Using the Bible to Test Hypotheses

 

Alice C. Linsley

 

 

In the July-August 2011 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review Hershel Shanks speaks about the prejudice and suspicion that one encounters in the Academe and among professional archaeologists toward those who maintain that the Bible is a source of reliable information for scientists. I've had this experience as a Biblical Anthropologist and I wrote about it here (Is Biblical Anthropology an Oxymoron?) and here (Biblical Anthropology is Science).

 

As far as my 35 years of research goes, the Bible proved to be a reliable source of information needed to reconstruct the marriage pattern of the Horites rulers and to understand that their marriage pattern drove Kushite expansion and the diffusion of the Proto-Gospel.

 

 

Here is what Hershel has to say:

 

In the highest, most sophisticated levels of professional Biblical archaeology, there is a certain prejudice against the Bible.

 

I take as my text a passage from a new book of which (full disclosure) the Biblical Archaeology Society, publisher of BAR, is a copublisher with the Israel Exploration Society. The book, written by my good friend Ronny Reich of Haifa University and excavator of the City of David,¹ is titled Excavating the City of David (reviewed in this issue). It is a magnum opus that will be read and studied a hundred years from now; but it does treat dismissively the excavation of another good friend, Eilat Mazar of the Hebrew University. (Ronny even accuses Eilat of acting “unethically,” but that is another matter.²)

 

One of Eilat’s crimes, according to Ronny, is using the Bible as a guide to where to excavate. Let me unpack this: As Eilat read the Bible, it seemed to indicate just where King David’s palace might be buried in the City of David—at least, it did to her. On this basis, she decided to dig there.

 

Read it all here.