Biblical archaeology school - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

This article presents information on Biblical archaeology as an academic movement; for major excavations and artifacts relating to Biblical archaeology, see Biblical archaeology (excavations and artifacts) and List of artifacts significant to the Bible. For the interpretation of Biblical archaeology in relation to Biblical historicity, see The Bible and history
The Bible and history
The Bible from a historical perspective, includes numerous fields of study, ranging from archeology and astronomy to linguistics and methods of comparative literature. The Bible may provide insight into pursuits, including but not limited to; our understanding of ancient and modern culture,...

.

Biblical archaeology, also known as Palestinology is the school of archaeology

Archaeology

Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...

which concerns itself with the biblical world.

18th Century

Adriaan Reland

Adriaan Reland was a Dutch scholar, cartographer and philologist....

, professor of philosophy at the University of Harderwijk

University of Harderwijk

The University of Harderwijk , also named the Guelders Academy , was located in the town of Harderwijk, in the Republic of the United Provinces...

, was one of the early Orientalists, teaching Hebrew antiquities from 1713.. Although he never ventured beyond the borders of the Netherlands

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

, he was also acclaimed as a cartographer and published the first modern work of Biblical archaeology, Palaestina ex monumentis veteribus illustrata, a detailed geographical survey of Palestine

Palestine

Palestine is a conventional name, among others, used to describe the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands....

in 1696 written in Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

and published by Willem Broedelet, Utrecht, in 1714.

19th Century

The foundations of biblical archaeology were laid in the 19th century with the work of antiquarians such as Johann Jahn

Johann Jahn

Johann Jahn, was a German Orientalist. He studied at the Faculty of Philosophy of University of Olomouc, and in 1772 began his theological studies at the Premonstratensian convent of Bruck, near Znaim...

, whose manual of biblical antiquities, Biblische Archäologie, (1802, translated into English 1839) was immensely influential in the middle years of the 19th century.

Shortly thereafter, Edward Robinson

Edward Robinson (scholar)

Edward Robinson was an American biblical scholar, known as the “Father of Biblical Geography.” He has been referred to as the “founder of modern Palestinology.” -Biography:...

, known as the founder of modern Palestinology published the bestselling Biblical Researches in Palestine, the Sinai, Petrae and Adjacent Regions (1841), which prompted a group of English clergymen and scholars to found the Palestine Exploration Fund

Palestine Exploration Fund

The Palestine Exploration Fund is a British society often simply known as the PEF. It was founded in 1865 and is still functioning today. Its initial object was to carry out surveys of the topography and ethnography of Ottoman Palestine with a remit that fell somewhere between an expeditionary...

"to promote research into the archaeology and history, manners and customs and culture, topography, geology and natural sciences of biblical Palestine and the Levant" in 1865.

This was followed by the Deutscher Palästina-Verein (1877) and the École Biblique (1890).

Early 20th Century

The American School of Oriental Research was founded in (1900), and the British School of Archaeology in (1919). The research these institutions sponsored, at least in these early days, was primarily geographic, and it was not until the 1890s that Sir Flinders Petrie introduced the basic principles of scientific excavation, including stratigraphy

Stratigraphy

Stratigraphy, a branch of geology, studies rock layers and layering . It is primarily used in the study of sedimentary and layered volcanic rocks....

and ceramic typology to Palestinian archaeology.

William F. Albright and the Biblical Archaeology school

The dominant figure in 20th century biblical archaeology, defining its scope and creating the mid-century consensus on the relationship between archaeology, the Bible, and the history of ancient Israel, was William F. Albright

William F. Albright

William Foxwell Albright was an American archaeologist, biblical scholar, philologist and expert on ceramics. From the early twentieth century until his death, he was the dean of biblical archaeologists and the universally acknowledged founder of the Biblical archaeology movement...

. An American with roots in the American Evangelical

Evangelicalism

Evangelicalism is a Protestant Christian movement which began in Great Britain in the 1730s and gained popularity in the United States during the series of Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th century.Its key commitments are:...

tradition (his parents were Baptist missionaries in Chile), Director of the American Schools of Oriental Research

American Schools of Oriental Research

The American Schools of Oriental Research, founded in 1900, supports and encourages the study of the peoples and cultures of the Near East, from the earliest times to the present. It is apolitical and has no religious affiliation...

