Archaeology involves the study of the past through material remains, through things such as artifacts, burials, and sites. In areas where there is a written history, archaeology may confirm the written accounts, add more insight into them, or conflict with the written history. Biblical archaeology is a sub-discipline of historical archaeology which explores the time periods described in the Bible. Geographically, biblical archaeology focuses primarily on the geographic region of modern Israel, Syria, Jordan, and the Sinai—in other words, the lands of the Bible.
In his book Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction, Eric Cline summarizes biblical archaeology this way:
“Upon occasion, the archaeologists can bring to life the people, places, and events discussed in the Bible. But biblical archaeology is not about proving or disproving the Bible; its practitioners are concerned with investigating material culture of the lands and eras in question and reconstructing the culture and history of the Holy Land for a period lasting more than two thousand years.”
In general, the archaeological findings have shed light on the ancient peoples of the region, their migrations and daily lives, but not on the actual stories in the Hebrew Bible, particularly those in Genesis and Exodus.
Archaeology data often appears to be at odds with the stories told in the Bible. There is little actual evidence of some of the kings, kingdoms, battles mentioned in the Bible. In her book Controversies in Archaeology, Alice Beck Kehoe writes:
“Data from the areas believed to be the Bible’s Israel and Judah, from late second millennium B.C.E. to Assyria’s conquest in 721 B.C.E., indicate there was never, in this period, a ‘United Monarchy’ of the two Jewish kingdoms.”
Many biblical heroes and kings appear to be more legendary than real and may be amalgams of real leaders from different regions and time periods.
Noah and the Flood
One of the stories that is commonly believed by many people to be historically correct tells of a world-wide flood in which the mythical character Noah builds an ark to rescue both humans and animals from the devastation. There is, of course, evidence of local flooding in the region, but both geology and archaeology show that there was no world-wide flood. During the early agricultural period, people often had their villages and towns near rivers which provided needed irrigation water to their fields. Rivers often flood and would have had devastating consequences for these villages and towns. Eric Cline writes:
“It is conceivable that such localized, perhaps devastating floods were the origin for the stories told by the Sumerians, Akkadians, and Babylonians that have so many details in common with the story of Noah and his Ark in the Hebrew Bible. The first such story appears to be a Sumerian version, perhaps dating back to about 2700 BCE, featuring a man named Ziusudra who survives the flood. In a version dating to several hundred years later, the survivor is a man name Atrahasis. By 1800 BCE, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, it is Utnapishtim who survives the Flood and tells that story to the epic’s protagonist, Gilgamesh.”
With regard to physical evidence of the flood, Eric Cline also reports:
“However, in terms of archaeology, no indisputable evidence for a worldwide flood has been uncovered by archaeologists. Similarly, no remains of Noah’s Ark have yet been found by a credible professional archaeologist. And yet, claims are made almost every year that another ‘expedition’ has found the Ark.”
The Patriarchs and the Exodus
One of the goals of early Biblical Archaeology was to provide the historicity of the patriarchs and to locate them in a particular period in archaeological history. Eric Cline reports:
“The simple fact of the matter is that although numerous excavations have recovered tremendous quantities of archaeological remains from the early second through the early first millennia BCE, at sites in lands ranging from ancient Mesopotamia to Canaan to Egypt, there has not yet been any direct archaeological or extrabiblical textual evidence found to confirm or deny the existence of Abraham and his fellow Patriarchs.”
While there is no direct archaeological proof that Abraham, for example, ever really existed, on the other hand, archaeology has provided some insights into the pastoral nomads and the migrations during the period of about 1800 BCE.
Another important patriarch in the Hebrew Bible is Moses. Once again, there is also no direct archaeological evidence of Moses nor any evidence of a mass exodus from Egypt. In his book The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, Nicholas Wade writes:
“Modern archaeology has provided substantial evidence that there was no exodus from Egypt and no conquest of the promised land: the Israelites had always lived in Canaan.”
Eric Cline writes:
“However, despite attempts by a number of biblical archaeologists—and an even larger number of amateur enthusiasts—over many years, credible direct archaeological evidence for the Exodus has yet to be found.”
