Biblical Archaeology School - Biblical Archaeology Today

Biblical Archaeology Today

The Albrightian consensus was overturned in the second half of the 20th century. Improved archaeological methods, notably Kathleen Kenyon's excavations at Jericho, did not support the conclusions the biblical archaeologists had drawn, with the result that central theories squaring the biblical narrative with archaeological finds, such as Albright's reconstruction of Abraham as an Amorite donkey caravaneer, were rejected by the archaeological community. The challenge reached its climax with the publication of two important studies: In 1974 Thomas L. Thompson's The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives re-examined the record of biblical archaeology in relation to the Patriarchal narratives in Genesis and concluded that "not only has archaeology not proven a single event of the Patriarchal narratives to be historical, it has not shown any of the traditions to be likely." and in 1975 John Van Seters' Abraham in History and Tradition reached a similar conclusion about the usefulness of tradition history: "A vague presupposition about the antiquity of the tradition based upon a consensus approval of such arguments should no longer be used as a warrant for proposing a history of the tradition related to early premonarchic times."

At the same time a new generation of archaeologists, notably William G. Dever, criticized Biblical archaeology for failing to take note of the revolution in archaeology known as processualism, which saw the discipline as a scientific one allied to anthropology, rather than as a part of the corpus of the humanities linked to history and theology. Biblical archaeology, Dever said, remained "altogether too narrowly within a theological angle of vision," and should be abandoned and replaced with a regional Syro-Palestinian archaeology operating within a processual framework.

Dever was broadly successful: most archaeologists working in the world of the Bible today do so within a processual or post-processual framework: yet few describe themselves in these terms. The reasons for this attachment to the old nomenclature are complex, but are connected with the link between excavators (especially American ones) and the denominational institutions and benefactors who employ and support them, and with the unwillingness of biblical scholars, both conservative and liberal, to reject the link between the Bible and archaeology. The result has been a blurring of the distinction between the theologically-based archaeology that interprets the archaeological record as "substantiating in general the theological message of a God who acts in history," and Dever's vision of Syro-Palestinian archaeology as an "independent, secular discipline ... pursued by cultural historians for its own sake."