False Testament; archaeology refutes Bible's claim

[POA]

False testament: archaeology refutes the Bible's claim to history
Harper's Magazine, March, 2002 by Daniel Lazare

Not long ago, archaeologists could agree that the Old Testament, for all its embellishments and contradictions, contained a kernel of truth. Obviously, Moses had not parted the Red Sea or turned his staff into a snake, but it seemed clear that the Israelites had started out as a nomadic band somewhere in the vicinity of ancient Mesopotamia; that they had migrated first to Palestine and then to Egypt; and that, following some sort of conflict with the authorities, they had fled into the desert under the leadership of a mysterious figure who was either a lapsed Jew or, as Freud maintained, a high-born priest of the royal sun god Aton whose cult had been overthrown in a palace coup. Although much was unknown, archaeologists were confident that they had succeeded in nailing down at least these few basic facts.

That is no longer the case. In the last quarter century or so, archaeologists have seen one settled assumption after another concerning who the ancient Israelites were and where they came from proved false. Rather than a band of invaders who fought their way into the Holy Land, the Israelites are now thought to have been an 'indigenous culture that developed west of the Jordan River around 1200 B.C. Abraham, Isaac, and the other patriarchs appear to have been spliced together out of various pieces of local lore. The Davidic Empire, which archaeologists once thought as incontrovertible as the Roman, is now seen as an invention of Jerusalem-based priests in the seventh and eighth centuries B.C. who were eager to burnish their national history. The religion we call Judaism does not reach well back into the second millennium B.C. but appears to be, at most, a product of the mid-first.

This is not to say that individual elements of the story are not older. But Jewish monotheism, the sole and exclusive worship of an ancient Semitic god known as Yahweh, did not fully coalesce until the period between the Assyrian conquest of the northern Jewish kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C. and the Babylonian conquest of the southern kingdom of Judah in 586.

Some twelve to fourteen centuries of "Abrahamic" religious development, the cultural wellspring that has given us not only Judaism but Islam and Christianity, have thus been erased. Judaism appears to have been the product not of some dark and nebulous period of early history but of a more modern age of big-power politics in which every nation aspired to the imperial greatness of a Babylon or an Egypt. Judah, the sole remaining Jewish outpost by the late eighth century B.C., was a small, out-of-the-way kingdom with little in the way of military or financial clout. Yet at some point its priests and rulers seem to have been seized with the idea that their national deity, now deemed to be nothing less than the king of the universe, was about to transform them into a great power. They set about creating an imperial past commensurate with such an empire, one that had the southern heroes of David and Solomon conquering the northern kingdom and making rival kings tremble throughout the known world. From a "henotheistic" cult in which Yahweh was worshiped as the chief god among many, they refashioned the national religion so that henceforth Yahweh would be worshiped to the exclusion of all other deities. One law, that of Yahweh, would now reign supreme.

This is not, of course, the story that we have all been led to believe is, at least to some degree, history. This is not the story told, for instance, in such tomes as Paul Johnson's 1987 bestseller, A History of the Jews, from which we learn that Abraham departed the ancient city of Ur early in the second millennium B.C. as part of a great westward trek of "Habiru" (i.e., Hebrew) nomads to the land of Canaan. "[T]hough the monotheistic concept was not fully developed in [Abraham's] mind," Johnson writes, "he was a man striving towards it, who left Mesopotamian society precisely because it had reached a spiritual impasse." Now, however, we know that this statement is mainly bosh. Not only is there no evidence that any such figure as Abraham ever lived but archaeologists believe that there is no way such a figure could have lived given what we now know about ancient Israelite origins.

A few pages later, Johnson declares that "we can be reasonably sure that the Exodus occurred in the thirteenth century B.C. and had been completed by about 1225 B.C." Bosh as well. A growing volume of evidence concerning Egyptian border defenses, desert sites where the fleeing Israelites supposedly camped, etc., indicates that the flight from Egypt did not occur in the thirteenth century before Christ; it never occurred at all. Although Johnson writes that the story of Moses had to be true because it "was beyond the power of the human mind to invent," we now know that Moses was no more historically real than Abraham before him. Although Johnson adds that Joshua, Moses's lieutenant, "began and to a great extent completed the conquest of Canaan," the Old Testament account of that conquest turns out to be fictional as well. And although Johnson goes on to inform his readers that after bottling up the Philistines in a narrow coastal strip, King David "then moved east, south and north, establishing his authority over Ammon, Moab, Edom, Aram-Zobar and even Aram-Damascus in the far north-east," archaeologists believe that David was not a mighty potentate whose power was felt from the Nile to the Euphrates but rather a freebooter who carved out what was at most a small duchy in the southern highlands around Jerusalem and Hebron. Indeed, the chief disagreement among scholars nowadays is between those who hold that David was a petty hilltop chieftain whose writ extended no more than a few miles in any direction and a small but vociferous band of "biblical minimalists" who maintain that he never existed at all.

In classic Copernican fashion, a new generation of archaeologists has taken everything its teachers said about ancient Israel and stood it on its head. Two myths are being dismantled as a consequence: one concerning the origins of ancient Israel and the other concerning the relationship between the Bible and science. Back in the days when archaeology was buttressing the old biblical tales, the relationship between science and religion had warmed considerably; now the old chill has crept back in. The comfy ecumenicism that allowed one to believe in, say, modern physics and Abraham, Isaac, et al. is disappearing, replaced by a somewhat sharper dividing line between science and faith. The implications are sweeping--after all, it is not the Song of the Nibelungen or the Epic of Gilgamesh that is being called into question here but a series of foundational myths to which fully half the world's population, in one way or another, subscribes.

So how did such a glorious revolution come to be? As is usually the case, we must first look to when cracks started developing in the ancien regime.

Ironically, the new archaeology represents something of a circling back to what was once known as the "Higher Criticism," a largely German school of biblical study that relied solely on linguistic and textual analysis. By the late nineteenth century members of this school had arrived at the conclusion that the first five books of the Old Testament--variously known as the Five Books of Moses, the Torah, or the Pentateuch--were not written by Moses himself, as tradition would have it. Rather, they were largely products of a "post-exilic period" in which Jewish scribes, newly released from captivity in Babylon, set about putting a jumbled collection of ancient writings into some sort of coherent order. The Higher Criticism did not topple the Old Testament as a whole, but it did conclude that Abraham, Isaac, and the other tribal founders depicted in the Book of Genesis were no more real than the heroes of Greek or Norse mythology. As the German scholar Julius Wellhausen put it in the 1870s: "The whole literary character and loose connection of the ... story of the patriarchs reveal how gradually its different elements were brought together, and how little they have coalesced into a unity." Rather than a chronicle of genuine events, the history that Genesis set forth was an artificial construct, a narrative framework created long after the facts in order to link together a series of unconnected folktales like pearls on a string.

