Chris and Kyle - Biblical Archaeology Rising (Part 1)

Welcome to Onscripts Biblical World, a podcast exploring the history, archaeology, geography, and cultures of the Bible. Visit us at onscript.study/biblicalworld. Hey everyone, welcome back to the Biblical World Podcast. This is Matt Lynch, coming to you from Regent College in Vancouver. In this episode, we have part one of a two-part history of Biblical archaeology that Chris and Kyle have recorded for you. Hope you enjoy this and thanks so much for listening. Be sure to share the word about this podcast as we get into this new academic year, great for people to hear about what we're doing here and if you could rate and review us, that will be also be helpful. Thanks so much. Enjoy. Welcome back Biblical World listeners. But today, I, Chris McKinney, am joined by Kyle Keimer, a co-host of Biblical World Podcast, to talk about a very Biblical world topic. The history of Biblical archaeology should be a really fun topic. Kyle has done a lot of work on this. He's putting together a really nice article and we've recently taught a class together at Jerusalem University College where we discuss a lot of these different things. So a lot of fun stuff to talk through. Kyle, how you doing? I'm doing pretty well. I can't complain. Well, I mean, I could, but like any other time in my household, no, no, listen. Yeah. I get that. I get that. So we've had a number of different series on this podcast. You know, we're working on the Gilgamesh with, the Gilgamesh epic with, with Amy. We've got the, the Egypt and the Bible series with Mark Johnson. We've got our judges series, which is a bit on hiatus for now. But actually, we've done a few of these here over the last, you know, months or so where we're really trying to kind of give people a bigger perspective of what Biblical archaeology is. We did one on what archaeology can and cannot do. We've done another one on historical geography. And so I think this kind of fits in with that bigger perspective on just what in the world is Biblical archaeology. And I think one way of explaining that is through its fascinating history. And I know you, like me, love kind of peeling back these layers and living in a different time. Like, I feel like if I could live in the 19th century, I wouldn't like the lack of perspective or the lack of internet, but you know, to be on the trail with Edward Robinson and to just kind of relive that through maps and images and, of course, their text is just an incredible thing. But I think one of the really wonderful things you've done in this, in this article is to just kind of give a really accessible way of, of how we've got to the point where we are now. And so there's one sense in which in this always the case when we teach through archaeology is we have one eye on the bigger picture of archaeology, its inception, its shifting changes. And then we're looking to the next of, okay, how much of that shifting perspective of method and what are we actually doing is seeping into our field, into Biblical archaeology. And then also back and forth. And then that's why I think that makes this a really interesting topic. Yeah, no, your points are all, I concur with everything you're saying here and I think that one of the things that is so fascinating for me in particular in looking at the history of the field is how it's this hodgepodge really of kind of different disciplines that have been woven together and have been evolving for the last 150 years or so. And to trace that out and to see the way that everything kind of comes together and is either impacting other fields or being impacted by other fields is just a fascinating kind of dialectic to see where we've come from, where we are, and potentially where we're going as well. Because the field is always changing, it's changed in the last 10 years, it's changed in the last handful of years as well. And it's going to continue to do that as new technologies come out as we're able to ask you questions. But if we don't really have a firm foundation in where we've come from, we miss out on a lot of the significance of what's being done, why it's being done. And also just if you're a student in particular going back and reading some of the older literature, you're going to find, you know, if you don't have the background, you're not going to know how things have changed and you're not going to be as informed as you could be if you did have at least some general understanding of that and evolving field. Yeah, you know, I would say just as a, you know, to go back and forth to these two different biblical archaeology and archaeology side by side is the thing that I keep coming back to is archaeology, big picture is always shifting and changing. But the way to kind of figure out what it is is really just to hold up a mirror to society. Like what is the change philosophically in philosophy? What is the change in terms of modernity, post-modernity, post-post-modernity or whatever it is? And if you even read like, you know, we taught through archaeology theory and method, and you just track the different additions of the book, of the expansions and things that are removed, things that are added, you can see where we're at with post-processual with the new archaeology with the processional technique before. And so it's, it's tracks with modernity and it tracks with post-modernity and it tracks with these different elements. And I think just as kind of a rule of thumb, it's not to say that, you know, things are relative, but things are always tied together. Archaeology is not kind of the separate thing that exists outside of where culture and philosophy and politics are. It is largely reflective of that. And I think at least acknowledging that is a really helpful, as you write, a hermeneutic for interpreting archaeology at every point. Yeah. And I think also when we have this bigger picture, like you're saying, it might help us to understand the problems in defining what we even mean by biblical archaeology, whether