PBS: Bible's Buried Secrets

This much-hyped show produced for PBS on Biblical archaeology I am preparing to watch and comment on over the next week or so beginning tomorrow. You can watch along by going here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bible/program.html

I must profess to beginning from an unsympathetic point of view. One of the principals of the show, scholar William G. Dever, described it in to The Christian Post as being "a shocking film in many ways, but it’s truth, revolutionary."

Typically when a scholar describes a work in this way we can be prepared for the worst sort of flimsy and whimsical speculation, which always, without fail, assaults the basic premises of Christianity. In any event, I will suffer through and give my reports and try to keep an open mind.

We'll begin with Chapter One, described by Nova as:

Merneptah Stele
Near the banks of the Nile in southern Egypt, in 1896, archaeologist Flinders Petrie unearths an Egyptian stone monument containing the first mention of a people named Israel.

First report coming tomorrow.