I have thoroughly enjoyed listening to the 12-part podcast produced by the BBC, entitled “How Did We Get Here?”. You can listen to it on BBC Sounds, or in any other podcast app by entering its direct feed URL: https://podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk/m002jty0.rss. It tells the story of the land we know as Israel-Palestine, to chart the twists and turns so we can appreciate how we got to the situation we’re in today.
From the podcast’s own introduction:
I’m Jonny Dymond, and from BBC Radio 4 this is How Did We Get Here? Israel and the Palestinians.
Not a blow-by-blow, battle-by-battle history of the region, but an attempt to draw out some of the events and people that brought the inhabitants of that sparkling land to where they are now.
In this series, some of the leading experts share their interpretations. There are, of course, other ones.
The podcast is presented by Jonny Dymond (an experienced and senior BBC journalist), and he’s joined each time by 2 or 3 guests who are experts in their field. The first episode runs from Bible times (starting with Abraham), up to Roman times (the fall of Jerusalem and the assault on Masada). Successive episodes tell the story in stages, spanning the crusades, the Byzantine empire, the Ottoman empire, the strategic position in the First World War, growing Jewish emigration, the British attempt to find them a home, the tensions that led to the Brits pulling out, the two intifada, Oslo, Camp David and October 2023. It’s a fascinating overview of an extremely complex piece of history. I’d need to listen to it a second time to really take in the key details.
However, it is let down by the first episode. In this episode the guests are Simon Sebag Montefiore and Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones.
I can see why that first episode goes the way it does. Part of the problem is that you have three major religions (Christians, Jews, Muslims) each claiming that their understanding of the significance of the land is the right one. The producers feel the need to be impartial, and I understand that. To understand the complexity, you need the ability to listen to all the people involved at each point in the history, not just expecting your point of view to be validated. So, when the producers were looking for expert guests to talk to Jonny, they needed people who are experts in ancient history, but who do not particularly represent any religion.
The problem that gets you is you end up with guests who don’t really know their Bibles very well, or at least don’t reveal a deep knowledge of the Bible in what they say. All debate should try to avoid straw men; when someone hears their view portrayed, they should feel they have been accurately represented. That is not the case here, and that is such an irony! They try so hard to be fair to all (not taking religious “sides”) that you end up with a critique of the Bible that is a complete caricature of the Bible.
I’d love readers of this blog to enjoy this podcast series thoroughly. However, episode 1 gets so much Bible wrong that I want to respond to it here. I’m hoping this will encourage people to enjoy episodes 2-12 without being put off by episode, and will answer some of the questions episode 1 may raise in their minds.
Jonny, wisely, says in the introduction to each episode: “In this series, some of the leading experts share their interpretations. There are, of course, other ones.” Indeed there are. Allow me to share another one.
So here are a few observations about some of the claims made.
The Bible is not history
The main problem throughout the episode is the assumption that the Bible does not contain a historical record.
It is true that many people do not believe the Bible to contain an accurate historical record. It is also true that not everything in the Bible claims to be a historical narrative. The parables of Jesus include a story of a man with two sons, one of whom left home early and squandered his inheritance (Luke 15:11-32). Parables are stories told as a teaching device, and almost always contain details that wouldn’t happen in real life to focus the attention of the audience. Nobody is claiming there really was such a man with his two sons.
But much of the Bible contains narratives that claim to be an accurate historical record. In 1 Corinthians 15:3, Paul says that the heart of the Christian message is the truth that “Christ died for our sins”; the message is both that Christ died, and that his death dealt with our sins. Both halves matter, because if Christ did not truly die then our sins are not dealt with. In 1 Corinthians 15:20, Paul says that “Christ has indeed been raised from the death, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep”. Jesus’ resurrection is a historical fact, and gives us assurance that we will also rise. If Jesus did not really rise, there is no such assurance.
