Appendix 15

A READER’S interest in archaeology may range from nothing more than a casual interest in the past, and a desire to know what happened then, to a fascination with a particular place and a need to know what has been discovered there. Or you may be about to give a talk about the subject and need to read up a bit about the items which you have seen illustrated.

Nowadays it is easy enough to download an entire PowerPoint presentation about the subject, or find photographs and images that can illustrate one, but how sure can you be that these items are still well regarded, and that their provenance is not in dispute? For that purpose you need something reasonably up to date, which covers the ground in reasonable depth, is easily accessible and has some illustrations. The best one-volume book on archaeology which I have come across (it was recommended to me by Brother David Burges) is The Stones Cry Out by Randall Price, published by Harvest House Publishers in 1997, and it is just about still available. The illustrations are black and white, but are fine for identification purposes, assuming you have got better graphics elsewhere. Price takes a conservative (evangelical) position, which accords with how we would see things, and is very readable. His work also includes reference to Brother Leen Ritmeyer’s findings about the temple site (of which more later).

Choices, choices!

As usual with books (which is why we end up with so many of them!) there are many options available if you want something more than a straightforward summary of what has been found and what it might mean. It all depends how much interest you have in this fairly specialised topic, how much you want to spend, the sort of authors you want to read (critical, academic or conservative), and whether you are interested in the history of the things found, or just want the latest discoveries and the latest scholastic attitudes. Here are some options.

Good graphics

Apart from the Internet, which has a lot of visual material available, some of it in reasonably high definition, there are some lovely ‘coffee table’ books which are both very attractive and informative. Alan Millard’s Discoveries from Bible Times (already mentioned) is an amalgamation of two earlier books, both by Lion, which often appear second-hand: Treasures from Bible Times (1985) and Discoveries from the Time of Jesus (1990 and 1993). The combined volume has over 300 photographs and over 70 maps and diagrams, so it’s a really useful resource, for just £20.

Lion have just brought out another nicely illustrated and informative book by James K. Hoffmeier (who has also written an interesting book about Israel in Egypt). This one, published in February 2008, is called The Archaeology of the Bible and in about 200 pages follows the Bible narrative and illustrates it with artefacts and scenes as it progresses.

Another visually attractive volume, also by Lion, is the Picture Archive of the Bible (1987) by Masom & Alexander (Editors), with archaeological notes again by Alan Millard. The photography is stunning, but this is more of a picture book than a textbook. There are plenty of books with visual material about the life and times of the Bible, like the Reader’s Digest Great People of the Bible and How they Lived (1974) which has a mix of colour photographs, drawings, sketches and suchlike, or Manners and Customs in the Bible, by V. H. Matthews. These can be useful background reading, as can the two books Everyday Life in Old Testament Times by E. W. Heaton and Everyday Life in New Testament Times by A. C. Bouquet. The accompanying line drawings in those books are only black and white, but useful even so, and both books are readily available second-hand. But they do not deal with artefacts or discoveries as such, just about everyday life situations.

If black and white illustrations will suffice, and if your budget or interest is modest, Werner Keller’s The Bible as History, which came out in many different versions and is still available now in paperback format, was also published as The Bible as History IN PICTURES (1964, Hodder & Stoughton) with “329 illustrations and 8 colour plates”. The illustrations were not that sharp, however, and were surpassed by Illustrations from Biblical Archaeology by D. J. Wiseman (1966, Tyndale Press), his commentary also being authoritative, although it was written 40 years ago.

Don’t forget how useful illustrated encyclopaedias can be, like the IVP Illustrated Bible Dictionary, several of which are also obtainable electronically. The Biblical Archaeological Society have produced a CD-ROM The Biblical World in Pictures which has over 1,000 photographs of Bible scenes and findings, at a resolution which is adequate for PowerPoint presentations, but as many of these photographs are taken from previous slide sets, some of them are disappointing in visual terms.

More detailed studies

If you prefer words to pictures and want to do some serious investigation into the past, there are many books available. Pick up a copy of the Biblical Archaeological Review and you will see scores of them advertised, but beware! Few of them are written by people who would want to be called ‘Bible archaeologists’. Even as conservative a writer as William Devers fights shy of that sort of designation in a recent book What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? (2001, Eerdmans). Examining the approach of the so-called ‘minimalists’ (critics of the Bible who are also sometimes termed ‘revisionists’), he concedes many of their arguments, especially for pre-Monarchy findings, and only really becomes helpful for later findings. His aim is summed up in the conclusion of that book when he writes:

“What I have attempted to do throughout this book is twofold. First, I have focused on methodology, in order to unmask the revisionists’ ideology and the postmodern paradigm that lies partly hidden behind it, and in so doing to expose their faulty methodology in approaching the texts of the Hebrew Bible. Second, I have sought to counter the revisionists’ minimalist conclusions by showing how archaeology uniquely provides a context for many of the narratives in the Hebrew Bible. It thus makes them not just ‘stories’ arising out of later Judaism’s identity crisis, but part of the history of a real people of Israel in the Iron Age of ancient Palestine.”

