ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 8, 1996 TAG: 9612090110
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: HAZOR, ISRAEL
SOURCE: DAVID BRIGGS ASSOCIATED PRESS
Amnon Ben-Tor is an archeologist who doubts anything he can't dig up. He takes nothing in the Bible on faith.
Yet, standing in a trench on a hot, barren mountainside, he stares into the fire-blackened stone and sees an army destroying the Canaanite city of Hazor 3,200 years ago.
Just as it says in the Book of Joshua.
``Hazor was destroyed by fire'' when the invading Israelites claimed their Promised Land, Ben-Tor said. ``Nobody can prove to me the story in Joshua is entirely fiction.''
From the Northern Hills of Israel to the desert of Yemen, a string of recent archaeological discoveries have provided the first hard evidence for a number of biblical figures and events, many of which had been widely dismissed as myths and moral tales.
Individually, the discoveries are important. Together, they are shaking the field of biblical archaeology and buttressing words believers have taken on faith.
They also have political implications in a region where Jewish and Palestinian claims to the land rest in part on events dating back to the time of Abraham.
In this volatile mix of archaeology, religion and politics, the most important of the new discoveries is evidence for the existence of King David.
The Bible says the child David slew the Philistine giant Goliath and went on to found Jerusalem, which this year is celebrating its 3,000th anniversary as the City of David.
David's story is an exciting tale of murder, adultery, political deceit and extraordinary faith and courage. The story is so fantastic, many biblical scholars have long thought that even David himself must have been made up.
Then came what Seymour Gitin of the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in East Jerusalem calls ``one of the greatest finds of the 20th century.''
In 1993, Israeli archaeologists digging in Tel Dan in the Golan Heights unearthed a piece of stone from an ancient monument, or stele. Inscribed on it, in ancient Aramaic, were the words ``King of Israel'' and ``House of David.''
The story so shook some scholars that they insisted the find was phony or the inscription incorrectly translated. A year later, however, archaeologists found more fragments of the stele with additional inscriptions referring to the ancient king.
The new scholarly consensus is that David was real. Not because the Bible says so, said Ronny Reich of the Israeli Antiquities Authority, but because ``archaeology has found it.''
The rock on which David's name was found is only one of the recent finds consistent with biblical accounts - discoveries that may be ushering in a new golden age of biblical archaeology.
*Recent expeditions at Shechem, where the Bible says Abraham built an altar to God, prove an organized community existed there during Abraham's time, nearly 4,000 years ago.
*This summer, archaeologists digging in a kibbutz in Central Israel found a stone tablet with a Phonecian inscription bearing the name of the city of Ekron, the fabled city where, according to the book of I Samuel, the Philistines took the Ark of the Covenant after capturing it from the Israelites.
*Recent excavations have uncovered a string of ancient Egyptian forts along the Sinai's Mediterranean coast. The discovery offers a plausible explanation for an Exodus story that has long puzzled scholars - why would Moses lead his people out of Egypt through the Sinai wilderness instead of along the shorter coastal route.
*This summer, archaeologists sifting through a 2,000-year-old garbage dump at Masada in Southern Israel unearthed a wine jug inscribed with the name of King Herod. It was the first object ever found bearing the name of the Judean king mentioned in the Gospels.
*An ivory pomegranate purchased in the international antiquities market by Israeli authorities for $550,000 in 1988 is now believed by many scholars to be the first relic ever found from Solomon's Temple. According to the Bible, the magnificent temple - generally dated to 950 B.C. - housed the Ark of the Covenant. An inscription on the pomegranate has been translated as ``Holy to the priests, belonging to the temple of Yahweh.''
No archaeologists are saying everything in the Bible is literally true.
``How reliable is the Bible?'' Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, asks rhetorically. ``The answer is it has a sound historical core. What is heating up now is an academic battle between those who deny this and those who affirm it.''
Some researchers accept the recent discoveries as proof that biblical accounts of Exodus and the conquest of the Promised Land are generally true. Others continue to insist that the events never occurred and the major figures of the Old Testament, from Jacob to Solomon, never existed.
The debate centers on figures and events that are important to three of the world's major religions - Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
At the center of the dispute is Israel Finkelstein, a professor at Tel Aviv University. On a warm day, the tall, thin, bearded archaeologist scampers up and down a slope, supervising scores of volunteers digging at Tel Megiddo, the mountaintop where the book of Revelation says the final battle between good and evil will take place.
They are searching for artifacts of the Iron Age and Late Bronze Age.
It was during those times, according to the Bible, that the Jews were claiming their Promised Land: Joshua conquered Canaan, and during the fighting, the ancient Canaanite city of Megiddo was defeated.
His work here, Finkelstein said, is proof that this never happened.
He has found evidence that Megiddo was still standing a century after Joshua supposedly conquered Canaan.
Those who dispute these findings, Finkelstein said, are practicing ``nationalistic archaeology'' that puts politics ahead of scholarship.
``I'm just a simple soldier in the forces of evolution,'' he said.
Less than 60 miles away, at Tel Hazor, short, burly Ben-Tor stands in the ruins of a once-magnificent Canaanite palace and supervises workers digging in the heat.
Finkelstein, Ben-Tor said angrily, is supplying ``anti-Semites with a fig leaf'' by attacking the traditional accounts of Israeli nationhood.
God grant him money and time, Ben-Tor said, and Hazor will be the place where Finkelstein's ``idiotic theory can be destroyed.''
Already, he said, his excavations have uncovered evidence that Hazor was destroyed by a terrible fire, and its Canaanite and Egyptian statues destroyed, in the late second millennium B.C. The findings support the biblical account of Joshua's triumph.
Discoveries at Hazor also show the city was occupied again by the 10th century B.C., supporting biblical accounts of King Solomon's reign.
Eventually, Ben-Tor said, ``someone will find an inscription with Solomon's name on it.''
How will such proof, or the lack of it, affect people of faith?
Camille Killam, a graduate student at Southeastern Baptist University working on the dig at Tel Hazor, said no archaeological discovery could change her beliefs.
``It wouldn't happen. It wouldn't happen,'' she said. ``I believe in God's word.''
A recent editorial in Christianity Today, the leading evangelical magazine, encourages conservative Christians to support biblical archaeology because evidence for the historical accuracy of the Bible bolsters faith.
``Evangelicals are committed to fostering a belief in the trustworthiness of Scripture,'' the editorial states. ``That requires both argument and evidence.''
James Sauer, a Harvard University archaeologist and former president of the American Schools of Oriental Research, never put much faith in the trustworthiness of the Bible's early stories.
But today, he goes so far as to assert a historical basis for one of the Bible's most ancient stories - the story of Noah.
The Middle East was not always such a dry place, Sauer said. In Yemen, the Hula Lake region of Israel and the Empty Quarter in Saudi Arabia, he and others have found evidence of flooding during the Early Bronze Age.
``What I'm saying,'' he said, ``is there was a flood in the Middle East that became recorded as the Flood of the Old Testament.''
From his St. Louis home, where he is in the debilitating stages of Huntington's disease, Sauer said he wants evidence of the flood to be his final legacy.
For most of his life, he said, he thought the story of the Great Flood was a fable that ``did not contain any historical memory. Yet, in my research as a scientist, I came up with this evidence that supports the Bible.''
LENGTH: Long : 155 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Archaeologist Israel Finkelstein (left) of Tel Avivby CNBUniversity supervises Dick Andrus of Salt Lake City at the Tel
Megiddo excavation in Israel. Finkelstein believes his findings
disprove the biblical story that Joshua destroyed the city of
Megiddo. color.