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What Did The Bible Writers Know & When Did They Know It? - What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel.Most compelling thought:"It has been my contention thus far that there is a crisis in the current study of the history of ancient Israel. The implication is that this crisis should be of concern not only to theologians and clerics, but also to intelligent lay folk, and indeed to all who cherish the Western cultural tradition, which in large part derives from values enshrined in the Bible. Yet the gravity of this particular crisis can be appreciated only by seeing it as part of a larger dilemma that characterizes modern intellectual and social life, particularly in the Western world." |
Buy this book for:
The more advanced Bible enthusiast. This book largely deals with disputes on a soaring academic level.
William G. Dever
William G. Dever (Ph. D. Harvard 1966) was professor of Near Eastern archeology and anthropology at the University of Arizona in Tuscon from 1975 to 2002, and director of numerous archeological digs in Israel. His list of publications is nearly endless.
A brief review of:
What Did The Bible Writers Know?
William G. Dever is a complicated man, with complicated arguments, which is probably fitting for a man of his stature. His book - a final, pre-retirement march onto the breach - carries a misleading title, offers a stunning wealth of insight in Levantine archeology and contains one major flaw.What Did The Bible Writers Know is an odd book. It seems to be a collection of unrelated papers, letters to friends and enemies, and a strew of marginal doodles, reaped together and coronated with a catchy but artificial title, which is fed back into the work and dealt with as with an after thought. After many endless chapters on the evils of postmodern revisionism - "And what marvelous new paradigm will come after this penultimate postmodernism? "Pre-apocalyptic"? If all this amounts to modernism and its aftermath, will someone please show me the way back to the Enlightenment?"- Dever concludes: "What did the biblical writers know, and when did they know it? They knew a lot and they knew it early."
He says this in a response to the claim of the nemesistic postmodernists, that the people who wrote the Bible also made it up, that there are no facts, no certainties and no historic truths in Scriptures. This kind of scholarly inbreeding really ticks Dever off. He spits his gal and effortlessly shows that the Biblical scribes who worked during the Babylonian exile must have worked from a very strong, trustworthy and ancient oral or perhaps even written tradition.
"Once again, the ceramic repertoire with which the original writers of the J, E, and D traditions were familiar is that of the Iron Age or Monarchy - and no other period. The text may have been edited late, but most of its contents are early."
Still, he submits, the Bible is a minority report, written by a priestly elite devoted to the Yahwist sect. "It presents us not so much with a picture of what Israelite religion really was, but of what it should have been - and would have been, had the biblical writers only been in charge. [] Archeology at its best provides a graphic illustration of the everyday masses, the vast majority of ordinary folk, their brief lives forgotten by the biblical writers in their obsession with eternity, their voices long muted until modern archeology allows them to speak again to us. It was these anonymous folk - not just kings and priests and prophets whom we know by name - who made Israel what it was."
And what was ancient Israel? Most certainly a centralized monarchy by the time of Solomon, asserts Dever. "The conclusion that we must draw is that Solomon, far from being the bold originator that the biblical authors thought him to be, was little more than on Oriental potentate, in the typical Irion Age Levantine style. His "genius" lay in the fact that he got away with it. [But] let me emphasize that every singe detail of the Bible's complicated description of the Jerusalem temple can now be corroborated by archeological examples from the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. There is nothing "fanciful" about 1 Kgs. 6-8. What is truly fanciful is the notion of the revisionists that a writer in Babylon in the 6th century, much less in Palestine in the Hellenistic-Roman era, could have "invented" such detailed descriptions, which by coincidence happened to fit exactly with Irion Age temples in Syria-Palestine hundreds of years earlier - temples that had long disappeared and had been forgotten."
