I heard on the OT course this morning that the ‘American School’of biblical archaeology, with W.F. Albright, the one I always heard had found all kinds of supportive evidence for the Bible, was later judged to be overly optimistic about their findings.

In the years since his death, Albright”s methods and conclusions have been increasingly questioned. William Dever notes that “[Albright”s] central theses have all been overturned, partly by further advances in Biblical criticism, but mostly by the continuing archaeological research of younger Americans and Israelis to whom he himself gave encouragement and momentum … The irony is that, in the long run, it will have been the newer “secular” archaeology that contributed the most to Biblical studies, not “Biblical archaeology.”[13]

Thomas L. Thompson strongly criticises his methods: “[Wright and Albright”s] historical interpretation can make no claim to be objective, proceeding as it does from a methodology which distorts its data by selectivity which is hardly representative, which ignores the enormous lack of data for the history of the early second millennium, and which wilfully establishes hypotheses on the basis of unexamined biblical texts, to be proven by such (for this period) meaningless mathematical criteria as the ”balance of probability” …”[14]

The historicity of the patriarchal narratives: the quest for the historical Abraham  Thomas L. Thompson Continuum International Publishing Group, 2002 – Religion – 392 pages

Archaeology seems to have become an active partner in the attempt to prove the historical truth of the Bible. Biblical archaeologists have gone to the field in search of Noah”s ark or the walls of Jericho, as if the finding of these artifacts would make the events of scripture somehow more true or real.  Thomas Thompson is one of the most vocal contemporary critics of biblical archaeology. His simple but powerful thesis is that archaeology cannot be used in the service of the Bible. Focusing on the patriarchal narratives-the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob-he demonstrates that archaeological research simply cannot historically substantiate these stories. Going further, Thompson says that archaeological materials should never be dated or evaluated on the basis of written texts. Looking to the patriarchal narratives in Genesis, he concludes that these stories are neither historical nor were they intended to be historical. Instead, these narratives are written as expressions  of Israel”s relationship to God.  (footnotes from Wikipedia)