First Person: Is the Bible a Bunch of Historical Hooey?
Harper’s Magazine would have us believe so
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“False Testament” blares the headline on the cover of the March issue of Harper’s Magazine. The subhead continues, “Archaeology Refutes the Bible’s Claim to History.”
This is about as close to a screaming, supermarket tabloid headline as we are ever likely to get from the venerable Harper’s (the magazine began publishing a decade before Abraham Lincoln was first elected president).
In the article, the author, Daniel Lazare, tries to knock down several “pillars” of Biblical history. Was there an actual Abraham? “Not only is there no evidence that any such figure as Abraham ever lived,” writes Lazare, “but archaeologists believe there is no way such a figure could have lived given what we know about ancient Israelite origins.” The Exodus from Egypt? “It never occurred at all.” The Israelite conquest of Canaan? The Bible’s account of that “turns out to be fictional as well.” The United Kingdom under David and Solomon? Lazare counters, “David was not a mighty potentate whose power was felt from the Nile to the Euphrates but rather a freebooter who carved out what was at most a small duchy in the southern highlands around Jerusalem and Hebron.”
The article has touched a nerve. I’ve received calls from clergy telling me that congregants have had their faith shaken by it. If the Bible is unreliable as history, why believe any of it? Our job at BAR is to follow the archaeology of the Biblical period, and the callers want to know if archaeology has, indeed, refuted the Bible’s claim to history.
Lazare is a good writer, and he does an admirable job of laying out the case against the Bible as a historically reliable book. However, he seems not to have any particular expertise in archaeology (his listed publications are on urban problems and on constitutional law), and the case he presents is only one side of a very hot debate in the field. Nowhere does he try to evaluate the merits of the other side’s case. In fact he gives no indication that he’s even aware there is another side.
Lazare also ignores the fact that the issue has been discussed over the last several years in a wide variety of venues, ranging from scholarly conferences to popular publications such as the New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz (which ran an article by archaeologist Ze’ev Herzog that laid out the core of Lazare’s case, as well as a rejoinder by BAR editor Hershel Shanks), the Web publication Salon.com and (not least) our own pages.
It’s true that Biblical archaeology has come a long way since the days when excavators went into the field with, figuratively, a spade in one hand and the Bible in the other. The academic study of the archaeology of the ancient Near East does not seek to “prove” the Bible. Neither does it accept all of the Bible’s historical claims (far from it). But most archaeologists who specialize in the Biblical period would be wary of dismissing the Biblical accounts as breezily as Lazare does.
Take the Exodus, for example. I doubt you’d find many scholars, once they leave aside any religious convictions they might have, who’d accept the Biblical account at face value. We have no archaeological evidence of a man named Moses, of Israelites wandering in the desert or of the events at Mount Sinai. But many of the details in the Bible’s account do mesh with what we know historically. As Baruch Halpern, of Pennsylvania State University, told U.S. News, “There were Semites there [in Egypt], there was forced labor, there was brick making, there was intense building activity under Ramses II.” There were also, as Egyptian papyri record, runaway slaves who fled into the Sinai desert.
On the Israelite emergence in Canaan, Lazare would have us believe that the Israelites were not conquerors but “a native people who never left in the first place.” The Biblical account of the conquest does have its problems—the picture formed by 054archaeology does not match the description in the Book of Joshua of a swift military victory by the Israelites. But the Biblical account is more complex than Lazare acknowledges; the Book of Judges indicates that in various places the Israelites were not able to dislodge the local population. And the Israelites-emerged-from-the-Canaanites theory championed by Lazare has its own problems; William Dever has argued in these pages that what happened was more complex.a The population of the Canaanite highlands (where Israelite society was first centered) shot up from 12,000 to 75,000 in about a century—too rapidly to be explained by natural birthrate. The Israelites had to come from somewhere outside Canaan, Dever argues, and they brought with them a unique architectural style, pottery types and script and language—all signs of a people with a distinctive identity.
What about David? The paucity of archaeological remains from tenth-century B.C. Jerusalem is a problem. The capital of a significant empire should leave behind some artifacts for us to recover. But Jerusalem has been frequently conquered and just as frequently rebuilt. This has created blanks in the archaeological record for various periods besides the tenth century B.C.—periods during which we know (from written records found elsewhere) Jerusalem was inhabited but for which we have no artifacts. We are far from being able to offer a definitive history of David, one way or the other.
Even regarding Abraham, the one subject that would seem most likely rooted in a mythical, not a historical, past, one can discern some historically accurate details. Kenneth Kitchen has written in BAR that certain details in the Biblical account about Abraham—like details of treaties he made with local rulers and the price of slaves—mesh well with the historical record.b
The debate over the historicity of the Bible is nowhere near as settled as Lazare would have the readers of Harper’s believe. Because it is such a lively debate and because it is over so important a subject as the Bible, the debate is also far more fascinating than readers of Harper’s will know. Those who want to follow the debate should, as they say on television when they don’t want you to change the channel, “keep it here.”
“False Testament” blares the headline on the cover of the March issue of Harper’s Magazine. The subhead continues, “Archaeology Refutes the Bible’s Claim to History.” This is about as close to a screaming, supermarket tabloid headline as we are ever likely to get from the venerable Harper’s (the magazine began publishing a decade before Abraham Lincoln was first elected president). In the article, the author, Daniel Lazare, tries to knock down several “pillars” of Biblical history. Was there an actual Abraham? “Not only is there no evidence that any such figure as Abraham ever lived,” writes Lazare, “but archaeologists […]
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Footnotes
“Save Us from Postmodern Malarkey,” BAR 26:02.
“The Patriarchal Age: Myth or History?” BAR 21:02.