Shanks Unearths the History of the Bible

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 25, 2000 | by Stephen Goode

An interest in biblical archaeology motivated Hershel Shanks to trade his legal pad for an editor's notebook to bring Bible scholarship to a wide popular audience.

Hershel Shanks was a Washington attorney in private practice when he decided "to create a year's sabbatical for myself, my wife and my two daughters" and go to Israel, he tells Insight. It was 1972; Shanks hadn't taken courses in the Bible or in archaeology in college, but that's what he was interested in -- biblical archaeology.

At first Shanks worked on a novel about King Saul but, after 300 typewritten pages, he decided that a novelist he wasn't and turned to writing "a little pamphlet" about an archeological site known as Hezekiah's Well that played an important part in Sennacherib's unsuccessful siege of Jerusalem in 701 B.C.

The little pamphlet turned into a "little book," Shanks says. It was published and reviewed in the Jerusalem Post, which said that of the many articles published on Jerusalem this one was so different as to stand out. Shanks still practiced law, but archaeology of the Bible became a passion. He founded a new quarterly, Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR), in 1974 which 26 years later comes out six times a year and is a highly regarded popular summary of what's going on in the field. He also edits Archaeology Odyssey, Bible Review and Moment. They are headquartered at Shanks' Biblical Archaeology Society in Washington.

Insight: One of the very hot issues in biblical archaeology today is whether David and Solomon ever existed at all. The so-called "minimalist school" of scholars says that King David and King Solomon are fictitious figures invented by writers who wanted to invent a great past for Israel. Isn't this the kind of scholarly position sometimes taken just to attract press attention?

Hershel Shanks: Yes. If someone were to say that David lived, that is not going to make headlines. If someone says that David never lived, then that's going to make headlines.

Insight: On what basis do they argue that figures as familiar to almost everyone as David and Solomon never existed?

HS: For the Jerusalem of the 10th century B.C. -- the time of David and Solomon and the united kingdom -- you have very little archaeological evidence. In fact you have very little evidence of the habitation of Jerusalem at that time. For the minimalists, this is enough to say that there was no city there. They ask, "Wouldn't there be evidence if Jerusalem were the great city that was the capital of David and Solomon?" Of course it would be nice if we had more evidence.

Insight: But is there some evidence that's outside of the Bible, outside of the stories of David and Solomon in the Old Testament?

HS: It just so happens -- it's almost as if God were ordering it -- that a distinguished archeologist in Israel, digging in Tel-Dan, dug up a fragment in 1993 of a stela that mentions the house or dynasty of David that dates about 150 years after David's time. If we didn't have that chance find, the minimalists would have a much stronger case. Personally, I think they go much too far.

Insight: Biblical archaeology can produce some heated debates, can't it? No doubt millions are offended by the claim that David never existed, for example.

HS: Yes, religious belief matters. In addition to Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR), I have another magazine, Archaeology Odyssey, which covers archaeology from Spain to Persia--nonbiblical archaeology -- so I have some basis for comparison. In BAR, everything is controversial! No matter what the question is, somebody else is saying, "No, you don't have it right! That's not right at all." There simply isn't the same passion in other fields of archaeology.

For example, in BAR we've run three articles on the precise location on the Temple Mount where the temple was, and each of them is slightly different. People care about that in a way they certainly don't care about whether the temple on the Roman Forum was here or there or some other place.

Insight: You've been doing archaeology now for nearly three decades. How have computers and other kinds of modern technology changed the field?

HS: In the old days, archaeology was more of a treasure hunt. You were looking for pieces that would go to museums. Today there's a major shift. We're trying to understand ancient life. We're trying to understand how ordinary people lived, not necessarily pharaohs and kings, what the ordinary people ate, from what they died, how they earned a living.

In order to learn these things you can retrieve old grain, bones of animals and fish, pots that are otherwise uninteresting. You retrieve old pollen, even fecal material, coprolites.

Insight: Does the computer help in all this?

HS: With the computer you can deal with millions of little "factlets," creating the danger you're going to be overrun by all your data, drowned in detail, because there's no limit on operations that can be performed to examine possible implications of the data.

Take pottery, which is extremely important for dating purposes. The ages of various sites can be determined by differences in the forms of the pottery found at the sites. But you also can do other things with pottery. You can perform thermoluminescence tests. You can perform neutron-activation analysis, petrographic analysis. You can perform color tests. What kind of stuff was it painted with or burnished with?