Archeology and History

Archeology and History.

In the treatment of this topic, as of many other topics relating to ancient times, no hard-and-fast line can be drawn. History proper should cover the entire religious and political life of a people. It should present their laws, customs, and manners. It should also, when occasion requires, include their relations to neighboring peoples, politically, socially, and commercially. Archeology has to do with but a part of this material. It concerns itself with the interrelationships of the people in domestic, civil, and religious life. It goes further, and includes in itself a consideration of the character of the land where they live, and of their social, industrial, artistic, and literary organizations and features.

Biblical Archeology depends for its material upon a mass of ancient literature and antiquities. It will be impossible for the student of archeology to utilize to advantage the literary material, especially of the Old Testament, without due regard to the literary processes by which it was prepared. Much of the available material of archeology is secured from literature, but only after it has been subjected to the most searching critical processes. In fine, archeology at large finds in literature one of its best sources of information and one the testimony of which can not be set aside. Nevertheless, at the bottom, beneath all the literary activity of the people, lie, of course, the conditions under which the Israelites produced their literature. Hence, while much that is of value to archeology is found in Israel's literature, a knowledge of archeology will include information concerning the land which nourished that literature. There is, consequently, a kind of necessary interdependence between these two branches of knowledge—literature and its native soil.

Judaic, Archeology and Biblical

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