ARCHEOLOGY. Archeology, as a branch of historical research, has taken shape over the last cent., and its definition must take account of the widening incidence of its raw material and the sources of its evidence. In the mid-19th cent., when archeology was staging its first triumphs, both the explorer and his public thought of the subject in terms of the major memorials of human culture: Layard’s huge Assyrian bulls rising out of the sand; “Priam’s treasure,” gathered furtively into Frau Schliemann’s shawl at Troy; the uncovering of buried Delphi...Today the objects of man’s curiosity and scientific examination are vastly more widespread. As the writer of this article has put it elsewhere:
“Man tells his story in the election slogan scratched on a Pompeian wall, in a scrap of potsherd marked with a candidate’s name, in the redwood chips of a Pueblo cave, in the split moa bones of a New Zealand swamp, in the papyrus remnants from a Fayum rubbish heap, in the brown stain of Rom. ditch and posthole in a London cellar, in gravestone and inscription, in coins lost and buried, in his own frail bones laid at last in Roman catacomb, Danish bog, or Saxon burial barge, in house foundations, and in time-defying trench and earth-work. Man’s footprints are inevitable and manifold, and it is to the credit of the modern world that man has learned to trace, to recognize, and to read the story thus recorded” (The Archeology of the New Testament, p. vi).
What, then, is archeology? Definition can be too comprehensive and become, in the process, description. For example, when, at the beginning of the 20th cent., awareness of the complex nature of the subject was growing, the Century Dictionary said: “Archaeology is that branch of knowledge which takes cognizance of past civilizations and investigates their history in all fields, by means of the remains of art, architecture, monuments, inscriptions, literature, language, customs, and all other examples which have survived.” R. A. S. Macalister, on the other hand, is too brief and circumscribed in his definition: “Archaeology is the branch of knowledge which has to do with the discovery and classification of the common objects of life.”
A brief but adequate definition might be: “Archeology is that branch of historical research which draws its evidence from surviving material traces and remains of past human activity.” Such a statement allows room for the increasing scope of such investigation, as modern techniques render significant hitherto neglected evidence. From air photography to C14 dating, the archeologist has multiplied and improved his tools and methods in a hundred ways. Nor has the refinement of both theory and practice reached the end of its development.
The extent to which such research has thrust back the frontiers of historical knowledge is apparent in every sphere. In New Zealand, the land where these words were written, the whole picture of the Polynesian occupation of the area has been transformed in the last ten years by the examination of the fragile debris on the campsites of the “moa-hunters.” Since Heinrich Schliemann’s enthusiasm gave Troy and Mycenae back to western knowledge a century ago, and Arthur Evans, at the beginning of this cent., revealed what lay beneath the soil of Crete, a succession of archeologists of increasing skill and effectiveness have given back to history the whole complex of Aegean and Central Mediterranean civilizations, which are not without reference to the archeology of the lands of the Bible.
When Samuel Johnson remarked in his pontifical fashion some two centuries ago that, “all that is really known of the ancient state of Britain is contained in a few pages, and we can know no more than the old writers have told us,” he was representing the attitude of the day. To be sure, Rom. London lay beneath his feet, with part of its surviving wall within five minutes walk of his house, but the 18th cent. had not learned to read the record in the soil. Awareness of this kind had a slow growth.
The same was true with the Bible and the lands where its action took place. Before archeological research transformed the situation, supplementary sources for the history contained in the OT and NT, and the only non-biblical sources for the early history of the lands concerned, were four: Herodotus, the “father of history,” the brilliant and widely traveled Gr. who lived from 484 to 420 b.c., is easily the most important of the four. He introduced his story of the Pers. assault on Greece, which was finally repulsed a few years before his birth, with two or three informative books on Babylon, Egypt, and the Middle E, lands which he visited and summarily investigated. Secondly, comes the fragmentary history of Berosus, a Babylonian priest who lived between 330 and 250 b.c., and who wrote a history of Babylon in Greek. Thirdly, Manetho, an Egyp. priest of the same period, wrote for Ptolemy II a history of Egypt in Gr., of which some portions survive. Finally there was Flavius Josephus, the Jewish priest and guerrilla leader who became secretary to Vespasian, and who wrote, in the last decades of the 1st cent., two large vols. on the history of the Jews right up to his own time. It was an invaluable record, uncritical and turgid in style. This is the sum total of extraneous aid to understanding before the rise of archeology.
Outline
A. The raw material of archeology.
1. Occupation debris. On many ancient sites the soil is rich in the discarded remains of human occupation. In the permanent camping sites of the first Polynesian occupants of New Zealand, the changes of diet may be traced over centuries from the vast bones of the moa, the prehistoric bird which was hunted to extinction, to smaller sea birds, fish, and then shellfish. The analysis of midden heaps in the garrison forts along Hadrian’s Wall can be made to tell the story of Britain’s peace and war, the failure of communications with the legionary base, with outposts reduced to living on local game and repairing cheap pottery, and times of ease when issues of coal from distant mines came over peaceful roads. A Bronze Age group who formed a part of the early population of N Italy is called the people of the Terramare. The word is pl., and terramara is simply rustic Italian for a deposit of black earth, the matured compost prized by the peasantry as fertilizer, and equally regarded by the archeologist as evidence of a site likely to yield fragments of ancient tools, to reveal burial customs, and offer other evidences of a primitive culture.
The midden may contain almost anything. A nine-ft. heap of oyster shells near Blackfriars Bridge reveals the position of an eating house in Rom. London and the Rom. fondness for the bivalve from the Essex coast. In Egypt, S of Cairo, the town rubbish heap is likely to contain papyri surviving in the rainless sand, and so to provide evidence of life and language in Egypt of Ptolemaic or Rom. days. Organic material has its value. Even charred or rotted wood can be dated by measuring the decay of the radioactive “carbon 14,” an ingredient in all living things, while pollen grains, visible under the microscope, are evidence of flora and climatic change.
2. Human remains. Burial customs have preserved much of value. Mummified remains of Egyp. royal persons, Norse skeletons from Greenland, and frozen bodies discovered by Russian archeologists in the arctic latitudes of Siberia have yielded recognizable corpses for medical investigation. The crushed skeletons in a fallen house and the mutilated human remains in a well at Gezer are eloquent testimonials to facets of Canaanitish life. More important are the contents of tombs: urn burials, Saxon and Norse ship burials, mound burials, beehive Mycenaean tombs, the amazing burial pits of Ur, Tutankhamen’s treasurepacked tomb and the pyramids all have their story to tell, and not infrequently surrender their objects of usefulness or art to the modern investigator.
