On a wintery Berlin evening in the year 1902 the famous German Assyriologist Freidrich Delitzsch stood in the beautiful and prestigious Singakademie to give an address. All the notables of Berlin high society were in attendance, including the Kaiser Wilhelm II. The topic for the evening was the Bible and Babylon, the ruins of which were just then being brought to light by a German archaeological expedition. The lecture proved to be a significant cultural moment, not because of anything Delitzsch said about Babylon, but about the Bible. Delitzsch began by pointing out that ancient Palestine was steeped in Babylonian thought. Such could be proved by the Biblical narratives themselves, the origins of which Delitzsch thought could be traced back to “the purer and more original”¹Gunkel 2009, 39; the expression was modified in later published editions of the text. Babylonian myths.²Delitzsch 1906, 38 ff. Even the name Yahweh was known in Babylon many centuries before Moses.³Delitzsch 1906, 64 Indeed, Yahweh was none other than Marduk, the dragon slayer, in another dress.⁴Delitzsch 1906, 43 ff. The Sabbath day also originated with ancient Babylon.⁵Delitzsch 1906, 37-38 Thus the lecture continued with Delitzsch comparing and contrasting the Bible with ancient Babylon.

A year later, in February 1903, the Kaiser invited Delitzsch to give another lecture in the Singakademie, this time with the empress also in attendance. Once again Delitzsch took the opportunity to compare the Bible with ancient Babylonian literature. But this time he was even more stridently antagonistic towards the Bible. The Biblical injunctions against idols, he argued, revealed a complete lack of understanding of what the Babylonians actually believed about them. And the Babylonians harbored monotheistic conceptions about God superior to the narrow exclusivity of Israel’s God.⁶Delitzsch 1906, 70; also Shavit et al. 2007, 233

Delitzsch was one of Germany’s foremost scholars. And so his opinions carried a lot of weight. But Delitzsch’s influence extended further abroad also. Two of America’s most influential Assyriologists, Paul Haupt (1858-1926) and Hermann Hilprecht (1859-1925), had studied under Delitzsch at the University of Leipzig before founding Assyriology departments at John Hopkins University and the University of Pennsylvania respectively. A number of other American scholars wrote their doctorates under his supervision.⁷Gilbert Mitchell (1846-1920), Nathaniel Schmidt (1862-1939), John Punnett Peters (1852-1921), Morris Jastrow (1861-1921), Richard James Horatio Gottheil (1862-1936), Carl William Belser, Maurice Price, and Felix Adler were all Americans who studied at German universities and then returned to teach Assyriology or Semitics at places like Cornell, Columbia, the University of Michigan, and the University of Chicago.  With the exception of Schmidt and Adler, all of these men studied at the University of Leipzig during Friedrich Delitzsch’s tenure there.  See: Burke O. Long, Planting and Reaping Albright : Politics, Ideology, and Interpreting the Bible  (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).

Although the Kaiser had been Delitzsch’s biggest promoter, now he sought to distance himself from the professor’s comments. In a letter to Admiral Hollman intended for publication the Kaiser openly criticized Delitzsch. But his letter to Hollman read more like an eulogy for Christian civilization than a rebuke of the professor. The common people needed to have faith, the Kaiser wrote, and the professor “unquestionably shattered or at least undermined for these people their faith.”¹¹Delitzsch 1906, 122  This was perhaps no exaggeration. The prominent German theologian Alfred Harnack observed that, “today it is the talk of the streets that the Old Testament no longer amounts to much.”¹²Delitzsch 1906, 126

In 1905 Delitzsch delivered his third and final lecture. This time he compared Babylonian and Hebrew poetry in order to sho “how similar was the poetical form of religious songs of the two lands.”¹³Delitzsch 1906, 187 He would also compare the conceptions of Yahweh found in the Bible with those of other nations in order to prove that the national gods of Moab and Ammon, Milchom and Chemosh, did not differ substantively from Yahweh.¹⁴Delitzsch 1906, 224 Delitzsch even likened the god Assur, the Assyrian god of gods, to Yahweh! Delitzsch concluded this final lecture with an appeal to the Christian ideal of a universal and all encompassing faith built upon spirit and truth.

