Neil Asher Silberman

Set aside for a long while to tackle a handful of ARCs along with a three week trip to Europe, I finally carved out time to finish this. Messrs. Finkelstein and Silberman put together a compelling (to anyone with a an open mind, their opposition excluded, of course) set of arguments and propositions as to what can and can’t be believed from the Bible, at least from a historical/archeological perspective. They make the case with a lot of supporting material that the Deuteronomical parts of show more the Bible were composed far later than claimed, mostly around the seventh century BCE. Events leading to the condition of the nation/kingdom at that time color the narratives of what came before.

They tell the stories, first from the Bible, as if it were literal and true (you’ll get a lot of synopses, which are pretty good summaries, minus most the unnatural stuff), and then of the archeological and historical record, which are more true, if less specific at times (and very specific at others). He also discusses stages of archaeological thought… early undisciplined excavations and the biased attempts to tie findings to biblical passages to later, rigorous and careful excavations that identified the strata much better and made more logical/rational deductions.

The authors present the various theories of how the Israelites rose, how the stories could have come to be, of interpretations of the archeological and historical records, offering the pros and cons and arguments for and against each.

Redrawing the lines of when biblical stories correlated with non-biblical sources (much later than the stories claim), when archeological finds correlate with much much later architectural styles, when they don’t correlate at all with any evidence, shifts the stories from historical to mythical. The archeology disputes many (most) of the legends - more probable than not the Israelites did not conquer Canaan, rather were fragments of Canaanite holdings that either rebelled, or survived a collapse and retold the stories to favor themselves. They did that a lot, it seems.

In short, while there are geographical correlations between actual sites and biblical references, there is slim evidence to support the Bible as a historical narrative. There are some places, names, even events in the Bible that appear to be actual, but the timelines do not align. There is archaeological evidence to contradict the biblical narrative. And there are other extra-biblical sources that corroborate that at least some of the later kings existed.

Anyway, if I was already predisposed to discount most of the biblical narrative, this didn’t move the needle toward belief; more firmly in the mythological camp for me, confirming my bias.

A few curated highlights:

“How strange it is to think that Jerusalem only belatedly—and suddenly—rose to the center of Israelite consciousness. Such is the power of the Bible’s own story that it has persuaded the world that Jerusalem was always central to the experience of all Israel and that the descendants of David were always blessed with special holiness, rather than being just another other aristocratic clan fighting to remain in power despite internal strife and unprecedented threats from outside.”
{They cover in extensive detail the archeology of Jerusalem as a backwater through most of its early biblical history, contrary to the biblical … history.}

“A careful reading of the book of Genesis, for example, revealed two conflicting versions of the creation ( 1 : 1 – 2 : 3 and 2 : 4 – 25 ), two quite different genealogies of Adam’s offspring ( 4 : 17 – 26 and 5 : 1 – 28 ), and two spliced and rearranged flood stories ( 6 : 5 – 9 : 17 ).”
{Gasp! And they had so much time to edit and fix things!}

“The biblical account of the life of the patriarchs is a brilliant story of both family and nation. It derives its emotional power from being the record of the profound human struggles of fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, daughters, and sons.”
{Emotional power? Right. Oops… did I key that out loud?}

“The most important clue is the note in 1 Kings 6 : 1 that the Exodus took place four hundred eighty years before the construction of the Temple began in Jerusalem, in the fourth year of the reign of Solomon. Furthermore, Exodus 12 : 40 states that the Israelites endured four-hundred thirty years of slavery in Egypt before the Exodus. Adding a bit over two hundred years for the overlapping life spans of the patriarchs in Canaan before the Israelites left for Egypt, we arrive at a biblical date of around 2100 BCE for Abraham’s original departure for Canaan.”
{Well, the OT concept of time was pretty skewed. }