3. Objects of art. On stone, bronze, silver, gold, or gems, cut crudely or with refinement and sophistication, man has left the record of his love of beauty and interest. The goldsmith’s work found from Ireland to the Crimea, the filigree art of Ur and the Sumerians, bronze mirrors from Corinth, and carved gems from Crete reveal features of the mind of man, and not infrequently depict or illustrate his activities. From the cave drawings of Neolithic men, to the exquisite gold reliefs of the Vaphio Cups, and on to modern times, man has left records in his art of all that he has loved and made. Lost, buried, or hidden materials of this order are prime archeological material. Greek vase painting has thrown notable light on Gr. drama. The murals of Egypt, Crete, and Assyria are pictures of life and history.
4. Pottery. The study of pottery, an almost universal object of human manufacture which can commonly be dated with a large measure of accuracy, is an important feature of archeology. Pottery is the investigator’s chief key to chronology. The merest fragment of broken earthenware is of significance, and the archeologist takes great pains to record and classify the exact level, place, and relationship of his finds. Pottery varies from the round vessels of the “beaker people,” the first recognizable inhabitants of Britain, to the beautiful vases of the Athenians, but in all its forms it has a tale to tell.
5. Buildings. Man’s efforts to house himself tell a human story. From the traces of the wattle huts, where the slave gangs lived, to the pyramids they built to house the royal dead, from the brown stains of Rom. postholes in legionary camps to the fluted columns of the Parthenon where Athena stood in the dim shrine, from the chariot stables of Megiddo and Hazor to the synagogue of Capernaum, Roman-British villas, the forerunners of the manor houses, Stone Age huts below the successive strata of Phoen., Gr., Rom., and Crusader occupation from Byblos and Baalbek to Tyre, structures humble and magnificent, sacred and secular, the architectural memorials of man reveal his beliefs, problems, and preoccupations, his techniques and his industry.
6. Inscriptions. All inscrs. on stone, metal, or pottery form part of the human record. They are infinitely varied, and from the marked jar seals of the Aegean civilization to the Nestorian Monument of China, from the Rosetta stone to the Nazareth Decree, from the Behistun inscr. to Augustus’ autobiographical Monumentum Ancyranum, the record of epigraphy is contemporary history, brief because of the physical limitations of such records. The reading of such abbreviated and allusive material, with its decipherment, is an additional skill. The study of graffiti (e.g., the wall scratchings of Pompeii) is a difficult branch of this same study.
7. Written documents. Papyrus documents from Egypt range from Pharaonic to Islamic times. The durable writing material manufactured from the river plant, the cyperus papyrus, in ancient Egypt does not rot in the dry conditions which prevail S of Cairo, and multitudes of fragments, and many entire rolls have survived. Unearthed from tombs, crocodile cemeteries, and the occupation debris of Nile Valley towns, the papyri have provided data of the utmost variety. In particular they have illuminated the language and background of the NT, though papyri of Biblical relevance go back, in fact, to the Elephantine papyri which throw light on the Pers. period in Egyp. history and on the Book of Nehemiah. Letters in large number reveal common life in significant centuries and form important comment on the epistles of the Bible.
Other writing materials fall under this head. The cuneiform inscribed tablets of Babylonia and Assyria, dug up in thousands in both imperial areas, have recovered a whole lit. with all that it reveals of human life and thought. The famous Tell el Amarna letters, which so strikingly reveal the state of Pal. before the Heb. invasion, are clay tablets of this sort.
Inscribed potsherds also fall in this category. Broken pieces of pottery, which abounded in every ancient town, were used for brief letters. The Lachish letters, found by J. L. Starkey in 1934, are documents of this order. Leather was used for writing; the mass of documents from the Qumran caves, which astonished the world in 1947, were written on prepared leather. Ancient Pergamum specialized in the manufacture of this material, hence, it was called pergamena carta, or parchment.
8. Tools and weapons. From antler picks found in Neolithic flint mines to weapons of bronze and iron which reveal the transitions of the eras to which metallurgy has given names, the record of man’s activity, belligerent and peaceful, is written in his implements of war and peace. In 1952 the cut shape of a Mycenaean dagger was picked up by photography on a stone face in Druidic Stonehenge to throw puzzling light on that ancient monument. The identification of the peculiarly characteristic Aegean weapon formed the interest of the strange discovery.
9. Coins. Whole tracts of Rom. history depend upon the record of coinage. Coinage, as nothing else, provides vital information on the easternmost kingdom of Alexander’s successory states. Coinage traces the progress of Mediterranean trade with India. Numismatics is another expert branch of knowledge for which the activities of the archeologist provide the abundant raw material. It covers many significant centuries and areas and is of prime importance in dating.
10. Botanical remains. The significance of pollen grains in occupation debris has been mentioned above. Wood, even charred remnants of burning, provides, in the growth rings of such long-lived trees as the redwoods of California, a dendrochronological record of occupation and climatic change. From the corn fragments in the Pueblo caves to the traces of pine cones used as aromatic altar fuel in the Carrowburgh mithraeum of Northumberland, the fragile remains of flora, identifiable by modern techniques, leave a message for the trained investigator.
11. Cult objects. Much of this material might be classified under art. The first recognizable piece of human sculpture, for example, is a bear in a Pyrenaean cave, molded in mud and marked by the thrusts of stone spears. Neolithic art was an aid to sympathetic magic. To kill in effigy aided the hunt. The fertility rituals, which may be traced from the Stone Age to the end of the pagan centuries, have left such figurines as those found commonly in Canaanitish sites, and phallic emblems, crude or sophisticated, like those which have left fragments on Delos. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish cult objects of the figurine or model type from children’s toys, of which examples are found. The “ram caught in a thicket,” which is a striking example of Sumer. art, is doubtless a cult object. So, in fact, are the major surviving or recorded triumphs of Gr. sculpture, the “idols” of anthropomorphic worship. Little, in fact, may be listed here which is not also art, unless it be such objects as the meteoric stone, which passed for Artemis’ image in Ephesus, “fallen from heaven.”
