Current Biblical Archaeology

[Rokcet Scientist]

Hats????
This is a hat.

Actually, that is a cap...

[Minimalist]

You know, You are getting more like arch every day!

[Rokcet Scientist]

You know, You are getting more like arch every day!

No, I'm not!
I take my pills!

[Minimalist]

Once again, back to the business of discrediting the bible.

Finally, in the last few years, radiocarbon dating has hammered the final nail into the coffin of the Solomonic mirage. Carbon 14 samples from major sites involved in the united monarchy debate have been submitted for testing and analysis. The samples came from numerous grain seeds and olive stones found in levels that were traditionally linked with the Davidic conquests and the Solomonic kingdom of the tenth century BC.

The results were stunning. Almost all of the samples produced dates lower, that is, later, than the widely accepted dates of the conquests of David and the united monarchy of King Solomon. Destruction layers that had previously been dated to around 1000 BC and linked to the conquests of King David provided dates in the mid-tenth century BC--the supposed time fo King Solomon if not a bit later. And the destruction layers that had traditionally been dated to the late tenth century BC and linked to the campaign of the Pharoah Shishak after the breakdown of the united monarchy provided dates in the mid-ninth century--almost a century later.

Thus the conventional view on the archaeology of the united monarchy was wrong by almost a century. In historical terms, this means that the cities assumed to have been conquered by David were still centers of Canaanite culture throughtout the time of his presumed reign in Jerusalem. And the monuments that have traditionally been attributed to Solomon and seen as symbols of the greatness of his state were in fact built by the kings of the Omride dynasty of the northern kingdom of Israel, who ruled in the first half of the ninth century BC. Archaeology, therefore, has forced us to undertake a far-reaching reevaluation of the nature of tenth-century society in Judah and Israel.

[Rokcet Scientist]

What does the archaeologic community say about all that?
We can guess what Arch' c.s. position will be, but are there supporters?

[Minimalist]

?

This IS the archaeological community...or at least the current school of Israeli archaeologists who are doing most of the field work right now. What Finklestein is putting forward is not solely his own research but references the work of others. All of which he duly notates in the book.

Do you really care what arch says?

[Rokcet Scientist]

And when was this published?
Previews or reviews in archaeological journals? Any tire kicking going on?

[Minimalist]

Copyright 2006. I got my copy in February.

I don't know about peer review. It hardly seems as if there has been enough time.

(Of course, that won't stop the archies of the world, will it?)



Actually, I would expect the peer review to have been done on the source articles (Finklestein makes repeated references to the work of David Ussishkin) rather than on this type of book which seeks to bring together the various finds for the layman. The bibliography and selected reading is 26 and 1/2 pages long.

[Rokcet Scientist]

Copyright 2006. I got my copy in February.

I don't know about peer review. It hardly seems as if there has been enough time.

(Of course, that won't stop the archies of the world, will it?)

Actually, I would expect the peer review to have been done on the source articles (Finklestein makes repeated references to the work of David Ussishkin) rather than on this type of book which seeks to bring together the various finds for the layman. The bibliography and selected reading is 26 and 1/2 pages long.

That'd be incentive enough for me to try OCR...

[Minimalist]

That would mean taking the book apart to run it through the scanner.

[Minimalist]

Okay, again back to modern archaeology in Jerusalem. Finklestein is speaking here of the City of David.

The archaeological results in this part of Jersualem have been impressive, but they do not mesh with the chronology of the biblical narrative. Although the site was occupied continuously from the Chalcolithic period (in the fourth millenium BC) to the present, there were only two periods of major building and expansion before Roman times--and neither could possibly be identified with the reigns of David or Solomon. In the Middle Bronze Age, six or seven centuries before the estimated time of David, massive walls and towers of an impressive city fortification were built on the eastern slope of the City of David. And only in the late eighth and seventh century, two to three hundred years after David, did the city grow and dramtically expand again, with fortifications, close-packed houses, and indications of foreign trade. In fact, the impressively preserved remains of the monumental fortifications of the earlier and later periods--of the Middle Bronze and Late Iron II--contradict the suggestion that the building activities in the time of Herod and in later periods eradicated all monuments of the time of David and Solomon.

During all the centuries between the sixteenth and eighth centuries BC, Jerusalem shows no archaeological signs of having been a great city or the capital of a vast monarchy. The evidence clearly suggests that it was little more than a village--inhabited by a small population living on the northern part of the ridge, near the spring of Gihon. If analyzed from a purely archaeological standpoint, Jerusalem, through those intervening centuries--including the time of David and Solomon--was probably never more than a small, relatively poor, unfortified hill country town, no larger that three or four acres in size.

[Rokcet Scientist]

That would mean taking the book apart to run it through the scanner.

That's funny, I never take a book apart to scan pages. What's wrong with simply putting it, open and upside down, on the scanner's platen?

[Minimalist]

It's not that kind of scanner.

[Minimalist]

Oh, this will make arch so happy, there's finally a shred of truth in his book!

Finklestein is speaking of the bible's claims of religious 'reform' under King Hezekiah in the late 8th century.

The finds at Arad, Beer-sheba, and Lachish thus seem to point to a similar picture: all three sites show evidence for the existence of Judahite sanctuaries in the eighth century BC, but in all three the santuaries fell into disuse before the end of the eighth century. In other words, in all three the city that was destroyed by Sennacherib in 701 did not have a shrine, which suggests that a cult reform did indeed occur throughout Judah in the time of Hezekiah.

[Minimalist]

Moving on to American Archaeologist, William Dever, in his 2001 book, Who Were the Early Israelites

Dever discusses the lack of archaeological finds to support the accounts of the Exodus in Sinai. He had previously noted the total lack of any findings, written or archaeological for the existence of any Hebrews in Egypt proper.

He focuses on two sites, Migdol and Kadesh-barnea. Beginning with Migdol:

But the fact is that only a few sites in the entire biblical text have ever been persuasively identified (if indeed so many ever existed in the barren and hostile Sinai). One is Migdol which is probably to be located at the site of a fortress on the Sinai coast near Lake Bardawil. But Israeli excavations have shown that Migdol was an Egyptian fortress on the border of the eastern Nile Delta and it was occupied only in the Saite period (7th-6th centuies BC). That is when many scholars think that the Priestly version (of the bible) was written and the J and E accounts re-edited. That would explain why the biblical editors knew where the site of Migdol actually was, although they did not know that it lacked any earlier history.

The only other known site is "Kadesh-barnea" where the Israelites are said to have sojourned for some 38 years ( Num. 13, 14,20). It has long been identified with Tell el-Qudeirat near the oasis at 'Ain Qudeis in the northeastern Sinai, on the border with Canaan, which still preserves in Arabic the ancient Hebrew name. The mound near the springs was extensively excavated by Israeli archaeologists in 1956 and again in 1976-1982, when Israel temporarily occupied the Sinai. Yet, despite high hopes of shedding light on what would have amounted to a national shrine, Israeli archaeologists found that there was only a small fort there, with several phases dating to the 10th-7th centuries, BC.

There was not so much as a potsherd from the 13th-12th centuries BC, the time frame required, as we have seen for the Exodus.