Walking the Bible

by Bruce Feiler

  This thesis has dominated scholarship ever since, with critics scrambling to unmask the ghostwriters. The “J” source must have lived in the kingdom of Judah, the reasoning goes, since Abraham buys land in Hebron, which is in Judah. The “E” source must have lived in the kingdom of Israel, since Abraham stops first in Shechem. Later scholars grew even bolder. Harold Bloom, the Yale literary critic, wrote a bestselling book in which he proposes that “J,” because of its style and sensitivity, was written by a woman. Richard Elliot Friedman of the University of California has gone further. In Who Wrote the Bible? he says that “D” can be dated to 622 B.C.E. and attributed to Baruch, a scribe in the court of Jeremiah. The redactor, he says, a fifth person who combined the various sources, was named Ezra and lived in the time of the Second Temple.

  Recently, the Documentary Hypothesis has come under increased criticism, with scholars complaining that the identifications are weak, convoluted, or just plain unhelpful. One German scholar declared Wellhausen’s theory “dead.” For a newcomer, trying to make sense of the alphabet soup was far more daunting than enlightening, and just the hint of the subject from Professor Malamat had me nearly jumping, like one of Dr. Freud’s patients, on his couch.

  “Basically there are good things in it,” he said. “But times have changed. It’s been one hundred years. Many people, good writers, say they can take a page of Goethe and find four sources. He was in a bad mood two hours after he wrote the first two lines. Let me show you a book you haven’t seen.” He sent me into his office and up a ladder, to the top shelf, where I removed a frail volume, The Book of Genesis, by C. J. Hall. “No other teacher has this book,” he said.

  I opened the book from the back, where the Hebrew text of Genesis was divided into four fluorescent colors, each assigned to a source. With its intersecting blocks of varying lengths it looked like a Mondrian painting. “You see!” he cried. “Can you read just the blue? Can you read just the yellow, the orange. Can you read it?!? Now you see how impossible it is.”

  “So you’re saying I should forget the sources.”

  “If you can.”

  “How can I forget them, once I know them.”

  “Look, it’s a game,” he said. “In my class I call it phantom. These are phantom sources. There are certainly different styles to the stories: Sometimes there is poetry, sometimes prose, sometimes long lists of laws. Probably these stories were written down by different people. But you will never meet these people, you cannot shake hands with them. Therefore I don’t deal with it. You should take the story as a whole. You shouldn’t divide it into sections and say this came from the fifth century, this from the eighth. You read it like Goethe, like literature.”

  “You’re telling me that as a historian you read it as literature.”

  “It is literature,” he said. “In Oxford once I bought this book that said that from the Bible to Shakespeare there was no great literature. To hell with Shakespeare! The Bible is better than Shakespeare. From the Bible to eternity there will be no greater literature.”

  “So it’s the best thing ever written.”

  “I think so.”

  “And the best thing that ever will be written?”

  He banged his cane on the floor approvingly.

  If literary criticism was destabilizing to the Bible, archaeology was downright revolutionary.

  The day after meeting Professor Malamat, I took a bus to a house just south of the Promenade. When I knocked on the door, a gentle man appeared, with a trimmed beard, a slight shuffle, and an averted glance. He fussed with a cigarette and poured me a Sprite. Like many archaeologists, Gabriel Barkay seemed uncomfortable with the details of modern life. Archaeologists, I had observed, seem to exist in a complex, multidimensional notion of time. Walk onto a site and they make instant connections: This piece of pottery from Mesopotamia is similar to that piece of art from Egypt, which from the eighteenth century B.C.E. to the fourteenth century B.C.E. completely dominated Canaan, which was later attacked by the Phoenicians, who wrote something in the ninth century B.C.E. that is uncommonly similar to something the Israelites wrote in Genesis, while they were in Mesopotamia, dreaming of Egypt. Got it? Now document it.