[POA]

If the linguists of the Higher Criticism were generally skeptical in regard to the Old Testament, modern biblical archaeology as it began taking shape in the early nineteenth century was something entirely different. The first modern archaeologists to set foot in the Holy Land were New England Congregationalists determined to make use of rigorous scientific methods in order to strip away centuries of what they regarded as Roman Catholic superstition and prejudice. As the American biblical scholar Edward Robinson, who first came to Palestine in 1838, put it, he would accept nothing until it was absolutely proven. And yet, as a dutiful Calvinist, Robinson assumed from the outset that whatever he uncovered would broadly confirm what he had learned years earlier in Sunday school. Evidence that buttressed the biblical account was eagerly sought out, while evidence that contradicted it was ignored. British archaeologists set sail a generation later with an even more explicit set of preconceptions. As the Archbishop of York told the newly created Palestine Exploration Fund in London in 1865,

This country of Palestine belongs to you and to me, it is essentially ours.
It was given to the Father of Israel [i.e., Abraham] in the words: "Walk
through the land in the length of it, and in the breadth of it, for I will
give it unto thee." We mean to walk through Palestine in the length and in
the breadth of it, because that land has been given unto us....

The first archaeologists were thus guilty of one of the most elementary of scientific blunders: rather than allowing the facts to speak for themselves, they had tried to fit them into a preconceived theoretical framework. Another layer of political mystification was added in the twentieth century by Zionist pioneers eager for evidence that the Jewish claim to the Holy Land was every bit as ancient as the Old Testament said it was. In 1928 members of a settlement known as Beth Alpha uncovered an ancient synagogue mosaic while digging an irrigation ditch. Since the settlers were members of a left-wing faction known as Hashomer Hatzair, it was inevitable that some would argue that the find should be left to the dustbin of history and that the work of building a modern agricultural settlement should continue uninterrupted. But others recognized its significance: the more evidence they uncovered of an ancient Jewish presence in the Holy Land, the more they would succeed in legitimizing a modern colonization effort. As the number of digs multiplied and turned into a national passion, what the Israeli archaeologist Eliezer Sukenik described as a specifically "Jewish archaeology" was born.

The result was a happy union of science, religion, and politics that by the 1950s would eventually bring together everyone from Christian fundamentalists in the American heartland to the Israeli military establishment. When David Ben-Gurion, the founder of modern Israel, spoke of a sweeping offensive in the 1948 War of Independence, he did so in language purposely evocative of the Book of Joshua. The armies of Israel, he declared, had "struck the kings of Lod and Ramleh, the kings of Belt Naballa and Deir Tarif, the kings of Kola and Migdal Zedek.... "Yigael Yadin, Eliezer Sukenik's Son, who was not only Israel's leading archaeologist but a top military commander, referred to an Israeli military incursion into the Sinai by quipping that it was the first time Israeli forces had set foot on the peninsula in 3,400 years. All assumed that the ancient events Israel claimed to be reenacting had actually occurred.

The politicization of archaeology reached something of a climax in the early 1960s, when Yadin was put in command of the excavation of Masada, a hilltop fortress where nearly 1,000 Jewish warriors had committed suicide rather than surrender to the Romans in A.D. 73. In Yadin's hands, Masada emerged as Israel's preeminent nationalist shrine, a place where military recruits were assembled to take an oath of allegiance in dramatic nighttime ceremonies--this despite complaints on the part of a few scholars that evidence for a mass suicide was lacking and that there was reason to believe that ancient accounts of the event were deliberately falsified.

Around this time, the pop novelist James Michener summed up the state of official belief in his heavy-breathing bestseller The Source (which this writer savored as a teenager). Using a fictional archaeological dig to weave a series of tales about Palestinian life from prehistoric times to the modern era, Michener briskly laid out the middlebrow orthodoxy of the day: i.e., that God had entered into a pact with the ancient Israelites early in the second millennium B.C., that Jews had dominated the Holy Land for some 2,000 years thereafter, and that with the birth of modern Israel they were claiming their birthright. "Deuteronomy is so real to me," Michener has a fictional Israeli archaeologist declare, "that I feel as if my immediate ancestor--say, my great-grandfather with desert dust still in his clothes--came down that valley with goats and donkeys and stumbled onto this spot." Michener says of another fictional archaeologist, an American who has just been reading the Torah,

This time he gained a sense of the enormous historicity of the book.... He
now read the Ten Commandments as if he were among the tribes listening to
Moses. It was he who was coming out of Egypt, dying of thirst in the Sinai,
retreating in petulant fear from the first invasion of the Promised Land.
He put the Bible down with a distinct sense of having read the history of a
real people....

Yet it was precisely this "historicity" that was beginning to come under fire. Resurrecting a theory first proposed in the 1920s, an Israeli named Yohanan Aharoni infuriated the Israeli archaeological establishment by arguing that evidence in support of an Israelite war of conquest in the thirteenth century B.C. was weak and unconvincing. Basing his argument on a redating of pottery shards found at a dig in the biblical city of Hazor, Aharoni proposed instead that the first Hebrew settlers had filtered into Palestine in a nonviolent fashion, peacefully settling among the Canaanites rather than putting them to the sword. Although archaeologists claimed in the 1930s to have uncovered evidence that the walls of Jericho had fallen much as the Book of Joshua said they had, a British archaeologist named Kathleen Kenyon was subsequently able to demonstrate, based on Mycenaean pottery shards found amid the ruins, that the destruction had occurred no later than 1300 B.C., seventy years or more before the conquest could have happened. Whatever caused the walls of Jericho to come tumbling down, it was not Joshua's army.

The enormous ideological edifice that Yigael Yadin and others had erected was weakening at the base. Whereas formerly every pottery fragment or stone tablet appeared to confirm the biblical account, now nothing seemed to fit. Attempting to pinpoint precisely when Abraham had departed the ancient city of Ur, the American scholar William F. Albright, a pillar of the archaeological establishment until his death in 1971, theorized that he had left as part of a great migration of "Amorite" (literally "western") desert nomads sometime between 2100 and 1800 B.C. This was the theory that Paul Johnson would later cite in A History of the Jews. Subsequent research into urban development and nomadic growth patterns indicated that no such mass migration had taken place and that several cities mentioned in the Genesis account did not exist during the time frame Albright had suggested. Efforts to salvage the theory by moving up Abraham's departure to around 1500 B.C. foundered when it was pointed out that, this time around, Genesis failed to mention cities that did dominate the landscape during this period. No matter what time frame was advanced, the biblical text did not accord with what archaeologists were learning about the land of Canaan in the second millennium.

