Does This Ossuary Back Up Biblical Accounts?

James Bone Box—A Fake?

Far from it—this is only the latest chapter in a fascinating story. Two other groups of specialists—from the Geological Survey of Israel and the Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto—also studied the bone box and concluded the inscription was ancient. And some of the world’s leading paleographers—specialists in ancient scripts—have dated the inscription’s style of writing to the first century A.D. Who is right? We still await a scientific report from the IAA.

http://www.bib-arch.org/bswbbreakingVII.html 7/9/03 4:33 PM

Why I Am Not Yet Convinced the "Brother of Jesus" Inscription is a Forgery

The day after the Biblical Archaeology Review published an article last October on the extraordinary inscription, "James, the son of Joseph, the brother of Jesus," scratched on a stone bone box from Jerusalem, it appeared on the front page of almost every paper in the world.

On June 18, 2003, a committee appointed by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) declared the inscription to be a forgery. The bone box, or ossuary, was indeed ancient, but the inscription was added in modern times, the committee found.

It may indeed be a forgery and, if so, let's hope the forger will be caught and put in jail.

But I'm still not convinced that it is a forgery.

The BAR article was written by one of the world's leading paleographers, André Lemaire of the Sorbonne in Paris. Each letter in Aramaic (the language Jesus spoke and the language of the inscription) has a history and development, much like modern car grilles. Paleographers can date the letters and also tell if an inscription is a forgery, for in an authentic inscription the shape of all the letters will date to the same time period. There was no doubt in Lemaire's mind that the inscription was authentic.

Normally, anything that André Lemaire writes for us would be enough to justify its publication in BAR. Because this was such an extraordinary inscription, however, we showed it to a number of other prominent paleographers. Harvard's Frank Cross, perhaps the world's most distinguished Semitic paleographer, said, "If this is a forgery, the forger was a genius." (Along the same line, leading Jerusalem archaeologist and paleographer Gaby Barkay is quoted in a recent news report as saying, "If its a fake, it's a fantastically executed piece.")

The inscription was also examined by P. Kyle McCarter, Albright Professor at the Johns Hopkins University (and author of Ancient Inscriptions), and by Israeli paleographer Ada Yardeni, author of The Book of Hebrew Script. They, too, saw no reason whatever to question the authenticity of the inscription.

We had it examined by one of the world's leading Aramaic experts, Father Joseph Fitzmyer of Catholic University of America. After some initial hesitation, he deemed the somewhat peculiar Aramaic phrasing on the inscription to be appropriate to the first century A.D.

The Geological Survey of Israel, a government agency, also examined the bone box and its inscription at our request and found both to be authentic.

By the time Ben Witherington III and I published our book, The Brother of Jesus (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), a second team of scientific experts had examined the inscription and found it authentic. The team was from the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, where the ossuary had been on exhibit.

The recent conclusion of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) is essentially the view of one person, Professor Yuval Goren of Tel Aviv University. The decision of the IAA purports to be by unanimous agreement of a 15-person committee, each of whom had been named by the IAA. It appears, however, that the only one on the committee with any geological and chemical knowledge on which the conclusion is based is Yuval Goren. He managed to convince the rest of the five-person (sub-)committee of his scientific conclusions based on materials in which they are not expert and which they have no more than a laypersons' knowledge. This (sub-)committee convinced the other scholars of the conclusion of the five-person scientific committee. The committee of other scholars has even less scientific expertise.

It would have been more comforting if other scientists, perhaps from the United States, would have been consulted and perhaps even included on the committee.

Of course, in this matter, Professor Goren may be right, but we need to wait for further developments before arriving at this conclusion.

There are other reasons why the conclusion of the IAA should at least be further explored before accepting it without discussion. For example, when the announcement was made the final report of the committee was not ready for distribution. Why was the announcement not made when the final report was ready to be released?

Can the IAA really be so sure of its conclusion? They seem to have no doubt whatever. In a Washington Post story on June 19, an IAA official is quoted as saying, "We're sure about it." Yet this same official later in the article is quoted as saying, "There is some doubt " about whether the word Yeshua (Jesus) is a forgery. As one scientist told us, "This is a very unprofessional way of doing things."

The committee never called in the scientists from the two other teams—the Geological Survey of Israel and the Royal Ontario Museum—that had examined the ossuary to see why their conclusion differed and to see what they had to say regarding the IAA's conclusion. For example, a handout the IAA gave out at its press conference states that the letters of the inscription "cut through" the patina. It is astounding that the two other scientific teams that examined the ossuary didn't notice this. The absence of patina in some of the letters may in fact have had something to do with the cleaning of the inscription; it had been partially scrubbed (apparently by the owner's mother). Shouldn't this have been at least discussed with the other teams before an announcement was made, especially since the Geological Survey of Israel's report specifically stated that it found "no evidence that might detract from the authenticity of the patina"?

At the IAA's press conference, the committee also announced that it had found that the patina contained an isotope of oxygen that indicated the patina included "tap water heated to a temperature not found in the Judean Hills during the last three thousand years." Our scientists tell us that this is a conclusion that can hardly be made with certainty, especially as the inscription had been partly cleaned and scrubbed, perhaps with hot water.

The latest word from the Royal Ontario Museum is that they stick by their conclusion. So do some of the paleographers we have talked to.

It's also significant that the team from the Israel Geological Survey has been gagged. They are not permitted to discuss the case. Why?

Another factor that cannot be ignored: Shuka Dorfman, the head of the IAA, hates antiquities collectors and antiquities dealers and the antiquities trade. He would like to put Israeli antiquities dealers out of business. His dislike is so intense that he stopped talking to me because BAR published the original article by André Lemaire. Indeed, he has even refused to approve an excavation permit for an important Jerusalem excavation because it was supported financially by the Biblical Archaeology Society, publisher of BAR.

In short, Shuka Dorfman would like nothing so much as to see the ossuary inscription declared a forgery. This extremely powerful man in Israeli archaeology packed the relevant committee (although he probably didn't have to). There were two IAA committees, only one of which was the scientific committee, called the "Committee for Examination of the Material and Patina." Dorfman appointed his own deputy as chairman of the scientific committee. The deputy is a fine archaeologist, but has no training in geology or chemistry. The professional geologist he appointed to the committee, Yuval Goren, had already expressed his view on the internet that patinas could easily be faked; indeed he explained in graphic detail how it could be done. He had apparently already made up his mind. To insure a majority on the committee, Dorfman then appointed another member of his staff to this five-man committee. It looks like Goren convinced his committee who then convinced the other committee, all based on the results of Goren's scientific interpretation.

All this is not to say that the IAA's conclusion is incorrect. What it says is that we must be patient and see what evaluations can be made of the IAA report when it comes out.

http://www.bib-arch.org/bswbbreakingHS.html 7/9/03 4:40 PM

EXCHANGE BETWEEN YUVAL GOREN AND HERSHEL SHANKS

(The most recent communication appears at the top of this page.)

Yuval Goren Responds

Mr. Shanks is absolutely right about one point. The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) should have published the full results of each one of the committee members before or during the press conference. It is not for me to protect the IAA here. However, I can testify that the press conference was the hasty result of leaks of information from the committee to the local media. Still, it was obviously premature. The IAA is seemingly aware of this fault and our results will soon be published, first as summaries and shortly after as scientific papers. In that, I think that Shanks’ point is obviously justified.

However, on other matters Mr. Shanks is skillfully twisting the facts in order to present the picture as he desires. It is much easier to depict a “one-person committee” and confront only this scholar in public, rather than to present the actual facts. It is much easier to attack one individual and portray him as a crock, than to deal with the verdict of five unrelated experts, each mastering a specific field or discipline. For reasons known only to him, Shanks decided to select me as his target and to discredit my scientific integrity in order to protect his own hidden agenda that is rapidly losing points. I do not intend to express my opinion about this policy, nor do I intend to play by these rules.

“The patina sub-committee” appointed by the IAA to examine the authenticity of the materials included five unrelated experts. One was Dr Elisabetta Buaretto, Head of the Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory at the Weizmann Institute of Science, obviously “a member of our committee who can talk intelligently on isotopic ratios of oxygen.” The second and third are Mr. Jacques Neguer and Ms. Orna Cohen, experienced conservators who, for years, have studied stone erosion and patination processes. The fourth member was myself. My expertise is in microarchaeology, namely mineralogic and micromorphologic study of archaeomaterials. I am nearly ignorant in the geochemistry of calcite and the isotopic values of oxygen and carbon. This part belongs in full to the fifth committee member.

As for this fifth member, the IAA contacted Dr. Amos Bein, Director of the Geological Survey of Israel (GSI), and requested him to appoint a senior scientist as his formal representative in the committee. Bein decided not to appoint Dr. Shimon Ilani or Dr. Amnon Rosenfeld, apparently for two reasons. First, because Ilani and Rosenfeld have already expressed their opinions about the two artifacts based on the analyses that they made unofficially under the auspices of their institution. Second, other members of their own institution had harshly criticized their conclusions. Therefore he appointed Dr. Avner Ayalon as the formal committee member on behalf of the GSI. In the handout given at the IAA press conference, Ayalon’s name was not listed due to a simple mistake made by the IAA spokeswoman, nothing more. For this reason I quoted in my previous reply to Shanks the endorsement letter in which Dr. Bein presented Dr. Ayalon as the GSI formal representative in the committee. The results presented by Dr. Ayalon are his and his only. In order to make this point clearer, I would like to conclude with an announcement released yesterday by the GSI. I also faxed the original document to Mr. Shanks.

(Click here to read Dr. Bein's letter.) I hope this will end Mr. Shanks’ vulgar, personal and unjustified attack against me.

Hershel Shanks Responds to Yuval Goren Regarding the "James Ossuary Inscription"

It may well turn out that Professor Goren's conclusion—that the inscription is a forgery—is correct. But he has not demonstrated that so far. And the announcement by the committee of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) of its conclusion certainly leaves room for doubt—indeed, in the very way that the announcement was made, without making the committee's report available, as if to shut off all discussion in order to get maximum media exposure, without allowing a response by other experts.

Once the committee's report becomes available I suspect other experts will have questions. But even now certain questions remain unanswered—and Professor Goren could enlighten us all, if he would.

For example, the Washington Post quotes the chairman of Professor Goren's committee as saying "there is some doubt" about the authenticity of the word "Yeshua." That, I suppose, means that "Yeshua" may be authentic. Please explain how the word "Yeshua" can be authentic and yet there is no possibility that the remainder of the inscription is authentic. And why would a forger start with a partially inscribed ossuary (whose hand he would have to try to match) when he could easily start with a blank ossuary and inscribe whatever he wanted?

How can it be that the other scientific teams who examined the ossuary inscription—at the Geological Survey of Israel and at the Royal Ontario Museum—did not notice that the inscription supposedly cut through the patina, as you found? Did the inscription really cut through the patina? Or is there another explanation, which you failed to consider, that the patina in part of the inscription had been scrubbed away by someone who cleaned the inscription? And if your committee made such a basic mistake, is it possible that on more complicated matters they also made mistakes? Have you not yet released your report because you are correcting some mistakes? You say Dr. Avner Ayalon was a member of your committee. Why then was he not listed as a member of the committee in the handout given out at the IAA press conference? (Incidentally, it is our understanding that Dr. Ayalon did only the mechanical work involved in performing the test, but that the interpretation was yours, Professor Goren. If this is wrong, please tell me so. Perhaps you can understand why it is difficult to respond when you have left so much unclear. For example, is there any other member of your committee who can talk intelligently on your reference to "the isotopic ratios of oxygen(16O-18O) in the calcite"?)

