| Reader's Digest Archeologists are Making Believers of Skeptics Is the Bible True? By: Jeffery L. Sheler The archeological team had been toiling through the hot summer, excavating the ruins of the ancient Isrealite city of Dan in upper Galilee. Gila Cook, the team surveyor, was carefully drawing the stone-paved plaza and walls outside of what had been the city's main gate. Now, as the rays of the afternoon sun angled aross a recently exposed wall, Cook noticed something odd. On the exposed tip of one of the wall's basalt stones, letters were inscribed. Cook called to the team leader, Avraham Biran of Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. As the veteran archeologist knelt to examine the stone, his eyes widened. "My God!" Biran exclaimed. "We have an inscription!" The stone was identified as part of a monument, or stele, from the ninth century B.C. It apparently commemorated the king of Damascus's victory over two enemies: the king of Israel and the House of David. The reference to David was a historical bombshell. Never before had the familiar name of Isreal's ancient warrior king, a central figure in the Old Testament and an ancestor of Jesus', according to the New Testament, been identified in ancient records outside the Bible. Skeptics had long argued that David was a mere legend. Now, at last, there was an inscription written not by a Hebrew scribe but by an enemy of the Isrealites little more than a century after David's presumed lifetime. The 1993 discovery seemed to corroborate the existence of King David's dynasty and, by implication, the man himself. The unearthing of an inscription or artifact can shed new light or cast a shadow on a scrippputral passage. Yet in extraordinary ways, modern archeology is affirming the historical core of the Old and New Testaments, supporting key portions of crucial Biblical stories. Age of the Patriarchs The book of Genesis traces Israel's ancestry to Abraham, a monotheistic nomad who, God promises, will be "father of a mulititude of nations" and whose children will inherit the land of Canaan. God's promise and Israel's ethnic identity are passed from genration to generation from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob. Jacob and his sons, the progenitors of Israel's 12 ancient tribes, are forced by famine to leave Canaan and migrate to Egypt. Modern archeology had found no direct evidence to confirm the Biblical account. Yet scholars like Barry J. Beitzel, professor of Old Testament and Semitic languages at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Ill., are not surprised. These are "family stories" of an obsucre nomad and his descendants, Beitzel says, not geopolitical history of the type one might expect to find preserved in the annals of the kings. Kenneth A. Kitchen, an Egyptologist and Orientalist now retired from the University of Liverpool in England, maintains that archeology and th Bible "match remarkably well" in depicting the historical context of the patriarch narratives. In Genesis 37:28, for example, Joseph, a son of Jacob, is sold into slavery for 20 silver shekels. That, notes Kitchen, was the precise going price of slaves in the region during the 19th through the 17th centruies B.C., as affirmed by documents recoverd from what are now modern Syria and Iraq. Other documents show the price of slaves rising steadily during later centuries. If the story of Joseph had been dreamed up by a sixth-century Jewish scribe, as some skeptics suggest, why doesn't the figure cited match the slave price from that time period? "It's more reasonable to assume that the Biblical data reflect reality." Kitchen says. Flight From Egypt The dramatic story of the Exodus of God's delivering Moses and the Israelite people from bondage in Egypt and leading them back to the Promised Land of Canaan has been called the "central proclamation of the Hebrew Bible." Yet archeologists have found no direct evidence outside of the Bible to support this story or that Moses even existed. Nahum Sarn, professor emeritus of Biblical studies at Bradeis University, says that the Exodus story tracing, as it does, a nation's origins to slavery and oppression "cannot possibly be fictional. No nation would invent for itself an inglorious tradition of this nature," unless it had an authentic core. Notes Universiy of Arizona archeologist William G. Dever, "Slaves, serfs and nomads leave few traces in the archeological record." The dating of the Exodus also has long been a source of controversy. The book of 1 Kings 6:1 gives what appears to be a clear historical marker for the end of the Isreaelite sojourn in Egypt: "In the 480th year after the people of Israel came out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel he began to build the house of the Lord." However, that date does not fit with other Biblical texts or with known Egyptian history. Sarna and others argue that the time span cited, 480 years, should not be taken literally. "It is 12 generations of 40 years each," notes Sarna. Forty is "a rather conventional figure in the Bible," frequently used to connote an long period of time. Viewing that 1 Kings chronology in that light, as a theological staement rather than as pure history, the Exodus can be placed in the 13th century B.C., in the days of Ramses II, where it finds strong circumstantial support in the archeological record. continue |