Walking the Bible (16 page)

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.”

“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.”

Today Hatzor sprawls across two hundred acres in Upper Galilee like a giant, bottle-shaped mesa. On a sunny afternoon, a few tourists wandered the remains. They struggled to link the stubby walls with the grand account of Joshua. They weren’t alone. During Yadin’s tenure, the composer Leonard Bernstein visited Hatzor. He was viewing some Canaanite ruins uncovered by Avner’s mentor, Trude Dhotan, when a call came from the upper tel, “We’ve found Solomon’s Gate!” Bernstein was thrilled. “This is magnificent!” he announced. “I’ll write an oratorio, I’ll write a symphony, I’ll write an opera.” He hopped in a jeep and went hurrying to the spot. Five minutes later he returned, dejected. What he had imagined was a soaring gate, no doubt adorned with trumpets and flags, turned out to be little more than a few stones in the ground. “He was devastated,” Trude recalled. “He never wrote an oratorio, a symphony, or an opera.”

Avner and I explored the site, as he pointed out features typical of Canaanite cities—the small homes with courtyards, the giant palace with plaster walls. Eventually we arrived at Solomon’s Gate, which on the surface was not so impressive, until Avner noted that the design was
the same as one in Megiddo. According to the book of Kings, which follows the Pentateuch, Solomon built such walls in Jerusalem, Gezer, Megiddo, and Hatzor. “What we have here is a clear piece of archaeological evidence that supports the text,” Avner said. “But you have to be able to read the stones.”

“Everybody in Israel seems to be able to read them,” I said.

“That’s true. A kid here will know what a tel is, that stones mean people.”

“And that’s the point: Stones mean people. Few around the world understand that connection.”

We hiked down to the lower tel, which was unexcavated and covered in grass. On top of a small hill we retrieved our Bibles. A grasshopper leapt onto my lap. Though the text never says Jacob was in Hatzor, it does suggest he came close. On his way to Harran, after hearing of his brother’s threat, Jacob comes upon a “certain place.” The place was probably on the Patriarchs’ Road and thus near Hatzor. Taking one of the stones of the place, he puts it under his head and lies down to sleep. He has a dream in which he sees a ladder, with “angels of God” going up and down on it. God appears and renews his covenant, promising to give Jacob the land promised to his father and grandfather.