Compared with other ancient historical works, the Bible has a tremendous amount of archaeological and historical support.

Skeptics’ complaints of no archaeological proof of Pontius Pilate were refuted in 1962 in the form of an inscription mentioning Pilate, “prefect of Judea.”

It was the most important archaeological find for the study of the Hebrew Bible since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In 1979, a team of Israeli archaeologists discovered nine caves on the hillside just west of Jerusalem in the Valley of Hinnom.

The caves were ancient burial sites that date back to the tenth century BC. Inside one of the caves archaeologists discovered two tiny silver scrolls or amulets, each about the size of a cigarette butt, upon which were written lines in Old Hebrew script. This ancient writing, similar to that found on the Samaritan Torah scrolls, is believed by some Jews to be the same script that Exodus 32:16 says God used when writing the tablets of the Ten Commandments (“The tablets were God’s work, and the writing was God’s writing, incised upon the tablets”).

Because of their delicate condition, four years elapsed before archaeologists were able to unroll the scrolls. When they did, they couldn’t believe their eyes: In tiny, almost microscopic letters, they saw the mysterious tetragrammaton YHWH [

], the sacred, ineffable name of God in the Hebrew Bible—one of the few times the full name had been found in Israel or anywhere in the world.

Working with scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena in the early 1990s, archaeologists and paleographers used infrared imaging technologies and computer image-processing programs to draw out previously invisible writing on the scrolls. The results took their breath away. Both scrolls, dated to the seventh century BC, had inscribed upon them the Priestly Blessing from Numbers 6:24–26: “May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord cause his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; may the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.”

The significance of this find was immediately apparent.

In that hillside cave in Jerusalem, the archaeologists had happened upon the oldest extant piece of the Hebrew Bible in existence—one dating four centuries earlier than the Dead Sea Scrolls. But equally important, the discovery called into question recent skeptical theories that postulate that the Torah was written very late—during or even after the Babylonian Exile of 560 BC—by scribes who learned their monotheism from Zoroastrian priests in Babylon. Instead, the writing on the tiny silver amulets suggested that the Hebrew text of the Torah was in existence much earlier than skeptical modern scholars have assumed—and was so revered that portions of it were inscribed in silver and worn around the neck.

The discovery of the Ketef Hinnom amulets, as they are known, is an example of how recent archaeological discoveries are often strengthening more traditional views of the Bible’s origins, undermining some scholarly certainties. The Israeli archaeologist Yohanan Aharoni, hardly a conservative, insists that recent archaeological discoveries such as the Ketef Hinnom amulets “have decisively changed the entire approach of Bible critics.... No authors or editors could have put together or invented these stories hundreds of years after they happened.”¹

This isn’t the first time that archaeological discoveries have undermined the unquestioned certitudes of modern skeptics. Time and again, archaeology has verified the existence of places, people, and events we once knew solely from biblical records. These discoveries by no means prove that the Bible is divinely inspired, or “inerrant,” but they do bolster the credibility of the biblical texts as containing real historical records.

A few examples:

The Merneptah Stela

In the nineteenth century, as in our own, some scholars questioned the reliability of the biblical narratives. Then, as now, some even suggested that the Israelites never really existed at all as a separate people—that is, until a seven-foot slab of black granite was discovered in a temple in Thebes, Egypt, in 1896. Written in hieroglyphics, the stela boasts of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah’s conquest of Libya and peoples in Palestine, including the Israelites. One line reads, “Israel is laid waste; its seed is not.” Archaeologists have precisely dated the stela to “Year 5, 3rd month of Shemu (summer), day 3”—or 1209/1208 BC. This is definitive proof that, not only did a people known as Israel exist in the 1200s BC, but they were known in Egypt. Israel is grouped together with other defeated city-states in Canaan such as Gezer, Yanoam, and Ashkelon.

Scripture Says

“Jesus answered, ‘It is written: ‘Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

Matthew 4:4

The House of David Inscription

In our own time, so-called biblical “minimalists,” such as Thomas L. Thompson at the University of Copenhagen, have claimed that many central characters of the biblical narratives are completely fictional—that such figures as King David or Solomon never existed. But then, on July 21, 1993, archaeologists working at Tel Dan in northern Israel, near the foot of Mt. Hermon, uncovered a basalt stone, written in Old Aramaic, that explicitly mentions the House of David. Pottery fragments near where the stela was found date it to the end of the ninth or the beginning of the eighth century BC—and certainly not later than the Assyrian destruction of Tiglath Pileser III in 732 BC. The stela refers to events recorded in the Old Testament Book of II Kings and refers to how the writer “killed [Ahaz]iahu son of [Jehoram kin-] of the House of David.”

