Can the Bible Be Trusted?
07/01/99
Commentary
By Halkin, Hillel
Magazine: Commentary, July-August 1999
CAN THE BIBLE BE TRUSTED?
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Two new books lie on my desk. Both are about the Bible and the ancient Near East. Each is written by a scholar whose views are considered extreme. One argues that almost everything in the Bible that is commonly thought to be history is myth. The other argues that almost everything in the Bible that is commonly thought to be myth is history. Logically speaking, both cannot be right, although it is possible for both to be wrong. Does it matter?
Thomas Thompson, a professor of Bible at the University of Copenhagen and the author of The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel,(A) is one of a group of Bible scholars sometimes referred to as "biblical revisionists" or "biblical minimalists." His position, when first staked out in the early 1970's, appeared so radical that he was, so he writes in his introduction to The Mythic Past, "shut out of university teaching" and "forced to make a living as a handyman and house painter." Even today it places him at the far end of a spectrum of thought that has since become respectable, even voguish.
What do the minimalists believe? Although they have their disputes among themselves, all agree that there is no historical basis to any of the narratives in the Pentateuch or in the books of Joshua, Judges, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, and the first half of 1 Kings--that is, to the Bible's entire account of Israelite origins from the age of the patriarchs through the "united monarchy" of David and Solomon, traditionally dated to the 10th century B.C.E. "Biblical history," if there is such a thing at all, begins for them with the separate kingdoms of Israel and Judah in the 9th and 8th centuries, of the existence of which there is independent confirmation in Assyrian records. The text of the Bible, including its legal codes, prophetic books, and psalms, is a literary creation whose oldest parts are no older than the late-6th-century Babylonian exile.
Not all of these opinions are exclusive to the minimalists. More moderate Bible scholars nowadays share some of them, too. Their quarrel with men like Thompson, or his Copenhagen colleague Niels Peter Lemche, stems from their belief that, first, starting at least with David and Solomon, the Bible is talking about real historical figures; and second, parts of its text predate the Babylonian exile and are possibly contemporaneous with the events they describe. In 1997, the biblical archeologist William Dever remarked to the two Copenhageners in a round-table discussion sponsored by the Biblical Archaeology Review:
If you guys think I or the Israeli archeologists are looking for the Israelite conquest [of Canaan] archeologically, you're wrong. We've given that up. We've given up the patriarchs. That's a dead issue. But the rise of the Israelite state [of David and Solomon] is not. . . . I agree that there is no connected history in [the Book of] Joshua, but maybe we should look at the Book of Judges. That fits a lot better with the facts on the ground as we now know them.
By "the facts . . . as we now know them," Dever was referring to a revolution that has taken place in biblical archeology in recent decades, one partly triggered by the Israeli occupation of the Jordanian West Bank in 1967. Until then, the dominant biblical archeologist of his times was William Foxwell Albright, an American who began digging in Palestine in the 1920's. Although no fundamentalist, Albright was a Christian in his fashion, and, happily for his religious beliefs, his and others' excavations in Palestine and the Near East, together with the wealth of written material unearthed by them from the ancient civilizations of Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria, and Egypt, appeared to corroborate the biblical record.
To be sure, apart from a single obscure reference to inhabitants of Canaan called "Israel" in the "Marniptah Stela" (from the late 13th-century B.C.E.), none of this material alluded to specific biblical events or individuals earlier than the 9th century. (A second exception, an Aramaic inscription apparently bearing the words bet-david, "the house of David," turned up at a dig in Tel Dan in northern Israel in 1993.) Nowhere was there so much as a hint of an Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, or Joseph; of an enslavement in Egypt or liberation from it; of an Israelite conquest of Canaan. Yet, broadly speaking, the more knowledge accumulated about ancient Near Eastern geography, history, culture, and religion, the more consistent with the Bible's descriptions it seemed to be. What especially impressed Albright and other archeologists were excavations interpreted as showing that numerous Canaanite towns and villages had been destroyed and abandoned, and then resettled, during the 13th and 12th centuries B.C.E. Since biblical chronology pointed to this period as the time of Joshua's conquest of Canaan, what better proof of the conquest could there be? And if the Bible was, as Albright put it, "remarkably reliable" about Joshua, why not about Moses and Abraham, too?
