Archaeology and the Bible

And we’re going to consider how – what we call the “realia,” how the things that we find in the ground and on the Earth, and the remains of history that we dig up help us to understand what’s going on with the Bible.

And so, Steve, I’m going to ask you to begin by telling us a little bit about your background in working with archeology, and what you’ve done, what you bring to this conversation in terms of your background.

I’m a graduate of University of Arizona, a student of Dr. Dever, one of the big names in biblical archeology. And I’ve been going to Israel – consider myself a “dig bum” – you feed me, I’ll dig for you. So, 30 years of experience and probably over 10 sites or so that I’ve been a staff member of.

And, Gordon, what about your own experience in this area?

And most field projects involve several layers of staff. And so, the square supervisor is the one that’s right there, watching everything, recording everything, and it kind of rests on their shoulders. And then you have a field archeologist controlling several square archaeologists, and then you have the director where I’m at, where we don’t do anything except give orders.

So, let’s talk about archeology first. You know, some people’s image of the archeologist is kind of –

So, where you gentlemen will be interested in the text, in what’s going on here, your iPad, the text, I’m interested in the actual material components of this event that’s going on here. And so, I’ll come, and I’ll study the table, the mics, the coffee cups and try to reconstruct what took place here, where a textual scholar, a biblical scholar, will look at the text itself to reconstruct what happened here.

But as a biblical archeologist, I’m looking for all the other stuff. Like you said, the living conditions, how people lived – a lot of things that aren’t recorded in the biblical text.

Another impression that often comes with archeology is – and then when I’m done with this, I’m gonna ask Gordy a question, but is that – is it the Bible can be proved by archeology – and I actually think this is one of the – another place where people can sometimes be misled about what archeology is and is not able to do. How do we deal with what archeology can actually do for us, and what can it do for us?

And one of the problems I have with students, or when I teach Sunday school, is most people have a simplistic equation. They find a verse in the Bible, and they tell me, “Okay, give me the archeology for that verse.”

And it’s like, “It doesn’t work that way.” It’s – you have the world that ancient Israel lived in. You have the recording of those events, God acting in that world, and there’s many layers to get to that level of that biblical text.

And so, today, most biblical archeologists aren’t looking for that one silver bullet that’s going to address the question. It’s like, “No, we gotta look at the whole world and reconstruct it.” And so, you need text guys looking at the texts; you need material culture guys looking at the material culture; and some, where we pull that together, and we’re able to give a picture of how the biblical text was formed in its culture. And then the theologians come along and, “How does that apply to our lives?”

People on the far right, and far right of fundamentalism, often are trying to argue that archeology proves the Bible, and they’re just looking for the silver bullet that Steve’s talking about. On the other hand, people that tend to be more negative are looking for things to try to disprove the Bible.

But what we’re looking for is – I think the key is that we try to adopt – we need to adopt detached neutrality, that we come to the text with no expectations, not trying to prove or disprove, but just to lay it out and see where the evidence goes.

We find burnt mud brick. We find abandoned cities. And we put all that together, and probably the key word, now that we deal with it – and Gordon mentioned it – is historical plausibility. We don’t look for direct proof. This isn’t like logic or science, where you add chemicals, and you determine –

Well, you gotta find all the pieces of evidence to reconstruct. And what they do in the courtroom is provide the best picture or reconstruction of what they think happened, based on the scientific data, on rules of evidence, and that’s what archeologists are doing. We’re taking those pieces of fragments and reconstructing it.

Now, in the case of the Old Testament, we’re saying, “Is the Old Testament account historically plausible? Here’s what we know. Does it make sense compared to the pieces of evidence we find on the ground?” And that’s where the debate happens, and a lot of times it happens in the media. And that’s where your audience will see –

You walk up to a space, and you think, “Okay, this site we think may have something there.” Okay? The technical term sometimes you hear is a “tell.” So, I walk up, and I’m starting from scratch. What happens on a dig?

And so, the first you want to do is you go like, “If I only have five or ten percent, where do I want to dig?” And that’s when archeologists will set up a grid system. They do a survey based on other sites. So, you kinda go like, “Okay, probably on the acropolis is where the king lived. Maybe we want to dig some up on the acropolis. Let’s look for a low area where we think might be the city gate.”

Gordon mentioned a trench. There’s one section, kind of like a cake. You go like, “Well, let’s give a broad picture of the whole history of these cities, and somewhere we want to kind of dig this trench where kind of like you just see the layers.” Here’s an example here, the backdrop here, of the various cities.

And so, you kind of, as a director, set up five or six areas. We’re going to kind of address all these issues, and part of it’s based on your research design. I’m an Old Testament archeologist. I’m digging Gezer. Well, we have a major Hellenistic city on Gezer. I’m not interested in the Hellenistic period. But I have to be responsible, so, I’ll try to find an area that doesn’t have a lot of Hellenistic overgrowth on it. Otherwise, I’m gonna spend three years excavating a Hellenistic city.