12. Earthworks. Fortifications built of stone may be classified under buildings, but there are distinctive types of walls built for defensive purposes, e.g., those of the Hyksos, which provide a key to historical understanding. The manifold stratification of the defenses of Jericho is light upon the continued but changing occupation of that ancient site. But fortifications and communications need involve no superimposition of material. The fortifications of the Maori are visible in terracing around the volcanic cones of Auckland, and Rom. camps have left their ramparts all over the empire. Parallel with Hadrian’s stone wall across England runs the earth vallum and the associated military road, visible even on the ground, but conspicuous from the air. Earth which has once been disturbed never retrieves its original texture. In the burial pits of the kings of Ur the earth still falls away from the cut sides, although the spoil was no doubt returned almost immediately to the excavation. The texture of the matting which lined the earth wall for the ceremony of burial was still distinguished when the pits were opened. The superimposed plan of Celtic and Saxon fields can be seen from the air, and Rom. roads are visible long after the paving has disappeared. Mining operations, from the Mendip country of Somerset to Sinai, have left the visible marks of human interference with the soil. It is all grist for the archeologist.
B. The methods of archeology. Implicit in the foregoing sections is some account of archeological method. The discovery and classification of the raw material, the artifacts, the remnants of building, utensils, tools, and the manifold marks of human activity and occupation involve a wide variety of technical and scientific skills. The use of air photography for the mapping and interpretation of road and ground plans, the overlaying patterns of agriculture and land division, e.g. in successive periods of Celtic and Saxon occupation in Britain, and for the identification of other forms of soil disturbance was a practice perfected by O. G. S. Crawford between the world wars.
The botanist has aided chronology by his study of pollen grains under the microscope and by his investigation of the growth rings of trees; the geologist by his study of varves, the sequences of water-laid gravel; the zoologist by his identification of animal bones; and the physicist by his “carbon dating.” The photographer and the skin-diver are indispensable members of any team of archeologists. The discovery of submerged material, e.g., the host of sunken galleys in the Mediterranean, and whole towns, such as Heliki on the Corinthian Gulf swallowed by tidal wave and land subsidence in the early 4th cent. b.c., has enlisted the support of the diver. Such underwater archeology may be the way to Sodom and Gomorrah, if indeed they lie beneath the southern end of the Dead Sea.
Much material lies visible and ready for investigation, and excavation has become an exact and highly sophisticated process. The archeologist no longer digs at random, driving pit or trench into massed material of human occupation, as did the amazing but prescientific Schliemann at Troy. A “tell,” as the hills of the Middle E which mark the sites of ancient towns are called, is squared and trenched with care and precision, each layer of occupation being dated by pottery and the other methods of chronological investigation. Both at Jericho and Ur, where the size of the “tell” precluded the complete removal of the accumulated material layer by layer, a shaft, sunk through the mass to bedrock level, proved the most efficient method of investigation.
At Ur fifty-nine ft. of archeologically productive material had been built up prior to the first dynasty three full millennia b.c. Visitors to Jericho can look down the great shaft sunk in the mound of the world’s most ancient city and see the tangle of human occupation over thousands of years, a stratified record meaningful to the trained eye of the archeologist.
Barrows and tombs sometimes require excavation as methodical and skilled. Sometimes, as in the royal graves of Egypt, the actual discovery of the concealed grave is the major task of the explorer, who is aided by the insight of the skilled detective as truly as by the exact knowledge of the historian.
The archeologist never knows whose aid he may need, quite apart from that of linguist, historian, epigraphist, and papyrologist. The unrolling of the granulated bronze roll from Qumran, and the identification of the concreted lump of silver beside one of the female dead in the royal grave of Ur, which turned out to be a rolled silver band, required the skills of sophisticated metallurgy and chemistry. The calcined papyrus rolls from the libraries of Herculaneum still await some inspired suggestion for their unrolling. An Italian firm has perfected a technique for the lifting and relaying of mosaic floors, a trade secret which it refuses to reveal. The lifting and removal of some Neolithic paddles from a Yorkshire swamp, which thousands of years of submersion had reduced to the consistency of mud, required technical skill of the highest order.
Simple ingenuity is sometimes the first requirement. Casts of the vanished dead have been recovered by pouring plaster of Paris into holes in the ash of Pompeii. The form of a harp was recovered from Ur by the timely observation of a hole in the spoil and the infusion of melted wax. (“Spoil” is waste material from making excavations.) Sometimes mere patience is called for. The assembly of thousands of pieces of colored plaster, fallen from the wall of a large lower room in the Romano-British villa of Lullingstone in Kent, established the existence of the Christian chapel in the building by the fresco of three praying figures. The assembly of a similar jigsaw puzzle from the multitudinous fragments of some of the DSS still continues. The ceramics expert has long since learned patience in putting together the shattered fragments of vases.
C. The scope of Biblical archeology. The theme of the Bible is not confined to Pal. That little land, comparable in size to Vermont or Wales, is part of the rim of territory around the Mediterranean from whose fusion of cultures the Western world and Europe sprang. The story of the Bible began at the eastern end of this long rectangle where the twin rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, join to run into the Pers. Gulf, and where Ur, the Sumer. seaport, lay at the nodal point of the world’s trade routes over desert, mountain, and sea. When the last apostle laid down his pen in Ephesus near the end of the 1st cent. of the Christian era, the Church was established in Rome, the ruler of all the territory where the story of the Bible took shape and form. Rome gathered her million people on the Tiber, near the western end of the same long rectangle of lands.
In the intervening centuries the history of Pal. was part of the history of all the lands which formed the history of the Inland Sea and the Middle E. Palestine was so placed that the tides of human life found confluence there. The land was a watchtower from where alert and sensitive spirits could observe the pageant of mankind and develop that deep insight and historical wisdom which is part of the message of the OT to the world.
A paragraph by George Adam Smith makes this point with some eloquence.
“But how could such a people be better framed than by selection out of that race of mankind which have been most distinguished for their religious temperament, and by settlement on a land both near to, and aloof from, the main streams of human life, where they could at once enjoy personal communion with God and yet have some idea also of His providence of the whole world; where they could at once gather up the experience of the ancient world and break with it into the modern? There is no land which is at once so much a sanctuary and an observatory as Palestine; no land which, till its office was fulfilled, was so swept by the great forces of history, and was yet so capable of preserving one tribe in national continuity and growth; one tribe learning and suffering and rising superior to the successive problems these forces presented to her, till upon the opportunity afforded by the last of them she launched with her results upon the world” (G. A. Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, 112).