or not that's an appropriate term, when in the history of the field that might have been more appropriate than other times and so many other related questions, because the public world out there will hear biblical archaeology and probably has a specific view of what that is, yet within the academic community, you're not going to find, by and large, many places that talk about biblical archaeology anymore in this day and age. It's either 11 teen archaeology or the archaeology of ancient Israel or any other number of names that are out there. So what are we actually talking about with this name? What does kind of baggage does that carry? And again, as we look through the history of archaeological exploration in what is now kind of Israel, Egypt, Jordan, the West Bank, Palestinian territories, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, what do we mean by this area or what are we trying to define? And really the term biblical comes in because so much of the exploration of this broader geographic area is the geographical domain of the events that are recorded in the Bible. And the Bible's, you know, for Christians and Jews alike, is this document that has power and that has this enduring legacy. And so there's an attempt to understand it, to interpret it, to make it relevant for every new generation. And as new tools come up or as new challenges come up for interpreting that text, you try to integrate those in. And archaeology is just one of these tools that has come along over the last 150 years in which we can actually do this. Yeah. And you know, I think another aspect of this is archaeology is greedy. And what I mean by that is archaeology wants it all like it wants to know kind of like every aspect of of culture. And that's why it tends to spill over into a lot of these disciplines. I mean, looking through, you know, these different things, you're going to deal with linguistics, you're going to deal with cultural elements of how people thought, you're going to deal with like we talk about in in a post-processor archaeology, the use of symbols, you know, all these elements that typically have fallen into different categories where in the past archaeology was much, okay, this is history and this is the material culture of that history. But but now nothing is off limits in terms of what can be brought in, whether it is kind of the higher sciences to answer questions about, you know, dating or or residue analysis or just even ethnography looking at, you know, modern cultures that live in ancient manners and customs. And so I think your your point is a really good one. It's it's hard to to exactly nail down not what archaeology is. I think which can be explained as, you know, to study the material culture of people in the past, but about, okay, what other sub disciplines can you can you use to get at exactly that question. And so that's why it can be confusing to say, okay, this is history, this is geography, this is culture, this is, you know, all these different other aspects, which makes it exciting, but also a real challenge to have it all under your Fedora, if you will. Yeah, no, it's a great point. And it leads into, I think, the earliest phase of this field that we're just going to generically call biblical archaeology for now. And again, we'll perhaps define it in different ways as we move on. But back in the late 1800s, early 1900s, there was a German scholar by the name of Johann Jan, who wrote a five-volume book entitled biblical archaeology, biblical archaeology. And this appears to be the first time that the phrase biblical archaeology was employed. But the meaning of that phrase is different in or it was different for Jan than what it comes to be known for us. As you gave a great definition of what archaeology is today. And the material remains of human cultures that we explore and kind of interpret everything. But for Jan, he was dealing more in a, I don't know, strictly Greek definition of the word that this is more so anything from ancient cultures that enlightens us about them. So the study of ancient people. So this could be inscriptions, which they knew of back then. It could be elements that we discern in the textual record by and large. And so Jan was working essentially with the biblical texts and saying, "What are the features within the text that are important to understand if we want to understand this culture and this text?" So he would look at social norms, political structures, aspects of the economy, not in big systematic ways, but more of the nitty-gritty things. So did they live intense? What did tents look like? And there was this real desire that was kind of rising in Europe out of this antiquarian fascination, if you will, that was on the rise and had been from the post-Enlightenment period, all the way up through Napoleon's campaign into Egypt and the Levant, which is going to take place a few years after Jan initially starts publishing his volume. And it's this fascination with reconnecting with the past, coupled with a realization developing in other fields such as geology and also kind of biological sciences that things do change over time. We can actually figure out how old things are and we can group them together in meaningful ways. And with kind of the basic tenets, archaeology starts to formalize as a potential way of investigating the past and knowing something more about, in particular, the Biblical text than was ever possible before that. Yeah, no, that's fascinating. This is such an aspect of this topic that you read different books on the subject. They normally start with the early 19th century at a Robinson and so on as kind of the start. And if you read Edward Robinson, which I highly recommend people should do, I try to always have my students do that, you realize he is not so much the start of something as just that repository of information that put it all together and then kicks the, you know, kicks the ball to start to start something new. But there's these predecessors and so what I