Digging Up Abraham

They called him "the father of pots.” It takes a certain kind of temperament to spend one's life digging around in the dirt. But eccentric Egyptologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie understood how archaeology would henceforth and forever be defined: the study of pots. It was he who declared that the construction of the ancient past is best accomplished not by considering gigantic monuments left behind, but by piecing together the tiny remnants of broken earthenware, the "unconsidered trifles.”

However, in the last decade of the 19th century Petrie was destined to stumble upon something that, while previously unconsidered, was hardly a trifle. It would in fact write a new chapter in the contentious field of biblical archaeology. Who was this William Flinders Petrie? The grandson of the first person to map Australia, here was a fellow with exploration in his blood. A sickly child, his mother, a scholar in her own right, taught him Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Though he lacked formal education, his father taught him surveying, which contributed to his later career as an archaeologist. As an eight year old boy he overheard a family discussion of an archaeological dig of an ancient Roman villa on the Isle of Wight, and protested that the earth ought to be cleared away with care rather than roughly shoveled out. As an elderly man, he later wrote: “All that I have done since was there to begin with, so true it is that we can only develop what is born in the mind. I was already in archaeology by nature.”

By the time he was a teenager, he was surveying prehistoric sites in Britain – an impressive beginning of a career that would lead him to Egypt, where he made a triangulation survey of the pyramids at Giza. He later got to work excavating the fabled city of Luxor: 

“Beyond the civilized regions of modern Egypt, past even the country palm Groves, where a stranger is rarely seen, there stretches out to the Mediterranean a desolation of mud and swamp, impassable in winter, and only dried into an impalpable salt dust by the heat of midsummer. To tell land from water, to say where the mud ends and the lakes begin, requires a long experience; the flat expanse as level as the sea, covered with slowly drying salt pools, may be crossed for miles, with only the dreary changes of dust, black mud, water, and a black mud again, which it is impossible to define as more land than water or more water than land. The only objects which break the flatness of the barren horizon are the low mounds of the cities of the dead; these alone remain to show that this region was once a living land, whose people prospered on the earth

It was in the funerary temple of the great pharaoh Merneptah that Petrie discovered an inscribed stone. Petrie was of course trying to uncover new evidence of ancient Egypt, but little did he know that what he had stumbled upon was nothing less than a milestone in biblical scholarship. Today it resides in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, but Petrie came upon it in the year 1896. Covered in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic characters, the black granite stone slab called a stele stands over seven feet tall. It celebrates Pharaoh Merneptah's triumphant campaigns of conquest. The gods Mut and Horus appear prominently, and two images of the god Amon face outward to the pharaoh. Toward the end of the inscription, in the twenty-fourth line, we find a single staggering proclamation: 

“The Canaan has been plundered into every sort of woe: Ashkelon has been overcome; Gezer has been captured; Yano'am is made non-existent. Israel lies desolate; its seed is no more."

Dating to the 13th century B.C.E., the stele represents the oldest mention of the word "Israel" anywhere in the world outside of the Bible itself. The Merneptah Stele is all the more important, considering that scholars have long been prone to “minimizing” the biblical text. Something about the scholarly temperament is trained to question everything. And that’s all the more true when it comes to a religious text. Casting doubt upon holy writ is somehow fashionable. It should hardly surprise us, then, that stories about the biblical patriarchs, about Moses, the great lawgiver, and about Joshua and the conquest of the land of Canaan, have come to be greeted with the same level of trust as Arthurian legend, and the knights of the Round Table. It all makes for a nice story, but don't take it too seriously. 

Many minimalists have not dared admit to the existence of a national or ethnic identity called “Israel" until at least the ninth century B.C.E. That would have been during the period of Israel's monarchy, when two squabbling kingdoms, consisting of ten tribes in the north and two in the south, were locked in constant competition for political and military supremacy. There was no King David, so they tell us, and even the fabled King Solomon is only that – a fable. 

But if it isn't exactly possible to prove anything on the basis of a religious text like the Bible, what about a stone inscription from Egypt, that may safely be dated four centuries older than modern conventional wisdom about when Israel as a people came to exist? If ever there were an archaeological "smoking gun," the Merneptah Stele is a serious contender. Nonetheless, the minimalist camp isn’t about to take a stone slab like this one lying down.

Meet Philip R. Davies, professor emeritus of biblical studies at the University of Sheffield, England. Serving as director for the Centre for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and publisher of Sheffield Academic Press, he became a leading advocate for the movement known as the Copenhagen School. He and other prominent scholars, including Niels Peter Lemche, Keith Whitelam, and Thomas L. Thompson, have been branded biblical “minimalists” by their detractors. Then there’s the acclaimed Israeli archaeologist, Israel Finkelstein, who also casts serious doubt on much of the biblical record of things. The claims of the minimalists are straightforward enough: that the Bible's version of history isn't supported by any archaeological evidence unearthed so far. In short the Bible cannot be trusted as history.