Progress

Although couched in Christian language, Delitzsch’s appeal was directed to Germans who were at that time turning in increasing numbers to a religion of progress whose philosophical foundations were laid down by Johann Fichte a century earlier. “Yours is the greater destiny, to found the empire of spirit and reason, and to annihilate completely the crude physical force that rules the world,” Fichte declared in an address to the German people in 1807.¹⁵Fichte and Moore 2008, xxiii   Often labelled “the father of German nationalism” Fichte was really a cosmopolitan at heart and an enthusiastic supporter of the French revolution. Even as late as 1799, after the Reign of Terror and the disastrous rule of the Directorate, Fichte could write, “It is clear that from now on only the French Republic can be the fatherland of the man of integrity, that only to it can he devote his energies; for from now on not only the dearest hopes of humanity but even its existence depends upon its victory.”¹⁶Fichte and Moore 2008, xi Fichte would support the French revolutionaries throughout the Reign of Terror.  It wasn’t until the Directorate fell under the spell of Napoleon that Fichte turned his back on France and “the nameless one”—Fichte’s term for Napoleon. In his Addresses to the German Nation Fichte declared that it was now up to the German people to carry the torch of progress.

Johann Fichte ascended to the prestigious chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin. He was succeeded by Georg Hegel. Arguable the century’s most influential German philosopher, Hegel built on Fichte’s legacy, arguing that certain processes at work in history had culminated in the advent of modern philosophy.¹⁷Hegel and Gray 1970, 311 The path forward, Hegel believed, was through the Greeks. They had introduced mankind to the philosophy of the mind.¹⁸“In Hegel’s opinion, the Jewish religion was very slightly superior to the religions of the heathen, nay, in more than one respect was even positively inferior to some of them.  In his view, the religion of intellectual individuality, or free subjectivity, passes through three stages – ‘the Jewish religion of sublimity (unity), the Greek religion of beauty (necessity), and the Roman religion of purposefulness (reason)'” (Kegel 1924, 25). Now the time had come for Germany to go a step further and introduce the world to the philosophy of the spirit. Thus the race of Teutons would bring to fruition the project begun by Descartes and usher in a new age that would outshine the golden age of Athens.¹⁹Hegel and Gray 1970, 311

Hegel was not the only German fascinated by ancient Greece. Ever since J.J. Winkelmann’s published his magisterial work The History of Art in Antiquity in 1764 influential German poets and literary figures had begun to treat Greek culture as a religious alternative to Christianity. Honored by Goethe as “the first great pagan of his time,” Winkelmann is generally credited with founding the cultural movement known as philhellenism—“the love of all things Greek”. “This was not simply a movement,” observes Legaspi, “it was a faith.”

With this backdrop in place, we return now to Julius Wellhausen, the author of the Prolegomena to the History of Israel and Friedrich Delitzsch, who, as we have seen, delivered the influential Babel und Bibel lectures. He considered his own work to be the continuation of a project initiated by Julius Wellhausen.

Wellhausen (and Delitzsch again)

Wellhausen’s big idea was that the Bible was comprised of documents edited together at a late date. While it is true that the idea of “documents” did not originate with Wellhausen, the use of the “documentary hypothesis” to apply an evolutionary paradigm to Scripture may be traced to him. Thus Wellhausen argued that most of the laws of the Pentateuch were a priestly invention written down in post-exilic times and were therefore completely disconnected from the life and times of ancient Israel. The primitive aspects of the earliest texts of the Old Testament, according to Wellhausen, represent a more authentic expression of ancient Israelite religion compared with later texts, which bear “a prophetic taint.”²¹Kegel 1924, 37 Thus Wellhausen suggested that the accusation of drunkenness leveled against Hannah at the tabernacle in Shiloh was in keeping with the nature of that feast.²²Wellhausen 1885, 72 Only later did the festivals and rituals of ancient Israel come under the control of a priestly class who imposed a rigid set of laws on the people.²³Wellhausen 1885, 78 By assigning the Mosaic law to a late period, Wellhausen effectively turned the Old Testament on its head. If the early religion of Israel continued the religious practices of the Canaanites, its late manifestation was a priestly invention.

