The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts is a 2001 book by Israel Finkelstein, Professor of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, and Neil Asher Silberman, an archaeologist, historian and contributing editor to Archaeology Magazine. The book discusses the archaeology of ancient Israel and its relationship to the origins and content of the Hebrew Bible.
Finkelstein and Silberman contend that the composition of the Bible began in the Iron Age, centuries after the events of Israel's founding myths—the patriarchs and the Exodus from Egypt. They argue that numerous biblical passages conflict with the Bronze Age and Iron Age archaeological record of the Land of Israel, and that the text reflects an authorship bias toward the Kingdom of Judah at the expense of the Kingdom of Israel. They also reject the historical plausibility of a prosperous united kingdom of Israel and Judah ruled by David and Solomon from Jerusalem in the 10th century BCE, instead positing this narrative as an ideological construct promoted by late Judahite kings such as Hezekiah and Josiah. The book was both praised and criticized by biblical scholars for its reconstruction of ancient Israel's history.
Methodology The methodology applied by the authors is historical criticism with an emphasis on archaeology. Writing on the website of "The Bible and Interpretation" in March 2001, the authors describe their approach as one "in which the Bible is one of the most important artifacts and cultural achievements [but] not the unquestioned narrative framework into which every archaeological find must be fit." Their main contention is that:
On the basis of this evidence they propose
As noted by a reviewer on Salon.com the approach and conclusions of The Bible Unearthed are not particularly new. Ze'ev Herzog, professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, wrote a cover story for Haaretz in 1999 in which he reached similar conclusions following the same methodology; Herzog noted also that some of these findings have been accepted by the majority of biblical scholars and archaeologists for years and even decades, even though they have only recently begun to make a dent in the awareness of the general public.
Content Early biblical archaeology was conducted with the presumption that the Bible must be true, finds only being considered as illustrations for the biblical narrative, and interpreting evidence to fit the Bible. Some archaeologists such as Eilat Mazar continue to take this "Bible and spade" approach, or, like the journal Bible and Spade, attempt to treat archaeology as a tool for proving the Bible's accuracy, but since the 1970s most archaeologists, such as Kenneth Kitchen,On the Reliability of the Old Testament, by Kenneth Kitchen have begun instead to interpret the evidence only in the light of other archaeology, treating the Bible as an artifact to be examined, rather than as an unquestioned truth.The Bible Unearthed, p. 22. This approach has led to results both in favor and against the historicity of the Old Testament.The Bible Unearthed, Section "History or Not History" of the Introduction
Ancestors and anachronisms
The Bible Unearthed begins by considering what it terms the 'preamble' of the Bible—the Book of Genesis—and its relationship to archaeological evidence for the context in which its narratives are set. Archaeological discoveries about society and culture in the ancient Near East lead the authors to point out a number of anachronisms, suggestive that the narratives were actually set down in the 9th–7th centuries BCE:The Bible Unearthed, p. 38. Aramaeans are frequently mentioned, but no ancient text mentions them until around 1100 BCE, and they only begin to dominate Israel's northern borders after the 9th century BCE.The Bible Unearthed, p. 39. The text describes the early origin of the neighbouring kingdom of Edom, but Assyrian records show that Edom only came into existence after the conquest of the region by Assyria in the late 8th century BCE; before then it was without functioning kings, was not a distinct state, and archaeological evidence shows that the territory was only sparsely populated.The Bible Unearthed, p. 40. The Joseph story refers to camel-based traders carrying gum, balm, and myrrh, which is unlikely prior to the first millennium, such activity only became common in the 8th–7th centuries BCE, when Assyrian hegemony enabled this Arabian trade to flourish into a major industry.The Bible Unearthed, p. 37. Recent excavations in the Timna Valley discovered what may be the earliest bones of domesticated camels found in Israel or even outside the Arabian peninsula, dating to around 930 BCE. This is seen as evidence that the stories of Abraham, Joseph, Jacob and Esau were written after this time. The land of Goshen has a name that comes from an Arabic group who dominated the Nile Delta only in the 6th and 5th centuries,The Bible Unearthed, p. 66–67. given as the place and period of the Exodus in Genesis 45:9–10, placing the Exodus incongruently nearly a millennium after its biblical timeline. The Egyptian Pharaoh is portrayed as fearing invasion from the east, even though Egypt's territory stretched to the northern parts of Canaan, with its main threat consequently being from the north, until the 7th centuryThe Bible Unearthed, p. 67.
The book comments that this corresponds with the documentary hypothesis, in which textual scholarship argues for the majority of the first five biblical books being written between the 8th and 6th centuries.The Bible Unearthed, p. 36. Although archaeological results, and Assyrian records, suggest that the Kingdom of Israel was the greater of the two, it is the Kingdom of Judah which is afforded greater prominence by Genesis, whose narratives concentrate on Abraham, Jerusalem, Judah (the patriarch), and Hebron, more than on characters and places from the northern kingdom (Israel); the Bible Unearthed explains this pre-eminence of Yahwist text as an attempt to seize the opportunity, afforded by the destruction of Israel in 720 BCE, to portray the Israelites as a single people, with Judah having (always) had primacy.The Bible Unearthed, p. 45.
