The earliest archaeological investigations in the Levant were conducted by European travelers in the second half of the nineteenth century. Learned societies dedicated to the investigation of the Holy Land were founded in short order in most Western powers. These included the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) in Great Britain (1865), the Deutschen Paliistina-Vereins (DPV) in Germany (1878), the licole Biblique et Archiiologique Francaise (1890), and the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) in 1900. The motives for this interest were sundry. Scientific curiosity was primary, but it was mixed with religious conceptions, romantic allure, and sometimes pure mysticism. Political and military interests of the big powers were very much in the background. Most of the early explorers were either missionaries or army officers.
Breakthroughs of the late nineteenth century were the accurate mapping of the region - culminating in the ‘Survey of Western Palestine’ conducted by the PEF in 1871-78, the first stratigraphic excavation of a Near Eastern tell - by W. M. F. Petrie at Tell el-Hesi in 1890, and the invention of typological seriation by the same.
Outside the Levant itself, the decipherment of cuneiform and hieroglyphic scripts enabled for the first time to evaluate biblical literature in its original milieu. This, plus the general move toward secularization of knowledge, had led to the deconstruction or decanonization of the Bible. The ‘documentary hypothesis’ of Graf and Wellhausen posits that the Hebrew Bible is not a single composition, but a patchwork of several different sources - far removed from each other in time, place of composition, theology, and moral outlook - cut and restitched in a pseudochronological order by (late) redactors.
World History
