William G.

Dever
For G. Ernest Wright (1909-1974) my teacher
 Foreword

Abbreviations

1. The Bible as History, Literature, and Theology

2. The Current School of Revisionists and Their Nonhistories of

Ancient Israel

3. What Archaeology Is and What It Can Contribute to Biblical

Studies

4. Getting at the "History behind the History": What Convergences

between Texts and Artifacts Tell Us about Israelite Origins and
the Rise of the State

5. Daily Life in Israel in the Time of the Divided Monarchy

6. What Is Left of the History of Ancient Israel, and Why Should It

Matter to Anyone Anymore?

Conclusion

For Further Reading

Index of Names

Index of Scripture References

Index of Subjects
This book has been 35 years in the making, and readers may be interested to
know what has gone into it. In any case, the "ideology" of writers is in the air
today, so I shall be up-front about how my own was shaped.

I was reared on the Bible, in a series of small towns in the South and
Midwest, as well as in Jamaica, where my father was a preacher in various
churches (he would never have said "clergyman"). Although I see in retrospect
that he was no doubt a rather old-fashioned fundamentalist, I remember him not
for his orthodoxy, but as a warm and compassionate man whose life was
centered upon what he believed to be the Bible's eternal truths and values. I can
still hear the cadence of his booming voice as he read Scripture from the pulpit;
and I suspect that some of my own homiletical style in the classroom and in
popular lectures comes from him.

I went from a small Christian liberal arts college in Tennessee to a liberal

Protestant theological seminary, where for the first time I was exposed to the
critical study of the Bible. I resisted mightily, knowing that my faith was at risk.
But in the end I was won over to the love, and the risks, of learning, so in 1960 I
went on to Harvard to do a doctorate in biblical theology. That was how I met
Professor George Ernest Wright, who knew me better than I knew myself and set
me on the path to a career in archaeology, starting with fieldwork under him at
Shechem in 1962. I abandoned theology, but I continued to read in the field.
However, I served as a Congregational minister in a liberal parish throughout my
years at Harvard, and found it a positive experience. I began to see something of
the wider world.

Upon graduation I went to Israel for a year at the Hebrew Union College -
Jewish Institute of Religion; fell under the spell of Rabbi-archaeologist Nel son
Glueck; and stayed on for 11 years. I became director of that school, and later
director of the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem,
as well as directing excavations at Gezer, Shechem, West Bank sites, and
elsewhere. I soon took up an interest in trends in biblical and Syro-Palestinian
archaeology (and helped to set a few). But above all, I began to see how the
realia of archaeology could illuminate ancient Israel. And I caught a vision of a
dialogue between archaeology and biblical studies.

In 1975 I returned somewhat reluctantly to the United States to take up an

academic career at a university renowned for the "new,"
anthropologicallyoriented archaeology. In addition to teaching and writing, I did
a great deal of traveling and lecturing to popular audiences and experienced the
satisfaction of communicating the results of archaeology and biblical studies to a
wider public. At the same time, I began to turn my attention from fieldwork to
larger syntheses, especially to the possibilities of a new style of "biblical
archaeology." I also converted to Judaism during this period, at least nominally -
although I am not a theist, and indeed remain a secular humanist. But the Jewish
tradition suits me in many ways.

In 1992 I read Philip R. Davies' In Search of "Ancient Israel" (Sheffield:

JSOT) and saw immediately a new, irresistible challenge. By 1995 I was writing
to oppose the "revisionists," as some called them. Gradually I began to immerse
myself in "revisionist" and "postmodern" literature, intuitively sensing that this
was leading me to a larger work - the present volume, as it turned out.

Why did I write this book? Because I had to, not only to counter the
"revisionists"' abuse of archaeology, but to show how modern archaeology
brilliantly illuminates a real "Israel" in the Iron Age, and also to help foster the
dialogue between archaeology and biblical studies that I had always envisioned.

A word of warning to the reader. This is meant to be a "popular" book,

designed to be accessible to the nonspecialist, so it may be at times overly
simplistic, and it is certainly polemical. Yet for those who wish to pursue some
scholarly matters further, there are detailed footnotes and references.

For further information on the dozens of archaeological sites and topics

discussed here, I recommend several handbooks, especially The New
Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, ed. Ephraim
Stern (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society and Carta, 1993); and Amihai
Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000-586 B.C.E. (New York:
Doubleday, 1990).

I want to acknowledge many who contributed to this book in many ways

that they probably never imagined. My parents inculcated in me not only a love
of the Bible, but a devotion to duty and a certain moral earnestness that has (I
hope) informed everything that I have ever done. To Professor George Ernest
Wright, my teacher and mentor, I owe more than I can say. My Israeli archaeo
logical colleagues over the past 35 years have shared with me the thrill of
discovery and have challenged me in many ways. From my "public," I have
learned that archaeology really matters, and is always exciting. I must also thank
my many graduate students, who probably taught me more than I taught them,
and who remain my most satisfying achievement. The future is theirs.

I with to thank my colleague, Prof. J. Edward Wright, whose reading of the

manuscript in a draft version saved me from several errors in the field of biblical
studies, but who is not to be blamed for the remaining idiosyncrasies.

Finally, I express my appreciation to my family - wives and children - who

have kept me part-time in the real world, while I was mostly off tilting at various
windmills.

WILLIAM G. FEVER

Tucson, Arizona

Turn-of-the-millennium
 The Mysterious Bible

The Bible, including the Old Testament, or as we prefer here, the Hebrew Bible,
is so familiar to those of us still steeped in the Western cultural tradition that it
would seem to need little explanation, much less defense. For centuries the Bible
has been the Classic - although that really means (1) that we take it for granted;
and (2) that we revere it, but don't bother to read it any more.

Yet for all the lip service still paid to the Bible in our society, it remains
largely a mystery to lay people. A recent, long-running television series in which
I became involved was entitled "Mysteries of the Bible." Obviously it capitalized
(so to speak) on the public's continuing fascination with the unresolved riddles of
the Bible: Where was the Garden of Eden? Did Jericho's walls really come
tumbling down? Why did the biblical writers think Jezebel such a wicked
woman? Such examples could go on and on.

Even though I was somewhat surprised, and indeed gratified, to see the
public's enthusiasm for the series (I now am recognized when I go to the local
barber shop), I became skeptical in the end. The commercial and somewhat
cynical exploitation of biblical topics is clearly designed to titillate more than to
educate the public. Any gratuitous educational benefits aside, the Bible remains
a mysterious book to most people.

The Nature of the Hebrew Bible

The above is true partly because we forget that the Bible is not a book at all, but
a whole shelf of books. That means that you cannot simply pick up the Bible and
read it from beginning to end, as a connected story with a structured plot and
believable characters. One of my friends was required to do that for a "book
report" in a college class on "The Bible as Literature" (he confessed later that he
could never bring himself to pick up the Bible again). What is the Bible's "story"
really about? Who wrote it, and why? And can we moderns really believe any of
it?'
 The many "books" that make up our Hebrew Bible (39 in English versions,
but 24 in Hebrew) have many stories to tell, written almost entirely by
anonymous authors. These stories were set down over a period of a thousand
years, the whole finally woven into a composite, highly complex literary fabric
sometime in the Hellenistic era (ca. 2nd century B.C.). This vast "library" - for
that is what the Bible really is - contains such diverse and indeed contradictory
literary forms as myths, legends and folktales, sagas, heroic epics, oral traditions,
annals, biographies, narrative histories, novellae, belles lettres, proverbs and
wisdom-sayings, poetry (including erotic poems - read the Song of Songs
without your spiritual blinders on), prophecy, apocalyptic, and much more.

All of this vast compilation of literature comes down to us from a longlost

Oriental world almost entirely foreign to our modern consciousness and
worldview. Furthermore, the Bible is written in a dead language. (Hebrew has
been revived as a spoken language only recently, as in Israel, but in any case it
differs considerably from Biblical Hebrew.) Finally, the librarians in charge of
the biblical corpus seem to be mostly clerics of one sort or another, intent upon
forcing their "orthodox" interpretations upon the rest of us, although no two of
them agree. Or else they are academics, who seem to delight in making the Bible
even more mysterious and therefore accessible only through them, although I
suspect that many professional biblical scholars are closet agnostics.

The Biblical Tradition under Attack

Where does all this leave the intelligent layperson, whether formally religious or
not, who wishes simply to understand the Bible better? And is the effort worth it
any longer, at a time when the biblical literature - indeed the entire biblical
tradition - is being dismissed by so many as "irrelevant," even by those in
Synagogue, Church, and Seminary? My colleagues tell me that many priests and
clergy no longer know Hebrew and Greek and thus cannot read the Bible in the
original. The study of the history of ancient Israel, long fundamental to our
understanding of biblical Israel and her faith, is scarcely taught in many
Protestant seminaries. History and historical exegesis have been replaced by
more stylish courses in liberation theology; feminist approaches to the Bible;
new literary criticism, including structuralism, semiotics, rhetorical criticism,
and even more esoteric "schools" that we shall discuss in more detail later.
 The Atlantic Monthly ran an article in December 1996 entitled "The Search
for a No-frills Jesus," by Charlotte Allen. Here Burton L. Mack, longtime
Professor of New Testament at the School of Theology of Claremont in
California, is quoted as saying of the latest studies in the "quest for the historical
Jesus" that the forthcoming publication of Documenta Q by the International Q
Project "should bring to an end the myth, the history, the mentality, of the
Gospels." Says Mack, who spent his entire professional life training Christian
ministers: "It's over. We've had enough apocalypses. We've had enough martyrs.
Christianity has had a two-thousand-year run, and it's over." I see here a
hypocrisy whereby one so long "professes" a history that he thinks did not exist.
As I shall note in Chapter 6, the malaise in the scholarly pursuit of "the historical
Jesus" parallels almost exactly the current crisis in the search for "the historical
Israel." The same methodological issues are involved.

The irony is that the most deadly attack on the Bible and its veracity, in
either the historical or the theological meaning, has come recently not from its
traditional enemies - atheists, skeptics, or even those "Godless Communists"
feared by Bible-believing people until recently - but from the Bible's
wellmeaning friends.

If its professional custodians no longer take the Bible seriously, at least as

the foundation of our Western cultural tradition, much less a basis for private and
public morality, where does that leave us? If we simply jettison the Bible as so
much excess baggage in the brave new postmodern world, what shall we put in
its place?

Is the Bible "Historical" at All?

For the purposes of the present discussion, I would argue that the most serious
challenge to the Hebrew Bible in its long history of interpretation and
controversy comes from a small but vocal group of scholars, mostly European,
who have recently undertaken what they sometimes allude to as "revisionist"
histories of ancient Israel. Of course, every generation in the history of Judaism
and Christianity has assayed to write its own, "new" histories of ancient Israel -
and rightly so, because the spirit of the biblical tradition is dynamic,
everchanging. Even within the biblical period itself, as Michael Fishbane, Jeffrey
Tigay, and other rather conservative scholars have shown, the biblical writers are
constantly in a kind of "inner dialogue" with themselves.2 These writers dare to
rework the literary tradition, even though it was regarded from early on as
Scripture, "sacred writings." And now, after centuries of such "recycling the
Bible," the effort has been made even more necessary - and rewarding. That is
because of the gradual development of basic tools of modern scholarship since
the Enlightenment that no scholars, even Fundamentalists, can ignore: literary
criticism, historical exegesis, comparative religion, and especially, as we shall
see, archaeology in its broadest sense.

Given these considerations, what is menacing about the revisionists and

their program? Simply this: if we look carefully at their agenda, the revisionists
do not intend merely to rewrite the history of ancient or biblical Israel; they
propose rather to abolish it altogether. As Philip R. Davies puts it in his little
book that started much of the fuss, In Search of `Ancient Israel" (1992), there
was no "ancient" or "biblical" Israel. These are all late "intellectual constructs,"
forced back upon an imagined past by centuries of Jewish and Christian
believers. The notion of "ancient Israel" stems ultimately from the Bible itself;
but the Bible is "pious fiction," not historical fact. The Bible, too, is a late
literary construct, written in and reflecting the realities of the Persian-Hellenistic
era (ca. 5th-1st centuries), not the Iron Age of Palestine (ca. 12th-6th centuries)
that purports to be its setting.

In Chapter 2 I shall expose the dangers of the revisionist challenge in much

more detail. Here I wish only to acknowledge the thrust of their major questions.
Is there any real "history," at least in the modern sense, in the Hebrew Bible?
And if not, how can we any longer write a history of ancient Israel or its
religion(s) at all? These questions deserve to be taken seriously, even though the
revisionists are hardly the first to have posed them. (As happens so often,
selfstyled revisionists are not nearly as radical as they suppose.)

The urgency here is simply that (1) not even the most extreme "modernists"
in critical biblical scholarship of the late 19th-20th century ever went so far as to
deny any historicity to the Hebrew Bible; (2) the current visibility of the
revisionists in the professional journals, at national and international symposia,
and increasingly on the Internet has scarcely come to the attention of lay people
and may seem frivolous to scholars, but it reveals a disturbing trend toward what
I would call nihilism. In adopting the term "nihilism" (Lat. nihil, "nothing"), I
have in mind its common and current usage in philosophy to mean "the denial of
the existence of any basis for knowledge or truth." The revisionists will reject
this term; but their own declared methodology and results betray them, as we
shall see presently. "No history" means no history. Here, however, I wish only to
sound a preliminary alarm, while at the same time taking the revisionist
challenge seriously.

What Kind of "History"?

When we are challenged as to whether there is any "history" in the Hebrew

Bible, we ought to reply first by asking: "What kind of history?" It should be
obvious that everything in the quest for history depends upon qualifications that
must be demanded at this point. The fundamental point is that there are many
kinds of history, and thus many differing but appropriate methods, aims, and
materials for history-writing. English has only one basic word, "history." But
German, for instance, has (1) Geschichte, or the academic discipline of history-
writing; (2) Historie, or less formal narrative history; and (3) Storie, which may
contain many mythical and folkloric elements, but nevertheless aims at a
connected account of the past. To put matters another way, we may distinguish:
(1) political history, the history of great public figures and institutions; (2)
intellectual history, the history of formative ideas; (3) socio-economic history,
the history of social and economic structures; (4) technological history, the
history of things and their use; (5) art history, the history of aesthetics; (6)
ideological history, the history of how certain concepts, specifically ethnic and
religious, have shaped culture; (7) natural history, the history of the environment
and the natural world (such as Pliny's Historia naturalis); and (8) perhaps a
culture history, or total history.3

Yet even most professional biblical scholars (and, I fear, nearly all
archaeologists) have scarcely given serious, critical thought to historiography -
the aims and methods of history-writing - even though they must presume
themselves to be historians. This may seem like a harsh criticism of my
colleagues, but consider the scholarly literature. As late as 1988, Giovanni
Garbini complained in his History and Ideology in Ancient Israel that "all those
who have been occupied with and have written about the story of the ancient
Hebrew Bible are not historians by profession, though for the sake of brevity I
have called them `historians'; almost without exception they are all professors of
theology."4
 The first full-scale critical study of historiographic issues in dealing with
ancient Israel in English-speaking biblical studies was John Van Seters' 1983
work, In Search of History: History and Historiography in the Ancient World
and the Origins of Biblical History,5 followed in 1988 by Baruch Halpern's
provocative The First Historians: The Hebrew Bible and History.6 The first
publications, by a biblical or Syro-Palestinian archaeologist (for the terms, see
below), that dealt extensively with historiography and ancient Israel, were by
myself, beginning in 1987.7 The literature since these early publications should
have burgeoned, but it has not. Why? Is it because we historians have lost
confidence in our ability to deal with a seemingly intractable past? Surely the
current skepticism about history-writing cannot be due to inadequate data, since
both textual and archaeological sources have mushroomed in the past century,
and new archaeological discoveries are now coming at a dizzying pace.

The Bankruptcy of "Mere Philology"

If one examines the malaise further, it soon becomes apparent that a

"historiographical crisis" is perceived only among those scholars who deal
specifically with the texts of the Hebrew Bible. I would argue that these scholars
- some trained originally as philologians, others secondarily as theologians,
many now attempting to recycle themselves as "new literary critics" - are
undergoing an identity crisis that they are projecting upon the rest of us. We
archaeologists have no such hesitation about writing histories, however
provisional, of Israel and the ancient Near East; we have been doing this for
more than a century now, with ever more promising results.

Here it may be instructive to compare two recent books, announced in the

same issue of the catalogue of the trendy Sheffield Academic Press. One is a
collection of essays from the 1994 Dublin meetings of the European Seminar on
Methodology in Israel's History, entitled Can a "History of Israel" Be Written?8
The other volume results from an international seminar held by archaeologists in
America the same year; it carries the upbeat title, The Archaeology of Israel:
Constructing the Past/Interpreting the Present. My own chapter in the latter
volume is entitled "Philology, Theology, and Archaeology: What Kind of
History Do We Want, and What Is Possible?"9 My Israeli archaeological
colleagues, who now dominate the field and who were at the symposium in
force, were incredulous; I was attacking a straw man. They all said: "Of course
we can write histories of ancient Israel; let's get on with it!"

I wish I could be as sanguine as they. But the fact is that mainstream

European biblical scholarship, which for two centuries has led the international
field in new directions, has virtually given up on writing a satisfactory history of
ancient Israel. In America, the revisionist discourse has not yet created much stir,
certainly not among the public. But at national professional meetings, European
scholars attend and make sweeping, doctrinaire pronouncements that would have
been regarded as arrant nonsense only a decade ago, but are now applauded by
audiences of hundreds. At the 1996 national meetings of the Society of Biblical
Literature, Thomas L. Thompson of Copenhagen triumphantly announced to a
standing-room-only crowd that not only was there no "ancient Israel," but there
was "no Judaism until the 2nd century A.D." His remarks were greeted with
applause. Mine was the only voice raised in protest; but I was drowned out, and
the chairman closed the session. Afterward, I found many of my colleagues
dismayed, but only a few of us had seen the handwriting on the wall (a biblical
allusion - Belshazzar's feast - for those who still respond to such images). What
is going on here? Should we be alarmed?

The sad state of our art is perhaps best seen in several recent developments.
One is an international seminar convened by European scholars in Jeru Salem in
1995, published in 1996 as The Origins of the Ancient Israelite States.10 The
opening address was a scathing, personal attack on me by Thompson, who
asserted among many other things that I had deliberately dismantled stones of
the "Solomonic" city gate at Gezer and had thrown out all the pottery that might
disagree with my preconceived notions of a 10th-century B.c. date. Although I
was unable to attend, having just returned from Jerusalem, "our" side was ably
defended by one of America's most brilliant young biblical scholars, Baruch
Halpern."

The latest "exchange" of views was at the 1996 Dublin methodology

seminar, to which apparently we dissidents were not invited. The papers have
now been published, and again Thompson's contribution, "Defining History and
Ethnicity in the South Levant," is largely a mean-spirited caricature of my views
and those of my North American and Israeli colleagues. As Thompson had
already put it, we are guilty of "an interpretation of Palestine's archaeology [i.e.,
all of it] in the context of an anachronistically projected biblical Israel." I, in
particular, have been throughout my long career "dependent on (a) commitment
to find a harmony between archaeologically derived sociocultural scenarios and
(a) reading of the bible (sic)." As for Thompson's own conclusion, he declares:
"I cannot imagine what a biblical text would look like that was judged to be
`historically wholly reliable.12 In much of what follows, I shall supply many
such materials, to be "read historically," both textual and archaeological.

Another deplorable development, one hailed by Thompson, was the 1996

publication by Keith W. Whitelam of The Invention of Ancient Israel: The
Silencing of Palestinian History.13 Whitelam claims that biblical scholars, and
especially archaeologists like the Israelis and myself, have "usurped" the history
of the Palestinians, the real occupants of the land from the Bronze Age onward.
In the name of a fraudulently conceived "biblical Israel," we have conspired to
deprive the Palestinians of their cultural heritage and dispossess them of their
rightful homeland. In Whitelam's reading of history, the charge of "inventing
ancient Israel" comes perilously close to anti-Semitism, as some reviewers have
pointed out.

Before moving on, we need to be aware of the "shorthand" that is

developing to categorize the protagonists in the growing debate, much of the
terminology in the "electronic gossip" on the Internet. Apparently the terms
"maximalists" and "minimalists" stem from my own writings a decade ago. Now,
however, we encounter "positivists" vs. "nihilists," "crypto-Fundamentalists" vs.
"scientific historians," "triumphalists" vs. "supercessionists." Next, I suppose, we
will see "Zionists" vs. "Anti-Semites.1114 Such name-calling is perhaps
inevitable in the heat of the battle; but it certainly seems silly to lay people, and
by oversimplifying, it serves only to obscure the substantial and serious
differences between two emergent "schools" of biblical interpretation that are
likely to dominate biblical scholarship for some time. In any case, the increasing
rancor of the discussion is the clearest indication of the desperation among
exclusively text-based historians that Halpern, quoting Jacob Burckhardt, has
characterized as the "spiritual bankruptcy of philology" in itself.15 The
revisionists are right about one thing: the impasse is such that neither they nor
we can write a history of ancient Israel based entirely on the biblical texts. That
is their despair, however, not ours.

In the remainder of this book, I hope to clarify these issues and to focus
upon what I consider to be the crux of the matter: How and whether we can write
a history of ancient Israel, and how biblical texts and archaeological evidence
can interact as legitimate sources for history-writing. Before proceeding,
however, we need to set the stage by noting what the revisionists substitute for
the now-rejected notion of "the Bible as history": "the Bible as literature."

History, Literature, and Faith

It has always been apparent that the Hebrew Bible is, among other things,
literature - and immortal literature at that. Thus the modern, critical study of the
Bible began properly in the mid-19th century as "literary criticism" (sometimes
called "Higher Criticism"). This approach was, and still is, despite many
detractors today, a fundamental starting-point. From the beginning, however,
literary criticism - the detailed analysis of the historical setting of texts; their
sources, authorship, and date; and the complex history of their transmission - had
as its ultimate goals (1) the recovery from the texts of a real history of events;
and (2) the exegesis of these texts so as to reevaluate the theological
interpretations to be derived from or attached to these events, both ancient and
modern. In short, the classical literary approach to the Hebrew Bible
incorporated a tacit recognition of the Bible's fundamentally "historical"
character. To be sure, over time literary-critical study has seemed to many to
undermine that very history, perhaps irretrievably. Again, the revisionists have a
point: it is no longer possible simply to read the Hebrew Bible at face value as
"history." The Bible is, rather, a series of theological reflections by later Israel on
its past experience, not a "history of Israel." Yet that fact does not mean that
there is no history to be gleaned from the literature, as I shall show presently.

For the "revisionists," however, one must make a choice: we are constrained
to regard the Bible either as "history" or as "literature." Given their
historiographical nihilism, the choice is a foregone conclusion: the Hebrew Bible
is only literature. As Niels Peter Lemche and Thompson put it recently: "the
Bible is not history, and only very recently has anyone ever wanted it to be.."16
Never mind that the statement is patently false (the Bible's millions of readers
over two millennia have almost always thought it to be "history"). What is at
work here? What is the ideological motivation behind the revisionists'
determination to view the Hebrew Bible merely as literature? And what do they
mean by "literature"?

The "Bible as Literature" Movement

Once again, the revisionists are scarcely innovators, for the beginnings of the so-
called "new literary critical" approach to the Hebrew Bible can be traced back
nearly 30 years. What distinguishes the "new" literary approach from the
traditional? According to J. Cheryl Exum and D. J. A. Clines (of the "Sheffield
school" of Davies and others) in their edited collection of essays, The New
Literary Criticism and the Hebrew Bible, the "new" literary approach "is not a
historical discipline, but a strictly literary one, foregrounding the textuality
(italics mine) of the biblical literature."17 According to these leading proponents
of the method, who are among the first to set it forth explicitly, it is rather
eclectic, embracing for instance newer (i.e., nonhistorical) literary-critical
approaches, poststructuralist methods, feminist criticism, political and materialist
(but not classically Marxist) criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, and above all
deconstruction.18

If one pursues the essays in this provocative volume, along with other recent
literature on new literary criticism, the following composite portrait emerges. It
should be no surprise that the resulting portrait resembles quite closely the
movement of the past decade or so known in wider literary circles as
"deconstruction," which in my judgment is the parent of this particular radical
school of biblical criticism. My categorization here may be somewhat cryptic in
the interest of brevity, but browsing a bit in recent literature will show that it is
valid.

What Are "Texts"?

1. A text is an individual "work of art in its own right," not something to be

pursued as a means to an end.

2. There is no single, authoritative "meaning" for a text.

3. How a text "signifies" is as important as what it "signifies."

4. "Structure" is more important than content.

5. There are multiple, almost limitless, approaches to a text that may be

legitimate and productive.

6. All texts, because of the "unbounded" nature of language, are incomplete,

 often contradictory; most even lack any "conscious intentionality" on the
writer's part.

7. Texts have no intrinsic "meaning"; any meaning must be supplied, and it

depends largely on the reader's response, as well as the "social context of
knowledge," the author's and ours.

8. "Meaning" is best "produced" by reading the text imaginatively and sym

bolically, on many levels at once, as well as in conjunction with other texts
("intertextuality").

9. Readings far beyond the text's original boundaries are not only possible but
desirable.

10. The only "test" of a reading's "authenticity" (if any) is acceptance by the
reader's particular community.

Such new literary critical manifestations may not necessarily be subscribed

to by all practitioners of the method, but they are typical. The theory, however, is
best understood in practice, particularly if we look at how texts are treated
specifically. Again, my point of departure is standard, recent literature in
mainstream biblical studies.

How to "Read" a Text: Deconstruction in Practice

First, we should look at the essays in Exum and Clines' basic handbook. Here we
learn that we must:

1. Read the text "against its demand, its coercion"; "identify its Achilles' heel."

2. Look for "cognitive dissonance," rather than integrity.

3. Regard the text as a "coherent intelligible whole, independent of its author."

4. Read the "biblical" text in Spanish, or whatever our own language is, so as
to appropriate it to our own situation.

5. Read the text "politically," as a "representation of power," "interrogate it for

what it fails to say."
 6. Rid ourselves resolutely of the old-fashioned notion that "literature is a
reflection of reality."

Perhaps the most instructive example of how texts should be treated by the
new literary critic is the chapter by Clines himself, a reinterpretation of Psalm 24
from an admittedly deconstructionist position. Here we learn that the appropriate
strategy for reading this text is an "ideologically slanted readerresponse
criticism." This intent is "a goal-oriented hermeneutic, which I shall call a
`bespoke' or `customized' interpretation." Clines explains later on that his is an
"end-user theory of interpretation, a market philosophy of interpretation." The
text thus means anything Clines can "sell"; he says that sometimes he is lucky to
find six "buyers." Is that any wonder?

Lest it seem that I am caricaturing Clines' position, here is his own

summary:

If there are no "right" interpretations, and no validity beyond the assent of

various interest groups, biblical interpreters have to give up the goal of
determinate and universally acceptable interpretations, and devote
themselves to producing interpretation they can sell - in whatever mode is
called for by the communities they choose to serve.

Clines ends his essay by musing: "I have often wondered what one should do
after deconstructing a text. A true deconstructionist would say, Start
deconstructing the deconstruction" Somehow, Clines is reluctant to do that. He
concludes simply that "We float on a raft of signifiers under which we signifieds
slide playfully like porpoises; but we have to live as if the foundations were solid
all the way down to bedrock."19

All of this would seem a counsel of despair. Clines is a belated borrower of

the notions of Stanley Fish, professor in the English Department of Duke
University (whom Clines does not cite), one of the founders of the
deconstructionist movement, who seems now to be going out of favor. It was
Fish, in his Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive
Communities, who argued that "it is the reader who `makes' literature."20

Behind Fish, really a rather banal exponent of deconstruction, there stand

pivotal founding figures like the poststructuralists Michel Foucault and Jacques
Derrida. The latter, for instance, has declared that "reading" a text is all about
"catching at a word," i.e., being brought up short by its "unresolvable
contradictions."

If a metaphor seems to suppress its (the word's) implications, we shall catch

at that metaphor. We shall follow its adventures through the text coming
under a structure of concealment, revealing its self-transgression, its
undecidability.2'

Deconstruction's basic approach to texts - which I would call "hostile,"

rather than, as formerly presumed necessary, "sympathetic" - is illustrated in
other recent works of biblical New Literary Criticism. Let us look, for instance,
at a volume of essays stemming from a 1994 conference of mostly "liberation
theologians" in Pretoria, South Africa, entitled Rhetoric, Scripture, and
Theology.22 Here we learn that we must:

1. Approach texts with the "politics and the hermeneutics of suspicion."

2. "Protect" ourselves from the text, and the text from us.

3. "Forget" the distance between the two.

4. "Celebrate diversity and plurality."

5. Remember that texts are "rhetorically invented."

6. Acknowledge that all ancient texts are "kyriocentric" (i.e., male chauvinist).

7. Grasp that "readings" are "autobiographical," "circular."

Even a recent mainstream handbook on methods in biblical scholarship - To

Each Its Own Meaning: An Introduction to Biblical Criticisms and
TheirApplication - reveals the inroads that new literary criticism, deconstruction,
and related literary approaches have made.23 Various authors assert of texts that:

1. A text is an "interpretable entity independent of its author."

2. The "author's intention" is an "illusion created by readers." What matters is

only the author's "semantic universe."
 3. Language is "infinitely unstable and meaning is always deferable."

4. All texts are to be "resisted."

5. An author's "convictions" are not to be confused with "theological, ethical,

or narrative expressions."

6. Others' "legitimate readings" are as good as ours.

The above notions of how texts, here particularly biblical texts, are to be
read would seem to require little comment, since readers with much common
sense will regard them as too absurd to be taken seriously. But such notions now
prevail among the many biblical scholars who have abandoned the Bible as
history for a new "literary Bible." Thus I think that some more formal rebuttal is
re quired. After all, the biblical texts have until recently been regarded as the
basic data - indeed the only data we have - for writing a history of ancient Israel.
That this is being questioned by the revisionists is seen in the not-entirely
rhetorical question now frequently raised in the literature: "Is it possible to write
a history of ancient Israel without the Bible?" We shall answer that presently.
But whatever the case, if the biblical texts are to be "salvaged" for the historian
in any sense, we shall have to address questions about the nature of these texts
and the best ways to read them. We would have to do that - which is what the
revisionists have conspicuously failed to do - even to dismiss texts in the end.

A Brief Critique of New Literary Criticism

My own misgivings about the new literary critical approach to texts concern
primarily the following:

1. Its determined "anti-historical" stance, for which I find no justification.

2. Its promise of superior results; but does this approach truly edify us, or
merely entertain us?

3. Its lack of sophistication, despite its claims, particularly in its inchoate

theories of "literary production." These are usually borrowed from other
disciplines long after they have become obsolete.
 4. Its largely reactionary character, self-consciously situated on the "margins"
of society and preoccupied with questions of ideology and power and
political discourse that may be totally foreign to the text.

5. Its stress on the "social context" of all knowledge, but its ignoring the
original context of the text itself.

6. Its minimalization of the importance of philological, historical, and

comparative-analytical competence; its "know-nothing" attitude toward, or
denial of, any original context.

7. Its contradiction in insisting upon the "isolation" of an individual text, but at

the same time arguing that "intertextuality" is essential in reading texts.

8. Its positing that a text must be "tested," but producing no criteria by which
that might be accomplished.

9. Its denial of "authorial intent," which defies common sense.

10. Its ultimate cultural relativism, which makes the text mean anything the
reader wants. This is no different from the distortion and exploitation of
texts of which they accuse both Fundamentalists and the liberal religious
establishment in the past.

11. Its fondness for "posing questions" of the text, but its lack of any answers.

12. Its elevation of the reader's subjective concerns to the status of final arbiter
of "meaning," which I find arrogant and self-indulgent.

13. The oppressively ideological and polemical character of the entire

movement, which substitutes slogans for sustained rational argument.

14. The superiority of this approach is often asserted, usually dogmatically; but
its actual reading of texts often borders on the fantastic.

15. A typical postmodern stance is assumed as essential, but it is rarely

defended. Is the latest fad (for that is what it will in time be seen to have
been) really the best?
 In Defense of Ancient Texts

As an archaeologist, I admit to being "premodern" in outlook, an

unreconstructed traditionalist by temperament and training. Consider, by
contrast, traditional assumptions in approaching ancient texts, which I find
infinitely preferable and more rewarding.

1. A text is a product of a particular time, place, culture, language, and it must

be placed back in that context to be understood at all.

2. A text is written by an author with a specific intent, usually for a specific

audience.

3. An original "meaning" is inherent and is expressed in language that is both

deliberate and potentially intelligible.

4. The reader's first task in approaching a text is to place himself and his
situation in the background, attempting to be as "objective" as possible so as
to be open to the text's original (i.e., "true") meaning in its own terms as far
as possible.

5. Methodically, there is no substitute for mastery of the text's original

language, geographical and cultural setting, and the light that other
contemporary texts may shed.

6. Since there are, at best, always personal, subjective factors at work in

interpreting an ancient text, these must be acknowledged, but they may then
be usefully exploited. These factors include intuition; an educated
imagination; and, above all, empathy, or "positioning oneself within
understanding distance."

7. Above all, the question of the modern appropriation of the perceived

meaning of a text must be kept strictly separate during the initial
interpretation in fulfillment of the requirement of "disinterestedness." Even
thereafter, the applied meaning is tentative and is not possessed of the same
"authority" that the text may have had in its original context. In short,
theological concerns must be rigidly distinguished from historical exegesis.
As Krister Stendahl, distinguished theologian, New Testament scholar, and
 former Dean of Harvard Divinity School, once observed, there are two
separate questions to be asked in all historical inquiry, especially in biblical
studies: (1) What did the text mean? and (2) What does it meanj24

If all this makes me a positivist, so be it. At least I have not unwittingly put
myself out of business as a historian by denying the existence of my
fundamental data, which I think the revisionists have done. In any case, I may
not be so old-fashioned after all. A number of astute trend-spotters have already
observed that the fascination with deconstruction may have peaked in many
university English and comparative literature departments, where the trend first
arose. In its place they predict a new approach, one that would seem to be the
obvious antidote to deconstruction's bleak outlook: "Neo-pragmatism." With
that, it seems to me that, after a generation of floundering around in literary
criticism, we have come full circle. Some of us, however, did not take that
journey; we have always been "pragmatist" - not "idealistic," much less
"positivist" - in trying to read ancient texts (and, as we shall see, artifacts as
well). Sometimes, as Freud might have put it, "a text is only a text." But it is
that.

I am hardly the only embattled traditionalist around. We may be in the

minority in the face of trendy academic fashions these days, but the battle is not
lost. Fads, being extremist by definition, usually trigger reactions that bring
about their demise and a return to the center.

What Is "Literature," and How Is It Produced?

Having examined the nature of texts as the fundamental issue in our

conversation with the "revisionists," we must now briefly move the discussion to
the next higher level of analysis, namely the question of literature, or the larger
construct of which texts are simply the fundamental building-blocks. The
essential notion of "literature" would seem to be self-evident, particularly in the
work of those scholars who are preoccupied with literary criticism. Yet
definitions are rare. The revisionists, for instance, simply assume that the Bible
is "literature." Why so? And what do they mean by that assertion?

Rarer still is a straightforward, reasoned exposition of any theory of

"literary production." Thus Robert Carroll, who has published widely on the
book of Jeremiah, seems forced to admit that "our knowledge of the processes
that gave rise to the book of Jeremiah in the first place is absolutely nil.."25 That
is simply untrue. We know a great deal about the political crisis provoked in
Judah by the Neo-Babylonian advance in the late 7th-early 6th centuries, both
from biblical and nonbiblical sources. Surely that was the formative situation in
which Jeremiah (or his "schools") lived and worked. Such statements simply
illustrate how absurdly wrong scholars can be when they are willfully blind to
historical context. I would attribute the failure to produce a coherent body of
literary theory among new literary critics to the fact that most biblical scholars
have no formal training in literary theory and comparative literature, as Exum
and Clines candidly acknowledge.26 It is significant that those scholars who do
have such training, like Robert Alter, a distinguished Hebraist and pioneer in
newer literary critical approaches to the Hebrew Bible, have never gone to the
extremes of many of the new literary critics. Alter's literary analyses in such
works as The Art of Biblical Narrative 27are more persuasive, precisely because
they do not necessarily exclude other readings, even historical ones, nor do they
eschew more traditional exegesis of the texts. Not incidentally, Alter is also a
Hebraist far superior to most biblical scholars. Compare this with the
muchquoted works of the Dutch "narratologist" Mieke Bal, who does not read
Hebrew.28 Somehow all this does not inspire much confidence.

Literature may be thought of as simply a "form of discourse" (a favorite

term of new literary critics) that is written, rather than verbal - although many
ancient texts may well have originated in long-standing oral traditions. I would
distinguish several salient points to be considered in any definition of literature.

1. Literature is the product of the creative, intellectual imagination of a very

few, especially in the largely-illiterate ancient world. Literature is written by
elites, for elites.

2. Literature is largely fiction, even if it is sometimes "historicized;" as in

much of the biblical narratives. It does not and cannot reveal "how it
actually was in the past" (in the 19th-century positivist historian Leopold
von Ranke's famous phrase, Wie es eigentlich gewesen war), at least for the
vast majority of people.

3. Despite the fact that literature is not a direct reflection of reality, it is

deliberately "intentional." It is (a) written for a specific audience, however
 limited; and (b) intended to communicate a certain vision of reality,
primarily the "inner reality" of the author's experience, but inevitably
reflecting at least something of the external (or "real") world. It both reflects
and refracts a vision of reality, perhaps transcending history, but not thereby
obliterating it.

An apt metaphor for understanding literature may be to regard it as a form

of "symbolically encoded thought and behavior," words being the specific
symbols chosen and language the code. To the extent that we can "break the
code" - difficult at best with ancient texts - we may be able to read the symbols
and thus penetrate behind them to the reality that the author sought to express.
To be sure, symbols (including verbal ones) are only "signs" pointing beyond
themselves, and therefore will always remain somewhat enigmatic. Yet "reading"
symbols is possible; and it is not mere guesswork unless it is ignorant of the
language, vocabulary, grammar, or syntax of the symbols, in this case the texts.
Texts, however encoded, are not "mute"; but historians are sometimes deaf.
Shortly we shall see how artifacts are "symbols," precisely like texts, and are to
be read with similar principles of interpretation (hermeneutics).

The Bible as Theology

Thus far I have argued in a preliminary way that the Bible is history in the sense
that it at least contains some history; and that the Bible is without doubt
literature, although not "mere literature." Does the fundamental nature of the
Bible, however, as we are examining it here, include theology? This may seem to
many a non-question; of course the Bible is theology, primarily theology. What
else? Yet we must remember what theology is: it is a systematic, unified body of
propositions about the nature of God, his revelation of himself, and his
requirements of the human family. In the light of this definition of theology,
there is no such thing as a "biblical theology," if only because the diversity of
materials in the biblical literature noted above militates against the very notion
of unity, much less a rational, systematic presentation of ideas such as theology
would require.

"Theology," in the sense of an academic or confessional discipline, is a

comparatively modern notion, i.e., at least post-Classical. It is worth noting that
there is no Hebrew term equivalent to "theology" in the Bible - indeed, no word
for "religion" (that phenomenon is simply taken for granted, needing no
definition). To be sure, there are many theological concepts in the Hebrew Bible,
because it is a profoundly religious document throughout; but there is no single
"biblical theology" that characterizes the biblical literature as a whole.

Having made this necessary qualification, I must nevertheless hasten to say

that we cannot simply secularize the Hebrew Bible, or "sanitize" it, by excising
those religious notions that we moderns find objectionable. Such radical surgery
may be tempting in works like Robert Oden's The Bible Without Theology29 or
Davies' Whose Bible Is It Anyway?3° To eliminate, however, the very element
that is the irreducible core of the Hebrew Bible - its deeply religious sensibilities
- is to violate its integrity as literature. Not even the revisionists would go to that
extreme. They would merely "liberate theology from history," as Lemche has
phrased it.31 Yet it is questionable whether we can in fact do that, as we shall see
when we examine "biblical theology" further below.

The question here is whether the radical depreciation of the Hebrew Bible as
history and the subsequent attempt to re-evaluate it as literature, sketched above,
compromises the Bible's authority as Scripture. Certainly the interpretation and
use of the Bible in Synagogue and Church over many centuries had assumed that
the Bible was "true" in every sense, including the historical, simply because it
was the Word of God. The Enlightenment and the rise of modern biblical
criticism, however, began the process of undermining that confidence, a process
that would now seem to have reached its logical conclusion in the revisionist
dehistoricization of the Bible.

Among the many attempts in the past century or so to resist the supposedly
destructive impact of biblical criticism was the notorious
FundamentalistModernist controversy that shook the very foundations of
American religious life early in the 20th century. Nearly every Protestant
denomination split into warring camps that remain at odds even to this day,
precisely over the question: Is the Bible historically true?"