In the introduction to his final work The Great Delusion published in 1920, Friedrich Delitzsch credits Julius Wellhausen with being the first to demonstrate that the Old Testament is “a tangle of untruthful historical traditions and unscrupulous perversions of every kind.”²⁴Kegel 1924, 16 Delitzsch concluded this work by recommending that German schools replace the Old Testament with Wilhelm Schwaner’s Germanen-Bibel, a compilation of thoughts about God, eternity, and immortality gleaned from the works of famous German writers. Delitzsch’s political slant is more evident in this book than in his lectures. Whereas in his first lecture he suggested that the wife of the Assyrian king Sardanapalus was an Aryan woman with golden locks of hair (how he was able to argue this from a stone relief is hard to say), in his final work he argues that Jesus might not have been Jewish at all, but a proselyte to Judaism, and that Jesus, the good Samaritan, and the Magi might have come from Aryan stock.

Koldewey, The Excavations at Babylon. Link

There are no Differences

A lot of water of water has passed under the bridge since Delitzsch’s day. And a lot of blood too. You won’t find many today arguing that Jesus was Aryan, that Yahweh was an old Babylonian deity, or that the Babylonians invented the Sabbath week (all of these claims are either unsubstantiated or have been proven false.) However, the central thrust of Delitzsch’s program (“How great the similarity between all things in Babel and Bible!”²⁵Delitzsch 1906, 91) is echoed in countless monographs today. But the locus for comparison has shifted from Mesopotamia to Ugarit, where a large archive of “Canaanite” texts were uncovered.  Summarizing general trends in contemporary Biblical scholarship, Mark Smith notes that the period 1970-1985 saw a turn away from the distinction between “Canaanite” and “Israelite” in the biblical guild.²⁶Smith 2001, 197 Elsewhere Smith states that there may be some commentators who still try to create the false dichotomy of “ours” versus “theirs”, Canaanite versus Israelite, but these scholars have not kept up with the times.  This type of categorization is “old news” although some commentators have “missed their newspaper delivery.”²⁷Mark Smith in Younger 2007, 4

In similar fashion the archaeologist William Dever dismisses attempts to distinguish between “Israelite” and “Canaanite” noting that it is “an almost exclusively Christian enterprise (and largely Protestant at that).”  Attempts to maintain such distinctions results in a bias that “precludes any honest scholarship.”²⁸Dever 2002, 19  Susan Ackermann goes a step further, arguing that all of the sins of Judah recorded in the prophetic and historical books of the Bible (necromancy, child sacrifice, the death cult, etc.) were once inherent aspects of YHWH worship. 

Mark Smith makes essentially the same argument:

Ever since Wellhausen published his Prolegomena to the History of Israel, scholars have scoured the Biblical text for vestiges of old Canaanite beliefs.  Even the religious reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah, which have traditionally been understood as attempts to reinstate an orthodox faith, are seen as evidence for a native folk religion which the “religious and political establishment” actively sought to suppress.³¹Dever 2002, 13  The prophets were an elite, highly literate group, whose words could hardly have been understood by “the folk.”  “If the oracles of prophets like Isaiah had originally been ‘sermons’ delivered in public,” writes Dever, “people in the countryside would scarcely have understood them.”³²Dever 2005, 70 These were simple farmers, uneducated peasants, whose religious practices were informed “not by the canonical literary tradition and its late, ‘orthodox’ ideals, but rather by centuries-old religious myths and rituals, many of them going back to Canaanite Bronze Age traditions.”³³Dever 2005, 60

The general consensus today is that the religious beliefs of the average Israelite living during the Iron Age could hardly be distinguished from those of the surrounding peoples.  Thus Biblical monotheism is considered to be a late development that did not take root until the exilic and post-exilic periods (6^th – 5^th centuries BC) and only among a small group of Judaeans returning to their ancestral homeland. The theology of the Old Testament may be interesting from the perspective of “history of religions” but is of limited value for understanding the folk religion that existed in Israel during the Iron Age.

