Archaeologists who work in the Holy Land, and especially those who deal with the Iron Age, are well aware of the often-uneasy relationship that exists among archaeology, history and the Bible. In this excerpt from a presentation to the British Academy,1 prominent Israeli archaeologist Amihai Mazar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem discusses the various ways scholars have chosen to grapple with these competing forces. There are five major ways to evaluate the Biblical text in reconstructing the history of Israel during the Iron Age [twelfth–sixth centuries B.C.E.]. An archaeologist like myself, who is an outsider to textual research […]