As we shall see, archaeology was drawn into this controversy almost from
the beginning, in the guise of the peculiarly American phenomenon known as
"biblical archaeology." The hope of many was that archaeology would prove the
Bible to be true. My own mentor at Harvard, George Ernest Wright, was a
prominent biblical archaeologist in the 1940s-1970s, and at the same time a
leading Old Testament theologian. Heavily influenced in the 1950s by the
postwar "Neo-orthodox" theological movement that grew out of Europe's
devastation and despair in those years, Wright published in 1952 a highly
influential little book entitled God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital.
Wright the archaeologist and theologian (a combination unimaginable today)
summed up the matter by declaring that history was the "primary datum" of
faith. Said Wright: "In Biblical faith, everything depends upon whether the
central events actually occurred."32 By central events of Israel's faith Wright
meant events such as the call of Abraham, the exodus, the promise of the gift of
the land of Canaan, and the conquest. In these historical events, God intervenes
in human experience to reveal himself and his will uniquely - thus Wright's title,
God Who Acts. All of this was resounding theology, and reassuring to many
devout believers (and even many not-so-devout biblical scholars of conservative
persuasion).

But suppose that the "central events" did not happen at all? Worse still, what
if it was archaeology, not simply liberal biblical criticism, that provided the
actual proof? Significantly, it was Wright's own students in archaeology who
were in the forefront of resolving the historiographical crisis that he foresaw. The
"archaeological revolution" in biblical studies confidently predicted by Wright
and his teacher, the legendary William Foxwell Albright, had come about by the
1980s, but not entirely in the positive way that they had expected. Many of the
"central events" as narrated in the Hebrew Bible turn out not to be historically
verifiable (i.e., not "true") at all. But is there any history left? And how might it
form the basis for modern religious life, or even for a secular morality? To these
questions we shall turn in subsequent chapters, and especially in Chapter 6.
In Chapter 1 we explored the nature of the biblical narratives as "history," noting
briefly the skepticism of a newer generation of biblical scholars who sometimes
style themselves "revisionists," but whom others now regard as "minimalists" or
even the "new nihilists."' There we faced resolutely the question that they have
now raised with some urgency: "Is it any longer possible to write a history of
ancient or biblical events at all?" Their answer, by and large, is: No.

In proceeding now to analyze the revisionist agenda in more detail, we

should note several things. (1) The revisionists have pointed to a real crisis. (2)
They did not themselves bring about this crisis, however, since the fundamental
philosophical issues of reason and historical knowledge arose in the En
lightenment in the 18th century. (3) It is the entire history of modern critical
biblical scholarship since the mid-19th century that created the momentum that
has led text-based studies of ancient Israel to this denouement. (4) Many more
recent and contemporary trends in biblical studies have contributed to a
devaluation of texts as history, including especially the new literary-critical
schools outlined above, and this has hastened the crisis. (5) The revisionists,
while still a very small minority of biblical scholars, have provoked the present
historiographical crisis only by being the most extreme, the most vocal, the best
coordinated strategists, and easily the most effective propagandists. In less than
10 years the revisionists have created a storm of controversy in the scholarly
literature and in national professional meetings, on the Internet, and now even in
the media and in popular magazines. This controversy is so recent, however, that
mainstream biblical scholarship has been slow to respond, and archaeologists,
with a few exceptions like myself, have not gotten directly involved at all.

The Postmodern Agenda

It is my contention here that behind the revisionists' program lurks a hidden

agenda. This agenda, in turn, can be understood best in the context of the
postmodern milieu in which they are steeped. But what is the intellectual and
social construct that goes under the general name of postmodernism?2

First, we must understand what this reactionary movement was reacting

against - in this case, late 19th- and early 20th-century modernism, or positivism.
Among the main propositions of positivism were the following. (1) There are
immutable and universal "laws" governing the universe and the relationships of
all its parts, including human society. (2) These "laws" are objective facts and
thus can be discovered by science, based on observation of the empirical
evidence. (3) This modern, rational, and positivist way of thinking supersedes all
earlier stages of thinking, such as (a) "theological/fictive," (b) "metaphysical
abstract," or (c) both "materialism" and "spiritualism."

Postmodernism must be understood as a reaction against positivism. Thus

its main features were and are: (1) rebellion against all authority; (2) distrust of
all universal, "totalizing" discourse; (3) the assumption that "social constructs"
determine all knowledge; (4) it is only "discourse" and "realms of discourse" that
matter; (5) all "truth" is relative; (5) there is no intrinsic "meaning;" only that
which we supply; (6) there is no operative "consensus" view, so that everything
becomes ideology, ultimately politics; (7) one ideology is as appropriate as
another (sometimes the more "radical" the better); (8) ideological discourse need
not be rational or systematic, but may be intuitive or even eccentric, representing
the neglected "peripheries" of society rather than the "center."

Such postmodern thinking has affected nearly all disciplines in the social
sciences since ca. the 1970s, to such an extent that it is now taken for granted as
the reigning paradigm. Yet its very name is negative; can any movement define
itself largely by what it follows and still maintain our confidence? And what
marvelous new paradigm will come after this penultimate postmodernism? "Pre-
apocalyptic"? If all this amounts to modernism and its aftermath, will someone
please show me the way back to the Enlightenment?

Deconstructionism

One particular expression of postmodernism is a movement or a method called

deconstructionism. Recently it has been prominent in literary criticism,
especially in some university English and comparative literature departments,
but it has also spread to other areas of the humanities, even biblical studies, as
we saw in Chapter 1. Deconstruction's major premise, derived from its overall
postmodern stance, is that texts have no intrinsic "meaning," at least none that is
recoverable in the case of ancient texts; the modern interpreter gives to the text
whatever "meaning" seems appropriate in the social context of his or her own
"realm of discourse," whatever the "realm" of the original author may have been.
The more extreme deconstructionists even argue that the original author may not
have had any specific intention (a curious conceit). Instead, the critical and
sensitive reader must inquire what the author's subjective inner world was about,
who the audience may have been, and what the reason for the particular style of
discourse was. Ultimately, one must ask not what a text "signifies," but how. We
can go no further; seeking a "historical context," an original meaning, or an
agreed-upon interpretation is methodologically suspect.

In the past decade or so, the deconstructionist mode of textual analysis -

especially in the form of new literary criticism sketched above - has made such
inroads in biblical studies that the traditional historical exegesis and criticism
that have ruled for more than a century are often dismissed today as passe. If the
search for "history" and for historical exegesis of texts is obsolete, the
archaeology of the "biblical world" is irrelevant. That may explain why
archaeology is neglected or at best misunderstood almost everywhere in biblical
studies and theology today.3

Postmodern Ideology and the Revisionist Agenda

It is at this point that I think we can comprehend the revisionist agenda in

biblical studies. It is, I suggest, thinly-disguised postmodernism, in this case
specifically deconstruction. If the reader thinks this proposal too far-fetched, or
too severe an indictment, consider the following, which are the main points that
the revisionists themselves have set forth - what I would call the manifesto of a
movement that self-consciously portrays itself as revolutionary.

(1) All the texts of the Hebrew Bible in its present form date to the
Hellenistic era (as late as the 2nd-1st century). They are therefore "unhistorical,"
of little or no value for reconstructing a "biblical" or an "ancient Israel," both of
which are simply modern Jewish and Christian literary constructs.

(2) Interpretation of the biblical texts should be "liberated from historical

consideration." It should proceed strictly on the basis of literary analysis of the
Bible's "stories," which reveal mainly the "self-perception" of the narrators.

(3) This radically "anti-historic movement" in the study of ancient Israelite

"history" has at last brought us such "new knowledge" that it makes all other
approaches obsolete, indeed illegitimate. Those who persist in traditional
approaches may be dismissed as either servants of the religious Establishment,
or simply crypto-Fundamentalists.

(4) Attempts to write any more histories of "Israel" should be abandoned.

Instead, we should be writing "Palestinian history," which American and Israeli
biblicists and archaeologists have conspired to "suppress" because of their
biblical and nationalistic biases.

The quotes above are all taken directly from the current literature; and I can
supply numerous other quotations from the principal spokesmen of revisionism,
including Philip R. Davies, Thomas L. Thompson, Niels Peter Lemche, and
Keith W. Whitelam.4 That my paraphrase above fairly represents the revisionist
position in general is easy to document (although this "school," like others, is not
necessarily monolithic). I suggest simply that the reader reflect on the obviously
ideological pronouncements above, then compare them with the
postmodern/deconstructionist agenda that I have outlined. Can there be any other
background against which to portray the revisionists and their stated objectives?
5

A "Revolution"?

It is true that most of the revisionists have either carefully avoided the terms
"deconstruction" and "new literary criticism," or else have denied that the terms
describe them. Nevertheless, I think that it is always instructive to pay more
attention to what people actually do, than to what they say or think they are
doing. And in my judgment the revisionists are carrying out a classic, deliberate,
single-minded deconstructionist agenda. It is also evident that their program is
complete with all those elements that typically characterize "revolutionary"
movements: pretense to authoritative credentials; ideological manifestos; po
larization of viewpoints; extremist rhetoric; personal polemics; evangelical (!)
fervor; apparatus for disseminating their own views; prevailing dogmatism; and
Utopian ideals. Readers can readily confirm these programmatic objectives by
browsing through the flood of recent revisionist publications. If I perceive their
intentions wrongly, I would welcome other readings (that is, if texts really have
any "meaning").

On Ideology, Bias, and "Realms of Discourse": Some Case-studies

Even if my attempt here to identify the revisionists as "ideologues" is persuasive

to some, others may protest. They could say, for instance, that all scholars are in
a sense ideologues, i.e., they have a position to defend; and that the revisionists'
ideology is not necessarily wrong-headed or particularly menacing. If the latter
qualifications are valid, then the whole controversy is a "tempest in a teacup."
But I think that there is more to it than that.

Before proceeding, let me define "ideology" and "ideologue." The former

term is often taken only in the negative sense, i.e., as the obvious bias of the
"other" I use "ideology" here, however, in its proper and neutral meaning, since
we all have "ideologies," or a "system of ideas," a way of thinking. It should be
content that determines whether a given ideology is good or bad (I do not
espouse to be a relativist). By "ideologue," on the other hand, I refer to those
who espouse a particular ideology, often uncritically examined, to the exclusion
of others, and who then become obsessed with visionary ideas.' Space prohibits
more than a few specific examples of how ideology typically shapes revisionist
discourse.

Philip R. Davies

Much of the present controversy began with Philip R. Davies, of the University
of Sheffield, in his provocative little book In Search of `Ancient Israel" (1992).7
Here Davies sets forth the basic revisionist premises noted above, which be
came the foundation for most subsequent discussions. The casual, off-hand,
sometimes outrageous style of Davies' book tempts one to dismiss it as either an
example of British eccentricity, or perhaps intended only as a tongue-incheek
piece for our amusement. But I suspect that Davies, with all his disarming flair,
is in deadly earnest: there was no "ancient" or "biblical" Israel; and the
"historical Israel" that archaeology might recover in theory is beyond our reach
due to archaeology's deficiencies. Yet I would point out that nowhere that I can
see does Davies document the basic premise on which his basic statement rests -
that all the literature of the Hebrew Bible in its present form was composed long
after the fact, and thus yields no real "history." In 1992 Davies simply asserted
this, not informing his readers that his is a decidedly minority view, one that
goes against a long tradition of mainstream biblical historical-critical
scholarship, as well as many studies in oral transmissions and literary
production.

As for archaeology's potential for writing a history of "ancient Israel,"

Davies rejects this as anything more than a remote possibility. Only once does he
cite any of the basic archaeological handbooks we noted above - Amihai Mazar's
Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000-586B.C.E.8 - merely to dismiss it
as irrelevant, since Mazar ends with the Iron Age in Palestine and does not cover
Davies' "biblical world" in the Persian-Hellenistic period. He does not even cite
Helga Weippert's Palestina in vorhellenistischer Zeit,9 which although only a
handbook is the single work cited by Thompson and most other revisionists.
Together these two fundamental sources contain some 700 pages of detailed
presentation of archaeological data on the Iron Age. If this complex, or
archaeological assemblage, is not "Israelite," what is it?

An even more egregious example of Davies' tailoring the evidence to fit his
presuppositions is his notorious attempt (along with others) to discredit the
recently discovered 9th-century inscription from Tel Dan in northern Israel,
mentioning the "house of David" and a "king of Israel," a king we can now
identify as Jehoram, ca. 840.10 Davies simply refuses to take the Dan inscription
seriously as a historical datum for the United Monarchy, in this case one that
would effectively contradict his assertion that there were no early Iron Age
Israelite and Judean "states." But Lemche and Thompson (below) have gone so
far as to imply that the inscription is a forgery, a hoax "planted" on the
unsuspecting dig director, the venerable Avraham Biran. Several of the other
revisionists have turned amusing intellectual somersaults to avoid the obvious
meaning of the Dan inscription.11 The irony is that biblical scholars have long
demanded that an archaeologist supplement our "mute" artifacts with texts. But
when we do find a spectacular text, they discard it! More recently, Davies has
alleged that our most secure ancient Hebrew monumental inscription - the
Hezekiah tunnel inscription, dated to the siege of Sennacherib in 701 (2 Chr.
32:1-5) - is a Hasmonean/Hellenistic work of the 2nd century, in effect
"fraudulent" as used by epigraphers and paleographers.12

As for "Biblical" Hebrew, Davies regards this as a Bildungssprache, an

artificial "literary" language that was invented by the late scribes who wrote the
Bible. He ignores the fact that we have hundreds, probably thousands, of
ostraca,inscriptions on stone, inscribed pots, seals, and seal-impressions from
well-dated 10th-6th century contexts, in precisely this "nonexistent" Iron Age
Hebrew. What is one to make of all this, unless we suppose that we are dealing
here with ideological pronouncements, rather than with honest, competent, fully
documented scholarship?

At least Davies' bias is obvious, and he has recently defended it: he is

resolutely anti-theological.13 Here I might agree with Davies, since one can
easily show, as I shall do below, that theology constitutes a separate quest and
must be clearly distinguished from historical and archaeological inquiries, which
have a different motivation. But it appears to me that Davies is largely reacting
against what may be his own Fundamentalist background.

Thomas L. Thompson

Another of the current revisionists, Thomas L. Thompson, actually set out on

this path, although apparently not deliberately, many years ago with his icono
clastic work, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives (1974),14 a radical
attack on Albright and his school. An "outsider" for many years, never accepted
by the religious establishment, Thompson has finally ended up in Copenhagen
with Niels Peter Lemche (below). In a very defensive piece in the Journal of
Biblical Literature, Thompson describes himself as "a Joycean Catholic
IrishAmerican emigre" and as a "neo-Albrightian."15 However, the first
characterization helps us to account only for Thompson's oblique writing style;
and the latter is simply absurd.

Thompson's real point of departure is revealed in comments elsewhere in

this article. He is "strongly influenced by the political, ideological, and religious
turmoil of the late 1960s"; 1968 was the year that meant "denying authority to
old opinions and institutions which are no longer able to present a decent
argument in favor of their continued existence." Thompson and the other
revisionists are committed rather to Wissenschaft (or "scientific knowledge"), in
this case partly a real theology of some sort. As Thompson says, we "never gave
up the hope that we could do something positive for this world."16
Commendable; but hardly a sturdy theology.

Somehow, all this does little to reassure me on the issue of ideology. Social
constructionism and political activism, combined with an appeal to "New Age"
theo-babble, hardly provide the most fruitful orientation to the "objective and
critical" study of the biblical texts that Thompson claims to be doing. On the
other hand, such an orientation - complete with the Utopian ideal - does
characterize postmodernism generally, and the biblical deconstructionists in
particular. Can one be forgiven for suggesting that there may be a connection
here?

The issue, however, is whether or not Thompson's ideological agenda, or

ours, has adversely affected scholarship. I think that in Thompson's case it has,
both in method and in results. Positing in Thompson's work a "revolutionary"
ideology explains many things, such as his exaggerations. Among them are the
following statements. (1) There were no real "cities" in the Bronze Age
heartland. (2) Archaeology "cannot distinguish" Israelite from Canaanite culture.
(3) Albright's "Canaanites" existed only "in his head." (4) In the Iron I period
(12th-11th centuries) the notion of an "indigenous Israel ... is historically
meaningless." (5) "The Bible's stories about Saul and David are no more factual
than the tales of King Arthur." (6) There was no Judean "state" until the 7th
century, because "only a few dozen villagers lived as farmers in all the Judaean
highlands." (7) Jerusalem finally became a political and religious center or
capital only in the 2nd century B.C. (8) "The very existence of an `exilic' period
... is open to serious challenge." (9) The concept of "Israel" was a literary and
theological creation of the Persian, if not the Hellenistic, period. (10) Our "new
knowledge" proves that the Hebrew Bible is a late "Jewish construct." (11) There
was no "Judaism" until the 2nd century A.D., and claims to the contrary are
"literaryfiction.""

Such exaggerations - which I can easily multiply - will no doubt be

defended by countering that they are quotations taken out of context or simply
part of Thompson's deliberately provocative style of debate. Nonetheless, this is
irresponsible scholarship - simply ideological rhetoric, with no attempt at
documentation or a well-balanced presentation that might enlighten the reader. If
Davies is a propagandist, Thompson appears to be a pamphleteer.
 Thompson's latest book, The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the
Myth of Israel (1999), only confirms my suspicions. Here the statements are
even more outrageous. A few typical quotations will give the flavor of the book:
(1) "It is only a Hellenistic Bible that we know: namely the one that we first
begin to read in the texts found among the Dead Sea scrolls near Qumran." (2)
"The Bible's `Israel' [is] a literary fiction.... The Bible is not a history of anyone's
past." (3) "There never was a United Monarchy in history, and it is meaningless
to speak of preexilic prophets and their writings." (4) "The literary nature of the
Mesha stele [a 9th-century B.C. monumental inscription from Moab, in
Transjordan, mentioning Omri, king of Israel] needs to be taken seriously. It is
quite doubtful that it refers to an historical person when it refers to Israel's king."
(5) "The central core of biblical tradition, this torah of instruction, was centered
on the belief in a universal and transcendent God. This belief is more
philosophical than religious." (6) "The concept of [Israelite] ethnicity, however,
is a fiction, created by writers. It is a product of literature, of historywriting." (7)
"Gods are created, but the true God is unknown. This important maxim lies at
the centre of the Bible's theology." (8) "The [biblical] text doesn't speak to us,
nor was it addressed to us. To pretend that it does and was, is among theology's
least critical and most self-serving lies."18

Is it any wonder that I have suggested elsewhere19 that Thompson and his
fellow revisionists have become the new nihilists?

Another aspect of Thompson's ideology is his misrepresentation or

suppression of the views of those who would oppose him. Typical are
Thompson's charges against me. From the beginning, he says, I have really been
an oldfashioned, Albrightian "biblical archeologist" (despite my much-
publicized opposition to this kind of archaeology for 25 years). I have distorted
archaeological data by using them to prove the "historicity of the biblical
Patriarchs" (although in fact I wrote to oppose this 20 years ago). Others have
argued for the methodological separation of Bible, archaeology, and the history
of ancient Palestine, but I have uncritically combined them; my "project has
always been the relationship asserted by biblical and Christian fundamentalism"
(i.e., between Bible and archaeology). I have "never recognized the
methodological and historical issues that were involved." I and other
archaeologists "only visit ideas." Proof of my "biblical bias" is that I went to
Gezer in 1967 deliberately to find a "Solomonic" city gate, where we pulled out
large in situ stones and rolled them down the hill, suppressing this evidence in
our report. And "when it came to questions of chronology and the gate itself, all
pottery discrepancies were consciously discarded prior to recording." Thompson
says that I refuse to address the issue that the revisionists raise, that my "ancient
Israel (is) a scholarly figment, rather than the goal of current research," a
"harmonistic scenario" with which to wed our "own hardly independently
derived phantasms." "Dever's methods ... have little to do with archaeology."
Mine is "history by committee," "not history at all," "wholly bereft of method."
By contrast, the revisionists' separation of archaeological and historical pursuits
is "a hard-won gain that has been accepted by all but fundamentalists." Even my
pioneering work on Early Bronze IV, begun in 1966, derives from Thompson's
"archaeological" publications.20

My few recent attempts to counter Thompson's charges are now dismissed

as seeking "credit for initiating the now dominant historiographical development
in our (sic) field which understands archaeology and the history of the southern
Levant as independent disciplines," or at worst simply "acrimonious" debate and
ad hominem attacks. I and others who are finally compelled to expose the blatant
ideology here are introducing irrelevant issues such as ques tions of competence
and integrity, and even of faith and morality. We are simply obstructionists who
stand in the way of acceptance of the New Truth that will soon triumph and will
resolve the "historiographical crisis" that many have acknowledged. The "newer
archaeology" that will support this historiographical breakthrough is not that
which I and others have developed, but is rather the work of biblical scholars
whom I do not even cite ("a form of Harvard censorship"), such as Gosta
Ahlstrom, Ernst Axel Knauf, Niels Peter Lemche, J. Maxwell Miller, John Van
Seters, and Thompson himself. (Never mind that I have cited and discussed all in
detail.) These scholars are not "ideologues" or "radicals"; their critics are. They
are not "skeptics" about the history of ancient Israel, but their opponents are
"maximalists" or "credulists." They are embattled protagonists for Wissenschaft,
"scientific historical knowledge," the New Truth.21

What is the fair-minded reader to make of all this fulmination? Let me

suggest that here, as in the other voluminous literature being spewed forth by
this vocal minority, are all the classic hallmarks of the "ideologue": the claim to
be "voices from the margin"; unmasking others' ideology, while denying their
own; "liberation" rhetoric; the deliberate intent to overthrow the Establishment
and to repudiate its "power to sanction"; dogmatic assertions with little
documentation; caricatures of the views of opponents; claims to have discovered
a New Truth, but without telling how and why they have repudiated their own
former "truth"; and revolutionary slogans and even claims to have won the
victory already (see further below).

Keith W. Whitelam

A more recent convert to revisionism is Keith W. Whitelam of the University of

Stirling, who had earlier collaborated with Robert B. Coote in an innovative
settlement-history of ancient Palestine entitled The Emergence of Early Israel in
Historical Perspective.22 This foray into archaeology was followed by Whitelam
on his own in several programmatic statements on "early Israel." Then in late
1996 there appeared a full-scale work, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Si
lencing of Palestinian History. Whitelam's basic thesis is similar to that of
Davies and Thompson, except for one twist. Not only have scholars been
preoccupied with reconstructing an imaginary "ancient Israel," but American and
Israeli biblicists and archaeologists have meanwhile conspired to deprive the
modern Palestinians of their history.

Whitelam's main arguments23 are that both archaeology and biblical studies
have conspired to "usurp Palestinian history" and that the conspiracy results
from the biases of European and American scholarship regarding an "ancient
Israel," as well as the program of Zionism coupled with modern Israeli
archaeology. According to Whitelam (with Davies, Lemche, and Thompson),
"the `ancient Israel' of biblical studies is a scholarly construct based upon a
misreading of the biblical tradition and divorced from historical reality." The
result of the preoccupation with an "Israel" has been that "in effect, Palestinian
history, particularly for the thirteenth century BCE to the second century CE, has
not existed except as the backdrop to the histories of Israel and Judah or of
Second Temple Judaism."

As proof of this bias, Whitelam asserts that recent Israeli archaeological

surveys of the West Bank have been "heavily influenced by biblical scholarship
and the all-consuming search for `ancient Israel."' These are research strategies
that have "invented and located Israel in the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition and
early Iron Age." The surveys "are also an expression of a claim to the land by the
mapping and conceptualization of that land" Biblical studies and Israeli
archaeological scholarship have "dispossessed Palestinians of a land and a past."
The "new paradigm" in both disciplines must be to rediscover the "Palestinians"
in the Iron Age and even in the Bronze Age; all who oppose that agenda are
"distracting" us from the proper objectives of scholarship.

Here the sensitive reader will see red flags all over the place; but let me
suggest only my chief misgivings about Whitelam, quite apart from his belated
conversion to the revisionist movement. (1) He does not document any of his
charges against Israeli (and other) archaeologists. That archaeologists, Israelis or
others, are not "objective," that they too are conditioned by their social context,
is a truism. But Whitelam would need to give some specific "casehistories" to
show how a connection with the Bible or the Land of the Bible has adversely
influenced scholarly conclusions. For instance, Whitelam castigates Israel
Finkelstein in particular as one of the leading Israeli archaeologists who carried
out the West Bank surveys, charging him with using this research to create an
"early Israel" and to validate modern Israeli claims to these territories. Whitelam
does not inform his readers that (a) since 1991 (even earlier, in Hebrew),
Finkelstein has repudiated the use of the label "Israelite" or even my "Proto-
Israelite" for the 12th-11th century hill-country archaeological assemblage that
he himself did so much to place on our settlement map. (b) Finkelstein does not
belong to the political right in Israel, which defends the modern settlements, but
is strongly affiliated with the opposition on the left. (c) Finkelstein - like all
Israeli archaeologists - is a secularist whose work is entirely separated from
programs of biblical and religious studies at every level, and who is adamantly
opposed to the religious establishment in Israel.24

Finkelstein's current negative views on "Israelite ethnicity" do indeed pose

some serious problems, which is why he and I are constantly engaged in
controversy in print. But these are strictly archaeological disputes - not
ideological, nationalistic, religious, or personal, much less biblical. They have to
do with legitimate professional differences in interpretation. And here,
Whitelam, not being an archaeologist, really lacks credentials that would entitle
him to enter the debate.

(2) The latter point leads me to the second problem that I have with
Whitelam's ideology: his appeal to archaeology is bogus. The fraud here lies in
the fact that Whitelam has no experience in fieldwork, no first-hand
acquaintance with the material culture of ancient Palestine (or his "Palestine")
and its interpretation, and only superficial and secondary knowledge of the
critical literature. Furthermore, if Whitelam wishes to complain of scholarly
"usurpation," let him confront his own hubris in claiming that he and other
biblicists must now take up the burden of the "neglected history of ancient
Palestine." We archaeologists have been doing precisely that history for nearly
150 years! Are he and the other revisionist biblical historians better equipped for
this task? Are they better equipped than the real "Palestinians," who now have
their own Department of Archaeology in the Palestinian Authority, and have no
need for outsiders to patronize them or to write their history? These Palestinians
are already collaborating with American, Israeli, and Jordanian archaeologists to
write a history of ancient Palestine in all periods, not just that of the Israelite
monarchy.

(3) Finally, several of Whitelam's statements border dangerously on

antiSemitism; they are certainly anti-Jewish and anti-Israel. There is a clear bias
here, as early critics have pointed out.25 Where does it come from, in a scholar
who is otherwise modest, quiet, and personally charming, and who in the past
has written perceptively and sensitively about a real "ancient Israel"? What has
happened to convert Whitelam to revisionism? In any case, other critics on the
horizon will be less charitable. These critics will charge (and perhaps document)
"anti-Semitism"; others will be outraged and will come to the defense of the
revisionists. Thus our several disciplines are likely to be further polarized and
isolated by the acrimonious discussions of what are essentially nonissues. I
choose to believe that Whitelam is sincere, although naive, and that he did not
consciously intend to precipitate such a furor. But that is what he has done; and it
is not just his scholarship that is at fault, but also and principally his ideological
agenda.

Niels Peter Lemche

Niels Peter Lemche, of the University of Copenhagen, came to international

prominence in 1985 with what at the time seemed a revolutionary new
socioanthropological history, Early Israel: Anthropological and Historical
Studies on the Israelite Society Before the Monarchy (popularized in 1988 as
Ancient Israel: A New History of Israelite Society). By 1994, however, his mind
had changed sufficiently that he could write a programmatic article entitled "Is it
Still Possible to Write a History of Ancient Israel?" Practically speaking, his
answer was No. His full-scale work in German in 1996 appeared in English in
1998, Prelude to Israel's Past: Background and Beginnings of Israelite History
and Identity. This was followed in 1999 by The Israelites in History and
Tradition. While less radical than Thompson's Early History of the Israelite
People (and later, nonhistories), Lemche's most recent works leave no doubts
that his "history" is so minimal that it scarcely merits the term. For instance,
David, Solomon, and the United Kingdom are all "invented." And "without a
Davidic empire there was no Israel in the biblical sense. The only thing that
remains is the tradition of two tiny states of Palestine in the Iron Age, which
were long after their disappearance chosen as the basis of a history of a new
nation to be established on the soil of Palestine in the postexilic period."26
Earlier Lemche had written an article entitled "Early Israel Revisited," in which
he argued that no traditional history of Israel is possible, even works such as his
own previously radical but rather well received histories.27 Lemche now
repudiates these, because they were too close to a "paraphrase of the Bible,"
relying "far too much on the biblical narratives."

Here I can give only something of the flavor of an exchange of views (an
attempt at dialogue - one of the few thus far in the scholarly literature) which
appeared in Sheffields's Journal for the Study of the Old Testament.
(Archaeologists rarely write, and are still more rarely invited to write, for
biblical journals; in this case, I invited myself, and the editor accepted.) Lemche
begins his overview by suggesting one dimension of the historiographical crisis
we face: the decline in university positions in biblical history and archaeology,
and even in theological seminaries, where these subjects "are increasingly
deemed unnecessary luxuries." He is absolutely right, as I also pointed out in a
somewhat alarmist article in the Biblical Archaeology Review entitled "Death of
a Discipline?"28 Lemche predicts that "Should Whitelam's plea (1996) for the
replacement of Israelite history with a proper history of Palestine find an
audience, the antihistoric movement among theologians will probably gain
momentum." Lemche thinks that it should, that despite certain risks - the
possibility of "bad exegesis" and "a kind of ethical morass" - theology should be
"liberated from historical considerations." Indeed, Lemche thinks that this has
already happened by and large, and that "the debate in this area is almost at an
end." The reason for this triumph of a new "secular theology" (as I would call it)
is, according to Lemche, the fact that "the old-fashioned endeavor to extract
historical information from the Old Testament narratives is considered a thing of
the past .1329

Lemche's view is that the biblical texts reveal only "the self-perception of
the people who wrote this narrative," and they lived in the Persian period in the
Exile (ca. 6th-5th centuries). Thus genuine "historical recollections of Israel's
early history are not to be found in the Old Testament historical narrative."
Therefore "we cannot save the biblical history of early Israel." In his conclusion,
Lemche observes:

Coming back to the field of studies on the history of early Israelis like
visiting an old house, formerly resplendent in all its glory, full of life and
merry conversation, but now forsaken by its inhabitants. It is hardly a place
to stay for long. In the corners a few ghosts of the past may still be lurking,
maintaining the basic historical truth of the historical biblical narrative.30

Lemche is speaking here of the Premonarchical period, the 12th-11th

centuries, but he notes that his basic historiographical skepticism could be
extended to cover the whole of the Monarchy, and even the exilic and postexilic
periods. In short, the Hebrew Bible should be "studied as what it is - a narrative."
For Lemche, as for the other revisionists, the Hebrew Bible for the most part is
only literature, not history. Is there, however, any "history" left? When I pressed
this point in a closed session at national meetings, Lemche could only respond
that "we (may) have a number of historical recollections" in the Bible," that "we
love these stories, but we don't believe them to be true." Thompson chimed in:
"We don't deny that there's early material in the Bible. But we do think it's small,
only fragmentary material." When P. Kyle McCarter (the other "maximalist"
invited to this private debate) and I pressed both Lemche and Thompson, citing
among other historical data the Tel Dan inscription and a brand new Aramaic
inscription found at biblical Ekron and mentioning "Ekron," they both argued
that the latter might be a forgery - just as they had said of the Tel Dan inscription
in a joint article in 1994.31 What can one do with scholars who refuse to regard
as legitimate any data that confound their theories? Don't bother them with facts;
their minds are made up.

Here is the crux of the matter: What is left of Israelite history after the
devastating attack of the revisionists on the biblical texts? I have yet to discover
in all their writings any real awareness of the "historical core" of the biblical
narrative, a core that I argue here can now be reconstructed by means of a
sophisticated reading of archaeological and textual evidence, taken together.

Further details of my critique of Lemche's position (and others) will be

given below in Chapters 3-6, but as I pointed out, such a negative approach does
indeed come dangerously close to nihilism. All the revisionists, in my judgment,
are rapidly becoming:

philologians - with no pertinent texts

historians - with no history

theologians - with no empathy with religion

ethnographers - with no recognizable "ethnic groups," no training, and no

field experience

anthropologists - with no theory of culture and cultural change

literary critics - with little coherent concept of literary production

archaeologists - with no independent knowledge or appreciation of material

culture remains

If this is an unfair characterization, I would welcome their defense; but it must

be documented. Meanwhile, I regard theirs as "nonhistories" of ancient Israel.
What results when historians like the revisionists leap from narrative to
archaeology and back again - says one whom they claim as their own, Ernst
Axel Knauf - is "a pseudohistory of nonevents."32

Israel Finkelstein

The only Syro-Palestinian archaeologist who has become involved with the
revisionist camp, except for a few critics like myself, is Israel Finkelstein of Tel
Aviv University. This in itself is significant, since all of the revisionists have
appealed to archaeology in one way or another, as we have seen. To be sure,
Thompson has claimed in print and on the Internet that several other
archaeologists support his approach, such as Peter Parr, J. Maxwell Miller, John
Woodhead, Henk Franken, James Strange, David Ussishkin, Ze'ev Herzog, a
certain "Tuft," and the vast majority of archaeologists working in Jordan. The
reader should be warned that none of these archaeologists has either written
anything expressly on the subjects at hand or espoused a basic method that is any
different from what Thompson calls our "harmonizing" approach. Finkelstein
alone might be said to remain in Thompson's camp, but he has not acknowledged
any such affiliation; nor does he share the revisionists' negative historiographic
or so-called archaeological views.33

Thompson's reasons for attempting to co-opt Finkelstein are simply that

Finkelstein has written in what seem to be supportive ways on two topics that are
critical to the revisionist agenda: (1) "ethnicity" and (2) the date of the rise of the
Israelite state.

(1) It was Finkelstein's own pioneering work in The Archaeology of the

Israelite Settlement that triggered much of the discussion of "Israelite origins" in
the past decade.34 Here Finkelstein published the first English version of his
extensive surface surveys north of Jerusalem, i.e., in the biblical "tribal territory"
of Manasseh. He also summarized the results of several other Israeli
archaeological survey projects in all parts of the country. The data revealed
nearly 300 small settlements of the late 13th-12th/11th centuries. Most were not
founded above "destruction layers" of Canaanite Late Bronze Age urban sites, as
a former generation of "biblical archaeologists" had argued, but were early Iron
Age foundations de novo. Located mostly in the hill country, this network of
agricultural villages represents not a large-scale military invasion of
"newcomers," as the Joshua story has it, but rather a largely indigenous socio-
economic movement. This is marked by a shift of population with the collapse of
the Late Bronze Age society to the rural frontiers and hinterland, accompanied
by a new agrarian economy and lifestyle, characterized by certain "reformist"
notions and a new religious sensibility (later to develop as Yahwism). While the
rural-style farmhouses and some aspects of agricultural technology (terraces,
cisterns, silos, and iron tools) are new on the Late Bronze/Iron I horizon ca.
1250-1150, other diagnostic traits of the emergent hill-country culture show
strong continuity with the Late Bronze Age Canaanite culture. This is especially
true of the pottery of the highland villages - always our most sensitive medium
for perceiving cultural contact and change - which is a direct outgrowth of the
13th-century Late Bronze Age repertoire. Today, on the basis of the evidence
that Finkelstein and his colleagues have presented in many subsequent
publications, all archaeologists and virtually all biblical scholars have abandoned
the older conquest model, or even "peaceful infiltration" and peasants' revolt
models, for "indigenous origins" and/or "symbiosis" models in attempting to
explain the emergence of early Israel in Canaan.

In an early review of Finkelstein's seminal work I criticized him for

adopting somewhat uncritically the ethnic term "Israelite" for his highland ar
chaeological assemblage.35 To be sure, we have an undisputed contemporary,
extrabiblical reference to "Israel" in the well-known Victory stele of Pharaoh
Merneptah, ca. 1210. I suggested, however, caution in connecting the 13th-12th
century archaeological "Israel" directly either with Merneptah's "Israel" or the
later, fully-developed state of "Israel" of the Monarchy and the biblical
narratives. Nevertheless, because of the direct continuity between the 12th-11th
century material culture complex and that of the 10th-8th century in the Iron II
period, I suggest calling Finkelstein's material "Proto-Israelite" Other scholars,
among them several of the revisionists, also criticized Finkelstein's original
"ethnic" designations, charging that this derived improperly from biblical
considerations.36

By 1991 Finkelstein had begun to soften his position on "Israelite ethnicity."

Then in several publications in 1994-97, he reversed himself completely, arguing
that it was impossible to identify an "Israel" in the Iron I material culture.37
Why this dramatic about-face? The reader will search Finkelstein's numerous
recent publications in vain for any new archaeological data; there are none since
the late 1980s, so we are all basing ourselves on the same, original data that
Finkelstein had. It is clear that Finkelstein has done much more reading in the
socio-anthropological literature on ethnicity since 1988, so his theoretical
arguments are now more sophisticated, but also more cautious. Such intellectual
growth is commendable, but I fear that in this case Finkelstein has changed his
mind not on the basis of any empirical data, but simply out of an inherent
iconoclasm, evident in much of his writing, as well as a sense of "political
correctness." When a scholar does such a radical about-face, without offering
any evidential basis, or even acknowledging the change in views, it seems to me
that we are entitled to be skeptical, to raise certain questions. Was he wrong then,
but right now? Or right then, and wrong now? Or, perhaps, wrong both times?
(As we shall see, the revisionists have all proven to have similar chameleonlike
qualities).

Elsewhere Finkelstein and I have debated the issue of "Israelite ethnicity"

extensively in the literature, so we need not dwell on details here.38 But it is
significant that ours is a strictly anthropological and archaeological difference,
one that has nothing whatsoever to do with biblical maximalists and minimalists,
much less the revisionists' insistence that there was no "early Israel."
Unfortunately, Finkelstein may have unwittingly played into the hands of
deconstructionists with whom he otherwise would have nothing in common.

(2) The second area in which Finkelstein's work seems to lend credence to
revisionist claims is the chronology of the early Israelite Monarchy. Finkelstein
has long questioned the proposed 10th-century date of the nearly identical Hazor,
Megiddo, and Gezer monumental city gates and walls, which for many point to a
degree of centralized planning that reflects the rise of a centralized government,
i.e., a state (below), and in this case that of the biblical Solomon. Finkelstein first
argued for a 9th-century date for these defenses, and recently has attempted to
lower the entire 12th-9th century chronology by as much as 50 years.39

Lemche and Thompson have hailed Finkelstein's new chronology as a

triumph, arguing that it proves their contention that there was no Israelite (or
northern) kingdom before the 9th century and thus that the biblical accounts of a
"King Solomon" are simply myths. What they do not tell the reader is that
Finkelstein does not deny an Israelite state, but only down-dates its origins
somewhat; and that his idiosyncratic "low chronology" is scarcely accepted by
any other archaeologist. Leading Israeli archaeologists such as Amnon Ben-Tor,
now excavating Hazor, and Amihai Mazar, digging contemporary levels at
nearby Beth-shan and Tel Rehov, argue strongly that Hazor, Megiddo, Bethshan,
Gezer, and other sites all belong to a mid- to late-10th century state, and were all
simultaneously destroyed by the raid of Shishak ca. 930 (as we shall note below
in discussing Gezer).40

Once again, the arguments of Thompson and other revisionists treat the
archaeological data selectively and cavalierly. Their obvious bias makes one
suspect that we are dealing here with a tendentious ideology, not honest,
competent scholarship. There are legitimate disagreements among
archaeologists, but they are archaeological disagreements, and nonspecialists
must not be allowed to make hocus-pocus of them. Ironically, the revisionists are
guilty of the very same flawed methods for which they castigate "biblical
archaeologists" - using selected archaeological data as proof-texts with reference
to the Bible, in this case their view of the Bible and its history (or nonhistory).
"Anti-biblical" archaeology is no improvement over "biblical" archaeology.

A Brief Critique of the Methodology and Agenda of the Revisionists

The positive constructive aspects of our rejection of the revisionists'

deconstructionist agenda will be presented in Chapters 4 and 5 below, i.e., our
own suggested reconstruction of ancient Israel's history. In anticipation of that,
however, we need to do a bit of "deconstruction" of our own, showing how
flimsy most of the revisionists' arguments are methodologically. The following
are, I believe, consistent fallacies.

(1) All the revisionists follow in one way or another Davies' original 1992
attempt to distinguish three "Israels": "biblical" and "ancient" Israel, both of
which are antiquarian and modern "social constructs," that is, fictitious; and a
"historical" Israel, which admittedly did exist, although little can be said about
it.41 Yet it is obvious even to the uninitiated that Davies, like so many
postmodernists, is partly playing word-games here. The terms "ancient" and
"historical" Israel clearly must refer to a single entity, however inadequately
known one claims it to be, that is, the tangible Israel of the past.