Be Appalled!

Although we do not have detailed biographical information for the writing prophets of the 8^th – 7^th centuries BC, what may be gleaned from the text suggests that most of them came from the countryside.  Amos was a shepherd from Tekoa; Micah was a prophet from Moreshet-Gat; Jeremiah was a priest from Anathoth—all rural villages.  Nor does it appear as though Isaiah was a regular at the court. When he brought a message to King Ahaz at the beginning of his prophetic career, he delivered it from outside the walls of Jerusalem.  And later, when Sennacherib threatened Jerusalem, Hezekiah sent messengers to speak with Isaiah but there is no record of the two ever having communicated directly.  

None of the aforementioned prophets were welcomed in the cities where they prophesied.  Indeed, it may be argued that there is no ancient text more critical of kingship, or of urban culture in general, than the Bible.  Babylon, Nineveh, Sodom, Tyre, Samaria, Jerusalem; none escape the prophet’s censure. The Biblical prophets do not look like an elite group connected to a royal court but seem rather to have been one of the folk, who, according to Dever, were all unabashed pagans!

Of course, it is not difficult to find references in the Bible to “canaanitish” religious practices in the countryside, but the “the people of the land” also acted in defense of religious orthodoxy. Their support for the Davidic dynasty made it among the most stable and longest lasting of any royal dynasty in the ancient world. And it was the “people of the land” who tore down the temple of Baal after the wicked queen Athalia was overthrown (2 Kings 11:18).  Likewise, during the Maccabean period, it was the rural areas outside of Jerusalem who opposed the Hellenizing faction in the city. There is no reason why a similar cultural dynamic could not have prevailed during the Iron Age as well. 

In any case, it is doubtful whether the picture painted by Dever of an impoverished and uneducated countryside is true to life even though we may never know for certain what degree of literacy prevailed there. Ancient Israel produced the most profound and beautiful texts in the ancient world. That such a remarkable literary output arose among an ignorant and unappreciative population hardly seems plausible. But we will save a more in-depth investigation into “folk religion” for later. For now it must be admitted that whenever the Judean prophets of the 8th-6th centuries BC spoke of idolatrous worship, they perceived it to have been a major departure from the faith and traditions of Israel.   Consider, for example, the cry of Jeremiah:

To use a modern parallel, consider the outcry that would surely ensue if the president of the United States announced that he would not be attending St. John’s Episcopal Church but the local Hindu temple instead.   Although there are undoubtedly a great many Episcopal churches today whose theology is closer to Hinduism than Christianity, and most American presidents are not devout Christians, they nevertheless feel they must flash their Christian credentials in order to get elected.  The question is, then, to what degree did Israelites living in the Iron Age share a historical, cultural, and religious awareness that rendered the words of the prophets intelligible, even if they did not always heed them?  And if they did share a common religious heritage, of what was its nature? 

Archaeology and the Religion of Ancient Israel

A newcomer to the field of archaeology may be forgiven for assuming that the archaeological evidence overwhelmingly supports the views of Dever, Ackermann, and Smith expressed above. And this is indeed the claim.

But the archaeological evidence clearly and definitively points in the opposite direction. Although it cannot be proved that the Israelites knew and obeyed all 613 laws of the Pentateuch, there are four in particular which lend themselves to archaeological investigation.