[POA]

This was not all. As Israel Finkelstein, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University, and Neil Asher Silberman, a journalist who specializes in biblical and religious subjects, point out in their recent book, The Bible Unearthed, the patriarchal tales make frequent mention of camel caravans. When, for example, Abraham sent one of his servants to look for a wife for Abraham's son, Isaac, Genesis 24 says that the emissary "took ten of his master's camels and left, taking with him all kinds of good things from his master." Yet analysis of ancient animal bones confirms that camels were not widely used for transport in the region until well after 1000 B.C. Genesis 26 tells of Isaac seeking help from a certain "Abimelech, king of the Philistines." Yet archaeological research has confirmed that the Philistines were not a presence in the area until after 1200 B.C. The wealth of detail concerning people, goods, and cities that makes the patriarchal tales so vivid and lifelike, archaeologists discovered, were reflective of a period long after the one that Albright had pinpointed. They were reflective of the mid-first millennium, not the early second.

In hindsight, it all seems so obvious. An ancient text purporting to be a record of events centuries earlier--how could it not fall short of modern historical standards? How could it not reflect contemporary events more than events in the distant past? Beginning in the 1950s, doubts concerning the Book of Exodus multiplied just as they had about Genesis. The most obvious concerned the complete silence in contemporary Egyptian records concerning the mass escape of what the Bible says were no fewer than 603,550 Hebrew slaves. Such numbers no doubt were exaggerated. Yet considering how closely Egypt's eastern borders were patrolled at that time, how could the chroniclers of the day have failed to mention what was still likely a major security breach?

Old-guard academics professed to be untroubled. John Bright, a prominent historian, was dismissive of the entire issue. "Not only were Pharaohs not accustomed to celebrate reverses," he wrote in A History of Israel, long considered the standard account, "but an affair involving only a party of runaway slaves would have been to them of altogether minor significance." The scribes' silence concerning the mysterious figure of Moses, Bright went on, was also of no account. Regardless of what the chronicles did or did not say, "The events of exodus and Sinai require a great personality behind them. And a faith so unique as Israel's demands a founder as surely as does Christianity--or Islam, for that matter."

This was dogma masquerading as scholarship. Not only was there a dearth of physical evidence concerning the escape itself, as archaeologists pointed out, but the slate was blank concerning the nearly five centuries that the Israelites had supposedly lived in Egypt prior to the Exodus as well as the forty years that they supposedly spent wandering in the Sinai. Not so much as a skeleton, campsite, or cooking pot had turned up, Finkelstein and Silberman noted, even though "modern archeological techniques are quite capable of tracing even the very meager remains of hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads all over the world." Indeed, although archaeologists have found remains in the Sinai from the third millennium B.C. and the late first, they have found none from the thirteenth century.

As with Abraham, the effort to nail down a time frame for the departure created more problems than it resolved. Archaeologists had long zeroed in on a relatively narrow window of opportunity in the thirteenth century B.C. bounded by two independently verifiable events--the start of work on two royal cities in which the Book of Exodus says Hebrew slaves were employed ("and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh ...") and the subsequent erection of a victory stele, or monument, that describes a people identified as "Israel" already existing in Canaan. Hence, the flight into the Sinai had to have taken place either during the reign of a pharaoh known as Rameses or shortly after the death of Ramses II in 1213 B.C.

Once again the theory didn't add up. The Book of Numbers states that, following their escape, the Israelites came under attack from the "Canaanite king of Arad, who lived in the Negev," as they were "coming along the road to Atharim." But although excavations showed that a city of Arad existed in the early Bronze Age from roughly 3500 to 2200 B.C., and that an Iron Age fort arose on the site beginning in roughly 1150 B.C., it was deserted during the years in between. The Pentateuch says the Hebrews did battle with Sihon, king of the Amorites, at a city called Heshbon, but excavations have revealed that Heshbon did not exist during this period either. Nor did Edom, against whose king the Old Testament says the ancient Jews also made war.

Then came a series of archaeological studies conducted in the aftermath of the Six-Day War in 1967. Previously archaeologists had intensively studied specific sites and locales, digging deep in order to determine how technology and culture had changed from one century to the next. Now they tramped through hills and valleys looking for pottery shards and remnants of ancient walls in order to map out how settlement patterns had ebbed and flowed across broad stretches of terrain. Whereas previously archaeologists had concentrated on the lowland cities where the great battles mentioned in the Bible were said to have taken place, they now shifted their attention to the highlands located in the present West Bank. The results were little short of revolutionary. Rather than revealing that Canaan was entered from the outside, analysis of ancient settlement patterns indicated that a distinctive Israelite culture arose locally around 1200 B.C. as nomadic shepherds and goatherds ceased their wanderings and began settling down in the nearby uplands. Instead of an alien culture, the Israelites were indigenous. Indeed, they were highly similar to other cultures that were emerging in the region around the same time--except for one thing: whereas archaeologists found pig bones in other sites, they found none among the Israelites. A prohibition on eating pork may have been one of the earliest ways in which the Israelites distinguished themselves from their neighbors.

Thus there was no migration from Mesopotamia, no sojourn in Egypt, and no exodus. There was no conquest upon the Israelites' return and, for that matter, no peaceful infiltration such as the one advanced by Yohanan Aharoni. Rather than conquerors, the Hebrews were a native people who had never left in the first place. So why invent for themselves an identity as exiles and invaders? One reason may have been that people in the ancient world did not establish rights to a particular piece of territory by farming or by raising families on it but by seizing it through force of arms. Indigenous rights are an ideological invention of the twentieth century A.D. and are still not fully established in the twenty-first, as the plight of today's Palestinians would indicate. The only way that the Israelites could establish a moral right to the land they inhabited was by claiming to have conquered it sometime in the distant past. Given the brutal power politics of the day, a nation either enslaved others or was enslaved itself, and the Israelites were determined not to fall into the latter category.

[POA]

If the Old Testament is to be believed, David and Solomon, rulers of the southern kingdom of Judah from about 1005 to about 931 B.C., made themselves masters of the northern kingdom of Israel as well. They represent, in the official account, a rare moment of national unity and power; under their reign, the combined kingdom was a force throughout the Fertile Crescent. The unified kingdom is said to have split into two rump states shortly after Solomon's death and, thus weakened, was all too easy for the Assyrian Empire and its Babylonian successor to pick off. But did a united monarchy encompassing all twelve tribes ever truly exist?

