The Bible Has a Habit

There have been plenty of claims that things contradict the biblical account, but the Bible has a habit of being proved right after all. I well remember one of the world’s leading archaeologists at Gezer rebuking a younger archaeologist who was ‘rubbishing’ the Bible. He just quietly said, ‘Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t rubbish the Bible.’ When the younger archaeologist asked ‘Why’?, he replied, ‘Well, it just has a habit of proving to be right after all.’ And that’s where I stand.

Professor Nelson Glueck, who I suppose would be recognized as one of the top five of the ‘greats’ in biblical archaeology, gave a marvellous lecture to 120 American students …. He said, ‘I have excavated for 30 years with a Bible in one hand and a trowel in the other, and in matters of historical perspective, I have never yet found the Bible to be in error’.

Professor G. Ernest Wright, Professor of Old Testament and Semitic Studies at Harvard University, gave a lecture at that same dig. He made the point that (because of the researches associated with the Hittites and the findings of Professor George Mendenhall concerning what are called the Suzerainty Covenant Treaties between the Hittite kings and their vassals) it had become clear that the records of Moses, when dealing with covenants, must be dated back to the middle of the second millennium BC. That’s about 1500 BC. Also, that those writings should be recognized as a unity. In other words, they go back to one man. That one man could only be Moses.

I went to Professor Wright later and said, ‘Sir, this is very different from what you’ve been putting out in your own writings.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Clifford, for 30 years I’ve been teaching students coming to Harvard to train for the Christian ministry; I’ve been telling them they could forget Moses in the Pentateuch, but at least in these significant areas of the covenant documents that are there in the Pentateuch, I’ve had to admit that I was wrong.’

—Dr. Clifford Wilson (1923-2012, Australian young-earth creationist, archaeologist