In his entry on Philistines and Israelites in The Atlas of World Archaeology, Christopher Edens writes:
“The early books of the Bible (written down centuries after the events they describe) recount the story of the arrival of God’s chosen people, the Israelites, in the Promised Land of Canaan after their escape from captivity in Egypt.”
However, the archaeological data suggests that the Israelites came from some small village communities in the central hill country of the Jordan River.
Regarding the story of coming out of Egypt, wandering in the desert for forty years, and destroying all the Canaanite cities, Karen Armstrong, in her book Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, writes:
“The archaeological record does not confirm this story. There is no evidence of the mass destruction described in the book of Joshua and no indication of a powerful foreign invasion. But the narrative was not written to satisfy a modern historian; it is a national epic that helped Israel create a cultural identity distinct from her neighbors.”
In his chapter in Year of Discovery, Haim Watzman summarizes the archaeological findings this way:
“There is little independent evidence to corroborate the stories of the patriarchs, the enslavement, the exodus, and the conquest, and what exists is ambiguous at best.”
King David and Solomon
The time period in which biblical archaeology is focused is a period in which there was writing. During this time period, it was common for rulers to have their names inscribed on stone monuments and to describe their deeds and proclamations. In general, there has been a lack of inscriptions recording mentioning King David who was said to have ruled about 1035-970 BCE. This lack of evidence has led some scholars to conclude: (a) the biblical King David is a mythical person or perhaps a composite of several leaders; or, (b) that David was not the king of a powerful state, but a chieftain of one of the many tribes in the area. However, some of the recent archaeological finds are providing new insights.
Recent excavations atop the hill in the City of David, has revealed a substantial structure which could have been a palace. Pottery from this site dates it to the 11th and 10th centuries BCE. A few archaeologists have suggested that this structure may have been the palace of King David and his successors.
Additional information comes from inscriptions which were found in the ancient city of Dan. These inscriptions, written in Aramaic, claim that a king, possibly King Hazael of Damascus, conquered Dan and killed both Joram, the son of Ahab, the King of Israel, and Ahaziah, the son of Jehorma, the King of the House of David. In her essay on biblical inscriptions in Discovery! Unearthingthe New Treasures of Archaeology, biblical archaeologist Roberta Harris reports:
“The latter phrase—very clear in the text—is of the greatest significance because it is the first reference to the dynasty of King David found archaeologically. Since the inscription dates to the 9th century BC, at least a century after the death of David, it is a very contentious piece of evidence for the two ‘camps’ of scholars who argue for and against the actual existence of David and Solomon and even the Kingdom of Judah itself in the 10th century BC.”
Jericho
From an archaeological perspective, Jericho (Tell es-Sultan) is an important site which dates back to the Natufian period at about 11,000 BCE. Kathleen Kenyon carried out extensive scientific archaeological excavations at Jericho from 1953 to 1958. In his book Archaeologists: Explorers of the Human Past, Brian Fagan reports:
“Initially, her primary goal was to identify the biblical Jericho, whose walls had been felled by Joshua’s trumpets during the 13th century BC—a dramatic Old Testament account that appealed to wealthy donors.”
As Kenyon’s team began their archaeological excavation at Jericho, radiocarbon dating was just becoming available. While it was common thought that Jericho had been founded about 4000 BCE, the radiocarbon dates showed a much earlier settlement, going back to the very beginnings of agriculture.
Earlier observers and archaeologists had noted that Jericho seemed to have ancient fortified walls. However, Kenyon’s meticulous work dated these fortifications to the Bronze Age, much earlier than the biblical accounts. Brian Fagan writes:
“Biblical scholars were disconcerted by these findings, which caused much controversy between archaeologists and those who believed that the Old Testament was the historical truth and an accurate account of what had happened in the past.”
Kenyon found that the site of Jericho had been destroyed about 1550 BCE and was deserted until the early part of the Iron Age which means that at the time of Joshua and the Israelites, Jericho was uninhabited. Alice Beck Kehoe reports:
“What Kenyon shows at the oasis of Jericho is a deep series of occupations going from the earliest farmers at the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age, through thousands of years as a commercial town. Not only were there no inscriptions naming a leader ‘Moses” or “Joshua’, but it is likely that the city was uninhabited at the time scholars think Joshua existed—if he existed at all. The same situation was demonstrated at the many other sites simplistically associated with biblical personages by eager theologians.”