Given the Bible claims that much of its narrative is accurate historical narrative, it is far too dismissive to say, simply, that the Bible does not contain history. This assumption underlines most of what is said in the episode, but it comes out explicitly at one point. Why are people reluctant to use the Bible to establish the history of the land of Israel-Palestine, asks Jonny? Answer: People “see through the pretence that the Bible is written as history”. (LL-J, 09:25)
At another point, LL-J says that the Bible: “doesn’t hold together particularly well as a historical book” (08:25).
The need for archaeology before we’ll believe anything
This fallacy follows on from the first one, and also reinforces it. We get the idea that we can only trust historical details in the Bible if they are confirmed by archaeological discovery. “My starting point would always be with the archaeology, and let the archaeology speak first.” (LL-J, 10:00)
That’s not to say that the Bible plays no part. For example, for a long time historians doubted the existence of King David, or dismissed him as a minor tribal figure who certainly did not unite all 12 tribes. Then, in 1991, archaeologists found the Tel Dan Stele, at Tel Dan (in the north of modern Israel). A stele is a stone monument inscribed, much like a modern-day gravestone. The Tel Dan Stele probably dates about 200 years after David, and mentions “the house of David” in the context of a descendant of David just killed by an Assyrian king. Without the Bible we wouldn’t know the significance of this house of David. As I say, we still need the Bible. However, it is all a bit silly for people to switch from saying David can’t have existed (because there was no archaeological record) to saying he did in fact exist (because of one discovery).
I not saying that discovery should automatically persuade all historians that the Bible is infallible in its narration. But it should have challenged the assumption. You’d like secular historians to say “maybe we were a little too hasty to dismiss the Bible; it seems it does contain a lot of accurate history after all”. Instead they begrudgingly accept this one detail, and maintain that the rest is entirely made up.
“In my opinion, David and Solomon probably existed, but in a much reduced form. Essentially, they were tribal war leaders more than anything else, you know, leading this group that we can call the Hebrews or the Israelites.” (LL-J, 13:45)
“I think we’re much too hung up on David and Solomon because whenever they were around 1000
“But as soon as you get on to Solomon, there is absolutely no mention of Solomon anywhere.” (SBM, 14:25)
In other words, there’s no evidence for David or Solmon, but from 930 onwards we’re “in the realms of history”, as if we weren’t before.
Then there's the astonishing claim that the Pentateuch is “set in the early Bronze Age, so we’re talking here about 3000
So, we conclude from the cultural markers that Abraham lived in the Bronze Age, and that places him about 3000
Why not instead look at the Bible to work out when Abraham lived? The middle of Solomon’s reign was about the year 960
That is only inadmissible as evidence if you have an a priori assumption that says so.
Theology and history are alternatives to choose between
Why can’t the Bible be both historical and theological? Indeed, as noted above, many of the Bible’s theological claims are given as divine interpretations of the Bible’s historical events. Instead of seeing history and theology as a choice to make, the Bible sees the two as reinforcing one another.
This is the context for a portion of the episode I quoted earlier:
“There is history in the Bible, but it is a history that has been repurposed, deliberately so. It serves an agenda, and it’s a theological agenda. The whole story of the Bible is the relationship of the Jewish people to their God. And that’s what the thrust is right the way through. And when we read it with another set of eyes, it doesn’t hold together paricularly well as a historical book.” (LL-J, 08:05)
That is a false choice. We should refuse the dilemma, and insist that the Bible claims to be both.
Editors threaten the historical record
The claim is made a few times that the Bible was edited after it was originally written, as if this undermines its historical accuracy.
“It had its editing, it had its redaction at a much, much later time. So, it is not a chronological book by any means. And while we can find pockets of history in it, we can’t find history throughout it.” (LL-J, 09:45)
There are two claims here. 1. It was written, then edited. 2. The events are not recorded chronologically.
Neither of those proves it is not historical. Subsequent edits could be accurate. You only introduce error by writing non-chronologically if you claim the events were chronological. Many modern epic films tell the story by moving all over the timeline; that does not mean there is not a coherent plot, or (in the case of a historical movie, like Oppenheimer) that this device in itself makes the film less accurate.
