Dead Men Tell Tales

In the romantic vocabulary of the twentieth century few words are more potent to arouse the interest of the average man than the fascinating word “archeology.” A flood of volumes has come forth from the press of our generation covering almost every phase of this now popular science. After one hundred years of steady plodding and determined digging, this school of research has at last come into its own and today occupies deserved prominence in the world of current literature. This science, which deals exclusively with dead races and the records of their conduct is, to many, the most fascinating field of investigation at present open to the inquiring mind of man. Nothing is of such interest to the human as is humanity. The study of the life and record of our own kind rightly means more to us than can most other subjects.

But the true appreciation of the value of the contribution of archeology to our modern learning can be appreciated only by those who grasp an outstanding fact that should be self-apparent, but is so often overlooked: Namely, these records derived from musty tombs and burial mounds constitute the daily events in the lives of human beings! The folks who left these records were ordinary people such as make up the nations of the earth today. They are not merely names on tablets or faces carved in stone. They were actual flesh-and-blood individuals with all that this implies. In hours of merriment they laughed, and they shed tears in moments of sorrow. They hungered, and ate for satisfaction; they drank when they were thirsty. They loved and they hated; they lived and they died. Pleasure and pain were their alternating companions, while ambition, aspiration, and hope drove them on the endless round of their daily tasks.

In a word, they were real. Their life was as important to them as is your life, and they lived it in much the same way. Therefore, the records written by humans and studied by their kind, who now live these thousands of years later, constitute the source of the most human science with which our generation has to deal.

The contributions of archeology have reached almost every branch of study, but to no particular group of people have they been more timely and valuable than to students of the Bible. The hoary antiquity of the Book which has been received in every generation by the intelligent and the discerning as the Word of God, has its roots in the same generations that archeology is investigating today. It is inevitable that much of the material being recovered by modern excavations shall have important bearing upon the various questions skepticism may raise concerning the text of the Scripture.