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Some notes on the archaeology of the Bible

Some notes on the archaeology of the Bible

Last updated on: September 26, 2026 at 11:09 am by Dan Peterson

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Some notes on the archaeology of the Bible 2026-09-26T11:09:36-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Mount Tabor (traditional site of the Transfiguration of Christ) and the Jezreel Valley in Israel. This is also the site of “Armageddon.” (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I think — since I’m under pressure with a lot of other things to do today — that I’ll share here a couple of passages that I marked in Eric H. Cline, Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), when I read it some time back:

Despite the fact that biblical archaeologists began their excavations in the Holy Land more than a hundred years ago — with a Bible in one hand and a trowel in the other — major questions still remain unanswered, including whether there was really an exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt and the extent of David and Solomon’s empires. Other unresolved issues involve the specific details of daily life during the period of the Divided Kingdom, after the time of Solomon, and the difference between Canaanite and Israelite material culture during the Early Iron Age. (1-3)

Tel es-Sultan, the ruins of ancient Jericho (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

One major problem for reconciling the biblical narrative with archaeological facts on the ground continues to be the extraordinarily ancient city of Jericho. Based upon his work at the site between 1931 and 1936, the archaeologist John Garstang was convinced that he had found the very site where “Joshua fit the battle of Jericho.” However, later work by Dame Kathleen Kenyon cast serious doubt upon Garstang’s dating:

According to Kenyon’s findings, Jericho had remained essentially deserted for the rest of the Late Bronze Age and into the early part of the Iron Age. It was therefore uninhabited at the time of Joshua and the coming of the Israelites. Thus, the archaeological findings and the biblical account are asymmetrical (or inconsistent with each other) at a site fundamentally important to the account of the Israelite conquest as Jericho. Although the debate over Jericho continues to this day, only a few biblical archaeologists still agree with Garstang’s position; the rest agree with Kenyon. (41-42)

It’s important to realize that significant archaeological questions persist even in the area of the world where archaeological efforts have been, by a considerable distance, the most sustained and intense. Some critics of the Book of Mormon like to pretend that there is no evidence at all for its historicity while — and this is especially true for Evangelical Protestant critics — exaggerating the degree to which archaeology confirms the claims of the Bible. (The classic discussion of this glaring inconsistency remains “Basic Methodological Problems with the Anti-Mormon Approach to the Geography and Archaeology of the Book of Mormon,” written by my late colleague and friend William J. Hamblin, gone much too soon.)

Remaining uncertainties in biblical history obviously don’t prove the Book of Mormon true, but they should induce some humility with regard to what we can confidently declare about, say, Mesoamerica, an area where the historical, cultural, and toponymic discontinuities are far more pronounced than those in Palestine, where the conditions (e.g., jungle overgrowth) make seeing what is there and conducting archaeological digs considerably more difficult, and where excavations and historical sources are significantly less advanced and less common.

Megiddo, or Tel Megiddo, is the site of an ancient city in northern Israel’s Jezreel valley. Photo by Itamar Grinberg (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Early in the book, Professor Cline sketches the early history of the discipline of biblical archaeology, focusing briefly on Edward Robinson, an American minister who, in 1838, made pioneering (and valuable) efforts to identity the locations of biblical sites.

Robinson’s identifications were not always completely accurate, of course, nor did he succeed in locating all of the ancient sites for which he was searching. At one point, he stood atop Tell el-Mutesellim, a seventy-foot-tall mountain in the Jezreel Valley — which he did not recognize as being man-made — gazing out into the valley towards Mount Tabor and Mount Gilboa, wondering aloud where the famous site of Megiddo (biblical Armageddon) might be. He knew that it must be somewhere close, but it never dawned on him that he was actually standing on it at that very moment and that there were at least twenty different levels of habitation stacked one on top of another within the ancient mound underneath his feet. He was unable to locate either Jericho or Lachish for the same reason, for he never realized that the prominent tells dotting the landscape of the Holy Land were actually the remains of ancient sites. (14)

Such stories — and they are legion — should also serve as a reminder to be modest in our claims about what we’ve found and what we haven’t found, and cautious in our conclusions about the extent of our knowledge. The famous archaeological maxim “Absence of evidence isn’t necessarily evidence of absence” should always be kept in mind.

And the role of chance in the discoveries that were made, both for good and for ill, should not be overlooked. Professor Cline mentions, for example, the excavations conducted at that very same Megiddo from 1925 until the outbreak of World War II in 1939 by the celebrated Professor James Henry Breasted and other archaeologists from the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. Along the way, they created heaps of debris around the perimeter of the actual archaeological site as they continued to dig.

It was on one of these mounds that a local kibbutznik, grazing his sheep and goats during the 1950s, found a fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh inscribed on a clay tablet. Clearly, like Schumacher before them, the Chicago excavators occasionally missed ancient artifacts, which then wound up on, or in, the spoil heaps of removed earth. (37)

A view of the township of Grand Blanc, Michigan, where last year’s massacre occurred. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

Twelve months after a critic of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Michigan expressed his negative opinion of his neighbors and their faith by means of bullets, truck, and arson, the Church retaliates with an act right out of the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™: “Church Delivers Another Thank You to Grand Blanc With Food Donation: Church will break ground on new chapel one year after the attack”

And there’s also this from the Hitchens File, specifically from the 14 April 2026 edition of Arena Magazine: “”Anxiously Engaged in a Good Cause”: Latter-day Saint ethos in American industry and technology.”

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