The Barefoot Evangelist

Every so often, something crosses my social media feed announcing that archaeology has finally proved the Bible true. Noah’s Ark has been found. Evidence of the Exodus has been discovered. Someone has found an inscription with the name Moses on it. The announcement is usually breathless, the conclusion enormous, and the actual scholarship considerably less certain.

That doesn’t mean the discovery isn’t real or important. It means scholarship moves much more slowly than social media does. Archaeologists, historians, linguists and other specialists can spend years studying a single object or inscription. They photograph it, date it, compare it with similar finds, argue about what particular marks mean, publish their conclusions, and then let other scholars argue with them. Sometimes an exciting new interpretation survives that process. Sometimes it doesn’t. “A scholar has proposed a new reading” and “archaeologists have proved this” are very different statements.

The recent social-media excitement about an ancient inscription from Sinai is a good example. One scholar has proposed that marks on the inscription include the name “Moses.” Other specialists disagree, including disagreement over whether some of the marks being interpreted as letters are writing at all. That is fascinating. It is exactly the sort of disagreement through which our understanding of the ancient world develops. It is not, however, proof of the Exodus.

Part of the problem is our desire to turn archaeology into another kind of proof text. We do it with the Bible when we pull one verse out of its setting and make it say far more than the writer intended. We can do exactly the same thing with an archaeological discovery. A Semitic inscription becomes a Hebrew inscription. A reference to El becomes evidence of Israelite religion. A possible person named Moses becomes the Moses. Before long, several possibilities have been stacked together and presented as fact.

And in our rush to prove something, we can miss what the discovery actually tells us—which is often much more interesting. Ancient people travelled, traded, worked for other cultures, borrowed ideas, adapted languages and religious practices, and lived alongside people who were different from them. The people who eventually became Israel did not develop in a sealed container. They belonged to the complicated cultural world of the ancient Near East. Every new discovery can help us understand that world a little better.

The same is true of the biblical text itself. The Bible did not drop into history as a finished book. Its stories were told and retold, written and edited, preserved and interpreted by generations of people living through migration, war, exile, occupation, cultural change and ordinary human life. Discovering connections between their stories and the cultures around them does not diminish the Bible. It gives us a larger window into the world in which those stories mattered.

So when the next headline announces that someone has finally “proved the Bible,” be curious – but be patient. Ask what was actually discovered. Ask who has studied it. Ask whether other specialists agree. And perhaps most importantly, give scholarship enough room to say, “We don’t know yet.”

Faith does not need archaeology to provide proof texts. And archaeology becomes much more interesting when we stop demanding that it do so.