The archeology of the Bible cannot therefore be confined to the little land which drew its European name from the Philistines, a western people, European intruders on the Levantine coast. They were the first of many to meet the ancestors of the Heb. people in the first confrontation of E and W in recorded history. Canaanite and Phoenicians were invaders who had followed the same path as the Hebrews around the Fertile Crescent. Egypt played a part in the history of Pal. for a significant thousand years. Assyria and Babylon, like Greece and Rome centuries later, poured through and over Pal. and in turn absorbed the scattered Jews. The Hittites penetrated Pal. without conquest from the time of Abraham. Samaria and Judea were, for a time, satrapies of the vast Pers. empire, just as later they were administrative districts of Rome.
Biblical archeology, therefore, fuses with the archeology of the lands which played a part in the unfolding of the Heb. story and the history of the founding of the Christian Church, which is its consummation. Picture a triangle, its long base to the N, slightly distorted. Its bent line runs from well over two thousand m. from Rome, to Philippi, to Hattusa, capital of the Hittites, bends slightly S from this mid-point to pass through Nineveh, capital of Sennacherib, to Susa, capital of the Pers. kings. The eastern side runs SW to find a southern point at Aswan where a Jewish garrison served Persia just after Nehemiah’s day and left their papyrus records on the island of Elephantine. Run a line from here to Rome and the triangle is complete. Geographically it contains the archeology of the Bible, the OT and the NT, from the catacombs where the first Christians were leaving their memorials before the last apostle had finished writing the last gospel, to Ur where Abraham first grasped the message of the one true God, and reaching S to contain the rubbish heaps of the Nile Valley towns with their masses of significant papyri.
Within the irregular figure lie the remains of seven empires: Egyptian, Hittite, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman, or those significant parts of them which had a place and part in the story of the Bible. A score of kingdoms, principalities, and city-states, a score of peoples came and went and left memorials of their culture meaningful for the study of the Bible in the same area.
Historically, the theme which archeology illustrates covers two full millennia, the twenty or more centuries which lie between Abraham’s Ur and Paul’s Rome, and its unearthing is mainly the work of the present cent. The next section will cover that story, and the reader should take note that a general article cannot cover the material exhaustively. The contributions of archeology to the understanding of the Bible are manifold—historical, geographical, literary, theological, and linguistic. Details will be found under many heads. The present task is introductory, detail illustrative rather than exhaustive, and the aim is to survey the ground from relevant vantage points.
D. The history of Biblical archeology. It is difficult to pinpoint the beginning of Biblical archeology. W. F. Albright, in an informative ch. (The Archaeology of Palestine, ch. 2), traces a genuine scientific interest in the archeological remains of Pal. back to travelers of the 16th cent. It is true that the spirit of exact inquiry, together with careful observation and recording, is no monopoly of the present cent. Johann Zuallart and Johann van Footwyck, travelers of the closing years of the 16th cent., both produced drawings which demonstrate an interest in ancient monuments, recognizably modern. In the middle years of the 17th cent., the Rom. Pietro della Valle produced an account of travels in Pal. which contains true archeological description. He was followed by such perceptive travelers as Henry Maundrell, Adrian Reland, and Bishop Pococke. Reland’s handbook (Palestine Illustrated by Ancient Monuments) is certainly a landmark. It was published in 1709. To Albright’s longer list the name of A. Bosio might well be added. This scholar’s book on the catacombs of Rome was published in 1632, anticipating de Rossi’s monumental work by over two centuries. If the study of subterranean Rome is part of Biblical archeology, as indeed it is, Bosio’s name deserves a place on the list.
For the most part, however, those who thus described the memorials of the Biblical past were of the order of Shelley’s “traveller from an antique land.” They sensed the romantic impact of the great fragments of dead and vanished civilizations, but missed their scientific and historical significance. Rose Macaulay has collected some of their comments in her fascinating book, The Pleasure of Ruins, and there is no reason why the scientific archeologist should miss or despise this deep source of human interest. Austen Layard, a genuine, if primitive, archeologist, was such a romanticist, in the true spirit of his age.
Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798 may be set down as the beginning of scientific archeology. The French conqueror was rightly convinced that Egypt was the strategic key to the Mediterranean, as indeed it always has been. He also saw the land as an essential stage on the road to India. Both reasons inspired conquest. Contemporary France was experiencing at the time something of a scientific revival, and the unprecedented step was taken of attaching a scholarly deputation to Napoleon’s military staff. It included the remarkable draughtsman, D. V. Denon. Some gratitude is due to Napoleon for this rare and timely realization that Egypt was a land of old renown, as well as a military base for the domination of the Mediterranean and the E. It is to this new spirit that the world owes the discovery and preservation of the Rosetta stone. Napoleon’s concern for the protection and copying of this bilingual inscr. is on record and is entirely to his credit. The stone became a British prize of war, but it is appropriate that a Frenchman and an Englishman are associated in the decipherment which opened the Egyp. hieroglyphic script. The date 1830 is another landmark in archeology. With the pictorial script successfully deciphered, Egyptology could begin, and the archeology of Egypt has numerous contacts with that of the Bible. Consider only the Amarna letters and the light they throw on the chaotic conditions in Pal. prior to the Heb. invasion. It is irrelevant, in this restricted survey, to trace Egyptology’s astonishing six generations of progress through Belzoni, Lepsius, and Mariette, to Petrie, Breasted, Carter, and Egypt’s own Department of Antiquities of today. It should not, however, in an account of Biblical archeology, be forgotten that the vast bulk of the papyri come from Egypt. The names of Grenfell and Hunt, together with that of Adolf Deissmann, must be mentioned in this connection. Documents directly and indirectly relevant to the study of the NT range from the logia of Christ, discovered at the turn of the cent., to the socalled Gospel of Thomas, published by Quispel in 1957.
The great empires of the N and the other river system, Babylon and Assyria, must similarly find mention. Paul Botta’s digging at Nineveh in the 1830s and Austen Layard’s excavations on Babylonian sites in the 40s are not without relevance to the Biblical theme. Georg Friedrich Grotefend and George Smith must not be overlooked in Babylonian studies, nor Henry Rawlinson’s decipherment of cuneiform in 1850, nor Robert Koldewey’s excavation of the mighty city of Babylon. Diggers like Layard and Koldewey, indeed the great Schliemann at Troy, were almost as destructive in their investigations as the first looters of Pompeii and the perennial robbers of Etruscan and Egyp. tombs, but these were early days, and the rough-handed pioneers were at least conscious of the significance and magnitude of the task upon which they were engaged. They have their place in the archeological calendar.
