The Bible Unearthed

[Tamrin]

The Bible Unearthed:
Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts

by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman

(Review / Excerpt)

The Bible Unearthed is our attempt to formulate a new archaeological vision of ancient Israel in which the Bible is one of the most important artifacts and cultural achievements—not the unquestioned narrative framework into which every archaeological find must be fit. As readers will see, we are deeply interested in what the historical books of the Bible have to say, how they say it, and how they relate to the archaeologically indicated history of the land of Israel.

Our main contention is that the historical narratives of the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History can be convincingly linked to the ideological and political program of the Judean kingdom in the 7th century BCE. That seems, from archaeological, sociological, and historical perspectives to be the likeliest era in which the biblical epic crystallized in recognizable form. Readers will see how we lay out the argument for this contention by examining how weak is the archaeological evidence for the patriarchs, Exodus, conquest of Canaan, and United Monarchy of David and Solomon.

[maximus]

I have this book. Good stuff.

[Tamrin]

The Bible Unearthed

[Excerpt - Article by M D Magee, www.askywhy.co.uk - Linked Above

Israel Finkelstein, director of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University and co-director of the university’s excavations at Megiddo, and Neil Asher Silberman, a professional journalist and director of historical interpretation for the Ename Center for Public Archaeology and Heritage Presentation in Belgium, have written an excellent book, The Bible Unearthed. In common with these pages, they set out to distinguish history and myth, and to inform ordinary people about the latest findings in Ancient Near Eastern and biblical scholarship

Finkelstein has carefully studied the archaeology of the emergence of Israelite society, and thereby lets us make better decisions about the feasibility of the united monarchy. In 1996, Finkelstein rejected his earlier traditional convictions and began to challenge the accepted chronology of Iron Age stratigraphy in the Levant, and proposed a sound chronology of Iron Age strata.

Is there, in tenth-century BC strata, anything to support the bible’s authority that Jerusalem was the center of a powerful empire? Monumental structures, putatively Solomon’s, had no sign of the legendary riches of that king in them. If these are not Solomon’s in the tenth century, then whose buildings were they and from what century?

The tenth century empire of David and Solomon did not exist because there was no Israel at all before the ninth century. Omri was the real founder of the state of Israel and the Omride dynasty (884-842 BC), as the Assyrian records and the Mesha stele say. This was Israel’s first kingdom. Strata thought to have been tenth century at Megiddo and other places were really ninth century BC, and city walls, ashlar palaces, and six-chambered gates at sites such as Megiddo, Hazor and Gezer could not have been built by Solomonic as 1 Kings 9:15 describes, but the earliest defences of the new Omride state of Samaria.

Finkelstein is the first well-known archaeologist to admit that the biblical united monarchy is an ideological myth conceivably as late as the Maccabees. Archaeologists depend on the biblical record of the tenth century BC in spite of the lack of direct evidence, and so Iron Age archaeology must be freed from the bible for objective progress to be made. He gives examples of archaeologists just accepting the bible as historical, such as Yadin’s dating of Hazor Stratum X which Yadin saw as answering to 1 Kings 9:15.

Finkelstein and Silberman say the Deuteronomistic historian wrote Deuteronomy, and Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings, but they accept the bible’s own deception that Deuteronomy was discovered in the reign of Josiah, the seventh century BC reforming king. Something must have stimulated this astonishing and self-deprecating explosion of creative activity in the time of Josiah, but nothing seems obviously significant enough to have done so. The activity and the apparent self-abuse of the Jews is better attributed to the Persians two centuries later.

The exodus and the conquest of Canaan never happened. Joshua’s campaign of sudden conquest through Canaan, and the slow tribe by tribe settlement in Judges are contradictory. The authors of The Bible Unearthed find the territorial and ideological aspirations of the biblical account mirrored in the Deuteronomistic historian.

The bible’s witness to the presence of kingdoms in and around tenth century Israel is not confirmed in imperial architecture. Monumental architecture at Hazor, Megiddo, Gezer, and Beth Shan cannot unequivocally be considered alone as confirmation of an imperial state operating in tenth century Israel. Finkelstein argues that, in the ninth century BC, the northern kingdom of Israel “would emerge as the first real, full blown state in Iron Age Palestine.”