Biblical minimalists are fond of declaring that the Bible was written thousands of years after the events it describes. Some extreme minimalists go as far as to suggest that it may have been written by Greek speaking Hellenistic Jews, perhaps as late as the first couple of centuries B.C.E. These later Israelites were supposed to have invented the myth of old Israel in order to justify themselves as its spiritual heirs. As with so many readers of the Bible, Davies began to doubt the historical validity of the text. He couldn't believe that over three million people – ancient Israelites – exited Egypt and crossed the Sinai desert over a period of forty years. He couldn't believe that the same Israelites, led by Joshua, committed genocide on a whole people – the Canaanites – and occupied the land in their place. In short he became convinced that the society and history created by the writers of the Bible was an imaginary one. 

Nonetheless, in light of Petrie's discovery, those who minimize the biblical record are prone to pivot to other arguments. For example, the stele relates nothing about Israelites living in Egypt, prior to the supposed “exodus.” Finkelstein points out that the famed stele provides nary a word, not a single clue, that Israelites were ever in Egypt. Nor does any other Egyptian hieroglyphic evidence. It refers instead to a settled group of people, already dwelling in the land of Canaan. On the other hand, the stele is perfectly consistent with the idea that a historical character named Moses led his people out of Egypt in the days of the great Pharaoh, Ramses II, around the year 1280 B.C.E. After forty years of wandering, they would have entered Canaan under Joshua around 1240, well in time for a subsequent pharaoh, Merneptah, to launch an attack and claim that this rebellious people were now “desolate.” 

The minimalists have no choice but to claim that the “Israel” of the stele is not the same Israel that later came to thrive in the region, or that came to be identified with the Jewish people. Who, then, are Merneptah’s “Israel”? Some other people in Canaan who just happen to have gone by the same name? That’s not impossible, but it does require some mental gymnastics. It’s also the predicament in which some archaeologists find themselves when they start with “foregone conclusions.” As another modern Israeli archaeologist, Amnon ben-Tor, pointed out, the guiding principle of many is: “If it’s in the Bible, it must be wrong.” But don’t tell that to William Matthew Flinders Petrie, who never quite knew what he was looking for … until he found it. 

We have to recognize that when it comes to finding hard archaeological evidence of historical characters who lived that long ago, even the likes of Moses, we're skating on proverbially thin ice. And if we can't even prove the existence of Moses, what about the greatest biblical patriarch of all – Abraham? In any case, British archaeologist K.A. Kitchen famously declared: "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

That said, it’s time we meet Sir Leonard Woolley. Born in the northeast London Borough of Hackney in 1880, to a large and impoverished family, Leonard Woolley's long odyssey that would lead him to Abraham's birthplace amounted to a series of happy accidents. His father was a local vicar and had a parish there. He wanted to become a clergyman himself, but didn't do well enough on his exams. The warden of his college subsequently called him and gave him the news - he was to become an archaeologist. In 1912 he got his first chance to lead a dig at a prominent site in Syria called Carchemish, along with a young chap named T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. They augmented their digging with a dose of spying on the nearby German construction of the Berlin to Baghdad Railway. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Woolley was commissioned and dispatched to Cairo, where he teamed up again with Lawrence and with the illustrious archaeologist turned spy, Gertrude Bell, who established the first antiquities service in Iraq and founded the Iraq Museum. 

Woolley observed: 

“The war brought the archaeologist out in a new light, and his habit of prying about in countries little known, his knowledge of peoples, and his gift of tongues, turned to uses far other than his wont. In Egypt alone there were half a dozen of us attached to the Headquarters Staff; in Mesopotamia, in the Greek Islands and at the Salonica, there were intelligence officers and interpreters who had graduated in archaeology, and the discovery that what had seemed the mere stock-in-trade of one’s profession could thus find wider scope made one regard it as possessing maybe some value of its own.”

Woolley was subsequently captured when the ship on which he sailed was blown up in the Mediterranean. He spent the duration of the war in a Turkish POW camp. When the hostilities ended, he was granted a permit, in 1922, to excavate the ancient site of Ur in southwestern Iraq. Woolley's journey had brought him here, to the place where, he was convinced, Abraham’s journey began. Describing the topography, Woolley observed:

“It was a delta periodically flooded, and in the summer scorched by a pitiless sun, but its soil, light and stoneless, was as rich as could be found anywhere on earth, and scarcely needed man’s labor to produce man's food. The description in Genesis of the creation of the earth as man's home agrees admirably with the process of the formation of the Mesopotamian delta: ‘Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so… And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.’”