On the outer periphery of the northern empires lay the Hittites of Asia Minor, an Indo-European people, with whose migrant colony in Pal. Abraham had commercial dealings. The story of their recovery by archeological investigation, by the reconstruction of their history, and by the decipherment of their script is somewhat outside the orbit of Biblical archeology or it would be necessary to add the names of A. H. Sayce, William Wright, Karl Humann, Felix von Luschan, and Hugo Winckler to the founders’ roll.
Crete and the Minoan Empire lay similarly on the periphery, and the story of Sir Arthur Evans and the excavations he began on the long Aegean island in the first year of the present cent. is a romance of discovery, ingenuity, and scholarship, as astonishing as any which surround the unearthing of the other great contemporary civilizations. The Philistines came from Crete, and doubtless there is work still to be done in relating the story of the collapse of Minos’ empire to the great upsurge of Philistine power in the old colony of the Gaza Strip, which challenged the first monarchs of Israel. The Cretan Linear B script, deciphered as late as 1953, has thrown no light on the history of either Crete or the Philistines.
Behind the Babylonian culture lay that of the Sumerians, and the string of towns and petty princedoms of the long Euphrates Valley. The relevant portion of the story of Sumer. archeology, and the excavation of Ur in particular, will be mentioned later, but it is necessary to mention that De Sarzec’s first explorations in the area lay between 1877 and 1881.
Albright, in the useful ch. already mentioned, lists many names from this period, men whose perceptive explorations contributed to the emerging study of Biblical archeology. Seetzen, the first scientific explorer of the Trans-Jordan area, the discoverer of Caesarea Philippi and Gerasa, and Burckhardt, the Swiss who found Petra, were busy in Bible lands between 1800 and 1812. In 1838 the American theologian Edward Robinson, a thoroughly trained Semitist and geographer, performed notable service by his wide identification of ancient place names. He was accompanied and aided in his work and travels by his pupil Eli Smith. Titus Tobler, the Swiss, a scholar of similar preoccupations, is quoted thus by Albright: “The works of Robinson and Smith alone surpass the total of all previous contributions to Palestinian geography from the time of Eusebius and Jerome to the early nineteenth century.” Geography, it is needless to stress, was at this time the essential prerequisite for the archeological investigation of Pal.
The year 1865 must be set down as the next important date. In this year a fund and a society were founded in London for the purpose of surveying and mapping Pal. and excavating its important sites. From 1865 to 1936 this society published a Quarterly Statement devoted to Biblical archeology, a publication continued from 1937 as the Palestine Exploration Quarterly. Charles Warren was the first archeologist to be financed by this fund. Although his digging at Jerusalem was clumsy in the light of later techniques, Warren laid the foundations for all later work on the topography and history of the city.
For six full years, from 1872 to 1878, the same fund kept a British team permanently in the field making an inch to a m. survey of western Pal. The two leaders were C. R. Conder and H. H. Kitchener. The latter, the famous soldier, Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, suggested by his presence that the War Office was not entirely without interest in the work of archeologists. The wartime careers of such famous figures as T. E. Lawrence and, in less flamboyant fashion, Stanley Casson are other illustrations of a secondary service for the trained archeologist, and the usefulness in contexts of modern history of a thorough exploration of historic lands.
The French, meanwhile, were not idle. While Warren was excavating along the line of the Jerusalem walls, Charles Clermont-Ganneau was using his position in the French consular service in Pal. to make considerable contributions to Biblical archeology. In 1870 he found, and sent to the Louvre, the famous Mesha (Moabite) Stone. In 1871 he unearthed the tablet bearing the inscr. which barred Gentiles from the court of the Temple. These are only two of his material contributions to archeology. His scholarly writings are no less important.
Generally the 1870s were fruitful years for archeology. In 1870, and over the following few busy years, Heinrich Schliemann excavated Troy and Mycenae and laid deep foundations for classical archeology. The main lesson of the astonishing discovery of Troy by this German genius was that a mound, or “tell” as it was called in the Middle E, was likely to be the accumulated ruins and occupation debris of an ancient inhabited site. In 1870, also, the American Palestine Exploration Society was founded, and it immediately set to work to complement the British survey of western Pal. by a similar survey of the eastern part of the land.
To this point the names of Robinson and Clermont-Ganneau had been highest on the roll of honor. In 1890 a third was added, that of a thirty-seven-year-old Englishman, Flinders Petrie. Petrie came to Pal. trained by ten years’ work in Egypt, where he had already learned to record systematically and in detail every find on a site. He had also glimpsed the possibility of using pottery for dating. In his excavations at Tell el-Hesi, Petrie reduced this invaluable idea to a time system. He was able to demonstrate that pottery could form a sequence and provide a key to the chronology of the stratified remains in any ruin mound. This fruitful discovery has been elaborated with the utmost sophistication and is now an indispensable skill for any archeological investigation. The last decade of the 19th cent. is significant for its invention, establishment, and general recognition.
The same decade saw further excavation at Jerusalem by F. J. Bliss, the American who was the first scholar of importance to recognize the value of Petrie’s pottery dating, along with his associate A. C. Dickie. William Mitchell Ramsay, professor of humanities at Aberdeen, was simultaneously busy with his epigraphical, geographical, and archeological explorations in Asia Minor, and was writing the authoritative books which established so decisively the historical accuracy of Luke and the meaning of obscure chs. in the Apocalypse.
At the turn of the cent., the Irish archeologist R. A. S. Macalister began work in Pal. Financed by the Palestine Exploration Fund, this notable scholar excavated several “tells,” including Gezer, where he spent no less than seven seasons (1902-1909). Three large vols., published finally in 1912, described this vast undertaking and established another significant milestone in the history of scientific archeology.
While Macalister was busy at Gezer, a Ger. expedition began the excavation of Jericho, a task which was to continue until today. To this point, except for a somewhat inefficient investigation of Megiddo, the Germans had done little in Pal. Their great archeological names remained those of Schliemann and Dorpfeld, the investigators of Troy. But now a joint German-Austrian team descended on Jericho. They worked from 1907 to 1909, under Ernst Sellin and Carl Watzinger, and, though their dating proved to be largely inaccurate, a start had been made on the world’s most ancient inhabited site. It is also noteworthy that Jericho saw, along with Samaria which was simultaneously explored, the first recognizably modern archeological team with its trained specialists, its meticulous photography, surveying, systematic filing, and scientific analysis of every scrap of archeological material and every shred of evidence. George Andrew Reisner and C. S. Fisher, who conducted the exploration of Samaria for Harvard, must be added to the list of notables.