And what about the invasion under Joshua, which very few scholars still believe in? The whole "Exodus-Conquest" cycle of stories must now be set aside as largely mythical, but in the proper sense of the term "myth": perhaps "historical fiction," but tales told primarily to validate religious beliefs. In my view, these stories are still "true" in that they convey forcefully later Israel's self-awareness as a "liberated people." I have even argued that there may be some actual historical truth here.... After referring to the historical "House of Joseph," a tribe that lived in a region where much of the stories about Israel at large originated, Dever makes the clever connection between Israel and the people of the US, who popularly celebrate their country's origin commemorating one single ship, and one single batch of immigrants.
Elsewhere Dever writes, "Population estimates, based on well-developed ethnographic parallels and site size, indicate a central hill-country population of only about 12 thousand at the end of the Late Bronze Age (13th century), which then grew rapidly to about 55 thousand by the 12th century, then to about 75 thousand by the 11th century. Such a dramatic "population explosion" simply can not be accounted for by natural increase alone, much less by positing small groups of pastoral nomads settling down. Large numbers of people migrated here from somewhere else, strongly motivated to colonize an underpopulated fringe area of urban Canaan, now in decline at the end of the Late Bronze Age."
The one major flaw that I thought I saw in this book comes probably from differing points of view of Dever and me, and it has to do with the nature of the Bible. Dever is a brilliant archeologist, but he is no fiction writer. Now that so many of us have come to the conclusion that the Bible should be classified as historical fiction (fictional narratives grafted on actual historic events), historians and archeologists should stay away from the discussion on what the Bible is, what it was intended to be, or what its present purpose might entail. Dever writes: "A text or an archeological artifact requires an external referent, an independent witness, to corroborate it before it can become valid testimony." Certainly, I agree. Before we can read a text, we must first learn its language. Before we can interpret it, we must first study the culture it is part of. But the value or meaning of a text is by no means limited to the intend of the author, or the relevance to its culture.
Dever, though converted to Judaism, is no theist. I am; I'm a Yahwist, to be precise, and on good days I even reckon myself a Christian (which means that I usually believe that Jesus Christ operates within the Yahwist tradition). I also believe that God had something if not everything to do with the production of the Bible. So, He chose to reveal Himself and the Way Things Are in the form of historical fiction. That means that Truth can be and is most comfortably conveyed by fiction, not by historical records or journalism (i.e. the story of the Good Samaritan is true). The Bible is a work of art, and art stems from sources within the artist that are hidden to even the artist's conscious mind. The artist is a spectator to what comes out of him, just as much as any other reader. The ultimate conclusion that many make, and which both Dever and I strongly refute, is that a text may thus mean anything, depending entirely upon the reader. This is only true for items that resemble a Rorschach ink blot; something that came to pass without any restriction or intention. The Biblical texts do not fit that description. The Bible is like a tree with blossoms. No reader can change anything about the tree, but only helps to determine what fruits may grow from its flowers. Any interpretation should be examined against the nature of the tree, and to know the tree we need people like Dever.
Dever writes, "The biblical writers and editors are making statements of faith. And faith is not knowledge; it can not by definition be indisputably proven or disproven...[]," but if indisputability is a sign of truth, Dever's book (largely a rather bellicose excursion in academic altercation) is no candidate. The apostle Paul, still a brilliant scholar, states that faith is indeed knowledge and may serve as proof (Heb 11).
Just like the discovery that the earth is not the center of the universe led to deeper insights in reality and Scriptures both, so will the discovery that the Joshua campaign never happened, serve to teach us more about the nature and purpose of the story. Dever hates revisionists with a passion, because their unsubstantiated claims corrode the very foundations of our reason. But the other extreme - Dever's - is just as detrimental. Texts such as the Biblical texts are mysterious beyond the reach of any contemporary science. There is material in Scriptures that borders magic; linguistic engineering that we can not duplicate with the best computers, insights in the mind of man that we can not even recognize, and models of reality that supersedes any modern model.
There are no limits to what the Bible means, and thus to what it is. The study of Scriptures will remain exciting and rewarding for a long time to come. Work such as that of William Dever will stay essential reading to any student of the Bible for slightly less long.
