Responsibly Presenting Biblical History and Biblical Archaeology to Undergraduates

Abstract

Teaching biblical history and biblical archaeology to undergraduates presents distinctive pedagogical challenges. Unlike graduate students, undergraduates often enroll with limited historical literacy, minimal exposure to ancient Near Eastern history, and religiously shaped assumptions about the Bible that have not been examined critically. At the same time, the cursory treatment of the biblical world in standard Western Civilization textbooks leaves many students without adequate chronological and historical frameworks. Presenting undergraduates with the complex historiographic issues innate to the field is problematic, as it can lead to alienation or even challenges to faith. This essay argues that instructors must be clear about their approaches and keep the distinction between teaching religion and teaching about the Bible as a historical document explicit, while acknowledging the diverse backgrounds with which students enter the classroom. The article uses several examples (including approaches to the Exodus narrative) to demonstrate how scholarship can be presented responsibly. The essay also addresses disciplinary and terminological complications.

1. Introduction

While teaching biblical history and archaeology on any level poses challenges, there are distinct differences between teaching courses on these topics at the graduate versus the undergraduate level. Undergraduates enroll in such courses for different reasons than graduate students. The reasons can often relate to their personal beliefs and/or religious upbringing, and when disregarded, frequently become obstructions to engaging critically with the material.

In religiously affiliated seminaries and colleges, it is a given that students have a religious orientation, or at least have an awareness and a respect for religion, but in secular institutions, both private and public, questions of whether or not the students have a religious background or orientation are most often ignored. While in most fields of study, conjecture about something so personal as religion should be avoided as inappropriate and irrelevant to course materials and student learning outcomes, in classes that deal critically with the Bible, ignoring students’ ingrained ideas is problematic, and acknowledging them is actually key to the class being a positive or negative experience. Faculty should at least be mindful of students’ backgrounds, as otherwise there is a real risk of alienation, whether their religious beliefs are core or merely peripheral to their understanding of the world.1

2. Graduate vs. Undergraduate Students and Biblical Studies

The commitment to graduate study is significant in terms of time and finance, and the admissions process to programs is not always easy—all of which means that when entering a graduate program, incoming students have at least some understanding of what biblical studies is about. Professors who teach graduate classes can assume that students have a serious interest in the field as well as a general understanding of its topics. This is true for seminary students heading towards a career in the ministry, but is also at least partly true for students entering MA or PhD programs in religious studies, biblical history or archaeology. In all these categories, students likely expect to encounter biblical criticism that may not dovetail with their religious ideas or beliefs. They will expect this because they will already have encountered some of it at the undergraduate level. They may not know all the ins and outs of what biblical studies involves or what types of issues further learning might force them to confront, but they have actively chosen the field. In cases where a student finds that a graduate course of study is not what they expected, they can quit their program, and/or reapply to one that might suit them better.

But those of us who teach undergraduates encounter a different sort of student, and should therefore have different expectations and different approaches. While certainly some undergraduates will enter a class on biblical history with true intellectual curiosity and openness to new ideas, others—the majority in some institutions—come into such a class without knowing what to expect, or worse, expecting the material and approach to be similar to what they learned as children in Sunday schools. Some may take a class only to fulfill a general education requirement. Still others will be first-generation students who have not yet had an opportunity to grapple with unfamiliar ideas. And some will fit into more than one of these categories.

3. Issues with Teaching Biblical Studies to Undergraduates

Nationwide, the current cohort of undergraduate students is less knowledgeable about the Bible, as well as history in general, than previous generations. Except for students with rigorous religious school educations—and those are usually only through the grade school level—even the basics are not known. Historical timelines are something they have not thought about before. While they know who Jesus was from a religious perspective, his timeframe is not understood, meaning they have not thought through the fact that the modern calendar is based on Christian belief about the date of Jesus’ birth. Many do not realize that the chronological setting of the New Testament is during the Roman period, and also do not know where Jesus lived, preached and died. The terms “Israel,” “Judea” and “Palestine” may be familiar, but require a lot of explanation. They cannot name the Patriarchs. They often cannot place Moses and, at best, only know about the Exodus through the DreamWorks movie The Prince of Egypt. Most know some biblical stories, but have never actually read the Bible for themselves. Most have only thought of the Bible as a religious text, not as literature or poetry. And notably, most have not considered the fact that some parts of the Bible may be historically accurate, while other parts are not. In short, they have never thought of the Bible as a text to be read critically.

