The Bible as History [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION *'The greatest happiness of the thinking man is to have fathomed what can be fathomed, and quietly to reverence what is unfathomable** Goethe When a non-theologîan writes a book about the Bible it is a rare enough occurrence to entitle the teader to ask for some explanation of how the writer managed to make himself master of his subject. As a journalist I have been for many years exclusively concerned with the results of modem science and research. In 1950 in the course of my ordinary routine work I came across the reports of the French archaeologists Professors Parrot and Schaeifer on their excavations at Man and Ugarit. Cuneiform tablets discovered at Mari on the Euphrates were found to contain Biblical names. As a result, narratives of the patriarchs which had been for a long time regarded as merely pious tales were unexpectedly transferred into the realm of history. At Ugarit on the Mediterranean, evidence ofthe Canaanite worship of Baal had for the first time come to light. By a coincidence, a scroll of Isaiah discovered in a cave by the Dead Sea was in the same year dated as pre-Christian. These sensational reports—and indeed in view ofthe significance of these finds it is not too much to use the word "sensational"—awakened in me the desire to come to closer grips with Biblical archaeology, the most recent and, generally speaking, least known province in the field of investigation into the ancient world. I therefore ransacked German and foreign literature for a comprehensive and intelligible summary of the results of previous research. I found none for there was none to find. So I went to the sources myself in the libraries of many lands—aided in this bit of real detective work by my wife's enthusiasm—and collected all the hitherto scientifically established results of investigations which were to be found in