Obviously, the way the testing of the ossuary was conducted and announced has been badly botched. What is needed is an examination by an impeccable scientific team conducted under the auspices of a distinguished research institution that can independently certify and interpret the results.

Maybe the committee of the Israel Antiquities Authority, on which Professor Goren was the only person capable of interpreting the results, will ultimately be proven to have been correct. But the world will never have confidence in that conclusion if all it has to go on is the word of Professor Goren, no matter how convincing he was to his fellow committee members.

Let's face it now: The Israel Antiquities Authority bungled it from start to finish—in the appointment of the members, in its failure to include more than one distinguished scientist who could interpret the results, and in the way the world was told about its conclusion. Unless a new test is performed under exemplary conditions, the world will forever be plagued by doubt and uncertainty—and understandably so.

http://www.bib-arch.org/bswbbreakingHSYG.html 7/9/03 4:46 PM

Shanks' Assertions are Simply Incorrect and Misleading

Yuval Goren

Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures

Tel-Aviv University, Israel
June 2003
In a press conference that was held on June 18, 2003, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) published the results of the special committee appointed to examine the authenticity of the inscription on the James ossuary and the Jehoash stone. The committee unanimously concluded that the two inscriptions were modern forgeries.

In his commentary for Beliefnet, Mr. Hershel Shanks, Editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review and co-author (together with Ben Witherington III) of The Brother of Jesus, suggests that “the debunkers’ “proof” rests in the hands of one scientist”. This devious Dr. Strangelove, who was “the only one on the committee with any geological and chemical knowledge”, is none but yours truly. According to Shanks, “Yuval Goren… managed to convince the rest of the five person (sub-)committee of his scientific conclusions based on materials in which they are not expert and which they have no more than a laypersons’ knowledge. This (sub-)committee convinced the other scholars of the conclusions of the five-person scientific committee”. Hence in a true conspiracy tale reminiscent of the classic 1957 film "Twelve Angry Men", he puts me in Jack Lemmon’s position as the one juror who skillfully convinced the rest of the jury to conclude with the verdict he desires. Desires for which purpose? I certainly have no idea, as I have never had any hidden agenda concerned with Christian studies, Aramaic epigraphy, biblical history or burial customs of the Jewish population during the Early Roman period. Still, when I quoted this passage from Shanks’ commentary to my mother, she said that I was wasting my time in archaeology, for if I can sweet talk such a distinguished committee, I should have taken a career in politics instead.

However, Shanks knows very well that his are empty words. The patina sub-committee included at least one more member whose knowledge in geology and geochemistry was by far greater than mine. Dr. Amos Bein, Director of the Geological Survey of Israel (GSI), appointed Dr. Avner Ayalon to officially represent the GSI in this special committee. In his letter to the IAA dated March 9, 2003, Bein declares: “by your request, I appoint Dr. Avner Ayalon as a member of the scientific committee for the examination of the [James] ossuary. Dr. Ayalon has broad expertise in the operation of the equipment required for the examinations, and long experience in the application of the geochemical and petrographic methods that are required for the identification and characterization of materials”. Hence Shanks’ assertion that “the committee never called in the scientists from the two other teams – the Geological Survey of Israel and the Royal Ontario Museum…” is simply incorrect and misleading. As Shanks later claims against me, “the professional geologist he [IAA director] appointed to the committee, Yuval Goren, had already expressed his view on the internet that patinas could easily be faked”.

By the same logic, Shanks would not support the inclusion of Drs. Ilani and Rosenfeld of the GSI in the committee, for they too had an expressed opinion about the ossuary. Moreover, Shanks himself expressed the same view (that patinas could be faked) in his book, as he insisted on having the patina of the James ossuary examined by scientists from the GSI (whom according to the testimony of one of them, had to work hastily and secretly and only examine if the ossuary had any unrelated artificial matter on it, as opposed to myself, who at that time had not set eyes on the specimen). In conclusion, anybody who had any opinion on the matter should have been excluded from this committee, including Shanks himself. If so, indeed only laypersons could be allowed in, having no previous opinion on patination processes or epigraphy. But coming back to the point, Dr. Ayalon indeed represented the GSI on behalf of its director and has acted as the most qualified geologist in the team.

In the IAA press conference of June 18, 2003, the results of the patina sub-committee were presented first by Dr. Uzi Dahari, vice-director of the IAA and chairman of the sub-committee. Then, Ayalon and myself presented our respective results in some more detail. Ayalon’s examination of the isotopic ratios of oxygen (160-18O) in the calcite of the true and fake patinas, gives the final knock-out to the assumption that the patina coating the inscription could have been created under natural conditions, be it in a burial cave in Jerusalem, or on some balcony in Tel-Aviv. Since Ms. Suzanne F. Singer, Contributing Editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review, also attended the press conference and even presented some questions, I am confident that Shanks was reported of this minor detail as well as all the others. Therefore, one may wonder if Beliefnet really cited him correctly.

There are two points that Shanks made, which are absolutely justified. First, the results of the investigations should be published in the framework of scientific papers. This will be done in the nearest future. Secondly, he is absolutely right when referring to me as a “controversial figure that, on other matters, his work has been criticized”. But one could say the same about Albert Einstein too. Indeed, Albert Einstein I am not, but alas, none of the persona involved in this saga is. The argument that “it could be more comforting if other scientists, perhaps from the United States, would have been consulted and perhaps even included on the committee” is chauvinistic, colonialistic and does not deserve further comment.

http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/Reply_to_Shankes.htm 7/9/03 4:48 PM

Another look at the James Ossuary

By Bruce Chilton
Bernard Iddings Bell, Professor of Religion
Bard College
April 2003
Last November, members of the Institute of Advanced Theology at Bard College joined me in a discussion with Professor John Painter from John Sturt University College in Australia. We all saw detailed photographs of the ossuary recently claimed as that of James, Jesus' brother. A few days after our session in Annandale I traveled to Toronto to view the artifact with several other scholars who have been involved in the analysis of the piece. This consultation was facilitated by the generous hospitality of Hershel Shanks of the Biblical Archaeology Society, who also gave the Institute access to the photographs.

Press coverage of the artifact up until November had been so enthusiastic that it sometimes appeared uncritical. As I said in November, if you do not know where an artifact has come from, it is not really an archaeological discovery at all -- but only an item on the collectors' market. Context alone can explain what precisely an artifact was used for, the conditions it has been submitted to, its meaning for the people who deposited it, and the chain of possession that reaches from its deposit to its possession by the current owner. All those considerations are involved in the issue of authenticity, and many of them are more interesting than whether or not a given object is a forgery.

That means that whoever took this piece from its cave (if that is where it was found) not only looted the ossuary itself but also looted our knowledge of what the ossuary really means. We cannot completely remove the possibility we are dealing with a forgery (however improbable that may seem) until we can say where it came from. I still believe that the best service any scholar can perform in this controversy is to convince the owner, Mr. Oded Golan, and the Israeli Antiquities Authority to work together to identify where precisely (in Jerusalem, presumably) this object comes from. Success may seem a remote prospect, but all the major players are apparently alive, and we must keep in mind that they can tell us things we will never know unless they divulge what they know.

During the meeting in Toronto, the skeptics had a very good run. They emphasized our lack of knowledge of the provenance of the piece in order to cast doubt on the integrity of the owner and of the whole Biblical Archaeology Society. Some press coverage turned around on a dime, making the transition from credulous to hypercritical from one day to the next. The damage the box has sustained has not helped anyone's cause: let's hope thoughtless handling that has scrubbed, gouged, and cracked the thing will finally cease.

One factor was open up by the controversy that might help future discussion. I mentioned during the talk with Professor Painter that the changing shapes of some of the letters, as you read through the inscription, disturbed me. Rochelle Altman has argued that the changes attest two completely different hands. That started the scholarly equivalent of a shouting match.

One side shouts "fraud." Meanwhile, some scholars in Toronto who had not noticed the alteration of the shapes of letters until it was pointed out to them still insisted the inscription is from a single hand. One senior epigraphist who just hates to change his mind kept repeating that the carver must have gotten tired. That argument is obviously lame, but both sides should take a deep breath. (Maybe that will make them sound less like Bill O'Reilly.) A change in style does not prove fraud. Grave markers are subject to emendation over time as you can see from visiting many family tombs from antiquity until today. "James, son of Joseph," might have been inscribed when James' bones were put in the box, and "the brother of Jesus" could have been added later. It is worth remembering that the first historian of Christianity, Hegesippus, refers to a monument being set up for James in Jerusalem. Was this bone box part of the memorial built-in above or below ground? That is the kind of question that should be asked alongside the obvious ones: is the ossuary genuine? Is it a fake?

And unless this is a fake, it is either the original ossuary of James or part of a monument to him. It could also be both. However you look at it, that makes this artifact evidence of the earliest identifiable Christian gravesite - and until we find out where the piece came from, we will be unable to say where that is. Anomalies remain, on any reading. Why is the reference simply to "Jesus," when the titles "Messiah," "Son of Man," and "Lord" were applied to him in Aramaic from a very early period? There, too, we are up against a wall of uncertainty, until someone lets us into the place where the ossuary was found.

http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/Another_look.htm 7/9/03 5:07 PM

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC AND BAR EVALUATE THIS FIND

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC NEWS - OCOTOBER 21, 2002

Burial Box May Be That of Jesus's Brother

Hillary Mayell, National Geographic News

Researchers may have uncovered the first archaeological evidence that refers to Jesus as an actual person and identifies James, the first leader of the Christian church, as his brother.

The 2,000-year-old ossuary—a box that held bones—bears the inscription "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." Until now, all references to the three men have been found only in manuscripts.

Andre Lemaire, a paleographer at the Sorbonne University in Paris (École Pratique des Hautes Études), first saw the artifact and its inscription while examining the relics of a private collector in Jerusalem. He dates the box, which was empty, to 63 A.D.

The ossuary is not quite rectangular, like most burial boxes found so far, but trapezoid in shape. It is about 20 inches long, 10 inches wide, and 12 inches high. The image on top shows the inscription "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." Photograph courtesy of Biblical Archaeology Society

"This is probably going to be the biggest New Testament find in my lifetime, as big as the Dead Sea scrolls," said Ben Witherington, a New Testament professor at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky.

"Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are all historical religions, and they have to be open to historical inquiry," he said. "To some extent they stand or fall on the authenticity of the historical record. This gives us one more piece of evidence outside of the Bible that these are real people, and that they're important people, and provides a small confirmation for the claims made about James as the brother of Jesus."

The find is described in the November/December issue of Biblical Archaeological Review.

Historical Record

From the first century B.C. to about 70 A.D., it was the burial custom of Jews to place their dead in a cave for a year, then retrieve the bones and put them in an ossuary. Several hundred such boxes from that era have been found—some ornately carved and others plain, some with feet and others without.

The burial custom changed in 70 A.D., when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and torched the Temple there.

The James burial box, which is about 20 inches (50 centimeters) long, was originally acquired in the antiquities market 15 years ago and has been in the hands of a private collector.

Lemaire stumbled upon the ossuary by chance. While he was in Jerusalem on a six-month project to study paleo-inscriptions, a friend introduced him to a private collector. The collector, who remains anonymous, told Lemaire he had a few inscriptions and showed him some photographs of an ossuary.

