Gleason L. Archer, Jr.

The 5 Books of Moses and Archaeology

"It was only natural that the Wellhausen hypothesis should base its judgments concerning the historicity of the Old Testament record upon the data of archaeology then available in the nineteenth century. Yet those data were regrettably meager during the formative period of the documentary theory, and it was possible on the basis of the ignorance which then prevailed to discount many statements in Scripture which had not yet found archaeological confirmation.

For example, at that time it was assumed that writing was unknown in Palestine during the Mosaic period, and that the Pentateuch could not, therefore, have found a written form until the tenth or ninth centuries BC. The references to the Hittites were treated with incredulity and condemned as mere fiction on the part of the late authors of the Torah; the same was true of the Horites and even the historicity of Sargon II (722-705 BC), since no extrabiblical references to him had yet been discovered.

The existence of such a king as Belshazzar (in the book of Daniel) was ruled out of possibility because no Greek author had mentioned him, and the biblical record could be presumed to be wrong. Since the days of Hupfeld, Graf, and Kuenen, archaeological discovery has confirmed the use of alphabetical writing in the Canaanite-speaking cultures before 1500 BC, and has contributed large numbers of documents to demonstrate the existence and major importance of both the Hittites and Horites (or Hurrians, as they are more commonly known), and also cuneiform tablets containing the name of Belshazzar.

In case after case where alleged historical inaccuracy was pointed to as proof of late and spurious authorship of the biblical documents, the Hebrew record has been vindicated by the results of recent excavation, and the scornful judgments of the documentarian theorists have been proved without foundation."