1. The command to worship Yahweh only (Ex. 20:3, Deut. 6:14)
2. The ban on making idols (Exod. 20:4-5)
3. The command to destroy and abandon Canaanite places of worship (Num. 33:52, Exod. 23:24, Deut. 7:5, 12:3-4).
4. The ban on necromancy and other rituals connected to the underworld

We will consider each of these under the following headings: text, image, temple, tomb. It will be seen that the culture of ancient Israel was quite different from those of surrounding peoples. These differences may clearly be discerned in the archaeological record.

The Third Order

But even if it were possible to prove that the ancient Israelite folk were all Bible-believing fundamentalists (hypothetically speaking of course) we are nevertheless confronted by the question epistemology. Dever doubts that Protestant scholars are capable of understanding the complex religious matrix of ancient Israel. Pressing home the point, Dever cites the Harvard professor of Jewish Studies, Jon Levenson, who characterizes the Protestant approach to the Old Testament as a search for “historical certitude” and the “systematization of religious beliefs.” In contrast, Jewish scholars have tended to take the same approach to the Hebrew Scriptures as non-Jews “not because of faith, but because of the lack of it, not in hopes of defining a theology, but of finding a replacement for theology.”³⁵Levenson 1987, 290; see also Dever 2005, 21-22 The total lack of “biblical theologies” among Jewish scholar who, according to Dever, lie closest to the stream of tradition that flows from the Hebrew scripture, makes Christian Old Testament theology “an enormous piece of hutzpah.”³⁶Dever 2002, 23

Indeed, in a remarkable piece of scientific positivism, Dever writes:

The myth of academic neutrality is precisely this, that a methodologically rigorous approach, unshackled from theology or philosophy, provides the surest path to understanding. But as the French scientist and mathematician Blaise Pascal observed, science properly conducted cannot be separated from matters of the heart. Pascal divided the realm of knowledge into three orders: nature, intellect, and charity.³⁹T. S. Eliot in the Introduction to Pensees, 1958, xix The order of nature requires rigorous experimentation, the order of intellect demands sound reasoning, and the order of charity requires spiritual understanding and intuition. Each must be given their due and none can be treated to the exclusion of the others. Although often overlooked or intentionally set aside, the order of charity is the most important of the three for it is where we get first principles such as ‘number’ and ‘language’ without which it is impossible to reason or think logically. Our understanding of what is good and beautiful comes from this order, and the knowledge of God “from whom are all things and for whom we exist” (1 Corinthians 8:6).

If archaeology belongs to the order of body and intellect, theology and philosophy deal largely with Pascal’s third order—the order of charity. Although it may be possible to maintain some level of objectivity by confining oneself to the first two orders, none can study archaeology without bringing theology and philosophy to the subject. This is especially true for the archaeology of ancient Israelite religion, so intertwined is it with Christianity, but it applies to ancient religions in general. For though one is not likely to find a devotee of Baal sacrificing on Carmel today, there is a sense in which a modern man, an Ugaritist, who appears to be a neutral arbiter of the truth, may keep a massebah in the closet next to his television.

Conclusion

The goal for what follows is twofold: 1) to show that “Old Testament theology” is an important aid to understanding the archaeology of ancient Israel, and 2) to make some connections between ancient and modern religion in order to show the continuity between them. I have divided the book into four sections, each dedicated to a certain type of archaeological evidence. We will begin in Pascal’s first order, with something dug out of the ground, before moving to a discussion of its interpretation and what theological and philosophical significance may be derived from it. Is it possible to draw a line between a Judaean ostracon, the theology of the name YHWH, and Hawking’s donut-shaped cosmos? Or between an ancient cosmogony, the Mosaic ban on idolatry, and Goethe’s Faust? I believe it is possible and may help us see that there is no place of neutrality in our quest for truth.

I should like to conclude by stating up front that I am not writing for academics and scholars but for you, my fellow travelers. I have nevertheless sought to include as many references as possible so that you may retrace my steps if you wish. I hope what follows may be of some benefit to you in your journey along life’s way.