According to the Bible, Solomon was both a master builder and an insatiable accumulator. He drank out of golden goblets, outfitted his soldiers with golden shields, maintained a fleet of sailing ships to seek out exotic treasures, kept a harem of 1,000 wives and concubines, and spent thirteen years building a palace and a richly decorated temple to house the Ark of the Covenant. Yet not one goblet, not one brick, has ever been found to indicate that such a reign existed. If David and Solomon had been important regional power brokers, one might reasonably expect their names to crop up on monuments and in the diplomatic correspondence of the day. Yet once again the record is silent. True, an inscription referring to "Ahaziahu, son of Jehoram, king of the House of David" was found in 1993 on a fragment dating from the late ninth century B.C. But that was more than a hundred years after David's death, and at most all it indicates is that David (or someone with a similar name) was credited with establishing the Judahite royal line. It hardly proves that he ruled over a powerful empire.

Moreover, by the 1970s and 1980s a good deal of countervailing evidence--or, rather, lack of evidence--was beginning to accumulate. Supposedly, David had used his power base in Judah as a springboard from which to conquer the north. But archaeological surveys of the southern hill country show that Judah in the eleventh and tenth centuries B.C. was too poor and backward and sparsely populated to support such a military expedition. Moreover, there was no evidence of wealth or booty flowing back to the southern power base once the conquest of the north had taken place. Jerusalem seems to have been hardly more than a rural village when Solomon was reportedly transforming it into a glittering capital. And although archaeologists had long credited Solomon with the construction of major palaces in the northern cities of Gezer, Hazor, and Megiddo (better known as the site of Armageddon), recent analysis of pottery shards found on the sites, plus refined carbon-14 dating techniques, indicate that the palaces postdate Solomon's reign by a century or more.

Finkelstein and Silberman concluded that Judah and Israel had never existed under the same roof. The Israelite culture that had taken shape in the central hill country around 1200 B.C. had evolved into two distinct kingdoms from the start. Whereas Judah remained weak and isolated, Israel did in fact develop into an important regional power beginning around 900 B.C. It was as strong and rich as David and Solomon's kingdom had supposedly been a century earlier, yet it was not the sort of state of which the Jewish priesthood approved. The reason had to do with the nature of the northern kingdom's expansion. As Israel grew, various foreign cultures came under its sway, cultures that sacrificed to gods other than Yahweh. Pluralism became the order of the day: the northern kings could manage such a diverse empire only by allowing these cultures to worship their own gods in return for their continued loyalty. The result was a policy of religious syncretism, a theological pastiche in which the cult of Yahweh coexisted alongside those of other Semitic deities.

When the northern kingdom fell to the Assyrians, the Jewish priesthood concluded not that Israel had played its cards badly in the game of international politics but that by tolerating other cults it had given grave offense to the only god that mattered. Joining ,a stream of refugees to the south, the priests swelled the ranks of an influential political party dedicated to the proposition that the only way for Judah to avoid a similar fate was to cleanse itself of all rival beliefs and devote itself exclusively to Yahweh.

"They did wicked things that provoked Yahweh to anger. They worshiped idols, though Yahweh had said, `You shall not do this.'" Such was the "Yahweh-alone" movement's explanation for Israel's downfall. The monotheistic movement reached a climax in the late seventh century B.C. when a certain King Josiah took the throne and gave the go-ahead for a long-awaited purge. Storming through the countryside, Josiah and his Yahwist supporters destroyed rival shrines, slaughtered alien priests, defiled their altars, and ensured that henceforth even Jewish sacrifice take place exclusively in Jerusalem, where the priests could exercise tight control. The result, the priests and scribes believed, was a national renaissance that would soon lead to the liberation of the north and a similar cleansing there as well.

But then: disaster. After allowing his priests to establish a rigid religious dictatorship, Josiah rode off to rendezvous with an Egyptian pharaoh named Necho in the year 609 B.C. Although Chronicles says that the two monarchs met to do battle, archaeologists, pointing out that Josiah was in no position to challenge the mighty Egyptian army, suspect that Necho merely summoned Josiah to some sort of royal parley and then had him killed for unknown reasons. A model of pious rectitude, Josiah had done everything he thought God wanted of him. He had purified his kingdom and consecrated his people exclusively to Yahweh. Yet he suffered regardless. Judah entered into a period of decline culminating some twenty-three years later in the Babylonian conquest and exile.

Does this mean that monotheism was nothing more than a con, a ruse cooked up by ambitious priests in order to fool a gullible population? As with any religion, cynicism and belief, realpolitik and genuine fervor, all came together in a way that we can barely begin to untangle. To say that the Jerusalem priesthood intentionally cooked up a phony history is to assume that the priests possessed a modern concept of historical truth and falsehood, and surely this is not so. As the biblical minimalist Thomas L. Thompson has noted, the Old Testament's authors did not subscribe to a sequential chronology but to some more complicated arrangement in which the great events of the past were seen as taking place in some foggy time before time. The priests, after all, were not inventing a past; they were inventing a present and, they trusted, a future.

Monotheism was unquestionably a great leap forward. At a time when there was no science, no philosophy, and no appreciable knowledge of the outside world, an obscure, out-of-the-way people somehow conceived of a lone deity holding the entire universe in his grasp. This was no small feat of imagination, and its consequences were enormous. Monotheism's attempt at a unified field theory--a single explanation for everything from the creation of the universe to the origin of law--failed, but in failing it ensured that people would try doubly hard to come up with some new "theory of everything" to take its place. The monotheistic revolution continued to build because it enlisted a larger and larger portion of the population in its great totalizing effort. The Book of Kings tells of the discovery, during Josiah's reign, of a sacred book, filled with rules and regulations that the Jews had so far failed to follow, deep within the recesses of the Temple. In other cultures, the king might have huddled over the book with his advisers and priests. But not Josiah. He

called together all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem. He went up to the
temple of Yahweh with the men of Judah, the people of Jerusalem, the
priests and the prophets--all the people from the least to the greatest. He
read in their hearing all the words of the Book of the Covenant, which had
been found in the temple of Yahweh. The king stood by the pillar and
renewed the covenant in the presence of Yahweh.... Then all the people
pledged themselves to this covenant.

This was all quite novel. Whereas formerly the king and the priests alone were responsible to the national deity, now "all the people from the least to the greatest" took the pledge. The people had been transformed from mere onlookers into active participants. Arguably, the people of Judah were less free as a consequence of Josiah's reforms. Under the old pluralistic order they could sacrifice to other gods, and now they could sacrifice to just one. Yet with the new system's responsibilities to uphold the sacred covenant came the makings of a voice. No longer could the masses be counted on to remain silent.

Was the purpose of all this merely to pluck one tiny nation out of obscurity and elevate it above all others? If the Yahwists were groping for some concept of ethics to go with their universalism, for the most part they seem to have fallen woefully short. To quote Julius Wellhausen on the Jewish scriptures: "Monotheism is worked out to its furthest consequences, and at the same time is enlisted in the service of the narrowest selfishness."