think you bring out in this article, which is really interesting, is right around the same time, you know, Napoleon is in Egypt and we have, you know, the discovery of the Reseta Stone and Egypt taking off in just a few decades after this Mesopotamia being uncovered. There's already kind of this philosophy starting to form. And I think, you know, based on, you know, reading I've done in other subjects, CS Lewis has a, I mean, we talk about, I talk about him a lot, but he also was a, you know, amazing literary critic. And one of the things he talks about in terms of like this medieval approach to the cosmos or thinking about the world as a cathedral and everything having, it's wonderful place and you look up at these great, these great churches in Europe. One of the things he describes it is, it's all cultural. That meaning that you could read the biblical story or Homer or wherever else and it just has kind of this quasi monolithic cultural element that is default to European perceptions of the past, which is sort of Greco-Roman, but influenced by Western Europe traditions and perceptions about how that actually looked, that gets ported on to Egypt, that gets ported on to the biblical authors. And, you know, one of the, you know, I think best expressions of this is if you look at paintings before 1798 of Joseph and Pharaoh, he looks like he's Dutch, but no one could imagine in 1801 or 1802 that Pharaoh looks anything other than like what we know Pharaoh looks like because of the European interaction with that. And so I just find it fascinating that you're kind of exploring an unlooked avenue here where actually knowing the culture is just as important for understanding the story. And obviously we live in the 200 plus years removed from that great cultural renovation, but yet we're still kind of grappling with how to make sense of this and how to read these texts well because in some sense this time is, they had it figured out for a long time with how you read the Bible or how you read Homer or how you read these stories. But now with all this new material, it's how we put it back together again in a way that is theologically rich, that is true to the original material, that is true to my experience. So it's a huge question. Yeah. And, you know, over the history of biblical archaeology, each of these questions has been addressed in different ways. And whether more successfully, less successfully, I leave it to individual to decide for themselves. But the people have thought of these questions, but many times they just haven't taken hold. So for instance, Jan, already in the late 1700s, recognized that by studying the text, we want to actually do a detailed study so that you can come up with an e-mech view as opposed to an edic view. So the distinction is you want the insiders view to understand the culture so that you're reading the text properly as opposed to the outsiders approach where you're kind of putting your own culture baggage onto the text. So he recognized this already in the 1700s and late, excuse me, laid out some good foundational aspects, even though he didn't necessarily recognize the importance that material culture of discovering new things from the ground would have for informing an e-mech perspective. And so people didn't pick up on this little component that he was pushing for as a way of kind of correcting bad theology or of correcting apologetics. And it lay kind of untapped for the next 50, 60 years until the next big threat came along. And that was kind of dealt with in the 1950s. Well, I'd say 100 years or so, basically 150 years in the 1950s with the biblical theology movement where they're trying to really see the relevance of archeology in that bigger picture, particularly for people of faith. Yeah, and I mean, I don't want to skip ahead, but you just make these points of whether or not the culture of the past, and we could think of whether it's Hebrew Bible for how do they perceive the worship of Yahweh at different points, or we could think of even second-title Judaism. I mean, this has so heavily impacted the last 50, 60 years of New Testament studies. And you know, even our partner podcast with with on script and Matthew Bates book Salvation Wars has set off a frenzy of discussion about how we are to understand salvation in its own ancient context within second-title Judaism. And then you have many people saying, "No, it can't be this, you know, it's connected with new perspective on Paul," because we understood it by the time of the Reformation. And so the Reformation itself was its own kind of cultural context. And I think that this whole aspect of you're getting at is it is so vital to understand its original context. And that's why it makes the methodology so critical. Just one last point on this, and when we start teaching through historical geography, especially, I think this is what is sort of at the, if you were to reduce it down to one thing, it is to try to see the land as its original occupants at that time understood it. It's to not be Caesar, but to be in as sandals as much as possible within the Roman Empire, or, you know, we could quote, you know, Jerome, you know, he who has not seen Athens cannot understand the great poets, or who was not stood on the shores of Troy can never really fully grasp the Iliad. And the same is true for the Judean Hill Country, to see the Judean Hill Country is to immediately in a way grasp the story of the death of the infants in Matthew 2. And a way that you, it's not that you're, you ultimately are lacking, but it's not like a deficiency in your interpretation. It's just another layer of, of meaning to see these, these details. And to just simply reject it, I think is, is missing out on on such richness in what the modern world can offer. As I always like to say to people like, yeah, we have a lot of problems in the modern world. We have a lot of advantages. You know, one of the advantages, like one of the first things I was like to say is when I'm standing maybe on, you