ABSTRACT
The southern Levant (modern Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories, southern Lebanon/ Syria and the Sinai Peninsula) is holy land to three world religions-Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Believers and affiliates of these great religions make up more than 3 billion people-over half the world’s population. They all have a vested interest-religious, intellectual, and/or political-in this small land bridge that joins Southwest Asia and the African continent. From the highlands of Judea and Samaria and the West Bank, to the coastal areas of Israel; from the plateau and lowlands of Jordan to the Negev and Sinai deserts-this land provides the geographical setting where the stories of the patriarchs and prophets revealed to us in sacred Scriptures took place. This is the land where the material culture of these ancient societies lay buried. From its 19th-century beginnings until today, the primary force that still drives the major excavation projects in this area is the ancient scriptures-first the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, then the New Testament and finally, the Koran. This can be documented by the amount of money invested in archaeological projects in the region by period. Say the words ‘Levantine Archaeology’ and most people around the world will have no idea what we are speaking about. This book is about exploring the historicity of aspects of the Hebrew Bible through archaeological research using the most objective scientific dating methods currently available. It is based on an international conference of Levantine archaeologists, Biblical scholars, Egyptologists and radiocarbon dating specialists that took place in September 2004, at Yarnton Manor-home of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. From a methodological perspective, this book will speak to all scholars interested in the relationship between archaeology and history. Both of these fields of inquiry about the past have had a kind of love-hate relationship based on the perceived reliability of one being able to glean more ‘truth’ about the past than the other. Representing one of the most negative views of archaeology is Philip Grierson (1959: 129) who wrote that
On the positive side is John Moreland (2001), who in his recent summary of the relationship of archaeology and textual evidence entitled Archaeology and Text, argues that we have now gone beyond the ‘servant and master’ relationship where the word always took precedence over artifacts. Due to the robust methodological underpinnings of archaeology, it can no longer be viewed as the ‘handmaiden’ of history, where history provided the historical framework based on written texts and archaeology simply supplied the matter to illustrate history. For Moreland (2001: 31) the relationship between history and archaeology can now be renegotiated due to the realization that both artifacts and ancient texts played active roles in the production, negotiation, and transformation of social relations in past societies. Thus, structurally similar critical methodologies can be applied to both archaeological and textual data to objectively understand the social context in which these data are interwoven in our quest to understand ancient societies. However, when researchers study historical ancient societies within the time span of ca. 3000 BCE to 500 CE, the paucity of written texts and inscribed evidence inevitably means that alternative sources of objective chronometric data are needed for establishing crucial chronological sequences so that historical and anthropological modeling can take place. This is the case for historical archaeologists working in regions as disparate as south India (Abraham 2003), Mesoamerica (Hodell et al. 2001; Pohl 2002; Pope et al. 2001), Mesopotamia (Guilderson, Reimer, and Brown 2005; Hasel 2004; Weiss et al. 1993), the Aegean (Manning et al. 2001, and Chapter 7, this volume), or the Levant discussed in this volume. Until fairly recently, amongst archaeologists, the application of radiocarbon dating in Near Eastern archaeological contexts has been characterised by a great deal
of scepticism over its usefulness, particularly in terms of its precision. The prevailing notion has been that in light of ceramic typologies, textual and historical information, and cross-correlated material culture from the wider eastern Mediterranean, there really is little need for absolute scientific dating (see Bruins 2001; van der Plicht and Bruins 2001). This situation is now beginning to change, but researchers wanting to take advantage of the available on-line calibration curves to establish sub-century chronological resolution, must overcome, as Guilderson, Reimer, and Brown (2005: 364) point out, ‘the calibration curve and its inherent limitations’. Bronk Ramsey (Chapter 5, this volume) discusses these problems in detail with special attention to the southern Levant. The chapters presented in this book demonstrate that Levantine archaeologists working with the historical, especially Biblical periods, have stepped up to the plate to apply the new advances in radiocarbon calibration and chronological modeling that can serve as touchstone for historical archaeologists working around the globe. Use the words ‘Biblical Archaeology’ and it is fair to say that most people will understand we are dealing with the archaeology of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. Given our scholarly obligation to transmit the knowledge we discover to the public, it seems appropriate to maintain the concept-Biblical Archaeology-for those periods that have direct relevance to these scriptures. This is especially true for the Iron Age, the main theme of this book, which is the primary timeslice in which the main events of the Hebrew Bible take place: the Exodus, the settlement of the Tribes of Israel in the land, the histories of the United Monarchy, the Divided Kingdoms of Judah and Israel, and neighboring polities such as Edom, Moab, Philistia, and others. Testing theories concerning the historicity of the processes, events and individuals associated with the Iron Age are contingent on our use of objective tools for dating. This is as true today as it was over hundred years ago when Sir Flinders Petrie first developed the principle of relative dating or seriation in Egypt. Over the past two decades, the term ‘Biblical Archaeology’ has taken on a pejorative connotation precisely because of the intimate