What Archaeology CanTell About Ancient

In his book What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel, Dever presents in an extremely lucid manner what will turn out to be a shocking expose in the realm of archaeology and interdisciplinary scholarship. Beginning with a discussion on just how useful the Bible really is to the current age, Dever makes a bold claim: this is “a time when the biblical literature—indeed the entire biblical tradition—is being dismissed by so many as ‘irrelevant,’ even by those in Synagogue, Church, and Seminary” (3). Dever deals predominately in his text with the effects on archaeology due to the spread of the post-modernistic movement. To his way of thinking, “honest inquiry, scholarly documentation, and reasoned discourse have been replaced by ideology and politics in many social science disciplines” (247).

The central theme to Dever’s argument is that there must be a historical ancient Israel; the documentation of its existence is proven through archaeological discovery. To prove his point, Dever spends a good amount of pages in the middle of his book discussing various finds that to his mind prove the truthfulness of historicity of Israel. Bullae (206), idols (193), engravings (128), and pottery (232) among others are brought into play by Dever to support his thesis. Repeatedly he presents evidence, and uses it to make the point that there is no possible way due to the age of the find and the way it fell out of common use that writers “making up” a historical Israel would have known enough about the objects to include such details as are found in the Biblical record (157).


The remainder of the book deals with the conundrum of just who makes history (105). Should it be the people who are in power? The masses? The elite? Though some amount of fallacy is inevitable in any historical recounting, Dever sets out some applicable guidelines which he feels can be of help in evaluating the validity of historical accounts (107-108).

Overall, the book is an amazing expose of the dangers from revisionists threatening the archaeological and religious community. Dever’s writing is impassioned and erudite. For someone with only a casual interest in archaeology there is enough interdisciplinary information in the book to make the information applicable and relevant to other fields. For an archaeologist, especially one with religious interests, the book should serve as a massive wake up call, and additionally a call to action. If revisionism is allowed to continue creeping into every area as quietly as it has in the past, Dever points out that the only possibility left is to react, and weak and hardly effective position. What Dever ultimately calls for is a proactive movement- to take back Biblical scholarship before the current “scholars” destroy it (295-298). ( )

Dr. Dever takes a sensible, pragmatic view of what we can learn of the history of ancient Israel from both the material culture findings of archaeologists and the nuggets of historical information that can be found in the Biblical narration by "reading between the lines". He decries the recent trend among scholars who espouse the "low chronology" to simply dismiss the entire Old Testament as an elaborate fiction created only in Hellenistic or Roman times, and therefore having no real historical value.
Devers points out that, while the Biblical writers clearly had a strong theological bias, they often mention facts or use expressions that refer to the workings of daily life, many of which link their narrations to known historical events or specific time periods. These references can be linked to material archaeological findings. For example, there are numerous references to specific weights, measures and scales in Old Testament scriptures relating to the period of the Divided Monarchy (approximately 9th through early 6th Centuries BCE). These can be directly linked to scores of standardized limestone weights labelled with Egyptian hieratic numerals found in dig strata dating to precisely this period. Yet, this measurement system was abandoned after the Babylonian captivity and the Hellenistic conquest of Palestine; hence, it would not have been used in documents created during the Hellenistic period. Such correlations both teach us about actual daily life in ancient Israel, and delineate the actual period during which each of these scriptures was composed.
On the down side, Dr. Devers has a habit of putting the chapters with criticism of other scholars at the beginning of his books, as he has done here, so that one has to search through several chapters before reaching the actual "meat" to which the title of the book refers. These chapters are of more interest to scholars in the field than to intelligent laymen, who would be best advised to skip ahead to the more topical chapters first.
Otherwise, this book, like his others, does a fascinating job of revealing a "truth" about the history of ancient Israel that encompasses both the material findings of archaeology and the nuggets of information contained in that remarkable archive of ancient documents we know as the Bible.

http://stromata.tripod.com/id279.htm ( )