So it is with the Bible. We know the books of the Bible were edited. For example, if Moses wrote most of Genesis to Deuteronomy, the mention of the territory of Dan in Genesis 14:14 is anachronistic, and Moses cannot have recorded his own death (Deuteronomy 34). We don’t know when those edits were made, but many argue that the final editing was done during the Babylonian exile.
This is not a “problem” with the Bible that modern historians have discovered but others have missed. The editorial markers are effectively there in the text. There is no reason to assume that the original writers were competent to write accurately, while the later editors were clumsy. The ultimate reason Christians believe the Bible to be the word of God is because Jesus himself treated it this way and taught us to do the same. The Bible he held in his hands was the Old Testament we have today, complete with all of the results of any editing. If Jesus trusted it in spite of the editing process, so can we.
This may explain the problems offered about the namings of other ancient ethnic groups.
“They get named in the Hebrew Bible, but the naming is much, much later than any evidence we have for them naming themselves. It’s not contemporary.” (LL-J, 06:05) “I was just going to say there’s quite a lot of anachronism.” (SSM, 06:15) “Completely. So, for instance, a Canaanite would never have called himself a Canaanite. It’s a much later word that is used.” (LL-J, 06:20)
Maybe a later editor did go back and insert the names that were used in their day for some of those ethnic groups.
Alternatively, maybe, Canaanites were called Canaanites in their own time. How can someone say with certainty that we do not know what the Canaanites called themselves but we can be sure they did not call themselves Canaanites? It’s very hard to prove a negative, and if we stop assuming that only archaeological evidence counts the Bible may give us the evidence that they were called Canaanites.
Or maybe not. Maybe this was a later piece of editing, and if so none of the Bible’s historicity would be threatened.
Failing to read the whole Bible story
There are other claimed inaccuracies that happen because the speakers have only read isolated parts of the Bible, not the whole thing.
Let’s start with the temple built by Solomon. We’re told this is unlikely to be historical, since archaeologists have never found it or anything like it in Near Eastern archaeology.
“If you look at First Kings and the description of the temple, this is a magnificent building, you know, the size of Karnak in Egypt and we find nothing of this. Not only do we not find it in Jerusalem, we find nothing of that kind of proportion or scale of building anywhere in the Levant at this period.” (LL-J, 13:25)
Why have they not found it in Jerusalem? Probably because the wood and stone structures were torn down and burnt, and the gold and bronze was carried away to Babylon. If they wanted to find the bronze sea in an archaeological dig, they need to look in Iraq not Jerusalem.
“On the seventh day of the fifth month, in the nineteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, Nebuzaradan commander of the imperial guard, an official of the king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem. He set fire to the temple of the Lord, the royal palace and all the houses of Jerusalem. Every important building he burned down. The whole Babylonian army under the commander of the imperial guard broke down the walls around Jerusalem. Nebuzaradan the commander of the guard carried into exile the people who remained in the city, along with the rest of the populace and those who had deserted to the king of Babylon. But the commander left behind some of the poorest people of the land to work the vineyards and fields.
The Babylonians broke up the bronze pillars, the movable stands and the bronze Sea that were at the temple of the Lord and they carried the bronze to Babylon. They also took away the pots, shovels, wick trimmers, dishes and all the bronze articles used in the temple service. The commander of the imperial guard took away the censers and sprinkling bowls – all that were made of pure gold or silver.” (2 Kings 25:8-15)
Why have they not found anything like it in the Levant from this period? Because the biblical record stresses the uniqueness of the temple. It is of a design, a scale, and a level of opulence unknown in any other kingdom (1 Kings 10:12). The whole point was that this was not patterned on the places of worship of the other nations, but was a design revealed by God that was intentionally different (1 Chronicles 28:9-19, in contrast to 2 Kings 16:10-18). This reminds me of when people tried to argue that Solomon’s throne (1 Kings 10:18-20) cannot have existed because no similar thrones have ever been found elsewhere. Apparently, that is the point: “Nothing like it had ever been made for any other kingdom” (1 Kings 10:20).