Their lack of knowledge is due to a decline in religious schooling. There was a time when the majority of Americans sent their children to Sunday school, but this has changed and continues to change, even in recent years. According to a 2008 Pew Research poll, approximately 60% of families sent their children for some sort of religious education, and within this, percentages differed by religion (Pew Research Center 2008). Compare that with the Pew 2023–2025 results, which brought the aggregate percentage down to 35% of families that consider religion important (Pew Research Center 2025). This might explain why typically students will not to try to name biblical figures when asked, because they simply are not sure of the answer. They know the Bible is important and are embarrassed about their lack of knowledge.

This is part of a larger and related problem, which is the general lack of historical literacy among students, especially regarding ancient history. Most students encounter ancient history briefly in middle school, usually in the sixth grade, and again early in high school, often in the ninth grade. These courses are spread rather thin, and include the ancient histories of Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, Greece and Rome, all taught very quickly and therefore superficially. And much of it is not political history, but rather social or cultural approaches. This leads to significant gaps in knowledge by the time students enter college, whether they attend elite or non-elite, public or private institutions.2 Within all of this thin ancient history education, the history of ancient Canaan and Israel—anything about the biblical world—is generally not encountered at all.

For this reason, I try to meet my students where they are at the beginning of a course—by asking them what they remember about ancient history from sixth-grade social studies or ninth-grade world history, or even what they remember from television shows on the History Channel or the Discovery Channel. They tend to remember something about Greece (usually just Athens vs. Sparta) and Rome, and some recall Egypt (just pyramids and mummification) and Mesopotamia (Gilgamesh and Hammurabi) as well. But they do not have a sense of the timeframes or political histories, even of Greece and Rome.

Adding to the problem is the way students may have encountered biblical history in a college-level world history course, if they have encountered it at all. World history survey courses do not fully ignore the biblical world, but present it in a sideways manner. This can be explored by looking at a typical Western Civilization textbook’s presentation of biblical history. Jackson Spielvogel’s Western Civilization, 11th Edition (Spielvogel 2021), a text commonly used in general Introduction to Western Civilization courses, can serve as an example. This 1000-page textbook comprises 30 chapters that take the student from antiquity to the 20th century. The presentation of biblical history is within the second chapter, titled “The Ancient Near East: Peoples and Places,” in which approximately eight pages are devoted to “The Hebrews.”

The initial sentence of this section states:

“Around 970 B.C.E., Solomon came to the throne of Israel, a small state in Western Asia. According to the biblical account he was lacking in military prowess but excelled in many other ways”.

(Spielvogel 2021, p. 33)

The phrase “according to the biblical account” is why this presentation could be called fairly balanced, as it implies that one shouldn’t use the Bible as a completely reliable historical source. But even this phrase is weakened by the sentence that precedes it, which clearly allows the assumption that Solomon was a historical figure to remain. There is also no mention of the term “Judah,” leaving “Israel,” a term more familiar from religious phraseology, to stand in for more than one ancient political body.

The authors try to address some of this by saying,

“The accuracy of this biblical account of the United Kingdom of Israel under Saul, David and Solomon has been recently challenged by a new generation of archaeologists and historians. Although they mostly accept Saul, David and Solomon as historical figures, they portray them more as chief warlords than as kings. If a kingdom of Israel did exist during these years, it was not as powerful or as well organized as the Hebrew Bible says”.

(Spielvogel 2021, p. 34)

However, this statement does not give serious weight to the historiography. Even though the phrase “according to the biblical account” is repeated multiple times in these few pages, and in spite of the reference to scholarly disagreements, the author still allows a tacit acceptance of the “truth” of the biblical account to permeate the text. Additionally, in this example and elsewhere, actual historiography is not dealt with—the biblical text never states that Solomon lacked military prowess; rather, this is an interpretation based on the lack of warfare and emphasis on diplomacy during his reign. None of this is explained.

