Holy Ground: The Faith-Fueled Science Behind the Birth of Biblical Archaeology
(REVIEW) In 1838, two American clergymen — Edward Robinson and Eli Smith — set out for the Holy Land, spades in one hand and Bibles in the other, as the famous saying goes.
Robinson, a professor at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, aimed to conduct the first systematic survey of Palestine and Sinai. Smith, a Christian missionary with experience in the Middle East, was fluent in Arabic and joined the expedition as translator.
Men of faith but also of science, they took meticulous notes on every topographical feature they encountered — from the banks of the Red Sea to the craggy heights of Mount Sinai to the subterranean pools beneath Jerusalem’s ancient streets — guided by Biblical passages in which these and other locations figured prominently.
The record of their journey, “Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea,” published in 1841, was not only the culmination of Robinson’s “ardent wishes,” as he wrote, to travel to the Holy Land, but it also established the Congregationalist clergyman as the “father of biblical archaeology.”
Robinson’s combined pursuit of inspiration and information — as opposed to exploration, conquest or trade — characterized the era explored in the new book, “The Victorians and the Holy Land,” by Oxford University science historian Allan Chapman.
Chapman begins with the fifth-century BCE Greek historian Herodotus, who made passing references to Palestine in his multi-volume “Histories.” He was more intrigued, like many later Jewish and early Christian travelers, by the pyramids. The prevailing belief was that they were granaries, built under the direction of Joseph, the Jewish vizier to Pharaoh, to store the seven-year surplus of grain described in Genesis. It was medieval Muslims who first identified the pyramids as tombs, tunneling into the Great Pyramid in an unsuccessful search for treasure.
Yet the myth of the pyramids as granaries remained largely unchallenged among Europeans for centuries, until figures like Italian circus strongman, engineer and proto-archaeologist Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778–1832) began exploring the pyramids and other ancient sites with a more critical eye.
Technological advances soon followed. Photography was still in its infancy when the first photographers arrived in the Middle East in the mid-1860s. Their bulky cameras, tripods and labor-intensive “wet-plate” process required chemicals and portable darkrooms—equipment ill-suited to archaeological digs and useless in the dim interiors of tombs.
Another Italian, Charles Piazzi Smyth (1819–1900), a compulsive measurer of the pyramids, devised a solution. He invented a small camera that produced proportionally smaller negatives, which could later be enlarged in a studio. He also used magnesium flash powder to briefly illuminate the interiors of tombs and pyramid chambers with bright white light. Despite his technical contributions to photography, Smyth is remembered as something of a crackpot; his obsessive interest in the pyramids’ dimensions was rooted in “pyramidology,” a now-discredited school of thought that attributed mystical or prophetic powers to the structures.
Mesopotamia soon yielded more evidence fueling the day’s obsession: proof of the Bible’s veracity. Though not a clergyman himself, archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley (1880–1960) — the son of a minister and husband to fellow archaeologist Lady Katharine Woolley — led excavations at Ur, Abraham’s birthplace, and Sumer. Their findings, including sedimentary studies, suggested that Noah’s flood may well have occurred, albeit not on a global scale. While not definitively proving Scripture true, the evidence provided a plausible backdrop for the early Biblical narratives.
Groundbreaking reports, exotic photographs and sensational headlines — not to mention the growing number of Biblical-era treasures filling institutions like the British Museum — began to attract a new kind of visitor to the Holy Land: the package tourist.
“Our first night was spent in the Valley of Ajelon [in the Judean foothills],” wrote itinerant Baptist preacher Thomas Cook, founder of Cook’s Tours, on his first organized trip to the region in 1869. “[A] turkey carpet covered the floor [of the tent]; an iron bedstead was ready for each of us... with clean sheets and blankets [and] in the evening after the toils of the day we enjoyed our table d’hôte of soups, fish, flesh and fowl.”
Such comforts were designed to attract a “solidly middle-class” clientele, who flocked to the region. By the early 20th century, Cook’s Tours reportedly brought more western Europeans to the Holy Land than all the Crusader armies of the Middle Ages.
While Cook’s clients came to pray, others chose to scoff — from a distance. Influenced by findings like those of the Wolleys, which suggested that Biblical truth was open to interpretation, scholars in the German university town of Tübingen and elsewhere began applying logical and philosophical analysis to Scripture. They concluded that Biblical stories were no more grounded in reality than Arthurian legends or Grimms’ fairytales.
Pushback came from one of their own. Tübingen-educated Scottish archaeologist and New Testament scholar William Ramsay (1851–1939), retracing the travels of Saint Paul, determined that the locations described in Saint Luke’s account of Paul’s journey were essentially accurate. For Ramsay, this was sufficient proof that the Acts of the Apostles were not “just stories.”
While broad in scope, Chapman’s book occasionally lingers on minutiae. Several paragraphs on the particle theory experiments of English polymath and early Egyptologist Thomas Young (1773–1859), for instance, feel more distracting than relevant. But overall, Chapman neatly summarizes an era full of larger-than-life characters, both Biblical and modern.
Tom Verde is a freelance journalist, specializing in religion, culture and history.