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NOVA / WGBH and Providence Pictures

The Bible's Buried Secrets

A two-hour NOVA special on the archaeology of ancient Israel: where the Israelites came from, when the Hebrew Bible was written, and what has and has not been found in the ground. Filmed on site across the Middle East with excavation footage and digital reconstruction.

VerifiedFilm & seriesInterdenominational
Where to watch

Why this is listed

The archaeology entry, and deliberately not a comfortable one. A reader who wants to know what the excavations actually show — rather than what either apologetics or debunking says they show — should start here and then read the criticism, which is easy to find and worth reading.

Before you press play

A documentary, so nothing is dramatised. The interpretive lean is the whole story and should be stated plainly: it presents the mainstream archaeological consensus, which finds no material evidence for a large-scale Exodus or for a conquest of Canaan as Joshua describes it, and which reads early Israel as emerging largely from within Canaanite society. It also presents the documentary hypothesis for the composition of the Pentateuch, and discusses inscriptions that appear to pair Yahweh with the goddess Asherah in popular Israelite religion. It drew formal protests from conservative Christian and Jewish organisations on release. Nothing here is unsuitable for a teenager; the difficulty is entirely intellectual, and it is a real difficulty rather than a manufactured one.

Suited to Adults. Age judgements are ours, not a rating board’s — you know your own family.

How to start

  1. Open pbs.org (opens an external site) and read what NOVA / WGBH and Providence Pictures says about itself before you read anything else.
  2. Read the note above first. It is there so an evening does not go wrong twenty minutes in.
  3. Watch it yourself before you watch it with children, if there are children.
  4. Read the passage it dramatises alongside it. The point is to send you back to the text, not to replace it.
  5. Afterwards, ask what the story added and what it left out. That conversation is worth more than the film.

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