The First World War interrupted operations. Its outcome, however, established the British in Pal. The land again was open. In 1920 the British Mandatory Government set up a Department of Antiquities, headed by John Garstang of Liverpool University. Fifteen amazingly fruitful years in Pal. followed, until mounting disorder and the darkening shadows of the tragic thirties slowed the work. The Second World War necessarily interrupted it. The years of the brief British peace in Pal. were those of Garstang’s continuation of the work at Jericho, of J. C. Albright’s notable work in the land, and of Père Vincent’s beneficent activity. Roads and transport eased the archeologist’s task. There was unprecedented cooperation and team work. Palestinian prehistory began to take shape. Flinders Petrie, after a lapse of thirty-seven years, returned to Pal. in 1927 and made major contributions to knowledge. A joint British, American, and Hebrew University team continued the excavation of Samaria from 1931 to 1935. It is still in progress under Israeli guidance. The Wellcome-Marston expedition, financed by the Pal. Exploration Fund, spent six seasons, 1932 to 1938, on Lachish. It was here that J. L. Starkey lost his life in 1938, the victim of an Arab bandit and of an emerging phase of tragic disorder in Pal. The Lachish letters, with their light on Jeremiah, were Starkey’s latest find. But for his tragic end, Starkey would have proved as great a genius as the archeology of Bible lands has produced. Ten campaigns under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania, always a notable promoter of archeological research, fall in these halcyon fifteen years. Bethshan was the principal site. The University of Chicago worked simultaneously on Megiddo, continuing until 1939, when the collapse of the world’s tense, uneasy peace again drastically interrupted all such research and exploration.
The list of names and projects is far from exhaustive, and this is no place to attempt more than an outline of the theme. The interrupted task has begun again in a bitterly divided Pal. under Jordanian and Israeli authorities. Miss Kathleen Kenyon’s work at Jericho is ample demonstration that even welldug sites still have much to yield. Finds like the DSS of 1947, and the associated excavation of Qumran, show that spectacular results are still a possibility. A considerable number of actually identified sites of ancient occupation still await competent excavation and examination in the narrower compass of ancient Pal. Science and the spade still have much to give, and a most encouraging feature is the emergence of archeological consciousness and scientific skill in the new nations of the Middle E.
Biblical archeology, however, is wider than that of Pal., and a few paragraphs are necessary on cognate activities. The great years of activity between the two world wars were notable the world over, as well as in the sphere of the present theme, for archeological activity and achievement. The immense and beneficent popularization of the subject dates from those years. Two events beyond others awakened the general public to the new science and its fascinating human interest. In 1922 Howard Carter discovered in the Valley of the Kings the amazingly rich tomb of the minor pharaoh, Tutankhamen. The newspapers, headed effectively by the sophisticated London Illustrated News, found that archeology could command the headlines. The second event, in a more restricted sphere, was the publication in 1924 of the earlier vols. of the authoritative and scholarly Cambridge Ancient History, which first demonstrated to an intelligent public how vastly archeology was transforming the study of history.
To follow the theme then, on a slightly wider orbit, a few of the more notable areas of investigation between the two world conflicts in recent years may be briefly mentioned. Fuller details may be sought in special articles.
The Euphrates Valley was explored in the late twenties and early thirties, with Leonard Woolley’s excavation of Ur (1928) as one of the highlights of discovery. Archeology has gone far to reconstruct the whole history of the Sumer. river civilization, that essential prelude to the story of the Heb. people. Light has been thrown on all the homelands of the migrating tribes, from Canaanite to Heb., who plied or followed trade, retreating fertility, or spiritual aspiration around the sharp curve of the Fertile Crescent.
In the early thirties, excavations were begun at Tell Hariri, near the Euphrates in SE Syria, where A. Parrot uncovered a considerable portion of the ancient city of Mari. He found a mass of clay tablets inscribed in a Sem. dialect which cannot have been very remote from the Heb. spoken by the patriarchs. Associated discovery has made history aware of the intense Sem. activity in those same centuries around Haran, Abraham’s staging post on his road to Pal. The tablets have also thrown light on much OT custom and practice.
Similarly, and even more strikingly, the tablets from Nuzi, or to give the site its modern name, Yorghan Tepe, near Kirkuk in Iraq, illustrate the stories of the patriarchs. The patriarchs obviously acted within the contemporary framework of law, practice, and custom. The stories of Sarah, Abraham, Hagar, Esau’s birthright, the deathbed blessing, Laban and Jacob, Judah, and Tamar find abundant illus. in these documents. The site was investigated by Chiera and his colleagues of the American Schools of Oriental Research from 1925 to 1931.
The year 1928 saw a chance discovery on the N Syrian coast near Latakia. No fewer than twenty-two seasons’ excavation took place here and at nearby Ras Shamra, the ancient Ugarit. A multitude of Canaanite cuneiform texts, literary and religious, have been discovered and deciphered there together with architectural, artistic, and epigraphical remains. Their linguistic, historical, and religious value is immense.
This outline of the major events in the history of Biblical archeology has naturally had most to say on matters relevant to the OT which so heavily depends upon archeologica evidence. It would be difficult to write a coherent history of the archeology of the NT. The OT, after all, finds a center in the story of one race. The NT tells the story of a world movement and activities extending from Jerusalem and Antioch to Rome. The NT is also a document of Gr. lit. and Rom. history. Archeological events relating to the understanding of the NT have already found incidental mention above. The long and unfinished story of the exploration of the catacombs, whose hundreds of m. of galleries in the tufa rock under Rome are part of the history of the early Christian community, the discovery and interpretation of the Egyp. papyri, a story of scholarship extending from Grenfell and Hunt to Gilles Quispel, Ramsay’s work on the ruins, geography, coins, and inscrs. of Asia Minor are all chs. in the story. Cities like Ephesus, Pergamum, Antioch, Corinth, and Thyatira have an archeological history of their own, large parts of which are relevant to the NT. Isolated discoveries, like those of the Qumran community and the Nazareth Decree, have a place in the account and a significance in interpretation and apologetics of inestimable importance. The archeology of the NT has demanded no staging of expensive and scientifically conducted projects of excavation. Its material often has been fortuitously discovered, or mingled, like the story of the Church itself, with the raw material of ancient world history. It is piecemeal, and sifted from a greater mass. Its relevance will find some reference in the next section.