(ASOR), (now the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research) through the `1920s and 1930s, editor of ASOR's Bulletin until 1968, and author of over a thousand books and articles, Albright drew biblical archaeology into the contemporary debates over the origins and reliability of the Bible. In the early decades of the 20th century this debate was dominated by the documentary hypothesis

Documentary hypothesis

The documentary hypothesis , holds that the Pentateuch was derived from originally independent, parallel and complete narratives, which were subsequently combined into the current form by a series of redactors...

. This explained the Bible as the composite product of authors working between the 10th and 5th centuries BC, and raised the question of whether the books of the bible could be regarded as a reliable source of information for Solomon’s period or earlier." European scholars such as Hermann Gunkel

Hermann Gunkel

Hermann Gunkel was a German Protestant Old Testament scholar. He is noted for his contribution to form criticism and the study of oral tradition in biblical texts. He was an outstanding representative of the "History of Religion School."...

, Albrecht Alt

Albrecht Alt

Albrecht Alt , was a leading German Protestant theologian.Eldest son of a Lutheran minister, he completed high school in Ansbach and studied theology at the Friedrich-Alexander-University in Erlangen and the University of Leipzig...

and Martin Noth

Martin Noth

Martin Noth was a German scholar of the Hebrew Bible who specialized in the pre-Exilic history of the Hebrews. With Gerhard von Rad he pioneered the traditional-historical approach to biblical studies, emphasising the role of oral traditions in the formation of the biblical texts.-Life:Noth was...

were suggesting that the books of the Old Testament rested on a body of oral tradition that reflected genuine history, but could not themselves be regarded as historically accurate. Albright saw archaeology as the a practical means to test these ideas. Biblical archaeology, for him, therefore embraced all lands and any finds that could "throw some light, directly or indirectly, on the Bible."

Albright and his followers believed that archaeology could and should be used to shed light on the Biblical narrative, particularly the Old Testament

Old Testament

The Old Testament, of which Christians hold different views, is a Christian term for the religious writings of ancient Israel held sacred and inspired by Christians which overlaps with the 24-book canon of the Masoretic Text of Judaism...

. The influential academic positions held by Albright and his followers, and their immense output - Albright alone was the author of over a thousand books and articles - made their work highly influential, especially in America, and especially among ordinary Christians who wished to believe that archaeology had proved the Bible true. In fact the members of the school were not biblical literalists

Biblical literalism

Biblical literalism is the interpretation or translation of the explicit and primary sense of words in the Bible. A literal Biblical interpretation is associated with the fundamentalist and evangelical hermeneutical approach to Scripture, and is used almost exclusively by conservative Christians...

, and their main concern was to discriminate between those parts of the biblical story that were true and those that were embellishments.

By the middle of the 20th century the work of Albright and his students, notably Nelson Glueck

Nelson Glueck

Nelson Glueck was an American rabbi, academic and archaeologist. Dr Glueck served as president of Hebrew Union College from 1947 until his death, and his pioneering work in biblical archaeology resulted in the discovery of 1,500 ancient sites....

, E. A. Speiser, G. Ernest Wright

G. Ernest Wright

George Ernest Wright , was a leading Old Testament scholar and biblical archaeologist. Expert in Ancient Near Eastern archaeology, he was especially known for his work in the study and dating of pottery.-Biography:...

and Cyrus Gordon, had produced a consensus that biblical archaeology had provided physical evidence for the originating historical events behind the Old Testament narratives: in the words of Albright, "Discovery after discovery has established the accuracy of innumerable details of the Bible as a source of history." The consensus allowed the creation of authoritative textbooks such as John Bright

John Bright (biblical scholar)

John Bright was an American biblical scholar, the author of several important books including the influential A History of Israel , currently in its fourth edition. He was closely associated with the American school of Biblical criticism pioneered by William F...

's History of Israel (1959). Bright did not believe that the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph could be regarded as reliable history, or that it was possible to reconstruct the origins of Israel from the biblical text alone, but he did believe that the stories in Genesis reflected the physical reality of the 20th–17th centuries BC, and that it was therefore possible to write a history of the origins of Israel by comparing the biblical accounts with what was known of the time from other sources.

Biblical archaeology today

The Albrightian consensus was overturned in the second half of the 20th century. Improved archaeological methods, notably Kathleen Kenyon

Kathleen Kenyon

Dame Kathleen Mary Kenyon , was a leading archaeologist of Neolithic culture in the Fertile Crescent. She is best known for her excavations in Jericho in 1952-1958.-Early life:...