[POA]

A single, all-powerful god required a single set of sacred texts, and the process of composition and codification that led to what we now know as the Bible began under King Josiah and continued well into the Christian era. "Canonization" of this sort concentrated rather than dispelled questions of nationalism and universalism. A framework for faith, the Bible was equally a machine for generating heresy and doubt, and out of this debate eventually arose Christianity, Islam, Protestantism, and a great deal else besides.

The new universalism had enormous energy, encompassing as it did the entire cosmos and enlisting the entire population, but the new democratic spirit ran aground over the issue of universalism versus narrow nationalism. What, after all, was the point of mobilizing such a broad population in this manner? So that they could slaughter their neighbors all the more thoroughly? How could Moses prohibit murder and then, in Numbers 31, fly into a rage because a returning Israelite war party has slaughtered only the adult male Midianites? ("Now kill all the boys," he tells them when he calms down. "And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.") Was murder a crime only when it involved members of the in-group? Or was it a crime when it involved human beings in general, regardless of nationality? Did an emerging concept of a more equitable social order apply only to Israel or to other nations as well?

In one form or another, these questions have been with us ever since.

Daniel Lazare is the author of America's Undeclared War: What's Killing Our Cities and How We Can Stop It (Harcourt) and The Velvet Coup: The Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the Decline of American Democracy (Verso). His essay "Your Constitution Is Killing You" appeared in the October 1999 issue.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Harper's Magazine Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group

[Moses]

Very interesting!

One minor point in terms of the history of "archaeology" of that region and its insistance of conducting it within the framework of the "Bible": I think the Brits actually started different forms of archeology in that region in the 18th century, if not before.

And, in a manner that has become all too suddenly familiar since the British theocratic imperialism has been strangely and suddenly imposed on us here.

In the 16th or 17th centuries, the scholars in England were all clerics-- initially Catholic but then of course "Anglican". They were deployed, as hired ministers, for British trading companies, and I know at least one or some were in the ME, in Turkey, at least. I think the first cleric to learn Arabic and translate some stuff was Edward Pococke of Oxford-- and I think he helped found the Bodelian. (this is all from memory-- correct me if I am wrong).

So right from the get-go you had this combination, heretofore rather foreign here in the US, until the neocon take-over resurrected it full-blown-- of commerce, religion, and military imperialism, all rolled into one. When it came to Jerusalem and surrounds, the "Bible" was used as a touchstone, at the very least, for all interpretations and analyses, I am pretty sure.

In the nineteenth century, one man-- I forget his name, actually did a study of the Israelis as regular humans, and was thanked by the Jewish organizations in England. However, some of the Orthodox Anglican clerics were displeased, and got his book banned, because they asserted that Israelis and that region could not be written about without including the "truths" of the bible.

I'll try to look up some details about this, because it is a bit of a watershed. Then, later, people looked back at this period and said-- gosh, wasn't it crazy that this book was banned back then? Isn't it good that we're enlightened? Until 2000, and Bush et al came to power.... Now there is a book published by Clerics in England that gives a history of Anglican zionism and calls it apostacy, but US publishers have refused to publish it.

[Moses]

The Milman History of the Jews & other Controversies (1830)

A. The Milman Controversy: WBM(writing c. 1850ish): “In his letter of the 28th March allusion is made to “Milman’s History” -- namely, a “History of the Jews,” published in three small volumes by Murray, in the series called “The Family Library”, and attributed to the Rev. Henry Hart Milman54 , Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. This work appeared to the Bishop, as it did to very many others, to have “a pernicious tendency”55 , from its treating the history of the Jews “as an ordinary history, having no other pretensions to notice than a history of Egypt, Greece, or Rome,” and not aiming at “the production of religious improvement;” and it had “given great offense,” from “the persuasion that the history was constructed upon principles and in a manner calculated to do injury to that which is considered of infinitely higher moment than any private personal interests-- namely, the honour of the Almighty, and the truth of the revelations of His will to mankind.” The pernicious tendency of the book had been ably exposed by Dr. Faussett, Margaret Professor of Divinity in Oxford, in a sermon before the University, which he printed at once: and it was hoped that if the work could not be withdrawn from circulation, its mischief might be neutralized, and that, at any rate, it would not be republished. This hope, however, proved fallacious, and the publication of a second edition was announced; and this was the occasion of a pamphlet, entitled “A Letter to the Rev. Henry Hart Milman56 , reputed author of a History of the Jews”, &c., deprecating the republication of that work, by “One who is also an Elder”57 ; the writer being the Bishop of Down”.

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Footnotes:
(54)MILMAN, HENRY HART (1791-1868), English historian and ecclesiastic, third son of Sir Francis Milman, Bart., physician to George III., was born in London on the loth of November 1791. Educated at Eton and at Brasenose College, Oxford, his university career was brilliant. He gained the Newdigate prize with a poem on the Apollo Belvidere in 1812, was elected a fellow of Brasenose in 1814, and in 1816 won the English essay prize with his Comparative Estimate of Sculpture and Painting. In 1816 he was ordained, and two years later was presented to the living of St Mary's, Reading. Milman had already made his appearance as a dramatic writer with his tragedy Fazio (produced on the stage under the title of The Italian Wife). He also wrote Samor, the Lord of The Bright City, the subject of which was taken from British legend, the " bright city " being Gloucester; but he failed to invest it with serious interest. In subsequent poetical works he was more successful, notably the Fall of Jerusalem (1820) and the Martyr of Antioch (1822). The influence of Byron is seen in his Belshazzar (1822). A tragedy, Anne Boleyn, followed in 1826; and Milman also wrote " When our-heads are bowed with woe,"[http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/w/h/e/whenourh.htm]and other hymns; an admirable version of the Sanskrit episode of Nala and Damayanti; and translations of the Agamemnon of Aeschylus and the Bacchae of Euripides. In 1821 he was elected professor of poetry at Oxford, and in 1827 he delivered the Bampton lectures on the character and conduct of the apostles as an evidence of Christianity. His poetical works were published in three volumes in 1839.

Turning to another field, Milman published in 1829 his History of the Jews, which is memorable as the first by an English clergyman which treated the Jews as an Oriental tribe, recognized sheikhs and amirs in the Old Testament, sifted and classified documentary evidence, and evaded or minimized the miraculous. In consequence, the author was violently attacked and his inevitable preferment was delayed. In 1835, however, Sir Robert Peel made him rector of St Margaret's, Westminster, and canon of Westminster, and in 1849 he became dean of St Paul's. By this time his unpopularity had nearly died away, and generally revered and beloved, he occupied a dignified and enviable position, which he constantly employed for the promotion of culture and in particular for the relaxation of subscription to ecclesiastical formularies. His History of Christianity to the Abolition of Paganism in the Roman Empire (1840) had been completely ignored; but widely different was the reception accorded to the continuation of his work, his great History of Latin Christianity (1855), which has passed through many editions. In 1838 he had edited Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and in the following year published his Life of Gibbon. Milman was also responsible for an edition of Horace, and when he died he had almost finished a history of St Paul's Cathedral, which was completed and published by his son, A. Milman (London, 1868), who also collected and published in 1879 a volume of his essays and articles. Milman died on the 24th of September 1868, and was buried in St Paul's Cathedral. .By his wife, Mary Ann, a daughter of Lieut.-General William thingyell, he had four sons and two daughters. His nephew, Robert Milman (1816-1876), was bishop of Calcutta from 1867 until his death, and was the author of a Life of Torquato Tasso (1850).