know, above the church of the upper room and just outside the old city is like, you know, Luther and Calvin never got to visit Jerusalem. They never knew where hot sore or magito was. I mean, nothing against them, I'm not speaking out against them, but we have the advantages of so, so much. And what you're doing, I think, is getting back into why that was important to people early on, where have we kind of missed where this can be applicable? And so again, that's what makes it such a fascinating discussion. Yeah, no, and that really, I mean, you've hit on essentially the big contribution of Edward Robinson and Eli Smith. And that is taking what Jan was doing with biblical archaeology and trying to do a detailed investigation of past cultures, albeit using the biblical text itself, which was just assumed to be this historically accurate document of whatever period it was talked about. And, you know, there was just no criticizing that component, even though higher criticism was evolving and developing in Europe at the same time period. Robinson comes along and says, all right, we do have to peel back some layers because even though what we're learning is, things stay the same in some regard, they're evolving. And I'll put that word in quotes, you can't see me quoting, but we'll say evolving because at the same time, you have the theory of evolution that's going to come out in the 19th century also, that's going to have a great impact. But the idea is that things are moving forward and yet there's developing set of tools that you can peel back the different layers and you can identify those layers and peel them back. And so when Robinson and Smith come and explore the land, one of their big goals is to distinguish between church tradition and myth. Or as you say, church tradition, myth, and then actual what they call truth. And so we have to remember the entire kind of Western world was dominated by the church and headband for the last 2000 years. And that was what everybody knew and that was how they framed everything. And so when that starts to be questioned, you have responses both that go along with that line of questioning but also responses that say, well, let's do it more nuanced and see if we're asking the right kind of questions. And I would say that Robinson and Smith are more of the latter where they're trying to discern, you know, what can we actually know? What can we observe? Let's go to the land and see these places, let's see these things, touch the tangible landscape and discern between what the church has been telling us and what is good tradition and what is other tradition. And that kind of is a bridging point, then, for the next evolutionary stage, if you will, of biblical archeology where now people can go explore the land and we have all these early explorers with all their journals and their fantastic reads, if you're interested, you should go check those out. But it gives way, then, to, okay, we can have this component of knowing the land, but we want more. We want even more tangible material because world archeology is showing us that there's stuff buried there that we can find. And so in the 1850s, Louis Filesseung can y'all, they salsa, they say it with the most terrible French accent possible, right? De Salsy comes to Jerusalem and explores at the tomb of the kings. And this is 1851, he's gonna come back with the first kind of official excavation license about 12 years later and do some excavations there, but this is the next stage, if you will. The land is one thing, great. Now we've got that, we want more. And so we want these artifacts. We want this realia that we can use to articulate these ancient cultures to date some of these ancient cultures and some of these events as well. - Yeah, I just want to take a step back. I mean, I think that's such a great point. And I would just say that I want to make two points. One point is for those of you who are trying to like put together like when are these different regions like online in the public perception. So the first is Egypt. This is Napoleon finding it going online for people's imagination already at the beginning of the 19th century. Champolione and the various expeditions into Egypt puts Egypt on the map. A few years later, we have Austin Henry Layered and others in Mesopotamia. This is in the 1840s or so. That puts Mesopotamia on the map. Robinson and Smith are the equivalent of that in Ottoman Palestine, but the discoveries are different. Egypt and Mesopotamia, it's palaces, it's temples, it's finding out the language, it's discovering what the Mesopotamian history and culture was like, it's finding the Gilgamesh epic with the flood account in the 1880s. Eventually, it's discussing and connecting it with Manito in Egypt for Ottoman Palestine, the Holy Land. It was, okay, we're going from a view of the ancient world where we have all these toponyms, these place names. And we kind of know where some of them are because Claudius told me in the second century, put down all of these and we can continue to use his coordinates to make this map and we can kind of just guess where these regions are and start to fill out our maps. And you can look at map after map after map from really the earliest part of medieval map making all the way up into Robinson and Smith. And you're like, well, they're all the same. They're all saying this. And it's not to say that there weren't these people who hadn't stumbled upon toponymic retention or things before, but no one was able to really apply in such a meaningful and powerful way. It's a landmark for those reasons. It's a landmark for not only discovering this culture and setting the field forward, but it's putting online literally the land between these two great empires and it's distinctive and it's distinctive forms. And one kind of just real criticism of, and it's not, you know, I'm never gonna criticize Edward Robinson, but if we were to say how we in the West, especially the Protestant West can still miss the balls, is he was very against