“So the combination of camels, Arabian goods, Philistines, and Gerar— as well as other places and nations mentioned in the patriarchal stories in Genesis—are highly significant. All the clues point to a time of composition many centuries after the time in which the Bible reports the lives of the patriarchs took place. These and other anachronisms suggest an intensive period of writing the patriarchal narratives in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE .”
{Write the stories to support the mission. Who’s going to question them? Literacy wasn’t common for a millennia and a half…}

“The saga of Israel’s Exodus from Egypt is neither historical truth nor literary fiction. It is a powerful expression of memory and hope born in a world in the midst of change. The confrontation between Moses and pharaoh mirrored the momentous confrontation between the young King Josiah and the newly crowned Pharaoh Necho. To pin this biblical image down to a single date is to betray the story’s deepest meaning. Passover proves to be not a single event but a continuing experience of national resistance against the powers that be.”
{This might be the most sensical explanation I’ve read.}

“The great Canaanite cities of the coastal plain and the northern valleys, such as Megiddo, Beth-shean, Dor, and Gezer, were listed in the book of Judges as uncaptured—even though their rulers were included in the book of Joshua in its list of defeated Canaanite kings”
{Oops, there’s that editing problem again.}

“It is also noteworthy—in contrast to the Bible’s accounts of almost continual warfare between the Israelites and their neighbors—that the villages were not fortified. Either the inhabitants felt secure in their remote settlements and did not need to invest in defenses or they did not have the means or proper organization to undertake such work. No weapons, such as swords or lances, were uncovered—although such finds are typical of the cities in the lowlands. Nor were there signs of burning or sudden destruction that might indicate a violent attack.”
{Darn that thing called science…}

“The process that we describe here is, in fact, the opposite of what we have in the Bible: the emergence of early Israel was an outcome of the collapse of the Canaanite culture, not its cause. And most of the Israelites did not come from outside Canaan—they emerged from within it. There was no mass Exodus from Egypt. There was no violent conquest of Canaan. Most of the people who formed early Israel were local people—the same people whom we see in the highlands throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages. The early Israelites were—irony of ironies—themselves originally Canaanites!”
{Surprise! Although this is something I’d read/seen at least ten years ago.}

“The reports of Solomon’s fabulous wealth (making “silver as common in Jerusalem as stone,” according to 1 Kings 10 : 27 ) and his legendary harem (housing seven hundred wives and princesses and three-hundred concubines, according to 1 Kings 11 : 3 ) are details too exaggerated to be true. Moreover, for all their reported wealth and power, neither David nor Solomon is mentioned in a single known Egyptian or Mesopotamian text. And the archaeological evidence in Jerusalem for the famous building projects of Solomon is nonexistent.”

“This Egyptian invasion is mentioned in the Bible, from a distinctly Judahite perspective, in a passage that offers the earliest correlation between external historical records and the biblical text: “In the fifth year of Rehoboam, Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem; he took away the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the king’s house; he took away everything. He also took away the shields of gold that Solomon had made” ( 1 Kings 14 : 25 – 26 ). Yet we now know that Jerusalem was hardly the only or even the most important target. A triumphal inscription commissioned by Sheshonq for the walls of the great temple of Karnak in Upper Egypt lists about one-hundred fifty towns and villages devastated in the operation. They are located in the south, through the central hill country, and across the Jezreel valley and the coastal plain.”

“We can never know how reliable were the traditions, texts, or archives used by the biblical authors to compile their history of the kingdom of Israel. Their aims were not to produce an objective history of the northern kingdom but rather to provide a theological explanation for a history that was probably already well known, at least in its broad details.”

