My friend Hugh Williamson, the Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford University, recently sent me a copy of his latest St. George’s Cathedral lecture on archaeology and Biblical history.a “There is still quite a substantial gap between the popular perception [of archaeology] and the position that has been reached by specialists,” he writes.
“Well-meaning Christian folk” who approach the professor don’t seem to realize that “many scholars nowadays would use archaeology precisely to undermine any close connection between the biblical narrative and history as we commonly think of it.”
Instead of confirming the Bible, archaeology, in the hands of many archaeologists, is seen to refute the Bible. In his lecture, Williamson uses the Israelite Conquest of the Promised Land as an example. Sites that were once thought to have contained destruction levels representing the Israelite Conquest as described in the Book of Joshua are now considered refutations of the Biblical narrative. The result, in Williamson’s words: “What was once considered a major argument in favor of a certain position has now to be explained away as a potential source of embarrassment.”
Later Biblical history is also being undermined by the archaeologists, Williamson says. “In the name of archaeology the biblical portrayal of Israel’s history is being radically challenged not just for the periods of the remote past, such as the patriarchal period, but even for material which until recently was considered by even the most critical scholars to be based, at least, on sound historical memory.”
But it is really worse than that, he says. The approach to history has changed. The historian’s “research agenda … [has] moved on.” Historians are no longer interested in what Williamson calls the men-and-movements approach, the approach of the Bible. Instead, historians now focus on la longue durée, to use the untranslatable French term: Historians are concerned not so much with men and movements as with “gradual development … imperceptibly slow processes such as climate change upon the economic development of a given region … [on] technological innovation … with its cataclysmic impact at different times on agriculture, industrialization, travel and communication.”
The archaeologists’ “research agenda” is now consonant with la longue durée. The major Biblical sites are no longer the focus. With the introduction of the archaeological surface survey, it “becomes possible to build up a history of the region which says nothing about prominent men and movements, but much about the life of that 99 percent of the population whose names are not recorded but whose story is arguably the real stuff of history.”
Williamson is mildly unhappy with this state of affairs, but he is critical, I would say, only in the interstices: Alongside the broader conditions for change, there is also “a particularity about the course of historical events which is equally the subject for legitimate inquiry.” With elegant British reserve, he sees in the exchange between Biblical historians and archaeologists “some excessively negative claims about history in the Bible.”
I would be more blunt. There is nothing wrong or unsophisticated in having an interest in the Bible and asking how archaeology can illuminate the text. I, too, would recognize that archaeological discoveries sometimes raise questions for the Biblical text. Often what seem to be contradictions, however, help us better understand 062the text. In the case of the Conquest, for example, the archaeological evidence alerts us to the validity of the Book of Judges, whose historical description of this period is far different from that of Joshua. Moreover, archaeology can be vastly helpful in illuminating the context of the Biblical narrative. In short, the more we know about the world in which the Biblical characters lived and/or the period in which the text was written, the better we understand the Bible. And archaeology has an enormous potential contribution to make to this not-so-outmoded research agenda.
The gap between archaeology and the Bible is widening, however, not narrowing. This is dangerous not only for people interested in the Bible but also for the archaeologists, many of whom, to be blunt again, could not be less interested in the Bible. For, in the end, public support for archaeology does matter.
My friend Hugh Williamson, the Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford University, recently sent me a copy of his latest St. George’s Cathedral lecture on archaeology and Biblical history.a “There is still quite a substantial gap between the popular perception [of archaeology] and the position that has been reached by specialists,” he writes. “Well-meaning Christian folk” who approach the professor don’t seem to realize that “many scholars nowadays would use archaeology precisely to undermine any close connection between the biblical narrative and history as we commonly think of it.” Instead of confirming the Bible, archaeology, in the hands of […]
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