church tradition, as you said, but one of the things that's so clear to me is church tradition is incredibly important, not only because it is getting us to potentially what might actually have been there from the original text, but by the very fact that it was an important tradition throughout this long period of time, is something of value to study on its own terms. So, you know, the fact that the Ark of the Covenant might not be an Ethiopia, the real one, or the fact that the Ark of the Covenant might not be in the latter in church and Rome as it was believed to for over a thousand years, it's important to finding the real one, or maybe knowing where it's, but the fact that it was important for a civilization for a thousand years in the case of Rome or for in the case of Ethiopia, that it's the center of the Orthodox church in Ethiopia until today is just as important for the study of history and archeology. And I think that the fact that he was, let's say, not on board with Catholic and Orthodox tradition here and lean more into his congregationalist background is still present, you know, and you and I both taken many tours and were like, "Ah, and sense, ah, who it's just tradition." I'm glad they were here to figure out where it was, but it'd be better if it was just open skies and landscape. No, it's important, it's, and if you're a Christian, it's part of your tradition and it's important on its own terms. And so I think that that, and of itself, is just kind of worth thinking about both as we try to unpeel, you know, what were the deficiencies, but also how are those kind of baked into what it is we're doing today? - Yeah, and I think this is a really important point because it really sets the tone for biblical archeology as we're gonna talk about it in later kind of manifestations. And really, we could say that biblical archeology, as a phrase, is an American endeavor, as opposed to a worldwide, you know, international type of endeavor because the British, the French, the German, the Israelis, they don't come to the archeology of Israel kind of with the same religious baggage or the same religious connections and perceptions. And a lot of this comes out of the 18th, 19th centuries and kind of challenges or perceived challenges or even expectations within various Protestant denominations in the US. And just to kind of articulate the distinction, right? Robinson and Smith have this clear religious agenda, if you will, even though it's scientific at the same time to kind of clarify attacks, it doesn't seem to have the same kind of imperialistic intonations as what we find with British exploration or French exploration. Because remember, at this time, in the 19th century, we've, the height of the British Empire, the height of the French Empire, are, right, these are the two mega powers of the day. And they're competing around the world, but as the kind of holy land is opened up and Europe realizes there's a much older past than the classical past that they kind of connect to, everybody is going bonkers to learn about this stuff, get material from these lands, to quote unquote preserve material from these lands. And this is both, there is a connection with Christianity in particular in Europe, but politicians recognize there is a great power also in having a political stage in this. And so there's a clear imperialistic bent or component to early French exploration, archaeological exploration and early British exploration, because you get these amazing treasures, you bring them back, it shows that you are the more dominant player over the other. So there's any number of different variables that are just going on, but really when we look at it closely, we see that already in this early stage in the 19th century, American kind of expectations or focus or thoughts of what biblical archaeology are or could eventually be are a bit different. They're framed in a strict and much more religious kind of overtone. Yeah, you know, the thing I would just add to that is simply to say that if you read Robinson or if you read, you know, the P E F and I assume many of the others is even though the focus is clearly on biblical sites and biblical material, one of the things that's really self evident from from reading those text is you can't just deal with that like you can't just simply say, you know, I'm going to know where Jezriel is by reading kings and knowing what people said about that you have to like deal with it all like you have to deal with crusader sources, you have to deal with sources all throughout the different periods and one of the things you start to see is this large data set of material and more and more, especially as we move into later periods of the history of expiration people starting to specialize and focus on, you know, these different aspects of history, these different aspects of of archaeology that are coming to light that are not just related only to the biblical period, but are necessary for study like even if your interest is only, you know, the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament, you can't. You can't just, you know, I'm only going to study Capernaum or I'm only going to study Jericho like, OK, well, if you do that, you have to study the full breadth of history for how these sites interacted and that's why I think why not only is there a focus on the Bible, but there's this, there's this understanding by Robinson and others that it's a tapestry of culture and history and sources and materials and philology and so on. That you are, that you have to interact with that I think makes him head and shoulders above the rest at the, at the early stage to be able to get this whole thing, this whole thing going, I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm just saying that that's just another element in this discussion. Yeah, no, absolutely, and this is the big, the kind of almost the big next step is in the 19th century, when hieroglyphics are deciphered, when Acadian or a certain kind of form is deciphered, now