's excavations at Jericho

Jericho

Jericho ; is a city located near the Jordan River in the West Bank of the Palestinian territories. It is the capital of the Jericho Governorate and has a population of more than 20,000. Situated well below sea level on an east-west route north of the Dead Sea, Jericho is the lowest permanently...

, did not support the conclusions the biblical archaeologists had drawn, with the result that central theories squaring the biblical narrative with archaeological finds, such as Albright's reconstruction of Abraham as an Amorite

Amorite

Amorite refers to an ancient Semitic people who occupied large parts of Mesopotamia from the 21st Century BC...

donkey caravaneer, were rejected by the archaeological community. The challenge reached its climax with the publication of two important studies: In 1974 Thomas L. Thompson

Thomas L. Thompson

Thomas L. Thompson is a biblical theologian associated with the movement known as the Copenhagen School. He was professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen from 1993–2009, lives in Denmark and is now a Danish citizen.-Background:Thompson obtained a B.A...

's The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives
The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives
The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives is a book by biblical scholar Thomas L. Thompson, Professor of Old Testament Studies at the University of Copenhagen....

re-examined the record of biblical archaeology in relation to the Patriarchal narratives in Genesis and concluded that "not only has archaeology not proven a single event of the Patriarchal narratives to be historical, it has not shown any of the traditions to be likely." and in 1975 John Van Seters

John Van Seters

John Van Seters is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East. Currently University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, he was formerly James A. Gray Professor of Biblical Literature at UNC. He took his PhD at Yale University in Near Eastern Studies...

' Abraham in History and Tradition
Abraham in History and Tradition
Abraham in History and Tradition is a book by biblical scholar John Van Seters.The book is divided into two parts, Abraham in History and Abraham in Tradition. In Part I part Van Seters argues that there is no unambiguous evidence pointing to an origin for the stories in the 2nd millennium BC...

reached a similar conclusion about the usefulness of tradition history: "A vague presupposition about the antiquity of the tradition based upon a consensus approval of such arguments should no longer be used as a warrant for proposing a history of the tradition related to early premonarchic times."

At the same time a new generation of archaeologists, notably William G. Dever

William G. Dever

William G. Dever is an American archaeologist, specialising in the history of Israel and the Near East in Biblical times. He was Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Arizona in Tucson from 1975 to 2002...

, criticized Biblical archaeology for failing to take note of the revolution in archaeology known as processualism

Processual archaeology

Processual archaeology is a form of archaeological theory that had its genesis in 1958 with Willey and Phillips' work Method and Theory in American Archeology, in which the pair stated that "American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing" , a rephrasing of Frederic William Maitland's...

, which saw the discipline as a scientific one allied to anthropology, rather than as a part of the corpus of the humanities linked to history and theology. Biblical archaeology, Dever said, remained "altogether too narrowly within a theological angle of vision," and should be abandoned and replaced with a regional Syro-Palestinian archaeology operating within a processual framework.

Dever was broadly successful: most archaeologists working in the world of the Bible today do so within a processual or post-processual

Post-processual archaeology

Post-processual archaeology, which is sometimes alternately referred to as the interpretative archaeologies by its adherents, is a movement in archaeological theory that emphasizes the subjectivity of archaeological interpretations...

framework: yet few describe themselves in these terms. The reasons for this attachment to the old nomenclature are complex, but are connected with the link between excavators (especially American ones) and the denominational institutions and benefactors who employ and support them, and with the unwillingness of biblical scholars, both conservative and liberal, to reject the link between the Bible and archaeology. The result has been a blurring of the distinction between the theologically-based archaeology that interprets the archaeological record as "substantiating in general the theological message of a God who acts in history," and Dever's vision of Syro-Palestinian archaeology

Syro-Palestinian archaeology

Syro-Palestinian archaeology is a term used to refer to archaeological research conducted in the southern Levant. Palestinian archaeology is also commonly used in its stead, particularly when the area of inquiry centers on ancient Palestine...

as an "independent, secular discipline ... pursued by cultural historians for its own sake."

18th Century

19th Century

Early 20th Century

William F. Albright and the Biblical Archaeology school

Biblical archaeology today

See also