There is merit in recognizing that the ideal theological "Israel" of the

Hebrew Bible, as well as that of many Jewish and Christian commentators and
believers, is not to be automatically equated with the real Israel of the Iron Age
of ancient Palestine. Furthermore, the revisionists are right in asserting that our
relatively recent rediscovery of data on the latter Israel has resulted in a
theoretical historical "reconstruction," rather than an absolutely certain and fully
accurate portrait. No responsible historian or archaeologist would claim
otherwise. In that sense, all "histories of ancient Israel" are indeed "social
constructs." But it is obvious that so is all our knowledge of the human past, the
external world, or any other purported "reality." Religion is a "social construct";
is it thereby irrelevant?42 The question is not whether claims to knowledge are
"social constructs" - intellectual formulations within a social context that gives
them particularity, relevance, and meaning - but a question of whether the
constructions are based on facts or merely on fancies. In short, the fundamental
historiographical and epistemological presuppositions of the revisionists with
regard to writing a history of Israel are either naive, or, even when
unobjectionable, banal. There is nothing sophisticated or new here.41

(2) The revisionists, having isolated a "biblical" Israel as the principal focus
of their attack, miss their target for several reasons. They fail to identify
specifically what they mean by "biblical" Israel. Do they mean the "Israel" of the
Pentateuch? The "Deuteronomistic" or historical school? The prophets? The
Wisdom, poetic, or apocalyptic literature? "Israel" in the earliest, or the latest
writings? There is no systematic, comprehensive, uniform portrait of Israel
among the many writers of the Hebrew Bible, as is well known. Clearly some
"Israels" are more idealistic retrojections than others, some more genuinely
historical than others. Lumping them all together to discredit them does not do
justice to the richness and variety of the biblical literature, nor does it constitute
sound critical and historical method.

What the revisionists seem to mean by "biblical" Israel is the Israel of

"mythic proportions." This is the Israel reflected in numerous "stories" that are
embellished with exaggerations and fanciful features such as miracles, compiled
partly from sagas, legends, folk-tales, and outright inventions. Above all, it is the
story of an Israel that is set in an over-arching theocratic framework whose intent
is always didactic. It aims not at historical narrative per se, but at elucidating the
hidden theological meaning of events and their moral significance.44 Of course
this "Israel" is not historical, except for revealing something of the historical
context of its writers and final editors. But then few modern readers except
Fundamentalists ever thought that it was. Here we see again one of the favorite
devices of the revisionists: caricature. Furthermore, their everrecurring theme
that the "biblical" Israel does not correspond with the "real" Israel - knowable for
them only through a few extrabiblical texts and scant archaeological data - is
true, but in the end irrelevant in the quest for ancient Israel. Fortunately, the
Hebrew Bible is not our only source.

Throughout their publications, the revisionists jump from the conclusion

that because the Hebrew Bible's "Israel" is really couched in idealistic terms,
there was no real "Israel" of the biblical period, that is (as we shall show), the
Iron Age of ancient Palestine. Such a conclusion is either naive, the result of
semantic confusion, or simply disingenuous. Were the revisionists better
historians, seriously engaged in a search for ancient/historical Israel, they would
have built upon their own pertinent observations on the limitations of the biblical
texts as sources for history-writing. They would then have turned to the now
primary source of new data, archaeology, in order to write truly revisionist
histories of ancient Israel. That they have consistently failed to do so (below)
suggests to me that they do not want to see the reconstruction of the history of
any Israel: it does not suit their ideological purposes.45

Finally, the "revisionists," for all their insistence on the Bible as literature,
have a curiously simplistic sense of literary theory, particularly in their notions
of literary production. For them, the Hebrew Bible must be either reliable history
(which it is clearly not), or blatant propaganda. They see no middle ground.
They do not appreciate the fact that all literature in effect is fundamentally
"propaganda," that is, self-conscious expression of a worldview, usually in the
advocacy of a cause. That the Hebrew Bible is in that sense "propaganda" is not
in dispute among responsible scholars; the only question is whether or not such
propaganda reflects anything of the real world of the time. And it inevitably
does, otherwise it would not have been credible for those to whom it was
originally addressed. Propaganda characteristically and deliberately exaggerates
and distorts; but it does not freely invent. Even a caricature is an accurate,
recognizable portrait in some respects, or otherwise it would have no impact.
The task of the real historian is to get at the "history behind the history" in the
Hebrew Bible, as we shall attempt in the following. The inability of the
revisionists to separate fact from fiction in the ancient texts at their disposal,
biblical or other, as discriminating commentators must do, is one of their more
conspicuous failures.46

(3) Even when the revisionists do occasionally acknowledge the existence

of a hypothetical Israel in the Iron Age (Davies' "historical Israel"), their
approach is consistently "minimalist," to use one of the common terms in the
current discussion.47 Given their skepticism about the trustworthiness of one po
tential source, the texts of the Hebrew Bible, it is not surprising that they can
salvage little useful information there. But what of archaeology, which most
acknowledge in one way or another?

The fact is that one of the revisionists' major faults is that they ignore, cite
selectively and cavalierly, misinterpret, distort, or otherwise abuse modern
archaeology and the rich data that it produces. Davies pointedly ignores actual,
specific archaeological data altogether, even in his chapter on "historical Israel,"
except to comment here and there on its "silence." And of course he does not
even attempt a history.48

Lemche's 1998 work, The Israelites in History and Tradition, has a chapter
on "Archaeology and Israelite Ethnicity," which does mention favorably several
recent developments in the archaeology of Israel, including my own
contributions; but again he cites only minimal data, largely negative in Lemche's
view. As he states: "The Israel of the Iron Age proved to be most elusive, in
historical documents as well as in material remains, where hardly anything
carries an ethnic tag that helps the modern investigator to decide what is Israelite
and what is not.... The only thing that remains is the tradition of two tiny states
of Palestine in the Iron Age, which were long after their dissolution chosen as
the basis of a new nation to be established on the soil of Palestine in the
postexilic period." Lemche concludes: "At the end we have a situation where
Israel is not Israel, Jerusalem not Jerusalem, and David not David. No matter
how we twist the factual remains from ancient Palestine, we cannot have a
biblical Israel that is at the same time the Israel of the Iron Age."49 Elsewhere,
he repudiates his own quite successful pioneering work, Early Israel:
Anthropological and Historical Studies on the Israelite Society Before the
Monarchy,50 as not radical enough, in effect not sufficiently deconstructionist.51

Thompson's The Mythic Past is subtitled Biblical Archaeology and the

Myth of Israel, but throughout it mentions archaeology only to caricature it as
the oldfashioned "prove-the-Bible" kind, never once citing and documenting any
actual archaeological data. Thompson is even more of a minimalist than
Lemche. In a 397-page book, supposedly devoted to a search for some Israel, he
devotes only three pages to early Israel, mentioning without documentation
some of the recent archaeological evidence, but never alluding to the 12th-11th
century high land settlers in Canaan as "Israelites"S2 (Elsewhere Thompson
deigns to refer to these folk only as the Iron Age population of "Syria's southern
fringe."53) To the entire development of the states of Israel and Judah in the
10th-7th centuries, Thompson allots barely seven pages. The rest of his
ponderous disputation is given over to arguing, again without documentation,
that the "effort to integrate the results of Palestinian archaeology, biblical
research and ancient Near Eastern studies in a comprehensive synthesis has been
refuted in both principle and detail." Thompson concludes that "The Bible's
`Israel' [is] a literary fiction.... The Bible is not the history of anyone's past."54
One might aspire to write a "history of Palestine," which in 1992 Thompson
actually attempted to do (Early History of the Israelite People). But he now
rejects even this (really no more than prolegomenon, in my opinion), confessing
that this "was after all hardly history, critically speaking, but rather just another
rationalistic paraphrase for biblical Israel .1155

Whitelam had collaborated in 1987 with Coote to produce The Emergence

of Early Israel in Historical Perspective, which was provocative and generally
wellreceived. By 1996, however, not only did he castigate virtually every
biblical scholar and archaeologist who had ever even attempted to document an
"early Israel," but he declared that there never had been any such Israel. Thus the
title of his 1996 book, The Invention of Ancient Israel. The goal itself being
inadmissible, the only proper procedure was for scholars to repudiate the whole
tradition of writing a history of "Israel" and concentrate instead on a history of
Palestine. His own earlier, confident treatment he now dismissed as "not radical
enough," "misleading," simply another aspect of the "invention" of ancient
Israel.56 A telling clue to all the revisionists' basic antipathy toward any real
"Israel" in the Iron Age is their consistent emphasis on how "small and
insignificant" Israel was (as though that had anything to do with the issues at
hand); how it was really only a part of "Syria's southern fringe" throughout its
history; how almost no contemporary nonbiblical documents ever refer
specifically to either Israel or Judah. In particular, they are hesitant even to use
the name "Israel" for the northern kingdom (if any), instead following, for
instance, the Neo-Assyrian references to "the house (i.e., dynasty) of Omri" or
the province of Samaria/"Samarina:' Even when the name Israel is admitted to
have existed, it is argued that it refers only to a "religious community," not to an
ethnic group, much less a real state. Such blatant misrepresentation of the textual
evidence - including the Neo-Assyrian texts, the 9th-century Mesha stele from
Moab, and the 9th-century Dan inscription - is perhaps the best evidence of the
revisionists' anti-biblical bias.s"

In view of their rejection of traditional historical and literary-critical

methodologies in the effort to reconstruct Israel's past, as well as their deliberate
search for newer methods, one might think that the revisionists would seize upon
what is probably the most promising recent trends, "social-scientific" approaches
to the Hebrew Bible and the history of ancient Israel. Yet only Lemche's The
Israelites in History and Tradition comes even close. Despite the popularity of
these approaches for the past 25 years or so, and the fact that the revisionists
have taken note of their promise, they themselves have produced nothing like a
"sociology of the history and religions of ancient Israel."58 Surely if no history
of Israel is possible, a "sociology" might be. But that, too, would be out of the
question if the texts of the Hebrew Bible are indeed late and historically
untrustworthy - unless one would assay to use them to produce a "sociology of
HellenisticRoman Judaism."59 By contrast, Paula M. McNutt, without any
vaunted claims to "revolutionary methods," has produced a superb social-
scientific work, Recon structing the Society of Ancient Israel.60 Not only does
she take the texts of the Hebrew Bible seriously as both literature and history, but
she also makes extensive and discriminating use of the archaeological data. The
result is, to put it simply, the history of ancient Israelite society that the
revisionists are unable or unwilling to write. It is instructive to compare
McNutt's book with Lemche's The Israelites in History and Tradition, both
published a year apart in the same Library of Ancient Israel series. The former is
a fresh, balanced, positive work, fully documented; the latter is little more than a
tendentious prolegomenon.

With this in view - and much more revisionist literature that I could easily
cite - is it any wonder that most mainstream scholars regard them as
"minimalists" or that I have dubbed them the "new nihilists"? A close reading of
their voluminous output in the past decade suggests to me that here we confront
not properly speaking a coherent scholarly "school," but rather an ideological
movement with revolutionary aspirations, one that as with most such movements
is characterized by a distinct, recognizable methodology and agenda. In the
following summary, I may be engaging in a bit of tongue-incheek caricature of
my own. But having steeped myself in revisionist literature ("discourse," I
suppose we must say) for several years, I assure the reader that the principal
revisionists are all easily recognizable here.61

1. Always attack the Establishment on principle, and in the name of

"revolutionary progress." Set in motion a counter-culture, even if it means
repudiating your own earlier works, but pretending that you have not done
so.

2. Pose a set of convenient false issues; create an imagined dichotomy between

positions; polarize the discussion.
3. Reject consensus scholarship; deplore the middle ground; carry the argument
to its most extreme; celebrate the bizarre, since it gets attention.

4. Caricature the history of traditional scholarship; demonize any remaining

opponents.

5. Deny that there are objective facts; insist that everything is relative, and that
all interpretations (except your own) are under suspicion.

6. Pretend to be scientific, but discard evidence that doesn't fit; falsify the rest.

7. Be "politically correct" at all times; pretend to identify with the oppressed

minorities, while still maintaining your elitist privileges.

8. Substitute clever epigrams for sustained rational argument; use catchy

slogans to conceal the real agenda.

9. Declare yourself innovative and "revolutionary"; inflate banalities into

presumptuous social pronouncements.

10. Reject empiricism and positivism as outdated and perverse; but promote
your own Utopian visions.

11. Elevate skepticism into a scholarly method; cherish cynicism; pride

yourself on how little real knowledge you possess, since that suggests
modesty and honesty.

12. Remember that the real issue is always ideology: race, gender, class, power,
and above all politics. Expose others' ideology, but deny that you have any.

13. Escalate the level of rhetoric, so that the issues are obscured.

14. Announce the "New Truth" triumphantly.

15. When exposed, decamp; accept martyrdom gracefully.

If all this sounds familiar, it is. It is precisely the method and agenda of the
extreme forms of postmodernism that I have posited above as the intellectual and
social matrix of revisionism. This is not sound, careful, balanced, honest
scholarship: it is demagoguery. If that charge sounds extreme, let us turn in the
remaining chapters to the case-studies that will prove it correct.
 The Nature of Archaeology, Old and New

The public seems to be perennially fascinated by archaeology. This is evident by

frequent headline stories of discoveries in all the media, the fact that hundreds
will turn out for popular lectures on any archaeological topic, and an apparently
endless flood of publications, from semi-scholarly books for laypeople, to
lavishly illustrated coffee-table volumes, to sensational stories in periodicals
from the Wall Street Journal to Biblical Archaeology Review and the National
Enquirer. Whenever I tell people that I am an archaeologist, they invariably
exclaim "Oh, how exciting!" Perhaps they have seen too many "Raiders of the
Lost Ark" movies. Archaeology isn't really like that: the elusive but available
field director isn't as dashing as Harrison Ford, even in the right fedora; his
female companion isn't necessarily young and beautiful, ripe for adventure (she
may be the over-burdened director of the project); the chase rarely leads to
anything spectacular, just bits and pieces of other peoples' garbage; the funds
never magically materialize, if at all; and the daily routine is long, hard, hot,
dirty, and mostly dull - hardly "glamorous"!

Modern, real-life archaeology is not treasure-hunting; it is simply another

kind of historical research. In this case, the research focuses not on texts
(although some may be found), but rather on what we call "material culture."
This basic body of data consists largely of artifacts of various kinds, together
with the immediate physical setting and larger environmental context in which
they are found. It may be said that an archaeologist writes "history from things,"
as a distinguished colleague, David Kingery, has recently titled his book on the
history of early technologies.) Another way of putting it is to say that an
archaeologist is an anthropologist who deals with "the ethnography of the dead."
The archaeologist attempts to "reconstruct" extinct social systems from traces of
the scattered physical remains that may happen to have been left behind.
Archaeology may thus best be thought of simply as a way of making inferences
about "how it was in the past" by examining material culture remains.
 Modern archaeology might be said to have begun as early as the 17th18th
century, with accidental discoveries of exciting relics in Europe and elsewhere.
The large-scale exploration and mapping of sites and the first attempts at
systematic excavation began, however, only in the late 19th century. Even so,
much of the early archaeological work was little better than "treasure-hunting."
One thinks of the British, French, Germans, and others who plundered the
treasures of Egypt and what is now Iraq and Iran to fill their national museums
in the 1840s-1890s. (We Americans would undoubtedly have been just as
rapacious, but we weren't yet a colonial power.) Or picture Heinrich Schliemann
at Troy in the 1860s, bedecking his young Greek wife with the jewels of
"Priam's Treasure" (now partly lost).2

Roots in the 19th Century: The Exploratory Era

The archaeology of the "Holy Land," in the broad sense of the exploration of
biblical topography and antiquities, goes back centuries to hundreds of pilgrim's
accounts since the Byzantine period. The modern discipline of Palestinian
archaeology, however, can be said to have begun with the pioneering visits of the
American biblical scholar Edward Robinson in 1838 and 1852, published as
Biblical Researches in Palestine and the Adjacent Regions (1852). Robinson and
his traveling companion Eli Smith correctly identified dozens of long-lost
ancient sites. The first modern maps, however, after those of Napoleon's
cartographers in 1798-99, were those drawn up by C. R. Conder and H. H. (later
Lord) Kitchener for the great Survey of Western Palestine (1878; published in
six volumes in 1884), sponsored by the British Palestine Exploration Society
(1865-), which also undertook the first actual fieldwork, C. W. Wilson and
Charles Warren's soundings around the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (18671870).

In Egypt and Mesopotamia, dramatic archaeological discoveries beginning

in the 1840s - partly by chance and partly the results of the first deliberate
excavations - soon drew attention to Palestine, largely because of its biblical
connections. Several foreign societies soon joined the British Palestine
Exploration Fund: the German Deutsches Palastina-Vereins (1878-); the French
Ecole Biblique et archeologique in Jerusalem (1892-); and finally the American
School of Oriental Research (1900-).3

Despite mounting interest, however, true excavations did not begin in

Palestine until the brief campaign of the legendary Sir William Flinders Petrie at
Tell el-Hess in the Gaza area (possibly biblical Eglon) in 1890, followed by
American work there under F. J. Bliss in 1893. It was Petrie who laid the
foundations of all subsequent fieldwork and research by demonstrating, however
briefly and intuitively, the importance of detailed stratigraphy of Palestine's
complex, multi-layered tells or mounds; and the potential of comparative
ceramic typology and chronology.

This first, formative era of archaeological exploration and discovery in

Palestine in the 19th century was characterized by adventurism, nationalism and
competition among the colonial powers, and growing expectations that
archaeology would shed unique light upon the biblical world. Yet ancient Syria
has scarcely been touched, although some archaeological exploration had begun
as early as the 1860s under French scholars such as Ernest Renan.

From the Turn of the Century Until World War I: The Formative Period

The first two decades of the 20th century constituted a sort of "golden age" in
Syro-Palestinian archaeology, one that saw the first large-scale, reasonably well
staffed and funded field projects.4 These included the work of the Americans at
Samaria (1908-10); of the British at Tell Gezer (1902-9); and of the Germans at
Ta`anach (1902-4), Megiddo (1903-5), Jericho (1907-9), and Galilean
synagogues (1905). In Syria, Howard Crosby Butler's splendid surveys of
Byzantine Christian sites for Princeton University (1904-9) deserve mention; but
by and large Syria was ignored as peripheral to the Holy Land. None of these
excavations, however, with the exception of George A. Reisner's work at
Samaria (not published until 1924), demonstrated more than the rudiments of
stratigraphy. Pottery chronology was off by centuries; and the publication
volumes, although sometimes lavishly illustrated, are largely useless today. An
almost exclusively architectural orientation or biblical biases marred most work.

All these and other projects were brought to a halt by the onset of World
War I, but the foundations of both Syro-Palestinian and "biblical" archaeology
had been laid. Nevertheless, neither an academic discipline nor a profession had
yet emerged in this second, formative period.

Between the Great Wars: The Classificatory Period

Following the corrupt bureaucracy of Ottoman Turkish rule, Palestine was
turned over to a British mandate in 1918 at the close of World War I. The British
government opened a Department of Antiquities, promulgated modern
antiquities laws, and undertook the first systematic, comprehensive program of
archaeological investigation of the entire area, including Transjordan. During the
ensuing period the foreign schools in Jerusalem noted above flourished. This
was particularly true of the American School of Oriental Research (founded in
1900), which now dominated the field under the direction of William F. Albright
(1920-29; 1933-36). Albright, one of the most eminent Orientalists of the 20th
century, was then followed (1932-33; 1936-1940; 1942-47) by his protege
Nelson Glueck, a rabbi famed for his explorations in Transjordan. It was
Albright who became known as the "Father of Biblical Archaeology," through
his unparalleled mastery of the pottery of Palestine, of the broad ancient Near
Eastern context in which the results of Palestinian archaeology needed to be
placed to illuminate them properly, and of the vast scope of biblical history with
which individual discoveries often seemed to correlate. Al though Albright
himself used the term "Syro-Palestinian archaeology" alternately, his overriding
concern was with the biblical world. Through his genius, his towering status, and
his own excavations at Tell el-Ful (1922), Bethel (1934), and especially at Tell
Beit Mirsim (1926-1932) and his innumerable disciples, Albright dominated
"biblical archaeology" from the early 1920s through the 1960s. One of his
proteges, G. Ernest Wright of McCormick Seminary and Harvard, carried on the
tradition by coupling "biblical archaeology" more specifically with the "biblical
theology" movement current in the 1950s-1970s. A transitional figure, Wright
trained most of the older American generation still working in the field today.

Many of the American excavations in Palestine between the two wars, under
Albright's influence, were at biblical sites, staffed by Protestant seminarians and
clergy, and supported by funds from church circles. These included Albright's
own excavations (above), those at Tell en-Nasbeh (1926-1935), at Beth-shemesh
(1928-1933), and many smaller sites. Nevertheless, there existed a parallel,
secular American tradition, especially in the large projects of the University of
Pennsylvania at Beth-shan (1926-1933); of the Oriental Institute of the
University of Chicago at Megiddo (1926-1939), well funded by the
Rockefellers; and of Yale University at Jerash in Transjordan (1928-1934).
These, too, were biblical sites; but the secular stream of American Palestinian
archaeology never captured the imagination of the public or succeeded in
perpetuating itself as the Albright school did. In retrospect, it seems that, in the
United States at least, archaeology in "poor Palestine" was not thought able to
justify itself without the biblical connection.

The Heyday and Decline of "Biblical Archaeology": 1950-1970

American-style "biblical archaeology" reached its zenith soon after the postwar
resumption of fieldwork in Palestine in the early 1950s. The principal
excavations were in Jordan now, those of Wright at Shechem (1957-1968);
James B. Pritchard at Gibeon (1956-1962); Joseph A. Callaway at `Ai (1964-
69); Paul W. Lapp at Tell er-Rumeith, Tell el-Ful, and Ta`anach (1964-68); and
Pritchard at Tell es-Sa`aidiyeh (1964-67). All these excavations, affiliated with
the American School in Jerusalem, were at biblical sites; the directors in every
case were clergy and professors of theology or religion; the agenda was often
drawn from issues in biblical studies; and funds came largely from religious
circles. In addition, the generation of younger American archaeologists who
would come to the fore in the 1970s was trained here. Finally, a series of
publications by Albright, Wright, and others attracted international attention to
American biblical ar chaeology and provoked heated controversy in Europe. At
issue were both fundamental questions of method in general (biblically biased or
not) and certain specific historical questions in biblical studies (e.g., the
historicity of the patriarchs and the Israelite conquest; Moses and monotheism;
Israelite religion and cult). Neither Albright nor Wright was a Fundamentalist
(although certainly conservative by more recent standards), yet outside of
America suspicions prevailed. Indeed, the misgivings were prescient; by the
early 1970s biblical archaeology (along with the biblical theology movement, an
outgrowth of postwar neo-orthodoxy) was moribund, if not dead.

In retrospect, the demise of biblical archaeology was probably inevitable.5

The reasons are many. First, what may be called internal weaknesses of the
movement were numerous: its reputation for amateurish fieldwork, naive or
biased scholarship, and poor publications; its parochial character, related as it
was largely to the conservative (if not Fundamentalist) character of so much of
American religious life; its reactionary nature, locked into dated theological
issues, which left it unable to respond creatively to new developments in or
outside the field; its resistance to growing trends toward specialization and
professionalism, which made it extremely vulnerable; and, above all, the fact
that it failed to achieve its own major objective, i.e., the demonstration of the
"historicity" of the Bible (at least as it was seen at the time).

There were also significant, indeed critical, factors that may be regarded as
external to biblical archaeology per se, although very much a part of archaeology
in general in modern Israel-Jordan and elsewhere. These included: the
stratigraphic revolution of the 1950s-1960s led by the British archaeologist
Kathleen Kenyon and others, which promised "total retrieval," automatically
generating much more and more varied data that required analysis by
interdisciplinary specialists; the growing complexity and costs of excavation,
especially in Israel, which pushed the field inevitably toward professionalization
and secular sources of support; field schools and student volunteerism, which not
only constituted an intellectual challenge but broke the monopoly of biblical
scholars on dig staffs and thus contributed to the secularization of the discipline;
the increasing sense that biblical archaeology was indeed parochial and had
failed to achieve even its own limited agenda of historical-theological issues;
increasing competition among the "national schools" - especially those now
rising in the Middle East (below) - which highlighted fundamental and
legitimate differences in approach and thus called into question any exclusively
biblicist view of ancient Syria-Palestine; and finally the advent of the "new
archaeology," which began in American New World archaeology in the early
1960s and by the end of that decade was beginning to have an impact on
archaeological theory and method generally.

The principal aspects of the new archaeology6 were: an orientation more

anthropological than historical, i.e., away from particularization and more
toward the study of culture and culture change generally; a "nomothetic"
approach that sought to formulate and test law-like propositions that were
thought to govern the cultural process (thus the common designation
"processualist" archaeology), in order to develop a body of theory that would
qualify archaeology as not only a discipline but a true science; an ecological
thrust, which emphasized techno-environmental factors (rather than simply
evolutionary trajectories) in the role of adaptation in culture change; a
multidisciplinary strategy that involved many of the physical sciences and their
statistical and analytical procedures in attempting to reconstruct the ancient
landscape, climate, population, economy, socio-political structure, and other sub-
systems (often using the model of General Systems Theory); and an insistence
on an overall, up-front "research design" for projects that would integrate all the
above and thus would advance archaeology as a culturally relevant enterprise.

The "New Archaeology"

By the 1970s, the initial efforts to excavate mounds in the Middle East with
proper stratigraphic (or "three-dimensional") methods were being supplemented
by newer field and analytical methods.

Perhaps the most typical aspect of the new archaeology in practice was its
interdisciplinary character. This approach, now commonplace on almost all
modern excavations, includes such disciplines as geomorphology and geology,
paleo-botany and paleo-zoology, climatology and paleo-ecology, hydrology,
physical and cultural anthropology, the history of technology, and any number of
other specialized branches of the natural and social sciences.

Newer techniques for analyzing excavated materials include: radiocarbon

and other chronometric means of dating; neutron activation analysis to
"fingerprint" the sources of clays for pottery making and thus to trace trade pat
terns; gas chromatography analysis to determine residues present; "use-wear"
analysis of objects using high-powered electron microscopes to define
manufacturing techniques, function, and reuse; and, more recently, DNA analysis
to identify the relationships between ancient populations and possibly even their
long-distance migrations.

Technical devices that aid immensely in field excavation and in the workup
of materials for publication now include: aerial photography and mapping;
geographical information systems, which can model ancient landscapes in detail;
electrical-resistivity surveying and ground-penetrating radar; laser transits,
which greatly simplify surveying; a whole range of photographic techniques,
including digital systems; and a vast array of computer-based systems of
recording, data-retrieval, manipulating models, preparing graphics, and even
final publication.

The development of the so-called "new archaeology" since the early 1970s
has radically transformed all branches of archaeology today. However, the rapid
progress of archaeology - once called "the handmaiden of history" - toward
independent professional and academic status, a full-fledged discipline of its
own, has not been greeted by enthusiasm in all quarters. It had been assumed all
along that archaeology had been an ancillary discipline (Latin ancillaris, from
ancilla, "maidservant"), or a sub-branch of history. Today, however, many
archaeologists regard themselves primarily as anthropologists (the discipline
from which they derive most of their theory), or even as full-fledged scientists
whose methods, aims, theory-testing, and generation of knowledge scarcely
differ from the "laws of behavior" of natural scientists. Where does all this leave
our branch of archaeology and its relation to the Bible as "history" in any sense?

"Biblical Archaeology" - or "The Archaeology of Syria-Palestine"?

Against this background of the "coming of age" of archaeology in general, we

now need to look more closely at one branch, namely ours. It has been called
"biblical archaeology" until recently, but now it is more commonly styled "the
archaeology of Syria-Palestine," or increasingly "the archaeology of the
Southern Levant." What's in a name? And, beyond mere semantics, what
underlying shifts in intellectual orientation and methodology are implied in the
change? Until we can characterize this peculiar (!) subdivision of Near Eastern
archaeology more accurately, we cannot assess any potential contributions that it
might make to biblical studies. In particular, we must ask whether the impact of
the new archaeology on our branch of archaeology renders it more "historical" or
less so.

Elsewhere I have written extensively on the history of the "biblical

archaeology" movement.' I have argued that it was more an aspect of theological
studies than a deliberate "school of archaeology" properly speaking, and that it
was largely an American phenomenon. A brief look at the actual development of
excavations in general in Palestine in the era 1900-1950 will confirm the first
point. The majority of American digs (and many others) were at sites identified
with biblical places, staffed almost exclusively by seminary professors and
clerics, funded largely by religious institutions, and having as their primary aim
the elucidation of problems in biblical history, not least of all the perennial
"faithand-history" issue. The exceptions, such as the Chicago excavations at
Megiddo and the Pennsylvania work at Beth-shan, only proved the rule.
American archaeology in Palestine was "biblical archaeology," whether of the
more respectable type epitomized by Albright or the Fundamentalist, "prove-the-
Bible" type all too common among his less enlightened (or conscientious)
imitators.

The scandalous stories of archaeological misadventures in the Holy Land

during the heyday of biblical archaeology in the 1920s-1950s may make for
entertaining reading, but they have left our field with a bad reputation for
amateur, substandard, biased archaeological work that remains an
embarrassment to this day - and this despite the fact that most of my generation
repudiated old-fashioned biblical archaeology 30 years ago. The current
generation, our students, regard it merely as a curiosity, a Stone Age relic. Due
to my own outspoken opposition, I have often been accused of "killing biblical
archaeology." I am flattered that anyone supposes that I might have that much
influence. But the truth is simply that I happened to be one of the first to observe
biblical archaeology's passing and to write its obituary, back in the early 1970s.

Archaeology as an Independent Discipline?

For at least the past 20 years, the branch of Near Eastern archaeology that deals
with ancient Palestine has been known chiefly as "Syro-Palestinian" or
sometimes simply "Palestinian," rather than "biblical," archaeology (the other
branches being Anatolian, Mesopotamian, Iranian, Egyptian, and occasionally
Cypriot archaeology). I did indeed insist upon and popularize the term
"SyroPalestinian." But that was Albright's original, alternate term for "biblical
archaeology" in the 1930s-1940s. I simply revived it, and it caught on because
others agreed with the rationale. Even Israeli archaeologists, who obviously find
"Palestine" problematic, use the term when speaking or writing in English.8

It is not, however, the label that matters, but what it says about the
transformations brought about by the new archaeology in our field. That field is
now a full-fledged, autonomous archaeological discipline, no longer an ancillary
branch of biblical or theological studies. Its geographical purview is not "Bible
Lands" as such, but ancient southern-central Syria and Palestine, both west and
east of the Jordan (i.e., modern Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and parts of Syria), or
more properly ancient "Greater Canaan." Its time-frame extends far beyond the
"biblical period," embracing everything from the Lower Paleolithic to the
Ottoman period. Its aims and methods are exactly the same as those of other
branches of archaeology (and anthropology). Where questions pertinent to the
"biblical world," as envisioned by the biblical writers, arise from the
archaeological data, they will be addressed; but the agenda is not drawn from the
Bible, much less from theological questions.

Syro-Palestinian archaeology today is characterized, in my view, by three

"watchwords": specialized, professional, and secular. By the latter term I mean
simply to say that in the past generation Syro-Palestinian archaeology has at last
come "out of the cloister," into the academy, and now even into the marketplace.
That marks the full evolution of our discipline toward independent status. That is
not to say that it will not develop even further - and dramatically so in the next
decade, I think - but that there is now no turning back. There can be none of
what I have called "nostalgia for a biblical past that never existed."

A Crucial Issue: Can Archaeology Write History?

It was generally assumed that the older-style biblical archaeology could and
should be employed in writing a history of ancient Israel, even though the
histories that it produced are now generally discredited - even works such as
Albright's magisterial From the Stone Age to Christianity (1940) - and ironically
by the very same archaeology in its later incarnation as "Syro-Palestinian
archaeology." Thus a "patriarchal era," an "exodus from Egypt," and a
panmilitary "conquest of Palestine," as portrayed in the biblical narratives, have
all now been shown to be essentially nonhistorical, "historicized fiction" at best.
And the proof has come largely not from radical biblical scholars, attempting to
undermine the historicity of the biblical texts. It has come from "secular"
archaeologists, Israeli and American, who have no theological axes to grind. So
apparently archaeology, even of the "new" variety, can write histories of ancient
Israel, if not conventional ones.

Yet archaeology has not always been conceived as a basically historical

discipline, nor was it assumed that it can contribute productively to
historywriting. Following the early history of biblical archaeology sketched
above, with its strong historical (some would say "historicist") thrust, the new
archaeology of the 1960s-1980s brought about a radical change in orientation.
One fundamental tenet of the new archaeology was that "archaeology is
anthropology, or it is nothing." The older "culture-history" approach, so typical
of both Americanist and Near Eastern archaeology in the formative phases in the
19001960 era, was now rejected as unproductive. "Historical particularism," the
attempt to classify and describe successive individual cultural and historical
phases, was now passe. That was because, it was argued, archaeology of that sort
could only describe cultural stages. It could not "explain" them, particularly in
terms of testing the "universal laws of the cultural process" that the new,
scientific archaeology thought was the only legitimate goal of archaeology. A
turning point in North America was marked by the appearance of Patty Jo
Watson, Steven A. LeBlanc, and Charles L. Redman's Explanation in
Archeology: An Explicitly Scientific Approach.9 The "modernization" of the
spelling of "archeology" was intended apparently to signal how avant garde the
new approach was to be. Despite spirited resistance from the Old Guard in
American archaeology, by the late 1970s the anti-historical crusade of the new
archaeology had triumphed. No respectable archaeologist would any longer style
himself or herself a "historian." We were now scientists.

Nearly two decades ago I analyzed the impact of the new archaeology on
Near Eastern and Syro-Palestinian archaeology.10 It was slow to be felt, largely
because nearly all of us in the general field of Near Eastern archaeology
considered ourselves basically historians, not anthropologists, much less
scientists. I pointed out early on that most of the Americans who led the new
movement were essentially prehistorians, and that led to a bias. They worked
with New World cultures that, even though comparatively recent (from our point
of view), were still preliterate. But those of us who dealt with the ancient Near
East had a history - a long, complex history of various peoples and cultures, copi
ously illustrated from the late 4th millennium on by a wealth of written remains
of every kind. There was good reason for our resisting the new archaeology's
prejudice against history and its rejection of history-writing as a legitimate goal
of archaeology (one among many, to be sure).

Toward a Rapprochement

Today, it seems, a proper balance is emerging in all branches of Near Eastern

archaeology. It seeks a modus vivendi that allows us to borrow appropriate
socioeconomic and cultural theories from many other disciplines, especially
anthropology. It provides us with a framework for integrating and interpreting
our data in a broader and much more sophisticated framework of knowledge, but
nevertheless does not imprison us in rigid or mechanistic evolutionary schemes
(what one distinguished new archaeologist himself called the search for "Mickey
Mouse" laws"). The new rapprochement also enables us to borrow freely from
any and all of the natural sciences their more precise analytical procedures,
which help us understand the artifacts that we dig up, how they were made and
used, and how they were a part of a larger functioning ecology and technology.

Thus the basic inter-disciplinary approach pioneered by the new

archaeology is here to stay - not so much because the theory was persuasive, but
because of the essentially pragmatic nature of Near Eastern archaeology from
the beginning. The "newer archaeology" is better for us because it works; it
produces superior data, data that can be understood and accepted by scholars in
fields far beyond our own. Thus the course of civilization in ancient Palestine, so
thoroughly investigated, finally becomes an instructive "case-study" in what is
widely called "the rise of complex society." 12 What is lost of the "uniqueness"
once attributed to ancient Israel is more than compensated for in the new
appreciation that archaeology brings us of "Israel among the nations" - not
unique, but distinct. Presently we shall see in detail how modern archaeology
can make the Bible and its story more "real" because it becomes more "tangible"
- a real story, about a real people, in a real time and place, like us.

"Post-Processual" Archaeology

The potential of archaeology for illuminating the past in unique ways - for
history-writing on a broad scale - has always seemed clear to some of us. But our
traditional instincts have been confirmed by one of the most recent trends in
archaeology. Reacting against the new archaeology's fascination with positivist
philosophies of science and its extreme anti-historicism, a group of younger
archaeologists began a decade ago to explore "post-processualist" approaches to
archaeology.13 Most had been raised up on "explicit science," structuralism,
Neo-Marxism, and other new critical archaeologies. But ultimately they became
disillusioned with the search for universal laws of cultural process and change -
the "processualism" that they saw as the essential thrust of the new archaeology.
They pointed out that the elegant theories had scarcely been confirmed in actual
fieldwork. What if there were no "universal laws of the cultural process"? If not,
why not go back to the task of trying to delineate individual societies and
cultures, doing it better than traditional archaeology had done, with the new tools
now at hand? Thus there emerged among the postprocessualists a renewed
interest in history, but accompanied now by a determination to write more
satisfying histories.

One of the most prominent and engaging spokesmen for postprocessualism

is Ian Hodder. Once a structuralist himself, Hodder became dissatisfied with all
forms of the "newer archaeology," largely because of the same failure to
"explain" cultural process that was charged against historical archaeologists. In
his 1986 work, Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in
Archaeology,14 Hodder lays out a program for postprocessual approach. Moving
substantially beyond the new archaeology, with its largely functionalist notion of
culture as ecological/technological adaptation, as well as his own previous
structuralist models, Hodder advocates a more idealist and historical approach
that he calls "contextual" - literally, artifacts "with texts." But he goes even
further in defining the archaeological record itself as a "text," and conversely
written texts as "artifacts." Thus both can and must be "read" - indeed in similar
ways, if a common "generative grammar" can be developed. Hodder says that
such a notion "has long been tacitly assumed in archaeology." But he gives few
examples; and he does not expand much on this fecund idea, beyond saying that
artifacts are not necessarily "mute," if we can work out suitable principles of
interpretation. Yet, as Hodder observes, somewhat ruefully, "there are no
grammars and dictionaries of material culture language."

Postprocessualism is still being resisted by die-hard new archaeologists -

now ironically the "old archaeologists," having become the Establishment they
once fought so hard. In Syro-Palestinian and Near Eastern archaeology to date,
usually a trend or two behind, little notice has been taken of postprocessualism,
although I argued some years ago (1993) that this trend augured well for us since
it made history-writing respectable once again.15 Meanwhile, the revisionists,
who must perforce turn to archaeology for data since they have jettisoned the
biblical texts as history, are oblivious to postprocessualism and its potential (see
above, Ch. 2). Astonishingly, they are still beating the dead horse of "biblical
archaeology," as the current revisionist literature shows. These would-be biblical
historians have no comprehension of modern archaeology, its aims and methods,
its recent accomplishments, its enormous momentum, or its potential for truly
revolutionizing our understanding of a real "ancient Israel."

Texts as Data
If the postprocessualists have set us back again upon the right track in studying
the past - assaying to write history based on archaeological data - we must
confront once again questions raised earlier. What kind of history do we want?
How do artifacts constitute data, and are such data primary or secondary? Here
we may take a clue from the postprocessualists themselves. One of their
persistent themes is "reading" the artifacts, not unlike reading texts. In fact,
artifacts are "texts," and similarly informative when skillfully and
sympathetically interpreted. (Won't that be news to the revisionists?)

We might begin to move beyond this impasse by developing a tentative

outline of a "grammar" of texts, based on what I would argue are parallels be
tween artifacts and texts. Here, in chart form, is what we must know in order to
"read" or interpret texts and artifacts, both as "objects" in themselves and as
signs.

Once again, the parallels in reading the two types of "texts" are striking.
Although I am sanguine about the possibilities for eventually reading the
archaeological record as effectively as the textual record in the Hebrew Bible has
been read in the past century of critical scholarship, examples of such readings -
what have been called "formalist-structuralist" interpretations - are still relatively
rare. One thinks, however, of New World examples such as James Deetz'
analysis of early New England houses and their furnishings; Henry H. Glassie's
similar study of folk-housing in Georgia; J. Muller's study of the American
Southwest; Kenneth Washburn's of ceramic design; J. Hill's interpretation of
Indian peace-pipes; and even of the revealing studies of modern discard patterns
by my colleague William Rathje and his fellow "garbologists." All these are
studies in "reading" material culture texts.16

In Old World prehistory, Andre H. Leroi-Gourhan has elucidated what

appear to be underlying structural principles that can be useful in understanding
Paleolithic cave art. This is a sort of "vocabulary, grammar, and syntax" for
reading the "statements" made by the various representations and arrangements
of animal drawings - what Leroi-Gourhan considers a "cave-as-text," or
"mythogram." Here is a striking example of the potential of poststructural "ar
chaeology of mind" for doing prehistory, if not history itself. It is from such
challenges to "realism" and "naturalism" that the reader of cultural texts - such as
literary myths, visual images, and archaeological artifacts - can profit. As
Terence Hawkes points out, however, the textual-artifactual record is not simply
a static, one-to-one representation of an underlying "reality" in the natural world,
but is dynamic in nature, subject interacting with object. Thus, he says, all art
(and, we would add, texts and artifacts) "acts as a mediating, molding force in
society rather than an agency which merely reflects or records." The conclusion
might be that in the structuralist and new literary-critical view, as opposed to the
empiricist/rationalist view, "reality" is not expressed by culture (or language) but
produced by it. Yet I think we need not go that far. There is a real, tangible world
"out there"; but intervening between us and our perceptions of it are always
ideas, beliefs, and meanings, both individual and cultural. Nevertheless, as
George Cowgill, a leading anthropologist and formalist, puts it: "I believe it is
possible to construct models of the world that increasingly approximate how it
really is, even if we never get beyond approximations." 17 On this "positivist"
note, I cannot help remarking how ironic I find it that at the very time when
biblical historians, basing themselves on texts, are rejecting von Rankian notions
of wie es eigentlich gewesen war ("how it actually was in the past") - despairing
of writing a genuinely historical picture of ancient Israel - some archaeologists
are about to take up the challenge. How is that possible? And how can the
unique artifactual data that we possess lead us to any certain knowledge of the
past? Are there archaeological "facts," and if so how are we to interpret them?
Here we must turn to epistemology, theories of knowledge.

