Is the Old Testament True? (Interview)

It’s God’s Word, but how many people today believe that it’s true? I’m Charles Morris and welcome to Haven Today from Chicago and have we got a treat in store for you. In the next few minutes, we’ll be joined by a real life Indiana Jones, an Egyptologist and archeologist who also happens to love Jesus. And last week, Oxford University Press released his new book where he offers his findings on where the Israelites crossed the sea out of Egypt. So, this is a program you won’t want to miss, a program called, “Is the Old Testament True?” Let’s start now by worshipping the Lord together with the music of Haven from their acapella album.

Song: A Mighty Fortress is Our God
Performed by: Haven
This is Haven Today and we are coming to you from Chicago. And I am with Dr. James Hoffmeier and he’s a professor of Near Eastern History and Archeology at Trinity International University’s Divinity School. And Jim Hoffmeier, I want to welcome you to Haven Today.
JH: Great to be with you.
CM: Jim, I’m going to be talking to you more about what you do. You are an Egyptologist, you’re an archeologist, you’re a Biblical scholar and as I look at you, you might even look a little bit like Harrison Ford too.
JH: Ah, he didn’t have a beard.
CM: OK, good, good point. All right. Jim, you spent a number of years digging in Egypt and we’re going to be talking, as we go on, about a very important new location that you’ve been working in. But first of all, I’d like to just read you a quote and get you to comment on this quote because I think this is pretty important. It’s by a scholar, K.W. Whitelum who says, “It is the historian and not the theologian who must set the agenda, the death of Biblical History.” Do you believe Biblical History can be true and do you believe like this scholar is saying, that it’s dead?
JH: Well, Professor Whitelum belongs to a small but influential group of scholars today that we call historical minimalists. Historical minimalists believe that there is a minimal amount of historical reality represented in the pages of the Bible and so he is one of the spokespersons for this position. And naturally I am the loyal, or friendly, opposition to that position.
CM: We probably have a lot of Haven Today listeners who are believers in Jesus Christ and hopefully faithfully read their Bibles and they would say, “If the Bible says it, well I believe it.” But you send your kid off to college and depending on where you send them, and some of their professors are not going to say you can believe it just because it is in the Bible.
JH: That’s true. And that, of course, is the dilemma we all face today. I would subscribe to the view that the Bible should be treated like any other ancient document. That used to sound a radical. Back in the 19th century when the church and Christendom had such a strong hold on the universities in Europe, the liberal scholars as they were trying to break away from the clutches of Christendom, there mantra was, “we need to treat the Bible like any other literature.” I still use that cry because I think as a historian, we should treat all ancient sources with the same respect. In other words, if an Egyptian document, or a Babylonian document or a Hebrew document makes a claim that person “x” did “y”, I see no reason to doubt that until there’s evidence to the contrary. So as a historian, I try to take that approach into my reading of the Bible or my reading of ancient Egyptian texts.
CM: Good point. Let’s take it back a little bit maybe even before what you just referred to, the coming of the Enlightenment. Some people in the days of the Enlightenment started to debunk the Bible, Thomas Payne being one. But you couldn’t be scientific and believe the Bible could be true, could you?
JH: The Enlightenment kicked off a movement that was largely anti-theological and rational, scientific thought was said to be the way to go. And for the last 200 years, Enlightenment thinking has dominated the academic world of Europe and America. And with an Enlightenment approach it basically dismissed the idea of revelation, dismissed the idea of the miraculous, only that which could be scientifically explained could be believed. So when the Bible spoke of things such as resurrections, waters parting and these sorts of marvelous events, these would be debunked, dismissed. So Enlightenment thinking has certainly dominated the academy until recent times. That has been the world view that has shaped the educational system that most of us were brought up in.
CM: I must say, 30 years ago I took an Old Testament Introduction course at a Southern Baptist college by a man who professed faith in Christ and had to sign a statement of faith. The textbook, though that was used was taking into account natural explanations for the Israelites crossing out of Egypt, crossing the water and the plagues and, but it also was into something called “source criticism” or “higher criticism”. You want to tell us a little bit about what that is, and that came with the Enlightenment too, I guess?
JH: Well, let me answer the first question first.
CM: All right.
