[tara tara vrem ostas]

Archeology has long been considered a good friend of the Hebrew Bible. Just as Heinrich Schliemann's discoveries proved that Homer's stories were not purely mythical, so archeological discoveries in Old Testament lands have been taken to demonstrate that the Bible is history rather than legend. Although for centuries textual critics have realized that the Old Testament represents the editing together of several texts produced at different times by different groups, until the 1970s most archeologists continued to accept its accounts at face value. Since virtually all were Christians or Jews with a strong commitment to the truth of the Bible, they interpreted their finds in light of scripture. No wonder, then, that archeological findings confirmed the Bible when researchers used the Old Testament to identify, date, and interpret the significance of the towns, buildings, pottery, and other artifacts they unearthed.

But in the 1970s a new trend emerged as archeologists began to treat discoveries in the Holy Land as they would those anywhere else. Concentrating on Israel's ancient history itself, rather than solely on its biblical associations, they used artifacts, architecture, settlement patterns, animal bones, seeds, soil samples, anthropological models drawn from world cultures, and other modern methods to produce a description based on scientific evidence. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman (Free Press, New York, 2001, 385 pages, ISBN 0684869128, cloth, $26.00; Touchstone Books, New York, 2002, ISBN 0684869136, paperback, $14.00) brings this scholarship to a general audience. Dr. Finkelstein is director of the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, and Dr. Silberman is director of historical interpretation for the Ename Center for Public Archaeology and Heritage Presentation in Belgium.

Seeking to "separate history from legend," the authors "share the most recent archaeological insights -- still largely unknown outside scholarly circles -- not only on when, but also why the Bible was written," discoveries which "have revolutionized the study of early Israel and have cast serious doubt on the historical basis of such famous biblical stories as the wanderings of the Patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt and conquest of Canaan, and the glorious empire of David and Solomon" (p. 3). The Bible Unearthed discusses in some detail the evidence behind these claims, and shows why, although "no archaeologist can deny that the Bible contains legends, characters, and story fragments that reach far back in time. . . . archaeology can show that the Torah and the Deuteronomistic History bear unmistakable hallmarks of their initial compilation in the seventh century BCE" (p. 23).

The Bible opens its account of the Jewish people with the wandering of the patriarchs, beginning with Abraham. To judge by recent cover stories in such magazines as National Geographic and Time, one would think that Abraham must be a well-established historical character. Said to be a Babylonian from Ur in what is now southern Iraq, according to Genesis Abraham moved northwest to Haran in southern Turkey, where the voice of God told him to go south into Canaan. The Bible traces all the nations of the region to his family. The Moabites and Ammonites derive from his nephew Lot; the Jews and southern Arabs from Abraham's sons, Isaac and Ishmael respectively. There follow Isaac's sons Esau -- father of the Edomites and other desert tribes -- and Jacob; then Jacob's twelve sons, each of whom ruled one of the twelve tribes of Israel. One son, Joseph, is sold into slavery in Egypt. During a famine the rest of the family, seeking relief there, discover that Joseph has risen high in the Pharaoh's favor. After Jacob's death, the children of Israel remain in Egypt.

What archeological evidence is there concerning these biblical figures? Archeologists, many of them churchmen, have searched in- tensely for evidence of the historical patriarchs because they felt that unless these people actually existed, their own religious faith would be erroneous. Although the Bible provides a great deal of specific information, the search has proved unsuccessful. Discrepancies in details are significant because such "specific references in the text to cities, neighboring peoples, and familiar places are precisely those aspects that distinguish the patriarchal stories from completely mythical folktales. They are crucially important for identifying the date and message of the text" (p. 38). For example, camels were not commonly used as beasts of burden in the Near East until the seventh century BCE, and the Philistines did not settle in Canaan until after 1200 BCE. Excavation of several sites mentioned as prominent in Genesis sometimes show that in the early Iron Age they were insignificant or nonexistent, but by the late eighth and seventh century BCE had become important.

Analysis shows, moreover, that the genealogies of the patriarchs and the nations deriving from them represent "a colorful human map of the ancient Near East from the unmistakable viewpoint of the kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. These stories offer a highly sophisticated commentary on political affairs in this region in the Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods" (pp. 38-9). The Bible also gives a dominant role to Judah in Genesis, even though at that time it was insignificant:

It is now evident that the selection of Abraham, with his close connection to Hebron, Judah's earliest royal city, and to Jerusalem . . . was meant also to emphasize the primacy of Judah even in the earliest eras of Israel's history. It is almost as if an American scripture describing pre-Columbian history placed inordinate attention on Manhattan Island or on the tract of land that would later become Washington, D.C. The pointed political meaning of the inclusion of such a detail in a larger narrative at least calls into question its historical credibility. -- p. 43

The authors conclude that the patriarchal traditions

must be considered as a sort of pious "prehistory" of Israel in which Judah played a decisive role. They describe the very early history of the nation, delineate ethnic boundaries, emphasize that the Israelites were outsiders and not part of the indigenous population of Canaan, and embrace the traditions of both the north and the south, while ultimately stressing the superiority of Judah. -- p. 45

Rather than a chronicle or history, evidence indicates that this part of Genesis was a national epic created in the seventh century BCE which successfully joined many regional legendary ancestors into one unified tradition.

A second series of biblical events revolves around the slavery of the Jewish people in Egypt, the miraculous escape of 600,000 led by Moses, their wandering in the wilderness for forty years, their swift conquest of the Promised Land under Joshua, and the slaughter of all the original inhabitants. These events, memorialized in major Jewish festivals, occupy four of the first five books of the Bible traditionally attributed to Moses. Physical evidence and historical texts confirm that Canaanites had traditionally settled in the prosperous east delta region of Egypt, particularly in times of drought, famine, and war. Some came as landless conscripts and prisoners of war, others as farmers, herders, or tradesmen. Egyptian historians tell of the Hyksos, Canaanite immigrants who became dominant in a great delta city and were forcibly expelled by the Egyptians around 1570 BCE. After the Hyksos expulsion, the Egyptian government controlled immigration from Canaan closely and built forts along the eastern delta and at one-day intervals along the Mediterreanean coast to Gaza. These forts kept extensive records, none of which mention the Israelites or any other foreign ethnic group entering, leaving, or living as a people in the delta.

Biblical scholars place the Exodus in the late thirteenth century BCE, and up to that time there is only one mention of the name Israel, despite many Egyptian records concerning Canaan. Nor is there any archeological evidence for a body of people encamping in the desert and mountains of Sinai in the Late Bronze Age:

Sites mentioned in the Exodus narrative are real. A few were well known and apparently occupied in much earlier periods and much later periods -- after the kingdom of Judah was established, when the text of the biblical narrative was set down in writing for the first time. Unfortunately for those seeking a historical Exodus, they were unoccupied precisely at the time they reportedly played a role in the events of the wandering of the children of Israel in the wilderness. -- p. 64