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Biblical Archaeology
John H. Sailhamer
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Biblical Archaeology
John H. Sailhamer
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About This Book
What is biblical archaeology? How does it help scholars with biblical interpretation? After all this time, are there still artifacts and literary documents being uncovered?
These are just some of the questions that this handy little book will answer. When busy people want to know more about the Bible and the Christian faith, the Zondervan Quick-Reference Library offers an instant information alternative in a manageable length.
Covering the basics of the faith and Bible knowledge in an easy-to-use format, this series helps new Christians and seasoned believers alike find answers to their questions about Christianity and the Bible.
The information in Biblical Archaeology is presented in units of one or two pages, so that each section can be read in a few minutes, covering the topic of archaeology as it pertains to:
- Early Genesis and the creation account.
- The patriarchs.
- The exodus.
- The united monarchy.
- The divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
- The exilic and post-exilic period.
- The Gospels.
- The early church.
The Zondervan Quick-Reference Library makes important knowledge affordable, accessible, and easy to understand for busy people who don't have a lot of time to read or study.
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Topic
Theologie & ReligionSubtopic
Biblische StudienArchaeology and Genesis 1–11
Introduction
Archaeologically speaking, the first eleven chapters of Genesis form a period distinct from the rest of the biblical narratives. The subject matter of these chapters is not limited to Israel and the land of Palestine, but is concerned with events of a global scale—Creation, the Flood, and the rise and fall of civilizations. Because of the vast scope of these chapters, archaeology in itself will probably never directly shed much light on those events. Questions about Creation and the Flood, in fact, belong to the science of astronomy and geology.
It is possible, however, to reconstruct a general picture of the early stages of human civilization and the world and to view these chapters from within that perspective. There is no complete agreement among evangelical Christians on this issue apart from the biblical account. They divide into two distinct approaches. Those who basically accept the views of modern archaeologists and anthropologists attempt to correlate the biblical narratives with that view. Others, however, hold that the modern scientific view of early human society is fundamentally flawed. They argue that we must take into account the biblical view if we are to understand the origin of our world and human societies. The biblical account of the Flood, they argue, would have radically affected human life and geological conditions on earth.
We believe neither of the two views gives an adequate picture of the real world. While the modern scientific picture of early human beings is quite different than what we find in the Bible, it is also true that much of what the modern archaeologist says about early human beings is derived not from the evidence itself but from an essentially unbiblical set of assumptions—for example, that “early humans” evolved from primitive, “prehuman” lower forms of animal life.
But the Bible knows of no such state of affairs. It pictures the first man and woman as fully human, capable of complex cultural skills such as language, farming, and raising livestock. There was nothing “primitive” about Adam and Eve as far as their culture is concerned. They lived much the same as many societies today. They were not, of course, technologically advanced, but neither were they “primitive.” When we hear archaeologists speaking of genuinely human remains, we should think of them as descendants of Adam and Eve. It is only by assuming a need for early “primitive” humans to develop into the more advanced stages that archaeologists are forced to assume lengthy time periods (above 50,000 years ago) for early humans. Care must also be taken not to confuse the scientific evidence for “early humans,” descendants of Adam, with the remains of earlier forms of animal life, such as chimpanzees and apes.
A General Picture of Early Human Society
Archaeologists classify early human cultures by the materials they used for making tools and weapons. The earliest human societies used stone implements— hence the Stone Age. The Old Stone Age, or Paleolithic, culture lasted from about 50,000 to 10,000 B.C. During that period, food was gathered from wild plants and hunting. At around 9,000 B.C. human culture entered a rather sudden transitional phase, the Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age, when many human cultures ceased depending on hunting and gathering food and began the process of domesticating plants and animals.
The chief cause of this transition in basic economies was a dramatic change in global climatic conditions. As temperatures began to rise at the close of the last Ice Age, large areas of land were left exposed to the warm climate. Vast forests rapidly covered the landscape. Paleolithic societies, which had once thrived on hunting large herds of reindeer, now found themselves having to stalk deer in densely forested terrain. Only by refining their tools and hunting implements (such as the bow and arrow, with finely tooled stone arrow tips) were people able to survive. The domestication of the dog also added to their hunting capacities.
The biblical city of Jericho provides a textbook picture of the progress of human culture throughout the early stages of prehistory. From the time of its early Mesolithic inhabitants, it was almost constantly occupied until the Israelites destroyed it in their conquest of Canaan. A Mesolithic culture flourished until its destruction in 7800 B.C. Its early inhabitants lived in modest mud huts at the top of an ancient hill at the center of the city. The technological revolution of domesticated plants and animals led directly to the Neolithic, or New Stone Age culture. This period began with the destruction of the huts of the earlier Mesolithic culture. An estimated two thousand inhabitants now lived in mud huts surrounded by a formidable city wall. At the corner of the west end of the city wall they constructed a large tower to help them defend the city. The only identifiable domesticated animal at that time was the goat.
