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I just finished Eric H. Cline's book From Eden to Exile: Unraveling Mysteries of the Bible. It examines seven "mysteries" of the Hebrew Bible from an archaeological perspective. Mr. Cline is a biblical archaeology scholar and is the associate directory of an ongoing excavation in Meggido (the biblical Armaggedon) in Israel.

The book is aimed at the interested layman and his writing style is very readable and easy to understand. His treatment of the various mysteries in the Hebrew Bible is short but informative. While I question some of his positions, on the whole the book is a great resource and I recommend it to everyone.

The seven mysteries his book tackles are:

1) The Garden of Eden

2) Noah's Ark

3) Sodom and Gomorrah

4) Moses and the Exodus

5) Joshua and the Battle of Jericho

6) The Ark of the Covenant

7) The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel

What's surprising in his book is his acknowledgement and treatment of crackpots. I'm used to scholars ignoring works by the lunatic fringe, for even acknowledging their theories gives them too much credibility. Not with Cline's book. In each of the mysteries, he enumerates both sober and fantastical ideas, challenging them for their consistency with the archaeological record. His dismissal of some fringe works can be acerbic, but not unwarranted as most of these "theories" get more media attention and gives genuine research a bad name.

I won't go into detail on each of the mysteries (go out and buy a copy if you want to know more!) but I will have to nitpick on his chapter about the Ark of the Covenant. I think he gives too much credibility with the biblical claim that King Josiah rediscovered the Ark (p. 151, "Since no one has seen the ark since at least Josiah's time"). It seems to me that Josiah concocted the story to give divine credence to his religious reforms. I think it's much too convenient that Josiah would suddenly stumble upon the Ark, with its Deuteronomic revisions of the Law, and how it so happens to justify his reforms.

Maybe I'm being too unsympathetic in my reading of that rather innocuous line, but at the very least Mr. Cline should've hinted at the possibility of Josiah's fabrication of the story about the ark. (Cline admits that he's less interested with examining the text of the bible and more with what archaeology has to say, so I guess he doesn't want to wade into contentious textual criticism territory.)