The Moabite Stone (or Mesha Stela)

The Bible in American History, Part II

“Education is useless without the Bible.”

Daniel Webster

Compared with other ancient historical works—such as Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War or Caesar’s Gallic Wars—the Bible has a tremendous amount of archaeological and historical support. One of the earliest pieces of evidence that the biblical chronicles concerned real persons and events was the so-called Moabite Stone discovered in 1868 by Anglican medical missionary F. A. Klein. Written in Moabite (a language related to Hebrew) around the year 930 BC, the stela is the personal testimony of a Moabite king that mentions numerous places in the Bible. “I am Mesha, son of Kemoshmelek, the king of Moab, the Dibonite,” the stela begins. “My father was king over Moab for thirty years, and I became king after my father.” The chronicle goes on to mention Israel and its God by name: “And [the god] Chemosh said to me, ‘Go take Nebo against Israel,’ and I went by night and fought against it.... And I took from there the altar-hearths of Yahweh, and I dragged them before Chemosh. And the king of Israel built Jabaz and dwelt in it while he fought with me and Chemosh drove him out from before me.”² This text was written in 930 BC, yet biblical minimalists claim that Israel didn’t even exist as a separate people at that time—and certainly were not ruled by a king. The Moabite text mirrors closely texts in the Bible, such as 2 Kings 3:4–5: “Now Mesha king of Moab was a sheepbreeder, and he regularly paid the king of Israel one hundred thousand lambs and the wool of one hundred thousand rams. But it happened, when Ahab died, that the king of Moab rebelled against the king of Israel.”

Ironically, after the House of David inscription was discovered at Tel Dan in 1993, scholars returned to the Moabite Stone, housed in the Louvre in Paris, and began studying it more closely. French scholar André Lemaire discovered that the same phrase “House of David” appeared in line 31 of the Moabite Stone. It reads “And the House of [Da]vid dwelt in Hauranen. . . . Chemosh said to me, ‘Go down, fight against Hauranen!’ I went down . . . and Chemosh restored it in my days.” The new evidence even led Time magazine to conclude in 1995 that “[t]he skeptics’ claim that King David never existed is now hard to defend.”³

Pharaoh Shishak/Shoshenq’s Victory Lists

The book of Chronicles relates that the Egyptian pharaoh Shishak (or Shoshenq) came “with twelve hundred chariots and threescore thousand horsemen” and plundered Israel’s capital, as well as such towns and fortresses as Rehov, Megiddo, and Hazor. Archaeologists have long known that Shoshenq’s exploits, carved on a monument in the temple of Amun at Karnak, have been confirmed by extra-biblical sources. But a discovery in 2003 at Tel Rehov in Israel, using highly sophisticated techniques of radio-carbon dating, provided additional proof that the biblical account is precisely correct. In the process, it also undermined the theories of biblical minimalists or skeptics, such as Israel Finkelstein and Thomas Thompson, who claim David and Solomon never existed. The radio-carbon dating placed Shoshenq’s looting at Rehov in the tenth century (925 BC) rather than the ninth. Additionally, it established that the cities Shoshenq mentions conquering—including Beth-Horon (Jo 10:10), Gibeon (Jo 9:3), Megiddo (Jo 12:21), and Gaza, (Jo 10:41)—all existed when the Bible says they did. These discoveries “have now put another nail in the coffin of [skeptic Israel] Finkelstein’s theories,” concluded Professor Lawrence E. Stager, director of Harvard University’s Semitic Museum, in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. “There’s no question that Rehov and the other cities that Shoshenq conquered were indeed there at the time of Solomon. We don’t need to rely any more only on the Bible or on Shoshenq’s inscriptions at Karnak to establish that Solomon and his kingdom really existed, because we now have the superb evidence of the radiocarbon dates.”⁴