all of a sudden we have windows opening up into the ancient past that we simply didn't have access to when we only had the biblical text. And I think, at least my own take, is that the fascination and access to these tens of thousands of inscriptions is one of the big reasons that in a biblical archaeology is ultimately going to largely be focused on what Christians would call the Old Testament and not so much the New Testament because New Testament, all that is Greco-Roman world, everybody knew how to greet Greek and Roman, you know, that was never forgotten. And so I think there was a mythical component that it just wasn't as sexy, it wasn't as exciting to be discovering something new into doing that. And so learning and focusing on the Old Testament where you have more challenges or more opportunities to shed light is what is going to kind of define biblical archaeology, even into the 20th century, where if you talk about biblical archaeology, you're really talking about Old Testament archaeology from a Christian perspective, Hebrew Bible archaeology, from a Christian perspective. Not so much New Testament archaeology. Yeah, and I mean, I would even say in terms of the biblical lands that are included in biblical archaeology, that's why we talk about the ancient Near East or, you know, in the new parlance West Asia. It's Egypt, it's Israel, it's Jordan, it's maybe Saudi, it's Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran, and Turkey. I mean, but Eastern Turkey only, but if we get into, you know, most of the New Testament story happens in Asia Minor and happens in Greece and to some extent in Italy, and maybe even in Spain, if we if we were to understand Paul made it there. And so I think in that sense, the scope of how far biblical archaeology as a kind of a regional connection is worth is worth bringing out, but also defining it in terms of what it is, it is biblical archaeology. Maybe any geographical material remain that can touch and inform and give us background of the biblical story. And I certainly think that it is more than that. I for one would say, and this is a great set of articles of this in the recent biblical archaeology review where they talk about the table of nations and they deal with from Kushe and the South. All the way to Carthage and the West with some great projects that are happening in both of those places, I think that's exactly the scope because the table of nations gives us from Tarshish and the West, if that's Sardinia or Spain. It's, you know, go West, young man all the way to the shore of the Atlantic until you get to the pillar of Hercules, and it's as far east as you can imagine with, with until Alexander with with with the Eelamites. And as far south as the edge of the world, you know, if we follow Greco Roman thought Ethiopia is where dawn lives. So it's as far as as the world is. And so that's where I think there still remains debate on what exactly biblical archaeology applies to as a term. Yeah, no, it's, it's a big question. And you know, if we, if we kind of are looking historically in the, in the 19th century, so Robinson Smith have done their explorations, other explorers have come done things there, you're starting to see surveys, you have the establishment of the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1865, five years later, you have the society of biblical archaeology established in England as well. And by and large, even though they're interested in archaeology, it's still largely focused on the recovery of texts that can be read in different languages and translated. And this is anything in this big, large kind of geographic sphere that you're, that you just kind of covered and mentioned falls within that is becoming part of the definition of of this field. Any text from Iran from Iran, you know, not that Iran exists as a nation at that time, but from the Ottoman Empire or from further east or, you know, down into to Africa or even into the Mediterranean, all of these inscriptions have to be read in order to shed light on the biblical text in particular. That's still the guiding framework. And on the one hand, you have intellectualism in Europe, and there is just an antiquarian fascination with the past and reading inscriptions to know about the past. But the, the subset of that is, and how does it illuminate the Bible? And a lot of scholars, that's the goal, even as they're reading these texts, particularly ones coming out of Mesopotamia or Egypt, is what light is it going to shed on the Bible? And it isn't going to be really until the late 1800s that the actual recovery of reality that is material remains from physically digging in the ground really starts to pick up and like, oh, wow, we actually this stuff can be more useful than we even realized. If you look in the history of archaeology as a field itself, that shift is there. And so in the 1870s, you actually have a kind of shift in definition of what archaeology is. So it's no longer just studying past cultures to learn about them, but it now it's actually referring to dirt archaeology where you're going out, you're excavating, recovering material remains that you're trying to date and trying to classify. And you're using that then to then interpret the text that you now have access to. And that would be the kind of the third stage, if we will, in the evolution of biblical archaeology. So we're studying ancient cultures by the text that we have available, the Bible, we're tying it in with the physical landscape of the land. Now we're tapping into the actual material that's buried in that land to see how it can shed light on the text itself. Absolutely. And I mean, you say that date 1870, that's also the very year that George Smith decipher is the flood tablet. I mean, I mean, it's the, it's like this, this watershed pun intended. And, you know, I, I think one of the fun things that if we think about that, that moment in whether it's the US or, or an England and we think about that generation of scholars. I've done some