The Bible Unearthed:
Archaeology’s New Vision
of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts
By Israel Finkelstein and Neil
Asher Silberman
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.
Yet in asserting that there was no single exodus, no
unified conquest of Canaan, and no glorious, vast
kingdom of David and Solomon, we certainly do not
intend to dismiss the Bible as a fact-less fairy tale,
a late ideological confection whose unmasking is meant
to serve some “hidden” political agenda.
We join generations of biblical archaeologists and
scholars in the belief that the Bible provides an
important testimony for early Israel; it is not just
another ancient literary source about ancient heroes,
kingdoms, and adventures. It is neither an Israelite
Mahabarata, nor a Judean Avesta, nor a Jerusalemite
Iliad or Odyssey. For Jews and Christians—and to a
certain extent for Muslims—the Hebrew Bible is not
just another ancient text, raw material for
never-ending doctoral dissertations and a solid
foundation for academic careers.
The Bible is everybody’s concern. It contains our
story of creation, our founding principles of
monotheistic religion, and some of our western
civilization’s most powerful prophecy, poetry, and
religious laws. In a word, it contains our spiritual
legacy. And that legacy has a thousand shades of
meaning and wealth of insight to give. But is it
history? Is it an accurate chronicle of a sequence of
events, arranged in chronological order? Is that where
its power lies? While hardly anyone these days gets
exercised over the suggestion that the Mahabarata’s
Hindu Prince Arjuna might be a powerful literary
creation rather than a specific historical figure, or
that a particular Achaean named
Achilles might not have slain a particular Trojan
named Hector, something strange and emotional seems to
happen when doubt is cast on the historical character
of the kingdom of David and Solomon.
But why should this be so? For the last two centuries
archaeologists and biblical scholars have been engaged
in a continuous struggle to separate the purely
theological or mythic narratives of the Bible from
those that contain what might be regarded as reliable
history. The Creation stories of Genesis were the
first field of combat. In the 1830s, Charles Lyell’s
epoch-making geological studies were branded as
heretical, and Charles Darwin was condemned a few
decades later by respected religious leaders as a
nihilistic deconstructionist (more than a century
before anyone had ever heard of postmodernism). Of
course today, the scholarly disputes over the
historicity of a seven-day creation of the world, of
the Garden of Eden, and the story of Noah’s Ark are
over—even though some nasty skirmishing occasionally
flares up at school board meetings and in the scripts
of sensationalist documentaries on cable TV.
But the battle line dividing the Bible’s history from
its metaphorical symbolism has been constantly moving,
pressing relentlessly on from the opening chapters of
Genesis. At each landmark a pitched battle was waged.
And when the matter was decided, the opposing forces
trudged on. Sixty years ago, many leading scholars—the
legendary W.F. Albright among them—argued forcefully
that the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were
historical characters who lived in the Middle Bronze
Age. Today, most scholars deal with the patriarchal
traditions as powerful and influential literary
creations; and they consider them no less powerful or
influential in the absence of conclusive proof
of their historicity. Long gone also are the serious
scholarly attempts to trace archaeologically the
progress of the Exodus of 600,000 Israelites across
Sinai toward Canaan. The Bible offers us a powerful
expression of liberation, peoplehood, and covenant
painted in the most searing Hebrew prose and poetry
the world has ever known.
Forty years ago, reliable biblical history was said to
begin with Joshua. The blackened destruction levels of
Late Bronze Age tells across the Land of Israel, were
confidently believed to be evidence of the military
action of the massed Israelite tribes. But here too a
battle was waged and the frontline of history shifted.
The extensive surveys carried out in the West Bank by
Israeli archaeologists during the 1970s and 1980s
showed that the settlement of the Israelite Tribes in
Canaan was not a lightning invasion but a complex
process of social transformation. And it was a process
in which population groups both inside Canaan and
outside were deeply and not only violently involved.
Today, the frontline has come to rest in the era of
David and Solomon. Indeed there is now an ongoing
scholarly free-for-all debate over the historical
reality of the Kingdom of David and Solomon in which
tempers have sometimes flared, names have been called,
and sneering accusations of hidden political and
religious agendas have been tossed back and forth. But
what exactly is at stake?
The Second Book of Samuel describes how David was
anointed King of Israel and established his capital in
Jerusalem. From there, according to the biblical
narrative, David led the armies of Israel on distant
campaigns that resulted in the establishment of a huge
territorial entity, stretching from the southern
deserts to northern Syria. The First Book of Kings
describes how under David’s son, Solomon, the vast
extent of the kingdom – at least much of it – was
maintained and a magnificent temple and palace were
built in the royal capital and holy city of Jerusalem.
The tremendous importance of these events—variously
dated between c.1000 and c.925 BCE are obvious: The
Davidic Dynasty and the sanctity of Jerusalem, then
established, formed the basis for later prophecies of
a messianic redeemer from the House of David and the
divine restoration of the greatness of united Israel.
Until recently no one seriously doubted that the
Bible’s stories about David and Solomon were basically
historical. Although the archaeological remains of
David’s rule were—and are—elusive, the sudden
appearance of monumental architecture, city walls, and
city gates in levels dated to the 10th-century BCE
at the Israelite cities of Gezer, Hazor, and
Megiddo—precisely those cities reportedly fortified by
Solomon according to First Kings 9:15—seemed
irrefutable evidence that archaeology, history, and
the biblical accounts were at this point fully
synchronized. But it is really that easy? Recent
stratigraphic analysis of the “Solomonic” gates at
Megiddo and Hazor and carbon-14 dates from relevant
strata suggest that these imposing monuments may have
nothing to do with Solomon at all.
In The Bible Unearthed, we invite you to follow our
line of argumentation, first an archaeological
analysis of the patriarchal, conquest, judges, and
United Monarchy narratives, showing that while
there is no compelling archaeological evidence for any
of them, there is clear archaeological evidence that
places the stories themselves in a late 7th-century BCE context.
We then go on to propose an archaeological
reconstruction of the distinct histories of the
kingdoms of Israel and Judah, differing dramatically
in environment, population, economy, and religious
forms. We highlight the largely neglected history of
the Omride Dynasty and attempt to show how the
influence of Assyrian imperialism in the region set in
motion a chain of events that would eventually make
the poorer, more remote, and more religiously conservative kingdom
of Judah the belated center of the cultic and national
hopes of all Israel.
This occurred in the 7th-century BCE and reached a
culmination, we argue, during the reign of King Josiah
(639-609 BCE)—and the primary history of
the
Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History are the
greatest achievements of this complex historical
process. But they are not “history” in the modern
sense.
So where is the boundary between biblical past and
present, between biblical history and myth?
Archaeology—the study of fragments of past
societies—inevitably takes us into the realm of
interpretation, and when it comes to the conquest of
Canaan and the Kingdom of David and Solomon, the
archaeological facts are not as unequivocal as they
once seemed. It is time to stop the name calling and
bitter polemics between “maximalists” and
“minimalists.” It is our hope that The Bible Unearthed
will provide an opportunity to debate and
intelligently discuss new directions in the
archaeology of the lands of the Bible—and to see past
archaeological theories about biblical history as
valuable foundations and the starting points for
future research, not confrontational lines drawn in
the sand.