Biblical archaeology

Biblical archaeology involves the recovery and scientific investigation of the material remains of past cultures that can illuminate the periods and descriptions in the Bible, be they from the Old Testament (Tanakh) or from the New Testament, as well as the history and cosmogony of the Judeo-Christian religions. The principal location of interest is what is known in the relevant religions as the Holy Land, which from a western perspective is also called the Middle East. The scientific techniques used are the same as those used in general archaeology, such as excavation and radiocarbon dating. In contrast, the archaeology of the ancient Middle East simply deals with the Ancient Near East, or Middle East, without giving any especial consideration to whether its discoveries have any relationship with the Bible.

Biblical archaeology is polemical as there are a number of points of view regarding the nature of its purpose. A number of points of view from important archaeologists are included in the section on Expert Commentaries.

In order to understand the significance of biblical archaeology it is first necessary to understand two basic concepts: archaeology as a scientific framework and the Bible as an object for research. Archaeology is a science, not in the Aristotelian sense of cognitio certa per causas but in the modern sense of systematic knowledge. Vicente Vilar expands on this point by stating that archaeology is both art and science: as an art it searches for the material remains of ancient civilizations and tries to reconstruct, as far as possible, the environment and the organizations of one or many historical epochs; as a relatively recent modern science, and as has said, it is a science that is barely 200 years old but that has, however, completely changed our ideas about the past.

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