"When I read it [the inscription], I immediately wondered if it was the same James who was said to be the brother of Jesus of Nazareth," said Lemaire. "To the collector, Jesus was known as the son of God, so he had no brother. It never occurred to him that this might be anything other than just another ossuary."

Lemaire said, "I knew right away that it could be something really important."

Telling Details

Translating the inscription was the easy part. Tying the ossuary to Jesus of Nazareth was much more difficult.

Scientists at the Geological Institute of Israel examined the box, which is made of Jerusalem limestone, and judged it to be about 2,000 years old. The inscription is written in Aramaic, in a form that further narrows the possible time frame.

"The script is very important for the date because the Aramaic script changed over time in ways we could measure," said P. Kyle McCarter, a paleographer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. "It's the most important criterion for dating this object, and the script is consistent with a date in the middle of the first century A.D."

The fact that the box is very plain, apart from the beautiful script, is not surprising, according to experts. "Highly decorated boxes are the ones that are unusual," said McCarter. Lemaire said extensive study of several hundred ossuaries found in Jerusalem has shown no connection between the ornateness of the design and the importance of the person whose bones they contained.

What is highly unusual is the mention of a brother.

"So far, with all the inscriptions we have, only one other has mentioned a brother," said Lemaire. "This is a very important point for the problem of identification. There would need to be a special reason to mention the brother. It suggests the brother was also prominent, an important person."

Jesus and Joseph were fairly common names of that era; James, slightly less so. Statistical analysis suggests that the possibility of these three names occurring in the given relationships (son of Joseph, brother of Jesus) is very small.

The lack of knowledge about where the ossuary came from is worrisome but not unusual, the experts say.

"It means there will always be doubts about the thing," said McCarter. "They've applied every possible test to it to determine its character and authenticity, but there will always be a cloud over it and there will always be those who doubt because it wasn't recovered in a legitimate archaeological dig.

"But this is not an unusual situation," McCarter added. "We get this a lot."

Jesus and James

Whether Jesus was the son of God is a theological problem, said Lemaire. But historians don't doubt the existence of either James or Jesus; both are mentioned frequently in early historical accounts.

Following the death of Jesus in 29 A.D., James assumed leadership of the Christian church in Jerusalem until he himself was martyred in 62 A.D. According to biblical accounts, he was one of the first apostles to see Jesus after his resurrection.

He is referred to as the brother of Jesus in both the Bible and in contemporary historical accounts. In Matthew 13:55-56, for instance, Jesus is said to have four brothers and two sisters. But the exact nature of these relationships—whether they were full siblings by blood, half siblings, or cousins—has been open to interpretation.

"If you're Catholic, you think they're cousins because the perpetual virginity of Mary is official church doctrine," said Witheringon. "But there are a lot of problems in the historical record with that."

"When James is referred to as the 'brother of our lord' in the New Testament, the word used means 'blood brother,'" he continued. "It would have to be qualified in context to mean something different."

A second interpretation is that James and the other siblings are half-brothers and -sisters, Joseph's children from a prior marriage.

"The ossuary gives us another piece of evidence outside the Bible that these are blood brothers and sisters of Jesus," said Witherington.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/10/1021_021021_christianrelicbox.html 10-25-02, 8:59 AM

Biblical Archaeology Review

November/December 2002

DECONSTRUCTING THE WALLS OF JERICHO 1999

Deconstructing the Walls of Jericho, Ze'ev Herzog

Following 70 years of intensive excavations in the Land of Israel, archaeologists have found out: The patriarchs' acts are legendary stories, we did not sojourn in Egypt or make an exodus, we did not conquer the land. Neither is there any mention of the empire of David and Solomon. Those who take an interest have known these facts for years, but Israel is a stubborn people and doesn't want to hear about it.

This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom. And it will come as an unpleasant shock to many that the God of Israel, YHWH, had a female consort and that the early Israelite religion adopted monotheism only in the waning period of the monarchy and not at Mount Sinai.

Most of those who are engaged in scientific work in the interlocking spheres of the Bible, archaeology and the history of the Jewish people—and who once went into the field looking for proof to corroborate the Bible story—now agree that the historic events relating to the stages of the Jewish people's emergence are radically different from what that story tells.

What follows is a short account of the brief history of archaeology, with the emphasis on the crises and the big bang, so to speak, of the past decade. The critical question of this archaeological revolution has not yet trickled down into public consciousness, but it cannot be ignored.

Inventing the Bible Stories

The archaeology of Palestine developed as a science at a relatively late date, in the late 19th and early 20th century, in tandem with the archaeology of the imperial cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome. Those resource-intensive powers were the first target of the researchers, who were looking for impressive evidence from the past, usually in the service of the big museums in London, Paris and Berlin. That stage effectively passed over Palestine, with its fragmented geographical diversity. The conditions in ancient Palestine were inhospitable for the development of an extensive kingdom, and certainly no showcase projects such as the Egyptian shrines or the Mesopotamian palaces could have been established there. In fact, the archaeology of Palestine was not engendered at the initiative of museums but arose from religious motives.

The main push behind archaeological research in Palestine was the country's relationship with the Holy Scriptures. The first excavators in Jericho and Shechem (Nablus) were biblical researchers who were looking for the remains of the cities cited in the Bible. Archaeology assumed momentum with the activity of William Foxwell Albright, who mastered the archaeology, history and languagess of the Land of Israel and the ancient Near East. Albright, an American whose father was a priest of Chilean descent, began excavating in Palestine in the 1920's. His stated approach was that archaeology was the principal scientific means to refute the critical claims against the historical veracity of the Bible stories, particularly those of the Wellhausen school in Germany.

The school of biblical criticism that developed in Germany beginning in the second half of the 19th century, of which Julius Wellhausen was a leading figure, challenged the historicity of the Bible stories and claimed that biblical historiography was formulated, and in large measure actually 'invented', during the Babylonian exile. Bible scholars, the Germans in particular, claimed that the history of the Hebrews, as a consecutive series of events beginning with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and proceeding through the passage to Egypt, the enslavement and the exodus, and ending with the conquest of the land and the settlement of the tribes of Israel, was no more than a later reconstruction of events with a theological purpose.

Albright believed that the Bible is a historical document, which, although it had gone through several editing stages, nevertheless basically reflected the ancient reality. He was convinced that if the ancient remains of Palestine were uncovered, they would furnish unequivocal proof of the historical truth of the events relating to the Jewish people in its land.

The biblical archaeology that developed following Albright and his pupils brought about a series of extensive digs at the important biblical tells: Megiddo, Lachish, Gezer, Shechem (Nablus), Jericho, Jerusalem, Ai, Giveon, Beit She'an, Beit Shemesh, Hazor, Ta'anach and others. The way was straight and clear: every new finding contributed to the building of a harmonious picture of the past. The archaeologists, who enthusiastically adopted the biblical approach, set out on a quest to unearth the 'biblical period': the period of the patriarchs, the Canaanite cities that were destroyed by the Israelites as they conquered the land, the boundaries of the 12 tribes, the sites of the settlement period, characterized by 'settlement pottery', the 'gates of Solomon' at Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer, 'Solomon's stables' (or Ahab's), 'King Solomon's mines' at Timna—and there are some who are still hard at work and have found Mount Sinai (at Mount Karkoum in the Negev) or Joshua's altar at Mount Ebal.

The Crisis

Slowly, cracks began to appear in the picture. Paradoxically, a situation was created in which the glut of findings began to undermine the historical credibility of the biblical descriptions instead of reinforcing them. A crisis stage is reached when the theories within the framework of the general thesis are unable to solve an increasingly large number of anomalies. The explanations become ponderous and inelegant, and the pieces do not fit together smoothly. Here are a few examples of how the harmonious picture collapsed.

• Patriarchal Age: The researchers found it difficult to reach agreement on which archaeological period matched the Patriarchal Age. When did Abraham, Isaac and Jacob live? When was the Cave of Machpelah (Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron) bought in order to serve as the burial place for the patriarchs and the matriarchs? According to the biblical chronology, Solomon built the Temple 480 years after the exodus from Egypt (1 Kings 6:1). To that we have to add 430 years of the stay in Egypt (Exodus 12:40) and the vast lifetimes of the patriarchs, producing a date in the 21st century BCE for Abraham's move to Canaan. However, no evidence has been unearthed that can sustain this chronology. Albright argued in the early 1960s in favor of assigning the wanderings of Abraham to the Middle Bronze Age (22nd -20th centuries BCE). However, Benjamin Mazar, the father of the Israeli branch of biblical archaeology, proposed identifying the historic background of the Patriarchal Age a thousand years later, in the 11th century BCE—which would place it in the 'settlement period'. Others rejected the historicity of the stories and viewed them as ancestral legends that were told in the period of the Kingdom of Judea. In any event, the consensus began to break down.

• The Exodus from Egypt, the wanderings in the desert and Mount Sinai: The many Egyptian documents that we have make no mention of the Israelites' presence in Egypt and are also silent about the events of the Exodus. Many documents do mention the custom of nomadic shepherds to enter Egypt during periods of drought and hunger and to camp at the edges of the Nile Delta. However, this was not a solitary phenomenon: such events occurred frequently over thousands of years and were hardly exceptional. Generations of researchers tried to locate Mount Sinai and the encampments of the tribes in the desert. Despite these intensive efforts, not even one site has been found that can match the biblical account.

The power of tradition has now led some researchers to 'discover' Mount Sinai in the northern Hijaz or, as already mentioned, at Mount Karkoum in the Negev. The central events in the history of the Israelites are not corroborated in documents external to the Bible or in archaeological findings. Most historians today agree that at best, the stay in Egypt and the exodus events occurred among a few families and that their private story was expanded and 'nationalized' to fit the needs of theological ideology.

• The conquest: One of the formative events of the people of Israel in biblical historiography is the story of how the land was conquered from the Canaanites. Yet extremely serious difficulties have cropped up precisely in the attempts to locate the archaeological evidence for this story. Repeated excavations by various expeditions at Jericho and Ai, the two cities whose conquest is described in the greatest detail in the Book of Joshua, have proved very disappointing. Despite the excavators' efforts, it emerged that in the late part of the 13th century BCE, at the end of the Late Bronze Age, which is the agreed period for the conquest, there were no cities in either tell, and of course no walls that could have been toppled. Naturally, explanations were offered for these anomalies. Some claimed that the walls around Jericho were washed away by rain, while others suggested that earlier walls had been used; and, as for Ai, it was claimed that the original story actually referred to the conquest of nearby Beit El and was transferred to Ai by later redactors.

Biblical scholars suggested a quarter of a century ago that the conquest stories be viewed as etiological legends and no more. But as more and more sites were uncovered and it emerged that the places in question died out or were simply abandoned at different times, the conclusion that there is no factual basis for the biblical story about the conquest by Israelite tribes in a military campaign led by Joshua was bolstered.

• The Canaanite cities: The Bible magnifies the strength and the fortifications of the Canaanite cities that were conquered by the Israelites: 'great cities with walls sky-high' (Deuteronomy 9:1). In practice, all the sites that have been uncovered turned up remains of unfortified settlements, which in most cases consisted of a few structures or the ruler's palace rather than a genuine city. The urban culture of Palestine in the Late Bronze Age disintegrated in a process that lasted hundreds of years and did not stem from military conquest. Moreover, the biblical description is unfamiliar with the geopolitical reality in Palestine. Palestine was under Egyptian rule until the middle of the 12th century BCE. The Egyptians' administrative centers were located in Gaza, Yaffo and Beit She'an. Egyptian presence has also been discovered in many locations on both sides of the Jordan River. This striking presence is not mentioned in the biblical account, and it is clear that it was unknown to the author and his editors. The archaeological findings blatantly contradict the biblical picture: the Canaanite cities were not 'great,' were not fortified and did not have 'sky-high walls.' The heroism of the conquerors, the few versus the many and the assistance of the God who fought for his people are a theological reconstruction lacking any factual basis.