Another problem is the unevenness of the presentation of ancient materials. Spielvogel, for example, devotes six chapters to antiquity—two on the ancient Near East, two on Greece, and two on Rome—but within these six chapters, only the aforementioned eight pages touch on the biblical world. While one can argue that ancient Israel and Judah were less important geopolitically than the other regions in antiquity, this is mitigated by their outsized role in Western religion and memory. But textbooks do not address that.

With this rather perfunctory academic presentation as students’ background on the one hand, and with church and religious school ideas as background on the other, how does one approach teaching undergraduates biblical studies? Both of these backgrounds are largely uncritical, as neither includes serious biblical historiography. This brings us back to the key problem—that encountering the Bible from a critical perspective can and often does shake the faith and worldview of students, whether or not they are actively religious. Critical readings can lead to religious doubt or even abandonment of beliefs.

Instructors, therefore, should be aware of who their students are. My own institution’s student population illustrates some of the issues that are common when teaching biblical material. I teach in a public institution, a small 4-year college that is part of the State University of New York system. As is not uncommon in the New York City metropolitan area, many of our students are first-generation college students and many of these are Latinx; in fact, the campus is classified as a Hispanic-Serving Institution, defined by the Federal government as having an undergraduate enrollment of full-time equivalent students that is at least 25% Hispanic. Many of these come from Catholic backgrounds. But because my biblical history courses are cross-listed between History and Jewish Studies (as there is no department of Religious Studies), I also see students with Jewish backgrounds. These two religious cohorts are similar to each other as they both tend to be familiar with certain Bible stories. They also present similar challenges.

How do you teach about biblical historiography to these students?3 They often come into class thinking they know the Bible, and in fact, they do know certain narratives, mainly Genesis stories through the beginning of Exodus, as well as the basic “plot” of the Synoptic Gospels. Their understanding of these narratives is from religious perspectives. They have not thought critically about the Bible or religion before. The professor’s job is to teach the academic material promised, but this material is going to spark questions that are more appropriate for a religious leader to address—a rabbi, priest or minister—than a college professor.4

Professors tend to assume that students can distinguish between teaching about religion and teaching religion itself; however, the students coming in with uncritical religious worldviews often cannot. As noted above, undergraduates arrive in biblically oriented classes without the clear interests and expectations of graduate students. Unlike graduate students, they do not yet have the tools to understand what the field is actually about. When they opted for a biblical history course to fulfil a general education requirement, they certainly based their decision on some interest—biblical studies rather than, say, Shakespearean literature—but interest is different than understanding that they will be critically examining the Bible as if it were any other primary source. In fact, their interest could be based on the thought that the material might be familiar to them and therefore “easy” because of their religious school training.

Add to this the fact that biblical historiography is particularly tricky. In history courses that deal with a much more recent past than antiquity—such as American History—students can accept that some scholars will interpret texts differently than others, because the texts themselves have no preconceived value to them. But when students come into a biblical studies course with the thought that the Bible is God-given and true, the very concept of scholarly disputes over its content is jarring if not blasphemous from day one.

So, what is the solution? In my classrooms I begin by explaining that the approach we will take is academic and secular, that it will not mirror anything they might have learned in previous contexts, and that we will be reading the Bible as a historical source—a primary source to be trusted just as much or as little as any other primary document. This needs to be stated explicitly right away. Perhaps more importantly, I point out that this secular approach is taught in most (but not all) modern seminaries, meaning that most priests, rabbis and ministers have encountered these concepts and have learned to reconcile them with their beliefs. I also point out that there are many archaeology and biblical history professors within the academic world who are religiously observant and firm believers themselves; they, too, have learned to reconcile historiography with belief.

I then give my classes various articles to read by scholars who address this issue of faith and academics. I make these readings optional and provide them with several to choose from. These include a PBS Frontline website entry called “The Tensions Between Faith and History: Can Christian faith be reconciled with an historical approach to Jesus and the Bible?” (PBS Frontline n.d.) and a slightly older blog post by Bart Ehrman titled “Why Textual Criticism is “Safe” for Conservative Christians” (Ehrman 2016). There are other similar readings as well, some geared towards Jewish audiences.

