Archaeology
Archaeology is vital for Biblical study because of the importance of history in Biblical revelation. Abraham was a real person, The miraculous Delivernce fro Egypt actually happened: The reliability of the record is part of the Truth of its teachings about the character annd purpose of God.
The two cannot be seperarted. The excavator does not dig indiscriminately: He selects his sites with define questions in mind, and tackles it with a view to solving certain defined problems. Work may be undertaken on a city, known to be active in Hellenistic and Roman times; with a viewing to secure a continuous and stratigraphically controlled corpus of pottery. Result
To bring the results of modern archaeology to bear on, the Sacred Scriputres, one would need to write a commentaryon almost every page of the Bible.
Most of the Assistance: the bible student gains from archaeolgy is indirect. It supplies the background for situations and incidents and even of customs. The stories of the Patriarchs in the Book of Genesis illustrates this:
The migration of Abram from Mesopotamia can be seen against the general movement of Amoritic peoples in the Middle Bronze Age. He moves around Caanan with his flocks, touching on towns like Hebron. This pattern of life matches the demography of Palestine around the nineteenth century B.C. At this time the populatio of the country was ethnically mixed, and and had different races.