• Origin of the Israelites: The conclusions drawn from episodes in the emergence of the people of Israel in stages, taken together, gave rise to a discussion of the bedrock question: the identity of the Israelites. If there is no evidence for the exodus from Egypt and the desert journey, and if the story of the military conquest of fortified cities has been refuted by archaeology, who, then, were these Israelites? The archaeological findings did corroborate one important fact: in the early Iron Age (beginning some time after 1200 BCE), the stage that is identified with the 'settlement period', hundreds of small settlements were established in the area of the central hill region of the Land of Israel, inhabited by farmers who worked the land or raised sheep. If they did not come from Egypt, what is the origin of these settlers? Israel Finkelstein, professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, has proposed that these settlers were the pastoral shepherds who wandered in this hill area throughout the Late Bronze Age (graves of these people have been found, without settlements). According to his reconstruction, in the Late Bronze Age (which preceded the Iron Age) the shepherds maintained a barter economy of meat in exchange for grains with the inhabitants of the valleys. With the disintegration of the urban and agricultural system in the lowlands, the nomads were forced to produce their own grains, and hence the incentive for stable settlements.

The name 'Israel' is mentioned in a single Egyptian document from the period of Merneptah, king of Egypt, dating from 1208 BCE: 'Plundered is Canaan with every evil, Ascalon is taken, Gezer is seized, Yenoam has become as though it never was, Israel is desolated, its seed is not.' Merneptah refers to the country by its Canaanite name and mentions several cities of the kingdom, along with a non-urban ethnic group. According to this evidence, the term 'Israel' was given to one of the population groups that resided in Canaan toward the end of the Late Bronze Age, apparently in the central hill region, in the area where the Kingdom of Israel would later be established.

A Kingdom With No Name

• The united monarchy: Archaeology was also the source that brought about a shift regarding the reconstruction of the reality in the period known as the 'united monarchy' of David and Solomon. The Bible describes this period as the zenith of the political, military and economic power of the people of Israel in ancient times. In the wake of David's conquests, the empire of David and Solomon stretched from the Euphrates River to Gaza ('For he controlled the whole region west of the Euphrates, from Tiphsah to Gaza, all the kings west of the Euphrates,' 1 Kings 5:4). The archaeological findings at many sites show that the construction projects attributed to this period were meager in scope and power.

The three cities of Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer, which are mentioned among Solomon's construction enterprises, have been excavated extensively at the appropriate layers. Only about half of Hazor's upper city was fortified, covering an area of only 30 dunams (7.5 acres), out of a total area of 700 dunams which was settled in the Bronze Age. At Gezer there was apparently only a citadel surrounded by a casemate wall covering a small area, while Megiddo was not fortified with a wall. The picture becomes even more complicated in the light of the excavations conducted in Jerusalem, the capital of the united monarchy. Large sections of the city have been excavated over the past 150 years. The digs have turned up impressive remnants of the cities from the Middle Bronze Age and from Iron Age II ( the period of the Kingdom of Judea). No remains of buildings have been found from the period of the united monarchy (even according to the agreed chronology), only a few pottery shards. Given the preservation of the remains from earlier and later periods, it is clear that Jerusalem in the time of David and Solomon was a small city, perhaps with a small citadel for the king, but in any event it was not the capital of an empire as described in the Bible. This small chiefdom is the source of the title 'Beth David' mentioned in later Aramean and Moabite inscriptions. The authors of the biblical account knew Jerusalem in the 8th century BCE, with its wall and the rich culture of which remains have been found in various parts of the city, and projected this picture back to the age of the united monarchy. Presumably, Jerusalem acquired its central status after the destruction of Samaria, its northern rival, in 722 BCE.

The archaeological findings dovetail well with the conclusions of the critical school of biblical scholarship. David and Solomon were the rulers of tribal kingdoms that controlled small areas: the former in Hebron and the latter in Jerusalem. Concurrently, a separate kingdom began to form in the Samaria hills, which finds expression in the stories about Saul's kingdom. Israel and Judea were from the outset two separate, independent kingdoms, and at times were in an adversarial relationship. Thus, the great united monarchy is an imaginary historiosophic creation, which was composed during the period of the Kingdom of Judea at the earliest. Perhaps the most decisive proof of this is that we do not know the name of this kingdom.

YHWH and his Consort

How many gods, exactly, did Israel have? Together with the historical and political aspects, there are also doubts as to the credibility of the information about belief and worship. The question about the date at which monotheism was adopted by the kingdoms of Israel and Judea arose with the discovery of inscriptions in ancient Hebrew that mention a pair of gods: YHWH and his Asherath. At two sites, Kuntilet Ajrud in the southwestern part of the Negev hill region, and Khirbet el-Kom in the Judea piedmont, Hebrew inscriptions have been found that mention 'YHWH and his Asherah', 'YHWH Shomron and his Asherah', 'YHWH Teman and his Asherah'. The authors were familiar with a pair of gods, YHWH and his consort Asherah, and send blessings in the couple's name. These inscriptions, from the 8th century BCE, raise the possibility that monotheism, as a state religion, is actually an innovation of the period of the Kingdom of Judea, following the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel.

The archaeology of the Land of Israel is completing a process that amounts to a scientific revolution in its field. It is ready to confront the findings of biblical scholarship and of ancient history as an equal discipline. But at the same time, we are witnessing a fascinating phenomenon in that all this is simply ignored by the Israeli public. Many of the findings mentioned here have been known for decades. The professional literature in the spheres of archaeology, Bible and the history of the Jewish people has addressed them in dozens of books and hundreds of articles. Even if not all the scholars accept the individual arguments that inform the examples I have cited, the majority have adopted their main points. Nevertheless, these revolutionary views are not penetrating the public consciousness. About a year ago, my colleague, the historian Prof. Nadav Ne'eman, published an article in the Culture and Literature section of Ha'aretz entitled 'To Remove the Bible from the Jewish Bookshelf', but there was no public outcry. Any attempt to question the reliability of the biblical descriptions is perceived as an attempt to undermine 'our historic right to the land' and as a shattering of the myth of the nation that is renewing the ancient Kingdom of Israel. These symbolic elements constitute such a critical component of the construction of the Israeli identity that any attempt to call their veracity into question encounters hostility or silence. It is of some interest that such tendencies within the Israeli secular society go hand-in-hand with the outlook among educated Christian groups. I have found a similar hostility in reaction to lectures I have delivered abroad to groups of Christian Bible lovers, though what upset them was the challenge to the foundations of their fundamentalist religious belief. It turns out that part of Israeli society is ready to recognize the injustice that was done to the Arab inhabitants of the country and is willing to accept the principle of equal rights for women - but is not up to adopting the archaeological facts that shatter the biblical myth. The blow to the mythical foundations of the Israeli identity is apparently too threatening, and it is more convenient to turn a blind eye. •

Prof. Ze'ev Herzog teaches in the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University. He took part in the excavations of Hazor and Megiddo with Yigael Yadin and in the digs at Tel Arad and Tel Be'er Sheva with Yohanan Aharoni. He has conducted digs at Tel Michal and Tel Gerisa and has recently begun digging at Tel Yaffo. He is the author of books on the city gate in Palestine and its neighbors and on two excavations, and has written a book summing up the archaeology of the ancient city.

http://www.bib-arch.org/bswbBreakingIllSpecial1.html 10/21/02 6:40:54 PM

Herzog's Attack on the Bible Unjustified

Author, Hershel Shanks

Full Text as Appeared in Ha'aretz Magazine, November 5, 1999

"The Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert," proclaims my archaeologist friend Ze'ev Herzog of Tel Aviv University ("It ain't necessarily so," Oct. 29). He thus aligns himself with a small group of scholars widely known as the "Biblical Minimalists," although one of their number, Philip Davies of the University of Sheffield in England, has called this "a sneering epithet." According to the minimalists, the Bible is worthless as a source of history for the periods it describes; the texts were written hundreds and hundreds of years after the events they describe and thus can tell us, at most, about the period when they were composed, but nothing about the events they describe.

The minimalists are sometimes called the Copenhagen School because several of their most prominent members are affiliated with the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Others are in Scotland, England and the United States. Among Israeli scholars, the minimalists are perceived as including Herzog's distinguished colleague (and another friend) Israel Finkelstein, whom Herzog cites approvingly in his article. While the minimalists have no formal organization and they do differ in details, they share the basic view that the Bible is essentially a fictional account that served other functions for the biblical authors, creating a glorious, but false national history at a much later time.

That the minimalists are motivated by interests other than pure scholarship is widely acknowledged. Again, they differ somewhat from one another. Almost all, like Herzog and Finkelstein, are serious scholars. But most of them also have a political agenda. Professor Avraham Malamat of Hebrew University publicly described one of them as both "anti-Israel and anti-Bible." At the extreme, they can even be viewed as anti-Semitic. One of their number has written a book entitled, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History. That about says it all.

In short, just as Herzog accurately tells us that "the archaeology of Palestine ... sprang from religious motives," so the position of the minimalists often takes on a conscious anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian cast. In this, it resonates with some of the recent revisionist histories of modern Israel. It also connects with a certain current faddish lack of pride in Israel's history, both modern and ancient, as well as a certain embarrassment at placing any great value, for whatever purposes, in the Bible. In Israel as well as elsewhere in the world, the Bible has somehow become associated with the literalists, the fundamentalists and evangelical Christians, not with sophisticated academic scholars.

Hence, it is not surprising that Herzog alludes to the Israeli-Arab conflict in an article otherwise about the Bible and archaeology: Although "part of Israeli society is ready to recognize the injustice that was done to the Arab inhabitants of the country," he tell us, it is not ready to recognize that "the archaeological facts ... shatter the biblical myth."

On the merits, Herzog's argument is simplistic and flawed. But it is also very clever and, as one might expect from such a distinguished archaeologist, based on an intimate knowledge of the facts on the ground. But the arguments are much more subtle than Herzog's quick-and-easy analysis recognizes.

A human composition

All modern critical scholars recognize that the Bible is a human composition (although this does not exclude the possibility that it is also inspired). Its purpose is primarily theological, not historical. (History cannot deal with miracles, for example.) And it is tendentious; it exaggerates to make a point. It often speaks metaphorically when it appears to a modern mind to be speaking factually. And, of course, given the fact that it is a human document, it can also be inaccurate.

But it also preserves its own dissent. We often get two (or more) sides of a story or event. Even its greatest heroes, whose history it is supposed to serve, are human and therefore flawed.

It is in this context that we must ask whether there is any history to be found in it. The view that simply says No is unwilling to do the hard work that the task requires—or, for other reasons, prefers to deny the possibility that there is history embedded in the text.

Take, for example, the Exodus. We don't need Professor Herzog to tell us that 2 million Israelites did not cross the Sinai on their way out of Egypt, despite the biblical implication as to this number (Exodus 12:37). And neither an archaeologist nor a historian can speak to the question as to whether God parted the Red Sea. It is also true that, as Professor Herzog tells us, no Egyptian document mentions the Israelites' presence in Egypt, nor the events of the Exodus. That is really all he says to support his grandiose lead: "The Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert." Given this lead, I am surprised that he did not add the usual canard that there is no archaeological evidence of the Israelites' wandering in the desert.