Second, let's look for cultural markers used to find, archaeologically, where the borders of Israel lay.
We’re told that archaeologists look for “cross-cultural influences in things like pottery or what we can see about religious practices, and then things which are seismically different. What demarcates a different tribe or a different group of people from those around them, for instance. Now, what’s remarkable is that by and large archaeologists just find in the Late Bronze Age, Early Iron Age, a oneness of these peoples. There is no stark evidence to suggest, for instance, that early Jews in the Levant at this time were eating differently from those people around them, okay? And that kind of thing really matters, of course, because what we have in the Hebrew Bible are the law codes about clean and unclean foods.” (LL-J, 16:30)
He’s saying you’d expect to find the dietary codes from Leviticus reflected in what you excavate. Within the borders of ancient Israel, there should be no evidence of certain meats being eaten, for example. In fact, the cultural markers are remarkably uniform, so (we’re told) there’s no evidence of a distinctive group of Israelites occupying a particular parcel of land.
“Again, people think because we read the Bible chronologically, ah, this [the food laws in Leviticus] must be very early. This is the time of Moses when they first settled there. There’s no evidence in the archaeology for that at all. That separation of clean and unclean begins again after the exile, when they come back from Babylon, when again, they’re trying to claim we are a unique people. We’re a different people. It’s one of their identifying markers then. And that’s where we see the evidence coming up in the archaeology, but not before.” (LL-J, 17:20)
So, the people in exile rewrote the ancient borders of the land; they invented some food laws that they added into the Torah after the fact to make it look like these were ancient laws.
Again, the answer is much simpler, and you only have to read the whole of the Bible story.
Why was the northern kingdom of Israel exiled by Assyria? “All this took place because the Israelites had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up out of Egypt from under the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt. They worshipped other gods and followed the practices of the nations the Lord had driven out before them, as well as the practices that the kings of Israel had introduced.” (2 Kings 17:7-8)
Why was the southern kingdom of Judah exiled by Babylon? “He did evil in the eyes of the Lord, following the detestable practices of the nations the Lord had driven out before the Israelites.” (2 Kings 21:2)
The people were given food laws in the time of Moses, but they did not follow them. Increasingly, they adopted the lifestyle of the nations around them. This explains why you will not find evidence of a different diet, or evidence of different gods being worshipped, in supposedly Israelite territory.
Finally, let’s look at the worship of Asherah.
“One thing that people don’t really recognise is that in the Bronze and Iron Ages, God, Yahweh, the Hebrew God, had a wife. He had a consort, the goddess Asherah. But little hints of her are found in the Bible, in the book of Jeremiah. Why do you bake resin cakes for the goddess of heaven, he says to the Israelites. But when the Bible had its redaction, the editors just simply put a red line through all references to God’s wife and many other things, which later Jews thought were heresies. But in the archaeology, of course, they can’t silence the archaeology. And we find little shrines, little statuettes, and pot images of God, of Yahweh, sitting next to his wife, Asherah, for instance.” (LL-J, 18:35)
It’s back to those pesky editors again. The original historical record would have had Yahweh, the Hebrew God, with his wife Asherah. Later Jews didn’t like that idea, so edited her out.
Except, they didn’t edit her out. Asherah does appear, and as LL-J recognised the people did worship her. Those were not passages the editors clumsily missed. They unpack the whole problem: syncretism. The people did not abandon worship of Yahweh and worship Baal and Asherah instead. They sought to mix things up, and worship both Yahweh and Baal / Asherah. This is the whole basis of Hosea’s charge of spiritual adultery: The people had not changed their spiritual allegiance but were disloyal by trying to have two gods at once.
As for images of Yahweh sat next to his wife, Asherah, how would anyone in our own day recognise a statuette or image to be that of Yahweh. God stressed to his people that they never saw what he looked like, but only heard his voice, so they should not make anything claiming to be an image of Yahweh (Deuteronomy 4:15-18). So it may be that these images and statues were actually images of another deity alongside Asherah. However, we know what Baal looked like, because he has been found, so it's quite possible that this deity alongside Asherah is indeed intended to be an image of Yahweh. That doesn’t mean that the editors removed this unpalatable wife from the account; it means that the people did not follow God’s commands. They made images of the God they had not seen, and mixed his exclusive worship with that of other gods from the surrounding nations.
