abstract
| - This article presents technical information on major excavations and artifacts relating to biblical archaeology, defined as that archaeology which concerns itself with the biblical world. Over the past thirty years, some archaeologists have led an effort to divorce archaeology in Israel from the biblical texts. Reflecting the change in biblical studies from historical reconstruction to textual criticism, the archaeology has become more sociological and processual and less a search for the realia of biblical life. The approach of the founders of the Biblical archaeology school, William F. Albright and G. Ernest Wright who faithfully accepted the biblical events as history have now been seriously questioned. According to Biblical archaeologist William G. Dever, "From the beginnings of what we call biblical archeology, perhaps 150 years ago, scholars, mostly western scholars, have attempted to use archeological data to prove the Bible. And for a long time it was thought to work. William Albright, the great father of our discipline, often spoke of the "archeological revolution." Well, the revolution has come but not in the way that Albright thought. The truth of the matter today is that archeology raises more questions about the historicity of the Hebrew Bible and even the New Testament than it provides answers, and that's very disturbing to some people. Archaeology certainly doesn't prove literal readings of the Bible...It calls them into question, and that's what bothers some people. Most people really think that archaeology is out there to prove the Bible. No archaeologist thinks so." The debate is usually articulated between Biblical maximalists, the assumption that the Bible is historically correct, and Biblical minimalists, the assumption that the Bible is mostly myth. Despite an on-going debate of the issue, the prevailing view still holds that the Bible is not wholly a work of fiction. Dever wrote: Archaeology as it is practiced today must be able to challenge, as well as confirm, the Bible stories. Some things described there really did happen, but others did not. The Biblical narratives about Abraham, Moses, Joshua and Solomon probably reflect some historical memories of people and places, but the 'larger than life' portraits of the Bible are unrealistic and contradicted by the archaeological evidence....I am not reading the Bible as Scripture… I am in fact not even a theist. My view all along—and especially in the recent books—is first that the biblical narratives are indeed 'stories,' often fictional and almost always propagandistic, but that here and there they contain some valid historical information...
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