Instead, Herzog begins to contradict himself. He admits that "many [Egyptian] documents do mention the custom of nomadic shepherds to enter Egypt during periods of drought and hunger and to camp at the edges of the Nile Delta." This suggests that it is at least plausible that the Israelites (or the Israelites in formation) were among these groups. And Herzog fails to mention that the Egyptians tell us that these shepherds (and others) came from Asia and that they settled in precisely the area where the Bible tells us the Israelites settled.

Herzog counters, however, that "this was not a solitary phenomenon: such events occurred frequently across thousands of years and were hardly exceptional." Does this prove that the Israelites were not one of these groups? Hardly. Herzog's point is perhaps that the story could have been invented years later. Of course that it is possible. But the reverse is equally possible. He has surely not proved that Israel was not there. Yet that is all he says to prove his major point.

In fact, much more could be said that indicates the plausibility of an Israelite sojourn in Egypt. An Austrian archaeologist has identified a so-called four-room house usually identified with Israelites that he discovered in Goshen, the part of the Nile Delta where the Israelites settled. A prominent English Egyptologist has noted that the price for which Joseph was sold into slavery was the price at the time of the supposed event, rather than the much higher price that prevailed when the story was composed. All scholars agree that in the mid-second millennium B.C. Egypt was ruled by some Asiatic interlopers known as the Hyksos. All this—and much more—plausibly suggests a real, historical prehistory of the Israelites in Egypt.

Slaves, not kings When people invent histories for themselves, their ancestors are secret kings or princes or descendants of gods. Who would invent a history of their people as slaves, if there were not some truth in it?

If you read Herzog carefully, he grudgingly admits that there probably was an Egyptian sojourn and an Exodus: "At best, the stay in Egypt and the exodus occurred in a few families," he concedes. That poses a different question. Now we are really talking about how big the group was, not whether there was such a group. Perhaps it was only a few hundred, or a few thousand. But that is a far cry from trumpeting as fact that "the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert."

Herzog admits that during the period identified with the Israelite settlement (Iron Age I, 1200-1000 B.C.), "hundreds of small settlements were established in the area of the central hill region of the Land of Israel." He cannot bring himself to call people who lived in these settlements the emerging Israelites, although that is precisely the area where, according to the Bible, the Israelites settled. Citing his colleague Israel Finkelstein, Herzog identifies these settlers as Canaanite shepherds settling down. The implication is that Israel emerged out of Canaanite society.

But if you read the Bible carefully, this suggestion is not at all surprising: Ancient Israel emerged out of many groups. Some tribes, like Asher and Dan, were associated with ships (Judges 5:17). The polyglot nature of early Israel is reflected in Ezekiel's proclamation: "By origin and birth you are from the land of the Canaanites—your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite" (Ezekiel 16:3). The Shechemites were circumcised to become part of Israel (Genesis 34). In short, the Bible is a lot more subtle than Herzog gives it credit for. The fact that many groups accreted and became part of Israel does not detract from the fact that some, whose story became the national story, came from Egypt where they had been enslaved.

Certainty eludes us when we are talking about the history of ancient Israel. We must talk about possibilities, likelihoods, plausibility and, at most, probability. I have not proved that there was an Egyptian sojourn and exodus. But neither has Herzog disproved it. And I believe my case is better than his, that is, that an element of ancient Israel came out of Egypt. For all that, however, we must learn to live with uncertainty. When we trumpet the negative, we only play into the hands of the worst elements among the biblical minimalists.

The same kind of analysis that applies to the Egyptian sojourn and the Exodus is applicable to the other instances cited by Herzog.

Take the Patriarchal Narratives. It is true that an earlier generation of scholars thought they had identified the patriarchal age—and they were wrong. From this, the minimalists conclude that there was no patriarchal age and that there is no historical truth behind the narratives. That the earlier effort to identify the patriarchal age failed does not mean that there was no patriarchal age. Archaeology has not disproved the existence of a patriarchal age. It has simply failed to identify one.

Nor has archaeology proved that the patriarchs never lived. Doubtless, the stories contain legendary material (we come to this conclusion not on the basis of archaeology but on the basis of the stories themselves), but they may well reflect an accurate historical context. As is often stated, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. This aphorism is not always applicable, but it is applicable here.

Well, yes and no

It is said that archaeology disproves the Israelite conquest of Canaan—or, in Herzog's words, "The archaeological findings blatantly contradict the biblical picture." Well, yes and no. Again, the question is more subtle than Herzog would allow. There are problems. But Herzog ignores the fact that the Bible itself recognizes this. We get two somewhat differing pictures in the books of Joshua and Judges. If we are looking for history, we must take into account not only the successful lightning attacks described in Joshua, but also the more gradual and incomplete settlement described in Judges. That the excavations of Jericho and Ai indicate there were no cities here at the time Joshua was supposed to have conquered them must be balanced against the fact that, according to Hebrew University archaeologist Amnon Ben-Tor, Hazor was indeed most likely destroyed and burned by the incoming Israelites, just as the Bible says (Joshua 11:1-11).

Moreover, there was a destruction of Jericho that comports in extraordinary detail with the description of the Israelite conquest of the city, down to the time of year and the fallen walls. But it occurred before the supposed date of the Israelite appearance on the scene. Did the Israelites somehow later take credit for this earlier destruction of Jericho? That's quite possible. But the situation is considerably more complicated than Herzog allows. It begins to seem that he has another agenda—simply to destroy the credibility of the Bible, as is so fashionable among academic sophisticates these days.

The minimalists' most recent attack is on the United Kingdom. Some minimalists deny the very existence of a kingdom of David and Solomon. Some even deny that there were such figures as David and Solomon. Herzog apparently thinks they may be right: "The united monarchy of David and Solomon ... was at most a small tribal kingdom", he says. If that is what it was at most, what was it at least? Some of the minimalists have gone so far as to charge that the recently discovered reference to the House (Dynasty) of David in a monumental stele excavated by Avraham Biran at Tel Dan is a forgery! Herzog does not go so far. He refers to the find only glancingly and does not discuss its relevance to a recognition of the power of the Davidic dynasty; it is mentioned in a monumental inscription of a non-Israelite ruler barely a century or so after David lived.

That the kingdom of David and Solomon was not as glorious or as extensive as the Bible indicates is certainly arguable and even probable. Perhaps Israelite hegemony was measured in different terms in those days—in terms of influence rather than absolute power. But again these are questions of "more or less than." To question the very existence of the United Monarchy because the Bible does not preserve its separate name, as Herzog does, bespeaks of denigration rather than a reasoned search for truth amid great uncertainty.

Similar tendentiousness infects Herzog's discussion of Israelite monotheism. He points to two extremely interesting finds that indicate that Yahweh, the Israelite God, had a consort. From this he concludes that ancient Israel had more than one god until a very late date. On the contrary, in many respects these finds confirm the picture we get from the Bible: Yahweh had a hard time of it; Israel was a nation of backsliders; this is what the prophets are all about. Herzog does not mention in support of his argument, as he could have, that thousands of clay figurines that apparently reflect polytheistic commitments have been excavated, even (and especially) in Jerusalem. Do these finds demonstrate that all Israel was polytheistic? Do these finds disprove the biblical assertion that elements in Israel soon developed a concept of a single God who created and ruled the world? Again, the archaeological evidence does not go so far as Herzog would have us think. Not all ancient Israelites were monotheistic, but neither were they all polytheistic. A far more measured response to the evidence is called for than Herzog provides.

A few final comments about archaeological evidence: It is minute compared to what we don't know and is subject to change tomorrow. True, some archaeological facts are closer to certainty than others. But it is not always easy to identify one from the other. Take Jerusalem as an example. Herzog correctly points out that very little has been found from the period of the supposed United Monarchy. Admittedly this is a problem, especially because Jerusalem is easily the most excavated city in the world. The so-called City of David, south of the Temple Mount, has been a particular focus of such modern archaeological giants as Dame Kathleen Kenyon and the late Yigal Shiloh. Despite their efforts, however, they failed to discover a major city wall that has been discovered only in the past couple of years by Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron. This wall has been preserved to a height of 15 feet. It is very close to the Spring Gihon where we would expect archaeologists to dig. Yet Kenyon and Shiloh (and others) missed it. Reich and Shukron have also found two or three major towers that protected the spring in about 1800 B.C. that previous excavators failed to find.

I mention this not to fault them and not because it disproves anything Herzog has said, but simply to suggest that the archaeological picture is never complete and is often revised. The next generation of archaeologists may well do to do the current doubters what they have done to such eminent scholars as William Foxwell Albright. (But then again, they may not. I do not trade in the certainty that is Herzog's coin.)

Ignoring the stele

Finally, the archaeological evidence is not only minute, but random. Herzog mentions a famous Egyptian stele that refers to "Israel" as a people in Canaan in 1208 B.C. No scholar questions this. Although Herzog mentions it, however, he doesn't deal with it. This wholly chance find makes the minimalists squirm. They argue that it refers only to a geographic location, not a people; or that it refers to some other Israel, not the one mentioned in the Bible. Without this chance find, you can be sure the minimalists would be arguing that there was no such entity as Israel at such an early period, that indeed Israel was "invented" hundreds of years later.

Similarly with the existence of David: Just as the minimalists were revving up for a full-scale attack on the existence of David (who had never been mentioned outside the Bible), Biran found the "House of David" stele. All this doesn't prove that the minimalists are wrong, only that we must be very careful in reaching our conclusions. History, and especially ancient history, is unfortunately very complicated, much more so than is dreamed of in Herzog's philosophy. Just as it is unjustified to conclude that the Bible is literally true in every detail, so it is unjustified to throw it out as historically worthless, especially when that view is so vigorously pursued by a few scholars with a political agenda. •

http://www.bib-arch.org/bswbBreakingIllSpecial2.html 10/21/02 6:44:10 PM

Archaeology Encyclopedia of Mormonism

Author David J. Johnson

Archaeology is the study and interpretation of past human cultures based on known material remains. Biblical and Mesoamerican archaeological research is of special interest to Latter-day Saints.

NO EVIDENCE FOR BOOK OF MORMON

Archaeological data from the ancient Near East and the Americas have been used both to support and to discredit the Book of Mormon. Many scholars see no support for the Book of Mormon in the archaeological records, since no one has found any inscriptional evidence for, or material remains that can be tied directly to, any of the persons, places, or things mentioned in the book (Smithsonian Institution).

INDIRECT EVIDENCE

Several types of indirect archaeological evidence, however, have been used in support of the Book of Mormon. For example, John L. Sorenson and M. Wells Jakeman tentatively identified the Olmec (2000-600 B.C.) and Late Pre-Classic Maya (300 B.C.-A.D. 250) cultures in Central America with the jaredite and nephite cultures, based on correspondences between periods of cultural development in these areas and the pattern of cultural change in the Book of Mormon.

PARALLEL EVIDENCE

Likewise, parallels between cultural traits of the ancient Near East and Mesoamerica perhaps indicate transoceanic contacts between the two regions. Among these are such minor secondary traits as horned incense burners, models of house types, wheel-made pottery, cement, the true arch, and the use of stone boxes. All of these may, however, represent independent inventions. Stronger evidence for contacts may be found in the tree of life motif, a common religious theme, on Stela 5 from Izapa in Chiapas, Mexico. Jakeman, in 1959, studied Stela 5 in detail and concluded that it represented the sons of a legendary ancestral couple absorbing and perhaps recording their knowledge of a munificent Tree of Life. This can be compared favorably to the account of Lehi's vision in the Book of Mormon (1 Ne. 8).