  As a boy I used to like going with my father, a builder, to construction sites. While he would go inside to check the workmanship, I would stay outside in the piles of white sand and construct imaginary communities. I was reminded of this on occasion when Avner would lurch to the side of the road and plunge to the ground. No matter where we went, he always came back dirtier than me. Ultimately that’s the image I carry of archaeologists: grown-ups playing in the sand. They’re adult versions of sandbox architects, taking materials they find in the ground, arranging them in a certain coherent order, and sprinkling in their own imaginations to create a thriving reality where the rest of us would see nothing, or worse, pave it over and build a mall. They’re squabblers at times; absentminded often. But, at their best, they’re sort of inverted prophets. If prophets foretell the future, warning of what might come, archaeologists foretell the past, warning of what already happened.

  And, best of all, they’re not modish. As Agatha Christie, whose second husband, Max Mallowan, was a prominent Assyriologist, wrote: “The great thing about being married to an archaeologist is the older you get, the more he loves you.”

  Gabi Barkay was not particularly old, but he was a veteran of Israel’s academic wars and a student of the relationship between the Bible and archaeology. I had come to discuss this relationship, which in two hundred years has altered both the world of science and the world of religion. Archaeology, or the “study of beginnings,” was invented in Europe in the nineteenth century largely for two reasons: to dig up The Iliad and The Odyssey, and to dig up the Bible. European Christians believed that they, not the Jews, were the rightful heirs to Palestine and needed to safeguard it. This had been the motivation behind the Crusades and now inspired a multinational scavenger hunt. As historian Moshe Pearlman wrote:“It was the greatest hunt in history, mounted on the largest scale, at the most lavish cost, pursued over the longest period over the broadest area by the most remarkable assembly of hunters ever committed to a search for buried treasure.”

  The idea of locating biblical sites began as early as the fourth century, when Constantine’s mother, Empress Helena, traipsed across the region and, using divine inspiration, identified the location of the Nativity, Calvary, and the Holy Sepulcher, the tomb where Jesus was buried. By the time Napoleon conquered Egypt in 1798, he brought scholars who carted off objects, among them a slab of basalt found in Rosetta with writing in Greek, demotic script, and hieroglyphics. Translated by Jean-François Champollion, the Rosetta Stone first allowed scholars to read ancient Egyptian.

  Other explorers were more eccentric. Lady Hester Stanhope, the niece of Prime Minister William Pitt, was born into London society in 1776. Ostracized for her outlandish behavior, she sailed for the Middle East, where she dressed as a man and started digging up biblical venues looking for gold. She found none and eventually retired to Lebanon, though her exploits made her famous as the godmother of biblical archaeology. The godfather was American clergyman Edward Robinson. Traveling from Alexandria to Jerusalem in 1837, Robinson, a self-styled Connecticut Yankee in King David’s court, used his knowledge of Hebrew and the Bible to map over two hundred sites.

  The defining moment of archaeology as an academic discipline occurred half a century later with yet another eccentric Englishman. “The founding father, without a doubt,” Gabi said, “is William Matthew Flinders Petrie. He’s the great mind that started it all.” An Egyptologist who dug in Palestine, Petrie (1853–1942) discovered how pots can tell time. Because pottery often breaks, each generation makes its own, with defining characteristics. Each style of pot is found in only one stratum of a tel. By linking each pottery style with a specific period, archaeologists could understand when each stratum was developed. This simple observation unlocked the ancient world. Before, scholars had
difficulty distinguishing remains from different millennia. Now, pots could date places more closely.

  Petrie’s discoveries set the stage for the golden age of biblical archaeology, led by William Foxwell Albright. “Albright was a giant,” Gabi said. “The scope of his knowledge was awesome. He was good in Hebrew, good in Akkadian, good in hieroglyphics, good in pottery, good in historical texts. He is described by his biographer as a twentieth-century genius, and it is correct—even with the criticism.”

