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Gleason Archer was an amazingly learned man, representing a kind of conservative biblical scholar trained in the Albright School and its astonishing capacity for managing multiple Ancient Near Eastern languages, the growing field of ‘biblical archaeology’, and an inside-out knowledge of the biblical texts.
It isn’t hard to observe that reviewers of Archer’s work and the Albright School’s legacy tend either to gush or to sneer. Neither response is entirely appropriate, though the gushers win on points.
What Archer possessed that most of his critics do not is the ability to allow the biblical authors the benefit of the doubt when a statement they made seemed to contradict the evidence, common sense, or—for Archer a very important matter—affirmations common to the rest of the Bible.
No doubt Archer over-reached in the attempt to harmonize difficulties. His work must most assuredly be subjected to this claim and will with some regularity be found wanting. Yet he worked the angles before he cried ‘uncle’, a patience and a discipline that too few onlookers are prepared to exercise. When he argued from linguistic data, he was seldom wrong.
This book can now look quaint in the light of a generation of biblical scholarship by men and women trained in the classical disciplines and profoundly respectful of the biblical text. Archer, who did not have the luxury of such company, was fighting a rear guard battle.
If all is not fair in war, some shortcomings are at least less difficult to understand.
Canter Bridge 
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