Samaritan Ostraca

The Bible goes into great detail about the tribes of Israel, even going so far as dividing up the twelve tribes into specific clans or families. Some modern scholars don’t take this seriously and doubt that there really were “Twelve Tribes” of Israel at all. That flies in the face of evidence that was discovered in 1910, under the direction of the Harvard archaeologist G. A. Reisner, in Samaria—sixty-three potsherds bearing inscriptions in Old Hebrew script written in ink, called ostraca. Among the oldest samples of ancient Hebrew writing, the ostraca are commercial records of shipments of wine and oil, but they have one characteristic of historic significance: Thirty of them name the clan or district name of seven of the ten sons of Manasseh mentioned in Joshua 17:2–3, including Abiezer, Asriel, Helek, Shechem, and Shemida. Two daughters of Zelophehad are also identified (17:3): Hoglah and Noah. These potsherds are dated to around 784–783 BC.

The Seal of Baruch

In the fourth year of King Jehoiakim’s reign (c. 605 BC), God spoke to the prophet Jeremiah and told him to write his prophecies on a scroll. “Perhaps if the house of Judah hears all the disasters I intend to bring upon them, they will turn back from their wicked ways, and I will pardon their iniquity and their sin,” God told Jeremiah (Jer 36:3). “So Jeremiah called Baruch son of Neriah; and Baruch wrote down in the scroll, at Jeremiah’s dictation, all the words which the Lord had spoken to him” (Jer 36:4).

In 1975, a bulla, or clay seal, bearing the name of the scribe was discovered in the antiquities market in Israel. Written in Old Hebrew (preexilic) script, the bulla was dated to around 600 BC and authenticated by some Israeli archaeologists. The writing on the bulla reads (left to right):

leyberechiah (Blessed of God)
ben neriyah (son of Neriah)
ha-seper (the scribe)

Many scholars and archaeologists believe the seal belonged to Baruch ben Neriah, the scribe who faithfully recorded the visions announced by the prophet Jeremiah and described in Jeremiah 36:4. Even more interesting, in 1996 a second bulla was discovered, presumably stamped with the same seal, and upon which was found a thumbprint embedded in the rock-hard clay—perhaps that of Baruch himself.⁵ While not all archaeologists are convinced these bullae are genuine, given the sometimes shady character of the Israeli antiquities trade, they are nevertheless further evidence that the people in the Bible were not “mythic” characters but real historical figures.

The Pontius Pilate Inscription

When contemporary skeptics complain that there is “no archaeological proof” that a certain biblical figure existed—such as Moses—what they often don’t admit is that there is little or no archaeological evidence for many figures of ancient history that no one seriously doubts existed. This “argument from silence” has been refuted so many times you would think that modern skeptics would stop using it. For example, until 1962 there was no archaeological proof that Pontius Pilate ever existed—and skeptics made much of the fact. But in that year, an Italian archaeologist working at Caesarea Maritima, on the coast of Israel south of Haifa—the center of government for the Roman administration in the time of Christ—found the long-sought proof. It came in the form of an inscription that mentioned Tiberieum/[Pon]tius Pilatus/[Praef]ectus Iuda[eae], “Tiberius [the Roman emperor of the period]/Pontius Pilate/Prefect of Judea.”

The Ebla Tablets

Some modern skeptics now concede that there may have been a minor chieftan named David, but nevertheless insist that the patriarchal narratives are entirely fictional—and no figure such as Abraham existed. What’s more, they used to say, the places that Abraham visits in Genesis don’t actually exist. We have no archaeological evidence for any of them. Then, in 1964, Italian archaeologists from the University of Rome began excavating a palace found at Tell Mardikh, in northern Syria. Inside the palace they found a virtual library of 15,000 well-preserved cuneiform tablets dating from around 2300 BC. Not only do these amazing tablets, written in Sumerian and Akkadian, reveal laws, customs, and events surprisingly in harmony with the account in Genesis, they also mention explicitly the five undiscovered “cities on the plain” mentioned in Genesis 14:8 that modern skeptics insist never existed—Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Zoar.