Toward an Epistemology
By the general term epistemology, sometimes called hermeneutics in textual
studies, I mean simply the study of theories of knowledge, as in philosophy, of
the question of how and whether we can know anything with certainty. Is our
preserved knowledge verifiable in any way, related to a real world out there, or is
the reality only our perceptions, which after all may be illusory?"

In one fundamental dimension, the new archaeology has so far proven as

deficient as the old, namely its failure to address the fundamental issue of
epistemology. It has built a much more adequate foundation in some aspects of
general theory, but it has not probed deeply enough to reach the philosophical
and methodological level at which all archaeological and historical inquiry must
begin: how is it possible to know anything with certitude about the human past?
Until this question has been addressed, both disciplines will remain superficial,
arcane, and too speculative to have anything of substance to say to each other. I
begin with some definitions.

To make archaeology and biblical history truly intellectual rather than

antiquarian enterprises, we need to think much more profoundly about what we
are doing. By this I do not mean simply more attention to "method" - which in
our field has usually meant asking how to dig better, how to collect and record
more information. Improvements in archaeology at this level are indeed
important, and the past two decades have seen remarkable progress. However,
archaeological advances and the proliferation of new material have now brought
archaeologists to a critical stage where they must ask: What is the point? What
are we trying to learn?

It might have been better to have asked these theoretical questions at the
outset of the new archaeology. But as Thomas S. Kuhn has stated in The
Structures of Scientific Revolutions, theory often follows rather than precedes
the practical "shift in paradigm" that he regards as constituting a revolution in
most research disciplines.19 Thus it is indeed "better late than never" to raise
these questions. In the discussion that follows I begin by reflecting on terms that
all use but seldom bother to define, wrongly assuming that their meaning is self-
evident.

On Archaeological "Facts"
Archaeology's original fascination for Albright, and I suspect for many of his
followers, was that it could serve as an antidote. Archaeology promised new
facts to offer the speculation of various schools of critical biblical scholarship,
which seemed to have reached the limits of useful inquiry. This was what
Albright meant when he spoke so confidently of realia. But archaeologists must
delimit for themselves the facts that are recoverable through archaeology or, for
that matter, define the so-called "facts of history."

By "fact" (derived from Latin factum, past participle of the verb facere, "to
do") we usually mean those discrete, irreducible, empirically observable things
or events whose existence cannot be doubted by reasonable persons. That is,
facts are theoretically provable and correspond to reality. In practice, however,
facts are merely inferences that each person draws, based not only on
observations, but also on our own social conditioning and the intent of our
investigation. Even in the natural sciences, this is true and is increasingly
recognized; and in all the social sciences, such as archaeology and history, the
factor of individual bias is even more operative. Thus, while in theory
archaeology does recover objective "facts" from the past - for example, a pot, a
stone tool, a figurine, the foundations of a building, perhaps the entire plan of a
village, or even a written text - the apprehension of the reality of any of these is
always dependent on present, subjective human interpretation. Facts do not
speak directly. They may in principle have a concrete existence of their own; but
they come to life, empowered to speak to me of the past, only as I am able to
incorporate them into my consciousness. This process is obviously an
extraordinarily complex matter.

A useful analogy is still the old philosophical puzzle: if a tree falls in the
woods and there is no human or animal in hearing range, is there any sound?
One may say "No," because sound, like meaning, is dependent on response, in
this case the impact of airwaves set in motion by the crash upon human eardrums
or other biological hearing mechanisms. Similarly, facts may be assumed to
"speak," but until meaning - a uniquely human quality - is supplied, there is no
message (see below). These inherent limitations of the facts brought to light by
archaeology must always be kept in mind.

Are there, then, no facts in archaeology? There are, but they are relatively
few and generally of minimal significance in themselves. Even these facts,
however, must be carefully established as such before becoming admissible
evidence. For example, using the list of items above, one might make an
assertion that a particular pot is a "wheelmade cooking pot"; but laboratory
analysis may show that it was handmade or that it was made for cooking but
used for something else. In another instance, the plan of a building may be used
as evidence that it was a "domestic house," not a temple. But it is important to
keep in mind that no one can be absolutely sure of this analysis.

The element of subjectivity increases in the case of archaeological

stratigraphy, or the science of untangling layers in a mound. It is possible to
conclude, using the geological "law of superimposition," that the material in the
uppermost of a sectioned series of earth layers is the latest; but further exposure
may reveal that the entire series is an inverted fill, and the earliest material is on
top. Again, a floor may be said to abut a wall rather than being cut by it, and so
is contemporary. But a careful scholar will bear in mind the fact that foundation
trenches can be surfaced-over so skillfully by later floors that the earlier purpose
of the wall remains undetected.

For all these and other reasons, I suggest that archaeologists ought rarely to
use the word "proof," because the kind of verification that is possible in sciences
that investigate the physical world is simply not obtainable for materialculture
remains, even though they are also physical objects. New archaeologists today
do formulate and test hypotheses, do seek regularities in the cultural process, and
in that sense they may aspire to "scientific" status of a sort. Ultimately, however,
they are dealing with human behavior, and behavior cannot be replicated in the
laboratory, nor is it predictable.

Thus archaeologists are better off speaking not of "laws" or "proofs" or even
of "facts," but rather of various "probabilities," some of which are better (i.e.,
more useful) than others. They may also speak of "levels of inference," of which
the lower are more certain than the higher. For example, to infer that the
structure above is a "house" may be relatively safe; but to conclude that "the
family is nuclear" is riskier, that "the social structure is segmentary" is still more
risky. What is essential in the necessary process of interpretation is not to deny
or minimize the difficulties, but rather to make presuppositions absolutely clear
and above all not to claim more than is actually known. This - knowledge of
what is true - is what the epistemological dilemma is all about.

Before leaving the topic of facts, it is worthwhile distinguishing four kinds

of facts with which the archaeologist (and biblical historian) works: artifacts,
textual facts, ideofacts, and ecofacts. Artifacts have already been mentioned, and
all who work in the fields of historical archaeology are well acquainted with the
necessity for using biblical and extrabiblical texts wherever possible for the
illumination of the past. These two classes of facts are much more similar than
usually thought. Both texts and artifacts symbolically represent a particular
perception of reality; both are "encoded messages" that must be decoded, using
rational, critical methods as well as empathy; both remain somewhat enigmatic,
however skillful and persistent the attempts to penetrate their full meaning.
Finally, I would argue simply that both objects and texts are artifacts, that is,
thought and action frozen in the form of matter, the "material correlates of
human behavior." Even the Bible is an artifact, in this case what I have called a
"curated artifact," or an item that originally functioned in one social context but
has subsequently been reused in other ways and settings. Thus the Bible is what
it once was, in addition to what it has become over the centuries of interpretation
as Scripture by Synagogue and Church. This fact must always be kept in mind
when biblical texts are used as evidence in archaeological reconstructions.20

What Are "Data"?

Both archaeologists and historians refer constantly to the basic data on which
their arguments rest. That is why an archaeological epistemology must begin
with a definition of the word datum. Etymology suggests that data (plural past
participle of Latin dare, "to give") are those facts that are "given" to us, the
bedrock evidence upon which conclusions are based. What is "given" and how it
is given, or by whom, are fundamental epistemological questions.

Ordinarily the terms "fact" and "data" are used interchangeably, but I
contend that they represent two successive stages of the interpretive process.
Archaeological facts in themselves, as has been seen, may possess intrinsic
value, but this is not true for meaning, which must be supplied by human beings.
In that sense, facts become data - that is, useful information - only as interpreted
within an intellectual framework that is capable of giving them significance. Or
put another way, it is possible to learn about the past, not simply by amassing
more and more bits and pieces of disjointed "evidence," but rather by
coordinating the pieces of evidence and situating them within a context, relating
knowledge to a deliberate quest.
 In all disciplines, but particularly in archaeology, the advance of real and
lasting knowledge comes not so much from chance discovery (as the popular
misunderstanding assumes), but rather from the systematic investigation of
specific questions. Thus what is learned depends largely on what is already
known, the goals and orientation of the investigation, and the method of inquiry.
Simply put, the best answers - true "data" - result from framing appropriate
questions. The use of the word "appropriate" does not imply any value judgment
about what the "right" questions are, but a notion of what may be possible, given
the nature of the material at one's disposal and the intellectual stage of the
discipline at the moment.

All of the foregoing is what should be intended by the use of the current
phrase "research design" in archaeology, but the typical design entails more
practical field strategy than it does an adequate theoretical base for the expansion
of knowledge.

As Lewis R. Binford and other new archaeologists remind us, limitations of

knowledge are more the results of inadequate research design than poor data.
The archaeological record can be much more efficiently exploited, if only we
better understand what cultural formation processes are and how superior data
can be generated from broader and more sophisticated research strategies. Again,
it all depends on asking appropriate questions. David Noel Freedman, one of
Albright's proteges and a leading biblical scholar, sums up the wrong approach:

Albright's great plan and expectation to set the Bible firmly on the
foundation of archaeology buttressed by verifiable data seems to have
foundered or at least floundered. After all the digging, done and being done
and yet to be done, how much has been accomplished? The fierce debates
and arguments about the relevance of archaeology to the Bible and vice
versa indicate that many issues remain unresolved. Can anyone say anything
with confidence about the patriarchs or the patriarchal age? The fact that
skeptical voices now dominate the scene indicates that the Albrightian
synthesis has become unglued and we are further from a solution than we
ever were. Archaeology has not proved decisive or even greatly helpful in
answering the questions most often asked and has failed to prove the
historicity of biblical persons and events, especially in the early periods.21

I contend, however, that it was not archaeology that went wrong, but a
generation of biblical historians who were asking the wrong questions - not
wrong in a moral sense, but certainly wrong heuristically. Much of classical
biblical archaeology was an exercise in futility in that the questions posed were
either parochial and so received trivial answers at best, or were basically
theological in nature and so received no answers at all. Only as scholars learn to
structure questions more appropriate to the archaeological record itself and to
socioeconomic history, rather than religious and political history, will
archaeology become the powerful interpretive tool that Albright envisioned for
reconstructing biblical life and times.

What Is "Context"?

"Context" is another term that is used loosely in biblical archaeology. While

recognizing the theoretical importance of context, archaeologists often mean by
it little more than the immediate provenience of an object - its locus or stratum,
or at most its associated materials. Rarely do they grasp that it is the total
systemic context that is essential, that is, an ascending hierarchy of findspot,
stratigraphic phase, site-wide chronological horizon, multi-site evolutionary
stage, ecological setting, and indeed long-term settlement-history. Lying behind
this holistic approach is often General Systems Theory, which assumes that any
given archaeological item functions within a larger environmental and
sociocultural system, without which it cannot be understood.22 It is this larger
setting that provides significance, for without it an artifact is torn out of its
original context, isolated as a curio, fit for little more than viewing in a museum.
It can tell us little of the culture that produced it and was in turn partly shaped by
it.

Biblical historians are often just as myopic in using biblical texts,

fragmenting sources into verses and verses into still smaller units. Ultimately the
critic becomes bogged down in the minutiae of literary analysis and loses sight
of the larger picture of Israel's whole life and history. This narrowness of vision
is all too prevalent, despite the broadening horizons of such newer approaches as
rhetorical and canonical criticism. It is true that from the beginning form
criticism stressed the importance of the Sitz im Leben ("life-setting"), but in
practice this tended to mean simply situating a text within the literary tradition,
not within the larger social and historical context of "real life." There were many
times when the broader context could be recovered only through archaeology,
but the dialogue between archaeology and biblical studies proved once again to
be deficient. However, refreshing exceptions can be found: Robert B. Coote and
Keith W. Whitelam's The Emergence of Israel in Historical Perspective, for
example, takes a settlement-history approach over very long time-spans.z3
Archaeology and History: Epistemological Principles

It is fashionable once again to speak of history-writing as a primary goal of

archaeology, and for this reason I turn now to the matter of defining the term
"history." Unfortunately, both biblical scholars and archaeologists have neglected
historiography until very recently, except for a few scholars such as John Van
Seters, Baruch Halpern, and Giovanni Garbini.24 Syro-Palestinian
archaeologists, historians of a sort, usually manifest a naivete regarding the
nature of history and the task of history-writing. Albright, on the other hand, was
familiar with and responded to works of such philosophers of history as Arnold
Toynbee, Benedetto Croce, R. G. Collingwood, and Eric Voegelin, but his
followers have shown little such inclination. The current result is highly
technical archaeological studies of isolated problems and periods, but nothing
approaching the full-scale synthetic history of ancient Palestine that today's
proficient archaeology is capable of producing. This criticism is true even of the
best recent works, such as Helga Weippert's Palestina in vorhellenistischer Zeit
or Amihai Mazar's Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000-586 B.C.E.25

This lamentable deficiency is the direct result of an attenuated notion of

history-writing among both archaeologists and biblical scholars. Scholars have
produced a bare-bones "political history" based exclusively on select biblical
texts and highly visible, monumental archaeological remains such as temples,
palaces, and destruction-layers. This "history" has emphasized public events and
the deeds of great men, but largely ignores socioeconomic history, much less the
kind of long-term history of the masses that Fernand Braudel and the annales
school undertake.26 Such an elitist history is unsatisfactory on many accounts,
not least of which is the modern biblical historian's apparently unconscious (and
certainly uncritical) appropriation of the ideological bias of the ancient writers. It
is history written "from within," rather than from the perspective of the external
evidence now available from the ancient Near East, both in abundant texts and
artifacts. Here again, even the most critical current works, such as J. Maxwell
Miller and John H. Hayes' A History of Ancient Israel and Judah, are a
disappointment.27 Yet progress in this matter is unlikely without a more
adequate concept of history and of the historian's task. At this point I wish to
present a methodology for what I foresee to be a more adequate written history
of ancient Israel in the future. Since, as I have argued, epistemology is basic, I
begin with an appeal for theory.

Archaeological Theory-Building

In his 1977 work For Theory Building in Archaeology, Binford elaborates on

one of the original motifs of the new archaeology of 25 years ago, stressing that
archaeology is unlikely to advance further unless this earlier revolution in basic
theory is carried forward.28 Unfortunately, the new archaeology has come and
gone, and most Syro-Palestinian archaeologists have missed the signal for
change. To judge from the scant discussions in the literature, the notion of
"theory" meets with apathy at best and often with open hostility. American
archaeologists, striving to reeducate themselves in newer approaches, have
shown some interest in what is usually called "theory and method"; but they
have construed method to mean simply improved digging and recording
techniques, rather than an inquiry that concerns the very intellectual foundations
of the discipline. Israelis view the few attempts at theory-building by Americans
or archaeologists in other fields with a skepticism revealing only their innocence.

Both Middle Eastern and American archaeologists fail to understand that

"theory" does not mean idle speculation (which our field has indeed seen too
much of) but simply a body of principles that guide research. The purposes of
theory-building are: to make explicit and examine the presuppositions that are
brought to research, whether consciously or not; to define a discipline with
respect to methods and objectives; to establish a common ground for discussion
within a discipline and for dialogue with other disciplines; and to promote the
health and advancement of a particular discipline and the branch of knowledge
that it represents. I seriously doubt that archaeologists who resist theory really
believe these goals are undesirable. And surely it is obvious that such goals will
not be achieved automatically.29

I contend that the unprofessional standards in biblical and Syro-Palestinian

archaeology, the failure to keep pace with other branches of archaeology, the
endless controversies, the isolation, and the failure to engage in productive
dialogue with biblical and historical studies are all largely the result of a
reluctance to confront basic questions of theory. Syro-Palestinian archaeology
will "come of age" only when it addresses the issue of theory, the first
consideration in developing an epistemology.

Archaeological Reasoning

A second step in developing an epistemology is reflecting on the nature of the

reasoning process of archaeology, as well as the reasoning process of history. It
is evident that both disciplines employ critical methods to sift the evidence,
whether artifactual or textual, in order to select data that can be judged useful in
reconstructing the past. Whatever the principles employed in this initial sifting
task, they should be made explicit.

Biblical scholars over the past century have indeed developed explicit
methodologies, but archaeologists are far behind. Often the assessment of
excavated evidence is based on little more than intuition or on the competence of
the excavator. Data of varying quality are categorized indiscriminately.
Wideranging historical and cultural conclusions are drawn from the flimsiest of
evidence or based on the cavalier citation of various "authorities." It is true,
unfortunately, that archaeology today is so specialized and so esoteric that the
nonspecialist (historian or biblical scholar, for instance) is at a loss to know
whom or what to trust. For this reason, among others, Syro-Palestinian
archaeologists need desperately to develop a hermeneutic, preferably one that
takes into account a number of parallel methods of interpreting artifacts and
texts, as pointed out by Hodder in Reading the Past.30

One aspect shared by both biblical scholarship and archaeology is a

dependence on analogy as a fundamental method of argument. It is possible to
know the past only by making inferences from artifacts preserved from that past.
Inferences, by definition, are observations (one might say "guesses") made by
individuals who experience the present world. Only by using analogies -
parallels thrown alongside - can one hope to illuminate these enigmatic relics.
Without some point of contact, it is impossible to determine the use of objects
from the past. This is true of ancient texts as well as ancient objects, since
translation is analogy, an attempt to render the images of the text into images
familiar to the reader.
 The challenge is to find appropriate analogues, those offering the most
promise yet capable of being tested in some way. Ethnoarchaeology is useful in
this regard, particularly in places where unsophisticated modern cultures are still
found superimposed, as it were, upon the remains of the ancient world, as in
parts of the Middle East. Analogies drawn from life in modern Arab villages or
Bedouin society can, with proper controls, be used to illuminate both artifacts
and texts, as many studies have shown. What is more, postulates made in this
way can be partially tested: those regarding social structure, by modern usage;
those regarding individual objects, by replication (a device all too infrequently
employed).31

Nevertheless the limitations of inquiry into the meaning of both artifacts and
texts must always be borne in mind by archaeologists, regardless of their method
of interpretation. It is no coincidence that Wright and Roland de Vaux, leading
scholars in Bible and archaeology, wrote articles near the end of their lives on
both the capabilities and the limitations of archaeology.32 All historians deal
with possibilities, at best with probabilities, never with certainties. The degree of
subjectivity can and should be reduced, but it can never be eliminated. It is
possible to hone the tools of textual analysis and archaeology fieldwork to an
ever-sharper edge, thus increasing the true data in quantity and quality, but the
past will always remain partly elusive. As Hodder says, of his new
postprocessual or "contextual" archaeology:

It is characterized by debate and uncertainty about fundamental issues that

may have been rarely questioned before in archaeology. It is more an asking
of questions than a provision of answers.33

The Dialogue between Texts and Artifacts in History-Writing

If, as we have argued thus far, texts and artifacts are both data to be "read" and
both may constitute sources for writing history, then they must be considered
together. Or, more precisely, they must be interpreted separately and similarly,
and then compared. In arguing for the necessity of a dialogue between these two
fundamental sources for the historian, I meant just that.

The possibility for a serious dialogue seems scarcely to have occurred to

either biblical scholars or Syro-Palestinian archaeologists. The former have
continued until recently to produce various "histories" of ancient Israel that upon
examination turn out to be little more than histories of the literature of the
Hebrew Bible, or as Garbini has scathingly put it, mere "paraphrases of the Bible
itself."34 Given the apparent futility of that approach, a few more radical biblical
scholars have recently sought to write "histories of ancient Palestine" as an
alternate. These would include works such as Gosta W. Ahlstrom's The History
of Ancient Palestine from the Paleolithic to Alexander's Conquest35 and Thomas
L. Thompson's Early History of the Israelite People: From the Written and
Archaeological Sources.36 Yet, as we have shown, these are far from
satisfactory as histories of either ancient Israel or Palestine - precisely because,
despite their paying lip-service to archaeology, out of desperation, they remain
monologues, not the dialogue between specialists that I envision as necessary.
Ahlstrom and Thompson are biblical scholars talking to other biblical scholars.
The point is simple: neither Ahlstrom nor Thompson is an archaeologist, so their
use of archaeological data is arbitrary, often amateurish, and ultimately
misleading. Their works, despite a laudable attempt to break the impasse we
have seen in writing text-based histories of ancient Israel, are essentially
nonhistories. They constitute what one of the revisionists himself, Ernst Axel
Knauf, said of a more traditional work, Miller and Hayes' History of Ancient
Israel and Judah, "a pseudo-history of non-events,"I' Certainly no Syro-
Palestinian archaeologist would recognize Ahlstrom's and Thompson's
"portraits" (and none but myself has even bothered to review them).

Meanwhile, what have the archaeologists been doing? It is significant that

until recently no full-scale, comprehensive diachronic treatments of the
archaeology of Palestine had been published since Albright's standard
Archaeology of Palestine38 and Kathleen M. Kenyon's Archaeology in the Holy
Land.39 That was due mostly to the rapid pace of discovery, which made the
task of synthesis daunting. Then in short order there were what are now the
standard handbooks: Weippert's Palastina in vorhellenistischer Zeit; and the
works of leading Israeli archaeologists, Mazar's Archaeology of the Land of the
Bible; and Archaeology of Ancient Israel, edited by Amnon Ben-Tor.40 Yet
Weippert's book, while valuable as a "handbook" (a typical German Handbuch),
is derivative, being written by an art historian, and simply contains a mass of
information. Despite Thompson's enthusiastic (and usually exclusive) citation of
Weippert, hers is by no means a "history of ancient Palestine." Mazar's work is
less detailed, but it has much more authority because it is written by one of
Israel's leading archaeologists, whose broad knowledge and balanced judgment
are widely admired. Ben-Tor's edited work is more uneven, but many chapters
are superb critical summaries of what is now known archaeologically. Once
again, however, the Israeli works are far from being "histories of ancient
Palestine"; they are reference works, compilations of raw data plus some
interpretation. There is little or no attempt at overall integration of ecological,
artifactual, textual, socioeconomic, cultural, and much other data; at connected
narrative of events; or, much less, at the discussion of cause (or "explanation" in
current archaeology) that would be essential for true history-writing.

All the above works, while extremely useful, are highly technical
monologues among specialists, in this case specialists in material culture studies.
Indeed, most Israeli (and other) Syro-Palestinian archaeologists are almost
entirely aloof from biblical and historiographical discussions like the present, for
reasons that we shall explore elsewhere but which have to do mostly with the
highly specialized and avowedly "secular" character of Israeli archaeology. In
any case, archaeologists and biblical scholars continue to labor away in their
little black boxes, largely oblivious of each other. In no case do we see real
collaboration. Despite Albright's original vision of a dialogue between
archaeology and biblical studies, not to mention my own call for it for more than
25 years, sadly enough there is none. Beyond the occasional "joint session" at
annual professional meetings in America, such as the Society of Biblical
Literature/ American Academy of Religion and the American Schools of
Oriental Research, there is not even much conversation, just scholars typically
"talking past each other."

This situation is appalling, especially since, as we shall now see, the

possibilities for dialogue have never been more promising or the rationale more
compelling. That is true especially because texts and artifacts can both now be
characterized as "data to be read," as I have suggested above. What I shall
attempt to show in the following is that the textual and artifactual data now avail
able concerning ancient Israel are remarkably similar in character; that the
history of scholarly interpretation of both classes of data runs surprisingly
parallel; and that these convergences point to an inter-disciplinary dialogue that
holds the best hope yet for writing an adequate history of ancient Israel.

How the Textual Record and the Archaeological Record Compare

We may begin by noting that the corpus of individual texts and artifacts
constitutes in each case what we may call a "record" of the past. That the texts of
the Hebrew Bible are a record of sorts is obvious, although the nature of that
record is disputed. On the other hand, archaeologists have also been seeking to
define a phenomenon known as "the archaeological record" since the dawn of
the new archaeology some three decades ago. By consensus today, the
archaeological record may be said to consist of all those physical remains that
survive from past human actions, i.e., not only artifacts or objects strictly
speaking; any observable traces of human impact upon the external world and
the natural environment, or "cultural deposits" of many kinds (including the
burials of the humans themselves); the above remains situated in their larger
spatial and temporal context; and the whole of the evidence seen in the light of
the intellectual and social matrix that we moderns inevitably bring to the task of
interpretation. Need it be stressed that biblical texts must be seen as constituting
a parallel and very similar kind of "record of the past" - indeed, with the same
scope, complexity, and limitations?

Before proceeding, we may attempt in the interests of brevity to list some of

the essential characteristics of both texts and artifacts - in a simplified chart form
(see p. 82), noting similarities and differences.41 Of these 12 diagnostic
characteristics, fully half are the same for both texts and artifacts, and a number
of others are similar or overlap. And, as I shall argue, even those characteristics
that differ share something, in the fact that the same interpretive methods are
required of the historian who works with these two types of data. Specifically,
both texts and artifacts are "objective," yet require "subjective" interpretation if
the record is to be read correctly. Both contain valid information about the past,
but only in the form of inferences we must make that must be tested against
some external criteria. These "facts," when established as such, then constitute
true data when placed within an intellectual framework that gives them meaning
in relation to specific questions that are appropriate to history writing.
Furthermore, the use of both classes of data requires an interpretive methodology
that is fundamentally genetic, evolutionary, and comparative. Finally, if
"reading" both the textual and archaeological record is the appropriate metaphor,
then it is obvious that the interpreter must master the peculiar vocabulary,
grammar, and syntax of each class of data, as we have seen. Otherwise, the text
of the Hebrew Bible will remain as "mute" as some misguided biblical scholars
maintain that the artifacts are.
 Parallel Interpretive Methods

In a recent publication42 I have shown in detail how all the 19th-20th century
"schools" of interpretation in biblical studies can parallel almost exactly the
history of archaeological scholarship (although the "schools" were not
necessarily contemporary). That would seem to confirm the suggestion here that
the two classes of data - textual and artifactual - are naturally complementary
when understood properly. Space precludes detail, but for instance (1) the 19th-
century philological approach, or "learning the language" of the Bible, was
paralleled by the initial mapping of the landscape in early archaeology. (2) The
later literary- or higher-critical approach, untangling the strands in the literary
tradition, was paralleled in archaeology by the stratigraphic revolution,
"untangling" the layers in a mound. (3) Form criticism, the attempt to isolate and
categorize various genres in the literary tradition, was paralleled in archaeology
by the typological analysis of artifacts, especially pottery. (4) Redaction or
tradition criticism, or the study of how the overall literary tradition was formed
and transmitted, has been paralleled in archaeology by the recent study of
"formulation processes of the archaeological record." (5) The "history of
religions" approach in biblical studies has now been paralleled in archaeology by
the burgeoning study of religion and cult in ancient Israel. (6) The ethnographic
approach, or seeking in cross-cultural comparisons a background for life in
biblical times, is paralleled by the strongly anthropological orientation of current
archaeology, as well as its penchant for cross-cultural studies. (7) The socio-
anthropological, or new "socio-critical," school is paralleled closely by the
socio-anthropological thrust of all recent archaeology. (8) Even the much-
maligned "Old Testament theology" school has its archaeological parallels, in the
"biblical archaeology" movement of the early-mid 20th century.

In the latter, especially, the convergences, as we shall call them, are

remarkable, as the chart above shows. Even though there were factors other than
these that were operative in the demise of biblical archaeology in the 1970s -
such as competition from foreign "national schools" and a crisis in funding - two
facts remain clear. As Albright and Wright, with their peculiar combination of
biblical studies and archaeological research, passed from the scene in the early
1970s, so did biblical archaeology, which had in many ways always been
uniquely Protestant and American. At the very same time, Brevard S. Childs
could write an obituary of the biblical theology movement, Biblical Theology in
Crisis.43 Both movements had construed the history of ancient Palestine and of
Israel as a sort of "religio-political history" that was thought to yield a universal,
self-evident cultural meaning. The effort was perhaps noble, but doomed to
failure.

Toward a New Hermeneutic?

The foregoing sketch of parallel schools of interpretation in biblical and

archaeological studies up until some 20 years ago is suggestive. I would argue,
however, that more recent trends in both disciplines pave the way for the first
dialogue between texts and artifacts, with unique possibilities for illuminating
the past in general, and the phenomenon of ancient Israel in particular.

Structuralism as a putative method, much less a "school," is nearly

impossible to define. But the approach as applied sporadically in recent biblical
studies has sought to penetrate behind the texts to comprehend the underlying
mental construct as a whole, as a closed system, yet one capable of
transformation (the "deep structure"). Often the analysis focuses on bipolar
opposites that constitute universal themes in the myths, and often function as
symbols or "signs": e.g., male/female, life/death, good/bad, nature/culture,
immanence/ transcendence. Structuralism originated not in biblical studies, but
in cultural anthropology, and especially in linguistics. Because of its interest in
the structure of society, structuralism is sometimes allied with Marxist notions of
the social relations of production, and the relation of these to ideology, as they
shape society (Marx was not simply a "vulgar materialist"). Structuralism has
had little if any impact on Syro-Palestinian archaeology, although it has had its
advocates in the general field of archaeology. Yet if there is a discernible "deep
structure" in texts, then it is reasonable to suppose that some such structure exists
in artifactual remains as well; and, furthermore, it is evident that artifacts, like
texts, are "signs" and have symbolic meaning.44

Similar in many ways to structuralism is semiotics - a "science of how

language works as a set of symbols" - and several related approaches that
sometimes go under the banner of New Literary Criticism. The effort of the lat
ter is directed toward a formal description of the fundamental structure of a text
as "discourse." Obviously this discourse is associated with some meaning; but
the question is not primarily what texts "mean," but rather "what makes meaning
possible?" In short, how is the text able to say what it says; how does it "signify,"
and to whom? The basic tool of the newer literary approaches is often
"metalanguage," a special language of description that focuses on the play
among "signifying elements" in the text - mostly opposites/ contrasts that are
said to make "meaning" possible. At the heart of these varied approaches is the
notion of symbol, understood as a primary language that emerges directly and
simultaneously out of experience. In a secondary stage, this symbolic language
comes to be arranged in narrative form as "myth," but this is not, however, yet at
the stage of reflective thought. These symbolized myths, in turn, must be
analyzed by the interpreter in terms of a double structure, as conveying obvious,
literal meaning, and as analogies. Texts, then - biblical or other - do refer to a
"reality," but in different and special ways. They do say something to somebody;
they offer at least the possibility of re-creating the world that was real to their
authors and/or editors, if not an "objective" reality.

New Literary Criticism, as we saw above, with its emphasis on "narrative

history" and the "intent" (if any) of the text, is clearly related to older
approaches, as well as more recent schools like rhetorical and canonical
criticism, and therefore it seems accessible to many biblical scholars (at least in
its less extreme forms). Unfortunately, New Literary Criticism falls easily into a
deconstructionist mode: the text itself means nothing, and we must supply
whatever meaning we choose, largely in terms of our own contemporary needs.
There are no "truths" about the past to be learned; our supposed knowledge of
the past is conditioned entirely by the modern context of the quest, mostly
political.

Complementary Histories?

If the parallel character of texts and artifacts as data for history-writing seems
well established, can they enable us to write "parallel histories"? And could
those differing but complementary histories ever converge? Again, the question:
"What kinds of history?"45

That the two histories are indeed different seems clear. (1) A text-based
history, in this case dependent upon the texts of the Hebrew Bible, while lim ited
could be expected to yield what I have termed "political history," a more or less
connected narrative of great men and public institutions, or a "theocratic
history," history as His story (what biblical scholars call Heilsgeschichte, or "the
history of salvation"). Such an account, if it could be shown to be factual, might
contribute to another traditional "history of the religion of Israel," or at its best
an "intellectual history of ancient Palestine." But that is a very large "if," as we
have noted above.

(2) Archaeology, in the broad, inter-disciplinary sense in which the

discipline is conceived today, might be expected to yield several histories, as we
noted above, at least in outline: a history of technology, a socio-economic
history, a cultural history, something of a history of religion (at least of cult, if
not of theology), and a larger portrait that might be called a "secular history of
ancient Palestine."

The latter term deserves further comment. It seems to have been introduced
in my 1987 paper at national meetings, which was not published however until
1991.46 Meanwhile, it was learned that Ahlstrom's 1992 and Thompson's 1991
"histories of Palestine" were in process, with an intent similar to mine to go
beyond traditional "confessional" histories of ancient or biblical history.
Ahlstrom did not use the term "secular" history, although he did make Palestine
in all periods his focus, not simply "biblical Israel."

Thompson had already outlined his program in 1987 (which I had not seen
when I first wrote) for a "long range goal of reconstructing a sound and critical
history of Israel and of its origins within the context of the historical geography
of Palestine."47 This is rather similar to Knauf's call at about the same time
(1991) for "an extension of natural history into the specific realm of homo
sapiens," suggesting that we combine Braudel's long-term history ("structures")
and his medium-term history ("conjunctures") into a "processual history," an
approach that Knauf says "cannot do without archaeology."48 That is similar to
my "history of cultural context" in the broadest (i.e., ecological) sense, and not
unlike the "natural history" of Pliny's Historia naturalis.

These tentative but independent attempts to transcend "theocratic histories"

of ancient Israel in the last decade, coming as they have from both biblicists and
archaeologists, would seem to bode well for the dialogue that I envision. Yet
ironically, it is precisely the protagonists noted here - Dever, Knauf, and
Thompson - who now differ vociferously on how to proceed. That may be due in
large part to the fact that we do not agree on whose data should be "primary,"
whose "secondary": texts, or artifacts?
 "Primary" and "Secondary" Sources

Biblical scholars, until recently trained primarily as philologians, have always

tended to overvalue texts as the more "objective" evidence, even when they
acknowledge as they must the inherent differences in interpretation. In my
judgment, this reflects a certain naivete about how texts serve as "symbols," and
an abysmal ignorance of how artifacts can serve in the same way (as we have
seen above). It was Martin Noth, one of the giants of German biblical
scholarship and long-term director of the German school in Jerusalem, who first
declared in The History of Israel that "as far as the Israelite age is concerned,
SyrianPalestinian archaeology is almost wholly silent."49 The German original
is dumm, "mute, silent," which provides an extra, if unintended, irony. Noth
probably only meant to point out that artifacts are usually anonymous; they
usually don't come labeled with the names of historical actors. In his History,
Noth went on to give a more positive account of archaeology's ability to
contribute to biblical history, concluding that "an account of the history of Israel
which does not refer constantly to the results of Syrian-Palestinian archaeology
is indefensible now that this source of information has become accessible." That
assessment must be balanced against Noth's other statement. And I know from
personal conversations not long before his death in 1969 that, had he lived to
revise his History, Noth would have been much more enthusiastic about
archaeology's contribution to biblical studies.

Noth's new optimism was clearly attributable to the contact he had in later
life with Paul W. Lapp, then director of the American School of Oriental
Research in Jerusalem, and to actual contact with good field archaeology. But a
later generation of biblical scholars seized upon Noth's somewhat cryptical
remark, which has been repeated mindlessly by leading historians such as
Siegfried Herrmann, Hartmut Rosel, Ahlstrom, Miller, and many others. Yet as
Knauf - something of a radical himself - points out, this is a slander: "the
archaeological evidence is no more silent than the Torah is to somebody who
cannot read Hebrew." Even though Knauf still regarded archaeological sources
as "secondary," he acknowledged their importance as "external evidence" and
even conceded that a certain kind of history of ancient Israel/Palestine could be
written without using the Hebrew Bible. He thought the latter task not entirely
desirable but "probably possible - and worth a try- 1150

At about the same time (indeed, in the same volume of essays) the
wellknown American biblical historian J. Maxwell Miller sharpened the issue by
asking: "Is It Possible to Write a History of Israel Without Relying on the
Hebrew Bible?" This was evidently meant as a rhetorical question, since Miller
went on to maintain once again that "artifacts are silent and remain `anonymous
unless interpreted in the light of written records.1115 But certainly this would be
news to prehistorians, who proceed confidently to do culture-history without a
written word from the past. It is at this point that I have observed of Miller and
others that "archaeology is not mute, but historians are often deaf." Certainly this
attitude does not foster the dialogue I envision between two independent but
complementary disciplines, each with its own appropriate aims, methods, and
body of data. Simple honesty and integrity, not to mention scholarly competence,
demand that scholars in our several fields respect the limitations of their
individual knowledge and commit themselves to teamwork. Here texts and
artifacts both must be considered "primary data," read similarly.

The position of another protagonist in this debate, Thompson, is now

nuanced. His 1987 work on the origin traditions of Genesis and Exodus actually
laid the foundations for his 1992 Early History of the Israelite People. Already
disillusioned with text-based histories, Thompson declared:

It is ... the independence of Syro-Palestinian archaeology that now makes it

possible for the first time to begin to write a history of Israel's origins.
Rather than the Bible, it is in the field of Syro-Palestinian archaeology, and
the adjunct field of ancient Near Eastern studies, that we find our primary
source for Israel's earliest history.52

I couldn't have said it better myself. In fact, I had been saying almost
precisely these things for a decade or more - using the very terms "Syro-
Palestinian archaeology" and "independent discipline" (as far back as 1973).
Thompson's failure is that he does not carry through his important insights into
"primary sources" in writing his own subsequent full-scale Early History, nor
can he. He is not an archaeologist himself and does not consult those who are.
He makes frequent reference to Weippert's 1988 handbook (his usual preference
for German works); but he does not even allude to the standard reference work,
Mazar's Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, published in 1990 and easily
available to him. Consequently, as I have shown in reviews, Thompson's scant,
arbitrary, and uncritical citation of some of the archaeological literature and
evidence renders his portrait a caricature of ancient Palestine, one that no
archaeologist would even recognize.53 Furthermore, Thompson's later writings
and nearly all of the revisionists' current outpourings in print and elsewhere
feature self-confident declarations about archaeology and even about individual
archaeologists that reflect ignorance, clear ideological bias, and malice (as
detailed in Chapter 2 above). I cannot understand rationally how the revisionists
can fall back upon archaeology in their disillusionment with the biblical texts,
and then refuse to educate themselves about its results. They become
"historians" with no history. Perhaps we are dealing not with reason at all, but
with ideology. Yet I continue to hope for a dialogue, because it is our only hope
for writing a history of ancient Israel.

Before we turn directly to that dialogue, however, let me summarize why I

think archaeological data can be "primary" sources for history-writing - indeed,
sometimes superior to biblical and other ancient Near Eastern texts.

1. Archaeological data in the broadest sense are by definition "external" to

the texts and therefore constitute an independent witness. In the case of the
biblical texts, this is the only such witness that we shall ever have, since the
Bible is a closed corpus.

2. Archaeological data, unlike texts, have not been deliberately edited and
altered in meaning over time by continuous commentary, so they allow us to leap
across the centuries and encounter a past reality directly. It is true that the forces
of mankind and nature may have shaped the objects in the ground since their
original deposition, what we call "formation processes of the archaeological
record." But we can control these factors with objects found in situ better than
we can account for the biases of the long interpretive process in the transmission
of ancient texts.

3. Archaeological artifacts constitute realia, as much as do texts. Far from

being enigmatic, artifacts may surpass texts in being more immediate, concrete,
and tangible, and therefore more "objective."

4. While surviving ancient texts will always be relatively scant, and largely
the result of accidental finds, archaeological evidence is potentially almost
unlimited. Archaeology provides a deliberate and productive research program,
producing data that are a dynamic, ever-expanding source of genuinely new
information about the past. While biblical studies everywhere seems to be
exhausted, lacking in either new data or compelling paradigms, archaeology is a
discipline barely beyond its infancy and full of youthful vigor and confidence.

5. The analysis of ancient texts will and should proceed, although I think
with diminishing results. (When was the last time that we heard about "the
assured results of biblical criticism"?) But it is only archaeology, in the broad
inter-disciplinary sense in which we conceive it today, that can truly
"revolutionize" biblical studies.

Rules for a Dialogue

Suppose the dialogue between texts and artifacts should begin to materialize.
What ought the ground rules be? This is not in fact a difficult question, since we
are merely talking about the interdisciplinary research that goes on all the time
among many other disciplines today, particularly the social sciences, where such
inquiries are taken for granted. Indeed our rules will sound rather banal.

1. The intellectual and professional integrity of each discipline (and

archaeology today is a separate discipline) must be respected, acknowledging the
"autonomous" aims and methods of each, even though that may seem at first a
contradiction in terms.

