Bible History - True or False?

Give a dog a bad name, and you might as well hang him.

Because of this many Biblical scholars of fifty to 100 years ago have a lot to answer for. They gave the Bible a bad name-quite unjustly-and the Bible still has not lived down the reputation they gave it.

Most people are vaguely aware of the sort of mud they flung at the Bible in those days. Here is a typical example, dating back to 1909:

" The history of Abraham (Genesis 11:27 to 25:18) consists of a number of legendary narratives, which have been somewhat loosely strung together into a semblance of biographical continuity."1

But far fewer people are aware of what leading scholars of today are saying. The late Prof. W. F. Albright, for instance. He was qualified as a theologian, historian, philosopher and orientalist. On top of that he was regarded until his death in 1971 as the greatest archaeologist in America, and one of the greatest in the world. This is his view of the Abraham story:

" A generation ago most critical scholars regarded this chapter [Genesis 14] as very late and quite unhistorical. Now we cannot accept such an easy way out of the difficulties which this chapter presents, since some of its allusions are exceedingly early, carrying us directly back into the Middle Bronze Age [2100 to 1600 B.C.]. For instance, the strange word for retainers (or, "trained servants"), used in verse 14, which occurs nowhere else in the Bible, is now known to be an Egyptian word employed in the Execration Texts of the late nineteenth century B.C. of the retainers of Palestinian chieftains, and used in the same sense four centuries later in one of the Taanach tablets. Several of the towns mentioned in this chapter are now proved to be very ancient "2

In another book he sums up the situation by saying:

" Our case for the substantial historicity of the tradition of the patriarchs [that is, of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob] is clinched."3

Notice the scholarly caution in that last statement. The substantial historicity is proved. Archaeology will never be able to give absolute proof that the Bible is historically true. Over-enthusiastic statements by some Bible-believers, to the effect that archaeology has "proved the Bible true", are well meaning but badly worded.

The real value of Biblical archaeology is not so much that it has shown the Bible to be true, but that it has shown many criticisms of the Bible to be false. There are countless examples of scholars declaring, "Well, anyway, that bit of the Bible is wrong," only to find, a few years later, that they had to eat their words.

Right After All

The Bible mentions quite a number of famous men and great nations that are not mentioned in any other ancient book. For a long time there were two points of view about this. Some said: "History knows nothing of King Belshazzar, or King Sargon and his henchman, Tartan. History knows nothing of the Hittite and Horite nations. Therefore the writers of the Bible must have been writing fiction, not history."

Others said: "Not so fast. History isnt complete yet. New facts may come to light one day that will show the Bible was right after all."

Now we can see the wisdom of the second approach. All these names appear in the history books today.

Belshazzar is described by the Bible as the last king of Babylon, who was slain by the Persians when they captured the city.4 But the ancient historians Berosus, Megasthenes, and Herodotus agreed that the last king of Babylon was called Nabonidus (or something like it). No historian ever mentioned Belshazzar. Something was wrong, somewhere.

In 1882 the explanation came to light. The archaeologist T. G. Pinches told the world of the discovery of what is called the Nabonidus Chronicle. This recorded on baked clay that Nabonidus had a son Bel-shar-usur (Belshazzar to his pals). Moreover, it made it clear that

Nabonidus had a habit of saying to Belshazzar, "Im off to the wars for a while, son. Just you run the kingdom till I get back."

Nabonidus was unlucky. The clay tablets tell us that the last time he did this Belshazzar lost his kingdom for him to the Persians, just as the Book of Daniel said. The Persian conquerors arrested Nabonidus as soon as he returned home.

For thousands of years the world knew nothing of King Sargon II of Assyria, except for the meagre information in Isaiah 20:1. Was he a real person, or a mythical one? The scholars wondered-but only until Sargons capital city of Khorsabad was excavated. Then they were able to read Sargons own account of his war with Israel. This even explained who Sargons man "Tartan" was: this was not his name, but his rank. A modern Bible5 calls him "commander in chief" instead of "Tartan".

Long before 1000 B.C. there were two great nations in the Middle East, the Hittites and the Hurrians. Ordinary written history (apart from the Bible) does not go back that far. Until the birth of modern archaeology in the nineteenth century, people who rejected the Bible as a history book would have said that history knew nothing of such nations.

But nowadays we know a lot about these peoples from the records left behind in their ruined cities. We know that what the Bible said about the Hittites is broadly in line with what are now regarded as the historical facts. The Horites of the Old Testament were almost certainly the Hurrians under their Hebrew name, The Biblical Hivites may have been Hurrians too, although this is not yet firmly established.