The Siloam Tunnel (or Hezekiah’s Tunnel)

According to 1 Kings 2 and Chronicles 2, an elaborate tunnel was constructed during the reign of King Hezekiah—between 727 BC and 698 BC—to protect the Jerusalem’s water supply against an imminent Assyrian siege. Most biblical scholars have long believed the 1,750-foot-long tunnel, rediscovered in 1838, did indeed date back to the time of Hezekiah; a minority insisted the passage was built centuries later. Some even claimed that an inscription at the outside of the tunnel proved it was built just before the birth of Christ. But once again, archaeology has proven the textual skeptics to be wrong. In 2003, Israeli and British scientists tested organic material within the plaster lining of the tunnel and dated it back to around 700 BC—just as the Bible says.⁶ The testing represented the first time that a structure mentioned in the Bible was dated through radio-carbon methods, according to researchers Amos Frumkin, Aryeh Shimron, and Jeff Rosenbaum in their published results in Nature (September 2003).

The Nuzi Tablets

A common tactic that critics use when attacking the historicity of the biblical narratives is to point out cultural anomalies—customs that (allegedly) didn’t exist in the period in question. For example, skeptics point to a number of customs in the Pentateuch that, they claim, do not correspond to what we “know” about the Middle East in the second millennium. But excavations in 1925 at Nuzi, in northern Iraq, discovered 4,000 tablets written in Akkadian cuneiform script that dated back to 2300 BC. The Nuzi tablets describe customs that parallel those described in Genesis—for example, a barren wife giving a slave (such as Hagar) to her husband to produce an heir or a father chosing a bride (like Rebekah) for his son. Once again, archaeological discoveries have disproven what was once “known.”

Archaeological supports for biblical records

These examples show how unique the Bible really is in the context of other religions’ holy books. While they do not prove that everything in the Bible is factually accurate—some chronological and historical correlation problems still remain—they certainly do demonstrate that the Bible’s records of events do have substantial outside support from archaeology and other historical records. Certainly, the Bible differs in a remarkable way from many other holy texts, such as the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita or the Buddhist Tripitaka, where the connection to proven historical facts is tenuous at best. There should be no more reason to doubt the truth of Old Testament historical documents than there is to doubt classical Greek historians Herodotus or Thucydides—whose descriptions of ancient events often lack substantial archaeological support.

The Exodus

For centuries, scholars have debated the historical reliability of the biblical account of the Exodus. But until the late 1970s, biblical scholars, historians, and archaeologists took the biblical account of the Exodus, if not at face value, then at least as a broad outline of historical events.

However, beginning in the late 1970s, a small but increasingly influential group of revisionist scholars came up with a novel way to account for all of the conflicting archaeological and textual evidence: None of it happened at all! It was all just made up!

Put another way: The central event of Jewish history—recounted faithfully each year in the Passover seder—was a complete fraud, made up out of whole cloth.

The first scholars to seriously propose this thesis appear to have been a group of Scandinavian and American scholars working at the University of Copenhagen in the late 1970s and 1980s—such as Thomas Thompson, Niels Peter Lemche, and Peter Davies. While different scholars disagree about the details, this school of thought—which is known as biblical “minimalism”—basically holds that the Bible is a work of fiction with little, if any, verifiable basis in historical fact.

The characters in the Hebrew Bible—from Abraham and Moses and David up to and including Jesus Christ—are merely nationalistic mythic constructs, no more historical than Odysseus in the Odyssey and Aeneas in the Aeneid.

When the anticlerical denizens of the media finally got wind of this story, in the late 1990s, they had a field day.

Despite the fact that the arguments against the historicity of the Exodus are hardly overwhelming—or could at least be considered “debatable”—the media predictably proclaimed that the matter was settled: The Bible had been “proven” false by archaeology—or, not just false, but an actual fraud, a deliberate lie, perpetrated and perpetuated by religious zealots (not unlike the Taliban!) determined to oppress women, perpetuate homophobia, enforce the death penalty, and so on.

Who Said It?

“I claim to be a historian. My approach to the Classics is historical. And I tell you that the evidence for the life, death, and the resurrection of Christ is better authenticated than most of the facts of ancient history.”

E. M. Blaiklock, chair of classics,
Auckland University

Time magazine featured a cover story in 1995 entitled “Is the Bible Fact or Fiction?” that swallowed the arguments of the minimalists without question or even comment: “If they really spent forty years wandering in the desert after fleeing Egypt, the Israelites should have left at least a few traces,” the Time article asserted. “But though scientists have evidence of human occupation in the Sinai dating to the Stone Age, nothing suggests that the Israelites were ever there.”