Woolley made hugely important discoveries at the site, where a great ziggurat – curiously reminiscent of the biblical Tower of Babel – featured prominently. Later, Woolley’s future wife Katharine was to join the team, initially to run the domestic side of the expedition, but later as an able draughtsman who also helped uncover some of the most delicate finds. These included ancient tombs of great material wealth, containing paintings of Sumerian culture at its high point, as well as gold and silver ornaments and other furnishings. Woolley was fond of pointing out to visitors an area of houses south of the ziggurat, the likes of which Abraham might have inhabited. These houses are now dated to around 1800 B.C.E. – exactly when Jewish tradition places the patriarch’s birth. Woolley even suggested that flood stratum he found in the city might lay at the root of the story of Noah – perhaps a local inundation rather than a worldwide flood. The bottom line is that when place locations mentioned in the Bible match what we find in the archaeological record, we may well be onto something historical. 

But before jumping to the conclusion that Abraham may well have been a historical personage, bear in mind that for good archaeologists, as for good detectives, the devil is in the details. And one such detail is the conspicuous presence of camels in the biblical narrative. We read that Abraham’s servant, Eliezer, is sent to find a wife for the patriarch’s son, Isaac. When he encounters Isaac's bride to be, Rebecca, she draws water not only for Eliezer but for his ten camels as well. But biblical trouble arose when two researchers from Tel Aviv University found camel bones south of the Dead Sea, dating to the 10th century B.C.E. and determined that this was the earliest use of domesticated camels. That's 1,000 years later than the days of Abraham and Isaac. Which means there were no domesticated camels at the time of the patriarchs and they have no business being in the Biblical account. Might all of these stories have been fabricated out of whole cloth many centuries after the fact? On the other hand, we also have a list of domesticated animals from ancient Mesopotamia – Ugarit – dating as early as 1950 B.C.E., and mentioning, among other beasts, a camel. So for most every argument we have a counterclaim. And that's the way it is…

Then there’s the fact that there are several places called Ur, and the best evidence of today’s archaeologists seems to indicate that the Ur of Abraham was in the same region as Haran in Northern Mesopotamia, and not the famous Ur in Southern Mesopotamia. There are in fact compelling reasons to place Ur of the Chaldees near Haran, identifying it with either Ura or Urfa. But even if Abraham came from one of these other locations, so what? Nothing has ever been uncovered to invalidate his existence, and the fact that such place names are accurate suggests that there might be more history here than our minimalist friends would care to admit. Indeed, the pastoral lifestyle of the patriarchs appears to many to mesh well with that of Bedouin nomads down to the present day – measuring wealth in terms of sheep and goats, clan conflicts with villagers over water wells, and disputes over grazing land. While this view of the biblical nomads has also been challenged, there is yet other circumstantial evidence that came to light with the discovery in 1933 of an ancient Sumerian city called Mari. It was inhabited from the fifth millennium B.C.E., until 1759 B.C.E., when it was sacked by the Babylonian king Hammurabi. 

Some Bedouin tribesmen were digging in a mound for something to use as a gravestone, when they stumbled upon a headless statue. The French, to whom Syria belonged in those days, dispatched archaeologists from the Louvre to begin excavating the site. In short order they uncovered the ancient temple of Ishtar, along with more than 25,000 clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform lettering in ancient Akkadian. It was a veritable treasure trove, bearing directly on the biblical record, since, for example, it mentions the biblical city of Nahor, referenced by the book of Genesis. There are also references to a group of nomads known in Akkadian as Habiru.

Some have identified Abraham as one of these Habiru, a word that sounds curiously

similar to “Hebrew.” They were semi-nomadic people described elsewhere, by Egyptian sources, as “wanderers” or “outcasts.” They were shepherds, agriculturalists, stone-cutters, and soldiers. They might also be understood as “guerrilla warriors” – a kind of ancient militia who rose up as needed. In the ancient Egyptian Amarna tablets, they are called ‘Apiru.