E. The relevance of archeology in interpretation. It remains to summarize the significance of archeological discovery in the interpretation of the Bible. Inevitably the theme has emerged under earlier headings, but it will be convenient to recapitulate and to survey it separately in conclusion.
If it is assumed, as it may be, that the earliest written records of the OT, ultimately incorporated in the Pentateuch, were Sumer. and dated back possibly to Abraham, it is clear that the Bible is a collection of literary and historical documents covering more than twenty centuries. The fact is some measure of the interpreter’s task. The first essential must always be to determine what the writer originally sought to communicate and to whom he first directed his communication. That is why all information which provides contemporary comment on social, political, or cultural backgrounds, which elucidates literary form and convention, explains language, or throws light on habits of thought and speech is relevant to interpretation.
In the case of the OT, such information is chiefly archeological. Around the whole sweep of the Fertile Crescent, the remains of peoples, cities and empires, epigraphical, architectural, artistic, and of every other sort of which archeology takes widening and increasingly expert notice, have elucidated and illuminated the text of Scripture from Genesis to the minor prophets. The NT, a too little regarded document of Rom. history, and contemporary with wide literary activity in Gr. and Lat., has been somewhat less completely dependent upon records and remains of archeological provenance. Epigraphy and papyrology, however, both of which derive their basic material from archeological investigation, have richly illuminated and explained its meaning.
Illustrations for both the testaments may be conveniently marshaled.
1. The confirmation of Biblical history. Events recorded in Scripture are a part of ancient history. The central theme of the Bible is the history of that stream of human activity which, in a great outworking purpose, found its consummation in the NT, the Messiah, and the Church. That stream did not flow in an isolated channel but mingled with the interweaving currents of universal human history, and is understood better when it is seen as part of a more complex whole.
It is, for example, no longer possible to dismiss the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as folklore of the sort invented by emerging peoples to explain their origins. Canny Greeks of southern Italy, for example, marking the rising star of a dynamic Rome, built the saga of Aeneas out of tenuous fragments of history and of myth. Abraham and Aeneas stand in far different categories. The conformity of the patriarch’s migration to the known pattern of folk movements around the northern edge of the deserts is too strikingly demonstrated to be dismissed as legend.
The Hebrew and Philistine infiltration into Pal. told in the Bible with that selection of incident which highlights personality or reinforces a spiritual lesson, is vivid in the glowing archeological record. The piecemeal movement of the new cultures, the Heb. overlaying of a base Canaanitish civilization, its checks and progress, the inevitable confrontation of the two intruders, European and Asiatic, on the line of central Pal., the passage from bronze to iron which marked the Heb. triumph over the Philistines, the emergence of Heb. power, and the climax of Solomon’s Golden Age, in all this developing theme archeology marches with the Bible story, confirming its accuracy in a thousand details.
Samaria, with the tragic division of the land, inherited the rich Phoen. trade which had brought wealth to Solomon, and fragmented ivory in the ruins of Ahab’s palace speak of the transference of prosperity and the corruption of a dominant minority who knew how, as Amos chided, to corner and appropriate the wealth of the land.
Assyrian art, uncovered in the palaces of the great empire, as vividly illustrates the grim nature of the northern threat to Israel’s prosperity. The cruelty and arrogance of the invaders lives strikingly in fresco and inscr. The ancient Heb. of the Siloam Inscription is light on Isaiah’s earlier theme, how Judah was spared the visitation which fell upon Israel, and how the faith of a prophet and a king preserved a nation. A cent. later another prophet had a far different role to play, and Jeremiah’s somber message divided the land. Archeology, with continuing relevance, appears again with confirmatory comments and illus. The Lachish potsherds, discovered in the 1930s, reveal the agony of the tension between those who believed that Jeremiah spoke with authority and those who thought that he undermined morale.
NT illus. of archeology’s confirmation of history could be found in the Nazareth Decree with its light on the proclamation of the Resurrection of Christ. Or perhaps for the present purpose, it may be confined to the less well-known theme of Pilate and his coinage. Much of the action in the story of Christ’s trial centers in the personality and record of the procurator. He is known from three stories in Josephus, one in Philo, and the gospel records. All three literary sources agree in representing him as arrogant, contemptuous of his subjects, outmaneuvered by them, and essentially a coward.
It is curious to find the story confirmed by numismatics. Coins are archeological sources. The procurators had the right to issue small coinage in Pal., but it was considered a duty, in designing coins which would be in the hands of the people, to avoid deliberate offense. Coins were always far more significant in ancient times than they are today. They were a means of instruction and information and were studied for what they had to say. The Rom. emperors had a strong appreciation for the propaganda value of coinage, and their use of this device for influencing opinion forms an interesting ch. in the archeology of ancient coins.
The story of Christ and the tribute money shows that the emperor’s portrait, with the offense involved, was current in Pal., but the silver denarius was issued as tribute money and was accepted as such. It was a different matter to mint a common copper coinage which ran contrary to Jewish sentiment, which Pilate did, committing again and on a daily universal scale, far more maliciously and subtly, the planned insults to Jewish feeling that Josephus and Philo record.
Valerius Gratus, Pilate’s predecessor, had issued coins harmlessly adorned with palm branches or ears of corn, familiar enough Jewish symbols, but as early as a.d. 29 Pilate issued copper coins bearing the lituus or pagan priest’s staff and the patera or sacrificial bowl—two symbols of the imperial cult which were bound to be obnoxious to the Jews. It was calculated provocation, but safe, because the coin users were insulted individually and the coinage did not produce collective demonstrations of hostility. The story of the tribute money shows that the Jews had a bad conscience about coins. They had accepted the imperial coinage and were carrying about its implied idolatry. Individually men endured the new piece of arrogance and said nothing. Seianus, who was prob. Pilate’s protector, fell in a.d. 31, and, significantly enough, the issue of the provocative coins ceased. In the British Museum is a coin of Pilate which has been overstamped with a palm branch by Felix, no man of principle, but more careful in his policy toward the Jews.
It is to be observed in all these cases that archeology underlines the essential truth and soundness of the Biblical record. It therefore enables the historian to tread with firmer foot where reliance on the bare statement of Scripture lacks extraneous support or amplification. This was the conclusion reached in the classic case of W. M. Ramsay, whose researches in Asia Minor led a frank sceptic to a firm championship of Luke as a pure historian.