4. Example: Re-Constructing the Exodus Narrative in the Undergraduate Classroom

The above approach is not ideal, but can work, especially once a class begins to examine some specifics. A particularly fraught biblical narrative is that of the Exodus, and this can serve as an example of not throwing away the core of a narrative even when history and archaeology cannot prove it literally true.

The story of the Exodus is one that students are most likely to be familiar with—some through film versions such as DreamWorks’ The Prince of Egypt, referenced above, and others through familiarity with the Passover seder, which most Jewish students know at least a little about. As well-known as it is, this narrative is rarely encountered in Egyptian history or archaeology classes, because it is not easily visible through Egyptian texts or archaeology, meaning there is nothing obvious or straightforward to teach. When teaching an Egyptian history class, it is possible not to mention the Exodus at all.

One teaching approach that was common a generation ago, and is what many professors still use today, is simply to deny the historicity of the narrative completely. These old-school approaches turn to Bronze Age and early-Iron Age history and archaeology, and point out that Egyptian texts have no mentions of a man named Moses, or a large-scale slave rebellion, and further point out that the Egyptians used corvée labor, not slave labor. That is enough to shake students’ faith in the infallibility of the biblical text, and certainly enough to make Passover less meaningful to those who participate in it.

But this is not a useful approach for many undergraduates. They have not entered this class to lose their faith or question family religious rituals. It is not a professor’s job to cause this questioning. So, we need to change the question: rather than asking, “Did the Exodus narrative really happen? Is the story true and can we find proof?” we need to ask (and teach students to ask) the following: “What events could have inspired such a long-lasting and formative mythos?” This question allows for nuances in what at first glance appears to be straight Egyptian history with no clear mention of the Exodus.

Indeed, there are multiple rather disparate ideas and theories about the Exodus narrative that can and should be combined for undergraduates that are both true to academic discourse and also allow students’ faith not to be as disturbed as it is with a solid “it didn’t happen” approach. The relevant theories are each self-sufficient, but come together nicely. But they also take time to teach on this level. Perhaps the first unified examination was presented in a 2015 conference titled Israel’s Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective, and the volume that came out of it (Levy et al. 2015).5 Bietak and Rendsburg (2021) have also gathered many of these threads together in an important article, but this may be too exhaustive and complex for a class of undergraduates to grasp easily, which is why I save this topic for the end of my course, after students have been grappling with other aspects of biblical historiography for weeks.6

There are at least four discrete strands to teach separately and then pull together. First is the likening of the Exodus narrative to the American story of Thanksgiving, an analogy that many scholars have written about (see (Halpern 1992, 2015; Bietak and Rendsburg 2021), and also (Walzer 1985; Hendel 2001)). The story of the Puritans’ arrival in North America became a founding myth that by the 19th century had consolidated Americans within one tradition, even though the actual story only happened to the ancestors of a few of the people who celebrate the holiday. In this way, the Exodus narrative, although possibly based on the experiences of only a few of the people who became the Israelites, became a foundational narrative.

As for the identity of those few people, while it is important for the students to know that the Egyptians used corvée labor and that slavery per se was not their main economic mode, it is equally important to point them to the 13th century (New Kingdom) Papyrus Anastasi VI, which speaks of two slaves escaping from Egypt’s eastern Delta through the Wadi Tumilat (see, for instance, Bietak and Rendsburg 2021)

Additionally, I explain to my classes the main points of Rendsburg’s 2015 study of particular elements of the pre-Exodus narrative that demonstrate the ways in which the biblical authors were familiar with the Egyptian court, and with Egyptian culture and texts in general (Rendsburg 2015). This, of course, does not “prove” that the miracles recounted in the Bible happened; rather, it demonstrates that the biblical authors were describing actual magic tricks performed in the Egyptian court that they were familiar with, rather than making things up. Rendsburg also points to the Papyrus Westcar’s story of Webaoner, who turns a crocodile made of wax into a real crocodile and back again, as a parallel to Moses and Aaron’s staffs turning into serpents and back again. He points to a line from the Admonitions of Ipuwer stating that the river has turned to blood, which parallels the first of the Ten Plagues, and to a line from the Prophecy of Neferti that parallels the plague of darkness, and to Pyramid and Coffin Texts that mention a slaying of the firstborn as parallel to the last Plague, and to another narrative in the Papyrus Westcar about a magician splitting a lake open so that dry ground was revealed as a parallel to the splitting of the Red Sea (Rendsburg 2015).