2. There is no substitute for absolute competence in one's own discipline.

Breadth of interests, open-mindedness, courage in crossing disciplinary lines, the
willingness to test new models, and imagination and skill in synthesis are all
necessary. But they cannot compensate for inferior work in one's own "home
discipline." Too much of what passes for "inter-disciplinary" research is
dilettantish and faddish; it is shabby, lacking a real disciplinary foundation. (I
think that is particularly true of much of New Literary Criticism generally, and
of the revisionists in particular.) As Knauf says wisely of the historian (and he is
speaking here specifically about biblical and archaeological sources), "you either
undergo training in which you are provided with a theoretical background that
allows you to make sense out of your source - disputable sense, of course - or
you are at the mercy of those who did.1154

3. However impossible absolute "objectivity" may be (and all acknowledge

that today), it is still a worthwhile and essential goal for the philologian and
exegete, specialist in material culture, or historian. Either there are empirical
data or there are not; and the historian who opts for the second alternative puts
himself out of business, at least as a serious scholar and not a demagogue.
Again, one of Knauf's observations is trenchant:

For all its inherent fallacies, its obvious subjectivism, its biased, sometimes
myopic selection of the material that is processed, we cannot totally
abandon the history of events for the scientific and objective history of
processes if we intend to study history as human history and if we maintain
that there is some basic difference between humans and wolves.ss

4. Simplistic as it may sound, the chief requirements for dialogue may be

courage and honesty. By "courage," I mean the individual scholar's willingness
to put his or her ego up for stakes; to abandon long-cherished positions when
necessary; and to acknowledge how and why one's mind has changed. By
"honesty;' I mean simply citing other scholars accurately, in context, and
crediting one's sources fully; not pretending to an expertise one does not possess;
resisting the temptation to indulge in personal polemics that stem from a sense of
inadequacy, either in oneself or in the evidence at hand; and refusing on
principle to distort the evidence or another scholar's view.

The fact that these virtues are demanding and therefore rare (i.e., "scholars
are only human") may account for the fact that almost everyone in the academic
world hails "inter-disciplinary research," but few undertake it seriously. Can we
provide a "case-study," an example of how it might work in this instance?

What Can We Know from the Integrated Study of Texts and Artifacts

I will present many specific case-studies of what I call "convergences" between

textual and artifactual evidence in Chapters 4 and 5. Here, however, I will try to
show what we can obtain by way of sure knowledge from looking at a specific
set of data from the two sources. I shall do this, not by artificially "harmonizing"
the sources as Thompson charges, but simply by allowing them to speak for
themselves insofar as possible.

First, let me take an isolated artifact, a pot not unlike the one of which
Knauf says "almost never is it possible to identify the nationality of a cooking
pot.1156 In fact, by "reading the artifact as text" in the way outlined above, we
can identify much more than nationality. Let us exercise our reading skills on a
typical mid-8th-century large storejar from southern Palestine, illustrated here. It
will speak clearly to us (to be politically correct, "signify") and will answer the
following questions - more, I suspect, if we could frame them properly: What?
Where? When? Who? How? and perhaps even Why? These are not mere
speculations, but "facts."

Iron II C storage jar from Tell Beit Mirsim (Ruth Amiran, Ancient Pottery of
the Holy Land)

(1) In size and shape ("morphological" typology) we can confidently

classify this as a "storejar," used for solid or liquid foodstuffs.

(2) It is not only from Lachish, where it was excavated under close control,
but from a destruction layer in the inner chambers of the main city gate, its exact
context being determined by the fact that it was "sealed" under the debris and
thus cannot be considered intrusive here. No site could be more Judean than
Lachish, so the storejar's "nationality" is clear, even if it was manufactured
elsewhere in Judah and shipped here for use.

(3) The storejar's date ("temporal" typology) can be fixed precisely in the
few years just before 701, since the destruction of Level III is correlated beyond
reasonable doubt with the well-known campaign of the Neo-Assyrian king
Sennacherib. This synchronism is attested by the Assyrian annals, dated by
astronomical observations and synchronisms; the Assyrian stone-carved reliefs
found at Nineveh, now in the British Museum, showing graphic details of the
city of Lachish and its gate; extensive British and Israeli excavations at the site,
which have yielded a picture that corresponds to the Assyrian texts and reliefs
almost exactly; and, not least, the biblical descriptions in 2 Kgs. 18-20 and 2
Chr. 32, whatever historical value may be assigned to them.

(4) The question of who made the jar can be answered, even if only
somewhat impersonally, through neutron activation analysis. This can
"fingerprint" the source of the clay and thus pinpoint the place of manufacture
within reasonable limits, in this case certainly Judah. If this storejar, like
hundreds of others nearly identical, happens to bear one of the "royal stamped
storejar inscriptions" in Hebrew, we can even narrow the place of manufacture to
one of four pottery production centers: Socoh (in Judah), Ziph, Hebron, or mmslt
(identification unknown, but plausibly merngelet, or Jerusalem) .57

(5) How the storejar was made ("technological" typology) need not be a
mystery, since modern laboratory analysis can reconstruct the clay and temper
sources, the wheel and hand techniques used, and even the firing temperature of
the kiln. How the storejar was used ("functional" typology) is also easy to
ascertain, since its standardized size, large shape, and features such as handles
can have been intended only for storing dry or liquid commodities. Indeed,
several nearly identical storejars have been found bearing such Hebrew
inscriptions as bat (a well-known biblical measure, ca. 5 gallons); yayin, "wine";
or semen, "oil."58

(6) The reason for the manufacture and use of storejars of this unique type
throughout Judah is perhaps the most difficult question and had long perplexed
archaeologists. As they knew, all too well, "cognitive" typology - the "Why" of
things, or what Binford called "paleo-psychology" - is the most elusive category
of typological analysis. Yet recently we have undertaken both neutron activation
analysis of the clays, and microscopic examination of the marks of the "royal
inscriptions" left by what are only a handful of signet rings. Taking the evidence
of tightly controlled production, together with the occurrence of only four place-
names in Judah in the inscriptions, the fact that the top line of all the inscriptions
reads in Hebrew "belonging to the king," i.e., under crown aegis, and finally the
well-stratified date of these jars to the very late 8th century, there can be only
one reasonable conclusion. These storejars were manufactured under royal
supervision (in this case, Hezekiah); certified by official inspectors of size and
quality with their signet-rings; and filled with provisions and sent to principal
store-cities throughout Judah such as Lachish, intended for the anticipated siege
of Sennacherib in 701. If further proof were needed, it comes from the fact that
none of the "royal stamped jars" have been found outside Judah, for instance in
northern Israel, which had already been devastated by the Neo-Assyrian
conquests in 735-721. And as proof of royal use of such storejars, similar ones
have been found on the ancient Iron Age citadel in Jeru salem, dating to the 8th-
7th century and inscribed in Hebrew "belonging to the governor.>59

Surely 2 Chr. 32:1-8 is pertinent here. This text, although later, details
Hezekiah's preparations for the Assyrian siege against "the fortified cities" of
Judah, including not only his securing of Jerusalem's water supply (witnessed by
the well-known "Hezekiah's water tunnel" and its monumental Hebrew
inscription) and his restoration of the city walls and towers (undoubtedly
Nahman Avigad's 8th-century "broad wall" in the Old City), but also his
appointing "commanders over all the people" and placing them under royal
edict.

How would the revisionists react to the remarkable "convergences" in the

Lachish archaeological evidence and the textual data? Ahlstrom has argued that
Lachish is not "Lachish," i.e., that the large mound Tell ed-Duweir (the only one
anywhere in the vicinity) cannot be positively identified with ancient Lachish.
Philip R. Davies has recently entered the fray by claiming that the long,
beautifully executed "tunnel inscription" - our best-dated Hebrew inscription,
and the fulcrum for paleographic study of all the scripts - really belongs to the
period of the Hasmoneans in the early 2nd century B.C. In effect, the inscription
is a "forgery" when used as a datum by epigraphers and paleographers. This is so
outrageous that in recent publications, and even in popular magazines like the
Biblical Archaeology Review, all the world's leading specialists in ancient
Hebrew scripts have ridiculed Davies.60
 As for the "eloquent storejar" discussed above, what would the revisionists
say of it? Given their own presuppositions (I will not dignify them by the term
"methods"), they would be obliged to say, as of texts: the storejar does not have
any concrete "existence," except as part of an extinct system; we do not know
who "produced" it; there is no objective, discernible "intent" or "meaning" here;
it could have had any number of meanings, since symbols (like this) are
"indefinite" and "unbounded"; the storejar is, if anything, a "statement about
power and social constructs"; in any case, it "communicates" nothing except
whatever the viewer/reader perceives; it can and should be manipulated for our
own modern purposes. The revisionists' approach, applied to nearly identical
"material culture texts," or artifacts, is so absurd that the archaeologist scarcely
needs to refute it.
The central proposition of this book is very simple. While the Hebrew Bible in
its present, heavily edited form cannot be taken at face value as history in the
modern sense, it nevertheless contains much history. Obviously most such "facts
of history" lie embedded in many kinds of quasi-historical narratives, where the
overriding theological framework of the writers and editors of the Hebrew Bible
will tend to obscure them to all but the most critical and discerning eye. The
historian must patiently dig out these nuggets of truth, a task that should never
be underestimated but in my judgment is possible. That is the exact opposite of
the approach of the "revisionists," who as we have seen declare that "the Hebrew
Bible is not about history at all," i.e., it is mere propaganda. For them, if some of
the Bible's stories are unhistorical, they all are - a rather simplistic notion.

It is not fashionable in these "postmodern" times to be a "positivist," to

assert that history can be understood and can have meaning. Thus in what
follows I must defend my modest but nevertheless optimistic proposal to use
some portions of the Hebrew Bible as a possible source for history-writing.

Prolegomenon: Which Books?

Let me begin by clarifying which books of the Hebrew Bible I think can be
utilized by the would-be historian, whether textual scholar or archaeologist. With
most scholars, I would exclude much of the Pentateuch, specifically the books of
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. These materials obviously constitute
a sort of "pre-history" that has been attached to the main epic of ancient Israel by
late editors. All this may be distilled from long oral traditions, and I suspect that
some of the stories - such as parts of the Patriarchal narratives - may once have
had a real historical setting. These traditions, however, are overlaid with
legendary and even fantastic materials that the modern reader may enjoy as
"story," but which can scarcely be taken seriously as history. For instance, no
archaeologist would go looking for the Garden of Eden (even though it might
make a good movie thriller). The story is really about Mankind (Heb. 'adam,
"man") and the Mother of all living things (hawwa, "life-giver") in an earthly
Paradise (gan `eden) - in short, an idyllic and profoundly true story about the fact
that when any man and any woman find each other, in love as it should be, there
is Paradise. Eden is not a place on any map, but a state of mind.'

Or take the Patriarchal narratives. After a century of exhaustive

investigation, all respectable archaeologists have given up hope of recovering
any context that would make Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob credible "historical
figures." Virtually the last archaeological word was written by me more than 20
years ago for a basic handbook of biblical studies, Israelite and Judean History.2
And, as we have seen, archaeological investigation of Moses and the Exodus has
similarly been discarded as a fruitless pursuit. Indeed, the overwhelming
archaeological evidence today of largely indigenous origins for early Israel
leaves no room for an exodus from Egypt or a 40-year pilgrimage through the
Sinai wilderness. A Moses-like figure may have existed somewhere in southern
Transjordan in the midlate 13th century B.C., where many scholars think the
biblical traditions concerning the god Yahweh arose. But archaeology can do
nothing to confirm such a figure as a historical personage, much less prove that
he was the founder of later Israelite religion.3 As for Leviticus and Numbers,
these are clearly additions to the "pre-history" by very late Priestly editorial
hands, preoccupied with notions of ritual purity, themes of the "promised land,"
and other literary motifs that most modern readers will scarcely find edifying,
much less historical.

Much of what is called in the English Bible "poetry," "wisdom," and

"devotional literature" must also be eliminated from historical consideration.
That would include books such as Psalms, an anthology of prayers and hymns
for liturgical use, which come from many periods; Proverbs and Ecclesiastes,
collections of wisdom-sayings, some quite late and others reflecting much non-
Israelite influence; Ruth, Esther, Job, and Daniel, historical novellae with
contrived "real-life settings," the latter dating as late as the 2nd century B.C. and
reflecting the crisis of the Hasmonean Wars; the Song of Songs (or Solomon), a
cycle of erotic Oriental love-songs that finally made it into the Bible only
because both Jewish and Christian commentators "spiritualized" it; and a number
of the late, "Minor Prophets," which the literary tradition itself places last and
does not regard as very influential. The outline thus far omits 1-2 Chronicles,
which are clearly dependent on 1-2 Kings but may have, despite many scholars,
some independent traditions of occasional historical value. Of the Prophetic
books we shall speak directly.4

Most scholars regard the "epic history" of monarchical Israel and the
preceding formative period ("Judges") as contained primarily in what is called
the "Deuteronomistic history" (Dtr). This is a composite work, stretching from
Deuteronomy through Samuel and Kings. It incorporates older sources, but is
woven together with great literary sophistication into a sweeping national epic
that purports to chart Israel's history from its earliest emergence in Canaan (i.e.,
in the 12th century as we now know) to the fall of Jerusalem and the beginning
of the Exile (the early 6th century).

This literary corpus, the Deuteronomistic history, can be distinguished in its

present form by unifying themes that characterize the first portion, the book of
Deuteronomy (or the "Second Law," of Moses). Indeed according to both an
inner biblical tradition and much of the opinion of modern scholarship, the core
of the entire Deuteronomistic history is a literary work that stems from a circle
of religious reformers in the days of Josiah, in the late 7th century. This "long-
lost lawbook" is reported in 2 Kgs. 22:8-20 to have been found by accident by
the high priest Hilkiah in the Jerusalem temple, then read to the king, after which
it became the basis for a sweeping national reform. One suspects, of course, that
radical members of what became the Deuteronomistic "school" compiled the
core of Deuteronomy themselves, put it in the mouth of the legendary Moses for
obvious reasons, then hid it in the temple where it would be dramatically
discovered. Thus it would appear to be a miraculous "new" Word from Yahweh,
a "second chance" for Israel to repent and save itself on the eve of the Neo-
Babylonian advance. In short, the Deuteronomistic history as a composite
literary work is largely "propaganda," designed to give theological legitimacy to
a party of nationalist ultra-orthodox reformers, what has been called (along with
the prophetic reform movements of the time) a "Yahweh alone" party.'

This brief sketch of the Deuteronomistic history represents the consensus of

mainstream biblical scholarship since about the 1930s. There remain, however,
several problems. (1) First is the date of Dtr's composition. It cannot be earlier
than the time of Josiah (ca. 640-609), but biblical scholars remain divided
beyond that. Some think Dtr is a unified work of the preexilic period; others see
a preexilic core (Dtrl ), much edited and supplemented by postexilic writers in
the Persian period (Dtr2); and more radical scholars, like the revisionists, date
the entire work, unified or not, well down into the Hellenistic period (Philip R.
Davies) or even the Roman period (Thomas L. Thompson).

(2) The answer to a second question obviously depends upon the answer to
the first: How reliable is the Deuteronomistic "history," given its overarching
theological agenda, complex literary composition, and uncertain date? Here we
must underline how crucial the second question is, for the Deuteronomistic
corpus contains not just the "core themes" attributed to Moses. The work as a
whole comprises the entire "epic history" of Israel mentioned above, that is, it
contains not only whatever basic document the Deuteronomists produced, but
also presumably a radically edited and reworked version of earlier literary
works, most of them lost to us. Dtr claims to be a story not only of late "Mosaic"
reforms, but of Israel's entire history; it is "theocratic history" on a grand scale.'

At the heart of the Deuteronomistic history lies the connected narrative in 1-

2 Kings, beginning with David's death and continuing the story until the fall of
Jerusalem some 350 years later. It is 1-2 Kings, therefore, that will provide the
best test-case for our attempt to mine "historical nuggets" from biblical texts. For
that reason, Kings continues to fascinate scholars, as shown, for example, by an
excellent recent attempt to grapple with the work by Steven L. McKenzie, The
Trouble with Kings: The Composition of the Book of Kings in the
Deuteronomistic History.?

McKenzie brings up another matter related to the date and composition of

Kings, namely the question of whether there may have been later prophetic
additions to the work, such as the Elisha-Elijah cycle (which McKenzie takes to
be largely unhistorical). We shall look at some of the prophetic materials for
ourselves, because I am convinced that however much they may have been
edited or even composed largely by later (postexilic) "schools" bearing the
prophets' names, they reflect a real historical setting, in some cases much earlier
and certainly going back to the Iron Age. To be more specific, much of the
material in the great prophetic books reflects Israelite "daily life," even if
unintentionally and incidental to the theological message. Furthermore, I shall
show that many aspects of this picture of daily life do not fit at all in the Persian
period, much less the Hellenistic-Roman era. They fit in, and only in, the Iron II
period (ca. 1000-600) and therefore must have originated in a real history of a
real, not fictional, "Israel." Such a proposition goes completely counter to that of
the revisionists, who assume that the biblical writers knew very little if any real
history. This allowed their imaginations a free reign in literary composition, or
even resulted in complete fabrications; the Hebrew Bible overall is for them
"pious fiction," in effect a literary hoax. It is precisely that assertion that I intend
to challenge and refute, using archaeological data.

Sitze im Leben: The Search for a "Real-life Setting"

Modern literary-critical study of the Hebrew Bible beginning in the late 19th
century isolated not only the "D school" (Dtr here), but also other blocks of
literary material or "sources" that were thought to trace back to other anonymous
groups of composers. These included the "J school," so-called because of its
preference for the name Yahweh (Jahve in German) for God, thought to have
originated in the 10th-9th century B.C., perhaps in the south. The "E school," by
contrast, used the Hebrew name Elohim for God; it was dated to the 9th-8th
century and seen as reflecting northern concerns. The J and E strands of the
literary tradition constituted the bulk of the Pentateuch, or Genesis through
Deuteronomy (now, as we have seen, better ended with Numbers). It was
theorized that the J and E materials, perhaps containing much older traditions,
were at some point combined and intricately interwoven. This would explain the
doublets, contradictions, anachronisms, etc., which scholars had long since noted
in the Pentateuch. This process of amalgamation and editing that produced the
Pentateuch in its present form was attributed to a "P" or "Priestly school" that
flourished principally in the postexilic period, when most would agree that the
work we know as the Hebrew Bible was actually compiled (although, as I shall
argue, not entirely composed or written). The isolation of these four "sources" -
J, E, D, and P - was the lasting contribution of "higher criticism," or the
"documentary hypothesis" of biblical scholarship. Although the basic theory of
such separate "sources" has been attacked again and again, and has been much
revised, it remains in broad outline the basis of all modern literary critical and
historical study of the Hebrew Bible.8

The latter, the historical concern, must be kept in mind in this era of purely
"literary" approaches. It must be recalled that "higher criticism," in contrast to
"lower criticism" or the attempt to establish a correct Hebrew text, had as its
ultimate goal historical exegesis, that is, an accurate reading in an original
context that if correct would produce "truth," if not in the theological then at
least in the historical sense. The goal of modern criticism became, and still is in
most circles, the establishment of a reliable Hebrew text, corrected of errors as
far as possible by philological and literary analysis; the recovery of the date,
authorship, and historical circumstances of individual books and units within
them; detailed exegesis or interpretation of the whole text, so as to render its
historical meaning and significance; and, in the case of much Protestant
scholarship, the systematic formulation of the overall religious ideas of the texts
when finally understood, or a historical "biblical theology," valid precisely
because it could be shown to be "historical" despite, or because of, modern
"critical" scholarship. The whole modern literary-critical approach was thus
"positivist" indeed, and many "postmodern" scholars have come to question it or
even to reject it precisely because of its over-confidence, as well as its
authoritarian stance. Yet the current attack on "historicism" too easily loses sight
of what I as an archaeologist regard as an essential, critical dimension of all
ancient textual studies: history.

One particular aspect of the modern critical study of the Hebrew Bible was
"form criticism," pioneered by the great German scholar Hermann Gunkel,
developed in books like The Folktale in the Old Testament (German original
1917) and first in his Genesis commentary (1901). Both form criticism and later
"redaction criticism" (the analysis of the way the literary tradition was finally
edited) sought to comprehend biblical texts and to explain how they were
collected, transmitted, and finally edited into larger literary compositions by first
isolating individual units. These could then be characterized - whether as myth,
legend, saga, folktale, or the like - by tracing them back to a specific Sitz im
Leben (lit., "life-setting") that might explain their origin and durability, first in
oral and then finally in written traditions. Form criticism developed its
attractions at the very time when Semitic philology, ethnography, the study of
comparative religion, and especially archaeology were beginning to broaden our
knowledge of the long-lost ancient Oriental setting of the Bible in exotic and
often dramatic ways.9

The basic notion of recovering a Sitz im Leben, or context, for the biblical
texts is particularly congenial to archaeologists, because that is precisely what
we had thought we were doing all along. The more recent "contextual
archaeology" of Ian Hodder and others (Chapter 3) simply reinforces the basic
understanding of archaeology's potential contribution to history and to
historywriting that underlies all of my argument here. Yet even archaeologists of
the older "biblical" persuasion have seldom juxtaposed archaeological context
and the Sitz im Leben of textual scholars in just this way - probably because of
the characteristic isolation of our two disciplines that we noted above.

For all the importance of context as sought by biblical scholars, in practice

the search produced little more than a Sitz in Literatur - a "setting" that reflected
much more the history of the literature and its transmission than of "real life" or
history in the usual sense. To be sure, a few biblical scholars have sensed this
deficiency. Rolf Knierim's incisive critique of recent literary criticism of the
Hebrew Bible points out:

For form criticism, the societal settings behind the texts are assumed to be
the decisive generative forces for the emergence of generic texts. This
assumption, however, has always meant that a comprehensive sociological
picture of Israel's history is indispensable for form-critical work. The only
problem is that we have never had such a comprehensive picture.'°

Knierim goes on to decry "dubious reconstruction of settings via dubiously

identified text patterns" - which I would characterize simply as a classic circular
argument. He concludes:

A new direction would evolve, however, if the sociological study of Israel's

history and the study of the genres of the OT literature, each in its own
right, would be programmatically correlated. Of such a programmatic
correlation we have at best embryonic indications but neither a program nor
an execution.) i

Exactly; but how about including in that program archaeology - the only source
of information on society independent of the Hebrew Bible. Indeed, I would
argue, archaeology is our best source for a real "sociology of biblical Israel."

Thompson has also addressed this point, although obliquely, in observing

that the postexilic "setting" usually delineated for the final redaction and com
position of the Hebrew Bible as a whole is the work of what he terms only "a
handful of tradents." "One ought not to assume, however, that such Sitze im
Leben lie in Leben des Volkes [`life of the people']. Rather we are dealing with
scholarly bibliophiles."12 I would say simply that we are dealing with literature -
a literary rather than a "real-life" setting. The essential point that many
philologians (and theologians) seem to overlook is that literature does not
necessarily mirror real life, at least not the life of the masses, but only of the
literati. As noted above, the biblical texts reflect the creative, literary
imagination of a very few of the elite classes. In ancient Israel, pre- and
postexilic, these classes constituted a mere handful of priests, intellectuals
sometimes attached to the court, writing prophets, and probably scribes. These
were the people who wrote the Bible, for others like themselves.13 And while
they could write "disinterested" history or include details on ordinary day-to-day
activities when they chose to do so, the fact is that they were simply not
interested in what the vast majority of people in ancient Israel thought or did.
Only archaeology, as Fernand Braudel and some annales historians argue, "can
give history back to the people."14 Or, to use biblical language, archaeology
gives back to those anonymous folk "who sleep in the dust" (Dan. 12:2) their
authentic, long-lost voice.

Perhaps the point is simply: Who makes history? And who writes it? Which
count more, the principal actors, countless individuals over the slow-moving
millennia, as with Braudel; or those few who rationalize events, who are often
makers of myth more than of history? If "history is written by the winners," what
constitutes "winning"? While I have argued here that there is much more genuine
historical information in the biblical texts than supposed by many nowadays
(especially if we read skillfully "between the lines"), the fact is that we are
nevertheless almost totally dependent upon archaeological data for most of what
we shall ever know, about most of the people of ancient Israel, most of the time.

"Life-setting" and Historical Method

Thus far I have been optimistic about the potential of archaeology for
reconstructing a "life-setting" for some biblical texts, thereby offering
independent corroboration of the likelihood that they preserve genuinely
historical memory and information. Not only will there thus be a promising
"convergence" of textual and artifactual evidence, but we will be able to offer in
place of the revisionists' presupposition that texts "just mysteriously happen" a
coherent theory of literary production. Obvious as this proposal of using
archaeology as a tool in textual criticism may be, it is a novelty. Such a method
has never been suggested before, much less carried through in practice, either by
biblical scholars or by Syro-Palestinian archaeologists. Of course one may object
at this point that seeking such "convergences" was just what the now-discredited
older "biblical archaeology" sought to do.'5 The critical difference between that
and what I propose here has to do with the independent but parallel investigation
of the two sources of data for history-writing, and the subsequent critical
dialogue between them that scholars must undertake. But we must address the
methodological issues further before proceeding with our case-studies; in short,
we must set forth a historiographical prolegomenon.

I offer the following as a resume of common-sense, widely accepted rules

for establishing the "facts" upon the basis of which history-writing can proceed
fruitfully, whether these are textual facts or artifacts. (I would welcome similar
methodological clarification from the revisionists before they proceed with more
nonhistories of ancient Israel.) If the language sounds a bit like that of the
courtroom, that may be an appropriate metaphor.16

(1) A text or an archaeological artifact requires an external referent, an

independent witness, to corroborate it before it can become valid testimony.

(2) In the case of the Hebrew Bible, the only possible external witness will
have to come from archaeology, either in the form of artifacts and ecofacts that it
recovers or in extrabiblical textual evidence.

(3) The essential, indeed the only, correct method is to "interrogate" each
witness separately; to use the same or closely similar interpretive methods in
"reading" the evidence, agreed upon by both textual and material culture
specialists; to establish the pertinent "facts" as such, critically and selectively;
and to compare the various sources of information and the facts derived from
them so as to arrive at a synthesis that summarizes what is known or claimed to
be known. If such a synthesis is undertaken before the independent comparison,
it constitutes a presupposition, not a conclusion; and the argument will be
unpersuasive because it is circular.

(4) While "objectivity" in historical investigation is clearly impossible, as

all responsible scholars have long acknowledged (the revisionists hardly
invented that observation), objectivity must be earnestly attempted, if only to
keep the inquiry as honest and open as possible, or "disinterested" in the proper
sense. Otherwise the investigation becomes a farce (as, for instance,
Fundamentalist "scholarship" often is).

(5) Whenever the two sources or "witnesses" happen to converge in their

testimony, a historical "datum" (or given) may be said to have been established
beyond reasonable doubt. To ignore or to deny the implications of such
convergent testimony is irresponsible scholarship, since it impeaches the
testimony of one witness without reasonable cause by suppressing other vital
evidence. Cases based on suborning the key witness should be thrown out of
court.

(6) The historian is the final arbiter, or judge, of what is to be taken as

"historically true," even if some cases remain circumstantial for lack of sufficient
direct evidence.

(7) Historical "proof" in the scientific sense is rarely available in historical

reconstruction, because the objects themselves are "subjective"; human nature
and behavior are not "lawlike" except in trivial ways, and thus they are not
predictable, as for instance the behavior of particles might be in physics; there
are too many unknown variables in trying to determine historical "causation";
even if there were "laws of the historical process," the experiments needed to
demonstrate them are impossible or unrepeatable; thus neither confirmation nor
falsification is possible.

(8) Finally, the historian must work often with "the balance of probability."
This may not offer ultimate proof of what happened in history; but to overturn
that would require a more likely scenario, replete with new and superior
independent witnesses. In the absence of that, skepticism is not warranted, and
indeed is suspect. The skeptic may remain a "hostile witness," but such a witness
is overruled, and the case may be considered sufficiently established by all
reasonable historical requirements.

(9) The final jury and court of appeal are the broader community of peers,
where consensus may prevail. In the case of textual and archaeological evidence
bearing on Israel's ancient history, this community will be made up of
mainstream scholars as well as the educated public. This is not "doing history by
vote," as Thompson charges, much less "marketing" idiosyncratic interpretations
of texts, as some New Literary critics maintain as the test of truth.17 It is, rather,
a matter of seeking broad consensus - which would be a refreshing antidote to
the rabble-rousing tactics of the revisionists. If mine be dismissed as "middle-of-
the-road" scholarship, so be it: that is where most often the truth is likely to be
found.

Some "Case-studies": Israelite Ethnicity

In refuting some of the basic assumptions of the revisionists above, I have

already anticipated one test-case, namely the question of whether we can
recognize in the archaeological record an "early Israel," in the sense of an ethnic
group that was different from its contemporaries. The revisionists uniformly say
"no," so there is no "early Israel." Building on the summary of the extensive
archaeological data presented there, as well as the introduction of ethnographic
and anthropological understandings of "ethnicity," let us now compare or
contrast these data with the biblical/textual data, first looking at the two sources
independently.18
Principal Iron Age sites in Israel and Transjordan

Plan of 12th-century Israelite village at Ai (Aharon Kempinski and Ronny

Reich, The Architecture of Ancient Israel)
 Since the early 1980s, Israeli and American archaeologists have been
developing what might be called a "symbiosis" model of Israelite origins.
Extensive surface surveys of the Israeli-occupied West Bank carried out by
several teams of Israeli archaeologists, together with excavation in depth at a
few sites, have revealed that in the heartland of ancient Israel about 300 small
agricultural villages were founded de novo in the late 13th-12th centuries. They
are quite small, a few acres at most, often situated on hilltops adjacent to arable
land and good springs, almost always unwalled and without defenses of any
kind. These villages are located principally in the central hill country, stretching
all the way from the hills of lower Galilee as far south as the northern Negev
around Beersheba. None are founded on the ruins of a destroyed Late Bronze
Age site; indeed, the sites chosen for occupation in early Iron I are nearly all in
areas conspicuously devoid of Canaanite urban centers. They are situated on the
marginal hill-country frontier that had previously been only sparsely occupied.
The dispersed pattern of settlement and the overwhelming predominance of
small villages point to a distinctive nonurban society and economy, undoubtedly
agrarian. Population estimates, based on well-developed ethnographic parallels
and site size, indicate a central hill-country population of only about 12 thousand
at the end of the Late Bronze Age (13th century), which then grew rapidly to
about 55 thousand by the 12th century, then to about 75 thousand by the 11th
century. Such a dramatic "population explosion" simply cannot be accounted for
by natural increase alone, much less by positing small groups of pastoral nomads
settling down. Large numbers of people migrated here from somewhere else,
strongly motivated to colonize an underpopulated fringe area of urban Canaan,
now in decline at the end of the Late Bronze Age.

Pillared courtyard house at Khirbet Raddana, 12th century (Photo by William G.

Dever)
 Plan of the major house complex at Khirbet Raddana (Joint Expedition to
Ai)

The villages that have been excavated are characterized by U-shaped

courtyard houses (the so-called "four-room houses"), clustered in groups of two
to four, often sharing common walls. The houses have room for animal shelter
and storage of provisions on the first floor and ample space for a large extended
family on the second floor. These distinctive houses have virtually no precedents
in Canaan, but they would be ideal farmhouses. Indeed, almost identical houses
are still found all around the eastern Mediterranean in rural areas. No
monumental or "elite" structures of any kind have been found in any of these
Iron I villages, only clusters of courtyard houses, up to a half dozen or so.
Harvard's Lawrence Stager has demonstrated that this unique house form and
overall layout of these hill-country villages correspond closely with many
narratives of daily life in the period of the judges in the books of Joshua, Judges,
and Samuel, reflecting no doubt a close-knit family and clan structure and an
agrarian lifestyle.19 In Stager's view the single-courtyard house represents the
nuclear family dwelling; and the cluster of several such houses would then be
the residence of the extended, or multi-generation family equivalent to the
biblical bet-'ab, or "house of the father."
 I myself have compared this socio-economic structure to the "domestic
mode of production," which anthropologist Marshall D. Sahlins has described as
"in effect the tribal economy in miniature, so politically it underwrites the
condition of primitive society - society without a sovereign."20 This would seem
to be an apt description of both early Israel as described in the Bible and the hill-
country archaeological assemblage.

A number of new or more efficiently developed technologies also appear in

the hill country at almost the same time - these include, for example, intensive
hillside terracing, best suited for small-scale subsistence farming, especially
horticulture and viticulture, but also adaptable for cereal production in the small
intermountain valleys, and even for herding of animals on many of the drier
slopes. Also, plastered cisterns cut into the bedrock are found in many of the
houses. Stone-lined silos for grain storage are still another new feature. These
are all relatively rare in preceding periods.

Bronze and flint implements continued in use at this time; but iron, a new
technology, appears sporadically, although only in the form of utilitarian objects
such as picks or plowpoints. Pottery forms continued generally in the degenerate
LB tradition, but wares are now often partly handmade rather than made on a
fast wheel.

Nearly all of the traits indicate that the village economy was based on mixed
agro-pastoralism, dry farming of cereals, and localized exchange of agricultural
surpluses and other products (as well as labor). Large multigenerational families
would have been the mainstay and focus of such an economy, the "domestic
mode of production" noted above.

Similar agrarian lifestyles have characterized ancient Palestine in the rural

areas in many periods, even in the mid-20th century A.D. But one aspect of what
archaeologists are now distinguishing as "food systems" is unique: the consistent
absence of pig bones in excavated remains. Pork was relatively common in
Bronze Age sites, pigs being well adapted to many areas. The statistical rarity of
pig bones in Iron I hill-country sites - often absent altogether or comprising only
a fraction of a percent - may be an "ethnic marker." In this case, it would be one
consistent with later biblical data regarding the prohibition of pork in Israelite
society, probably to be understood as a criterion distinguishing "Israelites" from
"Canaanites." The presence or absence of pig bones may thus be our best
archaeological indicator of the much-debated "ethnic boundaries" and their
physical extent.21 I suspect, however, that many other valid indicators will
eventually be discovered.

Politically, there appears to be no central authority, although the inhabitants

do seem to be in the process of defining themselves as an ethnic group. Needless
to say, this accords well with the statement in Judges: "In those days there was
no king in Israel, and every man did what was right in his own eyes" (Judg. 17:6;
21:25).

Religiously, there is a complete absence of temples, sanctuaries, or shrines

of any type in these Iron I hill-country villages - in sharp contrast to the
proliferation of temples in the preceding Late Bronze Age in Palestine.
Currently, we have only one Iron I cult installation of any sort, a small isolated
open-air hilltop shrine in the Samaria hills, featuring a low temenos wall, an
altarlike platform, and a large standing stone (the biblical massebd). A few Iron I
pottery sherds, pieces of a terra-cotta cult-stand, some iron fragments, and a
wellpreserved bronze bull figurine suggest connections with the old Canaanite
cult of the male deity El, whose principal epithet was "Bull El." El remained one
of the two names of the Israelite national god in many of the early biblical texts,
associated particularly with "the god of the fathers." Another putative early
Israelite shrine has been found atop Mt. Ebal, the Shechem area; but most
authorities regard this installation as an isolated farmhouse or fort.
 The "Bull Site," 12th century (The Hazor Archaeological Expedition)

Otherwise, we have no clear archaeological evidence of Israelite religion

and cult before the monarchy in the 10th-9th centuries. The absence of more
visible data suggests an extremely simple, aniconic, noninstitutionalized cult,
probably based on - and still in the tradition of - the older Canaanite "fertility
religions" that would have been well suited to an agrarian lifestyle.

Only a few fragmentary inscriptions have been found in these Iron I

villages. A late 13th-/early 12th-century jar handle inscribed with the
ProtoCanaanite letters 'ahl[d], possibly "belonging to Ahilud," a personal name
known from the Bible, was recovered at Radannah, near Ramallah. More
important is a four-line ostracon with an abecedary (or list of alphabetic letters),
found in an early 11th-century context at `Izbet Sartah, possibly biblical
Ebenezer, also in Proto-Canaanite letters. While not a literary text with any
content, such an abecedary cannot have been an isolated item; it is almost
certainly a schoolboy's practice text, and as such it may indicate at least the
beginnings of functional literacy.22

Pottery reflects many aspects of culture and remains our most sensitive
index to cultural continuity and change. The Iron I pottery of these hillcountry
sites, particularly that of the early 12th century, remains strongly in the old LB II
local tradition. The direct continuities are clear in nearly all forms, with only the
normal, predictable typological developments.
 Plan of the Mount Ebal installation, 12th century (Judith Dekel)

This complex of sites and material culture constitutes a parade example of

what archaeologists call an "assemblage" - an assortment of contemporaneous
archaeological artifacts and their contexts, found together in a consistent pattern
of association and distributed over a particular and well-defined geographic
region. Such an assemblage, when documented from enough excavated sites and
thereby distinguished from other assemblages, is usually said to denote an
"archaeological culture," particularly if the assemblage can be shown to be
distinctive, new, or intrusive. The assemblage can then often be confidently
attributed to a known "ethnic group," for example, the Philistines of Palestine's
coastal plain. Similarly we can recognize the remains of the Phoenicians,
Aramaeans, Moabites, Ammonites, and Edomites. Why not the Israelites?

A few archaeologists like Israel Finkelstein - who ironically had earlier

written the book on "Early Israel" - have recently been taken in by the
nowfashionable skepticism toward "ethnicity," which is simply part and parcel of
the postmodern paradigm already discussed. Since there is so little evidence to
support such extreme skepticism, it puzzled me for some time - until I realized
that for postmodernists ethnicity is mistakenly equated with racism. The most
recent book on archaeology and ethnicity written from this perspective takes as
virtually its only case-study of archaeologists improperly identifying "ethnicity"
the Nazis and their attempt to use archaeology to distinguish a "Super Race."
Surely this is "argumentum ad absurdum."
 The same skepticism about our ability, indeed our entitlement, to recognize
ethnicity in the archaeological record, is seen among the biblical revisionists.
Thompson, for instance, makes the following astonishing claims:

Ethnicity, however, is an interpretative historiographical fiction: a concept

construing human relationships, before it is a term (however conducive to
descriptions based on material remains....). Ethnicity is hardly a common
aspect of human existence at this very early period.

Thompson thinks that whatever "ethnicity" there might have been dealt only
with structures of societal relationships; and "the physical effects of such
selective decisions are often arbitrary and are, indeed, always accidental." If that
were true, no social science - the study of cultural phenomena that reflect
patterned human thought and behavior - would be possible. Other revisionist
absurdities are Thompson's statement that "all peoples writ large for purposes
fictional"; and Lemche's assertion that "The Canaanites of the ancient Near East
did not know that they were themselves Canaanites."23

Other biblicists are less doctrinaire, like some of the contributors to the
volume edited by Mark G. Brett, Ethnicity and the Bible. Yet Brett himself
simply accepts at face value the general skepticism of the revisionists, even
stating that the failure to locate "Israelites" in the archaeological record would
come as no surprise to most anthropologists, a gross over-simplification. Diana
V. Edelman, an American scholar often associated with the revisionists and now
also at Sheffield, has a long chapter in which she identifies several "ethnic
markers," in accordance with myself and other archaeologists who may follow
Fredrik Barth's pioneering ethnographic work. These include such material
culture traits as settlement type and pattern, architecture, pottery, burial customs,
and the like. She denies, however, that these are distinctively new in the
archaeology of the early Iron Age, or that even if present in some way would tell
us anything about ethnicity. Edelman argues that ethnic identity is complex and
dynamic, that ethnic markers cannot be predicted, that no single list of traits can
be generated, and that material culture traits alone are not definitive. What
archaeologist has ever said otherwise? Edelman, not surprisingly, concludes that
"given the present state of textual and artifactual evidence, nothing definitive can
be said about the ethnicity of premonarchic Israel." Underlying all this
skepticism, it seems to me, is not only a regrettable lack of knowledge of the
actual LB-Iron archaeological record, but the dubious assumption that because
ethnic consciousness and boundaries are flexible they are fictional.24

Has archaeology brought to light an entity that we can legitimately call

"early Israel"? Consider the "assemblage" described above. It is demonstrably a
new phenomenon at the dawn of the iron Age ca. 1200, despite a few
continuities with the Late Bronze Age. This village culture is also intrusive, at
least in the previously underpopulated hill country with its few urban centers.
And the overall assemblage is sufficiently homogeneous and distinctive to
warrant some label. The only remaining question is: What label?

We could of course call them "the early Iron Age hill-country settlers." Then
there is Thompson's term, "the Iron Age population of Syria's marginal southern
fringe" (evidently the very term "Israel" is an embarrassment to him). But even
minimalist designations presume a chronological, culturalevolutionary, and
functionalist distinction; and these too are "ethnic markers." So it seems that one
cannot avoid a judgment. After much reflection on the archaeological data, I
have suggested that we go further, adopting the term "Proto-Israelite" to
designate this 12th-11th century complex.

At least two additional pieces of evidence justify this proposal. The

wellknown "Victory stele" of the 19th-Dynasty Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah,
erected at Thebes in about his third year (ca. 1210), celebrates victories over a
number of real or perceived enemies in Canaan.25 The text lists several defeated
peoples and then mentions "Israel," who "is laid waste; its seed is not." All
scholars would agree that the date is fixed within a margin of less than five years
by astronomical reckoning; that the reading "Israel" is certain; that "Israel" is
followed by the Egyptian plural gentilic or determinative sign for "peoples,"
rather than a kingdom, city-state, or the like, and must therefore designate some
ethnic group; and that this entity, whatever it is, was distinct in the minds of the
Egyptians from Canaanites, Hurrians, Shasu-bedouin, or other groups in Canaan
well known to Egyptian intelligence and mentioned in this and other Egyptian
texts. Yet despite this fortuitous text - our earliest and most secure extrabiblical
textual reference to "Israel" - the revisionists have turned somersaults to avoid
the obvious implications. They argue, for instance, that the mention of an
"Israel" tells us nothing about its nature or location. Or they denigrate the
reference as our "only" known reference.