Once again, if you read the whole Bible account, you have a very simple explanation for what the archaeology has found.
Failing to recognise literary craftmanship
We're told, without evidence to back up the claim, that: “I like to look at it as a historical library, put together at different times, written by different people, and many events in it take place in different versions, at least twice within the Bible itself.” (SSM, 04:15, emphasis added)
As we’re not told which events these are, we have to guess. I’d suspect things like both Abraham (Genesis 20) and Isaac (Genesis 26) trying to pass off their wife as their sister to Abimelek. (Abimelek, = “my father is king”, could be a title rather than an actual name, a bit like “the Pharaoh”).
On this, the speakers simply need to read the literature. Detailed commentaries by biblical scholars look into such “duplicates”. There is far from a consensus that this is the same story, clumsily recorded twice.
Rather, this is an example of the masterful literary craftmanship of the biblical narrators. The Bible is full of hyperlinks, deliberate allusions to previous stories carefully woven in to show how God's history rhymes. We, as readers, are meant to be alert to these, and to notice the stories that happen in such similar ways. It is no accident that Daniel’s time in the royal court, interpreting dreams for the pagan king, resembles the time Joseph had in Egypt. Further, these allusions and echoes are one device the writers use to help us see what they are wanting to teach.
Just as editing and theology are not enemies of historicity, neither is literary skill.
The myth of neutrality
Finally, there’s the ever popular myth that we need to read the Bible stories with no filters, no presuppositions, simply looking to discover what is there.
SBM says that there are “there are many, many reputable archaeologists” (11:15). That rather patronisingly suggests you have to look hard to find them, because many are disreputable. A bit later on, LL-J asks us to “believe me, there are plenty of really good archaeologists, you know, without an agenda” (16:25).
There is no such thing as a human being “without an agenda”. Indeed, it is a power-play to claim that you are the historian without an agenda, and therefore your viewpoint is more valid than others who bring an agenda to their work. Some historians may be atheists, who follow no particular religion. (It's striking to note that LL-J is, in fact, ordained in the Church of Wales, so this is not his flavour of neutrality.) That does not mean they are “neutral”. Even the atheist has an agenda. They have certain choices of lifestyle, belief and attitude that are directly affected by religious claims. If any of those religious claims turned out to be true, they would need to make many changes. So there is no such thing as a dispassionate archaeologist or historian with no agenda of their own.
What archaeologists can do, and must do, is not allow their presuppositions to shape what they allow themselves to find. They must be willing to allow their work to challenge their beliefs, and work with honesty and integrity.
Maybe that’s what he meant by not having an agenda. The language used is far more emotive.
Conclusion
As I said at the start, episodes 2-10 of this podcast are excellent.
In episode 1, we have three people talking, who claim to be neutral historians, dispassionately looking at the facts of history.
In fact, their neutrality is no such thing. They have decided, a priori, to discount the Bible as inadmissible for the claims of history. We're told that it’s not historical because it is theological, that the only reliable sources of history are archaeological, and that later editors corrupted the historical narration beyond use. Evidence is found in the ground that contradicts individual verses, read in isolation, but that make perfect sense when the whole of the Bible’s history is considered. We’re told that the Bible is not to be trusted as history because parts of it were edited after originally written, and also because it was written with great literary skill.
It doesn’t greatly hamper the listeners’ understanding of the history of the land. But it could leave a damaging impression that the Bible operates largely in the world of mythology and make-believe. That assumption is deeply flawed, and takes us far from the way Jesus himself viewed the Old Testament. For the purposes of the podcast, the assumption will also make it much harder to resolve (mentally, and on the ground) the complexities of the Middle East today. A historical Bible doesn’t instantly solve any of the disputes, but denying it definitely reduces our ability to see clearly where the solutions don’t come from.
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