The Bible, Archaeology, and the History of Early Israel

By: Ralph K. Hawkins

The problem of the relationship between the Bible and archaeology is an old one, and archaeological trends over the last several decades have shifted away from using the Bible. For those working in biblical or Near Eastern studies, however, the question has an abiding relevance. What are the terms of engagement for a productive dialogue between the two disciplines?

I was first introduced to this question in 1992, in a master’s seminar in the book of Joshua. And when I began doing archaeological fieldwork in 1995, I experienced it firsthand. These experiences instilled within me a deep interest in the emergence of Israel in Canaan, and I finally decided to try my hand at writing a historical and archaeological reconstruction of this process entitled How Israel Became a People (2013). Since I had been working with the biblical text for several years, I realized that, while the author(s) of the Book of Joshua utilized some historical materials, he used them mainly for theological reasons and not to write an exhaustive, secular history that explains Israel’s appearance in the land of Canaan, with all its sociological, domestic, economic, and agricultural details. The account in Joshua, therefore, is a product of an Israelite author’s (or authors’) faith, an author who is seeking to “preach,” as it were.

But the task of writing a history of early Israel’s emergence in the land of Canaan is not focused on subjective theological questions, but on objective history. What actually happened in the process of Israel’s appearance in the land of Canaan? How did Israel come to be in the land? When they failed to drive out the Canaanites, how did they “live with the people” (as in Joshua 15:63)?  How did the Israelites define themselves ethnically and religiously, in contrast to the indigenous inhabitants of the land of Canaan? A historical and archaeological reconstruction that would answer these questions would necessarily be motivated by a completely different set of concerns than those that motivated the author of the book of Joshua, whose concerns were primarily religious.

The Historical Task

If it is necessary to reconstruct early Israel’s settlement in Canaan, then how are we to go about it? In a 1946 book entitled On History, the French historian Fernand Braudel outlined three “speeds” of history, including: (1) the history of events; (2) social history; and (3) la longue durée, or history over “the long term.” The history of events focuses primarily on rulers, wars, treaties, and foreign relations. Social history, on the other hand, includes concerns such as the history of families, governments, and the evolution of institutions. Finally, the focus of la longue durée is on the history of people’s relationship to their natural environment.

The traditional focus in history writing has been on the first of these, the history of events, and this is also the focus of the biblical authors. Obviously, this stream of events hovers above the market economy and is comprised of its upper limit. The second speed is much slower and represents the everyday material life, including the labor and exchange carried out by countless numbers of forgotten villagers in their quest for food, clothing, and shelter. These everyday events of material life constitute the deepest undercurrents of history. The third stream of history, history over the long duration, concerns people’s relationship to their natural environment. Reconstruction of early Israel’s appearance in Canaan must take into account all three of these dynamics of history.

Two Texts for Writing a History of Israel

In order to write such a history, two main texts must be used: the Hebrew Bible and archaeology. First, the Hebrew Bible must be used, but with an eye for two traditions between which the late professor of theology Rainer Kessler distinguished in the text, the “intentional” and the “unintentional” traditions. Critically, Kessler observed that “almost everything that interests us in our attempt at social-historical reconstruction appears only incidentally in the texts we use as our sources.”For example, in Jeremiah 32, the prophet buys a field during Nebuchadrezzar’s siege of Judah. The text goes into some detail about how Jeremiah weighed out seventeen shekels of silver for his cousin, signed and sealed a deed, secured witnesses, and carried out the transaction.

The goal of this passage, however, is not to educate readers about mercantile activity in the 6th century BCE. Instead, it is to inform readers about something theological: Yahweh’s promise that, despite the impending exile, Israel still had a future in the land into which Yahweh had brought them. Narrative texts in the Hebrew Bible like this one are typically interested in the theological significance of events, and simply assume the circumstances within which those events occur as background. In order to reconstruct the early history of Israel, however, careful attention must be paid to such “unintentional” details that may illuminate early Israel’s social life and relationship to the environment.

The other major “text” for use in reconstructing the early history of Israel is archaeology, but not as a “proof-text.” Such usage led to the burgeoning of Syro-Palestinian archaeology as a separate discipline, distinct from biblical studies, and this is the methodology that should be used in reconstructing the early history of Israel.

This “New Archaeology” was heavily influenced by New World archaeology and anthropology and is, in fact, often referred to as “anthropological archaeology.” Ultimately, the goal of anthropological archaeology is to investigate and explain culture, which is defined as a specific people group’s adaptation to the environment, their patterned individual and social responses, and the recognition that these features of culture are ever-changing. Any effort to reconstruct the early history of Israel cannot simply be a re-telling of the narrative of the Book of Joshua, nor can it simply be an illumination of the details of the book of Joshua by use of archaeological remains. Instead, it must seek to reconstruct the emergence of early Israel as a socio-ethnic entity with its own distinctive culture in the central hill-country of Canaan.

The Necessity of Dialogue

The Hebrew Bible and anthropological archaeology both provide data. Some have argued that scholars should only use the data provided by archaeology to reconstruct the early history of Israel. Archaeologists can certainly write narratives without the use of texts, and pre-historians do this all the time. However, in the absence of texts that provide interpretive constraints, historical reconstructions may defy credulity. There are some scholars who have written histories of ancient Palestine utilizing only archaeological data, but some of these are skewed accounts, since they give preference to one data set and exclude the other.

The reality is that excavated data has the same limitations as texts. While artifacts are “facts,” they must still be interpreted. In addition, they are also “selective,” not by an editorial process (as in the case of a text) but by the natural processes that randomly determine what will be preserved and therefore represented in the archaeological record. Instead of treating one data set as more “primary” than the other, we must recognize the limits of both. A balanced approach to the study of ancient Israel’s history will be “holistic,” in that it will allow for a dialogue between the two data sets of text and artifact.

Ralph K. Hawkins is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Averett University. He is the author of The Iron Age I Structure on Mt. Ebal: Excavation and Interpretation (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012) and How Israel Became a People (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2013).