Lastly, I teach my students about the Hyksos Period, beginning with the Middle Kingdom phenomenon of Canaanites arriving in Egypt’s Delta and the archaeological evidence for it, and continuing to the Second Intermediate Period takeover of northern Egypt by these foreigners, to the wars against them waged by kings Khamose and Ahmose, and the ultimate reestablishment of Egyptian independence (see for instance Hallote 2021 and Bietak and Rendsburg 2021). This leads to a discussion of how a “folk memory” of the Hyksos Period, a time when Canaanites lived and ruled in Egypt and were eventually thrown out with the Egyptian army at their heels, could have morphed into the story of Joseph, a man from Canaan living and ruling in Egypt, before his descendants were enslaved and finally escaped, with the Egyptian army at their heels.

It is worth noting that a number of the publications cited above are those of the Biblical Archaeology Society, whose mission is to communicate archaeology to a public interested in the Bible—not to scholars. This approach is more appropriate for undergraduates who are not seeking to have their religious views overturned by a college class.7

5. Example: The Historical Jesus

An equally difficult issue comes up when teaching about the Historical Jesus. First, the term needs to be explained, as many Christian students do not understand that Jews and other non-Christians do not accept Jesus as divine within their religions. They need to be made to understand that there is a difference between acknowledging that a man called Jesus existed historically, preached various doctrines and had followers, and was executed by the Romans, and believing that this man was the Messiah and son of God. Accepting that Jesus existed as a person does not mean that one has to believe in his divinity or resurrection. Students brought up in the Christian faith are not always aware of this (and sometimes are not even aware of the fact that Jesus is not part of Judaism at all), so the need to start with this basic information should not surprise instructors. Additionally, students are often disappointed to learn that archaeologically there is no evidence for Jesus and his family specifically, and that the only textual references to him outside the New Testament are later—and this knowledge can challenge some students’ beliefs, or at least unsettle them and cause doubts. One hopes this can be overcome by approaching the archaeology of Roman Galilee, the Nazareth area in particular, and explaining how all the elements of the Gospel narratives do generally fit together with the archaeology of village life in the 1st century CE.

6. Terminological Problems and Textbooks

Besides historiography, an issue that has become particularly problematic for teaching in recent years is terminology for and within the discipline that is often still called “biblical archaeology.” The terminology for the field, as well as within the field, has naturally evolved over the past century and a half. Sometimes the evolution has been slow and sometimes fast. This has led to inconsistencies and issues for students, especially undergraduates.

One of the earliest changes to terminology occurred at the turn of the 20th century, when the term “Bible lands archaeology” began to go out of use (Hallote 2017). In the 19th century, European and American scholars often used the term “the archaeology of Bible lands” to describe the excavation projects in the east, especially in Mesopotamia. The term was meant to encompass all the regions mentioned in the Bible, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. If one excludes the New Testament (thereby excluding all the travels of Paul in the western Mediterranean), the “Bible lands” that are mentioned in the Hebrew Bible still include Egypt and Mesopotamia—the latter encompassing the archaeology of Assyria and Babylonia, the conquerors of ancient Israel and Judah. It was not until the early part of the 20th century that the now more common term “biblical archaeology” took hold to refer to the archaeology of Ottoman Palestine. The reason for this change had more to do with Assyriology—the study of the languages of Mesopotamia—coming into its own, and dissociating itself with the study of the Bible in a religious sense.

