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William G. Dever is professor emeritus of Near Easternarchaeology and anthropology at the University of Arizonain Tucson. He has served as director of the Nelson GlueckSchool of Biblical Archaeology in Jerusalem, as director ofthe W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research inJerusalem, and as a visiting professor at universitiesaround the world. He has spent thirty years conductingarchaeological excavations in the Near East, resulting in alarge body of award-winning fieldwork.

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For centuries the Hebrew Bible has been the fountainhead of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Today, however, the entire biblical tradition, including its historical veracity, is being challenged. Leading this assault is a group of scholars described as the "minimalist" or "revisionist" school of biblical studies, which charges that the Hebrew Bible is largely pious fiction, that its writers and editors invented "ancient Israel" as a piece of late Jewish propaganda in the Hellenistic era.

In this fascinating book noted Syro-Palestinian archaeologist William G. Dever attacks the minimalist position head-on, showing how modern archaeology brilliantly illuminates both life in ancient Palestine and the sacred scriptures as we have them today. Assembling a wealth of archaeological evidence, Dever builds the clearest, most complete yet of the "real Israel that existed during the Iron Age of ancient Palestine (1200-600 B.C.).

Dever's exceptional reconstruction of this key period points up the minimalists' abuse of archaeology and reveals the weakness of their revisionist histories. Dever shows that ancient Israel, far from being an "invention, " is a reality to be "discovered. Equally important, his recovery of a reliable core history of ancient Israel provides a firm foundation from which to appreciate the aesthetic value and lofty moral aspirations of the Hebrew Bible.

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What Did the Biblical Writers Know, and When Did They Know It?

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Chapter One

The Bible as History, Literature, and Theology

The Mysterious Bible

The Bible, including the Old Testament, or as we prefer here, the Hebrew Bible,is so familiar to those of us still steeped in the Western cultural tradition that itwould seem to need little explanation, much less defense. For centuries the Biblehas been the Classic ? although that really means (1) that we take it forgranted; and (2) that we revere it, but don't bother to read it any more.

    Yet for all the lip service still paid to the Bible in our society, it remainslargely a mystery to lay people. A recent, long-running television series in whichI became involved was entitled "Mysteries of the Bible." Obviously it capitalized(so to speak) on the public's continuing fascination with the unresolved riddlesof the Bible: Where was the Garden of Eden? Did Jericho's walls really cometumbling down? Why did the biblical writers think Jezebel such a wickedwoman? Such examples could go on and on.

    Even though I was somewhat surprised, and indeed gratified, to see thepublic's enthusiasm for the series (I now am recognized when I go to the localbarber shop), I became skeptical in the end. The commercial and somewhatcynical exploitation of biblical topics is clearly designed to titillate more than toeducate the public. Any gratuitous educational benefits aside, the Bible remainsa mysterious book to most people.

The Nature of the Hebrew Bible

The above is true partly because we forget that the Bible is not a book at all, buta whole shelf of books. That means that you cannot simply pick up the Bibleand read it from beginning to end, as a connected story with a structured plotand believable characters. One of my friends was required to do that for a"book report" in a college class on "The Bible as Literature" (he confessed laterthat he could never bring himself to pick up the Bible again). What is the Bible's"story" really about? Who wrote it, and why? And can we moderns really believeany of it?

    The many "books" that make up our Hebrew Bible (39 in English versions,but 24 in Hebrew) have many stories to tell, written almost entirely byanonymous authors. These stories were set down over a period of a thousandyears, the whole finally woven into a composite, highly complex literary fabricsometime in the Hellenistic era (ca. 2nd century B.C.). This vast "library"?forthat is what the Bible really is ? contains such diverse and indeed contradictoryliterary forms as myths, legends and folktales, sagas, heroic epics, oraltraditions, annals, biographies, narrative histories, novellae, belles lettres, proverbsand wisdom-sayings, poetry (including erotic poems ? read the Song ofSongs without your spiritual blinders on), prophecy, apocalyptic, and muchmore.

    All of this vast compilation of literature comes down to us from a long-lostOriental world almost entirely foreign to our modern consciousness andworldview. Furthermore, the Bible is written in a dead language. (Hebrew hasbeen revived as a spoken language only recently, as in Israel, but in any case itdiffers considerably from Biblical Hebrew.) Finally, the librarians in charge ofthe biblical corpus seem to be mostly clerics of one sort or another, intent uponforcing their "orthodox" interpretations upon the rest of us, although no two ofthem agree. Or else they are academics, who seem to delight in making the Bibleeven more mysterious and therefore accessible only through them, althoughI suspect that many professional biblical scholars are closet agnostics.

The Biblical Tradition under Attack

Where does all this leave the intelligent layperson, whether formally religious ornot, who wishes simply to understand the Bible better? And is the effort worthit any longer, at a time when the biblical literature ? indeed the entire biblicaltradition ? is being dismissed by so many as "irrelevant" even by those in Synagogue,Church, and Seminary? My colleagues tell me that many priests andclergy no longer know Hebrew and Greek and thus cannot read the Bible in theoriginal. The study of the history of ancient Israel, long fundamental to our understandingof biblical Israel and her faith, is scarcely taught in many Protestantseminaries. History and historical exegesis have been replaced by more stylishcourses in liberation theology; feminist approaches to the Bible; new literarycriticism, including structuralism, semiotics, rhetorical criticism, and evenmore esoteric "schools" that we shall discuss in more detail later.

    The Atlantic Monthly ran an article in December 1996 entitled "TheSearch for a No-frills Jesus" by Charlotte Allen. Here Burton L. Mack, longtimeProfessor of New Testament at the School of Theology of Claremont inCalifornia, is quoted as saying of the latest studies in the "quest for the historicalJesus" that the forthcoming publication of Documenta Q by the InternationalQ Project "should bring to an end the myth, the history, the mentality, ofthe Gospels." Says Mack, who spent his entire professional life training Christianministers: "It's over. We've had enough apocalypses. We've had enoughmartyrs. Christianity has had a two-thousand-year run, and it's over." I see herea hypocrisy whereby one so long "professes" a history that he thinks did not exist.As I shall note in Chapter 6, the malaise in the scholarly pursuit of "the historicalJesus" parallels almost exactly the current crisis in the search for "thehistorical Israel." The same methodological issues are involved.

    The irony is that the most deadly attack on the Bible and its veracity, in eitherthe historical or the theological meaning, has come recently not from itstraditional enemies ? atheists, skeptics, or even those "Godless Communists"feared by Bible-believing people until recently ? but from the Bible's well-meaningfriends.

    If its professional custodians no longer take the Bible seriously, at least asthe foundation of our Western cultural tradition, much less a basis for privateand public morality, where does that leave us? If we simply jettison the Bible asso much excess baggage in the brave new postmodern world, what shall we putin its place?

Is the Bible "Historical" at All?

For the purposes of the present discussion, I would argue that the most seriouschallenge to the Hebrew Bible in its long history of interpretation and controversycomes from a small but vocal group of scholars, mostly European, whohave recently undertaken what they sometimes allude to as "revisionist" historiesof ancient Israel. Of course, every generation in the history of Judaism andChristianity has assayed to write its own, "new" histories of ancient Israel ? andrightly so, because the spirit of the biblical tradition is dynamic, ever-changing.Even within the biblical period itself, as Michael Fishbane, JeffreyTigay, and other rather conservative scholars have shown, the biblical writersare constantly in a kind of "inner dialogue" with themselves. These writersdare to rework the literary tradition, even though it was regarded from early onas Scripture, "sacred...