There is an entire content industry built on “biblical archaeology” right now — TV shows, YouTube channels, the House of David series on Amazon, all of it running on big Nephilim energy. Cynthia Shafer-Elliott does not watch any of it, because it makes her yell at the screen. (Her husband, however, likes to watch her watch it.) She is a professor of Hebrew Bible at Baylor and an actual field archaeologist, and here is what she would rather you get excited about: in one of her first seasons at Tel Rehov, in a square she had been working, they found hundreds of ceramic beehives — industrial apiaries. Which means the land of milk and honey had actual honey. Not date syrup, not wild honey. Real, farmed, bee-produced honey. She also personally uncovered a household shrine with a lion’s face carved into it, tongue out, human faces cowering under its paws. That one is in the Israel Museum now, and she says hello to it whenever she visits. We got into what “back in Bible times” and “biblical worldview” actually obscure, what household archaeology reveals about women’s authority that the text buries, why ancient Israelite religion should always be plural, why lentils deserve more respect than they get, and yes — the residue analysis at Arad confirming THC at an official Israelite worship site. She is one of the four Bible Divas, and all four are coming to Theology Beer Camp.
Highlights from the conversation
- What’s actually wrong with “biblical worldview.” Cynthia’s real trigger phrase. She has watched people at various jobs deploy it to justify a present-day political, social, or economic position — a biblical worldview of marriage, of sexuality — by pointing at an ancient Israel they think they see in the text. As someone who studies that world for a living, her assessment is blunt: what they are calling the biblical worldview is usually just their own presuppositions, and it is usually wrong. Her professor at Sheffield, the late Philip Davies, gave her the distinction she still uses: biblical Israel is the Israel reflected in the text; ancient Israel is what is actually in the ground and in other ancient Near Eastern sources.
- The academic study of the Bible saved her faith. She grew up in the church and never felt like she fit — avoiding eye contact during altar calls, underlining things in her Bible that nobody else was underlining. Then a required intro to Old Testament class her freshman year, and the realization that there was another path: to wrestle with scripture academically the way Jacob wrestled the angel (Phyllis Trible’s analogy). She said it out loud to a class at Portland Seminary without having planned to, and knew it was true as it came out of her mouth.
- Household archaeology, and what the matriarch actually ran. Not biblical archaeology — Iron Age archaeology of ancient Israel and Judah, with sub-disciplines for household, food, and gender. The method: you are not just cataloguing artifacts, you are documenting spatial relationships. Where is the oven? What room? Near a wall or centered? What clusters of artifacts sit with it? From that you reconstruct activities, then compare against other eighth-century houses and other Near Eastern texts and iconography. And the payoff for the “biblical worldview” crowd: on the domestic level, women — especially the matriarch of the household — had considerably more power and authority than we give them credit for. She managed the household, oversaw food production and preparation, and oversaw reproductive roles. That is real authority, and cherry-picked verses will not show it to you.
- Ancient Israelite religions, plural. Official religion was never the only thing happening. Excavate the houses and you find religious practice at home, and often not the prescribed kind — small clay figurines, three to six inches, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic, the teraphim your English Bible translates as idols (not the room-sized statues you pictured as a kid). The female figurines have been debated for decades: Asherah herself, or used in her worship, or in the worship of other fertility deities, or of Yahweh. And then the inscriptions at Kuntillet Ajrud and elsewhere mentioning Yahweh and his Asherah. Tripp’s addition from the evolution-of-religion side: the hand-sized female figurine is a cross-cultural constant, appearing everywhere humans expanded, and it keeps reappearing — in the saints, in Mary — every time a top-down masculine authority tries to purge it. The question was never whether it shows up. It was whether it would be handled well.
- Why food is never just food. Her monograph Food in Ancient Judah deliberately focused on everyday eating, because Hebrew Bible scholarship had gone to Kashrut and the sacrificial system while archaeology had gone to elite feasting, and nobody was looking at ordinary meals. Her favorite text: Jacob and Esau, and the red lentil stew. Lentils have been almost entirely ignored — they were cheap, easy to grow, high in protein and carbohydrates, and their roots put nitrogen back into the soil. Meanwhile the story’s structure tells you how life worked: Esau is loved by his father because he can produce meat, and meat was rare because you depended on your herds for secondary products. Jacob is in the tents with the women, cooking. Food is used to negotiate power, to take it, to form and hold memory, and to decide who is in and who is out.
- THC at Arad, and what archaeology finds that the text would never mention. The residue analysis on the standing stones inside the Holy of Holies at Arad — an official Iron Age worship site, not a household shrine — came back positive for THC, alongside frankincense. Which does put a certain spin on Saul’s ecstatic episode with the prophets, or Isaiah’s call, or (as Cynthia notes, and Tripp agrees is a whole different tier) Ezekiel. Contemporaneous Canaanite sites show opium. Given the neighbors, the absence would have been the surprise, not the presence.
About our guest
Dr. Cynthia Shafer-Elliott is Professor of Hebrew Bible at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, in the religion department. She holds her PhD from the University of Sheffield, where she studied with Philip Davies, and specializes in Iron Age archaeology of ancient Israel and Judah with sub-specialties in household archaeology, food, and gender. She has excavated at Tel Rehov, Tell Halif, and currently at Tel Abel Beth Maacah in northern Israel — the site of the wise woman of Abel in 2 Samuel 20, who talks a general out of destroying a city.
Her books include Food in Ancient Judah: Domestic Cooking in the Time of the Hebrew Bible (Routledge/Equinox), the edited volume The Five-Minute Archaeologist in the Southern Levant, and T&T Clark Handbook of Food in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel (Bloomsbury), which she co-edited with Janling Fu and Jonathan Greer.
The Bible Divas — Cynthia with Jennifer Garcia Bashaw, Anna Sieges, and Angela Parker. Two Old Testament scholars, two New Testament scholars, one of them an archaeologist. Go subscribe.
Dig with her. Tel Abel Beth Maacah plans to excavate next summer. Excavations in Israel run as field schools and take volunteers from anywhere, no experience required — Cynthia’s words: a good attitude and a willingness to wake up early. She will be on site and able to train people directly.
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