See A. C. Tait, Sermon in Memory of H. H. Milman (London, 1868), and Arthur Milman, H. H. Milman (London, 1900). See also the Memoirs of R. Milman, bishop of Calcutta, by his sister, Frances Maria Milman (1879). 63.1911encyclopedia.org/M/MI/MILMAN_HENRY_HART.htm
image (young): www.cyberhymnal.org/img/m/i/milman_hh3.jpg
image(old) : www.cyberhymnal.org/img/m/i/milman_hh3.jpg
(55)But to punish (as the law does at present) any dangerous or offensive writings, which, when published, shall on a fair and impartial trial be adjudged of a pernicious tendency, is necessary for the preservation of peace and good order, of government and religion, the only solid foundations of civil liberty. - Blackstone,
(56)A copy of this pamphlet appears to be in the Holden Collection at the University of Leeds: www.leeds.ac.uk/library/ subjects/arts/holden/holden-final.doc
(57)A phrase used by the apostle Peter in his first Epistle when addressing the other apostles.

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June 28, 1830 from Rev. Dr. G. Richards, Rector of St. Martin’s in the Fields. : Re: 3 publications he sent

A. “your first anonymous address to Milman was grave, considerate and kind. I wish that your advice, so kindly given , had been received as it deserved, and prevented the continuance and further spread of the mischief. But how much was he misled in supporting his attacks on the miracles by your express authority, omitting at the same time the only great point of difference between you; upon which, however, the whole of the question at issue rested. Your refutation is, I think, to a considerate mind, complete and triumphant. The author of the ‘History of the Jews’ evidently appears to labour to put the exercise of miraculous power as much out of the question as possible, and to bring prominently forward the means which man had recourse to by Divine Providence, without sufficiently marking, that they were so had recourse to. It has been generally allowed, that milman has deceived himself in his History, and had given a different complexion to many of the most important facts from that he really believes them to bear. What a dangerous thing is philosophy when it meddles with religion! It is sure to prejudice whatever it touches. It is impossible to write sacred history upon the same principles as profane annals may be traced. The alteration even of a single word, which has a peculiar interpretation affixed to it, tells very much indeed, and that , too, very unfavorably.” [Sound familiar? Unbelievable that this has been resurrected, as though the enlightment is still resented!]

[Moses]

More on the British Theocratic Imperialist history writing:

By the closing decades of the sixteenth century, Europe was at the height of the Renaissance, and its view of itself and its relations with the rest of the world was starting to change drastically. ... Travelogues written by Europeans visiting Palestine after that period point to a shift in Europe's relationship to the region. Where medieval pilgrims had often wept or gone into trances upon their arrival in Jerusalem, modern European visitors observed with curiosity what was before their eyes. They were traveling for pleasure and for cultural experiences; tourism was gradually replacing pilgrimage as a motive for visiting Palestine. By the end of the seventeenth century quite a few European tourists had already been to Jerusalem. The most famous among them was Henry Maundrell, the author of the book A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem in 1697. ¶The book would prove to be one of the most popular books about the East for centuries to come. By 1749 seven editions in different European languages had appeared, and sections of the book continued to appear in collections of travel writings published both in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.[2] ....¶ In many ways, Maundrell's book is an example of the new genre of travel writings on Palestine that was emerging at the time. The book is not a guide to the holy sites so much as a diary kept by the author in which he reflects on the things he saw and did. .... It starts with Maundrell leaving Aleppo on 26 February 1696 and ends with his return to the same city on 29 April of the same year. This type of writing was common among Muslim travelers to Palestine (such as Nasir-e Khusraw), but not among medieval Christians who visited Palestine. ¶ Although Maundrell's narrative was not that of a pilgrim, he did proclaim that the purpose of his journey was pilgrimage.[3] After all, he was the chaplain of the British Levant Company in Aleppo, and he was visiting a land revered by his faith. Yet Maundrell was also keen on illustrating how inspired he was by the new scientific spirit that was sweeping Europe. And his presence in the region was tied to European economic expansion. The accounts he presents of Biblical sites reflect his fascination with both science and Biblical history at once. His narrative presents the reader with detailed geographical information about roads and distances. At the same time, whenever the place he mentions has some Biblical significance, Maundrell includes verses from the Bible that relate to the site. ... ¶Whenever he visits a place mentioned in the Bible, Maundrell pays careful attention to all kinds of details concerning the physical location. For example, upon arriving at Jerusalem from the north, he observes that while the land in the region is rocky and hilly in nature, the people till the soil in a way that improves the land and makes it better fit for cultivation. Then he notes that, in contrast, the salty plains adjoining the Dead Sea are not as fruitful. Therefore, the inhabitants of the latter area have been inclined to engage in the production of honey, as Josephus had observed.[4] ¶ Despite Maundrell's interest in Christian history, he has an antagonistic attitude towards local Christians throughout his book. "Poor and pitiful" is his description of a local church that he visited on his way to Jerusalem.[5] No doubt his scorn was connected with Protestantism's general attitude towards Catholicism. But his attitude also reflects the general European disregard for native populations and their ways of life. Narratives written by the new European visitors often paid little attention to the actual lives of the people they encountered in Palestine if compared with the attention given to the archaeological ruins and the historic sites. Maundrell's narrative is merely an early example of European disinterest in the indigenous population of Palestine. .... His attitude to local Christians is ironic in light of the fact that his mission as the chaplain of the Levant Company in the region was to serve not just the company staff but also the local Eastern Christians. ¶As a memoir of a journey taken more than three centuries ago within the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire, Maundrell's narrative offers its readers a glimpse of life in Syria and Palestine at the time. This is particularly important because no more than a handful of studies actually focus on this particular period. For this reason this book is important for historians of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. At the same time, Maundrell's narrative offers a rather narrow view of social and cultural life in the region, mainly because it is essentially a memoir of a journey. Like all memoirs, what it has to offer relates more to its author and his reaction to the things he saw and did than to how life was then. This is especially true in this case because Maundrell was a tourist who spent only two months traveling in a region he knew very little about. --” Maundrell in Jerusalem: Reflections on the Writing of an Early European Tourist[1],” by Issam Nassar
www.jqf-jerusalem.org/2000/jqf9/classical.html

[Moses]

Also should mention that the British theocratic history-writing re: Jerusalem and surrounds really heated up and got direction from Oxford when the French happened to be occupying that region, and the Brits sent some troops of their own.

