Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Ian Hutchesson <mc2499 AT mclink.it>]

Dear Ken,

From your post, you should be able to understand the importance of
archaeological and epigraphic materials in historical analyses. You have
bodies of pharaohs, so you know they were real people. You have statues of
Gudea and of Julius Caesar, so you know what they looked like (well, Gudea
is somewhat stylized!). You have contemporary statements of a person's
deeds. You have different contemporary versions of the same events from
different countries so you can compare and discern the probable
eventualities. You have occupation and destruction dates of cities,
indications of popular movements through the Near East. Coins provide a lot
of contemporary information.

The problem with all of this is that you have to go out and get it. It
won't come to you, like the collected texts of a culture that you will find
in an OT/HB or a RigVeda. It's easy to dismiss the archaeological and
epigraphic evidence when it isn't well-known and it doesn't support what
you want it to. People may know Garstang's work on quantifying Jericho's
late bronze occupation, but very few seem interested in Kenyon's refutation
of that work.

Yet it is through the contemporary records that have emerged from the
chancelries of various ancient nations that have filled in a lot of gaps in
the past. Couple these with the archaeological records and the later
literary records, we can build up a fuller picture of the past. But, if the
literary texts don't complement the archaeological and epigraphic materials
then we must give the benefit of the doubt to the older materials as
providing a closer link to the period dealt with and more likely to
represent historical events. History is an attempt to reconstruct the past,
not simply give a picture of what it might have been. It is therefore bound
by due process to use strict and coherent procedures to guarantee the
quality of testimony. In a court of law a witness's credibility has to be
asserted otherwise the testimony is given no value.

It is only with the statuary, the coins, the monuments, the epigraphy, and
the myriad of other substantial evidence that the partial credibility of
witnesses like Tacitus, Thucydides, Polybius is defined. We then have to
apply all the critical analysis to these sources that we have to apply to
the epigraphic materials: what is the actual genre and purpose of the text?
what is stereotypical in the text? how does the witness measure up on the
specific issues? etc. And then, their main historical use is to give us
indications of what happened in the gaps in the archaeological and
epigraphic records.

I have asserted that we don't know when most of the OT/HB books were
written (though I have argued a late date for a few specific examples).
There is also very little in the archaeological and epigraphic remains to
lend credibility to them as usable witnesses. As credibility seems
unavailable to them, they have little place in historical analyses. The
best we can do is to show that most of the places mentioned existed and
there were people called Omri, Hezekiah and Sanballat attested to in the
epigraphic sources. The conflict between the archaeological record and the
biblical accounts (regarding, for example, the ) doesn't help their case
for credibility.

                               ---o0o---

I would be interested to know on what grounds, and which, specifically
biblical texts from Qumran can be dated to the third century BCE. I haven't
seen C-14 dating that indicates biblical texts that early. In fact not many
of the DSS biblical texts can guarantee even a second century BCE dating.


Ian