But one unimpeachable witness in the court of history is sufficient. The only
thing we really need to know at this point, the Merneptah stele tells us
unequivocally: There does exist in Canaan a people calling themselves "Israel,"
and thus called "Israel" by the Egyptians - who, after all, are hardly biblically
biased, and they cannot have invented such a specific and unique people as
"Israel" for their own propaganda purposes. Moreover, if we look at a map based
on the Merneptah stele, we see that the Egyptian-held territory is clear. The
"Hurrians" are located in the north; the Shasu-bedouin are to be located in the
Negev desert and Transjordan; and in less than a generation the Philistines and
other "Sea Peoples" will be entrenched along the coast. What is left in Canaan
ca. 1200 as an "Israelite" enclave except the central hill country? If Merneptah's
"Israel" was not here, where was it?

Typical 12th-century Israelite hill-country pottery, from Giloh (Israel

Finkelstein and Nadav Na'aman, From Nomadism to Monarchy)

I stress that our conclusions at this point do not depend in any sense on a
particular reading of the biblical texts, or even on the existence of a "Bible,"
much less on the need to defend theological positions. The Israeli archaeologists
involved in producing most of the above data are all secularists, from many
backgrounds but in no case theologically or nationalistically motivated - simply
professionals who specialize in the analysis of material culture remains. On the
other hand, a number of American archaeologists of conservative religious
background, who undertook archaeological research no doubt hoping to be able
to defend "invasion theories" like those of the book of Joshua, must have found
the overwhelming evidence of the "indigenous origins" of most early Israelites
hard to accept. But one and all they did so. As Joseph A. Callaway of Southern
Baptist Theological Seminary concluded, henceforth it is the archaeological
evidence, not the textual, that will be decisive in understanding Israelite
origins.26 So much for the revisionists' charge of "biblical bias." For those who
seem to know nothing whatsoever about archaeology to malign these
archaeologists, myself included, as "biblicists" and "Zionists" is absurd. It
certainly does little to inspire our confidence in them as historians.27
 Map of Merneptah's campaign to Palestine, with his "Israel" located in the
central hill country, in accord with the Iron I settlements now known there
(Biblical Archaeology Society)

Now let us turn to the biblical data. If we look at the biblical texts
describing the origins of Israel, we see at once that the traditional account
contained in Genesis through Joshua simply cannot be reconciled with the
picture derived above from archaeological investigation. The whole "Exodus-
Conquest" cycle of stories must now be set aside as largely mythical, but in the
proper sense of the term "myth": perhaps "historical fiction," but tales told
primarily to validate religious beliefs. In my view, these stories are still "true" in
that they convey forcefully later Israel's self-awareness as a "liberated people." I
have even argued that there may be some actual historical truth here, since
among the southern groups whom we know to have written much of the Hebrew
Bible there is known a "House (tribe) of Joseph," many of whom may indeed
have stemmed originally from Egypt. When they told the story of Israel's origins,
they assumed naturally that they spoke for "all Israel" (as the Bible uses the
term), even though most of the latter's ancestors had been local Canaanites. In
struggling to explain what it means to be an "American," we do the same thing.
At the great national holiday of Thanksgiving, we all patriotically identify with
those Pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower (as though we were all
cardcarrying members of the Daughters of the American Revolution). But in
fact, my ancestors came as dirt-poor Irish farmers from County Donegal in the
potato famine of the 1840s; and others may have come from Africa, Mexico, or
elsewhere. The revisionists like to stress the variety of meanings attached to
"ethnicity"; but ethnicity is simply a deep sense of belonging that cannot be
gainsaid by overlooking the fact of our unity in diversity, or that of any ethnic
group. The Jewish community - surely as diverse as any in the world, but no less
an ethnic group - understands all this instinctively. At Passover, Jews all over the
world solemnly commemorate the Exodus story by reciting: "It is as though we
had come out of Egypt this night." Precisely. The "Exodus story" is a really a
Passover Haggadah, partly fanciful, partly humorous, a hyperbole to be sure, but
profoundly true as a "story about who we are."

Yet however we attempt to "salvage" much of the biblical narratives about

the origins of Israel, we may be limited. We cannot make the Bible what it is not.
Fortunately, the writers and editors of the Hebrew Bible, being far more so
phisticated and better historians than some would have us believe, placed in their
final edition another version, back-to-back with Joshua, the book of Judges.
Many scholars, puzzled by the two often differing versions of events, have
attempted to harmonize them, but the obvious contradictions are too great.
Joshua, written largely to glorify a great hero of early Israel, credits him with
sweeping rapid military victories over most of Canaan, vanquishing the whole
land. Judges, however, begins its story with Joshua's death in Judg. 1:1, then
goes on to weave a 200-year-long tale of some 12 "judges," or charismatic
figures raised up by Yahweh to deal with the very threat that Joshua has disposed
of, namely the continuing presence of Canaanites and of Canaanite culture. Then
later in ch. 1 we find a "negative list" of the supposed "conquest," cities that
were not taken, some of them like Hazor the very same cities that Joshua was
said to have utterly destroyed. To explain the continuous struggle and the chaos,
the authors or editors of judges repeat the refrain: "In those days there was no
king in Israel, and every man did what was right in his own eyes" (Judg. 21:25).

The modern biblical historian, or even the thoughtful lay person, might
observe at once the "anti-royalist" bias of those who produced the book of
Judges. But the point here is that recognition of this bias should not obscure the
fact that the writers of judges have described much of the actual historical
process accurately. Their rationalization, developed perhaps centuries after the
fact, may be suspect; but many essential facts remain. The Iron I period, as we
would call it, was not characterized by decisive military battles, the wholesale
destruction of the Canaanite urban centers and the annihilation of the populace,
and the triumph by brute force of a group of outsiders. It was characterized,
rather, as we now know from intense archaeological investigation, by large-scale
socio-economic disruption, major demographic shifts to the hillcountry frontiers,
and by life-and-death struggles between competing ethnic and cultural groups
that lasted anywhere from one to two centuries. Among the elements in this
"multi-ethnic" society in Palestine and southern Syria in Iron I, scholars have
confidently identified "Egyptians," "Canaanites," "Philistines," "neo-Hittites,"
"Aramaeans," and "Phoenicians." I have argued that there is at least as much
evidence for our "Proto-Israelites" as for any of these other wellknown ethnic
groups.28 It would seem that arbitrarily eliminating them can only be the result
of a prejudice, conscious or otherwise. And the positive evidence for early
"Israelites" at this point comes not from the biblical accounts alone, or even
primarily - certainly not from the mainstream of the biblical narrative - but from
the convergence of archaeological and textual data, carefully sifted through,
mostly in the book of judges.
 Typical Iron I village house, as reconstructed by Lawrence E. Stager (Drawing
by Abbas Alizadeh)

It is not, however, only the general cultural situation presumed in the

narrations of judges which "rings true" in the light of what we actually know.
Stager took notice of the new archaeological data from Israeli surveys in the
West Bank at about the same time as I did. His brilliant 1985 article "The
Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Israel" outlined exactly the sort of detailed
convergences that I have in mind here.29 These are archaeological "facts on the
ground" that correspond astonishingly well with descriptions of daily life and
overall socio-economic conditions in the book of judges that purport to be
"factual." But they also converge in some degree with texts in 1-2 Samuel and
even in parts of Joshua.

(1) The individual dwelling, with living and storage accommodation for
foodstuffs, several animals, and up to a dozen people would represent the bet-
'ab, the biblical "house of the father," or patriarchal figure, the nuclear family to
which every geber, or individual, belonged. (2) The cluster of several houses,
sharing common walls, courtyards, and other features, would then be the biblical
mispahd, or "family," in reality a multi-generation extended family (the typical
Middle Eastern "stem family" today. (3) At the next higher level of organization,
the entire village, consisting of several such clusters, would be the biblical sebet,
or "clan, tribe." (4) The entire complex of many villages would be the bend-
Yisrael, or "sons of Israel," that is, the ethnic group as a whole. These striking
analogies between new and definitive archaeological data and a sophisticated
socio-anthropological reading of the older, folkloric strata of the biblical texts -
my "convergence" - suggest to me that at last archaeology has brought to light
the actual remains of "earliest Israel." If so, this is one of the most striking
success stories in the 100-year history of "biblical archaeology."

It may be significant that none of the revisionists ever refers to Stager's

much-quoted article on early Israel. To summarize the convergences at which
they might look if they were so inclined, let us put what we can know
independently from our two sources in simple chart form (see p. 125).

Convergences in the Biblical Period of the United Monarchy

As we saw above, the revisionists vociferously deny that there ever was any such
entity as the Hebrew Bible's "United Monarchy," or the reigns of Saul, David,
and Solomon. There was no Israelite "state" in the north, with its capital in
Samaria, until the mid-9th century; and no southern or Judean state, with its
capital in Jerusalem, until the mid-late 7th century.30 What is conspicuously
absent in their repeated assertions is not only lack of any evidence, but even
more damaging, the absence of critical discussion of the voluminous literature
on what are called "state-formation processes." This phenomenon has been one
of the most discussed topics among socio-anthropologists and scholars in
numerous other disciplines for over 20 years. One of the recent revisionists and a
student of Ahlstrom, Margaret M. Gelinas comments that "scholars have yet to
reach consensus on the definition of `statehood' as it would be applied to the
regions of Palestine during the period of early first millennium BCE," but that
"Thompson has taken this question seriously and started to identify the necessary
socioeconomic data to be examined."31
 This is the danger of scholarly inbreeding. Despite their pronouncements
about "states," one searches recent revisionist writing in vain for an awareness of
the basic theoretical literature on state formation processes. Again, Finkelstein
distinguishes himself from them by a rather thorough acquaintance with the
general literature; so although he may differ with me on the date of the
emergence of the Israelite states, at least he is knowledgeable when he discusses
"states."32 I can easily cite two dozen leading authorities who have analyzed
states and their evolution worldwide, over many millennia. Without exception,
they all point out that the single most significant criterion for defining
"statehood" is centralization of power.33 It is that phenomenon, not size, much
less urbanization, that characterizes statehood, as we shall see presently.

In the light of competent critical scholarship on the issue of

"stateformation," how do the revisionists fare? Not very well. Only Lemche and
Thompson have advanced any so-called evidence, and that is bogus. They have
declared:

In the history of Palestine that we have presented, there is no room for a

historical United Monarchy, or for such kings as those presented in the
biblical stories of Saul, David or Solomon. The early period in which the
traditions have set their narrative is an imaginary world of long ago that
never existed as such. In the real world of that time, for instance, only a few
dozen villagers lived as farmers in all of the Judaean highlands. Timber,
grazing lands and steppe were all marginal possibilities. There could not
have been a kingdom for any Saul or David to be king of, simply because
there were not enough people.34

In my opinion, those who so blatantly ignore the facts, even in a single such
statement, forfeit any credibility as discriminating scholars. Lemche and
Thompson cite no evidence whatsoever for their "few dozen villagers" in the
10th century. But Finkelstein, Adam Zertal, Avi Ophir, the late Yigael Shiloh, I,
and other archaeologists have shown on the basis of extensive surveys and
welldocumented demographic projections that the population of the late
13thcentury highlands was ca. 12 to 15 thousand. By the 12th century, it had
grown to ca. 50 thousand, by the 11th century to ca. 80 thousand, and in all
likelihood to ca. 100 thousand by the mid-late 10th century. Finkelstein's
estimate of "ca. 2,2001" which Thompson claims as the basis for his figures, was
clearly for the few villages around Jerusalem in the 10th century, not the entire
Judean highlands, much less Israel and Judah together. Elsewhere Finkelstein's
estimate for the population of the hill country - i.e., the territory that would have
constituted the heartland of the biblical "United Monarchy" - is ca. 65 thousand.
In oral communication Finkelstein says that he agrees with me that ca. 100
thousand is not too high a figure for all of "Israel" and "Judah" in the 10th
century.35

Even if Thompson could cut our 10th-century population to one-half, or

possibly one-quarter, he would still have no case against Israelite statehood. The
lowland Maya state of Tikal, recognized as such by anthropologists, had a
population of only some 50 thousand, and several multi-valley Andean states
had a population of 15 to 16 thousand. Other authorities would suggest a
threshold of about 20 thousand, beyond which a society may be said to develop a
degree of centralization and statehood almost inevitably.36 As for the
"urbanization" that Thompson seems to think essential but lacking in 10th-
century Palestine, the anthropological and archaeological literature demonstrates
differently. The distinguished authorities Vere Gordon Childe and Robert
McCormick Adams have shown independently that often it is not urbanization
that "causes" states to form, but the other way around. And some early societies
achieved statehood without ever experiencing a truly urban stage of evolution,
among them the Han Dynasty in China, one of the half-dozen or so examples of
"pristine" (independently evolving) states regularly cited in the literature on
statehood.37

Quite apart from that consideration, I have recently summarized the

available archaeological data in detail, showing that at least a dozen sites in
10thcentury Palestine would qualify as "cities" by clear-cut criteria that have
been de veloped for the small-scale entities of the southern Levant in the Iron
Age. Even 9th-century Moab in sparsely-populated Transjordan is now being
characterized by archaeologists as a state, at least of the "tribal" type that Philip
S. Khoury and Joseph Kostiner have documented so thoroughly in Tribes and
State Formation in the Middle East.38 In this case, the term "tribal state" seems
to be favored by more and more, rather than the "chiefdom" model that the
former generation preferred. The essential point is this: today nearly all
archaeologists recognize a small-scale but authentic "state" in central Palestine
in the mid-late 10th century, or the beginning of Iron II, on archaeological
grounds alone. Even our label "Israelite" could be extrapolated from the
Egyptian reference on the inscription of Pharaoh Merneptah to an "Israel" in
Canaan ca. 1210, in connection with the continuity of Iron I-II material culture
that all archaeologists acknowledge.39 It is not we archaeologists and students of
the cultural process who need the Bible, but the revisionists, whose point of
departure is nevertheless biblical: they recognize an "Israel" not when the
biblical text says it develops, but in the mid-9th century when the first references
known to us outside the Bible occur, namely in the Neo-Assyrian and Moabite
texts (below). How is it that the biblical texts are always approached with
postmodernism's typical "hermeneutics of suspicion," but the nonbiblical texts
are taken at face value? It seems to be that the Bible is automatically held guilty
unless proven innocent.

If there were any doubt about the revisionists' presupposition that there
cannot have been an early Israel, one has only to look at their summary rejection
of the 9th-century Tel Dan inscription mentioning "a king of Israel" and the
"House of David," now confidently dated by additional fragments to the reign of
Joram ("Jehoram") of Judah, who ruled ca. 847-842. On the "positivist" side of
the controversy, regarding the authenticity of the inscription, we now have
published opinions by most of the world's leading epigraphers (none of whom is
a "biblicist" in Thompson's sense): the inscription means exactly what it says.
On the "negativist" side, we have the opinions of Thompson, Lemche, and Cryer
of the Copenhagen school. The reader may choose.40

A final point should be made in this connection. Thompson and Lemche

must deny that there was any parallel course of development in the two states,
Israel and Judah in the 10th-8th/7th centuries, because they recognize only one -
what Thompson calls the state of Samaria or "Samarina" (a strangely
panAssyrian notion), that is, the biblical northern kingdom.4' There are,
however, clear indications of a north-south division by the 9th-8th centuries, on
strictly archaeological grounds. Ruth Amiran's classic Ancient Pottery of the
Holy Land already organized the analysis of much of the Iron Age pottery in
terms of northern and southern "families."42 It is also well known that the late
8th- and 7th-century inscribed sheqel-weights and pillar-base figurines, as well
as the late 8th-century "royal stamped jarhandles," so common in Judah, are
almost never found in the north. Thus there exists just north of Jerusalem, along
the Gezer-Bethel line, what archaeologists would call a "shatter-zone," implying
a cultural and thus a political border at that point.43 Biblical scholars themselves
have known for a century or more that there are even consistent dialectical
differences between Israel and Judah, differences in orthography in general, and
specifically in personal names compounded with the name of the deity that end
in the north in -yaw but in the south in the long form -yahu.44 Again, these
differences are archaeological and linguistic facts, not "biblical fancies."

The 9th-century Aramaic inscription from Tel Dan, mentioning a "King of

Israel," probably Joram, 847-842 (line 8), and the "House (i.e., dynasty) of
David" (line 9) (Tel Dan Excavations, Hebrew Union College)
 Distribution of the late 8th-7thcentury Judean inscribed sheqelweights,
corresponding with the political borders of Judah (Raz Kletter, following
Nadav Na'aman)

As for Thompson's refusal to acknowledge Jerusalem as a state capital

before the 7th century, that is entirely an argument from silence, as Nadav
Na'aman has recently pointed out. Na'aman's treatments of Israelite history
elsewhere have hardly been conservative, but on the contrary rather radical. Yet
he easily demonstrates the fallacy of Thompson's (and Lemche's) arguments.
Few 10th-century archaeological levels have been exposed in the deeply
stratified and largely inaccessible ruins of ancient Jerusalem, so the paucity of
finds means nothing. Yet there is growing evidence of extensive occupation.41

The Gates of Gezer

One "case-study" in the possibilities of a dialogue between texts and artifacts is

especially relevant, namely the well-known city gate and walls at Gezer. These
were excavated first by R. A. S. Macalister in 1902-9. It was the late Yigael
Yadin - widely experienced in matters of both statecraft and military strategy -
who first drew attention in modern times to the distinctive four-entryway gate
and casemate (or double) city walls at Gezer, after he recognized almost
identical gates and walls in his excavations at Hazor in the 1950s and later on at
Megiddo in the central Jezreel valley. Yadin, "biblical archaeologist" or not,
knew his Hebrew Bible, so in a brief 1958 article he cited 1 Kgs. 9:15-17.46
This text basically describes how Gezer was ceded by the Egyptians to Solomon
after the pharaoh had destroyed the city "by fire"; and how Solomon
subsequently "built the wall" at Gezer, along with walls at Hazor, Megiddo, and
Jerusalem. Yadin observed that the discovery of nearly identical 10th-century
city walls and gates at three of the four sites listed in 1 Kgs. 9:15-17 (and now
probably 8th-7th century parallels from Jerusalem itself) could hardly be a
coincidence. Indeed, he took the convergence, as we would call it here, to imply
that all these defenses could only have been constructed by a sort of "Royal
Corps of Engineers" under Solomon's highly centralized administration.

Between 1967 and 1971 the Hebrew Union College-Harvard Semitic

Museum excavations at Gezer relocated the long-buried gate and city wall and
excavated the portions that Macalister had left uncleared. We had already
discovered in Field II that the casemate wall was founded above a deep
destruction layer dated by the pottery to about the mid-10th century, the latter
possibly the earlier Egyptian destruction in question. In Field III, the city gate
associated with the wall turned out to be exceptionally well engineered and
beautifully preserved. The upper fourentryway gate, founded again on deep fills,
had a complex history, with more than a dozen successive street levels. After the
third repaving, the outer two-entryway gatehouse (and probably the rebuild of
Macalister's "Outer Wall") was added. Then shortly after that, the whole area,
including adjoining "Palace 10,000," suffered a major destruction, after which
buttresses were required to shore up the weakened western portion of the upper
gate. The pottery from this destruction layer included distinctive forms of red-
slipped and slipped and hand-burnished (polished) pottery, which have always
been dated to the late 10th century. The equally distinctive wheel-burnished
pottery characteristic of the early 9th century at all known sites was
conspicuously absent. Thus, on commonly accepted ceramic grounds - not on
naive acceptance of the Bible's stories about "Solomon in all his glory" - we
dated the Gezer Field III city walls and gates to the mid-late 10th century. In
addition to the ceramic evidence, we used the datum provided by the wellknown
campaigns of the Egyptian Pharaoh Sheshonq, ca. 925 (below), to fix the date of
the destruction, and thus place the construction and major use-phases somewhat
earlier. These would then fall within the ca. 970-930 date that the biblical
accounts would give for Solomon's reign.47 We did not create this "conver
gence"; we simply observed it and thought to use it as a proper source for
historywriting. If the biblical Solomon had not constructed the Gezer gate and
city walls, then we would have to invent a similar king by another name.

Plan of several fourentryway gates, probably all 10th century (Ze'ev Herzog,
The City-Gate in Eretz-Israel)
 The 10th-century four-entryway gate in Field III at Gezer (Stratum VIII),
looking outside the city (Photo by R. B. Wright)

We have used this evidence of centralization at Gezer, as well as at Hazor

and Megiddo, as proof of a Solomonic "state" in the 10th century, the heated
denial of which is one of the basic building-blocks of the revisionist agenda.
Thompson has recently accused me of going to Gezer in the Spring of 1969,
when no one living had seen the partially-excavated and reburied gate of
Macalister (his "Maccabean Castle"), to "prove the historicity of the Bible." He
even charges that I deliberately removed inconvenient stones from the gate and
rolled them down the hill, as well as discarding any of the pottery that might
challenge my hypothesis of a 10th-century date.48 What is one to make of such
slander, similar to Thompson's implication that the Tel Dan inscription is a
forgery? Is the revisionists' case so weak that they must resort to falsification of
the evidence and impugning the integrity of any scholars who differ with them?
 Plan of the Gezer Field III gate

Again, I suggest that the archaeological data are not "mute," but that some
historians cannot bear to listen. Even Thompson's concession that there was a
city gate at Gezer, but that it dates to the 9th century (i.e., "non-Solomonic"), is
not reassuring. He completely ignores the fact that our 10th-century date derives
not from any "biblical connection," but rather from the fact that the foundation
and early use levels of the gate and its streets are characterized by a unique style
of hand-burnished pottery. Here and elsewhere this pottery is found only in
occupational deposits pre-dating the destructions accompanying Sheshonq's
campaigns. This is the "Shishak" of 1 Kgs. 11:40 and 2 Chr. 12:2-4 (and of
Egyptian annals), texts that provide us with the necessary synchronism and thus
a terminus ante quem for the Gezer gate ca. 925. The latter text does so by
noting that Shishak's raid took place "in the fifth year of King Rehoboam,"
Solomon's son and successor, and thus five years after Solomon's death.
Solomon then would have reigned ca. 970-930, if the Bible's "forty years" is
correct. In any case, the destruction of Solomon's Gezer is closely fixed by extra-
biblical evidence at ca. 925.49
 Concerning the Shishak raid, it should be noted that earlier scholars like
William F. Albright, Benjamin Mazar, and Yohanan Aharoni worked out a map
of the Shishak raid a generation ago, with many sites suggested as candidates for
Egyptian destructions. Today the list and the map can be considerably expanded.
It would include, at minimum, the following sites and strata (from north to
south; *= named on the Shishak list):50
The campaign of Shishak. Note Gezer, Tirzah, Rehob, Bethshan, and Megiddo,
all of which (along with other sites) witness to a late-10th-century destruction
(Yohanan Aharoni, The Land of the Bible)

The critical reader will grasp at once the importance of this

SolomonShishak synchronism. Readers are also likely to sense instinctively that
there is simply no way that a biblical writer or editor living in the Persian-
HellenisticRoman era - when Pharaonic Egypt had long since sunk into oblivion
and its literature was largely lost - could have known about such a synchronism.
Later compilers also could not have known about specific destructions at the
sites noted above, since the ancient remains of these cities had long been buried
under the sands of time. The Solomon-Shishak destruction-layer synchronism is
so secure that most archaeologists take it for granted, arguing at most over
exactly which layer in a given mound is the best candidate for Shishak's raid. Yet
biblical scholars, especially the revisionists, are curiously blase. Recent standard
histories of ancient Israel pass over it with a few remarks, but not one goes into
the archaeological evidence and its significance. Gelinas, in treating the evidence
for a Solomonic kingdom, mentions the Shishak raid once in passing, only to
dismiss it because "there is no Egyptian narrative of the account." But what are
the battle-itinerary, list of destroyed sites, and registers of booty in the text of the
Shishak stele? She simply says that this text does not prove the existence of a
"state" of Israel or Judah. Again, does she suppose that an Egyptian pharaoh
launched a far-away campaign, of which he later boasted, simply against
Thompson's "few dozen villagers in all of the Judaean highlands"? Significantly,
Gelinas, along with the other revisionists, is totally silent concerning the
wellpublished archaeological data on the several Shishak destructions in
Palestine.51

The considerable archaeological evidence that I have summarized here

regarding centralized planning and administration reflects what is regarded in the
literature as the principal trait of state-level organization. Even if one is cautious,
however, about drawing such a specific conclusion at this point, the Hazor,
Megiddo, and Gezer evidence does not stand alone. The evidence presented here
is only the tip of the archaeological iceberg for the 10th century.52 Before going
into detail on some other specific data, I would stress again that the city defenses
and all the rest are part of a dramatic, large-scale process of organization and
centralization that utterly transformed the landscape of most of Palestine in the
period from the early 10th to early 9th century. It is such shifts in settlement type
and distributions together with marked demographic changes that signal most
clearly a new archaeological and thus new cultural phase, in this case the
transition from Iron Ito Iron II.

The revisionists simply ignore the data on the Iron 1-11 transition
(Thompson's "few dozen villagers"), but all archaeologists are in absolute
agreement that the phenomena of urbanization and centralization characterize
this horizon accurately. The only differences, even among "extremists," have to
do with the precise dating of phases within the century noted here: i.e., are the
city defenses late 10th century or early 9th century? The revisionists scarcely
cite these dates at all, and they refer to archaeologists' differing views on inner
phasing only selectively, as though to buttress their own opinions; they have no
understanding of the complexities involved, for instance, in ceramic dating.53

"Administrative Lists"

Among other specific cases of state-formation, let me turn now to the wellknown
lists of Solomon's "administrative districts" in 1 Kgs. 4. One of the principal
aspects of statehood stressed above is centralization, direct evidence for which
we should expect to find in the 10th century if Israel did indeed constitute by
then a real state, not merely some sort of a "chiefdom." In this casestudy, let me
begin with the biblical evidence per se, not because it determines our agenda, but
simply because it is clearly organized and thus provides a convenient framework
for our analysis. According to 1 Kgs. 4:7-19, one of Solomon's major
administrative policies was to organize the entire area under his control into 12
districts, each with its own "high official" (Heb. nitdr) or governor. One may
suspect that this is all much later propaganda on the part of the biblical editors,
designed to enhance Solomon's reputation as the "ideal king," and based on the
older and possibly nonhistorical notion of the "12 tribes." On the other hand,
since each district was to provide for the royal court's needs for one month, one
does not have to seek very far for another, nonbiblical rationale.

Our concern here, however, is only the question of whether or not the
compilers of this list in 1 Kgs. 4, working at whatever date and for whatever
reasons, had actual historical documents upon which to draw. The revisionists
would reject such a suggestion out of hand; but fairness requires us to ask
whether an original Sitz im Leben can be recovered for this passage. That is,
does the list of districts and principal cities correlate in any way with "the facts
on the ground" - does it make topographical sense? Again, a simple chart (see p.
140) can be used to summarize the biblical data (anticipating for the moment
possible archaeological correlations by suggesting identifications).54
 The first and most obvious comment to make about this supposedly
historical list is that it is clearly not a first-hand account, nor is it necessarily
consistent with other biblical materials. For one thing, the list does not really
come out to a number "12" that corresponds exactly with other lists of the "12
tribes." (The identification of districts in our column 1 depends partly on
Yohanan Aharoni's correlations.) The biblical text in 1 Kgs. 4 yields at face
value the names of only seven of the traditional 12 tribes (although the lists
vary), omitting in particular Dan, Manasseh, and Zebulun, but including other
areas not in fact controlled by Israel, such as Dor on the coast (probably
Philistine or Phoenician) and Bashan and Gilead in Transjordan (certainly not
Israelite at this time, if ever). Thus we cannot claim simply that the
"administrative list" in 1 Kgs. 4:1-17 is a valid historical document as it stands.
In its present highly edited form, it is clearly part of the Deuteronomistic history
and its panorama of Israel's history, dating from the late preexilic or postexilic
period. That does not necessarily mean, however, as the revisionists maintain in
all such cases, that there is no earlier, probably archival, material here. On the
contrary, I would argue that some aspects of this list not only fit very well with
what we know of the 10th century from extrabiblical sources, but they can
scarcely be placed anywhere else.
 Archaeological Correlations

A preliminary consideration might be that five of the 12 governor's names (or

six, if one includes Ba'ana) are compounded with Heb. ben, "Son of," which
would be expected in an early society still close to its kin-based roots (and such
names are, in fact, relatively rare in later Iron Age contexts). The same could be
said for two more governor's names, Ahinadab and Ahima'az, which are
compounded with 'dhi, "My brother (is)," another type of name characteristic of
"tribal" societies. One of these very personal names in 1 Kgs. 4, "Ahilud," father
of the governor of Megiddo, occurs in all probability on one of our earliest
Hebrew inscriptions (although partially broken), a 12th-century inscribed jar
handle found at Raddana, possibly biblical Beeroth.55

Map of proposed Solomonic districts, with principal towns (Yohanan Aharoni,

The Land of the Bible)

More compelling, however, than this evidence, which could be considered

circumstantial, is the evidence concerning the district capitals in this list. While
more than one possible center is listed for some districts (up to three), I have
suggested (as others) the larger and better-known town as the best candidate. It is
worth noting that of the 15 likely "candidates" on p. 140, all but two can be
identified with known ancient sites with some certainty. Of these 15, 13 have
been reasonably well excavated, several quite extensively. And what have
archaeologists found in the way of 10th-century material that might qualify any
of these 12 towns to have served as "district capitals," presumably with some
evidence of larger-scale, centralized planning? The answers might surprise the
revisionists and other historians of their ilk. We have already discussed 10th-
century Megiddo, Hazor, and Gezer in looking at the evidence for state-
formation; all three would likely have been the capitals of their districts in the
list. But let us add several more similar sites, some with impressive
archaeological remains (moving from north to south).

Tirzah

Biblical Tirzah is certainly to be identified with Tell el-Farah (North), a large,

prominent mound 15 miles northeast of Shechem, situated at the head of the
`Ain Farah spring where it begins its steep descent all the way to the Jordan
valley. It was excavated in the 1940s-1960s by the great French archaeologist
and biblical scholar Pere Roland de Vaux.56 An important and strategic Middle
Bronze town, it was refounded as biblical Tirzah sometime in the mid-10th
century. Tirzah then served in the 9th century as the capital of the northern
kingdom, replacing Shechem (1 Kgs. 14:17), until Omri moved the capital to
Samaria after having reigned at Tirzah for seven years (16:17, 18). The
10thcentury level in question if Tirzah had in fact served as a district
administrative center for Solomon would be Level VII-A. This stratum, securely
dated to the 10th century by its pottery, incorporated an offset-inset city wall; a
two-entryway city gate; a large public place near the gate with a shrine; and
several contiguous blocks of four-room courtyard houses, so well laid out that
they reflect a measure of urban planning. Thus Tirzah may well have been the
administrative capital of Solomon's northern district of Ephraim.

Beth-shemesh

I have suggested that Gezer, a prime example of an urbanized and strongly

fortified city of the 10th century, might well have been the administrative center
of the Benjamin district (see p. 140). But an equally good candidate would be
Beth-shemesh, which is in fact named in 1 Kgs. 4:9, whereas Gezer is not.
Bethshemesh was excavated in 1911-13 and again in 1928-1933 by British and
American archaeologists, but the results remained controversial. In 1990 Shlomo
Bunimovitz and Zvi Lederman returned to the city for a new series of campaigns
using much more precise modern methods.57 The older "Stratum II-A' was long
thought by leading authorities to date roughly to the era of David and Solomon,
but it appeared that the site was unfortified during this period, leaving Beth-
shemesh in limbo. The current excavations, however, have already proven that
Mackenzie's "Strong Wall" dates not to the Canaanite era, as he thought, but to
the 10th century. Furthermore, it is but one feature of a major changeover from a
rather typical "Proto-Israelite" village of the 1 lth century to a well-laid-out
urban center with a large storehouse, a spacious public building, and a massive
underground water system that is an engineering marvel. One find among the
10th-century materials is especially intriguing: a piece of a double-sided game
board inscribed with the name of the owner, "Hanan," in an early script dated by
the leading authority, Frank M. Cross, to the late 10th century. Not only does this
corroborate our arguments above for Hebrew writing as early as the 10th
century, but the inscribed game board is particularly significant at Beth-shemesh
since its sister site, as listed next in 1 Kgs. 4:9, is "Elon Beth-hanan," a nearby
village named "Oak of the Hanan family." The name Hanan also appears now on
a 10th-century bowl fragment found at Tel Batash, biblical Timnah, only 5 miles
away. The striking convergence here suggests again that the biblical writers and
editors drew on very ancient sources in compiling the Deuteronomistic history in
Kings. We now know, at last, what they knew: Beth-shemesh in the days of the
United Monarchy was not an obscure, undefended village, but a major urban
center. In the words of Bunimovitz and Lederman, two young archaeologists of
the "Tel Aviv School," "Beth-shemesh was completely reshaped into a fortified
administrative center." They conclude of the major building:

This public building had been constructed by the tenth century B.C.E.,
probably during the period of the United Monarchy. Thus Beth-shemesh
adds to the evidence of a centralized administration during the period of
David and Solomon.58
 A reconstruction of the Solomonic temple, following Albright and Wright
(Othmar Keel, The Symbolism of the Biblical World)

The revisionists will no doubt attempt to discredit this new evidence against
Thompson's "few dozen villagers in all of the Judaean highlands." However,
Thompson himself has cited the Tel Aviv group of archaeologists approvingly, as
the direct opposite methodologically of myself and the other supposedly
"biblical archaeologists."59 The simple fact is that all professional Israeli,
European, and North American archaeologists operate with virtually the same
field and analytical methods, differences of final interpretation notwithstanding.

The Temple in Jerusalem

One of Solomon's achievements that the Hebrew Bible regards as most fabulous
was his construction of a great national shrine, a monumental temple in
Jerusalem. Traditional biblical scholarship has been willing to take the rather
elaborate description of the Solomonic temple in 1 Kgs. 6-8 somewhat seriously,
but many of the technical terms of the plan, construction, and furnishings have
remained enigmatic until fairly recently for want of any external cor roboration.
The revisionists, of course, need no evidence to dismiss the descriptions in Kings
as completely fanciful. But let us keep an open mind, as good historians should,
and see once again whether there is any convergence between texts and artifacts.
 The salient features of the Solomonic temple, based at this point solely on
the biblical accounts in 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles, can be represented in chart
form (see p. 146).

It is important to consider these "data," if they are such, separate from any
external data that we may have, in the interest of a dispassionate, honest inquiry.
A few philologians and biblical historians have attempted to do that, but most
have given up due to the difficulty of several technical terms, as well as their
unfamiliarity with the nonbiblical parallels. The point is that the biblical
descriptions alone, however we understand the Hebrew, and however consistent
the language may appear to be, seem "fantastic;" literally unbelievable. Indeed,
the "fabulous" nature of Solomon's temple in the Bible is largely what prompts
the revisionists and others to dismiss it as a figment of later writers' and editors'
imaginations, fired by the old legends of the "Golden Age of Solomon." But is
the biblical temple really "fabulous," that is, nothing but a fable? Hardly. It
might have been so regarded a generation ago; but the fact is that we now have
direct Bronze and Iron Age parallels for every single feature of the "Solomonic
temple" as described in the Hebrew Bible; and the best parallels come from, and
only from, the Canaanite-Phoenician world of the 15th-9th centuries. Few
biblical scholars, however, seem aware of these parallels.

Here I can only mention in passing the wealth of archaeological

corroboration that we now possess for the Solomonic temple (listed here in
reference to the features as numbered in the chart above).61

(1) The supposedly enigmatic tripartite or "long room" temple plan turns out
to be the standard LB and early Iron temple plan throughout Syria and Palestine,
with nearly 30 examples now archaeologically attested. Even the dimensions,
proportions, and details fit the norm. The "Phoenician" derivation in Kings and
Chronicles thus turns out to be quite correct; there was no native tradition of
monumental architecture in Israel's earliest phases of urbanization in Iron IIA, so
models had to be borrowed from neighboring peoples in the centuries-old
Canaanite tradition.
 (2) The dressed masonry with interlaced wooden beam construction seems
odd at first glance; but we now know that it was typical of MB-LB construction
in monumental buildings throughout Canaan, with particularly close parallels
coming from palatial buildings at Alalakh and Ugarit, as well as at LB Hazor in
northern Palestine. As for the biblical description of "sawn" or chiseldressed
masonry blocks, produced in finished form at the quarries and fitted together at
the site "without the sound of a hammer," that also seems odd. So it is, unless
one happens to know that precisely such dressed, pre-fitted masonry - known as
"ashlar" to archaeologists - has been found by archaeologists to characterize
monumental or "royal" constructions in Israel precisely in, and only in, the 10th-
9th centuries. The finest examples of such ashlar masonry come from Dan,
Hazor, Megiddo, Samaria, Gezer, and Jerusalem, all of which were probably
administrative centers in some sense in the 10th-9th centuries, and thus under
royal administration (above). The introduction of such ashlar masonry into Israel
is now thought by some to have been due to the "Sea Peoples," Philistines and
others, who brought (or at least were acquainted with) Mycenaean-style ashlar
masonry to Cyprus in the late 13th century, and thence it came to the Phoenician
coast where it was probably adopted locally. Once again, the Hebrew Bible's
allusion to "Phoenician" artisans and craftsmen in stone makes perfect sense; and
the 10th-century date is just what we would expect for early Phoenician-Israel
contacts. As for the implication of an unusual style of pre-fitting the stones at the
quarry, one must cite ashlar blocks discovered at Megiddo and Gezer, precisely
in 10th-century contexts in monumental buildings and the city gates, which
exhibit identical geometric masons' marks and even traces of red-chalk lines, that
is, evidence of advance quarry-fitting.
Schematic plan and section of the Solomonic temple (Interpreter's Dictionary of
the Bible, 4:537)

(5) The description of wooden beams inserted into every third course of
masonry may also seem mysterious; but it is a standard device, not only in royal
constructions at other sites in Israel such as Dan, but especially at sites in Syria -
and precisely those where ashlar masonry is featured, as in the great palace at
Ugarit. Such construction was apparently a practical device for protecting large
heavy walls from earthquake damage by providing them with "break-joints," as
in modern construction.
 The biblical description of lower courses of masonry combined with upper
courses overlaid with wooden panels remained mysterious, unparalleled until
modern archaeological discoveries provided the answer. At MB Ebla and at LB
Alalakh in Syria, as well as now at LB Hazor in northern Palestine, we have
examples of monumental architecture featuring lower dadoes of black basalt
(volcanic) stone orthostats (upright blocks), with regularly-spaced drilled holes
on the upper sides that are mortises for tenons on the end of wooden panels that
were once attached to the orthostats. Once again, the biblical de scriptions,
though thought to be later, are uncannily accurate for the late LBearly Iron Age.
A coincidence?

Mason's marks on stone blocks from the Outer Wall and Gatehouse in Field III at
Gezer (Photo by William G. Dever)
 Lower courses of 9th-century wall at Samaria, showing groove for interlaced
wooden beams (Photo by William G. Dever)

(6) The two columns with elaborate capitals at the entrance of the
Solomonic temple, so prominent that they receive the names Boaz and Jachin in
the Hebrew Bible, are also not unique. The standard MB, LB, and Iron bipartite
and tripartite temples now known throughout Canaan exhibit just such columns,
as revealed by two typical surviving column bases flanking the entrance at the
vestibule or entrance-porch (the "temple-in-antis" plan that is well known even
down to Classical times). The description of the elaborate decoration of the
capitals is not entirely clear, but the motifs fit with the rest of the decor (see 7
below). Elsewhere, in simpler 10th-9th century royal constructions, the carved
"palmette" capital (previously called "proto-Aeolic"), usually not free-standing
but engaged, is typical; it is almost certainly the stylized "treeof-life" that goes
back to common LB motifs.

(7) All the motifs of the interior decoration of the temple and its furnishings,
formerly subject only to speculation, are now well attested in Canaanite art and
iconography of the Late Bronze-Iron Ages. The reference to "chains" is not
entirely clear, but it recalls the familiar LB Minoan guilldche design, featuring a
running row of spirals turning back upon themselves, as for instance on a basalt
offering basin from the Area H temple at Hazor. "Open flowers" almost certainly
refer to lilies or papyrus blossoms, both of which are exceedingly common
motifs in the Late Bronze Age. They are also well represented on numerous Iron
Age ivories, such as those from 9th-8th century Samaria; on many seals; and on
the painted storejars from the 8thcentury sanctuary at Kuntillet `Ajrfid in the
Sinai. "Pomegranates," commonly associated with fertility in the ancient Near
East, have LB-Iron parallels such as pendants on bronze braziers (below), on a
cultic bowl from Lahav, and on seals. They also appear on ivory priests' wands
from several sites, including the now famous 8th-century example from chance
finds in Jerusalem, bearing the Hebrew inscription "Set apart for the priests of
the temple of ... h" (restore "Yahweh"), which in all probability comes from the
temple of Solomon.

