The Archaeology of the Bible

James K. Hoffmeier

• Publisher: Lion Scholar
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781912552214
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion antique

For the past 200 years archaeological work has provided new information that allows us to peer into the past and open chapters of human history that have not been read for centuries, or even millennia.

In The Archaeology of the Bible James K. Hoffmeier provides the reader with an incisive account of archaeology's role in shaping our understanding of the biblical texts.

Fundamental issues addressed throughout include how archaeological discoveries relate to biblical accounts, and the compatibility of using scientific disciplines to prove or disprove a religious book such as the Bible.

This work is an ideal introduction to the societies and events of the Ancient Near East and their relation to our interpretation of the Bible.

PART 1

Introduction to Archaeology and its Application to the Old Testament

CHAPTER 1

THE BIRTH OF ARCHAEOLOGY

Travelling in Time

Knowing the past (history) is the key to understanding the present and the forces that continue to shape cultures, languages, national boundaries and political associations. In the smash hit movie Back to the Future, the eccentric scientist Dr Emmett Brown built a time machine-car that was capable of going back in time or launching forward into the future. Since time machines are not viable, how does one open the door to the past and pursue the history, adventures and mysteries that lurk in ancient times?

In fact we do have such a vehicle to take us back in time. For the past 200 years archaeological work has provided new information that allows people in the twenty-first century to peer into the hoary past and open chapters of human history that have not been read for centuries, or millennia in some cases. One area in which archaeology has played a critical role in making the past come alive is in the Middle, or the Ancient, Near East. Classical Greek writers, from Homer to Herodotus, wrote about the nations of the eastern Mediterranean. Because of these writings, Westerners had long been intrigued by the pyramids and temples of Egypt – her mummies and papyri – and the monuments and tablets of Babylon. In the Holy Land, centuries old churches and mosques are built over spots where important events of Bible history purportedly happened, and ancient ruins can be seen across the region. The archaeological remains from the Near East raise the following questions: Does this have anything to do with the Bible, the book that has profoundly influenced Western culture? Is there archaeological evidence that bears on the Bible? Are the narratives of the Bible, especially those from 3,000 and more years ago, myth or history? Is a scientific discipline like archaeology even compatible with an obviously religious book like the Bible? These are relevant questions that this book will seek to answer.

A casual reading of the Bible reveals that the setting for the events and peoples encountered in the pages of the Old and New Testaments is the Middle East. Going from east to west in the period covered by the Old Testament, this region includes the present-day lands of Iran, Iraq, eastern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Egypt and northern Sudan. These lands are also known as the Fertile Crescent, and the birthplace of civilization. In the Christian era, the setting of the Bible shifted west to include western Turkey, Greece, Italy and a number of Mediterranean islands. It stands to reason, then, that if one were to study and better understand the histories, languages, literature, architecture, art and geography of these regions, there would be a connection with the Bible. After all, the Bible is set in these regions, and names rulers such as Shishak and Tirhakah, Tiglath-Pileser and Sargon, Cyrus and Darius, Caesar Augustus and Herod. And they are also attested outside of scripture. Archaeology, then, can serve as a time machine for the reader of the Bible, opening doors of inquiry and lighting paths so that one can navigate through the darkness caused by the chasm that separates the present from the past.

The Origins of Archaeology in the Biblical World

Archaeology, as the word suggests, is the study of ancient things, especially cultures and societies. Since the European academic world has always been interested in classical history, languages (Greek and Latin), literature and art, it is not surprising that archaeological excavations began in Italy over 250 years ago at the sites of Herculaneum (1738) and Pompeii (1748). This development, naturally, would prove beneficial to the study of the New Testament, but this was not the motivation behind these early excavations. Heinrich Schliemann (1822–90), the son of a German minister, grew up with an enduring interest in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. This passion, along with the hope of verifying the historicity of Homer’s works, took him to Greece in the late 1860s where he began excavating various sites. Eventually he discovered the site of what is widely held to have been Troy, in western Turkey. Schliemann is regarded as a critical player in the development of more scientific methods of digging.

Thanks to Schliemann, some biblical scholars thought that archaeology could likewise serve their study of the Bible and its world. Indeed, it is generally acknowledged that it was interest in the Bible and its history that motivated many of the early explorers and archaeologists to travel to the Middle East to investigate and excavate ancient sites.

Archaeology in Mesopotamia

Nearly 400 years ago, Pietro della Valle (1586–1652), an Italian poet, soldier and traveller, visited the mounds or tells (as they are called in Arabic) that made up ancient Babylon. There he obtained bricks with curious wedge-shaped writing incised in the mud. These were the first examples of what scholars would call the ‘cuneiform’ (wedge-shaped) script to make their way to Europe. But no one could read them. During the next 250 years increasing numbers of intrepid scholars, diplomats and clergy travelled to the Middle East to explore biblical sites. Travelling from Europe to the Middle East and within these lands was in itself challenging in the seventeenth through to the early twentieth centuries, and disease and hostile locals proved dangerous to these earlier archaeologists.