But by the late 20th century, even the term “biblical archaeology” had begun to fall out of favor, thanks to scholars such as William Dever, who has correctly argued that archaeologists who work in this region are concerned with time periods beginning with prehistory and going through to the Islamic and even Ottoman periods, and thus are not always concerned with “biblical” timeframes, making the term “biblical archaeology” inappropriate. Even scholars who work on Iron Age topics are not necessarily focused on relevance to the Bible. Dever wrote about these issues several times over, making his points clearly in both academic and more popular publications (see, for instance, Dever 1994, 2012). But to date, nothing has fully replaced the term, as different scholars prefer different names, and use everything from “archaeology of the southern Levant” to the “archaeology of Syria/Palestine” to the “archaeology of Canaan,” and more.8

Terminology also affects the choice of textbooks for undergraduate classes. Unlike American History or European History texts that are fairly standardized and have new editions every few years, basic texts for our field are few and far between. In the 1990s, there was a small spate of books published that were usable as textbooks, and some of these still can serve as short summaries of the archaeology and history of the region in question. But they are hard to assign today, in part because they are too old to include recent finds and theories. On the other hand, many of the more recent books are not general enough to serve as introductory textbooks, or else contain inherent terminological problems.

An example of a useful but older introductory textbook is Amihai Mazar’s volume, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, which was first published in 1990. This is still one of the best descriptions of the archaeology of the region, as it includes historical prefaces to each archaeological period, and is therefore a very solid introductory text for undergraduates.9 Similar to this is Amnon Ben-Tor’s 1992 edited volume, which also gives a good basic introduction (Ben-Tor 1992). But both of these are over thirty years old, and therefore not ideal to assign to a class.

But problems with the more recent books make them even less appropriate for undergraduate survey classes. Many are too specialized, and many present theory without first explaining the basics. A volume like Israel Finkelstein and Amihai Mazar’s The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating Archaeology and the History of Early Israel (Finkelstein and Mazar 2007) is historiographical on a level that presupposes knowledge of the issues. The text is the result of a 2005 colloquium edited into book format by Brian Schmidt, a fact which is clear when one reads through it. These issues make it a poor choice for an introduction for undergraduates. Another even more recent text is Kyle Keimer and George Pierce’s edited volume The Ancient Israelite World (Keimer and Pierce 2023). This is organized topically rather than historically, and contains too much information for an introductory undergraduate course, although particular chapters can be assigned independently of the whole. In contrast, Eric Cline’s Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction (Cline 2009), which is part of Oxford’s “Very Short Introductions series,” is actually too condensed for serious teaching, and its chapter titles—such as Chapter 7: “From Noah and the Flood to Joshua and the Israelites,” and Chapter 8: “From David and Solomon to Nebuchadnezzar and the Neo-Babylonians”—are in line with an approach that is more biblical than archaeological (although Cline is an archaeologist). There are other recent books that are also problematic.10

But the problems with many of these volumes as undergraduate texts lie not just in how they present concepts, but also in terminological issues, regarding both time periods and place names. In some ways, these are issues inherent to the discipline itself, ones that make it impossible to teach history and archaeology without teaching historiography and history of the discipline—not a preferred approach for uninitiated undergraduates.

Let us examine some aspects of this issue.

First is the term for the archaeological period in the southern Levant spanning roughly 2200–2000 BCE. These days, I refer to it as the Intermediate Bronze Age, but have to explain to classes that this will not be the only term they encounter when they do their readings. An older term, which reflects the historiography of the field in the middle 20th century, is the Early Bronze IV/Middle Bronze I (EBIV/MBI). Some older texts, such as Mazar’s Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, use this term and, to the credit of the volume, give a good explanation of the term’s history (Mazar 1990, pp. 151–52). But this is an added difficulty—although not an insurmountable one—for an undergraduate already encountering difficult and unfamiliar material. In contrast, Ben-Tor’s The Archaeology of Ancient Israel, which is also a useful resource for undergraduates, uses the term Intermediate Bronze Age (Ben-Tor 1992, pp. 126–58).

And when choosing the term Intermediate Bronze Age, the instructor is forced to abandon other terms: The old MBIIA, MBIIB and MBIIC become MBI, MBII, and MBIII. This causes problems when assigning any older articles (or full-length texts) that use those older terms.