Filling in the Background

When I was at school in the 1930s, our French master in the Science Sixth Form insisted on teaching us French history. We protested against this, though in a very mild way; student demos had not been invented then, and the cane was still very much in use.

" Please, Sir, we are going to be scientists, not historians. We want to learn the French language. Why do we have to spend so much time on French history?"

"Because you will never be able to appreciate French literature unless you know something about the historical background," was his reply.

And he was right. Unless you know the setting of a book, you are reading in the dark.

This is why Bible readers owe such a debt to archaeology. Until the nineteenth century we knew practically nothing about the world in which the first half of the Old Testament is set, and not very much about the later periods.

But nowadays this is all changed. A modern Bible commentary will tell us the historical background of almost any chapter in the Old Testament, from Genesis 12 onwards. And almost invariably the chapters fit their background like hand in glove.

For example, take the use of animals in war. The earliest of these was the horse. It first appears in the Bible in the time of Joseph, which is shortly after it first appeared on the world scene. After this the Bible mentions horses more than 200 times.

Later there was a period when the elephant became the ancient equivalent of the tank. This period began when, according to critical scholars, Bible history was still being written. If they were right, you would expect to find the elephant mentioned in the Bible. But you dont. This fits in with the Bibles own statements about authorship, according to which the Bible was complete before the elephant appeared on the scene.

Countless little incidents take on a new meaning when we know the customs of the times. In the Tell-El-Amarna tablets (dated in the fifteenth century B.C.) a lesser king wrote to a greater king that he "bowed seven times". This was his way of saying that he would offer no resistance. Evidently this was what Jacob meant when he "bowed himself to the ground seven times" as he approached Esau.6

It used to be a puzzle why a worshipper of God like Rachel should steal her fathers idols.7 We are now able to make a good guess as to her motives. Some tablets were found at Nuzi, not far from where she used to live, and written more or less in her time, that laid down rules for families. In certain circumstances the man who held the household idols would inherit the fathers property. Greed, not idolatry, seems to have been Rachels sin.

Even some of the miracle stories of the Old Testament fit in with the archaeological records. The Assyrian king, Sennacherib, left records of his invasion of Israel. They are inscribed upon what archaeologists call the Oriental Institute Prism and the Taylor Prism. He tells how his invincible army assaulted and captured forty-six of King Hezekiahs walled cities. Then he turned his attention to Hezekiah and his capital. "Himself, like a bird in a cage in the midst of Jerusalem, his royal city, I shut up," wrote Sennacherib.

At that point the record of his triumphant progress ceases. Why did his mighty army fail to take the relatively small city of Jerusalem? He leaves us guessing. But the prophet Isaiah supplies a fitting explanation:

" Thus says the Lord concerning the king of Assyria . . I will defend this city to save it... And the angel of the Lord went forth, and slew a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians; and when men arose early in the morning, behold, these were all dead bodies."8

Since there are many readable books dealing with the impact of archaeology on our knowledge of the Old Testament,9 there is no need to enlarge on this theme here. The simple fact is this: the more we learn about the world of the Old Testament, the more it appears to be an accurate contemporary record, and not the mixture of myth and truth that it was once thought to be.

The eminent Jewish rabbi and archaeologist, Dr. Nelson Glueck, has spent many years of his life excavating in the land of Israel. This is how he views the impact of archaeology on the Old Testament:

"It may be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a Biblical reference. Scores of archaeological findings have been made which confirm in clear outline or in exact detail historical statements in the Bible. And, by the same token, proper evaluation of biblical descriptions has often led to amazing discoveries. They form tesserae in the vast mosaic of the Bibles almost incredibly correct historical memory."10 (The italics are mine.)

The New Testament

The New Testament was never shot at quite so severely as the Old. Nevertheless it did come in for many sweeping accusations of being unhistorical. And its critics, like their Old Testament colleagues, have often had to eat their words.

When Paul was in Thessalonica, he was brought before "the rulers of the city" (Acts 17: 6-8). The Greek word used to describe these people is politarch. This word is not found anywhere else in the Bible, or in any classical Greek author.

The critics therefore used to assume that the author of the Acts had blundered, and had misspelt poliarch, which is a well-known Greek word for a commandant.

Then archaeologists set to work in and around Thessalonica. They dug up a number of inscribed tablets which referred to the politarchs of Thessalonica and several other cities nearby. Apparently this was the local name for city governors, and the Bible is the only ancient book in existence that has noted this fact.

At one time Luke 3: 1 was heavily criticised. It says that in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar (Emperor of Rome), Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene.

"What a danger!" said certain scholars. "The fifteenth year of Tiberius was A.D. 27. But Lysanias was put to death years before that. And in any case, he wasnt called a tetrarch (ruler). He was a king."