The British and French were also active in the pioneering days of archaeology in Iraq. Sir Henry Rawlinson was appointed consul in Baghdad in 1843, providing him with the opportunity to begin excavations. Other pioneer archaeologists in Iraq were Paul-Emile Botta (1802–70) and Austin Henry Layard (1817–94). The former was the French consul in Mosul in northern Iraq from 1842, and he excavated at the ancient Assyrian capitals of Nineveh and Khorsabad where he discovered the palace of King Sargon II, who is mentioned in Isaiah 20:1. Many of the fine sculptures he discovered were taken to the Louvre in Paris. Layard, a British antiquarian, also worked in Nimrud and Khorsabad during the 1840s. His major discoveries were taken to the British Museum in London. Thus by the second half of the nineteenth century, the discipline of Assyriology was advancing with the decipherment of the cuneiform script and the discovery of ancient capitals such as Nineveh and Babylon, which were known from the pages of the Bible. Another renowned biblical city in Mesopotamia, Ur of the Chaldees, the home of Abraham (Genesis 11:28, 31), was excavated by Sir Leonard Woolley (1880–1960) between 1922 and 1934. Woolley discovered the royal tombs of the First Dynasty of Ur (c. 2650–2500 BC), which contained exquisite jewelry, golden utensils and various implements. Today these treasures grace the British Museum, while a portion of jewelry and the body of Pu-Abi, a queen or priestess of Ur during the First Dynasty, is on display in the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Inspired by the discovery of the royal tombs at Ur, Agatha Christie wrote her famous murder mystery, Murder in Mesopotamia, and also married Max Mallowan, Woolley’s assistant. Later Max and Agatha excavated at Nimrud in northern Iraq.

Archaeology in Egypt

Egyptology can trace its roots to the collecting of antiquities from the Nile Valley in the sixteenth century. Egypt was known through classical literature and the travels of Herodotus in the fifth century BC. The mystique of Egypt led many in Europe to think that esoteric and occult knowledge could be obtained through contact with Egyptian objects, and that the mysterious writings contained magical powers. These fanciful notions gave way to more scholarly investigations in the nineteenth century. Giovanni Belzoni (1778–1823), a one-time circus giant and hydraulic engineer by training, travelled to Egypt in 1816 hoping to sell his irrigation techniques to Muhammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt. There he met the British Consul General, Henry Salt, who was himself a collector of antiquities. This led Belzoni to spend many years exploring Egypt, opening tombs in the Valley of the Kings and exploring the Giza pyramids. He took it as a personal challenge to haul his larger finds back to England. Despite his reputation for using cavalier methods, he also made careful drawings of temples and statues that could not be moved, showing that he recognized the intrinsic value of the monuments.

One aspect of French colonialism in the Mediterranean was Napoleon’s campaign to Egypt. Standing before the great pyramids of Giza, Napoleon is reported to have announced to his troops that 5,000 years of history were looking down on them. Beginning in 1798, his host of scholars fanned out across Egypt recording information about the monuments. It was under the aegis of this French effort that the Rosetta Stone was found in 1799, a discovery which paved the way for the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics by the philologist Jean François Champollion.

The Rosetta Stone contained an edict by Ptolemy V (196 BC), inscribed in hieroglyphs as well as in Demotic, the highly advanced hieroglyphic shorthand used in Greco-Roman Egypt. It was, however, the presence of the third text, the Greek translation of the Egyptian portion, that provided the key to unlock the meaning of the cryptic signs. This advance paved the way for the reading and comprehending of hieroglyphic inscriptions from tombs, temples, stelae and papyri. Today the Rosetta Stone is in the British Museum, having been surrendered by Napoleon after his loss at Waterloo.

The Decipherment of Cuneiform

Looking at a cuneiform text, one might be inclined to think that the signs are completely unintelligible! Today, however, there are scores of trained scholars who can make sense of this curious script. Many great minds and countless hours of study led to the decipherment of this important script, and this in turn opened a door to understanding the ancient languages of Mesopotamia, which provide valuable background information for numerous Bible stories.

Carsten Niebuhr (1733–1815) is the person often credited with initiating further scientific investigations in the Orient. German by birth, Niebuhr was a mathematician who learned to survey, which gave him the credentials to join a team of Scandinavian and German scholars who were sent to explore the Middle East by the Danish monarch, Frederick V. His team included a linguist, a botanist, a zoologist and an artist. He spent time in Egypt, Sinai, Iraq, Syria and Persia (now Iran) between 1761 and 1767, and copied reliefs and cuneiform inscriptions at Persepolis (one of the capitals of the Persian empire), made drawings at Nineveh, and drew maps of various sites. Early on in this expedition, one by one all his team died; but he pressed on, paving the way for others to follow. At Persepolis, he studied the enigmatic texts, rightly concluding that three different systems of writing were used. While this was an important development, a more significant breakthrough came in 1802 when George Grotenfend correctly identified the names of three Persian kings on tablets, which resulted in the identification of thirteen Old Persian signs.

The key to completely comprehending the cuneiform script was the realization that the Behistun or Bisitun inscription from western Iran contained a trilingual text. This inscription contained the report of King Darius’s earlier years as ruler and was written in Elamite, Babylonian and Old Persian cuneiform. Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (1810–95), a British military officer, took advantage of being in Persia in 1833 to begin his study of the Behistun monument. Building on the foundation laid by Niebuhr and Grotenfend, Rawlinson’s painstaking work resulted in the complete decipherment of all three languages. This achievement was extremely important for the study of many ancient Near Eastern languages as many nations utilized this script. Although in the fourth millennium BC the Sumerians developed the cuneiform script in southern Mesopotamia, it was borrowed and used by the Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites and Persians. During the second millennium BC, scribes from Ugarit in present-day Syria took the cuneiform script a step further by developing an alphabet system.

Archaeology in Palestine/Israel

The third major area of the world of the Near East – the heartland of biblical archaeology – is Palestine/Israel, often known as the Holy Land. It is widely acknowledged that Edward Robinson (1794–1863), an American biblical scholar and seminary professor, is a significant figure in the origins of biblical archaeology, a discipline that only came into full bloom in the twentieth century. Beginning in 1837 Robinson travelled through Egypt, Sinai and Palestine, accompanied by an American missionary from Beirut, Eli Smith, who was fluent in Arabic. Robinson’s monumental three-volume ...