History, Archaeology and Biblical Criticism

 

The Argument from Silence: History 101

One of the first principals I was taught when taking History 101 was NEVER to argue from silence.  This fallacy has been the bane of Biblical studies for over 150 years and continues to this day.

The fallacy is simply this: if one cannot find ‘corroborating proof’ to substantiate what a text says – either in other texts or through archaeological digs - then the text must be wrong and its author lying.

This mindset goes well beyond the legitimate historical caveat and principal of bias: that a given source might slant, embellish or vilify someone or some event out of personal prejudice or to gain favour with the intended audience*.

But such is the mindset of modern ‘historians’, archaeologists and Biblical Critics that in the absence of supporting evidence, anything stated in the Bible is  ‘suspect’ a priori.

 

So what should one do with silence?   The answer is be patient, wait and don’t pre-judge.

Two famous illustrations are the Trojan War and the Great Sphinx of Giza.

Homer’s Iliad and its central tale were long viewed as ‘fictitious’, as a story created for amusement with little if any basis in fact.  Troy was unknown outside of Homer and archaeological efforts to find the lost city failed – until Heinrich Schliemann – using clues from the text -- did uncover such a site on the coast of Turkey.

Another example is the Great Sphinx at Giza. According to the ancient Greek Herodotus, a spectacular and huge sphinx sat in front of the giant pyramids of Giza.  But anyone who visited the site, just outside of Cairo, in the last 500 or so years before 1798, found no such massive stone creature, and no signs of it ever having been there.  The desert landscape is flat to the horizon and only the pyramids are visible; so Herodotus must have been ‘misinformed’.

But thanks to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, someone noticed a bit of stone sticking out from the sand.  Ultimately, after five years of excavation – literally removing tonnes of sand – the Great Sphinx was reborn.  It had not been fictitious or demolished, just buried by hundreds of years of sand blowing against its long, flat sides.

To quote Wikipedia:

It is the largest monolith statue in the world, standing 73.5 metres (241 ft) long, 19.3 metres   (63 ft) wide, and 20.22 m (66.34 ft) high.^[1] It is the oldest known monumental sculpture, and is commonly believed to have been built by ancient Egyptians of the Old Kingdom during the reign of the Pharaoh Khafra (c. 2558–2532 BC).

 

Great Sphinx

 

 

 

 

 

So patience, and giving credence to one’s surviving sources, is key.

This is especially true as what has survived from the past both in the form of texts and archaeological remains is ‘fragmentary’ and often a matter of ‘luck’.

Similarly, except for another chance find during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, we might still not know how to read and understand hieroglyphics.  The language lapsed into disuse and became ‘lost’ well over a thousand years ago.  But thanks to the discovery of a stone fragment – now called the Rosetta Stone –  which is translated into 3 languages, including well known Greek, linguists were eventually able to work backwards and unlock the ancient Egyptian language of the pyramids, tombs and Book of the Dead.  The Rosetta Stone also introduced archaeologists and the world to a second, and until then unknown, later Egyptian script now called Demotic.

Put briefly, to argue from silence is a no-no, but a common temptation among archaeologists, historians and Biblical Critics -- who rely on the ‘luck of the dig’.

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* For instance, today’s newspapers and other media have biases along capitalist-socialist-communist lines and on a variety of issues from global warming to women’s rights.  Ownership hire staff who share their  ‘world views’ and slant stories and information to fit ownership’s ‘agenda’.  That is why one should try to read and view broadly, to get as many perspectives on a given issue as possible.

But even bias or slant is not the same as lying and concocting fictitious events.