QUETZALCOATL EVIDENCE

The presence of a bearded white deity, Quetzalcoatl or Kukulcan, in the pantheon of the Aztec, Toltec, and Maya has also been advanced as indirect evidence of Christ's visit to the New World. The deity is represented as a feathered serpent, and elements of his worship may have similarities to those associated with Christ's Atonement.

RAY MATHENY'S WORK

Recent work by LDS professional archaeologists such as Ray Matheny at El Mirador and by the New World Archaeological Foundation in Chiapas has been directed toward an understanding of the factors that led to the development of complex societies in Mesoamerica in general. Under C. Wilfred Griggs, a team of Brigham Young University scholars has sponsored excavations in Egypt, and other LDS archaeologists have been involved in projects in Israel and Jordan.

RESEARCH IN NAUVOO

Another area of archaeological investigation is in LDS history. Dale Berge's excavations at Nauvoo; the Whitmer farm in New York; the early Mormon settlement of Goshen (Utah); the Utah mining town of Mercur; and, most recently, Camp Floyd, the headquarters of Johnston's army in Utah, have provided information about the economic and social interactions between early Mormon and non-Mormon communities.

Bibliography

Griggs, C. Wilfred. Excavations at Seila, Egypt. Provo, Utah, 1988.
Jakeman, M. Wells. "The Main Challenge of the Book of Mormon to Archaeology; and a Summary of Archaeological Research to Date Giving a Preliminary Test of Book-of-Mormon Claims." In Progress in Archaeology, An Anthology, ed. R. Christensen, pp. 99-103. Provo, Utah, 1963.
Jakeman, M. Wells. "Stela 5, Izapa, as `The Lehi Tree-of-Life Stone."' In The Tree of Life in Ancient America, ed. R. Christensen. Provo, Utah, 1968.
Matheny, Ray T. "An Early Maya Metropolis Uncovered, Elmirador." National Geographic 172, no. 3 (1987):316-39.
Smithsonian Institution. "Statement Regarding the Book of Mormon." Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, SIL-76, 1982.
Sorenson, John L. "An Evaluation of the Smithsonian Institution's 'Statement' Regarding the Book of Mormon" F.A.R.M.S. Paper. Provo, Utah, 1982.
Sorenson, John L. An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon. Salt Lake City, 1985.

DAVID J. JOHNSON

Archaeology and Our Religion - FARMS

Hugh Nibley

Nothing illustrates better than archaeology the inadequacy of human knowledge at any given time. It is not that archaeology is less reliable than other disciplines, but simply that its unreliability is more demonstrable. Meteorology (to show what we mean) is quite as "scientific" as geology and far more so than archaeology—it actually makes more use of scientific instruments, computers, and higher mathematics than those disciplines need to. Yet we laugh at the weatherman every other day; we are not overawed by his impressive paraphernalia, because we can check up on him any time we feel like it: he makes his learned pronouncements—and then it rains or it doesn't rain. If we could check up on the geologist or archaeologist as easily when he tells us with perfect confidence what has happened and what will happen in the remotest ages, what would the result be? Actually, in the one field in which the wisdom of geology can be controlled, the finding of oil, it is calculated that the experts are proven right only about 10 percent of the time.1 Now if a man is wrong 90 percent of the time when he is glorying in the complete mastery of his specialty, how far should we trust the same man when he takes to pontificating on the mysteries? No scientific conclusion is to be trusted without testing—to the extent to which exact sciences are exact they are also experimental sciences; it is in the laboratory that the oracle must be consulted. But the archaeologist is denied access to the oracle. For him there is no neat and definitive demonstration; he is doomed to plod along, everlastingly protesting and fumbling, through a laborious, often rancorous running debate that never ends.

To make a significant discovery in physics or mathematics or philology, one must first know a good deal about the subject; but the greatest archaeological discoveries of recent years were made by ignorant peasants and illiterate shepherd boys. From that it follows, as the handbooks on archaeology never tire of pointing out, that the proper business of the archaeologist is not so much the finding of stuff as being able to recognize what one has found. Yet even there the specialist enjoys no monopoly. Dr. Joseph Saad, who directed the excavations at Khirbet Qumran, tells of many instances in which the local Arabs were able to explain findings that completely baffled the experts from the West, to the rage and chagrin of the latter. Hence Sir Mortimer Wheeler warns the archaeologist: "Do not ignore the opinion of the uninstructed. 'Everyone knows as much as the savant…' Emerson said so and he was right.2 With everybody getting into the act, it is not surprising that the history of archaeology is largely the story of bitter jealousies and frightful feuds. Archaeology mercilessly accentuates certain qualities characteristic of all research but often glosses over the exact sciences. The elements of uncertainty, surprise, and disappointment, and the pervasive role of speculation and imagination, with all the unconscious conditioning and prejudice that implies, are not merely regrettable defects in archaeology—they are the very stuff of which the picturesque discipline is composed. "What in fact is Archaeology?" asks Sir Mortimer, and answers, "I do not myself really know…I do not even know whether Archaeology is to be described as an art or a science." Even on the purely technical side, he points out, "There is no right way of digging, but there are many wrong ways."3

Duel in the Dark

The idea of archaeology as the key to a man's origin and destiny was introduced as a weapon of anti-clerical polemic in the revolutionary movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reimar's "hate-filled pamphlet" on history and the New Testament launched the "scientific" attack on the Bible,4 and when Boucher de Perthes, a child of the French Revolution, found stone "hand-axes" among the flints of Abbeville he published them in five stately volumes entitled, with pontifical finality, "On the Creation."5 These objects, whose use and origin are still disputed, were to be nothing less than the key to the creation. Such fantastic leaps of the mind reveal the fierce determination of the first modem archaeologists to "get something" on the Bible. It was inevitable that biblical archaeology should become little more than "an offshoot of Darwinism."6 The great Lamarck, before he even came up with his explanation of the creation, was animated "by a severe…philosophical hostility, amounting to hatred, for the tradition of the Deluge and the Biblical creation story, indeed for everything which recalled the Christian theory of nature."7 And Darwin writes of himself in his twenties: "I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos [sic], or the beliefs of any barbarian…By further reflecting…that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become—that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible to us…This disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted for a single second that my conclusion was correct."8

This is a very revealing statement, a rich compound of cliches, a testament of Victorian smugness: "manifestly false…revengeful tyrant…any barbarian…fixed laws of nature…never doubted for a single second." Those are the words of a man who knows all the answers and is proud rather than ashamed of his unflinching loyalty to his adolescent prejudices. Just how much would a young English theology student in the 1820s know about the real history of the world, books of the Hindus, or "the beliefs of any barbarian"? Next to nothing, is putting it mildly, but it was enough to put the stamp of "complete disbelief" on Darwin's thinking forever after. Students commonly assume that it was the gradual amassing of evidence that in time constrained such men to part company with the Bible. Exactly the opposite is the case: long before they had the evidence, they brought to their researches such an unshakable determination to discredit the book of Genesis that the discovery of the evidence was a foregone conclusion. It was Darwin's bosom friend and spokesman who blurted out the real issue with characteristic bluntness: "Darwin himself avoided attacking the Bible, but for Huxley, his doughty champion against all comers," writes J. C. Greene, "the battle against the doctrine of inspiration, whether plenary or otherwise, was the crucial engagement in the fight for evolution and for freedom of scientific enquiry."9 The battle was against revelation, and evolution was the weapon forged for the conflict. We must not be misled by that inevitable tag about "freedom of scientific enquiry." When a Tennessee high-school teacher was fired for teaching evolution in 1925, the whole civilized world was shocked and revolted at such barbaric restriction on freedom of thought; yet at the same time there was not an important college or even high school in the country that would hire a man who dared to preach against evolution. Freedom of thought indeed.

The great debate between "science" and "religion" has been a duel in the dark. How do things stand between the picture that "archaeology" gives us of the past and the picture that the scriptures give us? Take the biblical image first: the best efforts of the best artists back through the years to represent a clear picture of things described in the Bible look to us simply comical. Even the conscientious Flemish artists, using the best Oriental knowledge of their time, paint Solomon or Holofernes as boozy Landgraves at a fancy dress ball, while the masters of the Italian Renaissance show their prophets and apostles affecting the prescribed dress and stock gestures of traveling Sophists of the antique world. We are no better today, with our handsome "Bible Lands" books, based on diligent research, showing Jesus or Elijah in the garb of modern Bedouins or Ramallah peasants moving through the eroded terrain of modern Palestine or discoursing beneath arches and gates of Norman and Turkish design. The moral of this is that no matter where we get our information, our picture of the Bible is bound to be out of focus, for it will always be based on inadequate data, and it will always be of our own construction. And at no time did the Christian world have a more distorted picture of the Bible than in the nineteenth century. To the Victorians, creaking with culture and refinement, it was easy and pleasant to assign all other creatures their proper place and station in the world—for that is what evolution does. Their outspoken objection to Mormonism was that it was utterly barbaric, an intolerable affront to an enlightened and scientific age. Huxley declared with true scientific humility that the difference between a cultivated man of his own day and a native of the forest was as great as that between the native and a blade of grass. What possible understanding could these people have of the real Bible world? Taken at face value the Bible was a disgustingly primitive piece of goods— "poor stuff," John Stuart Mill pronounced it; the work of people "ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible to us," as Darwin said, for this, of course, was the Bible that Darwin rejected: in it he was attacking an image that was the product of his own culture and nothing else.

The Mind's Eye

Archaeology today "in our universities and schools," according to Wheeler, "forms innocuous pools of somewhat colorless knowledge—mostly a refined Darwinismin—in which our kindergartens are encouraged to paddle."10 Again, everybody gets into the act. My own children, long before they could read, write, or count, could tell you exactly how things were upon the earth millions and millions of years ago. But did the little scholars really know? "What is our knowledge of the past and how do we obtain it?" asks the eminent archaeologist Stuart Piggott, and answers: "The past no longer exists for us, even the past of yesterday…This means that we can never have direct knowledge of the past. We have only information or evidence from which we can construct a picture."11 The fossil or potsherd or photograph that I hold in my hand may be called a fact—it is direct evidence, an immediate experience; but my interpretation of it is not a fact, it is entirely a picture of my own construction. I cannot experience ten thousand or forty million years—I can only imagine, and the fact that my picture is based on facts does not make it a fact, even when I think the evidence is so clear and unequivocal as to allow no other interpretation. Archaeology brings home this lesson every day, as Sir Flinders Petrie pointed out, for in no other field does interpretation count for so much.12 "The excavator, " writes Sir Leonard Woolley, "is constantly subject to impressions too subjective and too intangible to be communicated, and out of these, by no exact logical process, there arise theories which he can state, can perhaps support, but cannot prove…They have their value as summing up experiences which no student of his objects and notes can ever share."13 Yet what makes scientific knowledge scientific is that it can be shared. "There are fires," writes a leading student of American archaeology, "which man may, or may not, have lit—animals he may, or may not, have killed—and crudely flaked stone objects, which those most qualified to judge think he did not make. By weight of numbers these finds have been built into an impression of probability, but the idol has feet of clay."14 This is the normal state of things when we are dealing with the past: "If one certainty does emerge from this accumulation of uncertainties," writes an eminent geologist, "it is the deep impression of the vastness of geologic time."15 An "accumulation of uncertainties" leaves the student ("by weight of numbers") with an "impression" which he thereupon labels a "certainty."