reading with Chester 10. He visited Jerusalem and he put together this book called the New Jerusalem and he talks about being a kid and growing up reading those travel logs and journal. Like these were best sellers. I mean, this was long before Game of Thrones and so on. I mean, people were consuming this material, these beautiful illustrations of the Holy Land in Egypt and Syria and it both represents like this kind of mythical sense of adventure and explanation. But as things are becoming, okay, let's get down to brass tax. A lot of it's just myth and a lot of it's not quite what we assume before. I think it also kind of represents this untethering of, okay, who are we? Like what do we do? Like are we shaking the foundations and I know you're probably going to talk a little bit more about this, but I just kind of wanted to share that same angst can be felt not only in biblical archaeology, but what I might call inkling archaeology. And that is, if you think of some of the great sets in Narnia or Middle-Earth, they use these artifacts from a world that is much more belonging with Baywolf of giants and elves and things such like the stone table that Aslan has eventually killed on or the barodowns that Frodo and Mary Pippin and Sam end up in and have these swords inside of them. Those in the childhood reading of Tolkien and Lewis and everyone before that, these were places that giants built and so for Lewis and Tolkien to put these right into their literature as set pieces of that are archaeologically now explainable and yet trying to pull on, okay, they still have a mythic past. Okay, it was a tomb, you know, these barrels, but it was a tomb of a great ancestor who has, you know, this magic blade that can somehow still have a part to play. And so I just like to think of those as, why do we consider these two as still being relevant to today in terms of philosophy, in terms of having relevance as epic history and how does archaeology fit into that? Well, it's not biblical archaeology, but it's the same problem. It's the same problem, okay. Genesis 6 and the giants and the flood and all this. Like how do we fill this vacuum of meaning and of supernatural aspect that seems to be kind of untethered from the archaeological pursuit? And I'm not giving you an answer, at least in this podcast. I'm just saying like that same impulse is reconstructed in different ways. And that's in sort of a part of this next phase. Yeah, no, absolutely, and that you just lead perfectly into what I was gonna say next because it really is, I love the phrase you said, the mythic past that you have a world that had only known the biblical text and literary criticism is arising in the 19th century, a little bit, 18th century. And archaeology is developing. And yet at the same time, you also have evolution, the theory of evolution coming out as we're moving into the mid 19th century, you have geology and geological concepts kind of being established and codified. And there is kind of a bifurcation of people that are willing to question and be done with the mythic past. And then there are those that are going to use the same principles that are developing in other fields to implement via archaeology a way to support the mythic past or to kind of prove it, if you will, so that the truth of it can really rain through. And the layers, the fogs of myth can be removed. And this is the next stage as we move into the late 1800s into the early 1900s. This is where we are. And so you have within the archaeology that's taking place in Palestine and what is the Ottoman Empire, you have individuals that are definitely more kind of intellectual in bent that it's not so much about proving the Bible, we're going to shed light on it if we cause questions arise, so be it. That would be like a William Flinders Petri, right? Who comes and does the first quote unquote scientific excavation in Palestine at the site of Tallahassee in 1890? And then you have other individuals like a Melvin Grove Kyle, who worked with Albright and others in excavation sites, who archaeology was totally the tool of proving the biblical text to be historically accurate to prove the historicity of it. And so there is this kind of big bifurcation. Again, there's even more layers within that that are kind of coming out of it as people start to question and/or want to address the questioning of this mythic past that we've known or kind of lived in from having just the Bible as a resource. - I'll just make one anecdote about Petri since you brought it up, this fits in so well with his overall approach. I've been researching for quite a while on the Ark of the Covenant. And I remember reading articles, starting about 2015 or so and we got this great idea. The Ark of the Covenant has an Egyptian background, brand new idea. I'm like, oh, that is, it's a good idea, but he read virtually everyone from the 19th century all the way to Petri. And he's not only is the Ark clearly an Egyptian artifact, maybe we can even call the two cherubem, which is really Maat, the figures of Maat that we see on these Egyptian bark shrines and everything. Maybe that's actually grace and truth. The Emmet Vahecid that we have in Exodus. I mean, he's like, he was a Biblical archeologist. He saw the connection and clearly knew the Biblical world. And so it's just fascinating to see that even though someone, like him, who spent most of his career obviously in Egypt, the Biblical text was still a major part of his knowledge base and trying to elucidate a lot of that. - Yeah, and I would say that's probably the large of the case with everyone that's doing archeology in Palestine at that time. And kind of part and parcel with that upbringing, that background is this kind of positivist approach in archeology. The idea number one is that largely for many of them, the Biblical text presented in historically accurate details that could then be tested via archeological discovery. Also, the assumption was that for some, that it would be shown to be true, so to speak. But