I think this theocratic imperialism that we are experiencing, like some kind of nightmare, is actually of British zionist genesis, with American strains woven in by the propagandists, but the American strains are to bring about the turning of the US into Britain.

[Moses]

Book re: British Theocratic Imperialism as roots of Zionism by Anglican Scholar that US publishers won't publish.

[Moses]

Abstract
Religion and American Culture
Winter 2004, Vol. 14, No. 1, Pages 109-147
Posted online on February 24, 2004.
(doi:10.1525/rac.2004.14.1.109)

The "Christianization" of Israel and Jews in 1950s America

Michelle Mart, Associate Professor of History

Penn State University, Berks Campus, Reading, Pennsylvania


In the 1950s, the United States experienced a domestic religious revival that offered postwar Americans a framework to interpret the world and its unsettling international political problems. Moreover, the religious message of the cold war that saw the God-fearing West against atheistic communists encouraged an unprecedented ecumenism in American history. Jews, formerly objects of indifference if not disdain and hatred in the United States, were swept up in the ecumenical tide of "Judeo-Christian" values and identity and, essentially, "Christianized" in popular and political culture. Not surprisingly, these cultural trends affected images of the recently formed State of Israel. In the popular and political imagination, Israel was formed by the "Chosen People" and populated by prophets, warriors, and simple folk like those in Bible stories. The popular celebration of Israel also romanticized its people at the expense of their Arab (mainly Muslim) neighbors. Battling foes outside of the Judeo-Christian family, Israelis seemed just like Americans. Americans treated the political problems of the Middle East differently than those in other parts of the world because of the religious significance of the "Holy Land." A man such as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who combined views of hard-nosed "realpolitik" with religious piety, acknowledged the special status of the Middle East by virtue of the religions based there. Judaism, part of the "Judeo-Christian civilization," benefitted from this religious consciousness, while Islam remained a religion and a culture apart. This article examines how the American image of Jews, Israelis, and Middle Eastern politics was re-framed in the early 1950s to reflect popular ideas of religious identity. These images were found in fiction, the press, and the speeches and writings of social critics and policymakers. The article explores the role of the 1950s religious revival in the identification of Americans with Jews and Israelis and discusses the rise of the popular understanding that "Judeo-Christian" values shaped American culture and politics.

PDF (173 kb):http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/pdf/10.1525/rac.2004.14.1.109

[Moses]

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com's Best of 2001
The Bible Unearthed is a balanced, thoughtful, bold reconsideration of the historical period that produced the Hebrew Bible. The headline news in this book is easy to pick out: there is no evidence for the existence of Abraham, or any of the Patriarchs; ditto for Moses and the Exodus; and the same goes for the whole period of Judges and the united monarchy of David and Solomon. In fact, the authors argue that it is impossible to say much of anything about ancient Israel until the seventh century B.C., around the time of the reign of King Josiah. In that period, "the narrative of the Bible was uniquely suited to further the religious reform and territorial ambitions of Judah." Yet the authors deny that their arguments should be construed as compromising the Bible's power. Only in the 18th century--"when the Hebrew Bible began to be dissected and studied in isolation from its powerful function in community life"--did readers begin to view the Bible as a source of empirically verifiable history. For most of its life, the Bible has been what Finkelstein and Silberman reveal it once more to be: an eloquent expression of "the deeply rooted sense of shared origins, experiences, and destiny that every human community needs in order to survive," written in such a way as to encompass "the men, women, and children, the rich, the poor, and the destitute of an entire community." --Michael Joseph Gross

From Publishers Weekly
Finkelstein, director of Tel Aviv University's excavations at Megiddo (ancient Armageddon), and Silberman, author of a series of successful and intriguing books on the political and cultural dimensions of archeology, present for the first time to a general audience the results of recent research, which reveals more clearly that while the Bible may be the most important piece of Western literature--serving concrete political, cultural and religious purposes--many of the events recorded in the Old Testament are not historically accurate. Finkelstein and Silberman do not aim to undermine the Bible's import, but to demonstrate why it became the basic document for a distinct religious community under particular political circumstances. For example, they maintain that the Exodus was not a single dramatic event, as described in the second book of the Bible, but rather a series of occurrences over a long period of time. The Old Testament account is, according to the authors, neither historical truth nor literary fiction, but a powerful expression of memory and hope constructed to serve particular political purposes at the time it was composed. The authors claim quite convincingly that the kingdoms of Israel and Judah became radically different regions even before the time of King David; the northern lands were densely populated, with a booming agriculture-based economy, while the southern region was sparsely populated by migratory pastoral groups. Furthermore, they contend, "we still have no hard archaeological evidence--despite the unparalleled biblical description of its grandeur--that Jerusalem was anything more than a modest highland village in the time of David, Solomon, and Rehoboam." Fresh, stimulating and highly engaging, this book will hold greatest appeal for readers familiar with the Bible, in particular the Old Testament--unfortunately, a shrinking percentage of the population. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. Agent, Carol Mann.


Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Unlike the millions who revere the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) as the word of God, Finkelstein and Silberman approach it as a distinctly human record, one bearing the marks not of careful historians but rather of impassioned visionaries struggling to wrest transcendent meaning out of the whirlwind of events. Following a trail of evidence uncovered in recent decades by archaeologists working throughout the Near East, the authors find no corroboration for the biblical accounts of Abraham or Joseph or Moses. And although archaeology does verify the historical reality of David and Solomon, it exposes their empire as a mere shadow of that ascribed to them in Scripture. Clue by clue, a pattern of discrepancies accumulates separating archaeology from Scripture, so revealing the authorial fingerprint of an embattled group of religious leaders, fighting valiantly against political treachery and spiritual apostasy. The authors argue forcefully that these guardians of orthodoxy forged a powerful new testimony for their faith, fashioning inherited traditions and recent developments into one magnificent--but profoundly ahistorical--saga. A significant, if controversial, contribution to cross-disciplinary studies of history and religion. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
Jonathan Kirsch Los Angeles Times A brutally honest assessment of what archaeology can and cannot tell us about the historical accuracy of the Bible...presented with both authority and panache.