The so-called father of biblical archaeology, William Foxwell Albright, also took notice. Born to Methodist missionaries in Coquimbo Chile in 1891, he overcame the physical limitations of severe nearsightedness and a crippled left hand - mangled by a farm machine in his early childhood. When he was ten years old his parents bought him his most cherished possession – the recently published History of Babylonian and Assyria. That two-volume work would launch him on his lifelong journey of ancient discoveries. More than anyone else, it was Albright who pioneered the movement that would bring the science of archaeology to bear on the study of the biblical world. He observed:

“We read in the tablets of Ugarit that escaped slaves had been accustomed to find asylum with the ‘Apiru, preferably on the other side of the border between the Hittite empire proper and the vassal state of Ugarit. This practice was explicitly forbidden and runaway slaves had to be extradited. We find constant complaints in the Amarna tablets about 'Apiru raids in both Syria and Palestine, as well as about intrigues of Canaanite rulers with the 'Apiru. A Palestinian ruler distinguishes clearly between three groups: 'Apiru, robbers (or habbatu) and Beduin (or Sutu)... In other words, a clear distinction was drawn in this period, at least in Palestine and Syria, between 'Apiru and Beduin on one hand, and robber bands on the other. The 'Apiru might rob, and so might the Beduin; on the other hand, robbery was usually sporadic among the 'Apiru and they were much less nomadic then the Beduin."

While we can’t prove archaeologically that Israelites ever lived in Egypt, one intriguing theory links them with these semi-nomadic ‘Apiru, or Habiru, who included farmers, merchants, construction workers, and warriors. This theory too has its deficits, since the term seems to describe a social class rather than an ethnic group.

In any case, the book of Genesis relates that Isaac’s son Joseph was sold by his brothers into slavery in Egypt, only to rise to become the Pharaoh’s most trusted advisor. 

Joseph ultimately saves his wayward brothers, who end up in Egypt themselves, in search of food during a famine. Interestingly enough, an Egyptian tomb painting from the Middle Kingdom (which lasted from around 2,000 to 1,800 B.C.E.) depicts Asiatic ‘Apiru entering the land - for sustenance in a time of famine.

Joseph’s entire family comes down to join him in Egypt, settling in the rich and fertile land of Goshen, and all ends well ... or appears to. 

For a long time, archaeologists and biblical minimalists have renounced the idea of an Israelite captivity in Egypt corresponding to the biblical record of the Exodus. Countering this, we have the relatively recent unearthing of Israelite-style four-room homes found among Medinet Habu, opposite Luxor in Egypt near the remains of the temple of Ay and Horemheb. These may be compared to the many homes that have been found in excavations in the land of Israel, given the distinct similarities of pattern and function. In other words, they are not Egyptian at all in design. This is an important discovery by which archaeology begins corroborating the evidence of the biblical record yet again. And although the timeline doesn’t seem to entirely match, this is a great moment for those who, like William Foxwell Albright, value the science of archaeology, while appreciating the historicity of the biblical record. 

While the Bible suggests that the Hebrews peacefully coexisted with the Egyptians for a good two centuries, if the Habiru theory holds any water, they may actually have been employed as an integral component in the defense of Egy pt, protecting it from the Canaanite menace to the north. That’s why the Bible takes pains to point out that they settle in the northern Nile Delta area – the land of Goshen. 

Some speculate that this mercenary army is only about a thousand strong,  significantly less than the hundreds of thousands of biblical tradition, but they are significant enough to trouble what the Bible calls: “a pharaoh ... who did not know about Joseph.” The reference might conceivably be to Seti I (who ruled from 1294 to 1279 B.C.E.), and who became concerned about the growing power of this Hebrew horde, declaring:

“Behold, the people of the children of Israel are too many and too mighty for us; come, let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply, and it come to pass, that, when there comes upon us any war, they also join themselves to our enemies, and fight against us, and get them up out of the land."

He decides that the best course is to set them to work, building fortifications and city walls. In point of fact, we’re not really sure what this “slavery” amounted to. The traditional idea that vast throngs of Hebrews wearing shackles labor under the cruel whips of their taskmasters is undoubtedly a stretch. By contrast, while standard English translations tell us they are “slaves,” the actual Hebrew word is avadim, meaning “laborers,” perhaps “corvée laborers,” or “day laborers.” 

While minimalists continue to argue for a late date of composition of the biblical accounts (the 7th century B.C.E. or later), allowing none of this to be read as history, others, such as Israeli archaeologist Amihai Mazar, note that details in the Bible's narrative coincide well with what archaeology tells us about those ancient days. For example, we know that there were major building projects during the long reign of Pharaoh Ramses II, and the presence of slaves in Egypt and their migration from Egypt is well-attested in the archaeological and historical record.

Might the laborers, or avadaim, of the biblical account have found themselves working on the building projects of Pharaoh Ramses II? The Hebrews, according to this theory, aren’t “owned” in the way we imagine slaves in bondage; rather their servitude consists only in the dispensation of their labor. Hindsight being twenty-twenty, it must have seemed to the editors of the Bible that entering into the pharaoh’s employ, however it came about, was a grievous form of bondage. Who would not argue that it might have been better for the children of Abraham to suffer the ravages of famine in the land of Canaan than to enter the relative “safety” of servitude in Egypt? But enter they do, and in the end they will require nothing less than a revolution. They will need an “exodus.”