2. The provision of background. Inevitably illustrative material grouped under this head might also be relevant above, but it may be convenient to classify a few examples of archeological discovery which throw light on fact or practice, which elucidate culture or exemplify the application of Biblical law or custom, without providing the direct confirmation of statement which was illustrated briefly in the earlier paragraph.
Legal codes, for example, from the middle five centuries of the second millennium b.c. not only reveal how truly Israel moved with the tide of contemporary history in the first days of man’s attempt to organize life and activity under the sovereignty of law, but also how differently the people of the Bible conceived the task, weaving their code and system with the percepts of a lofty and monotheistic religion.
Detail often is strikingly illustrated. The legal documents from Nuzi, for example, throw light on Abraham’s attempts to establish his succession and on Jacob’s dealings with Laban in a manner which marks the documents, or the oral or written tradition on which they rest, as authentically contemporary. The symbolic transfer of a shoe mentioned in the little idyll of Ruth (4:7, 8), is mentioned in the Nuzi texts. The transaction seems to have been invented to establish a firm foundation in legality for an action or process which might be thought uncovered by some firm form of legislation.
It is in this sphere of interpretation that future archeological work is esp. likely to provide more information. The Ras Shamra tablets, for example, have some reference to the seething of a kid in its mother’s milk, a practice inexplicably forbidden twice in the OT (Exod 34:26; Deut 14:21). There were obviously pagan implications, and the Mosaic prohibition is an illus. of that awareness of surrounding paganism which led the Heb. law to make its major provisions for the safety of the first-born, a not unlikely object of human sacrifice in vicious codes. The Sumer. object of art, the “ram caught in the thicket,” which is a treasure in the British Museum, also awaits explanation of the sort which could easily be forthcoming. Abraham’s prompt recognition of divine direction when the animal was thus revealed suggests some law of sacrifice relating to the situation.
Discoveries in themselves unimportant may also serve to illustrate a passage of Scripture in a manner which lifts an impersonal provision into a realm of human interest and activity. For example, from the guardroom of an ancient fortress on the seacoast near Tel Aviv, an interesting letter has come to light. It is twenty-five centuries old and is the earliest Heb. letter known. It is scrawled on a broken piece of pottery, the writing material most readily available to ordinary folk. Papyrus was difficult to obtain, and expensive. On the other hand, any village street or rubbish dump was littered with broken shards of pottery. The Lachish letters, similarly found in a guardroom are of this order.
Seeking to file a complaint with the commander of the local garrison, a peasant, in the reign of the good King Josiah, seven centuries b.c., picked out a suitable piece of earthenware and inked his troubles upon it. There are fourteen lines of script, and scholars have so far succeeded in making sense of only seven of them. The indecipherable lines contain a Heb. word previously unknown.
The successfully tr. lines run as follows: “...and he took the cloak of your servant. I finished..my harvest...took the cloak of your servant...and all my brethren will witness on my behalf, those who harvested with me in...and my brethren will witness on my behalf, truly I am innocent of any guilt...my cloak...and I shall fulfil the prince’s....”
There is no doubt about the general purport of the letter. Someone by legal process had made away with a poor man’s most necessary possession. It was, moreover, a vulnerable possession. On the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser the attendants of Jehu wear knee length garments with a fringed edge which envelopes the body completely. Such were the cloaks of the Hebrews, and little was worn beneath them. Obviously they were not designed for working, and under the hot harvest sun would be laid aside. The opportunity for confiscation by some disgruntled creditor was easy. When night came, the poor harvester would look for the garment which covered him from the night’s chill, only to find it missing.
The Book of Ruth again illustrates such a situation. Boaz lay covered by his cloak at the end of the heap of corn in the fields of Bethlehem. Ruth, who claimed his protection in her widowhood, crept secretly under the ample edge of the garment at his feet. Awaking at midnight, the startled farmer found her there. “Who are you?” he asked. “I am Ruth your maidservant. Now spread your skirt (cloak) over your maidservant, for you are next of kin.”
Note the humanity of the law for debt. A cloak could be named as guarantee, but if claimed in forfeit by the moneylender, it was to be returned at sunset. “If he is a poor man, you shall not sleep in his pledge...restore to him the pledge that he may sleep in his cloak and bless you; and it shall be righteousness to you before the Lord your God” (Deut 24:12, 13). The law is even more vividly expressed in its earliest form: “If ever you take your neighbor’s garment in pledge, you shall restore it to him before the sun goes down; for that is his only covering, it is his mantle for his body; in what else shall he sleep? And if he cries to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate” (Exod 22:26, 27). Without the cloak a man was said to be naked.
The peasants’ letter is an illus. of the flouting of the law of Moses and the confident appeal to authority of a common man on such grounds. It also sheds a mellow light on the goodness of Josiah in a time of renewing and return to old traditions. It shows also that in Josiah’s reign the power of Israel had been thrust through the coastal plain, a widening of frontiers of which historians were previously quite aware. It is another tidemark in the ebbing power of the Philistines, whose high flood in Saul’s day had filled the valleys of the Shephelah and flowed N to Galilee.
3. Illumination of text and language. Two illus. will suffice to show how archeological discovery has illuminated the meaning of words and established text. integrity. The first is the contribution of the DSS. Textually these documents are of some importance. They have cleared up a handful of textual corruptions and thrown light on some minor difficulties of interpretation. Until 1947, for example, the oldest text of Isaiah was dated a.d. 895. A major item among the scrolls is an Isaiah MS a full thousand years older. It has some interesting features. There is, for example, no break between chs. 39 and 40. How, in the light of this, is the theory first propounded in 1892 by Bernhard Duhm, that there were three Isaiahs, conflated and fused in the 1st cent. to stand? Here is a book, dated at the latest about the end of the 2nd cent. b.c., which obviously knows nothing about it. Some individual texts have been notably cleared up. Consider Isaiah 21:8, which in the KJV is quite without meaning. The v. runs: “And he cried, A lion: My lord, I stand continually upon the watchtower in the daytime....” It should be realized that Heb. was originally written in consonants only. The vowels were inserted later. “Lion” in Heb. is built as RH which, properly vowelized, reads “ariah.” But “he who saw” is “raah” which, without vowels, is similarly RH. Some early copyist vowel-pointed the word wrongly and produced “a lion.” Read then: