In Their Own Words

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The roles that archaeology, history and the Biblical text should play in the study of ancient Israel are often debated by Biblical scholars and archaeologists. With expertise in Near Eastern archaeology, Hebrew Bible and classics, Anthony J. Frendo of the University of Malta discusses the interdisciplinary nature of Biblical archaeology in this excerpt from his book Pre-Exilic Israel, The Hebrew Bible, and Archaeology: Integrating Text and Artefact.¹

Since archaeology and history constitute two sides of the same coin, then there must be an interface between them where they meet without getting confused with each other; indeed, they become one without losing their identity. As [William] Dever has pointed out, “Only in the correlation of texts and artifacts—each supplementing and correcting the partial view of the other—are we likely to find a truly satisfying portrait of early Israel, one that does justice to its materiality and spirituality.”² … There are fields of study (such as those of archaeology and the Bible) which of their very nature draw upon various disciplines. If this is true of archaeology and the Bible, it is much more so of the field of Biblical Archaeology, which thus turns out to be an area of study consisting of the other fields and disciplines. The adoption of a holistic approach is scientifically sound as long as the canons of each discipline are respected. In this context it is interesting to note that the practice of obtaining a Ph.D. “in a specific discipline or area is of recent vintage.”³ Our current practice of specializing in one area or discipline has its advantages, such as those of “focus” and “concentration”—however, there is a price to pay for all this, since “the disadvantage is loss of focus at different focal length.”⁴ It is precisely in order not to lose the latter type of focus that the study of ancient Israel must be holistic, giving both archaeology and historical analysis their due weight; such research is necessarily interdisciplinary, and neither archaeology nor history should be ignored … In practice this means that the Biblical texts are analyzed according to the rules pertaining to Biblical exegesis (such as those of philology, textual criticism, literary appreciation, source analysis, historical-criticism and tradition criticism), whereas the relevant archaeological investigations are carried out according to the rules of archaeology (such as those of stratigraphic excavation, ceramic typology, and sound critical report writing). It is only thereafter that the interpretation of one field is compared with the interpretation of the other, namely that the results of Biblical exegesis are compared with the results of archaeology when both relate to the same historical reality.

The roles that archaeology, history and the Biblical text should play in the study of ancient Israel are often debated by Biblical scholars and archaeologists. With expertise in Near Eastern archaeology, Hebrew Bible and classics, Anthony J. Frendo of the University of Malta discusses the interdisciplinary nature of Biblical archaeology in this excerpt from his book Pre-Exilic Israel, The Hebrew Bible, and Archaeology: Integrating Text and Artefact.1 Since archaeology and history constitute two sides of the same coin, then there must be an interface between them where they meet without getting confused with each other; indeed, they become one […]