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The first paragraph in this week's Newsweek cover story did not portend well for the rest of the package. In "Unearthing the Bible," Melinda Liu and Christopher Dickey begin:

What there was in the beginning, in the world of the Bible, is what there was in the land now called Iraq. There is nothing left of the Garden of Eden, no artifact at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where myth has placed the Temptation and the Fall.

Using the loaded word myth is a sure way to alienate a huge part of Newsweek's readership. And readers are going to get exactly the wrong idea about what the Bible says. Here's Genesis:

A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush. And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

No one across the spectrum of Genesis interpretations argues that the biblical garden of Eden actually existed at today's confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers—the geography just doesn't match, even if two of the names do. Even six-day creationists point to the description of four rivers and say there's no way we'll ever know where the Garden was. (They add that Noah's flood wiped away all traces.) So if tradition puts the Garden at a specific place in Iraq, that is indeed extrabiblical. But Newsweek readers may think the "myth" being referred to is the Genesis account, not local tradition.

The rest of the Newsweek cover package is actually pretty good, even if most of it is old hat for CT readers. What's biblical archaeology for? Do recent findings prove or disprove the Bible? Is there a trustworthy middle ground between those who say the absence of proof is the proof of absence and those who claim that practically every stone in the Middle East cries out to prove the biblical record? Can we trust recent archaeological discoveries tied to the life of Christ? Can we trust their detractors? We talk about it every few years—and indeed, it's a conversation worth repetition—with the details changing slightly.

Newsweek says archaeology "is taking on new urgency," under threat from violence (both in Iraq and Israel) and looters. Archaeologists have had to massively scale back their work, since they and their institutions aren't thrilled with the idea of digging through gunfire and kidnappings. But the longer we wait, says Newsweek, the more we lose:

For believers contemplating the rise of the looters, lines from the Revelation of Saint John the Divine may come to mind: "Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen." For archeologists, for the faithful, for all of us, the loss of this past impoverishes the future. Ripping artifacts from their contexts takes away the last chance we have to know those civilizations—from the world of Abraham to that of Nebuchadnezzar—that gave us our own.

Of course, looting historical sites and robbing graves is as old as antiquity itself. And, as Newsweek notes, dubious relics associated with the life of Christ date back at least to the fourth-century life of Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine. (An old joke says that she's the world's most successful archaeologist—she found everything she was looking for, including the True Cross and Jesus' tomb.)

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August (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48