The Bible and Recent Archaeology

by Kathleen Kenyon and Kathleen M. Kenyon

Book Overview

Never used. No highlighting or marks. Dust jacket intact. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0804200106
• ISBN13: 9780804200103
• Release Date: January 1978
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Length: 105 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.

Customer Reviews

ANOTHER MAJOR WORK FROM AN IMPORTANT ARCHAEOLOGIST OF BIBLE LANDS

Kathleen Mary Kenyon (1906-1978) was a leading archaeologist of Neolithic culture in the Fertile Crescent, best known for her excavations in Jericho in 1952-1958. (She was also the eldest daughter of Bible scholar and British Museum director Sir Frederic Kenyon.) She states in the Introduction of this 1978 book, that it is "intended for a general readership of those interested in the Bible and its setting, and NOT for specialists, be they textual critics, historians or archaeologists. The title consciously echoes that of my father's book, The Bible and archaeology, published in 1940. He had been induced to write it to place the Bible in its setting against the background of the vast increase in knowledge of the history of Western Asia.... there is bound to be a difference of approach in that I am an archaeologist, an excavator, whereas my father was a classical scholar and an authority on the textual criticism of the New Testament." Here are some of her observations: "the date and route of the Exodus has ... produced almost as many theories as there have been writers.... The one thing that is certainly out of the question (though quite reputable authors discuss it at length) is the chronology given in the Bible. It is conflicting within itself. A period of 400 years for the sojourn and the statement that the fourth generation from the descent into Egypt took part in the Exodus are so obviously incompatible that one must disregard the consecutive account as non-historical, and attempt to make the best one can of the evidence provided in the biblical record." "But one cannot fit in an Exodus during the reign of Rameses II, say, c. 1250 BC, followed by a leisurely progress across Sinai and up the desert fringes of Transjordan with a crossing of the Jordan and a destruction of Jericho which, on present archaeological evidence, must be somewhere about the beginning of the thirteenth century." "No actual remains of Solomonic Jerusalem have survived." "The picture of Solomonic Megiddo has therefore changed radically since The Bible and Archaeology was written in 1940. The Samaria excavations provided pottery evidence to prove that the 'Solomonic Stables' were not Solomonic ... and it can now be doubted whether they were really stables." If you want more information about Dame Kenyon, read Dame Kathleen Kenyon: Digging Up the Holy Land (UNIV COL LONDON INST ARCH PUB).