“Despite Judah’s prominence in the Bible, however, there is no archaeological indication until the eighth century BCE 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 initiated wars in the region. 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. “

“Sometime in the late eighth century BCE there arose an increasingly vocal school of thought that insisted that the cults of the countryside were sinful—and that YHWH alone should be worshiped. We cannot be sure where the idea originated. It is expressed in the cycle of stories of Elijah and Elisha (set down in writing long after the fall of the Omrides) and, more important, in the works of the prophets Amos and Hosea, both of whom were active in the eighth century in the north.”
{They eventually settled down and decided to be content with being the chosen people, tolerating other gods because they had their one. Now, their decendant… well, those guys originated exclusivity. They were right and everybody else was wrong (even the other versions of themselves.)}

“Despite the biblical report of the miraculous deliverance of Jerusalem, contemporary Assyrian records provide a very different picture of the outcome of Hezekiah’s revolt. The Assyrian account of Sennacherib’s devastation of the Judahite countryside is presented concisely and coldly:”
{Supported by the archeological evidence, too.} show less

I found this book through a referral on, of all places, /r/AskHistorians on reddit, and, more to the point, the "How Much of the Bible is Historical" question linked to in the subreddit's FAQ where it was referred to as a decent reference. Having not read much Biblical Archeology in a while and finding the book in Amazon's Kindle Store, I downloaded it to my Kindle.

The Bible Unearthed is a dry, fairly technical text dealing with matching Archeology with books of the Old Testament, mainly show more Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings and pieces of Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and lesser Prophets. Working from the beginning with Abraham and concluding at the Exile into Babylon, the authors methodically dissect the Old Testament chapter by chapter and, in some places, verse by verse and compare it to the known archeological evidence to prove their core supposition: the Old Testament and the Torah were compiled, and in no small part written, in the mid-to-late 7th Century BC in Judah for a combination of political and religious aims by likely two Kings: Hezekiah and, later, Josiah. These are not historical recordings of mid-Bronze Age wanders but of Iron Age Kings under the Assyrian yoke who were trying to forge a national identity through myths, tales, stories of various tribal peoples, and political propaganda, stamp out the local religions and create a theocratic state.

Although the book is a little out of date, as it was written in 2000, the evidence presented is pretty plausible stuff if one can slog through chapters based on the settlement patterns of Iron Age bedouins and their village layouts or read 100 pages on pottery sherds at different strata.

The authors present:

* No historical record of the patriarchs in any form;
* Moses's Pharaoh is far more the Pharaoh of Late Period 26th Dynasty and not a New Kingdom Monarch;
* Joshua conquers cities that do not exist in the 12th century BCE but certainly do in the 7th, and those that did exist likely collapsed in the Bronze Age Collapse at different times over a hundred years;
* No sign exists of David's Kingdom and all that remains is that of a small hill fort and David's name in secondary sources;
* No sign exists of Solomon or his works;
* The Omrides, who kindly left heaps of archeological evidence and secondary sources, were likely quite good Kings;
* Israel was likely a victim of its enduring financial success making it a tempting target for a sack;
* Deuteronomy written in the format of an Assyrian legal document to a vassal describing the rules and rights therein;
* Etc... it goes on like this for ~400 pages.

All signs point to a 7th century BC compilation of books, tales and sources into one unified whole, smoothing over the lumps and presenting the people -- many suddenly pouring into Judah from the sack of Samaria -- a new complete identity with their One God. One shouldn't besmirch the power of an enduring document that managed to forge a people, see them through the Babylonian Exile, and then become the root of three major world religions. But no archeological evidence points to the Old Testament being a reliable historical document, either.

For me, it's fascinating book showing the pressures and the prejudices of a people who were living in uncertain times with two crazed superpowers (the Assyrians and the Late Egyptians) on their borders and smaller enemies all around them and just before the Phoenicians would become "a thing." These were Kings who wanted to reconquer Israel back from Assyria and return it to its once financial glory, and they saw the way forward was to unite all these people pouring into their tiny kingdom filled with bedouins under One God and One Temple. The plan didn't work out because sticking a finger into the side of a crazed kingdom loaded with mercenaries and a religion that tells them to kill and bathe in blood _never_ works out well but the legacy of that time endures.

