Squaring Archeology With the Bible

"One of the central paradoxes of the Bible is that, while it tells readers everything they need to know, they always want to know more," writes Amy Dockser Marcus in "The View From Nebo," a wholly fascinating study of what scientists actually find when they go in search of archeological evidence to corroborate Holy Writ. "They want to see Nebo for themselves, to climb to the top of the mountain, look out at Canaan, and see what Moses saw."

Nebo, of course, is the site from which Moses was afforded a glimpse of the Promised Land on the eve of his death. The archeological diggings at the site of Mount Nebo in the Jordanian desert have revealed no sign of the historical Moses, but there is plenty of hard scientific evidence for a people that the Bible simply ignores.

The hills around Nebo were used as a burial ground by nomads 3,000 years before the supposed lifetime of Moses, and the oldest objects recovered from the site include axes and arrowheads dating back about 18,000 years to the Paleolithic Age. "Suddenly Nebo took on significance outside the pages of the Bible," explains Marcus. "Here was an entire history that probably hadn't been known during the biblical age."

As Marcus expertly demonstrates, what began as "religious tourism" in the 5th century--pilgrimages by early Christians to sacred sites throughout the Holy Land--turned into "biblical archeology" in the 19th century as scholars began to search for evidence to corroborate the events reported in the Bible. But sometimes it seemed as if science mattered less than true belief among these archeologists, who were said to work with a shovel in one hand and a Bible in the other. "Discovery after discovery has established the accuracy of innumerable details," exulted William Foxwell Albright, one of the leading archeologists of the early 20th century, "and has brought increased recognition of the Bible as a source of history."

Nowadays, as Marcus shows us, such notions are mostly discredited, and leading archeologists are holding themselves to higher standards. "If you want to learn more about the Bible," says a modern archeologist, "stop looking at the Bible." Marcus leads us on an armchair expedition, pausing here and there to point out what archeology can and cannot prove about the figures and events depicted in the Bible.