The early Neolithic people of Jericho occupied the city for nearly a thousand years. After a short period when the city was deserted, a new population moved onto the hill. These new inhabitants still hunted wild animals for food, but they had also domesticated several kinds of animals and raised their own crops. They were part of a larger group of people living in settlements throughout ancient Palestine.
After another brief period of abandonment, a new population moved into Palestine around 6,000 B.C. and took up residence in Jericho. These people brought with them a highly developed use of pottery, domesticated livestock, and agricultural skills. In 4500 B.C. the first traces of metal tools were deposited in gravesites near Jericho. The city, however, remained unoccupied until another new population entered Palestine in 3100 B.C. and initiated an urbanized Early Bronze Age culture in Palestine.
Ancient Near Eastern Creation Accounts
Strictly speaking, there are no known creation accounts from the ancient Near East. There are, to be sure, several ancient myths from both Egypt and Mesopotamia that give accounts of creation in varying degrees and for different purposes. But there is no actual narrative account of creation, such as the one we find at the beginning of the Bible. Outside that biblical account, creation was not so much a fact from the past as it was an idea about the present. Ancient creation myths were designed to explain why things happen in the world today as they do.
The most notable ancient creation myth is the epic poem known to the Babylonians and Assyrians as Enuma Elish. Its title is taken from the first words of the epic, which begins, “When on high (enuma elish) the heaven had not been named, firm ground below had not been called by name. …” Since the first discovery of ancient fragments of clay tablets recounting the epic (1848–1876) , Enuma Elish has been studied as an ancient account of creation that bears surprising similarity to the Genesis account. In actual fact, creation plays a relatively minor role in the epic. Central to the epic is the attempt to explain why the Babylonian god Marduk is to be revered as the chief among the gods. The epic probably dates only from the time of the earliest copies of the epic (ca. 1,000 B.C.), though it may be older than that.
Enuma Elish begins by describing a primordial time when nothing yet existed except the three gods: Apsu (the primeval fresh water ocean), Tiamat (the salt water ocean), and their son, Mummu (the mist). In these three gods were represented all the elements of which the universe was thought to consist. As the epic story progresses, Apsu and Tiamat give birth to a multitude of gods. But a problem develops. The noise created by these younger gods begin to get on the nerves of the original pair. Apsu, taking matters into his own hands, decides to destroy the other gods and thus rest in silence. But his plan is thwarted by the god Ea, who casts a spell on Apsu, puts him into a deep sleep, and slays him in his sleep. Tiamat, understandably, is greatly disturbed by the death of her husband and sets out on a plan to avenge his death.
No one can contain Tiamat’s rage against the other gods until the Babylonian chief deity, Marduk, is summoned to the fight. But he cleverly refuses to fight Tiamat until all the gods have pledged to make him the supreme god. When the gods agree to this, Marduk wages war with Tiamat. In the account of his slaying of Tiamat the story of creation is told. Standing over the slain Tiamat, Marduk “split her like a shellfish into two parts: Half of her he set up and ceiled it as sky”; with the other half he constructs an abode for the surviving gods. When the lesser gods complain of the work they are assigned, Marduk creates human beings to serve them.
At the conclusion of the epic, Marduk is awarded a city and a temple, built for him by the council of gods. That city is Babylon, with its great temple. Isn’t it interesting that the biblical account of Creation also concludes in Genesis 11:1–9 with an account of the building of the city of Babylon? The Bible, however, as might be expected, has a quite different assessment of that city. Babylon is not the “gateway to heaven,” as ancient mythology supposed. Rather, it is the origin of all human futility and rebellion against God. In the biblical story, the name Babylon is identified with the “confusion” of languages that lies at the heart of all human misunderstanding.
Ancient Near Eastern Myth of the Garden of Eden
Apparently people in the ancient Near East believed in an early, earthly paradise, a place where all the woes and ills of this present life had not yet obtained. Such views are, in a few details, remarkably similar to the biblical account of the Garden of Eden. In an early Sumerian myth, Enki and Ninhursag (ANET, pp. 37–41), for example, a “land” called Dilmun is described as “clean and bright [where] … the lion kills not, the wolf snatches not the lamb, unknown is the kid-devouring wild dog.” It is a place where “the old man (says) not, ‘I am an old man,’” and where a constantly flowing river brings great abundance to the city that lies in its midst.
There are clear similarities here with the biblical account of Eden. But it should be noted that the Genesis account of the Garden of Eden does not suggests that lions did not kill or wolves did not snatch helpless lambs. That, of course, is true of other biblical pictures of paradise (such as Isa. 65:25), but it is not found in Genesis 2.
Ancient Near Eastern Myths
of the Creation of Human Beings
of the Creation of Human Beings
Curiously, in Enki and Ninhursag,a Sumerion myth discussed in the previous pages, a goddess named Ninhursag creates the goddess of life, Ninti, to soothe the hurting “rib” of her brother, Enki. The mention of a “rib” in conjunction with the creation of a female goddess has led some to compare this story with the biblical account of the creation of Eve from Adam’s “rib.” In the Sumerian myth, however, the mention of Enki’s “rib” occurs in a long lists of other body parts that “hurt” Enki and for which Ninhursag creates numerous gods to heal him. The mention of the “rib” is thus not as striking as might first appear.
