ABSTRACT
I must begin by saying something about the nature of the Bible, and the nature of archaeology, which will at least reveal my starting point. Like all other written books, including other holy books, the Bible is in the first place (whatever value we set upon it) a human artefact, with a human history. It is the product of many different human minds of varying ability, written by human hands of varied powers of co-ordination, copied and recopied by scribes of varied intelligence, printed and bound by craftsmen of varying standards of skill, read and interpreted by Jews and Christians and agnostics and atheists of differing hermeneutical approaches. It is also a book of very varied origins and contents. It is an anthology containing ancient Jewish laws, legends, myths, hymns, songs, love lyrics, proverbs, prophecies, stories, biographies, histories, letters, visions, philosophical reflection and so on, written at different times between, let us say, the eighth century BCE and the early second century of this era. Its many authors wrote to meet the needs of their own times rather than our own. The historians among them wrote history as they saw it, and they presented the past of Israel in terms designed to meet their own political or religious agenda, not our agenda. Divine inspiration may have led them to write better than they knew, but nevertheless they were writing as human beings for their own human situation, and could not have known what use later generations might make of their work or what interpretations they might put on it. And their work is itself part of history, and the historical books of the Bible are part of ancient historiography, to be read and studied alongside other ancient writings and other evidence of that past. And among that ‘other’ evidence is, of course, what we loosely call ‘archaeology’.
