*3.4. What Are the Results?*

Most questions that relate to a zooarchaeology of Israelite religion are informed by assessing differences between certain assemblages, once they have been excavated and analyzed. Differences are often observed in terms of species representation, age at death groupings, carcass part distributions, and other factors of comparison, and are then evaluated statistically. Such assessments of difference take place at the regional level, for example in the presence or absence of pig remains at certain sites (but see above), or at the local level concerning very specific contexts, for example the contents of one pit compared to another in the courtyard of a temple (see below). Trends over time are also assessed, such as in a comparison of the percentage of sheep and goats to cattle during different phases of settlement history at a particular site or in comparison to other sites.

#### *3.5. How, If at All, Do the Results—Understood in Context—Relate to the Bible?*

For better or worse, archaeologists working with remains from the Iron Age and Persian periods in the southern Levant are forced to, at least in one way or another, engage the Bible. For some this engagement is dismissive and for others it is intensive, but to ignore it completely would be irresponsible and, indeed, even though certain recent works may claim distance from it, it is impossible to ignore (cf. Miller 1991). This is not a negative reality, however, for any archaeology in this region that would jettison the Bible in such endeavors would be out of step with other archaeologies that take place in regions where written sources exist, e.g., ancient Greece or Mesoamerica. For, whatever the date and ideology of a certain textual tradition, such works provide rich resources of comparative material for an archaeologist. Indeed, a major difference with the Bible is that it still serves as an important religious text for a wide array of contemporary Jewish and Christian faith communities and, thus, the results of research often have bearing on the way such communities understand these texts to function as Scripture.

Even if it may be agreed that the Bible *should* be engaged (or *is* engaged, regardless of claims to the contrary), the question is *how* it should (or is) engaged, and much ink has been spilled over this question (e.g., Mazar 1992; Dever 2001, 2017; Silberman and Finkelstein 2002; Grabbe 2008; Levy 2010; Ebeling et al. 2017, to name a few). By and large, the discussion takes place in terms of certain historical claims that the Bible is understood to make, ushering in the "did it happen or not" sorts of debates, whether about the exodus, "conquest," or the extent (or existence) of a Davidic or Solomonic kingdom (cf. Moore and Kelle 2011). In many ways this rationalistic—even positivistic—approach has been encouraged by the incorporation of the hard sciences and an over confidence in the assured results such techniques can provide. Often missing from the discussions is an examination of the ancient genres employed in the biblical works and how they functioned, accompanied by a nuanced understanding of the claims that are being made and the purpose for which such events are recounted (Halpern 1996).

While evaluation of such historical claims, rightly understood, is important and indeed an essential backdrop for our discussion as it pertains to the existence of an Israelite presence in the southern Levant, it is not our focus here and, beyond establishing presence, such has less relevance for a discussion of religion and, thus, for assessing how the results of zooarchaeological studies relate to the Bible. This is due to the fact that the relevance of biblical texts for the study of Yahwistic religion is less bound by discussions of dates and events in that many elements of the practice of religion, in general, are remarkably stable across cultures. Such stability is likely to have been the case for ancient Israel, as may be paralleled in Mesopotamia (cf. Linssen 2004), even if meaning of particular rituals changed (Altmann forthcoming). That is, whether aiming to reconstruct Yahwistic practices from the Late Bronze/Iron I, Iron II, or Persian/Hellenistic periods that may be related to zooarchaeology, many of the general elements may have looked the same regardless of time period, whether sacrifice, rituals, or sacred meals that would have generated faunal remains, and these would have paralleled practices in the cultures around them.

## 3.5.1. How Do Ancient Near Eastern Practices Relate to Practices Described in the Bible?

Parallels to biblical cultic practices have been observed in Egyptian, Hittite, Mesopotamian, Ugaritic, and other contexts, demonstrating numerous points of contact while undoubtedly also illustrating differences on both the intercultural and intracultural levels (e.g., Weinfeld 1983; Milgrom 1991; Hess 2007; Knohl 2015).

In terms of methodology, then, any zooarchaeological inquiry into the practice of Yahwistic religion should be informed by a comparative exploration of these ancient Near Eastern texts and images, as well as the Bible, in ways comparable to other studies that integrate written and visual materials alongside of zooarchaeological and other excavated data, so that such similarities and differences may be assessed (cf. Wapnish and Hesse 1991; Wapnish 1993; Lev-Tov and McGeough 2007; Popkin 2013; Ekroth and Wallensten 2013; Greer 2013).

#### 3.5.2. How Do Critical Methodologies Applied in Biblical Studies Affect the Understanding of Texts?

When seeking to understand how zooarchaeological finds relate to the Bible, the same rigor that is applied to archaeological methods should be applied to textual studies. Just as it would be inappropriate for a text-centric inquiry to tack on a general reference to archaeology that ignores all of the complexity of stratigraphy, taphonomy, and radiocarbon dating, for instance, so too it is less than responsible to make general assertions about "what the Bible says" or the dating of certain traditions without carefully engaging source and redaction critical issues, textual criticism (especially in light of recent developments in Qumran and Septuagint studies), and literary studies, particularly in terms of genre. The Bible is a complex, multilayered ancient collection of textualized traditions from the Late Bronze/Iron Ages through the Persian/Hellenistic periods that needs to be engaged critically and carefully by researchers with broad training and in consultation and collaboration with specialists outside one's area of expertise before one should attempt essential syntheses.