With regard to Kathleen Kenyon’s archaeological findings at the site of Jericho, Eric Cline reports:
“Thus, the archaeological finds and the biblical account are asymmetrical (or inconsistent with each other) at a site fundamentally important to the account of the Israelite conquest as Jericho.”
Yahweh and His Wife
Another area of controversy involves the archaeological evidence that Yahweh had a wife. In 1968 archaeologists found a Hebrew cemetery inscription from the eighth century BCE at the site of Khirbet el- Qôm. The inscription gives the name of the deceased, and it says: “blessed may he be by Yahweh and his Asherah.” Asherah is the name of the old Canaanite Mother Goddess, the consort of El, the principal deity of the Canaanite pantheon. At the site of Kuntillet Ajrud in the Sinai, which dates to this same period, there are numerous “Yahweh and Asherah” inscriptions. While God’s consort Asherah was expelled from the written traditions, archaeological evidence shows that people at this time—the eighth-century BCE—believed that Asherah was Yahweh’s wife and that she was an important deity.
Christianity
With regard to early Christianity, John Lanci, in his entry on Early Christianity in The Oxford Companion to Archaeology, writes:
“Direct archaeological evidence for the early development of Christianity is scant and difficult to interpret.”
Many of the artifacts, such as the cross, which are distinctly Christian, do not appear in the archaeological record until the second century C.E. According to John Lanci:
“As a result, archaeological study cannot confirm the historical accuracy of biblical texts, and rarely sheds light on important early Christian figures, including Jesus and his first followers.”
While the archaeology of the Hebrew Bible covers a fairly large period of time (about 1,500 years) and a large geographic territory (most of what people today call the Middle East), the archaeology of early Christianity focuses on a shorter period of time (about two centuries) and a smaller region (the Mediterranean area). Eric Cline reports:
“Archaeology has not yet been able to shed any direct light on the birth, life, or death of Jesus. That is to say, there is not yet any archaeological evidence for the historical Jesus—or any of the apostles for that matter.”
One of the other controversies has involved the Shroud of Turin which some people claimed was used for wrapping the body of Jesus. Archaeologists uncovered a sealed tomb in Jerusalem in which the remains had not been transferred to an ossuary a year after death, as was customary 2,000 years ago. In the tomb they found a preserved shroud. Writing in Archaeology, Mati Milstein reports:
“The researchers also announced that the shroud, radiocarbon dated to A.D. 1-50, supports the idea that the Shroud of Turin had not been used to wrap the body of Jesus after his crucifixion. The Jerusalem shroud is made of simply-woven linen and wool, while the Shroud of Turin is made of a complex twill weave, a fabric not thought to have been available in the region until the Middle Ages.”
Is the Bible Reliable History?
Biblical archaeology is, at times, controversial, particularly when its findings fail to verify or conflict with strongly held foundational beliefs. Alice Beck Kehoe writes:
“At the crux of the controversy over biblical archaeology is the belief held by fundamentalists that the truth of their faith depends upon whether the Bible is reliable history.”
Reliable history here refers to the description of actual events and people in the past, and the Bible, like the oral histories of nonliterate peoples, fails at this task, perhaps because that is not the purpose of these kinds of histories.
The Bible, like other oral histories, can help provide some insights into past cultures and thus help explain the archaeological record. Archaeologist Chris Catling, in an essay in Current World Archaeology, writes with regard to the Old Testament:
“The first five books are packed with information of value to anyone seeking to understand archaeological phenomena.”
This includes information on the reasons for erecting standing stones and stone circles; insights into sacrifices; methods of burials; and so on.
Religion 101
Religion 101 is a series of essays on topics relating to religion in which the concept of religion is not restricted to modern Western religions nor to religions which are centered on belief in gods. More from this series:
Religion 102: Biblical Archaeology
Religion 102: Agnosticism
Religion 101: The Meaning of Ghosts
Religion 101: Ancestor Worship in Ancient Europe and the Arctic
Religion 101: Ceremonial Human Sacrifice
Religion 201: Reincarnation
Religion 102: Naturalism