The March 2002 issue of Harper’s went even further. It carried an article written by Daniel Lazare entitled “False Testament: Archaeology Refutes the Bible’s Claim to History.”

“Not long ago, archaeologists could agree that the Old Testament, for all its embellishments and contradictions, contained a kernel of truth,” wrote Lazare. “Obviously, Moses had not parted the Red Sea or turned his staff into a snake, but it seemed clear that the Israelites had started out as a nomadic band somewhere in the vicinity of ancient Mesopotamia; that they had migrated first to Palestine and then to Egypt; and that, following some sort of conflict with the authorities, they had fled into the desert under the leadership of a mysterious figure who was either a lapsed Jew or, as Freud maintained, a highborn priest of the royal sun god Aton whose cult had been overthrown in a palace coup.”⁷

Recent archaeological “discoveries,” Lazare continued, changed all that. “In the last quarter century or so, archaeologists have seen one settled assumption after another concerning who the ancient Israelites were and where they came from proved false.”

Eventually, even some clergy started parroting this line. Rabbi David Wolpe of Los Angeles told 2,000 worshippers at the Conservative Sinai Temple that “the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all.”⁸

This is an astonishing remark for a rabbi to make. After all, the events of the Exodus have been central to the religious understanding of Jews (and Christians!) for millennia. Every Passover, Jews meet together for the ritual seder meal when the story is retold of the Israelites’ liberation from bondage in Egypt.

What is the basis for this new skepticism? After all, for most of the twentieth century, archaeologists and historians generally believed the Exodus, in some fashion, actually occurred—even if they were unclear how all the details fit together.

In 2001, an Israeli archaeologist named Israel Finkelstein and a journalist named Neil Asher Silberman wrote a book that summarized and gave new life to the minimalist cause. It was entitled The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origins of Its Sacred Texts.

One argument the authors put forth in the book is that the Exodus didn’t happen at all because it’s difficult to fit all the known historical dates together. Finkelstein and Silberman discuss the Hyksos, the mysterious West Semitic people who overwhelmed Egyptian society in the sixteenth century BC and who were forcibly expelled from the kingdom. The Egyptian historian Manetho (c. 250 BC) describes how the Pharaoh defeated the Hyksos, “killing many of them and pursuing the remainder to the frontiers of Syria.” Finkelstein and Silberman concede that “the basic situation described in the Exodus saga—the phenomenon of immigrants coming down to Egypt from Canaan and settling in the eastern border regions of the delta—is abundantly verified in the archaeological finds and historical texts.” But, they say, it’s impossible to reconcile all these dates with the biblical account. So, what is Finkelstein and Silberman’s conclusion? It must be all made up!

But as we have seen, as difficult as it is to fit all the pieces of the historical puzzle together, saying the whole story is fiction is hardly the only, or even the most logical, way to account for all the evidence.

The Hyksos, for example, may have merely been the forerunners of the Israelites—one of the first of many waves of impoverished Semitic peoples to seek refuge in Egypt over the course of centuries.

We know from the Amarna Letters, a series of cuneiform letters dictated by the Pharaohs Amenhoptep III (c. 1391 BC) and Tutankhamen (c. 1330 BC)⁹ and discovered in the late nineteenth century, that there existed groups of foreigners known as the ‘apiru (or habiru) who were considered to be brigands or “disenfranchised peoples on the outskirts of society.” While the ‘apiru cannot be simply equated with the Hebrews, the Egyptians may well have considered any Israelite tribe “riffraff” who were a threat to Egyptian society. Middle Eastern historian Robert Stieglitz of Rutgers University argues that carvings on a chapel of Egyptian Queen Maakare Hatshepsut refer to the expulsion of the Hyksos, in 1550, but also to a second, later expulsion of a group with “foreigners amongst them”—a reference that closely mirrors Numbers 11:4, which states that the Israelites fleeing Egypt included “a mixed multitude” (asafsuf) and not merely the Israelite tribe.

As for the city the Bible calls Rameses, said to have been built by the enslaved Israelites, archaeologists concede that it was indeed built and occupied at the time the Bible gives for the Exodus but may have been called by a different name at that time.

There are many ways to account for the conflicting evidence other than to simply assert that none of it happened.