Book Description

Is the Bible true? For the last hundred and fifty years a war has been waged over the historical reliability of the Hebrew scriptures. Recent dramatic discoveries of biblical archaeology have cast serious doubt on the familiar account of ancient Israel and the origins of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Though the Bible credits Abraham as the first human to realize there is only one God, we now know that there is no evidence for monotheism for many centuries after the reported time of Abraham. Nor is there any archaeological evidence for the Exodus, for Joshua's conquest of Canaan, or for the vast "united monarchy" of David and Solomon.

In The Bible Unearthed two leading scholars, an archaeologist and a historian, combine an exhilarating tour of the field of biblical archaeology with a fascinating explanation of how and why the Bible's historical saga differs so dramatically from the archaeological finds. They explain what the Bible says about ancient Israel and show how it diverges sharply from archaeological reality. They then offer a dramatic new version of the history of ancient Israel, bringing archaeological evidence to bear on the question of when, where, and why the Bible was first written.

What do we know about the time of the ancient patriarchs? When did monotheism first arise? When and where did the first Israelites appear? How did the people of Israel first come to occupy the Promised Land? How extensive was David and Solomon's kingdom? When and why did Jerusalem become the capital of ancient Israel? All of these questions have new answers.

As to why the answers are so new, Finkelstein and Silberman draw on evidence from decades of archaeological work and dozens of digs in Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria, to explain that the key early books of the Bible were first codified in the seventh century BCE, hundreds of years after the core events of the lives of the patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt, and the conquest of Canaan were said to have taken place.

Yet the ultimate message of The Bible Unearthed is not just a correction of the record. Instead, it is a unique and fascinating explanation of the origins of the Bible. The Bible's newly identified authors, threatened with political crisis and the intimidation of nearby empires, crafted a brilliant document, a set of stories and teachings that would eventually appeal to the faithful beyond the boundaries of any particular kingdom.

The Bible Unearthed will forever change how you think about the world's greatest book.

About the Author
Israel Finkelstein is director of the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University.

[Moses]

Scholarly and Accessible, March 12, 2001
Reviewer: Mark Wylie (Spokane, WA United States) - In "The Bible Unearthed," Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman display a rare talent among scholars--the ability to make specialized research accessible to a general audience. In this book the authors reveal how recent archaeological research forces us to reconsider the historical account woven into the Hebrew Bible. Among the conclusions they draw are:

1) The tales of patriarchs such as Abraham are largely legends composed long after the time in which they supposedly took place. This is seen in anachronisms such as the use of camels, not domesticated in the Near East until nearly 1000 years after Abraham's time, in many of the stories.

2) There is good reason to believe that the Exodus never happened. Had migrants to the number of even a small fraction of the 600,000 claimed in the Bible truly sojourned in the Sinai Peninsula for 40 years, archaeological evidence of their passage would be abundant. In fact, there are no traces of any signifant group living in the Sinai at the supposed time of the Exodus.

3) The Israelite "conquest" of Canaan, such as there was, was far from the military invasion of the books of Joshua and Judges. Many of the cities described as being conquered and destroyed did not even exist at the time, while those that did were small, unfortified villages, with no walls to be brought down, by blowing trumpets or otherwise.

4) While there is evidence that a historical David existed, and founded some sort of ruling dynasty known by his name, there is good reason to believe that he did not rule over the powerful united monarchy described in II Samuel. One reason for doubt: Jerusalem, portrayed as the great capital of a prosperous nation, was during the time of David little more than a village.

5) Neither Israel nor Judah emerged as organized kingdoms until significantly after the supposed period of the united monarchy. Israel does not appear as a recognizable kingdom until the time of the Omrides of the 9th century BCE, while Judah does not appear as such until the late 8th century BCE, at the time of kings Ahaz and Hezekiah.

Along with their revision of the biblical account of history, Finkelstein and Silberman attempt to explain the origins of the Hebrew Bible, suggesting that the composition of much of the Bible can be tied to the religious agenda of King Josiah of Judah during the late 7th century BCE. While the origins of the Bible will never be known with certainty--there simply isn't enough evidence--Finkelstein and Silberman definitely provide a plausible interpretation.

The authors, as I noted above, do a superb job of making their work understandable to non-specialists; since even college history majors often don't study the ancient Near East, they take care to include sufficient background information for the reader to understand the context of their account. Anyone with an interest in the subject will find "The Bible Unearthed" to be fascinating reading. And anyone who thinks the Bible is an accurate history book should definitely read it.





Excellent Scholarship, January 9, 2001
Reviewer: Deborah Appler (Bethlehem, PA) - I just finished The Bible Unearthed and I have one overall word to say about it: EXCELLENT! First of all, the authors provide a complete and easy to read explanation of ALL of the "hot" issues currently debated in the field of archaeology and biblical studies. Should the reader not find full agreement with the authors' final conclusions, he or she will have the data available to express this disagreement, especially since the authors place their arguments in the context of what is believed by both majority and minority scholarly opinions. They provide an excellent summary of the opposing arguments; summaries that are fair and complete. Too often people are quick to dismiss Finkelstein as a "biblical minimalist" because these readers are often misinformed or have misread Finkelstein's work. In "The Bible Unearthed," Finkelstein and Silberman are clear to disassociate themselves from the biblical "minimalists" while affiming the questions that they raise, questions that even the most "maximalist" scholar must honestly deal with in light of the paucity of archaeological evidence associated with the time of the ancestors through the rise of the Omride dynasty in 9th century Israel. One of the major questions plaguing the field of biblical studies is the one concerning David and Solomon. Do they really exist? Finkelstein and Silberman unequivocally state that both David and Solomon are historical beings. The magnitude of their kingdom, however, is the issue at hand. Based on the archaeological evidence, the authors suggest that the biblical account of these kings is a mixture of both fact and some embellishment by later authors, most likely writing during King Josiah's reign in 7th century Judah. Finkelstein and Silberman argue convincingly that Josiah, wanting to expand his kingdom to include the now fallen kingdom of Israel, found it useful to weave together the "histories" of the northern and southern kingdoms to create one unified and sacred text uniting the peoples of these two kingdoms. This understanding is not so far afield from earlier scholars who attribute the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua--2 Kings) to the time of Josiah and later. As a seminary professor and an ordained Christian minister, I am not willing to throw David and Solomon out and I struggle with those who argue that the Bible was constructed in the Persian and Hellenistic periods. Finkelstein and Silberman are not amond these minimalists and are well within what is argued by mainline scholars, especially those trying to come to terms with how the Bible and the archaeological data coincide and differ. Yes this book will rankle feathers yet it isn't far afield from what has been recently argued by biblical experts. This book will be assigned to my students because I want these people, who will be church leaders and scholars, to struggle with these issues. It is a well written and researched book and has a great deal to offer the reader. Besides, should questions threaten one's faith, one must question the veracity of the faith that was threatened.

[Moses]

Note: If I am not mistaken, this negates the Koran, as well?