You can imagine a mere schoolboy making the obvious suggestion

-and the reception he would have got.

" Perhaps there might have been another Lysanias, Sir?"

"Dont be ridiculous! Youre only guessing."

Fortunately for the Bibles good name a gentleman called Nymphaeus dedicated a pagan temple in Abila, the town that gave its name to the territory of Abilene. An inscription telling his story has been found there. This inscription includes a title, "The Lords Imperial", that was only used of the Emperor Tiberius and his mother, Livia. Consequently we know that it was carved in the days of those two rulers, namely between A.D. 14 and 29. And Nymphaeus describes himself as "a freedman of Lysanias the tetrarch".11

So now we know that there was, after all, a second Lysanias. He was a tetrarch in Abilene, just as Luke said, and he lived in exactly the right period for Lukes date to be correct.

But, as with the Old Testament, archaeologys greatest service is in showing that the historical background of the New Testament 15 "right". As one scholar has put it:

" This background is a first-century background. The New Testament just will not fit into a second-century background."12

All men are children of their age. The writers of the New Testament were clearly children of the first century. Two examples are taken from the Gospel of John, one of the last New Testament books to be written.

John refers to the place where Jesus was tried as "the Pavement in the Hebrew, Gabbatha".13 Albright has shown that this was the Tower of Antonia, the headquarters of the Roman garrison. This was destroyed in the siege of A.D. 66-70 and was never rebuilt. Evidently the Gospel writer was a man who knew Jerusalem in the days of peace, before A.D. 66.

Again, Johns Gospel was once criticised for its language. Many of its expressions were thought to have come from the Greek mystics who infiltrated Christianity in the second century. But many identical or similar phrases occur in the Dead Sea Scroll-which were written by Jews at, or near, the time of Jesus. This supports the Bibles assertion that the author of Johns Gospel was a first-century Jew.

Some Unsolved Problems

You would not expect archaeology to solve all the historical problems connected with the Bible. The list of unsolved problems is steadily getting smaller, but it still contains quite a number.

Although Daniel has long since been vindicated in his references to Belshazzar, his other classic "mistake" has not yet been cleared up. He refers to another king, Darius the Mede, and nobody yet knows who this is. Some scholars think that this is another name for a governor called Gobryas, or Gubaru.14 Others think it was an alternative name for Cyrus, the Persian king.15

Nobody really knows. But in view of what has happened in the past it would take a brave man to say that Daniel definitely blundered. One more shovelful of earth, and the final answer to the problem may appear tomorrow.

We must always remember one thing when we criticise Jewish historians. Their methods were not the same as ours. This does not mean that we are right and they were wrong. It just means that they did things differently.

A good example of this is the way they recorded the lengths of the reigns of their kings. They did quite a number of things that no modern European historian would do. To give just one example, they sometimes had reigns that overlapped by several years, while one king was living in semi-retirement and his successor was ruling for him. Because of this the whole period of the kings of Israel used to give historians many a headache.

Much of the tangle has now been straightened out by Thiele,16 who has discovered most of the principles on which the Jewish historians appear to have worked. Even so, some problems about dates still await solution.

Numbers in general present more unsolved problems than anything else. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, ancient methods of writing numbers were very clumsy (compare the "Roman" date for Napoleons retreat from Moscow-MDCCCXII-with our 1812). Hebrew and Greek numbers were difficult to copy accurately, and there appear to be more copyists errors in the numbers than in any other part of the text.

Then again, the ancients often used numbers in an approximate sense. We do this to a certain extent. Nobody would accuse you of inaccuracy if you said you had just had a fortnights holiday, when in fact you had been away for fifteen nights.

The Hebrews did this sort of thing to a greater extent. The widow who said she was gathering "two sticks" to make a fire17 obviously meant "a few sticks". For the purpose of local government the people were provided with "rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties and rulers of tens". Obviously, in this context, "ten", "fifty", "hundred" and "thousand" were the names of administrative units, not exact numbers.

The ordinary Hebrew word for "thousand" is sometimes used to mean "family", and is actually translated that way in Judges 6: 15.

The Hebrew word for "captain" is spelt the same as the word for "thousand", although the pronunciation is different. Since a regiment in the Jewish army was also called a thousand, it is easy to see how this association of words would arise. Thus it is possible that some of the "thousands" who fought, or were slain in battle, were really captains.18 If so, then the size of the army of Israel, and of its casualty lists, may possibly have been smaller than they appear in our English Bible.

While these uncertainties remain, we must be patient and wait for further information to emerge. On a very few occasions you may come across some other problem to which there is still no convincing answer.

If so, resist the temptation to say, "That cant be true!" Remember that critics of the Bible historians have often had to beg their pardon a few years later. The chances are that, in a few years time, you will find that it could have been true, after all.