This confidence in the biblical text was first shaken in the 1950's when the British archeologist Kathleen Kenyon began reexcavating the already dug site of Jericho--which, she now demonstrated, had been abandoned well before the 13th century and was a ghost town at the time that Joshua and his Israelites were said to have brought down its walls. It was only in the 1970's, however, as a new generation of Israeli archeologists using more sophisticated methods gained access to the Jordan Valley and the hills of Judea and Samaria--the areas of central Palestine in which Israelite settlement supposedly first occurred--that the whole structure of Albright's "biblical maximalism" collapsed.
Many other Canaanite sites, it now turned out, had also been abandoned earlier; others had been resettled long after; many showed no signs of a violent end, their depopulation being apparently due to causes other than warfare. Albright and his school, a growing consensus now held, had misread the evidence. And if the Bible was remarkably unreliable about Joshua and his conquest, why trust it about what had happened before or after?
A bit simplistically stated, this is the background for Thompson's new book, a sweeping survey synthesizing current biblical scholarship from a minimalist perspective. The Israelites, The Mythic Past proposes, were not invaders of Canaan but Canaanites themselves who gradually abandoned their towns and villages in the Late Bronze and Iron Transition age (roughly 1600 to 1200 B.C.E.) because of a prolonged period of drought that forced them to give up agriculture; shifted to a seminomadic life based on herding; and slowly resettled their old homes and founded new ones when an improved climate encouraged them to "resedentarize" in the Iron age. Even as late as the 10th century B.C.E., their society was too primitive and decentralized to support the imperial kingdom ascribed to David and Solomon, who must be considered purely legendary--as must Solomon's temple and the early importance of Jerusalem, a city lacking all geopolitical significance prior to the 8th century. As for the Marniptah and Tel Dan stelae, the "Israel" of the first has nothing to do with the people of the Bible, while the bet-david of the second should probably be read bet-dod, "the house of the beloved," and be considered a place name.
And the composition of the Bible itself? Thompson now dates this in its entirety to the Hellenistic age, the period between Alexander the Great's conquest of Palestine in 333 B.C.E. and the beginnings of Roman rule in 63 B.C.E.. Much of it, he believes, took place coevally with the writing of the Dead Sea Scrolls and early pseudepigrapha like the Book of Jubilees, and the entire project reflects the concern of a freshly emergent Hellenistic Judaism to celebrate "not an ancient nation" but "a new Israel," a surviving remnant of a largely fictional "old Israel" that the Bible's authors invented in order to appoint themselves its religious heirs.
"The point to grasp," Thompson sums up, "is that the Bible's stories . . . aren't about history at all, and that to treat them as if they were history is to misunderstand them."
Like Thompson, David Rohl has been over-looked by the academic world; the difference is that he still is. Currently president of the lowly Sussex Egyptology Society, he and his work are not even listed in the lengthy bibliographies appended by biblical scholars to their books. Nor is his new, slickly illustrated Legend: The Genesis of Civilization,(B) which claims among other things to have discovered the historical sites of the garden of Eden and the beaching of Noah's ark, likely to improve his academic reputation.
Despite a penchant for overstatement and an adventure-story style, however, Rohl is no mere sensationalist. Legend, with its profusion of detail, charts, tables, and archeological photographs, is as mentally demanding a book as Thompson's The Mythic Past. Nor is it primarily about the Bible, despite its intricately constructed claim that the early chapters of Genesis and their fabled heroes, genealogies, and eponyms that even an Albright never took seriously as history can be correlated with real people, places, and events in ancient Mesopotamia and Assyria. Its main thesis concerns proposed connections between these two lands and Egypt, whose Pharaonic civilization, Rohl believes, began with a daring Mesopotamian conquest of the Nile valley in the neighborhood of 3000 B.C.E.
More germane to the issue of the Bible's historicity is a previous book by Rohl, Pharaohs and Kings: A Biblical Quest (1996). In it, he recalibrates the accepted chronology of ancient Egyptian history and contends, by means of a complex chain of historical argument, that the so-called "third intermediate period," a Pharaonic era traditionally placed between 1070 and 715 B.C.E., began much later. Since the years eliminated by him create a time vacuum, earlier Egyptian history must move up to fill it. Thus, the reign of the nineteenth dynasty's Rameses II, identified by some historians with the Pharaoh of the Exodus, is transferred by Rohl from the middle 13th to the late 10th century B.C.E.; that of Amenemhat III of the twelfth dynasty is transferred from the late 19th and early 18th centuries to the middle 17th; and so on.
