The Indiana Jones movies have raised interest in archaeology, but they’ve also misrepresented it pretty badly. For starters, the guy in the cool hat accomplished 15 or 20 lifetimes’ worth of archaeological discovery in just a handful of movies. Most archaeology is pretty boring to people who aren’t cut out for it; it’s a lot of digging in the dirt, slowly, methodically, sweatingly, and finding nothing of substance over the course of several summer digs. A potsherd will make your week, and a scarab or a ring will make your year. The chances of your finding something historically or economically significant are slim.
Patience. Only those who love archaeology are likely to persist.
And over the decades, those who love it have found some remarkable things.
Archaeology is a global endeavor—or maybe I should call it a sport—and every continent has yielded finds to the persistent. But my field is the Bible, and since the biblical narrative is confined to Egypt and the Middle East—and mostly in Israel—my focus is on a relatively small portion of the globe.
Some few of these discoveries get attention in the popular press, and a disturbingly large portion of those popular reports are just wrong—sometimes accidentally, because the concepts are complex, and sometimes intentionally, to stir up interest and get hits on somebody’s web page. (No, archaeologists did not find chariot wheels at the bottom of the Red Sea.)
But there are genuine, significant discoveries. Pretty much everybody’s heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Some significant discoveries tell us simply about what the culture was like in ancient days. (The linked article, by the way, has the “click-bait” title typical of reports in the popular press.) That’s probably the most common type. Others help us understand ancient languages better.
There’s another subset of these discoveries that I find particularly interesting, because of what they tell us about history.
If you grew up in a Christian school or home school, you studied both world history and the Bible. I don’t know if you noticed, but world history and biblical history seem to have different casts of characters.
World history had Hammurabi and Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar.
Biblical history had Adam and Noah and Abraham and David and Ezra and Paul.
Different characters.
Oh, there’s a little overlap. Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus and Caesar Augustus show up in both stories. But overall the two seem to be very different.
There are good reasons for the difference, of course. The biblical narrative begins before the start of written records or a surviving material culture—especially before the Flood—placing that period out of the reach of historians. And after that, the biblical story is focused on the development of a small nation without much political power, rather than on the great world powers, except as their plans intersect with that small nation of Israel.
But skeptics often consign biblical history to the legend bin because the stories are so different.
And thus I consider certain archaeological finds interesting because they bridge the gap between the two stories; they serve to tie the two stories together in a historical way.
Something I particularly like about these intersections is that they tend to be small. They don’t connect David or Solomon, say, with the incipient Assyrians, which would get serious headlines; rather they tell us about little details, such as the name of Jeremiah’s scribe, or the amount of gold traded between a couple of cities in the time of Abraham. I would suggest that a forger is not likely to be interested in these sorts of data. They don’t have the popular punch of, say, Hitler’s diaries.
In the next few posts, I’d like to present a few of these discoveries, ending with an observation about their significance.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