Origin of the Israelites The book remarks that, despite modern archaeological investigations and the meticulous ancient Egyptian records from the period of Ramesses II, also known as Ozymandias (13th century B.C.), there is an obvious lack of any archaeological evidence for the migration of a band of Semitic people across the Sinai Peninsula,The Bible Unearthed, p. 62–63. except for the Hyksos. Although the Hyksos are in some ways a good match, their main centre being at Avaris (later renamed 'Pi-Ramesses'), in the heart of the region corresponding to the 'land of Goshen', and Manetho later wrote that the Hyksos eventually founded the Temple in Jerusalem,The Bible Unearthed, p. 55. it throws up other problems, as the Hyksos became not slaves but rulers, and they were chased away rather than chased to bring them back. Nevertheless, the book posits that the exodus narrative perhaps evolved from vague memories of the Hyksos expulsion, spun to encourage resistance to the 7th century domination of Judah by Egypt.The Bible Unearthed, p. 69.
Finkelstein and Silberman argue that instead of the Israelites conquering Canaan after the Exodus (as suggested by the book of Joshua), most of them had in fact always been there; the Israelites were simply Canaanites who developed into a distinct culture.The Bible Unearthed, p. 118. Recent surveys of long-term settlement patterns in the Israelite heartlands show no sign of violent invasion or even peaceful infiltration, but rather a sudden demographic transformation about 1200 BCE in which villages appear in the previously unpopulated highlands;The Bible Unearthed, p. 107. these settlements have a similar appearance to modern Bedouin camps, suggesting that the inhabitants were once pastoral nomads, driven to take up farming by the Late Bronze Age collapse of the Canaanite city-culture.The Bible Unearthed, p. 111–113.
The authors take issue with the book of Joshua's depiction of the Israelites conquering Canaan in only a few years—far less than the lifetime of one individual—in which cities such as Hazor, Ai, and Jericho, are destroyed. Finkelstein and Silberman view this account as the result of the telescoping effect of the vagaries of folk memory about the destruction caused by other events;The Bible Unearthed, p. 91. modern archaeological examination of these cities shows that their destruction spanned a period of many centuries, with Hazor being destroyed 100 to 300 years after Jericho,The Bible Unearthed, p. 81–82. while Ai (whose name actually means 'the ruin') was completely abandoned for roughly a millennium "before the collapse of Late Bronze Canaan. ... Like Jericho, there was no settlement at the time of its supposed conquest by the children of Israel."The Bible Unearthed, p. 82.
David and Solomon or the Omrides? Although the Book of Samuel and initial parts of the Books of Kings, portray Saul, David and Solomon ruling in succession over a powerful and cosmopolitan united kingdom of Israel and Judah, Finkelstein and Silberman regard modern archaeological evidence as showing that this may not be true. Archaeology instead shows that in the time of Solomon, the northern kingdom of Israel was quite small, too poor to be able to pay for a vast army, and with too little bureaucracy to be able to administer a kingdom, certainly not an empire;The Bible Unearthed, p. 134. it only emerged later, around the beginning of the 9th century BCE, in the time of Omri.The Bible Unearthed, p. 176. There is little to suggest that Jerusalem, called by the Bible David's capital, was "more than a typical hill country village" during the time of David and of Solomon,The Bible Unearthed, p. 133. and Judah remained little more than a sparsely populated rural region until the 8th century BCE.The Bible Unearthed, p. 142.The Bible Unearthed, p. 230. Although the Tel Dan Stele seems to confirm that a "House of David" existed, and "clearly validates the biblical description of a figure named David becoming the founder of the dynasty of Judahite kings in Jerusalem", it says nothing else about him.The Bible Unearthed, p. 129.
There are remains of once grand cities at Megiddo, Hazor and Gezer, with archeological evidence showing that they suffered violent destruction.The Bible Unearthed, p. 135–139 This destruction once was attributed to the 10th century BCE campaigns by Shishak, these cities therefore being ascribed to David and Solomon as proof of the Bible's account of them,The Bible Unearthed, p. 141–142 but the destruction layers have since been redated to the late 9th century BCE campaign of Hazael, and the cities to the time of the Omride kings.
The Tel Dan Stele, the Mesha Stele, the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser, and direct evidence from excavations, together paint a picture of the Omride kings ruling a rich, powerful, and cosmopolitan empire, stretching from Damascus to Moab,The Bible Unearthed, p. 178–180. and building some of the largest and most beautiful constructions of Iron Age Israel;The Bible Unearthed, p. 182. by contrast, the Bible only remarks that the Omrides 'married foreign women' (presumably to make alliances) and upheld Canaanite religion, both of which it regards as wicked.The Bible Unearthed, p. 194. The Bible Unearthed concludes that the biblical writers deliberately invented the empire, power, and wealth, of Saul, David, and Solomon, by appropriating the deeds and achievements of the Omrides, so that they could then denigrate the Omrides and obscure their accomplishments, since these kings held a religious viewpoint that was anathema to the biblical editors.The Bible Unearthed, p. 194–195.
Hezekiah and monolatry