Why read the Bible?
For the religious believer, of course, the Bible is the word of God and above criticism. There are even some who believe that God dictated the entire thing - in Shakespearian English and complete with punctuation - to the prophets and who view modern translations - which are in modern English and use differing punctuation - with suspicion. How do you know that it's a bad translation? If it says "you" instead of "thou".
Actually, this emphasis on 17th century English is an odd one but it is fairly pervasive. Joseph Smith, prophet of the Mormons, penned his literary work in mock Tudor English, presumably because it was considered more "sacred" to use "thee" and "thou". Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall, a 19th century converty to Islam, used the same "sacred language" in his translation of the Qur'an, but even less successfully.
Putting aside such religious views, with no disrespect to those who hold them, there still remains considerable debate as to how historians and archaeologists should regard the Bible. Does it contain reliable history or should it be put on the bookshelves beside Tolkein's "Lord of the Rings" as a work of pure fiction or, even worse, a piece of nationalistic propaganda on behalf of the Jews?
The first thing is to realise that the Bible is not one book but a collection of 66 individual works. There are poems (of varying quality), religious exhortations, personal letters, historical accounts, apocalyptic prophecies and codes of law. This means that it is impossible to make any statement that would apply to the whole thing: a criticism of the poetry is irrelevant to the law codes, the archaeological considerations that apply to the historical accounts have no bearing whatsoever on the apocalyptic prophecies, and so on.
On an archaeological website, our primary concern is with the historical parts of the Bible. These include the books of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Joshua and Judges, the books of Samuel, the archival records of Kings and Chronicles, the personal accounts of Ezra, Nehemiah and, to a lesser extent, Esther; finally there are the four Gospels and the book of Acts.
Back in the late 18th and early 19th centuries there was a move to dismiss the whole of this corpus as myth and fantasy. (In fact, this attitude has persisted in some quarters down to the present and I know one woman from America who was shocked to her core to visit the British Museum and discover there objects from Ur of the Chaldees and Babylon, cities she had been taught to regard as on a par with Gondor and Perelandria.) The archaeological discoveries that were made in the Middle East from 1750 onwards made this position increasingly untenable.
To the astonishment of the critics and joy of the believers, hieroglyphic and cuneiform records were found that mentioned places and people familiar from the Bible - Jerusalem, Ahab, Jehu, Jehoiakim, Nebuchadnezzar, the Hittites, Sennacherib, Pharaoh Necho, and so on. At the same time "historical" accounts which contradicted the Bible - such as the claim by Berossus that Babylon was founded by Queen Semiramis - were shown to be false. This was the time when triumphant believers could loudly proclaim, "The spade confirms the Book!"
Since then further discoveries have been less supportive of Holy Writ. The vast, grandiose Temple of Solomon, replete with gothic spires and flying buttresses, imagined by some in the 1800s can now be whittled down to a much more modest affair, its fine stonework probably a bare minimum of shaping applied to field stones. The fiercely independent Jehu can now be seen humbly paying tribute to his Assyrian overlord and long-continued Egyptian garrisons and governors have been found in the heart of the supposedly autonomous kingdom of Israel.
Some discoveries, in fact, have flatly contradicted Biblical statements. The excavations of Jericho revealed that at the time when Joshua was believed to be marching around the city and causing its mighty walls to collapse in ruins, the tel was in fact unoccupied. More intense study has shown that the Iron Age, long considered the period of the Israelite invasion, was merely a continuation of Canaanite culture from the preceding Late Bronze Age.
Once more there are calls for the Bible to be dismissed as myth, but it seems to me that such calls represent personal prejudice rather than scientific detachment. Even if the historical records of the Bible are as unreliable as some claim, they also contain statements which have been demonstrated to be true and accurate. It must never be forgotten that a mixture of truth and error is typical of all historical records. The task of the historian is not to accept or dismiss the Bible in toto, but to disentangle the reliable from the unreliable, just as he would with any other historical source.
In another sense, however, even the errors - if they exist - in the Bible are useful to the historian. The stories which a nation or culture tell about themselves are just as interesting to the student of history as the sober recitation of the facts. The "Angels of Mons" are pretty universally disbelieved these days, but the fact that the story was so widely accepted in 1914 tells us a lot about how the British saw themselves and their struggle against the Germans.
In addition, even if every historical statement in the Bible was incorrect, it would still be a valuable historical source book! Historians are interested, not just in kings and battles, but also in the minor details of everyday life. The fact that the kings were buried in the City of David, that a widow's sons could be seized for debt, that men rent their garments as a sign of horror or grief, all these are interesting facts that help us understand the sort of people who lived in the ruins which we dig up.
I have encountered some who objected to the Bible because "it is a religious book". Of course it is! The fact, of which these objectors appear to be ignorant, is that the majority of texts we have from the ancient world are just as religious as the Bible. The boastings of Rameses II about his great victory at Kadesh are larded with prayers to the gods and claims that the gods came down to help and preserve him. The Assyrian records are dated by reference to religious festivals and put battles in second place to the building of temples. Flood stories and creation myths are found among the records on which we base our knowledge of ancient history. We do not reject the whole corpus of cuneiform literature just because Gilgamesh slew a magical monster and spoke to the man who had survived the Flood.
In short, the Bible is a valuable source of historical knowledge, even for the most secular of scientific historians. He may differ from the believer in his estimation of the amount of error it contains, but even the most pessimistic of such estimates still leave plenty of material which will enhance our understanding of Middle Eastern history. When, in addition, we recognise the importance of the Bible for our own history and culture, it becomes one of the "must read" books for everyone. Whether or not you believe in a God or regard youself as religious, you cannot claim to be educated or cultured if you have not read the Bible, any more than you could make those claims while neglecting Shakespeare, P.G. Wodehouse or Chaucer.
finally In actual fact there are snippets of historical information in all the books of the Bible. Amos, for example, begins his prophecy with the chronological information, "The words of Amos, who was among the herdmen of Tekoa, which he saw concerning Israel in the days of Uzziah king of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash king of Israel, two years before the earthquake." (Amos 1:1) Evidence for this earthquake has been found in the archaeology of Palestine and fully justify the significance Amos accorded to it!
Jonah, widely dismissed because of the whale, nonetheless contains a snippet of information about international trade and merchant shipping. Jeremiah gives us vivid pictures of life in the closing years of the kingdom of Judah, St Paul preserves the fact that the Nabateans ruled over Damascus, while Haggai provides invaluable insights into the mentality of the Jews seeking to rebuild Jerusalem. Examples could be multiplied. Return
a mixture of truth and error For example, I have a book which consists of eye-witness accounts of the Battle of Waterloo, a collection of the recollections of those who actually took part in the battle. Not only do the different accounts differ in detail, but some of the most reliable-sounding assertions can be demonstrated to be incorrect! An eye-witness might recollect in great detail firing upon a particular French regiment while other accounts and possibly even battlefield evidence place that regiment at the other end of the battlefield from where the narrator was stationed! Return
© Kendall K. Down 2009