A second point against the Exodus that Finkelstein and Silberman make is that we have no written records of Israelites in Egypt from Egyptian sources. The authors point out that, after the forced expulsion of the Hyksos around 1570 BC, the Egyptians established a network of forts along their eastern frontier. Some of these forts have been discovered and excavated. Archaeologists have even found a papyrus that shows how closely the Egyptian border guards, like today’s customs and immigration officials, monitored movements of tribes and peoples: “We have completed the entry of the tribes of the Edomite Shasu through the fortress of Merneptah-Content-with-Truth, which is in Tjkw, to the pools of Pr-Itm . . . ,” reads one entry on the papyrus.

So what does this evidence tell Finkelstein and Silberman? “If a great mass of fleeing Israelites had passed through the border fortifications of the pharaonic regime, a record should exist.”

Of course, this assumes that detailed, comprehensive records, written on papyrus scrolls more than 3,200 years ago, still exist and have survived millennia of wars, revolutions, invasions, fires, floods, and other disasters.

Worse, say the authors, there is no record of Israel in Egypt whatsoever—no tomb inscriptions, no monument, no writing on the temple walls. They concede that the famous Merneptah Stela, found in Egypt in 1898 and erected by Pharaoh Merneptah, son of Rameses the Great, does mention Israel by name. Reliably dated to around 1208 BC, the stela clearly identifies a culture of people named “Israel” whom Merneptah battles in Canaan: “Israel is laid waste, its seed is not.”

But the absence of the name “Israel” in Egypt inscriptions really proves nothing. The aristocratic, clean-shaven Egyptians no doubt thought of the descendants of Jacob as just another mass of hairy Semitic marauders, like the hated Hyksos. What’s more, the Egyptians, like all ancient peoples, weren’t in the habit of making monuments to their failures—like mass escapes of slaves.

However, this doesn’t stop Finkelstein and Silberman from taking their argument a step further to assert that a mass migration of people was actually “impossible” during the reign of Rameses II. In addition to pointing out the system of forts along the Egyptian border (mainly along the coastal “Ways of Horus”), they point out that Egyptian power at the time of Rameses II was at its peak—and the Egyptians maintained military control over Canaan.

But there are a number of problems with this argument: First, it assumes that the Exodus occurred in the era of Rameses II, when there are textual arguments against that dating; and second, it ignores the fact that the Bible itself specifically insists the fleeing Israelites did not take the coastal road lined with forts, the “way of the Philistines’ land, though this was the nearest” (Ex 13:17), but that God led them south, toward the open desert, by way of the Red Sea.

And of course, the Bible does describe the Egyptian army pursuing the fleeing Israelites—no fewer than “six hundred first-class chariots and all the other chariots of Egypt, with warriors on them all” (Ex 14:7).

The text even names the place where “Pharaoh’s whole army” caught up with the Israelites when they were encamped at Pi-hahiroth, in front of Baal-Zephon, two place names that have not been identified. The text then describes one of the greatest miracles of the Bible.

Whether you understand the crossing of the Red Sea as it is described in Exodus 14:22 (with the waters divided like a “wall to their right and their left”) or prefer to think of it in more naturalistic terms (as an army in heavy battle armor getting bogged down in swampy marshes of the “Sea of Reeds” and drowning), there is nothing inherently unrealistic in the basic scenario outlined in the Exodus account. Pharaoh’s army gave chase to the fleeing, escaped slaves and fell victim to some type of disaster involving water, with the heavy infantry and charioteers drowning in the Red Sea.

But, say Finkelstein and Silberman, then why is there no archaeological evidence of a large group of people wandering in the desert for forty years? The obvious answer to anyone familiar with the Sinai Desert is that though it is a vast, forbidden wasteland of about 24,000 square miles, it has nonetheless been traversed by countless armies over the millennia, from the Roman legions to the armies of Arabia, and has been the scene of ferocious battles fought by the Arabs and Israelis in the 1956, 1967, and 1973 wars.

Finkelstein and Silberman say that despite “repeated archaeological surveys” in “all” regions of the peninsula, not a single piece of evidence has turned up of the Israelites’ “generation-long wandering in the Sinai”: “not even a single sherd, no structure, not a single house, no trace of an ancient encampment.” This is known as an “argument from silence,” and you would think that archaeologists would be humble enough to no longer make them. That’s because some of the most embarrassing gaffes in the history of archaeology have been the result of such arrogant “arguments from silence.”