  Albright (1891–1971) was a contradictory figure. On the one hand, working from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (where Avraham Biran was his first doctoral student) and the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem (where Avner was a fellow), he established biblical archaeology as a formal discipline. On the other hand, as the child of Methodist missionaries, Albright had something of an agenda. He was one of a series of scholars—G. E. Wright, a minister; Nelson Glueck, a rabbi—who carried a pick in one hand and a Bible in the other and set out, more or less, to prove the Bible. Their effort was a direct response to Wellhausen, who had caused a crisis particularly in Protestant denominations, which rely heavily on the divine word of Scripture.

  “I think his religious background was an obstacle,” Gabi said. “The fact is, in America there was a tendency to dismiss the Bible as being a religious truth, not a historical one. Albright was very affected by people having a tendency to ignore the Bible. He wanted to resurrect it.”

  “How does proving the Bible help faith?” I said.

  “I’m a local Jew,” he said. “I don’t care whether this or that detail is incorrect in the Bible. It doesn’t change my attitude toward the Bible, toward religion, toward God. Or toward myself. But in America there was an idea that the Bible is a kind of machine; if you prove that two of the screws really existed, then the whole machine existed, and if you take out two of the screws, the whole thing collapses. But the Bible is not a machine. It doesn’t have screws.”

  The race to shore up the Bible proved so successful that for decades a sort of golden triangle existed among scholars, funders, and the press. Religious institutions would fund elaborate excavations, scholars would rush to sensational conclusions (“I have found the Flood!”), and the press would run breathless stories. This magical stew of romance, adventure, and faith proved irresistible to the public, who scooped up books and magazines on the Bible’s great comeback. Werner Keller, a German journalist, crystallized this trend in 1956 with his book The Bible as History, which sold ten million copies. Few readers know that the real title in German can be roughly translated as See, the Bible Was Right After All. Objectivity was not the point; boosterism was.

  Inevitably, a backlash followed. By the 1960s, a new generation of archaeologists introduced more scientific techniques unencumbered by faith. As a result, archaeology, which had begun as a way to support the Bible, slowly started to undermine it. Jericho couldn’t have burnt down when the Bible says, revisionists claimed; there are no remains of a burnt city at that time. William Dever, who trained as both a minister and an archaeologist, led the way. “The sooner we abandon the term biblical archaeology the better,” he wrote. By the 1990s the schism had become so great that one group, called the “minimalists,” claimed that since no concrete evidence of the patriarchs exists, the entire Pentateuch must have been made up at a later date. Less than a century after Petrie, biblical archaeology seemed to be dead. “I wish to regard the Bible as an artifact,” Dever wrote. The text, in other words, had become just another piece of pottery.

  But then, as it has so many times before, the Bible fought back.

  “Look,” Gabi said. “Serious people know that some parts of the Bible go well with archaeology, others do not. So what? I’m not going to find in archaeology, ever, a business card that says ‘Abraham, son of Terah.’ But it doesn’t matter. It’s not a book of history. It’s a book of faith.”

  Others seem to share this view. Dever himself converted to Judaism and started criticizing the minimalists.

  “So in the end, biblical archaeology isn’t dead,” I said.

  “Perhaps there’s even a rejuvenation,” he said. “What I’m doing is biblical archaeology. I am dealing with Jerusalem in the First Temple Period and I cannot ignore such an important text. I wish all archaeologists had such a gold mine. I have information about daily life, burial customs, the landscape. Indian archaeology in Arizona doesn’t have that.”

  He began to tell a story. In 1979, Gabi was excavating burial caves on the slope of the Hinnom Valley in Jerusalem, just paces from where Avner and I had been during our walk to the Temple Mount. One day he was hosting a group of children from an archaeology club. A twelve-year-old boy was constantly tugging at his shirt, asking silly questions. At the time the team was digging in a first-millennium cave. “I thought to myself, This is a place to put little Nathan. So I said to him, ‘Don’t leave this place until it’s cleaner than your mother’s kitchen, and don’t touch anything you find.’ Five minutes later I felt my shirt being pulled from behind. I turned around and saw this terrible little creature with two large pieces of pottery in his hands. I thought I was going to shoot him.”

  “Where did you get those pots from?” Gabi asked.

  “Under the stones,” Nathan replied. “What stones?”