What does this have to do with the historical accuracy of the Bible? Everything, says Rohl. His calculations lead him to identify Amenemhat with the Pharaoh of Joseph, and the Pharaoh of the Exodus not with Rameses but with the mid-15th-century B.E.E. Dudimose. This enables him to relocate the story of the Exodus itself from circa 1250 B.C.E., where it has commonly been put, to circa 1450--at which point all falls into place. Joshua now arrives at Jericho just in time for its walls to topple; other Canaanite cities, too, are destroyed when they should be; and David and Solomon are pushed back to the Late Bronze age, from which there is archeological evidence of impressive royal construction not only in Jerusalem but in Palestinian sites like Megiddo, Hatzor, and Gezer.
Before he is through with this historical tour de force, Rohl has found the palace and tomb of the patriarch Joseph in the eastern Nile delta; discovered evidence of the epidemic that killed Egypt's firstborn in the last of the ten plagues; located references to Saul and David in the el-Amarna letters, an 11th-century B.C.E. cuneiform correspondence between Canaanite rulers and the Pharaonic court; and proposed still other parallels between persons and events in the Bible and ancient Egyptian sources. "Without initially starting out to discover the historical Bible," he writes, "I have come to the conclusion that much of the Old Testament contains real history."
Even if Rohl's new Egyptian chronology should prove correct (and this is not an issue that a lay reader can judge), his theories are strongly flavored by what Thompson calls the "circular reasoning" of biblical maximalism. A good example is the treatment in Pharaohs and Kings of an el-Amarna letter written by a Canaanite chieftain named Labayu in Palestine's central hills.
Since labayu means "lion" in ancient Canaanite, a language similar or identical to ancient Hebrew, and since Psalm 57, ascribed by the Bible to David while hiding "when he fled from Saul," speaks of being surrounded by "lions" (leva'im), the letter writer or "Lion Man," Rohl concludes, must have been Saul himself. And yet, while this conjecture is intriguing if one assumes that Saul and David were real people; that they lived at the time of the el-Amarna letters; and that David wrote the psalm in question, it becomes little more than unruly speculation when deprived of such assumptions. The whole problem, as Thompson puts it, is that "We are looking for the origins of Israel as we know it from the Bible, yet we are unable to confirm any biblical narrative as historical until we first have a separate, independent history with which we might compare the Bible's account."
But there is circularity in the minimalists' approach, too. They, too, beg the question by positing that, in the absence of a "separate, independent history," the Bible is not historical. What makes this premise any more logical than its opposite? It is one thing, after all, to claim that archeology disproves the Bible's version of the conquest of Canaan.(C) It is quite another thing to deny all existence to an Israelite leader named Joshua simply because there is no extrabiblical confirmation of it. Why should the burden of proof rest with the Bible?
Because, say the biblical minimalists, the Bible, when read carefully, is an obviously inconsistent, unrealistic, and tendentious document. Considered as history, it does not deserve our trust.
That may be so. But to put the matter this way is essentially to return the argument over the Bible's historicity to its starting point when the so-called higher criticism first arose in the 19th century: that is, from the arena of archeology to the biblical text itself. What, then, does this text tell us about its own history?
The answer, of course, is many things--nearly all of which have been commented on ad infinitum since modern biblical scholarship began. That the books of the Bible have different strands and different authors, for example. And that different parts of them appear to have been redacted in different places and at different times. And that not all of those who wrote or edited them shared the same point of view. And that all had some point of view that they sought to impose on their material. And that some of this material is clearly fanciful or imaginary.
All this is perfectly consistent with biblical minimalism. Yet two aspects of the biblical text, I think, are not. Both are literary--and what they reveal, curiously, is that scholars like Thompson and Lemche, who make much of the literary nature of the Bible, have, when it comes to literature, a tin ear.
The first aspect concerns periodization. Let us imagine, by way of analogy, that, due to the loss of all pre-19th-century records, the controversy over "who wrote Shakespeare" has, by the 28th century, grown so confused that a group of scholars proposes that Shakespeare's plays were not written in Elizabethan times at all but were composed in the late Victorian age in an archaic Elizabethan English deliberately seeded with anachronisms. Would such a claim be credible? I think not. What serious literary critic would believe for a moment that even the most brilliantly versatile talent could produce Twelfth Night or Midsummer Night's Dream (let alone Hamlet or King Lear) in the era of Major Barbara and The Importance of Being Earnest? (Continued in next post) |