If you want a more conservative approach, which uses the Bible as a basis and looks from that viewpoint to see what archaeology can tell us by way of confirmation, John McRay has written two volumes: Archaeology in the Old Testament (1998) and Archaeology in the New Testament (1991), both published by Baker. He is following the footsteps of Merrill Unger who also wrote two useful works, Archaeology and the Old Testament (1954) and Archaeology and the New Testament (1962), both by Zondervan. Those are still available second-hand and are worthwhile, although dated. Another stalwart is J. A. Thompson’s The Bible and Archaeology (1963, Paternoster). A good deal more detailed, but equally dated, is Jack Finegan’s Light from the Ancient Past (1959).

These older works provide a helpful way of getting familiar with the history of Bible times, even if they can’t inform you about the latest findings or the current criticisms.

Amihai Mazar wrote Archaeology of the Land of the Bible – 10,000 to 586BC (1990, Doubleday) as part of the Anchor Bible Reference series, and that is a fairly standard textbook, with a few drawings and black and white pictures, if you want to read something that starts with archaeological findings and works outwards. Mazar does not, for example, believe in the Exodus as it is recorded in the Bible, but he does provide some comparisons of how different historical interpretations line up.

There are encyclopaedias of archaeology available, like Avraham Negev’s Archaeological Encyclopaedia of the Holy Land (1996), also available in Libronix electronic format, or the Wycliffe Dictionary of Biblical Archaeology (2000), formerly The Biblical World, edited by Charles Pfeiffer. The New International Dictionary of Biblical Archaeology, edited by Blaiklock and Harrison (1983), is available in print and electronically from Zondervan, who also publish an NIV Archaeology Study Bible (go here for details and sample pages).

Older works

Not surprisingly, when people had more respect for the authority of the Bible as the word of God, their findings were more likely to accord with what is historically accurate, as recorded there. People like Dame Kathleen Kenyon challenged earlier findings, for example, the work of Garstang in excavating Jericho, but her studies have since been examined and found wanting. So, older works like John Garstang’s Joshua-Judges (1931, reprinted by Kregel in 1978) are still useful, as are the two books by Sir Charles Marston, The Bible is True (1934) and The Bible Comes Alive (1937), and the classic work by Sir W. M. Ramsay The Bearing of Recent Studies on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament (1915). Some of Ramsay’s books are now available electronically, like Was Christ Born in Bethlehem? (downloadable from here), but not the earlier one mentioned above, at present.

These older works need to be read in conjunction with later writings. For example, Edwin Yamauchi in The Stones and the Scriptures (IVP, 1973) puts the work of Ramsay in the setting of his time, contesting the Tubingen school of higher criticism.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries people were really excited by findings which were seen to support the historicity of the Bible and many of those early works become available from time to time. Sir Leonard Woolley’s findings at Ur of the Chaldees were published in popular format by Penguin Books, because of the public interest, though his findings about the flood now need to be treated with caution. Earlier the work of A. H. Layard at Nineveh was published as Nineveh and Its Remains (1849), in 2 volumes, and many books appeared with details of such findings, like Light from the East, C. J. Ball (1899) and The Old Testament in the Light of the Historical Records, T. G. Pinches (1908). Because Christadelphian readers closely followed such happenings, these works often appear in our second-hand selections and they are fascinating period pieces. And it has been possible to follow more contemporary discoveries also, by reading about Yigael Yadin’s excavations, for example at Hazor (1975) or Masada (1973).

Christadelphian works

This review would not be complete without mentioning Brother W. H. Boulton who wrote extensively about Bible Archaeology, his books also being intended for the general public. His general introduction to the subject was The Romance of Archaeology (1930) and he wrote more specialist books on Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt and Palestine.

Much more recently, Brother Leen and Sister Kathleen Ritmeyer have published many works, most of which are still available. Both of them worked on a major excavation site in Jerusalem where Brother Leen developed a theory about the location of the temple, which is widely quoted and debated. First published in the Biblical Archaeological Review, his ideas were then made available in booklet form, Reconstructing Herod’s Temple Mount in Jerusalem (1989, BAS), then in study-note format, The Temple and the Rock (1996). More recently they have been published as Secrets of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount (2006, BAS) and The Quest (2006, Carta). This last book, which comprises 440 pages, and is beautifully illustrated, is available here.

In addition to this consideration of the temple mount, Brother Leen and Sister Kathleen have also produced 4 large-format paperbacks, as follows:

Again, all of these are available from The Christadelphian Office.

Containing a mixture of photographs, diagrams and maps these are informative productions. Some of the photographs lack pin-point clarity, which is a pity, but the text and diagrams are excellent. Brother & Sister Ritmeyer have a website you might want to access.

Archaeology magazines

Reference has been made more than once to the bi-monthly Biblical Archaeological Review magazine, edited by Hershel Shanks. Beautifully illustrated, and also available electronically in Libronix format, this is not to everybody’s taste. It can be obsessive, for example in pursuing the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls material (which it effectively achieved), or in challenging the current attitude of the Israeli archaeological establishment, who are challenging the provenance of all items which were not found in situ, and are alleging that forgeries abound. But, if you can cope with that, and accept that it is not always going to publish material that accords with our belief in the inerrancy of scripture, it can help keep you up to date with findings and attitudes in our increasingly secular age.

On the BAS website you can see samples of the most recent issue and find out about the books they publish.

There are other magazines, and no doubt you can recommend helpful books other than those mentioned. Let’s hear from you, please.

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