relationship bound up in this term’s allusion to the mutual relationship between text and artifact-in this case the emotionally charged views of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament and the tangible material past. A number of scholars have summarized the nature and history of this debate including P.R.S. Moorey (1991), J. Laughlin (2000), I. Finkelstein and N. Silberman (2001), B. Halpern (1995, 1997), W.G. Dever (2001), and others. The public shift away from using the term ‘Biblical Archaeology’ is perhaps marked best by the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) decision to change the name of their flagship public outreach journal, Biblical Archaeologist, to Near Eastern Archaeology in 1998. In the early 1980s, Dever (1981), under the influence of the ‘New Archaeology’ emanating out of the University of Arizona (cf. Schiffer 1976), argued strongly for the independence of historical Levantine archaeology (traditional Biblical archaeology) from it’s perceived inferior role as ‘handmaiden’ to ancient Near Eastern textual scholarship (especially Biblical scholarship) by advocating the use of the term ‘Syro-Palestinian Archaeology’ to separate it from its role as ‘servant’ to the Biblical ‘master’. This effectively ‘killed’ Biblical archaeology as a separate field of inquiry within academic discourse, particularly in the United States. It is ironic that by the early 1990s, Dever (1990) was calling for a ‘New Biblical Archaeology’ in light of the development of ‘PostProcessual Archaeology’ (cf. Hodder 1986) and its critique of the New Archaeology that showed how it failed to integrate the role of history in explanations of culture change. Post-Processual archaeology invigorated Dever, Lawrence Stager (1990) and others with rediscovered confidence that text (the Hebrew Bible) and artifact could be studied together in systematic and objective ways through rigorous methodologies advanced not only by anthropological archaeologists (Levy [ed.] 1995), but historians using the Annales historiography approach (cf. Bintliff 1991; Knapp 1992; Stager 1988, 1990). But it was premature to call for a New Biblical Archaeology, in the early 1990s because historical (Biblical) archaeologists working in the southern Levant had not fully embraced
the science-based methodologies to control time (chronometric methods) and space (e.g. Geographic Information Systems [GIS] and other digital processing technologies [Levy et al. 2001]) that underlie mainstream science-based/anthropological archaeology today. As seen in this volume, archaeologists working on the problem of text and archaeology for the Iron Age history of the Levant have now taken the ‘methodological ball’—and run with it. They have redefined the domain of Biblical Archaeology into something new-the New Biblical Archaeology for the beginning of the 21st century. The Quest for Controlling Time in Biblical Archaeology
Scientific excavations have taken place in the southern Levant since the late 19th century with Petrie’s pioneering excavations at Tell el-Hesi, where early on, he applied his revolutionary relative dating system known as ‘sequence dating’ to date archaeological deposits found on this Palestinian tel. It was Petrie’s revolutionary development of seriation dating that earned him the reputation of a genius because, for the first time, archaeologists had an objective method of dating archaeological assemblages and deposits (Moorey 1991). From a global perspective as well as its beginning in the Holy Land, archaeology’s most precious commodities have been the control of ‘time’ and ‘space’. Time-to clarify historical events and processes; and Space-to isolate the material remains associated with history in meaningful social and temporal contexts (Levy et al. 2001). As shown in the papers presented in this volume, the embrace of science-based methods in the archaeology of the Levant, whether we are talking about radiocarbon dating of Iron Age deposits, provenance studies of the Late Bronze Age Amarna tablets (Goren, Finkelstein, and Na‘aman 2004), or Neutron activation studies of l’melch jars, it seems fair to suggest that a radically different paradigm now exists for the Bronze and Iron Age archaeology of the southern Levant from the traditional Biblical archaeology that was attacked in the 1980s and 1990s (Dever 1982, 1990). Perhaps we can now speak of a New Biblical Archaeology that fundamentally integrates Biblical and extra-Biblical texts, rigorously recorded and analyzed archaeological data to control time and space, and anthropological models to help flesh out new understandings of how and when historical processes occurred in the Holy Land. There will be much controversy in how we interpret high precision radiocarbon dates and other science-based data; however, we have passed the point of no return-absolute dating techniques are now an integral part of our tool box and must be applied in 21st-century Iron Age archaeological research (see Fig. 1.1). How do the seemingly irreconcilable schools of current Biblical scholarship affect the ‘New Biblical Archaeology’? Not as much as some pundits would have us believe. Cultural relativism has practically destroyed cultural anthropology, history, and other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, mostly because there is no consensus on methodology-that is how to record and analyze data. However, the situation for archaeology is markedly different and there is no need to panic (as Finkelstein alludes to in Chapter 3, this volume). Biblical textual scholarship has mostly fallen victim to relativism because of a lack of concern with methodology. It is difficult to learn a minimum of 9 ancient and modern languages to work with the Hebrew Bible. The result has been the emergence of the so-called ‘Biblical minimalist’ approach that is based on pure ‘literary criticism’ and is embodied in the Sheffield and Copenhagen ‘schools’ (cf. Davies 1992; Thompson 1999). The so-called ‘maximalist’ or traditional approach is rooted in historical analysis and command of the ancient languages, history, and archaeology and is characteristic of programs at Harvard University, Penn State University, UCLA, Jerusalem University, and UCSD (Dever 2003; Zevit 2001). Rather than ‘maximalist’, this group should probably be referred to as ‘Historicist’ or something similar. The tools traditional Biblical scholars use to investigate the historicity of the Hebrew Bible are outlined in Figure 1.2.
