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 and who wishes to study the Iron Age of the southern Levant [including Israel], must make a choice. There are five major possibilities as follows:
1. Accepting the bulk of the information in the Bible as credible and attempting to fit the archaeological data to the Biblical text.
2. Claiming that the entire Biblical narrative is useless as a source for writing a history of Biblical Israel. If this claim is accepted, archaeology and external sources (many of them suspected as biased) remain the sole source of reconstructing some kind of history.
3. Claiming that as archaeologists, we should limit ourselves to our trade—the reconstruction of social and economic changes based on the study of material culture alone—and should not intervene in historical discussions.
4. Using archaeological and historical data in the Bible and external sources in a manipulative way, reconstructing processes, phenomena and events based on archaeological and Biblical data freely and imaginatively.
5. Claiming that the Biblical sources retain important kernels of ancient history despite the fact that the Biblical text was written long after the events they purport to describe. In addition, archaeology can be used to examine Biblical data in the light of archaeology and judge critically the validity of each Biblical episode.
I choose the last approach. I recognize that the Pentateuch, the collection that scholars call the “Deuteronomistic History,” consisting of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, as well as large parts of the prophetic and wisdom literature, were written and further edited during the late Monarchy (eighth–early sixth centuries B.C.E.) and even later, during the Babylonian Exile and the Persian period that followed (sixth–fourth centuries B.C.E.). But I also accept the view of many scholars that the late-monarchic authors and editors used early materials such as Temple and palace libraries and archives, monumental inscriptions perhaps centuries old, oral transmissions of ancient poetry, folk stories rooted in a remote historical past, and perhaps even some earlier historiographic writings.
I also accept the view that though much of the Biblical historiographic texts are basically literary works biased by late Judean theology and ideology, they nevertheless retain valuable historical information, which may be assessed on the basis of external written sources and archaeological finds.
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 […]
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