The PBS series "NOVA" has produced an engrossing two-hour show about how the Hebrew Bible was written. Aspects of it will intrigue anyone interested in the Bible, but it ultimately overreaches and tries to settle disputed scholarship.

"The Bible's Buried Secrets" (8 p.m. Tuesday on WQED) features Ronald Tappy of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary among the many archaeologists who speak on the subject.

Dr. Tappy is among those whose conclusions tend to support biblical accounts of King Solomon's era. But although "NOVA" sometimes shows scholars disagreeing with one another, too often it implies that matters are settled when they're not. The script cuts an inconsistent path between biblical minimalists -- who believe next-to-nothing in the Bible is historical fact -- and maximalists who believe it's reliable history.

"NOVA" tries to explain how large portions of what Christians call the Old Testament were written, a contentious area of Jewish and Christian scholarship for 200 years. Liberal and moderate scholars -- and some conservatives -- generally believe that stories and poems were collected over centuries, then edited and re-edited until they approached final form during the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BC. "NOVA" takes that as gospel.

The show's flaws are in packing 1,000 years of disputed history into two hours and in naively trying to bring a purely scientific approach to an inherently theological topic. It's impossible to explain the Bible without making a theological statement. "NOVA's" implicit creed is that the Hebrew Bible is solely the work of humans trying to explain their own experience.

In the beginning, the narrator asks how the Israelites "discovered" the concept of one God. Near the end he intones that, as scholars reworked texts in Babylon, "the concept of God as it is today was born."

Not even a nod is given to the idea that God might be a real being who revealed himself to the Israelites or guided the formation of the texts. Those aren't theories that science can probe but, when the topic is the Bible, they can't be ignored.

The most egregious case of taking sides in a scholarly dispute concerns the exodus. "NOVA" concludes that the Israelites were never slaves in Egypt but were Canaanite serfs who rebelled against Canaanite masters and were later joined by a few escaped slaves from Egypt. They allegedly got the idea for their god, YHWH, after having a religious experience in the Midianite town of Yhw.

The scholars in the show reflect a range of views on the historical reliability of the Bible, though that's not always made clear. Dr. Tappy, who discovered a stone in an ancient Israelite military outpost inscribed with an alphabet for teaching, has more confidence in the biblical accounts than some others do. Although the show examines criticism of his work, it seems to side with his argument that Israelites in King Solomon's time were literate.

Dr. Tappy believes the show can be a valuable tool for teaching about archaeological discoveries pertaining to the Bible and the limits of what those discoveries can reveal.

"Archaeology cannot prove or disprove the Bible. What it does is shed light on the world that gave us the Bible," he said.

"The evidence is open to different interpretations and the evidence is incomplete. We are working with part of the evidence that was once there and we have to temper our conclusions based on this fact."

Congregations that want to use the show should have someone who knows archaeology introduce it and take questions, he said. It's possible to hire Dr. Tappy for this. But Pittsburgh Theological Seminary has built an evening around the show's debut that local religious educators may find helpful.

Another of the show's archaeological stars, Israel Finkelstein, the leading biblical minimalist, was already scheduled to give a Nov. 18 lecture at PTS. The public is welcome to attend his free 5:30 p.m. talk in the auditorium. Dinner can be purchased in the dining room. At 8 p.m. attendees can watch "NOVA" in the Knox room, after which Dr. Tappy and Dr. Finkelstein will take questions. It's an opportunity to have two participants with differing views fill in the missing context.