JH: the question about miracles and miracles vs. natural occurrences. I think this is an unnecessary dichotomy that many Christians will set aside a naturalistic explanation because somehow they think that doesn’t make God look good. My world view as a Christian views everything that happens in the created order as being something that is under God’s Sovereign control. So, for instance, if it is an earthquake that causes the waters to stop so that Joshua and the Israelites could cross the Jordan River, I have no problem with an earthquake being the phenomenon that God uses. After all, we’re told in Amos chapter 1 that there is this massive earthquake in the days of Uzziah and the prophet describes this as God roaring from Zion his disapproval at the people. So if God is using an earthquake in Amos’ day to judge and to warn the people, why can he not use an earthquake in Joshua’s day to stop the waters of the Jordan River so the Israelites could cross into the Promised Land? My approach is that God is in Sovereign control and so I do not find it offensive to say that there may be natural explanations for things. To say that really reflects the scientific world view. For the believer there is no difference between natural and supernatural because all are under God’s Sovereign control, so that’s my approach to the first part of that.
CM: The Enlightenment started bringing in something called “documentary hypothesis”, “source criticism”, “higher criticism”, why don’t you give a run at that. You’re doing great so far.
JH: Well, this really goes back to about 1700. It was thought by, actually he was a Swiss medical doctor, Jean Astruch, who I believe was a court physician for one of the “Louis’” of France. He read Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 and thought he saw two different creation stories where God created man in his image in chapter one and God formed man out of the dust of the ground in chapter 2. And he noticed in Genesis 1 through 2:4a, God or the Hebrew word, “Elohim” is said to be the creator. When you get to Genesis 2:4b and on, Jehovah, the Divine name, Yaweh, is used as the creator and this led to the thought that there were actually two different creation stories and that these two stories reflected two different traditions, perhaps oral traditions, that have been preserved in different parts of Israel and that these were at a later date brought together by yet a third person, an editor, who wove together these earlier stories. And so this was, in a sense, a rationalistic explanation to how the Bible came into being. It was also influenced by evolution. We tend to think of evolution as just biological, and that the theory of evolution means that animals developed from simple to more complex life forms. Well, if you buy into evolutionary theory, then it logically follows that humans also socially and intellectually developed from simple to complex. So the Bible, or say the Book of Genesis is simply too complex for one person in some ancient time to have written. It had to evolve and it had to come from simpler forms and be put together in this complex form. So there really is the intellectual evolutionary theory was applied to social, literature and other fields of science, not just biology.
CM: So in the beginning, since the early 1700’s some people have been reading this source theory into the Bible, but then the last 20 years there’s been another strain that has come out. And I guess well, you and your new book – and we’ll tell people about your new book that Oxford University Press has out now – but there is also a “Postmodern” reading of the Bible as well, and that’s a little different. Do you want to tell us about that?
JH: Yes, let me clarify. The so called rationalistic or post Enlightenment world view that has dominated western thought for so long is sometimes also called the Modern view of things. What has happened in the last 20, 30 years within the academic world is a development called “Postmodernism”. In a sense, Postmodernism is a critique of Modernism. For the Postmodernist, modernism, or the scientific world view doesn’t answer all the questions. So in a sense, a Christian can resonate with that because they say of course science doesn’t answer all the questions. If science answered all the questions there would be no sociologists, no psychologists, no one studying feelings and all these other elements to humans that just can’t fit into the scientific realm. And so postmodernity really is a critique of the sure and assured conclusions of the scientific world view. Now this is being applied to literature and not only literature in general, whether it’s Melville or Shakespeare, but also the Bible. The destructive part of postmodernism as it comes to the area of literature and the Bible is that the postmodern interpreter basically believes that he or she is the ultimate authority and interpreter of the text. It doesn’t matter what the author intended. It doesn’t matter what the original context was. What matters is what you, the reader, think it means. Postmodern literary approaches typically look at the Bible as literature and literature only and therefore they tend to dismiss or at least marginalize the historical. And that, of course, is the danger of postmodern literary approaches to the Bible.
CM: So we’re living in a world right now where – and I’m going to steal this from your new book as well as the last book you wrote for Oxford Press – the academic community, whether it’s an English course or whether it’s a Bible course, is going to have doubts about the authenticity of the scripture and it’s almost like you’re guilty until you’re proven innocent. You have to prove innocence here, not the other way around like the American legal system, right?
