doesnt the bible say all that wealth was ransacked and nothing was left??
Real archaeologists would reject out of hand the implication that they are treasure hunters in the Indiana Jones mode. They are delighted when they find broken pottery or foundations of houses.
It is important to remember that even in the more populous Kingdom of Israel the "cities" which existed in the Late Bronze Age Canaanite-era were not rebuilt as great urban centers. Rather, Megiddo, Hazor, Gezer were more administrative centers with a palace (or at least big residence for the governor) a warehouse or two and a few outbuildings. Israel was an agricultural nation and most of its people lived in farming villages.
In the southern Kingdom of Judah, at the time which arch's precious (and phony) bible claims that Jerusalem was the capital of a great Davidic Empire, the reality is that it was a thinly settled area of a few small villages (Jerusalem being one of them and far from the most important!) mainly populated by nomadic herdsman.
As Finklestein puts it in The Bible Unearthed
"Despite Judah's prominence in the bible, however, there is no archaeological indication until the eighth century BC (the 700's) that this small and rather isolated highland area, surrounded by arid steppe land on both east and south, possessed any particular importance. As we have seen, its population was meager; its towns--even Jerusalem--were small and few. It was Israel not Judah that conducted wide-ranging diplomacy and trade. When the two kingdoms came into conflict , Judah was usually on the defensive, forced to call in neighboring powers to come to its aid. Until the late eighth century there is no indication that Judah was anything more than a marginal factor in regional affairs. In a candid moment the biblical historian quotes a fable in which he diminishes Judah to the status of the "thistle of Lebanon," as compared to Israel, the "cedar of Lebanon(2 Kings 14:9). On the international scene, Judah seems to have been just a rather small and isolated kingdom that, as the great conquering Assyrian King, Sargon II derisively put it, "lies far away."
Now ask yourself, would the expansionist Assyrians have avoided moving up against Judah if it had really been wealthy and powerful? Would Shishak have avoided mentioning his subjugation of such a powerful entity if it had in fact existed? No.
Judah's place in the history of the other nations of the area is clearly second-string and of no great interest.
What proves the tale is that when Judah expanded, mainly through the flood of Israelite refugees who swelled its population when the Assyrians took out Israel and subsequently grew to be a wealthy (although never powerful) state sitting across the Arabian trade routes, the Babylonians DID decide it had become a worthwhile target and took it out. In this age, war had to pay for war, and no one was going to waste their time attacking pastures full of sheep and goat shit.
Poor arch is so mezmerized by visions of Glorious Jerusalem that he cannot accept the reality of a cluster of ramshackle houses surrounded by sheep pens.
