Canter Bridge

The Biblical Archeology Review is the go-to popular guide to archaeology in the lands that have been variously named: biblical, holy, Syro-Palestinian, Levantine, and the like. Each of those adjective bears considerable ideological and political freight. (See my review on http://www.amazon.com).

BAR’s tireless and provocative editor, Herschel Shanks, has raised the Review’s status to the point that even professional archaeologists who profess no love for Shanks find it worthwhile to publish popularized reports of their findings in the periodical upon which has stamped his outsized image.

I say more power to him. He has singlehandedly forced the specialists both to report and to expose their conclusions to an intensely interest non-specialist readership.

Recently, the steady progress of archaeologists and biblical scholars who affirm the essential historical reliability of the Bible has displayed its momentum through publishing well-considered pieces in BAR. Scholars like James Hoffmeier, Ed Yamauchi and Bill Arnold have argued the evidence in way that puts paid to the cheap accusation-too common in the scholarly guild-that faith inevitably distorts one’s reading of historical data.

It is time to stop mumbling such defensiveness as though a secular posture opened privileged access to antiquity. To affirm such dismisses too easily the hard-won credibility of scholars who find historical skepticism in its most absolute form to be the most rigid of creeds.