The Bible as History
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRlTING The Bible as History By Stanley Edgar Hyman I am, and have been for a long time, an amateur student of the Bible and of archaeology. When Dr. Werner Keller's The Bible as...
...Here is a photograph of the sea itself, and its sudden squalls "can be quite dangerous...
...This solves the problem by raising a much more severe one: why then does Genesis describe, not Egypt turned topsy-turvy by the Hyksos, but a traditional Egypt ruled by the Pharoahs...
...A stable with stalls for 450 horses excavated at Megiddo is King Solomon's Stable (Solomon has stalls for 40,000 horses in I Kings 4:26...
...Meanwhile, John the Baptist and Jesus, Paul and Peter, remain equally unsubstantiated by archaeology or history...
...The archaeological find that made this clear (The Bible as History in Pictures does not mention it) was the discovery, around the turn of the century, of some Aramaic papyri on the island of Elephantine in Egypt...
...I resolved not to miss its sequel, The Bible as History in Pictures (translated by Dr...
...The Christian first century disappears at a touch...
...The first book claims to be addressed to "churchmen and agnostics alike.' This one, with 329 illustrations, is more openly addressed to Keller's true public, the nitwits...
...it is an account of Christ crucified, risen, and to come again...
...Solomon must have built the Temple, because at a place now called "Solomon's quarries," "traces of quarrying are plainly visible...
...My reward was the experience of reading, with mounting shock, one of the most ignorant and fraudulent books I have ever encountered...
...How can one refuse to believe that David killed Goliath as described, after he has seen a photograph of an ancient sling stone from the area...
...The Canaanite Amarna letters, about 1400 B. C., mention the "Hapiru," who may or may not be the Hebrews...
...He demonstrates the historicity of Abraham by showing the ruins of Haran and a statue of its governor at the time...
...Paul's autograph letter...
...But the New Testament is not a travelogue to Christians...
...Utterly unsubstantiated, and obviously "sacred history"—that is, myth believed to be history—are not only Adam and Noah and Samson, but Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, Joseph and Moses and Joshua, David and Solomon and the First Temple...
...where are the other 88 stables...
...When Keller deigns to argue, he is foolish...
...Zephaniah even "foresaw with horror" so unpredictable an event as the Scythian invasion of Palestine...
...They had their own temple in which they performed blood sacrifices, and they worshipped Yahve, his female consort Anath, and three other gods...
...But the Flood in Genesis is not a Mesopotamian inundation, but a story of God's destruction of all flesh for its wickedness, of the salvation of the righteous Noah and his family, in an ark containing breeding pairs (or sevens) of all the animals in the world, and of the covenant afterwards established with Noah...
...Keller's real interest, as the book makes clear, is custom and costume, and he keeps insisting on "the astonishing accuracy of the biblical record of the life and customs.' There is no mention in his index of Covenant or Passion, but there are 29 entries under "Hairstyle," in 10 categories...
...He confirms God's punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah with a photograph of a pillar of salt near the Dead Sea, captioned, "Among the many remarkable salt formations, some of them surprisingly human in appearance, is one which still to this day recalls the punishment of Lot's wife...
...Why not the very bed...
...Keller is a German journalist, and I do not know of what branch of learning he is a doctor...
...a copper mine found at Eziongeber is King Solomon's Mine...
...Keller has become somewhat more sophisticated, or been much corrected, in the eight years between the two books...
...William Neil, Morrow, 360 pp., $7.95...
...It is a story, in short, of divine justice and mercy, not of water and mud...
...This should suggest the opposite conclusion, that the Bible's geneologies are constructed out of anything that came to hand...
...One by one they are credited with foreseeing the rise and fall of Assyria and Babylon, the captivity and return...
...Keller has given up his explanation of manna as tamarisk exudations produced by a plant louse...
...He no longer identifies two Assyrian soldiers on a relief as "Tiglath-Pileser III (with bow and sword) besieging a fortress...
...Reconstructions drawn from Bible descriptions are cleverly interspersed among the photographs, as though those things too had been dug up...
...This has always been the contention of the radical critics, who date the Priestly compiler late and the Prophetic books later, seeing them as nationalistic and Pharisaic reactions to Hellenism, written from 350 to 150 B. C.) If The Bible as History in Pictures is irrelevant or a disservice to the religious, it is an insult to the intelligence of the rationalist...
...To the believer, I should imagine, all this is irrelevant or distasteful...
...It documents, or at least explains, some of its sequel's unsupported assertions...