JH: Yes, that of course is the issue. If the Bible makes a claim that Moses led the people out of Egypt, the postmodernist, and really many of the modernists, the post-Enlightenment rationalists, would also say that you need extra-Biblical evidence. If there is some sort of documentation then we can accept that there was a Moses who led the Israelites out of Egypt. But the Bible can’t be its own testimony. It’s like if you go to court, you cannot use your own testimony against yourself. A witness has to come from the outside either to vindicate you or to judge you as being guilty. Now, many of those who adopt the postmodern treatment, they would even dismiss an external source. They would say ultimately the text can only mean what me, the reader thinks it means. So even some postmodernists would say where there is an extra-Biblical source that too is a literary work and therefore it can’t be used to prove the Bible.
CM: Jim, let me just slip something in right here in what you’re saying. There was a very famous stele, or I guess that’s a carved rock that was discovered in the last century. Do you want to tell us about that?
JM: Well, actually it was found in the century before that. It was discovered in 1896, or published in 1896, discovered in 1895, discovered by Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie. A stele is like a tombstone. You think of a tombstone as a slab of stone, rounded at the top and that’s what we call a stele. And we have these in the Bible they’re called Ayad, a hand, because it’s shaped just like a hand. But remember King Saul set up one of these and got himself in trouble because he was glorifying his victories. But the Stele you’re referring to was from the funerary temple of the King Merneptah. Merneptah was the son and successor of the great Ramses the Second. When people don’t know who I’m referring to when I say Ramses the Second, I say Yule Brenner from The Ten Commandments. And they’ll say, “oh yeah now I know who you’re talking about.” So it’s Yule Brenner’s son, Merneptah. And he reigned approximately from 1213 BC to 1203 BC, for about 10 years he reigned. And he conducted a military campaign into the land of Canaan and fought a number of people. He mentions cities that he fought and claims to have conquered, including cities that we know from the Bible like Ashkelon and Gezer, and he also is said to encounter a people called Israel. So we know that there was a group of people living in the land of Canaan that the Egyptians recognized as Israel about 1208 BC. So there was definitely a people called Israel, in the Promised Land at that time.
CM: Wow, we have just gotten started here and we haven’t even gotten to your find that you have made which I think is very important and people need to hear about, so I’d like to have you back again tomorrow. But, as a person of faith and you are a believer, you said you were a believer in Jesus Christ. How can we read the Bible with faith? How can we read the Bible, how can we send our kids off to college somewhere where they’re going to hear something differently? How does faith work into this?
JH: I’m always both challenged and encouraged by what Paul says in 1 Corinthians where he says, “I pray with my mind and I pray with my spirit.” And I think that for a student who is in that critical context of a secular college or university, don’t be afraid to use your mind, but also perceive and understand what you’re looking at by your spirit. And I think it’s that balance because there’s an old saying that the heart cannot rejoice in that which the mind rejects as false. So one always has to think about these things, and if you look carefully at an argument that is presented, you will usually find an underlying assumption. And you have to take a look at what that assumption is. And invariably the assumption that is negative towards the Bible is the one that you have to be suspicious of, because you have to ask, why is it that they come to the Bible with this negative assumption? What is their agenda? And if you ask that question, then you usually come out realizing that the person who is questioning the Bible has some issue that is shaping their thinking, their assumptions and how they read the Bible.
CM: All right. Jim Hoffmeier, thank you. We’re going to get you to tell us where the Israelites crossed the sea tomorrow, so thanks and come back again tomorrow on the program, please.
JH: It’ll be my pleasure.

Song:
Performed by: Haven

Thanks for joining us on Haven Today and I promise tomorrow we’ll talk in detail with Dr. Hoffmeier about his discoveries relating to the crossing of the sea by the Israelites out of Egypt. Now this new book of his, “Ancient Israel in Sinai” was just published last week by Oxford University Press. It is an academic book, but if you have a keen interest in the Old Testament and you like to read, then this book is for you. It’s filled with new maps and charts, even satellite photos by NASA and we’re asking the retail price of this hard back, academic book, $50 with shipping included as a gift to Haven and we’ll get it out to you right away. You’re not going to find this in a book store yet. We’ll also include on CD the two interviews with this world class scholar. And we have the acapella album by Haven that you heard open the program today. You might want that as well. Here’s how to make your gift. You can give online and read more about this just published book by going to haventoday.org, that’s haventoday.org. Or by calling 1-800-65-HAVEN, that’s 1-800-65-HAVEN. Let me give you our mailing address as well, especially if you’d like to mail us a prayer request. You can mail that and send a gift too, to:
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I’m Charles Morris. Come back again tomorrow, Jim Hoffmeier with us. We’ll be talking more about the Sinai and where the Israelites crossed the sea out of Egypt, here on Haven Today.