All these issues may be easily digested by graduate students who will read many different texts from different decades thoroughly and thoughtfully—and it is appropriate and important for them to understand how and why the terminology has evolved. But for undergraduates, the majority of whom are likely to have only one class on the subject throughout their college careers, a clear takeaway for something as basic as terminology would be helpful, and the lack of one is problematic.11

7. The Term “Palestine” in Archaeological Writing

An even more serious problem for teaching undergraduates is the term Palestine. Both older and some newer textbooks and academic articles often use the term “Palestine” for the southern Levant in antiquity, “Syro-Palestine” for the Levant as a whole, or the phrase “the archaeology of Syria/Palestine.” These related terms were once completely appropriate to use when discussing time periods stretching from the Roman Period up to the first half of the 20th century, as in all these periods, that was the official name of the land—in fact, when archaeology was born as an academic discipline in the late 19th century, the land of Palestine was still part of the Ottoman Empire. But in recent decades, the term “Palestine” has taken on modern political implications, and does not imply the same geographic area as it used to, but a much smaller, politically fraught locality.

Roman “Palestina” was originally a specific regional designation—the Latin version of “Philistia,” a region located on the southern coastal plain of the southern Levant. It was one of several regional designations that had been in use since at least the Iron Age, along with other designations such as Judah (later Judea) for the southern area of the central hill country, and Samaria (meaning the Iron Age entity of Israel, whose capital city was Samaria), for the northern parts of the central hill country.

After the Roman emperor Hadrian forcefully put down the Bar Kochba Revolt in Judea in 135 CE, the term “Palestina” came to refer to the southern Levant as a whole, both east and west of the Joran River. This was likely done as a way to compound the humiliation of the Jewish population after their rebellion failed, by using the name of the Philistines, the ancient biblical enemy of the Israelites, for the entire larger territory. The name Palestine stuck from the time of Hadrian onward, through to the 20th century CE.

During the course of World War I, Britain claimed all of Palestine, a claim that was ultimately accepted internationally. Then, after the war, Britain ceded Eastern Palestine, everything east of the Jordan River, to the Hashemite family in 1922.12 And then, after the acceptance of the United Nations Partition Plan for Western Palestine, the modern State of Israel was created in a part of Western Palestine in 1948.

The part of Western Palestine that is not part of Israel is still referred to as the Palestinian territories and is partially governed by the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority. If it gains independence and becomes a State of Palestine, it will encompass an area much smaller than Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine, meaning that the archaeology of a future State of Palestine would encompass only a fraction of the territory that many archaeology texts still refer to as Palestine. This is particularly problematic for undergraduates who do not have a grasp of the modern politics and geography, let alone the politics of a century ago.

8. Recent Name Changes for Research Institutions

Another difficulty when teaching undergraduates is dealing with the numerous academic institutions that have recently changed their names. While this is less problematic than some other terminological issues, it is worth examining, as it affects students’ ability to situate themselves in a changing discipline.13

In 2020, Harvard’s “Semitic Museum,” which was founded in 1899, changed its name to the “Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East.” A statement was released saying that the name change was made “to be more inclusive and accurately reflect the diversity of the museum’s collection” (Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East 2025). The change itself is quite reasonable, as the term Semitic today properly refers just to a language group—still-spoken Semitic languages include Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic and a few others—and the term should not be used as an ethnic designation. Since the public that hears the term “Semitic” today is not linguistically oriented, and is only familiar with it in the context of “anti-Semitism,” this change is not as difficult to digest as some others.