Steven Ortiz: Each city’s unique and different.

_______ cities.

The example, I’m working at Gezer, I’m interested in the tenth century and the transition to statehood, the Solomonic period. I’ve been there six years, six field seasons, and I still haven’t got to Solomon yet. And people are asking me, “When you get –”

I go like, “Well, I have to remove the Hellenistic. I have to remove the eighth century. I have to –”

And, of course, my crew was mad at me. And I told, “No, you’ve got to understand. We helped them – to set that up. Otherwise we would have destroyed half of the stuff if we’d gone down too quickly.

And Israel is very, very sensitive about her antiquities. And so, sometimes that can put a hold on a project. They care that much about their history. Is that –

The one that I think about, that I’m most familiar with directly, not because I’ve ever worked on an archeological site, but because I’ve dealt with the hype that has surrounded it, was the Talpiot Tomb. That Talpiot Tomb, where supposedly the found these tombs with the name of Jesus’ family on it was big about a decade ago. But that – they were building apartments. In fact, you go there today, and the apartments are all around it.

So, they had to – and when they built the building, which is really interesting – when they ended up building the building, they ended up building it in such a way that they can preserve the contents of this site so that now, if you want to see what’s in there, you have to drop cameras in there and that kind of thing. So, it’s interesting – the effort that’s been made by people who are sensitive to this, to try and preserve these spots, if they decide not to dig in them.

But oftentimes, and this is one of the parts of the history that I think people may not be aware of is in the past, some people were just diggers. You know? They just went down and tried to go for what they were going for. And as you mentioned, archeology is a destructive science, so that once you dig it up, and you mess it up, it’s messed up.

And when things just show up in a shop, in an antiquities shop, and it’s undocumented, or a scholar has just handled – as with the Jesus’ wife’s text – and this is a New Testament issue, or actually post-New Testament issue, Jesus’ wife’s text, and we don’t know where it came from, anything about it, all we have is the paper and the ink, we really don’t have much context to sort out exactly what it is that we’re dealing with.

But they couldn’t test the ink, because that would have destroyed the small piece that you had. And they’re just lots of things about it we don’t know. All we have are parts of eight lines. There’s no context around it. We don’t have anything introducing it. We don’t know what the debate is surrounding the affirmation that’s made. We don’t even know if, in the midst of saying that Jesus had a wife, if there’s another part of the section that says, “Oh, no He didn’t.” You know?

So, like a Gezer, I probably only have a staff of 20, but 40 others are volunteers, students who have never dug before, but are going to the Holy Land. And so most digs are – they’re a teaching program also. So, it’s not like we just get slave labor. It’s like students come over, and we’re just gonna use –

There was a time in which the way this worked is, you did your dig. You wrote up your study. You had it vetted by people who were – who knew what they were looking at. It was presented to the public in a very scholarly and organized kinda way, and there’s a lot of study that still is done that way.

But it strikes me that in the last 20 to 25 years – I don’t know how much longer this has been – but that we’ve had a lot of things happen that don’t work that way. That basically a scholar has gotten a hold of a site; he’s gotten – or he’s gotten a hold of an artifact, maybe more accurately, or a set of artifacts. And what he has done is rather than go through the normal vetting process and the normal scholarly process, he’s connected with a media organization, of one kind or another, to promote what it is that he’s doing.

He presents his case, not necessarily before scholars in a vetted kind of way, but directly to the public, and we’re off and running. You know, kinda the beginning of the Kentucky Derby, “And they’re off.” And boom, it’s in the public square, and we’re off and running. And we seem to have things backwards.

I’m tempted to say, “Jesus walked on the site,” just to –

And then we have this particular find. And so, we heard, in the press, all kinds of things being argued about the significance of what this meant. So, I’m gonna – I think I’m gonna start here, because here we’re dealing with the contents of what was found and what’s described as debated. It’s where it fits that gets debated.

So, here I’m turning to the historian amongst us and say, “Okay, so what should I do with this when I hear this?”

I never want to just respond knee jerk to a press release, but give it a couple of years, see what everybody says. And especially people that are specialists in the area. Not people, for example, with my level of training. I’m a Bible person first and archeology just by hobby, if you will. Not for us to weigh on, but to wait for the people – the specialists to weigh on.

Now, as far as this text, when you said, “the ark,” the text tells us, The ark is round.” Well, we have to understand how this fits with all ancient Near-Eastern texts about the flood. You’ve got going all the way back to Eridu as the first ancient, Near-Eastern flood text – mmm, 2600-2800 B.C. You’ve got Gilgamesh Epic talks about –