Yet with examples gross as earth to exhort him, the archaeologist is constantly slipping into the normal occupational hazard of letting the theory rather than the facts call the tune. For years archaeologists always assumed that pieces could be chipped from the surface of stones merely by exposure to the burning sun—they never bothered to put their theory to the test, though no one ever was present when the sun did its chipping.16 From Breasted's Ancient Times, millions of high-school students have learned how primitive man woke one morning in his camp in the Sinai Peninsula to find that bright copper beads had issued from the greenish rocks with which he banked his fire that night. It was not until 1939 that a scientist at Cambridge actually went to the trouble to see if copper could be smelted from an open fire, and discovered that it was absolutely impossible.17 Nobody had bothered to check up on these simple things—like the Aristotelians who opposed the experimenting of Galileo, the men of science felt no need to question the obvious. If man had been on the earth for, say, 100,000 years, scattered everywhere in tiny groups subsisting on a near-animal level, could we possibly find the cultural and linguistic patterns we do in the world today? After fifty thousand years of local isolation, is it conceivable that languages at opposite ends of the earth should be recognizably related? Only in our day are such elementary questions beginning to be asked— often with surprising and disturbing results. But however vast the accumulation of facts may become, our picture of the past and the future will always be, not partly but wholly, the child of our own trained and conditioned imaginations. "The world will always be different from any statement that science can give of it," a philosopher of science writes, and he explains: "that is, we are looking for an opportunity to restate any statement which we can give of the world…We are always restating our statement of the world."18 Scholarship is also an age-old, open-ended discussion in which the important thing is not to be right at a given moment but to be able to enter seriously into the discussion. That I cannot do if I must depend on the opinion of others, standing helplessly by until someone else pronounces a verdict, and then cheering loudly to show that I too am a scholar.

Because interpretation plays an all-important role in it, archaeology has been carried on against a background of ceaseless and acrimonious controversy, with theory and authority usually leading fact around by the nose. If the great Sir Arthur Evans decided eighty years ago that the Minoans and Mycenaeans were not Greeks, then evidence discovered today must be discounted if it shows they were Greeks; if it was concluded long ago that the Jews did not write in Hebrew at the time of Christ, then Hebrew documents from that time if they are discovered today must be forgeries. "Does our time scale, then, partake of natural law?" a geologist wonders. "No…I wonder how many of us realize that the time scale was frozen in essentially its present form by 1840…? The followers of the founding fathers went forth across the earth and in Procrustean fashion made it fit the sections they found even in places where the actual evidence literally proclaimed denial. So flexible and accommodating are the 'facts' of geology."19 "Science," said Whitehead, "is our modern-day dogmatism." There is something cozy and old-fashioned, almost nostalgic, in the archaeology of forty years ago with its invincible meliorism and romantic faith in man's slow, steady, inevitable onward and upward march. But archaeology is the science of surprises, and the most desperate efforts of accommodation have not been able to discredit the sensational changes of our day.

"One of the most exciting results of the radio-carbon dating," writes Piggott, has been to emphasize how rapidly and severely the environment was modified."20 Extreme and rapid changes of environment have long been anathema to science. "Darwin's secret, learned from Lyell,"21 according to H. F. Osborn, was (in Lyell's own words) that "all theories are rejecting that which involves the assumption of sudden and violent catastrophies."22 In a world of nuclear explosions this seems downright funny, but it "was a perfect expression," as Egon Friedell has written, "of the English temperament and comfortable middleclass view of the world that refused to believe in sudden and violent metamorphoses, world uprising, and world calamities."23 One of the most militant evolutionists of our day says that "it remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families, and nearly all categories above the level of families, appear in the record suddenly, and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences."24 One wonders why if most species appear on the scene suddenly without millions of years of evolutionary preparation leading up to them, the human race cannot have done the same. "Because it didn't," we are told. For a hundred years, thousands of scientists have devoted their lives to proving that it didn't; yet all they have to offer us as proof to date is a large and cluttered science fair of bizarre and competing models, interesting but mutually damaging.

The New Uniformity

Through the years the writer, who is no archaeologist, has had to keep pretty well abreast of the journals and consult occasionally with archaeologists in order to carry on his own varied projects. Anyone who has any contact at all with what is going on is aware that the significant trend since World War 11 has been the steady drawing together of far-flung peoples and cultures of antiquity into a single surprisingly close-knit fabric. Early in the present century an "Egyptologist" could make fun of the "amusing ignorance" of the Pearl of Great Price, in which "Chaldeans and Egyptians are hopelessly mixed together, although as dissimilar and remote in language, religion, and locality as are today's American Indians and Chinese."25 Today a ten-year-old would be reprimanded for such a statement, since now we know that Chaldeans and Egyptians were "hopelessly mixed together" from the very beginning of history. Even as late as the 1930s so eminent a scholar as T. E. Peet had to exercise extreme caution—suggesting that there might be any resemblance between the literatures of Babylonia, Palestine, Egypt, and Greece.26 Today we know better, as every month establishes more widely and more firmly the common ties that knit all the civilizations of the ancient world together.

A hundred years ago, investigators of prehistory already sensed "the essential unity of the earlier Stone Age cultures throughout the Old World." From the very beginning of the race "at a given period in the Pleistocene," writes Piggott, "one can take, almost without selection, tools from South India, Africa and South England which show identical techniques of manufacture and form…What happened at one end of the area seems to be happening more or less simultaneously at the other."27 I have never seen any attempt to account for this astounding worldwide coordination in the industries of primitive beings who supposedly could communicate to their nearest neighbors only by squeals and grunts. In the mid-nineteenth century the folklorists were beginning to notice that the same myths and legends turned up everywhere in the Old and New Worlds, and philologists were discovering the same thing about languages; today Hockett and Asher are bemused by the "striking lack of diversity in certain features of language" and make the astounding announcement that "phonological systems [of all the languages of the world] show much less variety than could easily be invented by any linguist working with pencil and paper."28 The same authorities note that "man shows an amazingly small amount of racial diversity," and pardonably wonder "why human racial diversity is so slight, and…why the languages and cultures of all communities, no matter how diverse, are elaborations of a single inherited 'common denominator.'"29 With a million years of savagery and hostility, ignorance, isolation, and bestial suspicion to keep them divided, it seems that men should have had plenty of time to develop a vast number of separate "denominators" of language, legend, race, and culture. But that is not the picture we get at all.30

In religion it is the same. It was not until 1930 that a group of researchers at Cambridge cautiously presented evidence for the prevalence through the ancient world of a single pattern of kingship, an elaborate religious-economicpolitical structure that could not possibly have been invented independently in many places. We do not find, as we have every right to expect, an infinite variety of exotic religious rites and concepts; instead we find a single overall pattern, but one so peculiar and elaborate that it cannot have been the spontaneous production of primitive minds operating in isolation from each other.31

When history begins, "let us say c. 5000 B.C.," to follow J. Mellaart, "we find throughout the greater part of the Near East…villages, market towns…and castles of local rulers" widely in touch with each other as "goods and raw materials were traded over great distances."32 It is essentially the same picture we find right down to the present; and we find it everywhere—if we go to distant China "the life of the Shang [the oldest known] population can have differed little in essentials from that of the populous city-states of the Bronze Age Mesopotamia,"33 or from that of the peasants of the Danube or of "the earliest English farming culture."34 This is what has come out since World War II. Before that, archaeology had made us progressively aware of the oneness of our world with successive discoveries of Amarna, Ugarit, Boghazkeui, Nuzi, and so on, each one tying all the great Near Eastern civilizations closer and closer together while revealing the heretofore unsuspected presence of great nations and empires as active and intimate participants in a single drama. And the Bible is right in the center of it: the patriarchs who had been reduced to solar myths by the higher critics suddenly turned out to be flesh-and-blood people; odd words, concepts and expressions, and institutions of the Bible started turning up in records of great antiquity; the Hittites, believed to be a myth by Bible scholars until 1926, suddenly emerged as one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever seen. Since then a dozen almost equally great empires have been discovered, and the preliminary studies of each of them have shown in every case that they had more or less intimate ties with the great Classical and Middle Eastern civilizations.35 The picture of ancient civilization as a whole has become steadily broader and at the same time more uniform, so that the growing impression is one of monotony bordering on drabness. Seton Lloyd is depressed by "the drab impersonality of the 'archaeological ages.'"36 Archaeology gives us, as M. P. Nilsson puts it, "a picture-book without a text or, in the words of Sir Mortimer, "the archaeologist may find the tub but altogether miss Diogenes."38 The eager visitor to a hundred recent diggings is fated to discover that people once lived in stone or brick or wooden houses, cooked their food (for they ate food) in pots of clay or metal over fires, hunted, farmed, fished, had children, died, and were buried. Wherever we go, it is just more of the same— all of which we could have assumed in the first place. The romance of archaeology has always resided not in the known but in the unknown, and enough is known today to suggest the terrifying verdict that a great Cambridge scientist pronounced on the physical sciences a generation ago: "The end is in sight."

And now we come to the crux of the matter. As the tub without Diogenes has nothing to do with philosophy, so archaeology without the prophets has nothing to do with religion. "You cannot," says Piggott, "from archaeological evidence, inform yourself on man's ideas, beliefs, fears or aspirations. You cannot understand what his works of art or craftsmanship signified to him."39 The ancient patriarchs and prophets ate out of ordinary dishes, sat on ordinary chairs, wore ordinary clothes, spoke the vernacular, wrote on ordinary paper and skins, and were buried in ordinary graves. The illusion of the pilgrims to the holy land, Christian, Moslem and Jewish, that this is not so— that is, that contact with such objects by holy men rendered them holy—gave rise to Biblical archaeology at an early time. The Palestine pilgrims from Origen and Gregory to Robinson and Schaff had all been looking for extra-special things, for miraculous or at least wonderful objects. Men who viewed the idea of living prophets as a base superstition turned to the dead stones of the "Holy Land" for heavenly consolation, and enlisted archaeology in the cause of faith.40 But though archaeology may conceivably confirm the existence of a prophet (though it has never yet done so), it can never prove or disprove the visions that make the prophet a significant figure. Former attempts to explain the scriptures in terms of nature-myths, animism, and psychology had nothing to do with reality.41 What can archaeology tell me about the council in heaven? Nothing, of course—that all happened in another world. The same holds for the creation, taking place as it did at a time and place and in a manner that we cannot even imagine. Then comes the garden of Eden—a paradise and another world beyond our ken. It is only when Adam and Eve enter this world that they come down to our level. Strangely enough, the biblical image is not that of our first parents entering a wonderful new world, but leaving such to find themselves in a decidedly dreary place of toil and tears. Before long the children of Adam are building cities and are completely launched on the familiar and drab routines of civilized living: "dreary" suggests old and tired, and there is nothing fresh or new about the Adamic Age.