  He returned to the site and immediately realized what had happened. Nathan, ever zealous, was not content merely to clean the kitchen; he wanted to remodel. He took a hammer, smashed the floor, and underneath found the pottery. “Of course, if the pottery was under the floor,” Gabi said, “it wasn’t a floor. It was a ceiling that had fallen during an earthquake and buried the contents of the chamber. As a result, looters must have thought what I did. I realized that little Nathan had just made the discovery of my life.”

  Gabi sent the children home and began digging with more experienced students. Inside they found a repository with more than one thousand objects. Near the bottom of the chamber Gabi discovered what Biblical Archaeology Review later named one of the ten biggest finds of the century: two pieces of rolled silver the size of cigarette butts.

  “It took us three years to unroll them,” he said. “And three more years to read them.”

  For the first time he was leaning forward in his chair. I could see his academic crust melting away. Once again he was that boy in the sand.

  The process of unrolling proved especially taxing. First they softened a piece, using saline solution and formic acid. It cracked and broke. Then they heated it, first to 250°C, then 600°C. That also didn’t work. Finally, looking to harden it, they coated the piece with Plextol B-500, an acrylic glue, then picked it apart with a dentist’s tool. This time it worked.

  “Immediately I tried to read it,” Gabi said. “It was in ancient Hebrew. And the first thing I saw were the four letters, YHWH. Yahweh. The first time in Jerusalem.”

  The inscription, it turns out, was from the Bible.

  “I have the priestly benediction from the Book of Numbers, chapter 6, written on pieces of silver that date back 2,600 years. And these are the very same words which my father used to bless me when I came back from synagogue. Besides the archaeological importance, it has a personal impact as well.”

  “Which is what?”

  “I’m close to these words. I’m close to the biblical text. The very fact that it was written by people who lived here, and I live here myself. It speaks to me. ‘May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord shine his face upon you and favor you. May the Lord lift up his face toward you and grant you peace.’ ”

  “Is this the most satisfying thing you’ve ever found?”

  “It’s the most important thing. These are the earliest biblical verses ever found—three hundred years earlier than the Dead Sea Scrolls. And it has an impact on what we were discussing earlier, Wellhausen and the dating. Already in the seventh century B.C.E., as proven by these pieces, the text existed. It was not made up by some people in the Hellenistic period.”
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  “So did you ever call Nathan and tell him what he found?” I said.

  “No, but I gave a lecture ten years later. I told the story to a group of professional archaeologists. I realized while speaking that somebody was standing to the side of the hall. A very tall soldier. He was making me nervous. When I finished I went over and asked him why he was standing there. Was he interested in archaeology? He said, ‘I’m Nathan.’ I was so shocked I forgot to ask him his last name. And to this day I don’t know who he is.” Gabi lifted his hand to his eyes. He was uncomfortable expressing emotion. “By now, he should be a father,” he said. “Maybe he’s reading the priestly blessing to his children, like my father did to me.”

  A few days later Avner and I left Jerusalem for our final trip to the Galilee and the epic tel of Hatzor, which the Bible describes as “the head of all those kingdoms.” Located just north of the Sea of Galilee, Hatzor is the biggest tel in the country and was one of the largest cities in the ancient world. At its peak in the second millennium B.C.E., the city had a population of twenty thousand.

  Hatzor played a pivotal role in modern history as well. In 1955, Yigal Yadin, the former chief of staff for the Israeli Army, led an excavation that proved vital to the Jewish state. For Yadin, archaeology was more than a science, it was a way to justify Israel’s existence. Gabi called him a “secular fundamentalist.” Unlike Albright, he didn’t care about bolstering faith. But if he could prove that Joshua conquered Hatzor, he could boost the country. Yadin was a “prophet of national rebirth,” wrote his biographer, Neil Silberman. “Rising to the lectern with the confidence of a master, he would look out over audiences of eager listeners, charm them with his wit and erudition, and inspire them to see in the modern State of Israel a poetic culmination of all Jewish history.” For him, archaeology was a “profoundly patriotic activity.”