It is a strange but telling irony that both the validity of the Bible as well as the validity of worldviews most strongly opposed to the Bible both depend to a great degree on the humble work of the spade in archeology. The Bible, for example, speaks of the history of Israel and its surrounding regimes, and those who believe that the account is trustworthy and accurate throughout history have simply understood that the vagaries of preservation and our lack of knowledge of the historical relics in the ground beneath our feet have led to much of that knowledge being forgotten and no longer seen in evidence. The faith of these people has largely been rewarded by the discoveries of such finds as the Tel Amarna and Mari Tablets as well as the areas of Ugarit, the Hittite Empire, Babylon, and Nineveh, which have validated and expanded the historical and social context of the Bible and shown the Bible to be a faithful recorder of facts moral and historical about those places and the regimes who ran them. Those who oppose the Bible, on the other hand, have been of the belief that the Bible is untrustworthy at a historical work (largely because of an unwillingness to accept the moral strictures of Scripture) and have placed their faith in different archeology-based studies, such as the belief in fictitious chains of intermediate beings who, after more than a century and a half of search, have never yet showed themselves to human investigators. Yet those same scientists themselves, who proud themselves on being a rational and empirical lot, have never seen that faith redeemed, but continue to hold on to their faith despite the lack of evidence to support their cosmological claims, with their abhorrent moral implications.

Despite the success of archeologists in digging up many ancient cities and discovering the historical reality of many ancient near east personages than we had known before by seeing the physical presence of their lives and reigns, to say nothing of our greater knowledge of the lives of ordinary and obscure people much less likely to leave a solid mark on the historical record because of their obscurity, there are still major gaps in our knowledge due to the imperfection of our abilities to recover that which has been lost to our knowledge because of the ravages of time, the great destroyer. In light of the fact that our knowledge is imperfect, but based on what knowledge we do possess, we can look into biblical history with the knowledge that it speaks accurately about historical realities (and that its moral judgments, while certainly given from a very strong perspective that may not often be our own by nature, are equally sound), even if we may not yet have the evidence to back up that belief. Then we go about looking for that evidence and expecting to find it eventually.

An example of a possible historical mystery of this kind is in Ecclesiastes 9:13-15: “This wisdom I have also seen under the sun, and it seemed great to me: There was a little city with few men in it, and a great king came against it, besieged it, and built great snares around it. Now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city. Yet no one remembered that same poor man.” We might be tempted to think this a merely proverbial sort of statement without any sort of firm historical basis. Yet we know from our knowledge of history, for example, that humble men through their wisdom and alertness have saved their cities from great armies before. The example of the tenacity of the people of Vienna saving their city (which apparently may have included some forgotten historical culinary wisdom through my favorite breakfast pastry [1]) has largely been forgotten while credit has been given to the Viennese and Polish rulers who came to their aid, largely because the Viennese themselves were burghers and not aristocrats. In light of this sort of historical reality, and the fact that the Middle East has always been a place of immense conflict and a fertile ground for religious reflection in light of human error and folly, there is little doubt that Solomon could have seen or known about such a historical incident in his own time or through his examination of history [2], and therefore our lack of knowledge about this is not because the story is not true (even if it is told in a vague and general manner for its moral relevance rather than with scholarly precision as part of a proper history).

There is also one indisputable mystery about the Bible when it comes to ancient realms and their rulers that has been the subject of fascinating interest for a variety of reasons. The same part of the Bible that first introduces the shadowy and fascinating character of Melchizedek, King-priest of Salem (with all of its Christological significance) also introduces four equally shadowy but powerful kings engaged in a pillaging raid that ends up leading them to defeat in the face of Abraham and his small army of armed servants: Chedorlaomer, king of Elam, Amraphel, king of Shinar, Arioch, king of Ellasar, and Tidal, a tribal king of various peoples. Given the names and our knowledge of the history of the early second millennium (which remains scanty), between the fall of the Old Assyrian Empire and the rise of the Old Babylonian Empire of Hammurabi and his successors, we know that such a time period saw the rise and fall of many mini-empires and regimes which did not long outlive the founders of their states. The Bible, of course, contains one huge example of such a mini-empire in the Empire of David and Solomon, as well as a smaller and even more short-lived Empire of Jeroboam II and his Judean neighbors to the south. Given a knowledge of the names, it appears that the four allied kings came from four different regions, Elam in what now Iran/Persia, Shinar in southern Mesopotamia, Ellasar in northern Mesopotamia, and Tidal’s force from Anatolia (given the Hittite origin of his name in this period before the Hittite Empire was formed). We can thus see in this coalition [3] an example of alliance building between four moderate sized regimes, of which Elam appears to be the most distant and the most powerful at this time, and assume that the Bible’s account of this invasion, which demonstrates Abraham as a considerably important person on the same level as the petty kings of city-states at the time (which is over and over again discussed in Genesis), is basically trustworthy even if the specific kings and their regimes cannot be known with any certainty.

Our attitudes towards mysteries like this depends both on our reasonableness as well as our knowledge and acceptance of the accurate state of knowledge that we have about our past. If we assume that the evidence we uncover is basically trustworthy, it stands to reason as well that we will similarly view the Bible, in giving confirmation of those discoveries, is equally trustworthy. This, of course, has been the contention of sound biblical scholars such as K.A. Kitchen [4]. Our assumption that the Bible is basically untrustworthy, though, would be in violation of that which we do know about history and archeology, rather than in accordance with what we do know. We may therefore ponder the mysteries that remain in the knowledge that the Bible’s viewpoint is reliable, even if we may at this time lack the evidence to specifically confirm in it every instance. The work of the spade still remains to be done, but the basic accuracy of the Bible’s perspective on the past can be taken as reliable, even if it does not tell the whole story. For what would life be like if there was no mystery in it?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vienna

[2] This presumes, of course, a Solomonic authorship of Ecclesiastes:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/06/20/a-case-for-solomonic-authorship-of-ecclesiastes/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/a-case-for-solomonic-authorship-of-ecclesiastes-part-two/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/06/22/a-case-for-solomonic-authorship-of-ecclesiastes-part-three/

[3] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/genesis-14and-ancient-coalition-warfare-2/

[4] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/06/09/book-review-on-the-reliability-of-the-old-testament/