As in the Bible, in some Babylonian and Sumerian myths human beings are created from the ground. Sometimes their creation is pictured as a plant growing out of the ground, and other times as a clay figurine molded by a potter. In the Babylonian account Atrahasis, for example, humankind is created from the blood of a slain god mixed with clay. Human beings are thus depicted as clay figurines filled with divine blood. It is often argued that this view of the creation of human beings bears remarkable similarity to the biblical account of God’s “fashioning” man from the dust of the ground (Gen. 2:7).
But one must recognize a fundamental difference in literary type between the ancient Babylonian account and the Bible. Atrahasis is an epic poem; the Bible is written as historical narrative. The depiction of human beings as clay figurines is a poetic image. The Bible, on the other hand, gives a straightforward account of the man Adam’s creation from the ground. In the Bible, the Hebrew word used to recount God’s “fashioning” a man (Gen. 2:7) is related to the word for “potter.” That has seemed to many to make its relationship to Atrahasis virtually certain. More recently, however, two important factors have suggested that the biblical account is quite different than the Babylonian one. (1) We now know that the Hebrew word often translated “to fashion” in Genesis 2:7 means simply “to create.” There is thus nothing in that Hebrew word to suggest the image of a potter. (2) The text of 2:7 does not use the word for “clay,” as one would expect if the sense were of a potter making a figurine. The word used is simply “dirt” or “soil.” The biblical account is interested in where the man came from, not what he is made of.
To be sure, biblical poetry frequently envisions human beings as “houses of clay” (Job 4:19) and God as our “potter” (Isa. 29:16), but there is a vast difference between a poetic image and an historical narrative account. The similarities between the biblical view of humanity and that of the ancient Near East lies in their use of common poetic images—not in their understanding of humankind’s origins.
Ancient Near Eastern Flood Accounts
No other biblical passage has so many extrabiblical parallels as does the Genesis account of the Flood. More than three hundred “flood texts” from around the world have been collected and published. Those texts record ancient and primitive accounts of a worldwide flood and the survival of a single man and his family. There are many other similarities, both among these documents and with the biblical story of the Flood.
The single most important Flood story from the ancient world is found in the Epic of Gilgamesh. This epic is about a man’s quest for eternal life, and the story of the Flood is one of its chapters. Gilgamesh, the hero of the epic and a kind of ancient Marco Polo, sets out on a long search to meet the famous survivor of the Flood, Utnapishtum. He of all persons, Gilgamesh believes, will know the secret of immortality—Utnapishtum was granted immortality by surviving the Flood. When Gilgamesh finally meets him, he hears the harrowing account of the Flood and of Utnapishtum’s survival.
One day, while living peacefully in a city on the banks of the Euphrates River, Utnapishtum was warned by the god Ninigiku-Ea of a devastating flood that the other gods had decided to send against the city. Utnapishtum was warned to tear down his house and build a ship. The god gave him the dimensions of the ship he was to build and further instructed him to take aboard the ship “the seed of all living things.” The ship itself was to be in the shape of a huge square box, sealed with asphalt and stocked with a great amount of food. After seven days, the ship was launched into the Euphrates River, and Utnapishtum brought abroad all his family and every craftsman of the city, along with “the beasts of the field [and] the wild creatures.” When it began to rain, he boarded the ship and “battened up the entrance.” Then followed a frightening storm and flood. Humankind was devastated, engulfed by the flood. Even “the gods were frightened by the deluge.” They fled into heaven and “cowered like dogs, crouched against the outer wall.” They lamented the destruction they had brought on the very people they had created. “The gods, all humbled, sit and weep.”
The rains lasted seven days. When Utnapishtum looked out at the devastation, he saw that “all of mankind had returned to clay” and wept at the sight. In time, the ship rested on a high mountain, Mount Nisir. After seven days, Utnapishtum sent out a dove, but it returned, having found no resting place on dry land. He then sent out a swallow, and it too returned. He then sent a raven, and it did not return. At that, Utnapishtum and all those with him on the ship disembarked and immediately “offered a sacrifice.” The gods were appeased, and a jewel necklace of lapis lazuli was given to the goddess Ishtar as a reminder “of these days, forgetting (them) never.”
When the god Enlil, who had brought on this flood, found the ship and the survivors, he flew into a rage. “No man was to survive the destruction!” he told the other gods. Enlil was then persuaded by the other gods that it was Utnapishtum’s own wisdom that enabled him to anticipate and survive the deluge. At that, Enlil awarded Utnapishtum and his wife the immortality of the gods, and he was given a home “far away, at the mouth of the rivers.”
The complete copies of this epic date from the seventh century B.C. Fragments of it date from the eighteenth century B.C. It is reasonable to suppose that the epic itself dates back to about 2,000 B.C. It is also fairly certain that the story of Utnapishtum and the Flood, which is only a ...