(8) The term "cherub" now presents no problem whatsoever, although long
misunderstood as some sort of chubby, lovable winged creature shooting darts
into lovers. The biblical "cherub" is simply a "mixed creature" of the sort widely
known from the 3rd millennium onward in the ancient Near East, usually with
the body of a lion, a human head, and wings. From early times the cherub is one
of the principal iconographic representations of deities, often occurring in pairs
bearing the king seated on his throne on their backs. Such "lion-thrones" occur in
Palestine on a well-known 12th-century ivory panel from Megiddo, showing a
Canaanite king receiving a procession. Later Iron Age examples of cherubs
include those on one register of the 10th-century terra cotta cult stand from
Ta`anach; on one of the painted storejars from `Ajrfid (a seated female figure, in
my judgment Asherah; below); on the Samaria and other ivories; and on
numerous seals. The symbolism of a pair of cherubs, a "pagan" motif, in the
Jerusalem temple is now clear; Israel's national god Yahweh sat enthroned on a
lion-throne just like all the other deities of the ancient Near East, except that he
was invisible.

Typical 9th-8th century Phoenician-style "palmette" (older "Proto-Aeolic")

capitals, usually accompanying ashlar masonry (Amnon Ben-Tor,
Archaeology of Ancient Israel)
Inscribed ivory pomegranate, probably from the Jerusalem temple, ca. 8th
century (P. Kyle McCarter, Ancient Inscriptions)
 (9) The references to "lions," of course, overlap with references to cherubs,
but the lion often appears in its own right in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages,
often carrying a nude female deity riding on its back, almost certainly Asherah.
She is widely known in ancient texts as the "Lion Lady" and is much favored in
iconography from Egypt all the way to Mesopotamia. Iron Age examples of the
lion motif would include an ivory box from Megiddo; both 10thcentury cult
stands from Ta'anach; the storejars at Kuntillet `Ajrud; several Samaria ivories;
and many seals, especially the well-known Megiddo seal of "the servant of
Jeroboam," now thought to be Jeroboam I, ca. early 9th century. "Oxen" may
refer to bulls or bull calves. The bull was commonly associated in the Levant
with the preeminent Canaanite male deity El, whose titles and imagery were
borrowed in early Israel and associated with the new national god Yahweh, as
Cross and others have shown. One recalls the famous "golden calf" set up at Mt.
Sinai, and again at Bethel when the northern kingdom seceded. Actual Iron Age
examples of bulls in cultic context in Palestine include a beautiful bronze bull
from a 12th-century Israelite open cult place (the biblical "high place"; below) in
the territory of Manasseh; one on the Ta`anach stand (some think it a horse),
carrying a winged sun-disk on his back and many examples on 8th-6th century
seals.

In the biblical descriptions of the temple, the building and its courtyard were
said to have been lighted and heated as well by cast bronze "open-work"
braziers. These were as much as 4 ft. high, some with wheels, and decorated
with such motifs as cherubs, lions, oxen, and palm trees. Very similar bronze
braziers have been found on Cyprus from the 12th century onward, as well as in
Phoenicia.

Finally, the reference to "palm trees" is clear, as we have seen in discussing

the temple's columns and capitals above. Following Yigal Shiloh's work on
"palmette" capitals, as well as that of Ruth Hestrin and others, the meaning of
the familiar "tree" imagery is now beyond doubt. We finally understand its
frequent prohibition in the prophetic and Deuteronomistic literature and the
denunciation of Asherah and her hilltop "groves," vividly expressed in the
descriptions of Israel's fornication with strange gods "under every green tree and
on every high hill" (Isa. 57:3-5). Given the capitals that depict the drooping
fronds of the palm tree's crown, the columns themselves are clearly stylized
palm trees. Indeed, we have several Iron Age naoi, or terra cotta temple models,
that have just such a pair of trees - columns flanking the entrance, complete with
palmette capitals. One comes from 10th-century levels at Tell el-Farah (North).
Others are known from Transjordan. All have other related temple motifs as
well, especially the dove, associated with Asherah/Tanit in the Phoenician world;
or the "stars of the Pleiades," again an Asherah-symbol. A clear example of a
Phoenician naos is the one from Idalion in Cyprus, probably 7th-6th century,
which has two fully-represented palm-capitals flanking the doorway and a nude
female standing in the doorway, no doubt Asherah (identified with Astarte in
Cyprus and associated with Adonis, Semitic 'adon, "Lord," or the equivalent of
Canaanite-Israelite Ba'al).

"Lion-throne," 12th-century ivory panel from Megiddo (Gordon Loud,The

Megiddo Ivories, No. 2)
Ivory carving from Samaria, 8th century (Sylvia Schroer, In Israel Gab es
Bilder?)

Bronze wheeled brazier from Cyprus (Sylvia Schroer, In Israel Gab es

Bilder?)
Terra-cotta model temple (naos) from Tell el-Far'ah (North), biblical Tirzah, ca.
10th-9th century (Louvre AO.21689; Alain Chambon, Tell el-Farah I)

Royal palace and tripartite temple from Tell Ta'yinat in north Syria, ca. 10th-9th
century (Amnon Ben-Tor, Archaeology of Ancient Israel)

I have presented a relatively small sampling of archaeological examples of

the individual motifs of the Solomonic temple enumerated in Kings and
Chronicles, but we have a number of more or less complete Iron Age temples
that may provide even more instructive comparisons. The one usually cited (but
ignored by the revisionists) is the small 9th-8th century temple at Tell Tayinat in
northern Syria, excavated by the University of Chicago in the 1930s. It is a
tripartite building, similar to the biblical description in both plan and size,
exhibiting two columns with lion-bases at the portico. The inner sanctum (the
biblical debir, or "Holy of Holies") has a podium on the rear wall for a
representation of the deity. The excavators presented evidence for ashlar
construction, as shown in some reconstructions. Other examples of Syrian
temples from the 9th-8th centuries include the recently discovered and
marvelous acropolis temple at the Aramaic capital of `Ain Der`a, in northern
Syria near the Turkish border. Few archaeologists or biblical scholars are aware
of this temple. It is of tripartite style, decorated in and out with carved basalt
orthostats featuring lions and cherubs. The most stunning feature is the four
giant footsteps carved into the threshold and then the entrance into the main hall
- first one foot, then higher up a pair, and finally one striding across the threshold
- the god entering "his house." The effect is overpowering.61

Other acropolis temples come from Zinjirli (now in Turkey; the ancient
Aramaean capital of Sam'al) and from Tell Halaf. Both these small temples are
part of an entire royal complex that incorporates a fortified citadel, a palace, and
other monumental structures. The overall resemblance to Solomon's "upper city,"
with its temple, palace, harem, and administrative complex, is striking. The
conclusion we must draw is that Solomon, far from being the bold originator that
the biblical authors thought him to be, was little more than an Oriental potentate
in the typical Iron Age Levantine style. His "genius" lay in the fact that he got
away with it.

Before leaving Solomon, perhaps a bit diminished now, let me emphasize

that every single detail of the Bible's complicated description of the Jerusalem
temple can now be corroborated by archaeological examples from the Late
Bronze and Iron Ages. There is nothing "fanciful" about 1 Kgs. 6-8. What is
truly fanciful is the notion of the revisionists that a writer in Babylon in the 6th
century, much less in Palestine in the Hellenistic-Roman era, could have
"invented" such detailed descriptions, which by coincidence happened to fit
exactly with Iron Age temples in Syria-Palestine hundreds of years earlier -
temples that had long disappeared and had been forgotten. The point is simple:
the only life-setting for "Solomon's temple," whether there was a biblical
Solomon or not, is to be found in the Iron Age, and in the 10th-8th centuries at
latest. Perhaps the question is simply this. Which strains the reader's credulity
more: the supposedly "fanciful" descriptions of the temple in the Hebrew Bible;
or the revisionists' scenario of its "total invention" by writers living centuries
later?62
The Aramaean tripartite temple at `Ain Der'a in north Syria, ca. 10th-9th century
(Photo by William G. Dever)

Plan of the 9th-century acropolis at Zinjirli in Turkey, ancient Sam'al (Felix von
Luschan)
According to the historical framework of those who compiled the Hebrew Bible,
Israel's history was divided into two eras by the death of Solomon and what
amounted to civil war over the question of dynastic succession, since the issue
was considered still unsettled. We have already looked at some of the
"convergences" suggesting that the biblical notion of a United Monarchy - or at
least an early "state" - ca. 1020-925 B.C. is not a figment of the biblical writers'
imaginations, but is based on a fundamental reality.

We turn now to the "Divided Monarchy," ca. 925-586. This era sees a long
line of kings of the "house of David" on the throne in Jerusalem, which remained
the capital in Judah, while the northern kingdom was ruled by a succession of
unstable "royal houses" from capitals at Shechem and Tirzah, then principally at
Samaria under Omri and his successors. The secessionist northern kingdom of
Israel, supposedly incorporating 10 of the old "tribes," fell to the Neo-Assyrian
advance in 735-721. The southern kingdom of Judah, however, whose history is
strongly favored by the biblical writers and editors, persisted until the fall of
Jerusalem in 587/586 to Nebuchadnezzar II and the NeoBabylonians.1

We have noted the skepticism of the "revisionists" and others about the
existence of a pan-Israelite "state" at all in the 10th century, and about a "state"
in Judah before the mid-7th century. But just as I have rejected their view on the
first issue for lack of any real evidence, I shall now dispose of the latter - again
by pointing to a series of remarkable convergences between some of the biblical
texts and recent archaeological discoveries.

To be sure, the revisionists do accept the reality of a northern state of Israel

with its capital at Samaria after the mid-9th century; but that is only because the
extrabiblical Neo-Assyrian annals now mention such an entity for the first time.
Again, however, the biblical texts are regarded with suspicion, while the Neo-
Assyrian texts are accepted at face value as a properly "historical" witness. In
any case, the revisionists admit to little more than a skeletal outline of the history
of a northern Israelite state, in practice only a bare king-list where there are Neo-
Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian synchronisms. But there is much more evidence,
which the revisionists routinely ignore. Why is that? The archaeological data are
summarized in standard handbooks such those as by Helga Weippert, Amihai
Mazar, and Amnon Ben-Tor, in hundreds of pages of detailed information.2

Rather than repeating the rich data presented in the above reference works,
here I shall select only a few convergences to show that they establish a firm
Iron Age context for the core of the biblical narratives in Kings and the
Prophetic literature, while at the same time they unequivocally rule out a
Hellenistic-Roman context.

King-lists and International Synchronisms

A working outline of the supposedly historical narratives of 1-2 Kings (and of 1-

2 Chronicles, largely dependent upon Kings) can be developed initially by
compiling a list of the Judean and Israelite kings mentioned in the book of
Kings. The biblical writers mention all the kings of these two principalities from
beginning to end, in successive order, giving the length of their respective reigns,
usually cross-indexing them, for instance with such formulae as "King A of
Judah began his reign in the -th year of King B of Israel." These complete and
elaborate king-lists can hardly be a late invention but must have come down to
the final editors from much older, often contemporary court records, annals, and
the like.

In this regard, the biblical king-lists are not unusual, certainly not unique.
Elsewhere in the ancient Near East we have, for instance, the well-known
Sumerian king-list, a chronicle that purports to go all the way back to
antediluvian times (like the biblical genealogies). There is also an Egyptian king-
list that covers 30 dynasties and some 3000 years. Both these king-lists in their
present form have been in a sense created by scholars, i.e., pieced together from
many surviving fragments, some quite late. Nevertheless, it is still possible
thereby to produce a more or less coherent and correct ordering, or what we call
a "relative chronology." The "absolute" or calendrical dates for such king-lists in
the 3rd millennium, however, are still lacking in precision, despite modern
corrective tools like carbon 14 dating. Thus dates for the beginning of the 1st
Dynasty in Egypt vary according to different authorities from ca. 3200 to ca.
30003

By the time we reach the 2nd millennium, however, the reigns of kings,
particularly those in Egypt, can be fixed often within a margin of error of 10-20
years or so. Such precision is made possible by the fortunate practice of the
ancients in observing the heavens for "signs," and particularly their frequent
coordination of important political events such as the accession of a king with an
astronomical event like a solar eclipse. Modern astronomy can fix the occurrence
of an eclipse to the very day. Thus we can often obtain a fixed date upon the
basis of which an entire portion of a king-list, like a particular dynasty, can be
worked out in detail - a sort of "chronological peg" upon which to hang the
whole sequence. The absolute dates for Egyptian chronology in the first half of
the 2nd millennium can still vary by as much as some 20 years, due to
uncertainty as to exactly how and from where the ancient astronomers made
their observations. Thus in both Egypt and Mesopotamia early to mid-2nd
millennium dates are given in various sources using so-called "high," "middle,"
or "low" systems. By the 1st millennium, however, both Egyptian and
Mesopotamian chronologies have now been fixed within a margin of error of no
more than a very few years, and often are precise to the very year. Thus we know
for certain the names and exact dates of a long series of Neo-Assyrian and
NeoBabylonian kings, from before 900 to the founding of the Persian Empire in
539 by Cyrus the Great.4

Piecing together this story has taken a century and a half of archaeological
discovery, plus painstaking detective work by scholars in many disciplines,
including astronomy and the natural sciences. But thanks to those efforts we now
have a fairly reliable chronological framework for ancient Near Eastern history,
especially for the 1st millennium, or our Iron Age in Palestine. Such a
"framework," however reliable and detailed, does not constitute in itself a proper
history, even an episodic "history of events." Yet it provides a beginning,
because chronology is the essential foundation upon which any history must be
built. The chronological framework gives us a structure into which we can place
persons and events in a context that can give them meaning. Without a reliable
chronology, history appears to be completely chaotic.

The enormous implications of well-established international synchronisms

will be obvious to any reader. As our ancient Near Eastern chronologies began to
take shape in the 20th century, biblical scholars quickly seized upon them in the
attempt to correct the chronology of the book of Kings by means of external
data. It must be recalled that until the mid-late 19th century no one had a fixed
date at which to begin the biblical king-lists, much less any way of knowing
whether any of the information was reliable. Real control over the biblical data
through the correlation of the king-lists with Assyrian and Babylonian king-lists
began with such early works as Edwin R. Thiele's The Mysterious Numbers of
the Hebrew Kings5 and continues in the most recent handbooks.

Biblical chronology is an enormously complex subject, and there is a vast

literature.6 The details, however, need not concern us here. For simplicity's sake
we can set forth in chart form all the Israelite and Judean kings mentioned in the
Bible who can be correlated directly through both biblical and nonbiblical texts
with known Assyrian and Babylonian kings, giving the dates for all.

I cannot discuss here all the textual data that make these synchronisms
relevant, but some key historical correlations may be mentioned. The first direct
Neo-Assyrian references to Israel occur in the annals of Assur-nasir-pal II and of
succeeding kings, who will soon refer to Israel as "the house of Omri," the first
king they encountered in pushing their increasingly frequent campaigns
westward through Syria toward the Mediterranean. The revisionists make much
of the fact that the first Assyrian references occur only in the 9th century;
indeed, much of their argument that "Israel" was not a "state" at all before then
rests solely upon this datum. Not only is this obviously an argument from
silence, but the revisionists neglect to tell their readers that the reason why
Assyrian references commence only in the early-mid 9th century is simple. Their
western campaigns began only then, so they could scarcely have known or cared
about any of the petty states in the west, such as the Aramaean and Israelite
states. The Assyrian texts do not mention Judah either in the 10th or even the 9th
century for the same reason. That does not mean that Judah did not exist as a
state, but only that the Assyrians did not first encounter Judah, so far south, until
after the destruction of the northern kingdom in the campaigns of ca. 735-721, in
the time of Sennacherib's famous campaign in 701.
 Omri's son Ahab, correctly regarded by the Assyrian texts as of "the house
(dynasty) of Omri," joined a coalition of western kings and met the Assyrian
king Shalmaneser III in 853 at the well-documented Battle of Qarqar, in the
Beq`a valley in Syria. The Assyrian annals report that Ahab contributed more
forces than any other king, even Ben-Hadad I of Damascus - 2000 chariots and
10 thousand infantry. It happens that archaeologists have now correctly dated the
famous "Solomonic stables" at Megiddo, the regional capital, to the 9th century,
or the reign of Ahab (although some scholars suggest that they may have been
royal storehouses). The great water tunnel, dug deep through the bedrock to
convey the water of the nearby springs safely within the city walls, also dates to
this period.? At Hazor, another district administrative center, the remains of
Ahab's royal constructions include massive structures on the fortified citadel,
both a large administrative complex and a series of magazines or storehouses, as
well as a water shaft and tunnel that surely rank as ancient Israel's most
spectacular engineering feat.' And at Samaria, the capital, most of the impressive
royal buildings on the acropolis, including double defense walls and a multi-
roomed palace, are probably to be attributed to Ahab, since his father Omri, the
founder of the dynasty, ruled only seven years. It is likely that some of the
beautiful ivory inlays, imports from Phoenicia, found in the final destruction
layers, originated in the 9th century.9

Plan of Megiddo in Stratum IV-A, ca. 9th century, perhaps a "chariot-city" of

Ahab (Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, The Architecture of Ancient Israel)

It is worth noting at this point that Ahab was one of Israel's most capable
rulers, to judge from both the impressive remains that he has left us, as well as
the respect accorded to him and his dynasty by his Assyrian enemies. Yet the
writers of the Hebrew Bible, faithful to their southern loyalties and to the
Deuteronomistic theological reform movement, treat Ahab and his Phoenician
wife with a contempt and loathing reserved for no other king, and attribute his
downfall to his apostasy. While these stories may well be legendary as they have
been utilized by the compilers of Kings in writing their history, the salient facts
of Ahab's long rule are not thereby necessarily obscured - especially if the
archaeological data and extrabiblical texts tend to corroborate them, as they do.
In particular, the biblical writers' condemnation of such aspects of Ahab's reign
as his construction of a temple of Baal at Samaria is, ironically, our best proof
that just such a temple really did exist. In short, even the heavy overlay of
propaganda does not exclude some real history. On the method of "reading
between the lines" in the biblical texts we shall see more below, when we come
to discuss "popular religion."

Hazor water tunnel, ca. 9th century (Photo by William G. Dever)

 Plan of the acropolis at Samaria in the 9th century (Aharon Kempinski and
Ronny Reich, The Architecture of Ancient Israel)

Jehu, although the biblical writers approve of the religious fervor that
brought him to power, was by contrast a hapless king. He has the dubious honor
of being the only king of Israel or Judah whose actual portrait has survived to
come down to us. Having just acceded to the throne, he capitulated to the
Assyrian Shalmaneser III in 841 and was forced to pay heavy tribute. Thus he is
portrayed on the famous Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser, now in the British
Museum, bowing in humiliation before the Assyrian king and kissing his feet.'°
The biblical writers do not mention Jehu's paying tribute, either because they did
not know about it or possibly because they were hesitant to reject a onetime
revolutionary of whom they had originally approved. 2 Kgs. 10:28-32 reports
only that "in those days the Lord began to trim off parts of Israel," blaming the
attrition on Jehu's abandonment of the "Yahweh only" policies that in their view
had brought him to power.

Jehoram, Jehu's short-lived predecessor, is not mentioned in Assyrian

records, at least those that are extant. His name, however, can now be restored
with certainty from additional fragments of the Aramaic victory stele from Tel
Dan, discussed above. The revisionists, as we have seen, deny the reading "the
king of Israel," and especially the phrase "the house of David," even suggesting
that the inscription is a forgery (Chapter 4, p. 134). Their motives, however, are
suspect; and virtually all other scholars would place the Tel Dan inscription
alongside the Neo-Assyrian texts, as a historical datum. 1I It is particularly
important because this datum appears to confirm the correlation of Jehoram of
Israel with the king of Damascus (Hazael, as 2 Kgs. 9:14-16; but possibly Ben
Hadad I, since the year 842, Jehoram's last year, marked the succession of the
two Aramaean kings). It must be cautioned, however, that the Tel Dan
inscription cannot be taken simply as confirmation of the biblical accounts of
Aramaean contacts, since it supplies new information that seems to differ with
the biblical accounts. Yet it does confirm significant Aramaean victories over
northern Israel in the mid-9th century, of which the southern writers and editors
seem to have been aware, however sketchy the accounts finally produced for
their own purposes in 2 Kings.

The last Israelite kings that we can correlate with the available NeoAssyrian
texts are listed in Fig. 1 above, all of whom encountered first Tiglathpileser III in
his western campaigns, and then in the fatal final siege of Samaria, which lasted
perhaps a year and a half or more, Shalmaneser V and Sargon II.

The brief biblical accounts of the destruction of Samaria and the Assyrian
annals may seem to contradict each other, since 2 Kgs. 18:9 attributes the victory
to Shalmaneser, whereas in the Assyrian accounts it is Sargon who claims to
have captured Samaria. But it is clear from the Assyrian king-lists that Sargon
succeeded Shalmaneser in 722, no doubt while the siege was in progress. Thus
the difficulty is easily resolved. That the biblical account provides so few
specifics for such a momentous event as the fall of the northern kingdom, while
Sargon supplies much more detail, also poses no problem for the historian. Each
party is interpreting events to glorify its own exploits; and from the point of view
of the Judean editors of Kings, apostate Israel got just what it deserved and
needed no further mention.

Again, the bias of the biblical writers and editors is obvious; but because of
its obviousness the bias can be easily eliminated so as to clarify underlying
events that really did happen. It is worth noting here that on their own
methodological postulates the revisionists would be required, in the name of
consistency, to deny the fall of the northern kingdom, were it not for the extra-
biblical accounts. Their principle is: "One witness is no witness." Yet on that
ground one could deny the existence of most great individuals and events of
antiquity. For instance, outside the New Testament there are almost no extant
references to the earliest Christian movements, not even to the person of Jesus
himself. We shall return to this methodological issue somewhat later.

Sennacherib and Hezekiah

The most widely discussed convergence between our several sources of

historywriting is the well-documented campaign of a later Neo-Assyrian king,
Sennacherib, against Judah in 701. Here the divergences may be as instructive as
the convergences, remarkable as the latter are. The pertinent sources for
Sennacherib's campaign of 701 are: the long passage in 2 Kgs. 18:13-19:37
(paralleled in Isa. 36-37 and supplemented by 2 Chr. 32:1-31); the Assyrian
annals of Sennacherib describing the capture of 46 towns in Judah and the siege
of Jerusalem; the series of monumental stone reliefs depicting the siege and
capture of Lachish, found in Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh and now in the
British Museum; and the extensive excavations of Lachish carried out by British
archaeologists in 1935-38 and by Israeli archaeologists under David Ussishkin
and others in 1973-1987.12

It is noteworthy, but not surprising, that the biblical editors barely mention
Lachish, Kings noting in a single verse only that Sennacherib had "been" at
Lachish at one time, and Chronicles adding only a single reference to a "siege"
there. No destruction of the site whatsoever is alluded to in the Bible. The
Assyrian annals, however, boast of the fall of Lachish as a great victory - indeed,
one important enough to be commemorated by having an entire hall of
Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh dedicated to it, featuring some of the finest
Assyrian art ever discovered, and portraying the battle of Lachish in graphic and
often horrifying detail.

What is even more remarkable is that the archaeological excavations at

Lachish have corroborated the Assyrian reliefs to an astonishing degree. The
evidence of it is all there: the enormous sloping siege ramp thrown up against the
city walls south of the gate; the double line of defense walls, upslope and
downslope; the iron-shod Assyrian battering rams that breached the city wall at
its highest point; the massive destruction within the fallen city; the refugees
streaming out of the destroyed gate and the burning city, headed for exile; the
brutal slaughter of resisters, some depicted as having been beheaded and others
staked out on the ground and flayed alive; and the abandonment of the city to
Assyrian garrisons.

Virtually all the details of the Assyrian reliefs have been confirmed by
archaeology, even the hilltop vantage-point from which Sennacherib must have
watched the battle and from which artists made their original sketches. Also
brought to light by the excavators were the double city walls; the complex siege
ramp, embedded with hundreds of iron arrowheads and stone ballistae; the
counter-ramp inside the city; the destroyed gate, covered by up to 6 ft. of
destruction debris; huge boulders from the city wall, burned almost to lime and
fallen far down the slope; some 1500 skeletons from the cleanup of the city,
thrown into a deep water-shaft; well-preserved Assyrian-style helmets; and even
layers of pig bones indicating the Assyrians' love of pork, forbidden to Jews.
One can only suppose that the Assyrian kings took along on their foreign
campaigns an ancient version of "war correspondents," scribes who took notes
and artists who made accompanying sketches. This strategy must have been
designed to enhance stories back home later of the mighty king's prowess in
battle - and of the fact of his being favored by the national god, now proven
more powerful than the gods of all the other nations. The Assyrian texts and
battlereliefs are thus without doubt "propaganda," and of the most blatant sort.
Yet they nonetheless convey an account of events that actually did happen, and
moreover are now known to have happened in very much the way that the story
implies.
 Plan of Stratum III at Lachish, late 8th century (David Ussishkin, NEAEHL)

If we turn to the unusually long and detailed accounts of the same events in
the Hebrew Bible, we are struck by how obviously they are propaganda as well.
The entire account in both Kings and Chronicles is obviously shaped by the
Deuteronomistic historians' overriding "Jerusalem temple theology." The story
celebrates the miraculous delivery of Jerusalem from Sennacherib's siege when
Yahweh sends a plague on the Assyrian camp, and the decimated army (2 Kgs.
19:35 specifies 185 thousand dead) retreats in defeat. According to both the
Kings and Chronicles versions, blasphemous Sennacherib is not only humiliated,
but upon his return to Assyria he is assassinated by his own sons while
worshipping in the temple of his god Nisroch. Hezekiah does not even have to
pay tribute to get the Assyrians to withdraw; the temple is saved, and its
treasures are intact. All that matters is that Yahweh has triumphed over the
mighty Assyrian armies and their impotent gods. Of the other sites in Judah that
were threatened, only Lachish and Libnah are even mentioned, and that only in
passing.13

Main siege ramp and assault on the town of Lachish under Sennacherib, 701
(David Ussishkin, The Conquest of Lachish by Sennacherib)
Destruction debris fallen down from western gateway of Lachish into the valley
below (Photo by William G. Dever)

I can think of no more telling demonstration of the biblical writers' and

editors' single-minded preoccupation with theocratic history than their rendering
of the campaign of Sennacherib. This campaign was undoubtedly the most
significant event in the life of Judah in the last quarter of the 8th century, as well
as the beginning of the series of disasters that finally overtook Judah and brought
it to an end a century later. Yet the biblical "history" is oblivious to all but the
deliverance of Jerusalem. Nevertheless, once again there is some real history that
one can glean from the narrative, especially when the biases of the biblical texts
can be corrected by extrabiblical evidence, as we shall see. This much is clear,
even from the biblical text alone, when read with some sophistication: (1)
Lachish, presumed to be the most strategic fortress in all Judah, was besieged.
(2) Jerusalem was also besieged and severely threatened by Sennacherib, but for
some reason it was not conquered. (3) The Assyrians did retreat, and somewhat
later Sennacherib died and was succeeded by his son Esarhaddon (681-669).14

It is interesting to see that these "bare facts" gleaned from the biblical
accounts do not necessarily contradict the version of Sennacherib's campaign of
701 in Assyrian records. There are, as would be expected, a number of differing
interpretations of the events in the Assyrian version. For one thing, we learn that
as many as 46 Judean towns and cities were threatened in one way or another,
not just Jerusalem, Lachish, and Libnah. In addition, the Assyrian records do
narrate a determined siege of Jerusalem - Sennacherib boasts "Hezekiah, the Jew
(i.e., Judean), I shut up like a bird in a cage"; but the texts pointedly do not claim
an actual destruction of the city. Finally, Assyrian records note that Sennacherib
did die subsequently at the hands of assassins, his own sons, although 20 years
later (ca. 681) rather than almost immediately as the biblical story implies (i.e.,
as prompt, divine retribution). Yet none of these interpretations of events in the
Assyrian sources contradicts the essential facts of the biblical account, only their
interpretation by the Deuteronomists - whose biases are so well known that they
can rather easily be stripped away from the story. When we add the unequivocal
evidence of the reliefs and the archaeological discoveries at Lachish (and
Jerusalem), a reasonably accurate and believable history of Sennacherib's
invasion emerges. Again, the best possibility for history lies in the convergences,
divergences, and the "balance of probability."

The Last Days of Judah

Between a century and a century-and-a-half later, we meet the last Judean kings
who are mentioned in Mesopotamian texts, especially the ill-fated reformer
Josiah, and the last independent king of Judah, Jehoiachin. Josiah's fatal
involvement in the Battle of Carchemish, and his death at Megiddo while
attempting to block the advance of an Egyptian relief column in 609, can be
correlated with both the rise of the Neo-Babylonian Empire under
Nebuchadnezzar II, beginning in 605, and the reign of the Egyptian 26th-
Dynasty pharaoh Neco II (609-593). The accounts of Josiah's last days in 2 Kgs.
23:29, 30 and 2 Chr. 35:20-24 make perfect sense in the light of what we know
from other sources about the turbulent transfer of power from Neo-Assyria to
NeoBabylonia in the mid- to late 7th century, as well as Egypt's attempts to
intervene and thus stave off an invasion of Egypt itself by either power. Josiah,
caught hopelessly in the middle of the conflict, forfeited his life and his
kingdom. Here the biblical narrators have got it right, despite the fact that the
tragedy destroys their history, rather than validating it. They solemnly record all
the portentous events at face value, even though they lionized Josiah and
mourned the fall of Jerusalem a few years later, with little or no editorializing.

The last real king of Judah, Jehoiachin, is known to us in the Hebrew Bible
only from brief accounts. He gained the throne at 18 after the Babylonians' first
siege in 598/597, then three months later was deposed and sent to Babylon in
exile, where he eventually died. Seal impressions of a certain Jehoiakin, no
doubt this very king, have been found. Moreover, the Babylonian chronicles
from the year of 562 refer to rations provided for an exiled king "Jehoiakin.."15
Sic transit gloria mundi.

Religion and Cult in the Divided Monarchy

I have argued thus far that at least an outline of what might be called a "political
history" of Israel and Judah in the 300-year period of the Divided Monarchy
emerges from the core material of Kings, despite its overarching, tendentious
Deuteronomistic framework. Now we must begin to fill in that outline by
expanding beyond Kings to the broader Deuteronomistic and prophetic literature
and turning then to archaeological discoveries. The latter, and the latter alone,
can "flesh out" a history of ancient Israel, precisely because of archaeology's
unique ability, as we saw above, to supplement the elitist approach of the "great
tradition" of the classic literature. Archaeology at its best provides a graphic
illustration of the everyday masses, the vast majority of ordinary folk, their brief
lives forgotten by the biblical writers in their obsession with eternity, their voices
long muted until modern archaeology allows them to speak again to us. It was
these anonymous folk - not just kings and priests and prophets whom we know
by name - -who made Israel what it was. Their world, their situations, are
different from those who wrote the Bible, but no less important for that. Indeed,
the lack of convergences here may be the most revealing of all the data that we
have now for writing a realistic history of Israel - not the "ideal Israel" of the
imaginations of the biblical writers, but an "Israel, warts and all."

Let us begin to listen to the lost voices by focusing first on religion and cult
in the Divided Monarchy. In doing so, we must recognize, as one of my
theologian friends reminds me, that the Hebrew Bible is "a minority report."
Largely written by priests, prophets, and scribes who were intellectuals, above
all religious reformers, the Bible is highly idealistic. It presents us not so much
with a picture of what Israelite religion really was, but of what it should have
been - and would have been, had the biblical writers only been in charge.
Furthermore, the Bible is an elitist document in another sense, because it was
written and edited exclusively by men. It therefore represents their concerns -
those of the Establishment of the time - to the virtual exclusion of all else. In
particular, the focus is on "political history," the deeds of great men, "public
events," affairs of state, and the great ideas and institutions. The Bible almost
totally ignores private and family religion, women's cults and "folk religion,"
and indeed the religious practices of the majority in ancient Israel and Judah.

If the biblical texts alone are an inadequate witness to ancient Israelite

religion, where else could we turn for information? Modern archaeology can be
an excellent source, for many reasons. First, archaeology has brought to light a
mass of new, factual, tangible information about the long-lost biblical world, and
the history and religion of ancient Israel in particular. Second, this new
information is incredibly varied, almost unlimited in quantity, and has the fur
ther advantage of being more "objective" than texts in some ways, that is, less
deliberately edited. Finally, archaeology possesses unique potential for
illuminating "folk religion," in contrast to the "official religion" of the texts,
because material remains reflect the masses rather than only the elites, and they
illustrate concrete religious practices rather than abstract theological
formulations. Thus, if "religion" is what the majority of people actually do in the
name of the deity or deities, rather than what priests and clerics say they should
do, then archaeology can give us a different and perhaps more realistic picture of
Israelite religion (although not one that is necessarily "truer" in the theological
sense).

In what follows I shall review some of the recent archaeological data, which
I believe force us to rewrite all previous histories of ancient Israelite religion,
and in particular to address the issue of whether Israel in the monarchical period
was truly monotheistic.16

A Survey of Cult-Places Brought to Light by Archaeology

Let us look now at a number of recently excavated sites in Israel that have
produced materials that are clearly cultic in nature, some of them no doubt what
the Bible means by references to condemned bamot, or "high places." We shall
move from north to south and from the period of the judges to the Monarchy, or
the Iron I-II periods.

The "high place at Tel Dan," ca. 9th century (Abraham Biran, EAEHL)

(1) A small open-air hilltop sanctuary in the tribal territory of Manasseh,

dating to the 12th century, was excavated in 1981 by Amihai Mazar. It features a
central paved area with a large standing-stone (the biblical mdssebd) and an
altarlike installation, the whole surrounded by an enclosure wall. The only
material recovered consisted of a few early Iron I sherds; some fragments of
metal and of a terra-cotta offering stand; and a splendidly preserved bronze zebu
bull. The bull, possibly a votive, is matched almost precisely by another bronze
bull found by Yadin at Hazor in a Late Bronze context some two centuries
earlier. It must be recalled that the principal epithet of El, the chief male deity of
the Canaanite pantheon in pre-Israelite times, was "Bull." Thus the Manasseh
shrine or sanctuary - the only clear Israelite cultic installation yet found from the
period of the judges - was probably associated not with Yahweh, but with the old
Canaanite deity El (although in the earliest period Yahweh appears as an El-like
figure).17

(2) Tel Dan on the Lebanon border, one of the early centers of the northern
kingdom of Israel, has been excavated since 1966 by Avraham Biran. At the
highest point on the northern end of the mound there is an impressive 10th9th-
century installation. It consists of a large podium or altar; an approach in the
form of a monumental flight of steps, all in fine ashlar (chisel-dressed) masonry;
and an adjoining three-room sanctuary, in one room of which was found a low
stone altar, a nearby ash-pit, and three iron shovels. The latter is probably an
example of the biblical liska, or sanctuary; and the whole installation is probably
best understood as an example of the enigmatic Canaanite-style bama, or "high
place," that is condemned in the Hebrew Bible. We may have here, in fact, the
very "house/temple `on' high places" that is mentioned in 1 Kgs. 12:3 1. Related
materials brought to light within the precinct include an olive oil-pressing
installation, for liturgical purposes; large and small four-horned altars of the
types alluded to in several biblical passages; a bronze-working installation and
several implements such as a fine priestly scepter; seven-spouted lamps; a naos,
or household temple model/shrine; several dice; both male and female figurines;
and other items. This cult installation lasted from the 10th/9th century into the
8th/7th century. If we attempt to coordinate text and artifact, it is evident that
most of the features of the Dan "high place" are misunderstood by the southern
writers and editors of the Hebrew Bible - loyal to the temple in Jerusalem - or
not mentioned at all. The installation in general, however, is condemned as a
prime example of the worship of "foreign gods" - in this case, no doubt the
Canaanite-Phoenician deities Baal and his consort Asherah. Nevertheless,
despite the disapproval of the biblical writers, the archaeological evidence from
Dan illustrates dramatically that "non-Establishment" cults did exist, in the early
Monarchy as well as throughout Israel's and Judah's history.'8

(3) Tell el-Farah (North), biblical Tirzah, the temporary capital of northern
Israel in the early 9th century, was excavated by Pere Roland de Vaux in 1946-
1960. Just inside the city gate is a masseba and an olive-press, very similar to
installations at Dan - no doubt a "gate-shrine" like those of which the Bible hints.
In addition, there were found at Tell el-Farah (North) numerous 10th/ 9th-
century female figurines (some of the earliest known "Asherah" figurines;
below); and in particular a rare terra-cotta naos, which to judge from
comparative examples typically had a deity, or pair of deities, standing in the
doorway, one of them certainly Asherah, the old Canaanite Mother Goddess
(above, p. 152). This Stratum VII-B Canaanite temple model is roughly
contemporary with the Solomonic temple in Jerusalem, which according to the
biblical writers centralized all worship in Jerusalem.19

(4) Another example of supposedly prohibited local worship is a household

shrine found in 10th-century levels at Megiddo, a Solomonic regional capital in
the north. The shrine consists of several cult vessels and small fourhorned
limestone altars, of the type found at many Israelite sites. They were probably
used for incense-offerings, which are integral to official worship in the biblical
texts, although the horned altars are not specifically referred to (only much larger
examples are mentioned, as in 1 Kgs. 1:50, 51).20

Bronze priestly scepter-head found near the altar at Tel Dan, ca. 9th century
(Abraham Biran, Biblical Dan)

Plan of Tell e1-Far`ah, biblical Tirzah, ca. 10th century (Stratum VIII) (Helga
Weippert, Palastina in vorhellenisticher Zeit)
 (5) A few miles east of Megiddo lies its sister city Ta'anach, where even
more substantial 10th-century cultic remains have come to light.21 A shrine
there consists again of a large olive press; a mold for making terra-cotta female
figurines like those at Tell el-Farah (North), probably as votives; and a hoard of
astragali, or knuckle-bones, for use in divination rites. More remarkable were
two large, multi-tiered terra-cotta offering stands. One, found long ago in the
German excavations, depicts ranks of lions. The other, from the American
excavations of Paul W. Lapp, has four tiers. This stand is probably best
understood as a temple model. The top row or story shows a quadruped carrying
a winged sun-disk on its back. The next row down depicts the doorway of the
"temple," which however stands empty, perhaps to signify that the male deity
presupposed here in the door of his "house" (in Hebrew, bet, "house," means
"temple" when used of a deity) is invisible. The third row down has a pair of
sphinxes, or winged lions, one on each side, examples of the biblical "cherubim"
that are located in the Solomonic temple. The bottom row is startling, for it has
two similar flanking lions, with a smiling nude female figure standing between
them, holding them by the ears. Who is this enigmatic figure? I have suggested
elsewhere that she can be no other than the Canaanite Asherah.22 She is known
throughout the Levant in this period as "the Lion Lady," often depicted nude,
riding on the back of a lion. A 12th-11th century inscribed arrowhead from the
Jerusalem area reads on one side in the Canaanite or Old Hebrew script "Servant
of the Lion Lady," probably the title of a professional archer, naming his
patroness. On the other side we read his own name, "Ben-`Anat" or "son of
`Anat," `Anat being the old Canaanite war goddess.23 We can only wonder what
a model temple depicting possibly an invisible Yahweh and a very visible
Asherah is doing at Israelite Ta'anach in the days of Solomon and the Jerusalem
temple. This is a remarkable piece of ancient Israelite iconography. As we shall
see, however, there is much more evidence today for the cult of Asherah in Israel
in the biblical period.

(6) Among the many pieces of archaeological evidence of religion from

Jerusalem, I single out only a few here. A monumental rock-cut tomb on the
grounds of the Dominican Ecole Biblique, long known but only recently dated
correctly to the 8th-7th century, has benches for the bodies that feature headrests
carved in the shape of the well-known Hathor wig. This distinctive bouffant wig
is worn in New Kingdom Egypt by Qudshu, "the Holy One," who is the
Egyptian cow-goddess now identified with the popular Canaanite goddess
Asherah. The point is that even in Jerusalem, the spiritual center, a pious Judean
woman could be buried with her head resting in the representation of a wig that
was everywhere associated with the Canaanite goddess Asherah.24
Terra-cotta cult stand from Ta'anach, ca. 10th century, showing Asherah the
"Lion Lady" on the bottom register (Helga Weippert, Palastina in
vorhellenisticher Zeit)

The "Lion Lady," Egyptian New Kingdom plaque, with all three of her
names: Quds"u, Astarte, Anat (Collection of Winchester College)
 Another tomb, of the late 7th century, found near St. Andrew's Scots
Church, produced similar benches with headrests, as well as two silver amulets.
One amulet is particularly interesting, since it is inscribed with the Priestly
Blessing of Num. 6:24-27. Its date ca. 600 makes it by far our oldest surviving
fragment of a biblical text - at least four centuries older, for instance, than any
manuscripts from the Dead Sea caves. Furthermore, this bit of Scripture is not
being used for edification, as the priests would no doubt have prescribed, but as
"magic," which was strictly forbidden in orthodox Israelite religion. What we
have here is a biblical text engraved on silver, rolled up and worn around the
neck on a string as an amulet, a good-luck charm.25 And there are many more
archaeological examples of such magical or superstitious rituals, from Israelite
and Judean contexts, some of them invoking foreign deities like the Egyptian
gods Bes and Osiris. Biblical scholars have paid little attention to archaeological
finds of this sort, but they should, because they illustrate the prevalent "folk
religion" that the biblical writers condemn so vigorously - apparently without
really understanding themselves what they were dealing with. A prime example
of such elite misunderstanding of "folk religion" is 1 Kgs. 15:13 (2 Chr. 15:16),
which condemns a mipleset, "an abominable thing" of some sort, made for
Asherah. That word occurs only here in the Hebrew Bible, and we are not sure
of its meaning. The later biblical writers probably weren't sure either; they only
knew that one shouldn't have the "abominable thing," whatever it was.