...The small part of the book devoted to the New Testament, 30 pages out of more than 300, largely ignores the Gospels to concentrate on The Acts of the Apostles: the events of Holy Week are passed by in silence, with the barest mention of the Crucifixion and none of the Resurrection, while St...
...in the new book, which does not mention manna, he limits himself to explaining the quail...
...Nor does he know a syllable of Hebrew, to judge by his statement that the name Seraiah "suggests that this dignitary was an Egyptian...
...The drawing of Solomon's Temple in the first book is pure De Mille...
...He has learned that ostraca (inscribed potsherds) are not "baked clay tablets...
...Keller's principal trick is illustration by false syllogism...
...But Keller rarely argues...
...Did he think that one was Tiglath and the other Pileser...
...After The Bible as History in Pictures, The Bible as History proves an anticlimax...
...Keller does one positive disservice to believers: in his eagerness to show the Prophets as prophetic, he makes them seem pseudepigraphic (later false attributions...
...The Book of Daniel is conventionally dated about 164 B. C. because that is the date of its last accurate "prophecy...
...And the bondage...
...Archaeology may eventually expose Christian sacred history similarly...
...Was Joseph really in Egypt...
...Actually, archaeology confirms little in the Bible, and nothing of any significance...
...Nor is this the only sort of slyness and deceit...
...Before the ninth century B. c. there are only two items...
...Just take a look at this brick with wisps of straw in it...
...the stele of Pharoah Merenptah, about 1230 B. C., mentions a people of Israel, perhaps, living in Palestine...
...This is like believing that Egyptian kings habitually stood on the heads of their enemies...
...Cowley published them in 1923 in Aramaic Papyri of the Fifth Century B. C.) They are the letters and documents of a Jewish colony there contemporary with Ezra...
...the accurate prophecies of the Prophets would seem to suggest that their books too were written after the events they "predicted," that they are all post-Exilic...
...Keller propounds Breasted's theory that there is "not even the barest mention" of Joseph in "the otherwise meticulously accurate Egyptian records" because the events occurred when Egypt was under the Hyksos occupation...
...He is unbelievably ignorant of Bible scholarship and criticism...
...Only a careful reader will discover that the page of the Epistle to the Romans pictured is not St...
...But is it Lot's wife, and if so, who are the others...
...Archaeologists given to schliemannizing (claiming to have discovered Agamemnon's Tomb or Priam's Treasure when they have dug up an anonymous burial), in order to make a splash in the newspapers, must share some of the blame for Keller...
...in the second it looks like a discreet reformed temple in Scarsdale...
...Keller has no idea what history is, or what might be considered historical evidence...
...These claims are the excavators', not Keller's...
...It is a typical Hebrew name, meaning "God strives...
...Paul's travels are illustrated in detail...
...Werner Keller's The Bible as History appeared in 1956, I somehow missed it...
...He thinks that Assyrian kings fought lions hand to hand, because they are shown doing so on reliefs, and he is impressed by their bravery...
...In the ninth century some real history begins to appear in the Bible, in Kings and II Chronicles, and it has been confirmed by archaeology...
...Keller is convinced that Leonard Woolley found the Flood in Mesopotamia, and he shows a photograph of a thick deposit of clay that it left at Ur...
...Keller is so credulous that he believes in Herod's Massacre of the Innocents...
...How about Jesus calming the wind and waves on the sea of Galilee...
...Here are photographs of the Sphinx and some pyramids, "which Joseph and many of his kinsmen must have seen...
...I now know why Keller believes in Herod's Massacre of the Innocents: "it fits in perfectly" with Herod's "revolting" character...
...Where earlier writers of books of this sort have had the humility to give them such titles as Daily Life in Bible Times, Keller has the effrontery to claim that he is confirming the Bible...
...His custom is to assert, usually with maddening vagueness: "Many scholars today reckon," "This is thought to have been," "Experts believe," and so on...
...He takes the historicity of the patriarchs as established by the fact that Peleg, Serug, Nahor, and Terah turn up as place names in the Mari cuneiforms...
...The colonists were orthodox Jews, as their correspondence with the high priest at Jerusalem makes clear, yet their papyri show that they had never heard of Moses or the Torah, the Exodus, the Sabbath, the Patriarchs, the Twelve Tribes, or of any festival except Unleavened Bread...
...We can no longer doubt that Jesus healed a paralyzed man at the pool Bethesda, by saying "Rise, take up thy bed, and walk," since Keller shows us a picture of the very pool...
Vol. 47 • October 1964 • No. 21