there is also the idea that as we find material culture, it's going to shed light on and shed light between the lines of the text on individual cultures. And we're going to identify what Canaanite culture was or what Philistine culture was or what Israelite culture was. And we can then, through looking at the material culture, not only identify these discrete barrier-defined cultures, we can also see how they interact, which was always understood to be via diffusion. One group got stronger than the other and passed their material to the other. That was pretty much the approach of archeology in those days. And that's how you explain in an evolutionary framework, coming out of the theory of evolution that was developing by Darwin, that we're moving from one thing to another. And there is this linear progression, even if there are maybe multiple variables that you have to factor in to this linear progression. And coupling positivism with an evolutionary framework is going to set the tone for Biblical archeology really up through the 1960s. And for better or worse, that is the case. It doesn't even continue even after that, actually, for many archeologists. - Yeah, I would just add one point. And it's both that, which, as we'll see, is problematic, but it's also like an approach that it's going to have problems, but also excavating enormous amounts of material without the questions that we're interested in at different phases involving until today. So it's both like, this is what we're trying to do, and we're just going to excavate as much as we possibly can without thinking about the future, which has pros and cons, mostly cons, but some good things that come out of that too. - Yeah, well, and that's the approaches. We're going to exit as much as we can, so that number one, we can learn as much as we can, but number two, we're going to find cool stuff that we can send back to museums to show how great our country is as well. And the interesting thing is that, as this kind of underlying perspective to archeology is unfolding, you have the creation of all these research institutes in Palestine, the French set up the Ecole Biblique. So we're looking now basically time-wise, we're at the end of the 19th century into the early 20th century. Every European country and America wants to have their foot in the archeology that's coming out of the quote unquote holy land, so that for political purposes, religious purposes, they are there and they can contribute in either making something great, making something great. great find, or shutting light on the Bible in some way. So you have the creation of the Acole Bimbleek, the French school. You have multiple German schools. You have the American school established. The British school in archaeology is actually one of the latest ones, but we already had the PEF back in 1860s. Then you have the Israel Exploration Society in the early 20th century as well. And so everybody is establishing their own research institution to fund, to assist in, to disseminate the results of excavations that are taking place. And in the early 20th century, following Petrie's excavations, right, his kind of replacement, if you will, Frederick Jones Bliss comes and takes the principles that Petrie establishes, which are pottery typology and seriation, stratigraphy and stratigraphic analysis, the two core tenets of archaeology even today. He takes those and actually applies them to the tell of tell El-Hessie in a way that even Petrie himself wasn't able to do. And so that opens up a new understanding of the nature of the archaeological record in Palestine, and it led to early massive excavations by the Germans in particular at Tanok and Megiddo and Jericho, the Americans at Samaria. And again, you're just churning up Earth. You've got hundreds of workmen, usually you've got one archaeologist. And they're not usually even a real archaeologist. They're a theologian or a biblical scholar. Maybe if you're lucky, some of the Germans were trained as classical archaeologists elsewhere in the Mediterranean, and they've come to the Near East to try and excavate now in this area. But there's no such thing as a quote-unquote biblical archaeologist yet at this point. There's theologians, architects, text critical scholars that like archaeology and want to uncover some things. And they're the ones that are leading the charge even up to World War II. Well, let's say World War I at least. I think you're exactly hitting the point. And I would say for those of you who want to go deeper in this area, a great book that I read. I think he was on the podcast a year ago or so with Eric Klein's book of Digging Up Armageddon. I think is the name, The Search for Solomon City. And that is one of the main things that really shines through is like, even if you are sitting on a gold mind of donor support, which the the OI, the Oriental Institute, as it was called, then had in a, you know, promissory notes from from a John D. Rockefeller, you wouldn't just say, okay, I'm going to go find the biblical archaeologist. No, you were going to have to kind of cobble together something in the even in the 1920s and then find these different staff people who may have had some excavation experience. But it just didn't even by then exist to the point where this is kind of its own self-defined thing, which I guess is both alarming for that for that stage. But it's also I think somewhat encouraging because a lot of even people that are in different fields today, there is crossover abilities, right? You know, if we're talking about someone who can do geographical system, you know, GIS or a geologist or whatever else, historian, there is, it's not there's not crossover. It's just, it's showing how new and innocent this, this field was. You've been listening to OnScript's biblical world podcast. If you enjoy this show, please show your support by giving us a rating on iTunes or wherever you listen. You can support the show by visiting onScript.study/donate. Until next time, keep digging.