Men Who Have Changed Sides

In any controversy you always find men changing sides, in both directions. Listing the men who have crossed over to ones own side does not prove that one is right. I should not bother to mention any of them, were it not for one thing.

Those scholars who have swung in mid-career to a belief in the historical accuracy of the Bible have usually been archaeologists. In their case it has not been theoretical reasoning or the pressure of public opinion, that has moved them. It has been the evidence before their eyes.

One such man in the late nineteenth century was Sir William Ramsay. His early years established his reputation as a great and impartial scholar. He had been trained in the critical school of Biblical scholarship, and leaned that way.

His work in the Middle East as an archaeologist, specialising in New Testament times, changed him completely. In the later years of his life he was no longer the impartial scholar he had once been. He was a dedicated champion of the New Testament writers, because he had become so convinced of their accuracy.

But even in the more detached period of his life, before he reached his full enthusiasm, he could write:

" Lukes history is unsurpassed in respect of its trustworthiness ... Luke is a historian of the first rank... this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians."19

Lukes accuracy as a historian is of especial importance because his two books-Lukes Gospel, and the Acts of the Apostle-are full of eye-witness testimony to the resurrection of Jesus. Can you imagine Luke, the "historian of the first rank", including these testimonies unless he had very good reason to accept their accuracy?

Ramsays researches appear to have played a part in the transformation of another great scholar of the age, Harnack. Towards the end of the nineteenth century he was in the front rank of those scholars who chose to attack the Bible. In the early years of the twentieth century he made an intensive study of the two books written by Luke, and ended up by defending Luke with the utmost vigour.20

A more recent case is that of Professor C. H. Gordon, who began his scholarly career as a higher critic. He has described how in about 1950 he made a study of the Gilgamesh Epic.21 This is a series of tablets found in the ruins of Nineveh. They contain the legendary story of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, and his companions. It probably dates back to about 2,000 B.C.

It contains the story of a flood, which reads very like a perverted version of the flood of Genesis. As Professor Gordon studied this part of the Epic, a thought came to his mind and would not leave. The flood story on these tablets was being told in the time of Abraham. It bore the marks of having been derived from the Genesis version, and not the other way round. Hence it must have come after the Genesis story.

Yet he had always assumed that Genesis was not compiled until a few hundred years before Christ-that is, more than a thousand years after the Gilgamesh flood story. This started him thinking for himself. Now he rejects what he formerly accepted without question. He regards the Critical view of Genesis as a dubious theory, based on inadequate evidence, and frequently in conflict with the facts of history and archaeology. Instead, he prefers to accept the Bible as true history, recorded at the time of the events it describes.

Another archaeologist, P. J. Wiseman, has reported a conversation in the course of a "dig" in Iraq. A man he describes as "one of the most brilliant modern archaeologists" said to him:

" I was brought up a Higher Critic, and consequently disbelieved in the actual truth of the early narratives of the Bible. Since then I have deciphered thousands of tablets, and the more I learn, the more I believe the Bible to be true."22

True or False?

The title of this chapter poses a question. Is Bible history true or false? It is not a simple question to answer. The facts are decidedly complex. Let me try to gather together the main threads.

In the first place, there has been a most noticeable change amongst ancient historians over the past century. In 1873 they tended to say, "If the Bible says it, then its probably untrue." Nowadays they tend to say the opposite: "The Bible is a good history book. If the Bible says something, provided there is nothing miraculous about the story, it is probably true."

On the whole, Biblical archaeologists-the men who should know best-are the first scholars to defend the Bible. Some of them accept the Bible as the inspired Word of God, and are therefore biased in its favour. But even the others generally regard it as a very, very accurate book. The stories of miracles are probably the biggest stumbling blocks; these will be discussed in Chapter 21.

In the old days great numbers of supposed "historical errors" in the Bible used to be trotted out. Very many of these have now been shown to be errors by the critics, not by the Bible.

A few apparent errors remain unexplained. In other words, a number of interesting problems remain. As we saw in Chapter 12, this is exactly what we should expect. Every profound subject being studied today bristles with unresolved problems.

The very least that any informed person can say is this: the Bible has been proved to be in a class of its own as a history book. No other ancient book can begin to be compared with it for accuracy.

But the Bible-believing Christian will go further than this. He will say: "Because of the evidence that the Bible was inspired of God; because Jesus taught that the Scripture cannot be broken-because of this I believe that Bible history is completely accurate. I believe that the relatively few problems that remain will one day be cleared up, just as so many earlier problems have been."

When he talks like this, the Christian is speaking by faith. But there is a very solid layer of fact underpinning his faith. There is nothing a historian can say to prove him wrong.