On the archaeological side we have Jericho, by general consensus (as of the moment) the oldest city in the world. It emerges abruptly full-blown, with a sophisticated and stereotyped architecture that remains unchanged for twenty-one successive town-levels, and from the first it displays a way of life substantially the same as that carried on by the inhabitants of the nearby towns right down to the present day. This has come as a great surprise; it is not at all consistent with the official model of the onward and upward march of civilization that we all learned about at school. When the civilization of China was rediscovered by European missionaries in the seventeenth century, skeptics and atheists saw in it a crushing refutation of the Bible—here was a great civilization thousands of years older and far richer, wiser, and more splendid than anything Western man had imagined, thriving in complete unawareness of God's plan of salvation. It was the discovery of such other worlds, such island universes, that was once the concern of archaeology, ever seeking the strange, the marvelous, and the exotic. But now archaeology has found too much; the worlds are there, but they are not isolated—not even China; they are all members of a single community, and by far the best handbook guide to the nature and identity of that community remains the Bible.

Notes

1. Sloan, Raymond D., "The Future of the Exploration Geologist—Can He Meet the Challenge?" Geotimes 3, no. 1 (1958), p. 6. "Only one wildcat well in nine discovers oil or gas: only one in forty-four is profitable." In spite of scientific methods, "the high risks…are unusual in the business world." (Sloan, pp. 6, 7.)
2. Wheeler, Sir Robert Eric Mortimer, Archaeology from the Earth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 50.
3. Wheeler, p. 2.
4. Jeremias, Joachim, "The Present Position in the Controversy Concerning the Problem of the Historical Jesus," Expository Times 69 (1958): 333.
5. Rapport, Samuel, and Helen Wright, eds., Archaeology (New York: New York University Library of Science, 1963), pp. 18-20.
6. Gall, August Freiherm von, Basileia tou Theou (Heidelberg: Winter, 1926), p. 12, discussing the Wellhausen school.
7. Gillespie, Charles Coulston, "Lamarck and Darwin in the History of Science, " American Scientist 46 (Dec. 1958): 397.
8. Darwin, Charles, Autobiography (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), describing the period between 1836 and 1839. Darwin was born in 1809.
9. Green, John C., "Darwin and Religion," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 103 (1959): 717.
10. Wheeler, p. 23.
11. Piggott, Stuart, ed., The Dawn of Civilization (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), p. 11.
12. Petrie, William Matthew Flinders, Social Life in Ancient Egypt (1923), part 3, pp. 80, 81.
13. Woolley, Leonard, Digging Up the Past (New York: Crowell, 1954), p. 119.
14. Bushnell, G.H.S., "The Birth and Growth of New World Civilization," in Piggott, p. 377.
15. Swinnerton, Henrv Hurd, The Earth Beneath Us (Boston: Little-Brown, 1955), p. 15.
16. Morgan, Jacques Jean Marie de, La Prehistoire Orientale (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1925), II, pp. 4ff., discusses this phenomenon, with pictures of "hatchet-shaped seile chipped by the heat of the sun." (Fig. 2.)
17. Coghlan, H. H., "Some Experiments on the Origin of Early Copper," Man 39 (1939): 106-8.
18. Mead, George H., Movements of Thought in the 19th Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), p. 508, discussing Bergson.
19. Spieker, Edmund M., "Mountain-Building Chronology and Nature of Geologic Time Scale," Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists 40 (August 1956): 1803; cf. Norman D. Newell, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 103 (1959): 265.
20. Piggott, p. 40.
21. Osborn, Henry Fairfield, The Origin and Evolution of Life (New York: Scribner's, 1918), p. 24.
22. Lyell, Charles, Principles of Geology (New York: John Murray, 1872) 1:318. 23. Friedell, Egon, Kulturgeschichte Aegyptens und des alten Orients (München: C.H. Beck, 1953), p. 105.
24. Simpson, George Gaylord, The Major Features of Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), p. 360.
25. Peters, John, in Rev. Franklin S. Spalding, Joseph Smith as a Translator (Salt Lake City: Arrow Press, 1912), p. 28.
26. Peet, Thomas Eric, A Comparative Study of the Literatures Of Egypt, Palestine and Mesopotamia (London: British Academy, 1931), pp. 52f., 96f., 127-29, 113-16.
27. Piggott, Stuart, Prehistoric India (London: Cassell, 1950), p. 26.
28. Hockett, Charles F., and Robert Ascher, "The Human Revolution," American Scientist 52 (1964): 90.
29. Hockett, p. 90.
30. Hockett and Ascher insist not only that man had already achieved the essence of language and culture at least a million years ago (p. 89), but that "the crucial developments must have taken place once, and then spread" by that time, since "true diversity is found in more superficial aspects of language" but not in the fundamental aspect (p. 90). That is, all the languages of the world have retained recognizable ties to a parent language from which they separated over a million years ago! Since C. S. Coon puts the age of the human race at about 50,000 vears, this is quite a thing.
31. Lord Raglan, The Origin of Religion (London: Watts and Co., 1949).
32. Mellaart, James, "The Beginning of Village and Urban Life," in Piggott, Dawn of Civilization, p. 62.
33. Watson, William, in Piggott, p. 271.
34. Sieveking, Gale, "China: The Civilization of a Single People," in Edward Bacon, Vanished Civilizations of the Ancient World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), this being the Windmill Hill site of 2750 B.C.
35. For a good survey, see Sieveking's paper in the preceding footnote, which deals in major civilizations of which we have virtually no history but all of which are definitely tied to the great civilizations of antiquity.
36. Seton, Lloyd, "The Early Settlement of Anatolia," in Piggott, p. 185.
37. Nilsson, Martin Persson, Minoan and Mycenaean Religion (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1950), p. 7.
38. Wheeler, p. 214.
39. Piggott, p. 15.
40. We have discussed this in the Jewish Quarterly Review 50 (1959): 99ff., 109ff.
41. Lord Raglan, p. 38.
"Archaeology and Our Religion," accompanied by two cover letters dated September 16, 1965, was originally intended to be included in the I Believe" series in the Instructor.

THREE OFFICIAL ARCHEOLOGICAL CLAIMS

I chose the three examples of specific Mormon claims because they all were included in an official publication of the Book of Mormon in a special 1966 edition. These are also good examples because many have written about the artifacts in question. This version of the Book of Mormon was a special large print illustrated annotated edition designed for seminary students. The notes and photographs leaders chose were supplied by Milton R. Hunter. Hunter was a general authority of the church with a Ph.D. in history. [BOM 521].

Mormon Doctrine, in its article on Quetzalcoatl quotes both Milton R. Hunter and Thomas Stuart Ferguson. Also cited in Mormon Doctrine is Hunter’s work, Christ in Ancient America. Both this work and the Book of Mormon were published by Deseret Book Company which is the official publication arm of the church. These Book of Mormon notes and photographs identify Quetzalcoatl as Christ and the Nephites as being Maya. [Joseph Smith, The Book of Mormon, [Salt Lake City, Deseret Press, 1966], 217, 345, 521].

EXAMPLE 1

Beneath is a photo titled, Replica of the Famous Cross of Palenque, National Museum, Mexico City. The bottom photograph is explained by notes which identify the panel which say this glyph depicts “two priests shown presenting an offering.” The photograph of the glyph in the Book of Mormon is not of very good quality. We refer students to a copy suitable for Maya scholars in Linda Schele’s book [Schele, Blood of Kings, 115, Fig. 11.7]. Another excellent source are the illustrations are those accompanying Howard Goodkind’s Biblical Archeological Review article on Lord Kingsborough [Howard Goodkind, Biblical Archeological Review, 1985, 60-61].

The Book of Mormon notes on the replica begin by identifying the top central top feature as “a quetzal bird perched on the cross and the serpent’s mouth on the crossbar of the cross indicate that the people of Palenque were worshipers of Quetzalcoatl.” Final notes on this page claim, “most archeologists now agree that many of these artistic masterpieces date back to the beginning of the Christian era.” The date of this city is restated as predating the birth of Christ [BOM 281].

Problems with the Date of this “Mormon” Interpretation. This temple did not exist in the Christian era but was constructed more than 300 years after the final “Christian” in the Book of Mormon was killed. This glyph documents the accession to the throne the god-king Kan Xul in A.D. 721. Michael Coe has written that Palenque’s first ruler didn’t even rise to power until A.D. 431 [Coe, The Maya, 225].

Problems with Two Figures on the Glyph. The Book of Mormon notes say the two figures are “two priests presenting an offering.” In contrast, modern Mayanists Schele, Miller, Coe and Goodkind say the figure on the right is new king Kan Xul. They say he is pictured here just before he accessed to his throne because he is still dressed in plain clothing being barefoot. The figure at the left is Kan Xul’s deceased father Pacal. Mayanists know Pacal is depicted as deceased in this glyph citing the water lilies in Pacal’s hair as evidence. Dr. Coe documents the death of Pacal in A.D. 683. Dr. Goodkind dates the accession on January 10, 684.

Problems with the Mayan “Cross.” The so called cross is on this glyph is not a Christian symbol but the pagan Maya world tree. Dr. Goodkind says the Mayan “world tree” that “according to Mayan religious beliefs, stood at each of four corners and in the center of the universe. The “world tree” seems to grow out of a monster, which represents the underworld.” The world tree is represents four points of Maya compass the equivalent of our north, south east and west. Schele and Miller agree saying the “world tree” is depicted sitting atop the Quadripartite Monster. Mormons are not the only ones confused by these world trees. Early Catholics in central America thought St. Thomas, the apostle had visited and many linked Quetzalcoatl with Thomas [Goodkind, Lord Kingsborough, 60].

Quetzalcoatl perched atop the cross. Problems with Quetzalcoatl interpretation, Dr. Coe has identified this image as being the “bird monster Wuqub’ Kaqix. Schele sees it as the Celestial Bird which should not be linked with the Serpent Bird. Coe identified this bird as “the leading figure in the crystallizing Maya pantheon ... is the monstrous form of Wuqub’ Kaqix, an anthropomorphic bird who shows up in the Popol Vuh as the arrogant “sun” of the creation preceding this one.” [Schele, Blood of Kings, 64].

Instead of being like Christ, Wuqub’ Kaqix is seen by modern Maya scholars as the “monstrous arrogant bird that falsely claims to be the Sun of this penultimate Creation, and this is none other than Wuqub’ Kaqix, “Seven Macaw,” whom we have already seen in the gigantic stucco masks of the Late Preclassic, and in the huge carved head from Altun Ha. The Hero Twins defeat Wuqub’ Kaqix by shooting out his teach with a blow gun pellet, then replacing them with soft maize; the great bird sickens, then dies.” [Schele, Blood of Kings, 202].

EXAMPLE 2

The notes in this 1966 version of the Book of Mormon associate the photographed artifact with both the Smithsonian Institution and the National Geographic Society. The language of this note even says a Smithsonian Bulletin “identified this carving as “The Tree of Life” and gave a partial analysis of it.” We will be looking at the official response of both organizations to these comments.

In the second paragraph of notes is a controversial quotation from Dr. M. Wells Jakeman. This paragraph reads “Dr. M. Wells Jakeman, Brigham Young University, interpreted the carving as a representation of Lehi’s Dream of the Tree of Life, recorded in 1 Nephi 8:1-38. Dr. Jakeman wrote: ‘... the resemblance of this sculpture to the Book of Mormon account cannot be accidental ... it practically establishes ... an historical connection ... between the Ancient Central American priests responsible for the sculpture and the Lehi people of the Book of Mormon! Indeed the accurate and detailed knowledge of Lehi’s vision ... displayed by these priests in this sculpture can be explained only by their identification as an actual group of the Lehi people.” [M. Wells Jakeman, An Unusual Tree of Life Sculpture from Ancient Central America, Provo, UT: BY