Finkelstein and Silberman make much of the fact that archaeologists have “identified” many of the specific places mentioned in the account of the Exodus and haven’t found any evidence of ancient encampments there. Specifically, they point to Kadesh-barnea, where the Bible says the Israelites encamped for thirty-eight out of the forty years of wandering in the desert. “The general location of this place is clear from the description of the southern border of the land of Israel in Numbers 34,” say the authors. “It has been identified by archaeologists with the large and well-watered oasis of Ein el-Qudeirat in eastern Sinai, on the border between modern Israel and Egypt.”

Well, there you have it.

Imagine: After three thousand years, not a trace of an Israelite encampment—even one that lasted thirty-eight years—remains.

Of course, the truth is that the identification of Ein el-Qudeirat with the biblical Kadesh-barnea is not universally accepted, but that is a standard tactic of the biblical minimalists who seek to undermine the believability of the biblical narratives, to treat as settled scientific “facts” what are, in truth, merely the opinions of one group of scholars or archaeologists.

A Book Atheists Want to Burn

The Stones Cry Out: What Archaeology Reveals About the Truth of the Bible, by Randall Price; Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 1997.

The authors’ final refutation of the Exodus as a historic event is the claim that it is merely a fictional story, told to unite the Israelites during the reign of King Josiah in the seventh century BC. There is only one major problem with this argument: Some of the biblical prophets, such as Amos and Hosea—whom many scholars confidently date living a full century before King Josiah—have numerous allusions to the Exodus and the wandering in the desert. “When Israel was a child I loved him,” said Hosea, “out of Egypt I called my son” (Hos 11:1). Amos begins one of his prophecies with the words, “Hear this word, O men of Israel, that the Lord pronounces over you, over the whole family that I brought up from the land of Egypt . . .” (Amos 3:1). If the Exodus was merely a work of fiction, written between 640 and 609 BC, then how could the prophets have made references to it a century earlier?

Finkelstein and Silberman explain this conundrum by agreeing that there was indeed a “shared memory” of a “great event in history that concerned liberation from Egypt and took place in the distant past” but that it had nothing to do, really, with the Israelites per se. Rather, there was a general collective memory of the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt and the authors of the biblical texts merely appropriated this collective memory and made it their own.

What Finkelstein and Silberman propose is that when it came time to invent a new “national epic saga,” the authors of the Torah chose to fashion a history for themselves first as abject slaves in Egypt and then to imagine themselves invading the land they already occupied, and indeed had always occupied, destroying all their neighbors’ cities and engaging in centuries of bloody warfare with... their own people.

In New Testament studies, when something is inherently embarrassing—such as the apostles being dim-witted—historians tend to think of it more likely being true as not because people don’t tend to make up stories that make them look bad.

When we think of other “national sagas,” such as the Iliad or the Aeneid, we read of heroic exploits. The Greeks, far from being abject slaves freed only by the power of God, venture forth to repair their wounded honor and destroy the Trojans in an epic battle. In the Aeneid, the Trojan Aeneas journeys to Italy and helps to found a new people destined to rule the world and establish truth, justice, and the Roman way. Finkelstein and Silberman want us to believe that royal scribes created a national epic for the Israelites that depicted them as impoverished slaves.

Irrefutable?

The five basic arguments against the Exodus in The Bible Unearthed may seem “irrefutable” to the authors, but not to many other distinguished archaeologists and scholars.

Egyptologist K. A. Kitchen argued in his 2003 book On the Reliability of the Old Testament that the factual details of the Exodus account—salt-tolerant reeds in the Red Sea, the habits of quails, kewirs (mudflats south of the Dead Sea), and so on—reflect detailed, precise knowledge of real local conditions, not something a creative novelist could know sitting in Babylon or Jerusalem.

As for the arguments from silence and the lack of Egyptian “records,” Kitchen points out that “a handful of wine-vintage dockets from broken jars is the sum total of our administrative texts so far recovered from Pi-Ramesse.” ¹⁰ In other words: It’s not as though we are holding 3,000 years’ worth of comprehensive passport and immigration records and can say, “See, there is no ‘Jacob’ from Canaan listed as passing through the frontier border check.”

Concerning the lack of a “single sherd” in the Sinai, Kitchen also points out that terrified, fleeing refugees might be more inclined to take water skins into the desert, not earthenware amphorae that would leave sherds in the first place.