’s history of successes and sufferings and of changing cultural and ideological environments. To understand more fully the words that have been preserved for us from the early tellers of tribal lore, the religious archivists and historians, the prophets and psalmists, the gospel writers and the writers of letters, we need to understand as best we can those changing historical contexts that helped shape their perspectives. Even the writers of apocalyptic visions wrote in response to particular religious crises: Ezekiel out of the suffering of the Babylonian Exile, Daniel during the religious persecutions of the Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes, 086and John of Patmos during the persecutions of the Roman emperor Domitian (while all three of them also reused imagery and ideas from earlier writers).

When we bring this awareness of layers to our reading in the Bible, each book in its own way expands accordion-style backward in time, providing us with an ever richer legacy from our forebearers’ pilgrimage of faith, and we are better able to find those voices among them that speak most relevantly to our own time and condition.

Larry Toombs’s words have proved to be sound advice, not only when digging on tells, but of even greater importance when digging into the Bible. The answers do often lie below.

“The answers lie below,” said the voice over my shoulder.