There is a similar movement away from using the term “Oriental” for institutional names. A century ago, “Oriental” was used unselfconsciously by Westerners to refer to the East. But since the 1978 publication of Edward Said’s influential book Orientalism, the implications of the term began to be recognized on a large scale, even outside of academic circles, as Said (1978) demonstrated that the term was implicitly biased. While it is high time to move away from the term “Oriental,” the alternatives that institutions have chosen for themselves are not satisfactory:

In 2023, the “Oriental Institute” of the University of Chicago, founded in 1919, removed “Oriental” and changed its name to “The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures”, abbreviated to ISAC (Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures 2023). Similarly, in 2021, the “American Schools of Oriental Research”, changed its name. It had been founded in 1900 as the American School of Oriental Research but by 1921 had pluralized its name to “Schools” to include its then nascent Baghdad school alongside the original Jerusalem one. But in 2021, ASOR (as it is still abbreviated) changed its name to the “American Society of Overseas Research” (American Schools of Oriental Research 2025). The new name was chosen to purposefully leave the acronym “ASOR” the same, to preserve the continuity of the organization.

And most recently, in 2025, the “American Oriental Society” (AOS), founded in 1842, changed its name to the “American Society for Premodern Asia” (ASPA), removing “Oriental” from its name. Their announcement acknowledged that not all members were in favor of the change, as they were attached to the older, traditional name, but that the change was instituted regardless, because “the offensiveness of the term ‘oriental’ is in the end decisive” (American Oriental Society 2025). (Ironically, as of this writing, the URL and proper citation for this institution, as well as those for ASOR, still include the old names.)

In the first two cases—the Oriental Institute and the American Schools of Oriental Research— the new names do not reflect or explain what the institutions are about. “Ancient cultures” can be anywhere on the globe, and “overseas research” not only can be anywhere, but does not reflect antiquity. “Premodern Asia” is slightly better in terms of geography and timeframe.

Along with the erasure of the terms “Semitic” and “Oriental”, there has also been a strong movement away from using the term “biblical.” Much like the 19th and early 20th century abandonment of the term “Bible Lands archaeology” for the archaeology of Mesopotamia discussed above, which kept Assyriology and related fields clear of religion, since the late 20th century, there has been a desire to move away from any implication that the archaeology of the southern Levant has anything to do with the Bible. As mentioned above, it is true that archaeologists who study this region do not all deal with “biblical” periods or topics, and we have seen that this terminology has long been critiqued in Dever’s writings. This line of thought is why the journal of ASOR, which was established as “Biblical Archaeologist” in 1938, changed its name to “Near Eastern Archaeology” in 1998. The editor at the time stated,

“The new title for our journal necessarily projects a new image and appeals for a new orientation to the archaeology of the Near East. In reality, this orientation, which endeavors to embrace the ‘ancient worlds from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean,’ has for many years supplied the magazine’s editorial policy.”

(Hopkins 1998, p. 1)

This moved the organization farther away from the Bible and reflected its wider focus on the wider area of the Middle East.14

Interestingly, unlike the terms “Oriental”, “Semitic” and “Biblical”, from which the discipline has retreated, the term “Palestine” is still embraced by many in the discipline, regardless of the issues discussed above. Organizations that have not removed this term include the German Deutschen Palästina-Vereins (the German Palestine Society), founded in 1878, with its journal the Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins. Similarly, the British Palestine Exploration Fund, founded in 1865, has not changed its name, although in recent decades it has displayed the initials PEQ prominently on its journal while spelling out the full name only in small print.

With these various name changes within the field of biblical studies, it is very difficult to title a course in a way that remains true to the discipline and that also remains true to the content that will be taught, while still using phrases that an undergraduate will recognize in the course catalogue.

9. Conclusions

This essay has raised more questions than answers, but they are important ones, and ones that many college instructors do not grapple with enough. Going forward, instructors should recognize how difficult it is for undergraduates who were taught to think of the Bible as an infallible text to be suddenly exposed to the world of critical biblical historiography. While classroom approaches need to be framed in secular academic terms, instructors should also be clearer about acknowledging the different worldviews and perspectives that exist in these secular classrooms, and should make sure that students understand that the goal of the course is not to undermine their faith or cultural convictions. As with the Exodus example, it is up to the instructor to present various academic theories so that students can find at least one that does not shake their faith or go against their cultural beliefs. This is particularly important in light of the lack of adequately updated textbooks and the disparate terminologies, but the goal should always be a hybrid approach that allows for respecting everyone’s beliefs and backgrounds while still presenting historical and archaeological ideas responsibly.