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harry
August 25th, 2011 | 12:55 pm

Re: Why Do I Doubt Detractors of Biblical Archaeology?

Those interested in this topic will enjoy On the Reliability of the Old Testament by K. A. Kitchen. About Professor Kitchen (from the book jacket):

K.A. Kitchen is personal and Brunner Professor Emeritus of Egyptology and Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Archaeology, Classics, and Oriental Studies, University of Liverpool, England. He is the author of many books on Egyptology, the ancient Near East, and biblical history, including Pharoah Triumphant: The Life and Times of Ramesses II, Ancient Orient and Old Testament, and The Bible in Its World: The Bible and Archaeology Today.

Kitchen has been studying the subject of his interest for over fifty years. He has formed definite opinions of the current state of biblical scholarship (from the book jacket):

For more than two hundred years controversy has raged over the reliability of the Old Testament. Questions about the factuality of its colorful stories of heroes, villains, and kings, for example, have led many critics to see the entire Hebrew Bible as little more than pious fiction. In this fascinating new book, noted ancient historian K.A. Kitchen takes strong issue with today’s “revisionist” critics and offers a firm foundation for the historicity of the biblical texts.

In a detailed, comprehensive, and entertaining manner, Kitchen draws on an unprecedented range of historical data from the ancient Near East – the Bible’s own world – and uses it to soundly reassess both the biblical record and the critics who condemn it. Working back from the latest periods (for which hard evidence is readily available) to the remotest times, Kitchen systematically shows up the many failures of favored arguments against the Bible and marshals pertinent permanent evidence from antiquity’s inscriptions and artifacts to demonstrate the basic honesty of the Old Testament writers.

After systematically reviewing and summarizing corroborating data from sources external to the Bible, Kitchen sums up the historicity of Kings like this:

Thus we find in Kings a very remarkably preserved royal chronology, mainly very accurate in fine detail, that agrees very closely with the dates given by Mesopotamian and other sources. Such a legacy would, most logically, derive from then-existing archives (such as the “book(s) of the annals of the kings of Judah” and “of Israel” mentioned in Kings), besides archives of administrative, legal and other documents. It cannot well be the free creation of some much later writer’s imagination that just happens (miraculously!) to coincide almost throughout with the data then preserved only in documents buried inaccessibly in the ruin mounds of Assyrian cities long since abandoned and largely lost to view.

From the closing chapter:

In this closing chapter we must now review the overall picture so far as our observed facts go, and set out two lots of phenomena side by side: namely, what emerges directly from the ancient Near Eastern past (texts, artifacts, Hebrew writings), and the loud claims of “prophets” new and old.

First we need to turn to representative pronouncements of minimalist writers and compare these with the emergent facts of the case. Are the constituent writings in the Hebrew Bible exclusively the product of a group of Jewish literary romantics of the fourth-third centuries B.C., and thus truly a late Perso-Hellenistic product? Or do the vast millennially long tapestry and the fact-determined grid lines of Near Eastern civilization show clearly otherwise? …

Second, it has to be understood that our present-day minimalists are not a sudden, new phenomenon without precedent. It all began a long time ago, and the present efflorescence is merely a development of some 150/200 years that has in a way come to a head, but simply more scathing of others and more extreme in its views than were its precursors. …

Third, to see a proper perspective and really find out “where it all went wrong,” we therefore should (however briefly and compactly) turn the spotlight on all three phases, old, middle, and new [early (1800-1890), middle (1970s), and late minimalists] . How do any of them measure up to today’s factual/practical state of knowledge? If at all. Finally, the time has surely come not merely to draw up a balance sheet on the log, but more positively to propose a genuinely radical approach, a proper paradigm shift, and clearing of a broad, free space in which we may all go forward to better things …

“Why pick on poor, dear old Julius Wellhausen?” some may say. Indeed, he was but one of a number of very active literary-critical investigators of the Old Testament in the second half of the nineteenth century … but Wellhausen’s merit is that he represents the acme of nineteenth-century biblical criticism … he applied an evolutionary framework, against which he set the history both of the religion of Israel and of her political-sequence. Or, more accurately, he set the rearranged features of the religion and the deconstructed materials of the history on an evolutionary sliding scale … And it is his presentation (not that of others) that molded much of biblical studies from right then through the twentieth century. … Thus Wellhausen remains at heart the real basis for what followed, through the 1970s, and in part underlies late-period minimalism’s bizarre frolics. …

The nineteenth century just loved evolution, in the wake of Charles Darwin’s spectacular theories in the natural world. And in religious/historical terms, it gave Wellhausen the concept of arranging the development of Israel and her institutions on an ascending line from the most primitive level to the most sophisticated … But what really happened in ancient history? The first thing to recall – which almost all modern observers totally overlook! – is how very, very little was know of ancient Israel’s surrounding context, the Near Eastern world, back in 1878. Incredibly little. … At that time there were no Amarna letters (only found in 1887), no Code of Hammurabi of Babylon (only dug up in 1901), no other early law collections, no Siloam inscription (found only in 1880) … There was no systematic archaeology by strata … Large-scale and scientific enhanced archaeology lay far into the future, unimagined. No Ugarit, no Hurrian, no vast Ebla, Mari, Ugarit, Emar archives from outside Mesopotamia.

So Wellhausen worked in a near vacuum and could speculate freely. But that day has long, long since gone. We today do have the vast resources hinted at just above. And they do enable us to profile ancient history accurately in its broad sweep. And straight bottom-to-top evolution is out. It never happened like that; no, not ever. … Entirely false is the nineteenth-century “evolutionary” scheme (pure theory!)… This final scheme, pumped into generations of students, both future and practicing biblicists, is and (alas!) always was pure, unadulterated fantasy. I am sorry, but that’s how life is – and wasn’t. It clashes horribly with real-life historical profiles for cultures that we can test … That is how things are, and it wrecks the Wellhausen scheme completely ….

I think Kitchen has much to say to Protestant and Catholic Scripture scholars alike, especially those who were trained to consider Wellhausen’s thought far more worthy than Kitchen reveals it to be.