Monday, 10th May 2010
PROFESSOR HUGH WILLIAMSON (Oxford University)
THE BIBLE AND ARCHAEOLOGY - WHERE ARE WE NOW?
Arguments continue to rage about the proper association of archaeology with Biblical studies. Some continue to believe that archaeology should be used mainly as a handmaiden to Biblical history, supporting the written text and illustrating it where appropriate. Others take the completely opposite view and think that the history of Israel should be written exclusively on the basis of archaeology (this being first-hand evidence) and the Biblical account can then be seen to be largely erroneous and should be corrected accordingly. And of course, many others sit somewhere between one or other of these extremes. This lecture will be a very personal take on this dispute, drawing on the lecturer's experiences of excavation at Lachish and Jezreel while being professionally a teacher of the Hebrew Bible. He will suggest that the current debate has important issues of method to raise about the proper approach to ancient history but that both sides are guilty of misrepresenting one aspect of the topic or another; archaeology and textual study can be better viewed as complementary rather than as exclusive undertakings.
Hugh Williamson, who has been the chairman of our Society for twenty years, has been the Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford University since 1992. Before that, he studied and taught in Cambridge. While his main expertise is in the history of the literature of the Hebrew Bible he has always taken an active interest in the archaeology of Israel and its value for historical research. He excavated for four seasons at Lachish and for five at Jezreel, while administratively he has been much involved over the years with the Palestine Exploration Fund and the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (now the Kenyon Institute under the wider auspices of the Council for British Research in the Levant). His principal publications have been on the books of Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah and Isaiah.
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