In his most recent (and highly recommended book on biblical archaeology), William Dever lays the smack down on popular postmodernist approaches to written texts and archaeology:
(1) A text is indeed a construct, as postmodernists insist. But contrary to their notion, a text is a deliberate construct, unless one assumes that the authors were merely doodling or too confused to know what they really thought (which is absurd).
(2) A text, therefore, is an encoded symbol that has a referent, an inherent meaning, even if that meaning is not self-evident. Meaning is not supplied; it is discerned, at least wherever possible. A text may be only a symbol, but that does not mean that it does not point beyond itself to some realty.
(3) A text, however, may have more than one meaning if the author is ambivalent, a careless writer, or intends to obscure rather than to clarify. A text may thus be a form of propaganda (postmodernists would say that it always is). A text can lie; it can deceive or mislead us. That may be due to the author’s intention, the interpreter’s incompetence, or even his or her deliberate ideological manipulation. Nevertheless, there is such a thing as authorial intent, although many postmodernists would deny that. If such were not the case, no rational inquiry or credible conclusions would be possible; the result would indeed be nihilism.
(4) If a text is a construct, of whatever sort, it can and should be deconstructed. Btu the intent should be not only to reveal its supposed contradictions or to unmask its ideological biases, ultimately to discredit it as unbelievable. The purpose of our interrogation of the text should be rather to reconstruct the text after critical analysis. The intent is to recover its own meaning as far as possible, whatever the interpreter’s ideology may be. It is a truism that absolutely objectivity is impossible, but some objectivity is better than none. Likewise, to offer some sense of the meaning of a text is better than falling back on the lame declaration that there is none.
(5) Finally, although the meaning of a text is sometimes not transparent and our interpretation is simply a mere translation, we must develop some hermeneutical principles that are promising. But in the end, these are always subjective. There is no alternative: we are the subjects. This is not a counsel of despair, only the recognition that knowledge is a social construct. Claims to knowledge of natural or cultural phenomenon are made possible, however, by appealing to universal human experiences of which we are part . . . Let us now look by comparison at an artifact in the quest for meaning, in this case a tenth-century cooking pot . . .
(1) Our cooking pot is also a construct. It was made by someone, sometime, somewhere, with deliberate intent. It was meant to serve as a pot for cooking, not a store jar or a lamp. Here the intent is more manifest than it may be with texts.
(2) The cooking pot is also an encoded symbol, one that has a reference, in this case clearly food preparation. That part of the code is easily decipherable. But archaeologists assume that artifacts point further beyond their surface meanings, that they reflect the behavior and potentially the thought of the makers. Their manufacture and intended use reflect mentalities, or cultural norms. That is why archaeologists universally presume that a typology, the classification of artifacts by descriptive categories works. It works because a type may be an abstract concept, but it cannot fail to have cultural significance.
A ceramic type, such as our cooking pot, is a mental template, an embodiment of a conceptual world that is somehow related to the real world. Again, this is an argument from universal experience, from analogy. It is in that sense that archaeologists often call their data realia. A text, of course, is also tangible, an object written with something on something. But its ontological character is more ambiguous. Noth spoke long ago of the “plasticity” of archaeological remains, an apt phrase: malleable but real.
(3) Unlike a text, which may be ambiguous, our cooking pot has one meaning. Texts can and do lie; that is what propaganda is. But an artifact cannot lie. It could mislead us, but only because we might misinterpret it. If we are sophisticated enough to go beyond functional and deterministic explanations, however, we will understand that cooking is not just about food; ultimately it is about lifeways, foodways—cuisine—which looms large in every culture’s self-understanding. Again the particular cultural manifestation may be unique, but the cultural phenomenon is universal.
(4) Deconstruction may be a useful technique with a text, but it is useless with artifacts. Although we could do so, we do not need to take our cooking pot apart, even for laboratory analysis, in order to interpret and understand it. Deconstructing a cooking pot would leave only a pile of sherds. We need not unmask the cooking pot’s inner contradictions, reveal its lies, because there are none. The cooking pot is exactly what it appears to be. It does reflect an ideology, if by that we mean the maker’s intent. But that is discernible on quite objective grounds, and it is so fundamental that it is unexceptionable.
(5) Finally, a hermeneutical principle for artifacts is similarly based on some subjective elements, but it based also on the reality of human experience, on analogy, in the end literally on common sense. (William G. Dever, Beyond the Texts: An Archaeological Portrait of Ancient Israel and Judah [Atlanta: SBL Press, 2017], 25-27, italics in original)
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