It's doubly fascinating to think this: in the 7th Century BCE, the great Egyptian Kingdom of Ramesses II, the Hittites, the fall of Sumeria and founding of Assyria, were as far away from them as the /Fall of Rome is from Modern Day/. The time of great civilizations and great kings was destroyed by the Bronze Age Collapse and left huge mounds where cities once stood -- and no one of Iron Age II knew why. No one read those languages. No one did satellite-based archeology. This is something to think about -- the time of Moses and Joshua and Judges were all distant myth at a time when real 7th century enemies were on the doorstep. Why _wouldn't_ there be stories about how those ancient dimly remembered cities? Why _weren't_ there be ancient kings and great heroes and an explanation of how those civilizations of the great antiquity fell? Why wouldn't those stories be forged in one narrative of one God who destroyed them in the past and will destroy them now?

Not for the highly religious, obviously. Interesting if one wants to read the constant debates on reddit, though.

ALSO: if you have no time to read the book, the BBC did a 4 part series with the authors which is available on Youtube some years ago. show less

The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman. Age: adult. Library section: 7 A: The Church in the World: World Religions. This fascinating book shows how archaeological finds of the last 30 years have revolutionized thought about ancient Israel and the origin of the Old Testament. Who wrote the books of the Bible? When and where were its various books written? Were books of the OT written as the events took place or were they written long afterward? Were Biblical show more writings visions of what the writers wished had happened rather than what really happened? Or were the writings predicting the future? What happened when those predictions came to pass, and also when they did not come to pass? Did the ancient Hebrews lose their faith and turn away from God?
Archaeologists help us answer more and more of these questions as more and more excavations take place throughout Israel. What’s fascinating though, is that the Bible’s integrity and historicity do not depend on “proof” of any of its particular events such as the parting of the Red Sea or David’s slaying of Goliath with a single slingshot. The power of the Bible lies in its being a compelling and coherent narrative of the timeless themes of a people’s liberation, continuing resistance to oppression, and quest for social stability. It eloquently expresses the deeply rooted sense of shared origins, experiences and destiny that every human community needs in order to survive. This is why the Bible still feels so relevant to our struggles today. And we are not Jews, but Christians. That’s a pretty impressive thing for a collection of books to be able to do.
This book gave me a good overview of how the ancient Hebrews arrived in Canaan from the eastern wastes of desert (the later Biblical writers claimed that Abraham came from Ur, a city reknowned and respected for its educated elite, but no one knows for sure where he and his clan originated); and how the ancient Israelites first formed a strong kingdom of Israel in the north of what we know as the area west of the Sea of Galilee. After this kingdom declined, the southern kingdom of Judah, always considered the “poor cousin” to the north -- a motley group of isolated hill villages – grew quickly in population and the small backwater of Jerusalem became a mighty city. Archaeologists tell us that the ancient temple was not built in Solomon’s day, but much later. This book tells how Israel/Judah was a buffer zone between the powerful nations of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon, and it kept being overrun by these powerful nations which plundered the Hebrew kingdoms at will over the centuries, carrying off booty and Hebrews to exile in these other kingdoms.
No wonder the Hebrews needed a book that would remind them of who they were, to make holy their covenantal relationship with their one God; a family, national and religious narrative with which every Jew could identify. The Bible as we know it today, which first crystallized during the reign of Josiah, king of Judah (639-609 BCE), provided the world’s first fully articulated national and social compact, including men, women and children, rich, poor and destitute of an entire human community.
So if we bicker about whether the earth was made in six days or six eons, whether Abraham came from Ur or Haran, whether Solomon built the temple, whether Moses wrote the first five Biblical books – none of that really matters. It’s a smoke screen that hides the real importance of the Bible. And there are questions we will NEVER have answers to – archaeology cannot answer them all! What matters is that the Bible served as a tool to unify the early Hebrews, and it became a sacred expression of their covenant with God. It helped them retain and deepen their faith, and survive in a dangerous place and time. It still speaks to us in the same way today. show less

The authors discuss the archaeological explorations in the Holy Land, and what has (and hasn't) been discovered. This book is not going to be popular with those who are convinced that archaeology has confirmed the Biblical stories, as the authors, free from the usual censorship which surrounds most books about Holy Land digs, demonstrate that the very best you can say is that there is no evidence for many, if not most, of the familiar Biblical stories.