(7) Beersheba, marking the southern limits of the settled zone in

monarchical times (the borders "from Dan to Beersheba"), was excavated by
Yohanan Aharoni in 1969-1975. Among the most spectacular finds were several
large, dressed blocks of stone that make up a monumental four-horned altar like
those that perhaps stood in the Levitical "cities of refuge" (especially in
Jerusalem; 1 Kgs. 1:50-53), where one could seek asylum by clinging
symbolically to the horns of the altar. This is one of only two examples of such
large altars that archaeologists have brought to light (the other being at Dan). Its
stones, however, were not recovered in situ, but were found built into the rubble
walls of the later "storehouses" near the city gate - stones from a dismantled
horned altar, thrown out and picked up later for building material. Where had
that altar originally stood, and why had it been dismantled? Aharoni argued that
his "basement building" - a large structure set into an unusually deep foundation
trench that obliterated lower levels - was the site of what had once been a large
temple. There the altar had originally stood. In that case, the temple had perhaps
been destroyed in the religious reforms of Hezekiah in the 8th century, among
whose measures was pulling down the "high places" and their altars. As though
to confirm Aharoni's theory, a large krater or two-handled pot found nearby is
inscribed in Hebrew godes, "sacred/set apart" (for cultic use). Here at Beersheba
we have perhaps the first actual archaeological evidence confirming the reforms
of various Judean kings - and the need for such, just as the biblical prophets
complained in denouncing what they call the worship of "foreign gods."26

(8) Not far east from Beersheba is Arad, a small Judean hilltop fortress and
sanctuary also excavated by Aharoni. The dating and interpretation of the
various 10th-6th-century phases remain controversial because of faulty
excavation methods and the lack of final reports. Yet the main points for our
purpose are clear. One corner of the walled citadel of the 9th-8th centuries is
occupied by a tripartite (or three-room) temple, very similar to the plan of the
partly contemporary temple in Jerusalem. The outer area (the biblical 'clam,
"vestibule") is actually an open-air courtyard with a large stone altar, at the base
of which there were found burned animal bones; a terra-cotta offering stand; a
fine crouching bronze lion; and two shallow platters inscribed with the Hebrew
letters qop kap, probably an abbreviation for godes ha-kohanim, "sacred/set apart
for the priests." And several priestly families at Arad, with names identical to
such families in the Bible, are in fact known from the ostraca, or inscribed
potsherds, one of which (no. 18) also mentions the "house/temple of Yahweh."
The middle chamber (the biblical hekal, or main room) is a smaller room, its
main feature being low benches, undoubtedly for the presentation of offerings.
The inner chamber (the biblical debir, or "Holy of Holies") is a still smaller
niche. It features two stylized horned altars at the approach steps, found with an
oily organic substance on top that suggests incense; and against the back wall,
two stone stelae (the biblical mdssebot, "sacred standing stones") with traces of
red paint, one of them conspicuously smaller than the other. Since these altars
and standing stones had been carefully laid down and floored over in a later
stage of this building, Aharoni argued that here again we have archaeological
evidence of the reforms of Hezekiah (others said Josiah), who abolished local
sanctuaries in order to favor the Jerusalem temple. I would go further to suggest
that both the bronze lion and the pair of standing stones show that Asherah, the
"Lion Lady," was worshipped alongside Yahweh at Arad, and for perhaps a
century or more before this became a problem for religious reformers. Do we
confront here the sort of "syncretism" that the prophets decried; or was Asherah
so thoroughly assimilated into the Israelite cult from early times that she was
thought by most Israelites to be "native" to their belief and practice, i.e.,
associated with Yahweh, perhaps even his consort?27

An unrolled silver foil amulet from a Jerusalem tomb, ca.

600 (Gabriel Barkay)
Plan of Stratum III at Beersheba, ca. 8th century (Aharon Kempinski and Ronny
Reich, The Architecture of Ancient Israel)

Plan of Israelite fort and temple at Arad, ca. 8th century (Helga Weippert,
Palastina in vorhellenisticher Zeit)
 (9) As though to answer this question, dramatic textual evidence of Asherah
has recently come to light at two sites. Kuntillet `Ajrud is a hilltop caravanserai,
or stop-over station, in the remote eastern Sinai desert, discovered by the British
explorer Edward Palmer in 1878 and excavated in 1978 by the Israeli
archaeologist Ze'ev Meshel. Again the finds are controversial and published only
in preliminary reports.28 Yet the impact of the material known so far is
revolutionary for our understanding of ancient Israelite and Judean religion. The
main structure, from the 8th century, is a large rectangular fort with double
walls, towers at the corners, and an open courtyard in the center, similar to other
known Iron Age fortresses in the Negev. The entrance area, however, is unique.
It is approached through a white plaster esplanade that leads into a passageway
flanked by two plastered siderooms with low benches, behind which are
cupboard-like chambers. The latter are clearly favissae, or storage areas for
discarded votives and cult offerings, such as are known at many Bronze-Iron
Age sanctuaries; and the benches are not for sitting but for placing offerings,
again with many parallels. If there were any doubt about the existence of a
shrine here in the `Ajritd gateway (and surprisingly enough, some scholars do
doubt it), it is removed by even a cursory examination of the finds. These
include a large stone votive bowl inscribed in Hebrew: "(Belonging) to
Obadaiah, Son of Adnah; may he be blessed by Yahweh." On several large
storejars there are painted motifs and scenes: a processional of strangely garbed
individuals; the familiar "tree of life" with flanking ibexes; lions; and especially
a striking scene with two representations of the Egyptian good-luck god Bes and
a seated half-nude female figure playing a lyre, whose distinctive lion-throne
suggests to me that she is a goddess (as we find seated on lion-thrones, along
with kings, elsewhere in the ancient Near East). A Hebrew inscription on this
storejar is a blessing-formula, ending with "May X be blessed by Yahweh of
Samaria and by his Asherah." Other Hebrew inscriptions also mention Asherah,
as well as El and Baal, alongside Yahweh. Some biblical scholars take a
"minimalist" view of the appearance of the Hebrew word `dsera here, which
occurs some 40 times in the Hebrew Bible and often appears to refer only to a
wooden image of some kind, a pole or tree, commonly associated with the well-
known goddess of the same name.29 Yet a growing number of scholars begin to
recognize the point: whether "a/Asherah" at `Ajritd means the goddess herself or
merely her symbol as an "agent of blessing" that could be invoked alongside
Yahweh, it was the widespread perception of the goddess's reality in ancient
Israel that gave the symbolism its efficacy. Either way, old Canaanite Asherah
was not dead and gone in many circles in Israel, but was alive and well - despite
the abhorrence of some prophets and priests by the 8th-7th centuries, when
attempts to discredit her began. The archaeological evidence at Kuntillet `Ajrud
alone, even on a minimalist interpretation, would in my opinion force us to
rethink much of what scholars have written about "normative" religion, about
monotheism, in ancient Israel. The ideal of the later formulations of the Hebrew
Bible is one thing; actual religious practice was another, reflecting a popular
religion that we would scarcely have known about apart from the accidents of
archaeological preservation and discovery.30

Platter/bowl from Arad, with the Hebrew letters qdp-kap, probably an

abbreviation for "sanctified for the priests" (Yohanan Aharoni, Arad
Inscriptions)
 Map showing location of Kuntillet `Ajrid in the eastern Sinai (P. Peck)

Painted scene and Hebrew inscription mentioning "Asherah" on a storejar from

Kuntillet `Ajrud, ca. 9th-8th century (Ze'ev Meshel, Kuntillet `Ajrud)
 (10) The `Ajrud texts do not stand alone, but actually corroborate the
meaning of an 8th-century Judean tomb inscription at Khirbet el-Qom near
Hebron that I discovered in 1968. Although parts of the reading are difficult and
controversial, the best reading goes something like this:

`Uriyahu, the Prince; this is his inscription. May

`Uriyahu be blessed by Yahweh, For from his
enemies he has saved him by his Asherah.

Virtually all scholars now agree that the reading "by his a/Asherah" in line 3 is
certain - and identical to that at `Ajrud, and with the same problems of
interpretation. Nevertheless, considering that we have literally only a handful of
ancient Hebrew inscriptions from tombs or cultic contexts, the fact that two of
them mention "a/Asherah" in a context of blessing is statistically striking. It
would appear that in non-biblical texts such an expression was common, an
acceptable expression of Israelite-Judean Yahwism throughout much of the
Monarchy. Thus Asherah was thought of as the consort of Yahweh, or at least as
a "hypostasis" of him, a personified aspect (as "Sophia," Wisdom, became later;
or the "Shekinah," God's "effective presence" in the world of medieval
Kabbalistic Judaism). I would argue that the orthodox textual tradition has, in
effect, purged the Bible of many original references to the Goddess Asherah, as
well as downplaying the remaining references to the point where many are
scarcely intelligible.31

Inscription no. III from Khirbet el-Qom, ca. 8th century (William G. Dever)

Artifactual Data and Israelite Cult

In addition to the cult-places discussed above (and a number of other similar

examples), we now have many individual artifacts that reflect the variety of
religious beliefs and practices in ancient Israel and Judah.

(1) We have dozens of terra-cotta offering-stands from ancient Israel, dating

to the 12th-7th centuries. They continue a long Bronze Age tradition of offering-
stands throughout the ancient Near East, which as we know from seal
impressions and paintings were used to present gifts of food and drink to the
gods, as well as perhaps to offer incense. Such rituals also became part of the
standard cult in ancient Israel, as we know from many biblical texts, so there
must have been at one time a fairly elaborate paraphernalia. Yet it is a curious
fact that nowhere in the Hebrew Bible are offering-stands even hinted at, as
though the writers were unaware of them - or perhaps disapproved? (The text is
also silent concerning other cult artifacts that we now have.)

Some of the Israelite-Judean offering-stands are rather plain, with no

obvious symbolic significance. But others, like the 10th-century Ta'anach stand
discussed above, are full of "Canaanite" religious imagery. One of the most
enigmatic is a 12th-century stand from `Ai, certainly an Israelite site of the
period of the judges, that has numerous fenestrations or "windows," probably for
use in incense-burning, but also features a curious row of well-modeled,
protruding human feet around the bottom. A foot-fetish cult? In any case, the
omission of any reference whatsoever in the Hebrew Bible to these common
offering-stands, when the texts are so preoccupied with sacrificial rituals, should
give us pause. What are the biblical writers and editors describing: actual
religious practices in ancient Israel, or their own idealistic, theologized
reconstruction of what should have taken place?32

(2) We have noted above some of the four-horned limestone altars,

including the one life-sized example we have from Beersheba. Most examples,
however - and at least 40 are now known - are of the miniature variety, from
about 1 to 3 ft. high. These small horned altars, ranging from the 10th to the 6th
centuries, are found all over Israel and Judah, in many contexts, cultic, domestic,
and even industrial.33 The significance of the four hornlike projections at the
corner (sometimes stylized) is uncertain, but the symbolism may be connected
with the older Bronze Age "bull cults" well known throughout the Eastern
Mediterranean world. We have noted above the title "Bull" used of El in the
Canaanite pantheon. It is also significant that when the biblical writers want to
speak of apostasy among the Israelites, they tell stories of the setting up of a
bronze calf at Mt. Sinai, or the golden calf that Jeroboam erected in his newly
established royal sanctuary at Dan (1 Kgs. 12:28, 29) after the death of Solomon
and the secession of the northern tribes.

Cult stands and bowls from "Cult Room 49" at Lachish, ca. late 10th
century(Yohanan Aharoni)
Small four-horned altar (Helga Weippert, Palastina in vorhellenisticher Zeit)
 In any case, once again the biblical writers and editors are completely silent.
There is not even a hint in the texts of these small horned altars, despite the fact
that they were probably used for burning incense, and incense offerings are often
described in some detail in the biblical text. Again, we must ask, What is going
on? When the Bible describes local altars being "torn down" in religious
reforms, it surely does not refer to these small, portable monoliths. But in that
case, what is being referred to, and why do the texts not give us any details? If
they had, we might have identified more monumental altars, of which we have
so few certain examples, as well as the miniature varieties. As it is, the "facts on
the ground" do not coincide entirely with the biblical descriptions, indicating at
the very least two differing perceptions, if not religious realities, where texts and
artifacts are concerned.

(3) We have many archaeological examples of various exotic terra-cotta

vessels and implements, often one of a kind, that are probably best understood as
"cultic" in nature. That is, they were no doubt used for ritual purposes, even
though the exact manner in which they were employed, as well as the rationale,
may elude us. One class of such cultic vessels would be the naoi, or model
temples, discussed above, of which we have several Israelite examples.34 They
continue a long Bronze Age tradition of model shrines for household usage,
often with a deity or pair of deities depicted standing in the doorway. The
frequent association with lions, doves, and Hathor wigs suggests that these
model shrines were used in the veneration of Asherah, perhaps by women at
local shrines and in domestic cults.

Another class of cult vessel is the kernos (pl. kernoi), or "trick-vessel,"

closely connected with Cyprus and perhaps introduced into Israel by the "Sea
Peoples" or the Phoenicians. These are usually small bowls with a hollow rim
that conducts fluid and communicates with hollow animal heads perched on the
rim at the top. When filled with something like olive oil or wine, these bowls can
be tilted and manipulated so as to make the heads drink and/or pour. While some
scholars seem to think that the kernoi were simply toys, it is more reason able to
presume that these complex, exotic vessels were used in the cult, no doubt for
libation offerings. Such offerings are frequently mentioned in biblical texts; but
again there is no hint of kernoi or of any other libation vessels that we can
actually identify archaeologically.35
 Kernos from Khirbet el-Qom, ca. 8th century (Photo by Theodore Rosen)

Next we may note the very common terra-cotta zoomorphic figurines,

especially from 8th-7th century Judean tombs. Most are quadrupeds like horses
(sometimes with riders), cows, or bulls, but other common farm animals are
portrayed as well (in one case an amusing three-legged chicken). Some of these
animal figurines are hollow and could have served as libation vessels, but others
are enigmatic. The horse-and-rider figurines or quadrupeds with sun-discs on
their heads have been connected with references such as those in 2 Kgs. 23:11,
12 describing Josiah's cleansing the Jerusalem temple of the "horses" and
"chariots of the sun." This is an obvious allusion to the Assyrian and Babylonian
solar and astral cults that probably made serious inroads into Israelite and Judean
religion in the 8th-6th centuries and which met with prophetic condemnation.36

Zoomorphic figurines from Cave I in Jerusalem, ca. late 7th century (Kathleen
M. Kenyon, Jerusalem: Excavating 3000 Years of History)
 There are many other terra-cotta items now known from archaeology that
almost certainly had a cultic function, but I can mention only a few of them here.
Particularly common in tombs are miniature models of household furniture, such
as chairs, couches, or beds. They undoubtedly were meant to accompany the
dead into the afterlife, and thus they must have had some religious ("magical")
significance. The same is probably true of the small stone-filled "rattles," but
apart from the general connection of music with the cult little can be said of
these rattles. All these and other vessels are sometimes interpreted merely as
"toys," but it seems to me that such reductionist views simply highlight our
ignorance (or lack of imagination?) in dealing with the ancient cult. On the other
hand, some clay vessels, like the perforated tripod censers, have an obvious
cultic function, and we must try to understand what that was.37

(4) By far the most intriguing cultic artifacts that archaeologists have re
covered are the 2000 or more mold-made terra-cotta female figurines, found in
all sorts of contexts. They depict a nude female en face, the earlier examples
often clutching a tambourine (or bread-mold) or occasionally an infant to the
upper body, the later Judean ones prominently emphasizing the breasts. In
contrast to the typical LB plaques depicting the Mother Goddess with large hips
and exaggerated pubic triangle, the Israelite figurines usually show the lower
body stylistically, the body only a pillar possibly representing the tree symbolism
often connected with Asherah (giving them the name "pillar-base" figurines).
These comparatively "chaste" portrayals may indicate that Asherah/ `Anat, the
old consort of the male deity in Canaan, with her more blatantly sexual
characteristics, has now been supplanted by a concept of the female deity
principally as Mother and patroness of mothers. William F. Albright's
designation of these as "dea nutrix figurines" maybe close to the mark. More
recently, Ziony Zevit has aptly termed the female figurines "prayers in clay" - in
this case, invocations to Asherah.38

In view of the obvious imagery of these female figurines, it is surprising that

so many biblical scholars and archaeologists are reluctant to conclude anything
about them. Some think them merely "toys" - what I call the "Barbie doll
syndrome." Others think that we simply do not and cannot know what they are.
To me, however, their cultic connotations are obvious. I would argue that in
ancient Israel most women, excluded from public life and the conduct of
"official" political and religious functions, necessarily occupied themselves with
domestic concerns. Predominant among these concerns were those connected
specifically with reproduction - conception, childbirth, lactation - but also those
connected with rites of passage, such as marriages, funerals, and all the other
practical matters that insured the maintenance and survival of the family. To be
sure, men were probably involved in some of these domestic activities as well,
but "the religion of hearth and home" fell mainly to women in Israel, as it did
everywhere in the ancient world. It would not be surprising if Yahweh -
portrayed almost exclusively as a male deity, involved in the "political history"
of the nation - seemed remote, unconcerned with women's needs, or even hostile.
Thus one-half of the population of ancient Israel, women, may have felt closer to
a female deity, identified more easily with her. In this case, it would have been
Asherah, who was still widely venerated in many guises in the Levantine Iron
Age (and even much later). To this and other aspects of popular religion we now
turn.
Female mold-made terra-cotta figurines of (a) the "tambourine" style, Ta`anach,
10th century (Sylvia Schroer, In Israel Gab es Bilder?); and (b) the "pillar-base"
style, Jerusalem, 8th century (Urs Winter, Frau and Gottin)

Toward a Definition of "Popular Religion"

At the outset of this chapter, I noted that nearly all commentators on ancient
Israelite religion have based themselves on what we may call texts of the "Great
Tradition." In this case, the evidence comes from the official, or canonical, texts
of the Hebrew Bible, which as we have shown are thoroughly elitist. That
version of the religion of ancient Israel - the "orthodox" one - may have been the
one intended by the final editors of the Hebrew Bible. Certainly it has been the
one congenial to most of the theologians and clerics who have commented on
the biblical text over the centuries. But such a portrait is artificial, even arbitrary;
and it scarcely does justice to the rich variety and vitality of the actual religious
practices of the majority in ancient Israel. It is only recent archaeological
discoveries that have enabled us to balance this portrait, by giving attention to
"folk" or "popular religion," usually not directly reflected in the written sources.

But what is popular religion? A number of recent studies have approached

the subject, but none in my opinion even offers a working definition. That would
include works like Susan Ackerman's "Under Every Green Tree": Popular
Religion in Sixth-Century Judah and Karel van der Toorn's From Her Cradle to
Her Grave: The Role of Religion in the Life of the Israelite and the Babylonian
Woman.39

One way to define popular religion would be to look not only at the
archaeological evidence, which may differ radically from official texts, but also
to look closely at the condemnation of religious practices in the texts of the
Hebrew Bible. In doing so we are making a practical and legitimate assumption,
namely that prophets, priests, and reformers "knew what they were talking
about." That is, the religious situation about which they complained was real, not
invented by them as a foil for their revisionist message. The irony is that in
condemning popular religious practices, the biblical writers have unwittingly
preserved chance descriptions of such practices, of which formerly the
"archaeological revolution" constituted our only witness. (That is not to say,
however, that the same writers and editors in their zeal for orthodoxy did not
deliberately suppress much information about popular religion that we should
like to have.) Fortunately, archaeology has supplied not only much
supplementary information, but in doing so it has given us some valuable clues
as to how to "read between the lines" in the biblical texts.

As examples of how we might read the textual and the archaeological

records together, each illuminating the other on popular religion, I would suggest
the following. In Jer. 7:18 there is a telling description of what must have been a
common family ritual, although one decried by the prophet: "The children gather
wood, the fathers kindle fire, and the women knead dough, to make cakes for the
Queen of Heaven." The latter is either Asherah or her counterpart `Astarte; the
two often coalesced in the Iron Age. An even fuller example of what was really
going on in Judean times is the lengthy description in 2 Kgs. 23 of King Josiah's
reform measures in the late 7th century. Most biblical scholars have taken this
famous passage largely as a piece of "Deuteronomistic propaganda," not an
accurate historical account. But apart from the question of whether the supposed
"reform" was successful, there is the question of whether the purported need for
such a reform is based on an eye-witness, realistic appraisal of the actual
religious situation. It appears that it was; indeed, as I have shown recently, every
single religious object and/or practice that is proscribed in 2 Kgs. 23 can readily
be illustrated by archaeological discoveries. The terminology of the text is not at
all "enigmatic," as has usually been supposed by textual scholars, but is a clear
reflection of the religious reality in monarchical times.40

I would argue that all of the following features are now well known
archaeologically and give us an accurate picture of what may be called "popular
religion." Popular religion is an alternate, nonorthodox, nonconformist mode of
religious expression. It is largely noncentralized, non institutional, lying outside
state priests or state sponsorship. Because it is nonauthoritarian, popular religion
is inclusive rather than exclusive; it appeals especially to minorities and to the
disenfranchised (in the case of ancient Israel, most women); in both belief and
practice it tends to be eclectic and syncretistic. Popular religion focuses more on
individual piety and informal practice than on elaborate public ritual, more on
cult than on intellectual formulations (i.e., theology). By definition, popular
religion is less literate (not by that token any less complex or sophisticated) and
thus may be inclined to leave behind more traces in the archaeological record
than in the literary record, more ostraca and graffiti than classical texts, more
cult and other symbolic paraphernalia than Scripture. Nevertheless, despite these
apparent dichotomies, popular religion overlaps significantly with official
religion, if only by sheer force of numbers of practitioners; it often sees itself as
equally legitimate; and it attempts to secure the same benefits as all religion, i.e.,
the individual's sense of integration with nature and society, of health and
prosperity, and of ultimate well-being.

The major elements of popular religion in ancient Israel, as we can gather

both from substrata of the biblical text and archaeology, probably included:
frequenting bamot and other local shrines; the making of images; veneration of
`dserim (whether sacred-trees or iconographic images) and the worship of
Asherah the Great Lady herself; rituals having to do with childbirth and children;
pilgrimages and saints' festivals; planting and harvest festivals of many kinds;
marzeah feasts (sacred banquets); various funerary rites, such as libations for the
dead; baking cakes for the "Queen of Heaven" (probably `Astarte); wailing over
Tammuz; various aspects of solar and astral worship; divination and sorcery; and
perhaps child sacrifice. These and other elements of "folk" religion are often
assumed to have characterized the religion of "hearth and home," and thus to
have been almost the exclusive province of women. That assumption, typically
made by male scholars, inevitably carries with it a note of condescension. After
all, women in ancient Israel were largely illiterate and marginalized; they played
an insignificant role in the socio-political processes that shaped Israelite life and
institutions.41 Nevertheless, I think that family re ligion in ancient Israel
involved many men as well, especially in rural areas far from the influence of
elite circles in Jerusalem. Asherah, who brought life, could be the patroness of
men as well as women.

Asherah Abscondita

Why has the role of popular religion and the cult of the Mother Goddess in
ancient Israel been neglected, misunderstood, or downplayed by the majority of
biblical scholars? There are many reasons, including the male, Establishment,
elitist bias of most students of the subject, agreeing (not coincidentally) with the
biases of the biblical writers themselves; the typical preference of the Protestant
scholars, who have dominated the study, for theology rather than cult (i.e.,
religious practice) in any form; and the notion that texts alone can inform us
adequately on religious matters - that philology, rather than archaeology or the
study of material remains, should prevail. Yet archaeology is literally forcing us
to revise our basic notion of what ancient Israelite religion was. In particular, we
now know that the old Mother Goddess Asherah - virtually expunged from the
texts of the Hebrew Bible, and all but forgotten by rabbinical times - never died
out, but enjoyed a vigorous life throughout the Monarchy. This is not really
surprising, since most biblical scholars now agree that true monotheism (i.e., not
merely "henotheism") arose only in the period of the Exile and beyond.42

There are even later reflexes of the cult of the Great Mother: the
personification of divine Wisdom (Hokmah) in later Judaism; and the conception
of the Shekinah, or effective divine presence in the world, sometimes called the
Matronit or even the Bride of God, in medieval texts of the Kabbalist sect of
Judaism. In the Christian Church, parallel doctrines that may go back to a
primitive memory of feminine manifestations of the deity may be seen in the
development of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, a more immanent, nurturing
aspect of the transcendent God. Especially relevant in this connection is the later
ele vation of Mary to the position of Mother of God, a feminine intermediary
through whom many Christians pray, rather than directly to God himself.
Mainstream, more orthodox clergy, both Jewish and Christian, have always
resisted these "pagan" influences in what are ostensibly rigorously monotheistic
religions. In popular religion, however, the old cults die hard. But when they do,
archaeology sometimes rescues them and thus writes a better balanced history of
religion.43

The point of all the foregoing resume is simply that the biblical writers and
editors were once again not so much "wrong" in many of the facts of their
history of Israel's religious development as they were one-sided in their
interpretation of the facts. Yet despite their own partisan, rigorously orthodox
outlook, they nevertheless give us many clues as to what the "real" religions of
ancient Israel were. Perhaps they do this unwittingly; but nevertheless by their
very condemnation of pagan beliefs and rites they confirm their widespread
existence. Otherwise, there would have been no point to the repeated
condemnations by prophets and reformers like the Deuteronomists. Here is
where we might agree with the new literary critics and revisionists and do a little
deconstruction of our own. It is by reading many of the biblical texts "against the
grain," or despite their idealistic pretensions, that we may best get at the truth
about ancient Israelite religions. This may not be the religious "truth" that the
biblical writers had in mind, but it is historical truth, and that is our proper goal
as archaeologists and historians. Even without the archaeological evidence
sketched here (and there is much more) we might, however, have grasped this
truth long ago, were it not for the fact that too many of us, Jews and Christians,
have sided perhaps unconsciously with one particular biblical worldview, that of
the late Deuteronomists and reformist prophets. Yet there were many other
worldviews that were once part of Israel's Yahwistic religion, however
unorthodox they came to be seen in time. How the recognition of the actual
diversity and vitality of religion in ancient Israel may contribute to our own
religious thinking is a topic that we will explore further in the final chapter.

Daily Life in Biblical Times: Fortifications

I have argued in Chapter 4 that ancient Israel had achieved statehood already by
the 10th century, and even the revisionists would grant as much by the 9th
century, for the northern kingdom at least. I based my case for statehood, for
both the northern and the southern kingdoms, on the strong archaeological evi
dence for several developments by the late 10th century: a pronounced shift to
an urban settlement pattern; evidence for highly centralized administration; and
the emergence of Israel as a major international and economic power among the
nascent states and peoples of the southern Levant by the time of the fully
developed Iron Age.

Apart from the difference of opinion among scholars about the date of the
first unequivocal evidence of statehood, we need to inquire now whether the
writers and editors of the Hebrew Bible had any real knowledge of such typical
features of statehood as city fortifications in the Iron II period, or the Divided
Monarchy, in which their history is set. In short, what convergences may there
be between the biblical texts and what we now know archaeologically?
Honoring our principle of independent sources and inquiries, let us look first at
what we might learn from the biblical texts alone.

City walls are rather "generic," lacking in specific features. Thus, while they
are archaeologically well enough known, they cannot be expected to be
described in detail in the biblical texts. Let us look rather at city gates, which
exhibit many diagnostic features. Numerous such features are mentioned in
biblical texts. (1) General descriptions of city gates appear in several texts, such
as 2 Sam. 18:4, 24, a passage that refers to a lower and an upper gate, an inner
chamber, and two towers. This, of course, fits precisely the plan of the 10th-
century city gates of Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer (discussed above, pp. 131-34),
and also a few 9th-8th-century gates, such as the ones at Lachish and at
Assyrianperiod Gezer. It is worth noting that none of the city gates of this type
excavated thus far postdates the 8th century, so it is hard to see how much later
writers could have "invented" them.

(2) Specific aspects of city gates mentioned in the Hebrew Bible include
several features. (a) Swinging wooden doors (Heb. delet), usually with metal
bars, are mentioned in texts such as Deut. 3:5 (Bashan); 1 Kgs. 16:34 (Jericho);
Judg. 16:3 (Samson, in Gaza). Actual sockets for such swinging doors can still
be seen today in the excavated city gates at 10th-8th-century Gezer and at
9th8th-century Dan.44 (b) The iron bolts (man`Al) that were needed to secure
these doors in place are mentioned in Neh. 3:3-15, beams (gora) and bars
(beriyah) that would have been used for reinforcement are noted in texts like 2
Kgs. 6:2, 5; 2 Chr. 3:7; and Deut. 3:5; Judg. 16:3; 1 Sam. 23:7; and 2 Chr. 8:5,
14:7. The holes in the threshold stone of the city gate, where the iron bolts were
shot home, can still be seen in the gate at Gezer. (c) The fact that city gates
served for more than defensive purposes, and could also have economic, juridi
cal, and ceremonial usages, is indicated by such biblical passages as 2 Kgs. 7:1,
18 (a "marketplace"); Deut. 21:19, 20; Ruth 4:1, 11; Isa. 29:21; Amos 5:12, 15
("justice," "retribution," and "charity" dispensed in the gate). Several excavated
10th-7th-century gates have produced unique ceramic grain-scoops, large
storejars, bronze balance-scales, and inscribed stone sheqel-weights - all clear
evidence of commercial activities. In addition, there have been found benches
lining the walls of the inner rooms of the gateway complex at Gezer and
elsewhere - so basic that they were rebuilt and reused in every successive stra
tum.45 These benches would have been suitable for local judges sitting in
tribunal in the gate area. Ceremonial functions of gate complexes are illustrated
in particular by the gate at Tel Dan, which has in the outer courtyard a prominent
low podium of dressed ashlar masonry, no doubt for a wooden throne, with four
surrounding recessed stone column bases that served originally as sup ports for
wooden beams which would have upheld an overhead canopy. That would
explain a passage like josh. 20:4, which prescribes that an accused person can
flee to a designated "city of refuge" and there "stand at the entrance of the gate
of the city, and explain his case to the elders of that city." Other texts refer to the
custom of the city elders sitting in judgment in the city gate (Deut. 21:19, 20;
Ruth 4:1, 11), reproving in the gate (Isa. 29:21), and hearing the claims of the
needy in the gate (Amos 5:12). Above all, one recalls Amos's impassioned plea:
"Hate evil and love good; and establish justice in the gate" (5:15). In addi tion,
the 9th-8th-century Tel Dan gate had in the outer courtyard area several unique
structures that suggest the "bazaars" or extramural marketplaces (hussot, or
"outer installations") that Ahab was given permission to construct in Aramaean
Damascus, and that the Aramaeans were granted reciprocally in Samaria (cf. 1
Kgs. 20:34).46
Foundation stones of the Gezer Field III gate, where an iron bolt and socket once
were; ca. 10th century (Photo by William G. Dever)

Ceramic grain-scoop from Lachish Level III, late 8th century

(Olga Tufnell, Lachish III)

Benches running around the three walls of the "guard rooms" of the Field III city
gate at Gezer, ca. 10th century (Photo by R. B. Wright)

Reconstruction of the canopied "throne" in the inner gate plaza at Tel Dan,
ca. 9th-8th century (Abraham Biran, Biblical Dan)
 In conclusion, the many biblical passages that mention city gates - not as
part of any deliberate propaganda, but simply offhand - fit remarkably well with
excavated gates at a number of sites of the 10th-7th centuries, and only of this
period. In the Persian-Hellenistic-Roman period such gates had long since
passed out of existence and memory, as archaeological evidence has shown. No
writer living then could have "invented" city gates like ours, known only long
before in the Iron Age.

Literacy in Ancient Israel

One of the revisionists' principal objections to Israel's having been a centralized

state in the 10th century is that writing would have been a bureaucratic necessity,
but we have little if any 10th-century evidence. I have mentioned that the few
early Hebrew texts that we do happen to have, however, include an abcedary, or
list of the letters of the alphabet ('Izbet Sartah; 12th-I lth century), and a poem
giving the agricultural seasons (Gezer, 10th century).47 Both are almost
certainly schoolboys' practice texts. Students and others were now learning to
write, adapting the Old Canaanite alphabet and script as Hebrew developed into
a national language and instrument of cultural expression. We may assume that
writing, and even what we may call "functional" literacy, was reasonably
widespread by the 10th century, and certainly by the 9th century when even the
revisionists must concede that an Israelite state did exist.48

It remains true, however, that we have relatively few examples of Hebrew

writing of any kind from the 9th century and have produced no extrabiblical
texts that could be considered real "literature." The problem becomes
particularly acute if we consider the Yahwist and Elohist sources or "schools"
that began the literary tradition which later grew into the Pentateuch and other
historical works to have emerged as early as the 10th-9th century, as most
biblical scholars have argued until recently. Could there possibly have been
written sources that early, given our lack of any significant literary remains
except the Hebrew Bible (which in its present form is later than the Iron Age)?

There is considerably more written evidence from Iron Age Palestine than
the revisionists and other minimalists know or are willing to take seriously.49
But before turning to this evidence, let us begin, as before, by looking at the
evidence for writing in the Hebrew Bible itself.

Many scholars have suggested that biblical texts such as Deut. 6:6-9 - God
instructing the Israelites to "write (the commandments) on your doorposts" -
indicate early and widespread literacy. But this passage, although set by the
Deuteronomistic editors in the "Mosaic era," is almost certainly quite late,
probably postexilic, and offers no real evidence for the early Iron Age. In fact,
the text actually implies that the oral tradition was still the primary means for
transmitting knowledge. Many of the other allusions to writing in the biblical
"Patriarchal" and "Mosaic" eras reflect the same preliterate stage of cultural
evolution, such as Exod. 17:14. This passage relates how, after the Battle of
Amalek, God said to Moses: "Write this as a memorial in a book and recite it in
the ears of Joshua." Thus the mention of "writing" in these and related texts is
really an anachronism, not historical evidence.50

Seals and Sealings

There are several other biblical texts that offer more possibilities, especially for
archaeological commentary. One category of Hebrew inscriptions that is well
illustrated is the practice of writing on a gemstone for a signet-ring or seals,
which could be worn on a finger or hung around the neck. The Hebrew word for
"seal" (hotam) occurs a number of times in the Bible. In Gen. 38:18, 25 Tamar
demands from Judah his "seal and cord" as a pledge that he will keep his
promise of a gift. Signet rings themselves are described as gifts or offerings to
God in Exod. 35:22; Num. 31:50. According to Exod. 28:11, 21, 36; 39:6, 14,
30, priests serving in the temple possessed "engraved seals," some with "the
names of the sons of Israel." The king and other high state officials in ancient
Israel had seals as symbols of their authority, worn on the right hand (Jer. 22:24).

Seals could be and often were not only symbols of wealth or authority, but
were used in a practical way to designate ownership. In 1 Kgs. 21:8 Jezebel seals
Ahab's documents, that is, she affixes a signet-ring to a wax or clay patty that
binds the strings and knots surrounding a rolled-up papyrus or parchment
document. Jer. 32:10-44 refers several times to "sealing" deeds of purchase. In
Neh. 9:38; 10:1 the priests "seal" a covenant document. Certainly seals were
intended for making seal-impressions, as proven by the fact that all the hundreds
of examples we possess are engraved in the negative, even though that was
technically difficult. Both Cant. 8:6 and Isa. 8:16 use the term "seal" as a
metaphor (the latter in reference to a megillah, or scroll), referring to God's
promise to "bind up my testimony, seal my teachings." While these and a few
other passages in the Bible attest to the rather widespread ownership of seals,
many of the texts themselves cannot be dated precisely. Nor can it be assumed
necessarily that everyone who possessed and used a seal could read or write -
indeed, the inability to do so might be one reason for having a seal, although
someone must be presumed to have been literate or the whole business of sealing
something would have been pointless.
 A selection of Israelite and Judean seals of the 8th-7th century (John W.
Crowfoot, Grace M. Crowfoot, and Kathleen M. Kenyon, The Objects from
Samaria)

There are so many known Iron Age seals - perhaps a thousand or more, to
judge from many recent publications and an Israel Museum Catalogue - that I
can note here only a few of the most significant convergences with biblical
texts.sl

If space permitted, I could cite hundreds of 9th-6th-century seals inscribed

with Hebrew personal names, the vast majority of which occur also in the
Hebrew Bible, including the supposedly "Hellenistic-Roman" Deuteronomistic
materials. A number of seals and seal impressions, however, have such specific
connections with individual biblical texts that they must be singled out here. One
of our best collections of bullae - or clay patties from papyrus scrolls, with seal
impressions in them - is the group of more than 300 7th6th-century examples
published in 1976 and 1986 by Israeli epigrapher Nahman Avigad.52 Many of
them bear ordinary Hebrew personal names well known from the Hebrew Bible
(more than 140 different names); but at least some have the names and titles of
high-ranking officials, since this is an archive of important documents. Three of
this group of bullae feature the title "who is over the house," identical to the
phrase in Isa. 22:15, identifying one Shebna as "the royal chamberlain." The
same phrase - indeed with the same name, Shebna - occurs in another
extrabiblical text, the famous Royal Steward Inscription (below). Two other
bullae in the Avigad group feature the title "servant of the king," and three others
belonged to "sons of the king" or royal princes (in this case, Neriyahu and
Yerahme'el). The most interesting bulla, however, is that of "Berakyahu, son of
Neriyahu the scribe." This is only the second Hebrew seal of a "scribe" to be
published, and is thus unusual in itself. Moreover, as Avigad points out, this
must be the seal of none other than "Baruch (the short form of the name), the son
of Neriyahu," whom the Hebrew Bible identifies as the amanuensis of the
prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 36:4-32).53 So important was this Baruch that some
scholars think he was the real author not only of the book of Jeremiah, but
perhaps of the first version of the Deuteronomistic history. Richard E.
Friedman's book, Who Wrote the Bible? even argues that much of the Hebrew
Bible in its present form is the work of this very Baruch. The bulla of Baruch in
the Avigad archive bears a fingerprint on the clay patty. Is this the "signature" of
the man who wrote the Bible? Possibly! And more recently a bulla bearing the
name of the great reformer King Hezekiah has appeared.

Seal impression of "Hanan, son of Hilkiah the Priest," ca. 600 (P. Kyle McCarter,
Ancient Inscriptions)
Seal impression of "Yerahme'el, son of the King," ca. 600 (Original drawing
by Nahman Avigad, courtesy Israel Exploration Society)
 An even more intriguing possibility, however, involves another biblical
convergence. According to the biblical sources (Jer. 36:1ff.), in the fourth year of
King Jehoiakim of Judah, or 605/604), Baruch wrote down on a scroll an oracle
of Jeremiah concerning the imminent destruction of Jerusalem. The king,
incensed, ordered the scroll burnt; but, forewarned, Baruch and Jeremiah re
wrote the scroll. On another occasion, Baruch was witness to a symbolic land
purchase made by Jeremiah, who entrusted the "sealed deed of purchase" to
Baruch with the request that he put it in ajar for safekeeping (Jer. 32:1-15). Was
it sealed with the same signet-ring that produced the Avigad bulla? Perhaps. In
any case, the seal was used repeatedly; we even have another bulla, now in the
Israel Museum, impressed by the same signet-ring that made the Avigad bulla.
Now what is the revisionists' reaction to this rather striking convergence, even if
taken minimally? Thomas L. Thompson and Niels Peter Lemche have recently
suggested, in all seriousness, that the bulla is a fake!54 We now have at least 65
other late Iron Age bullae, however, some from well-controlled archaeological
contexts, like those from Jerusalem and Lachish. It would be almost impossible
for a modern forger to duplicate bullae like these, not only because there is no
way that a forger could know the authentic early scripts that well, not to mention
"inventing" nonbiblical personal names that are precisely of biblical type, but
because of technological difficulties. Where would a modern forger get the right
kind of papyrus to make the papyrus impressions that are clearly visible on the
backs of the bullae? What can one say when scholars resort to such desperate
measures to deny or to suppress evidence that may threaten their cherished
theories?

Seal impression of "Berakyahu (Baruch), son of Neriyahu the Scribe," ca. 600
(Original drawing by Nahman Avigad, courtesy Israel Exploration Society)
 Reconstruction of a sealed papyrus document, with three bullae attached
(Original drawing by Nahman Avigad, courtesy Israel Exploration Society)

One other point deserves mention here. While it is obvious that the more
than 300 Hebrew bullae that we now possess were once attached to papyrus
scrolls as seals, we have found only one fragment of an actual Iron Age papyrus
scroll. It survived among the much later Wadi Murabba'at texts only because of
the extremely arid conditions at the Dead Sea area.ss Does the present lack of
any written remains on papyrus scrolls from the Iron Age mean that they never
existed? To be consistent, and to protect their theories, the revisionists would
have to say: Yes. But again, this is strictly an argument from silence - and in this
case, manifestly absurd. It is obvious that at least a rudimentary or "functional"
form of literacy was widespread in ancient Israel, and it could not have
developed overnight only in the late 7th century, at the very end of the
Monarchy. If much of the writing was done on papyrus, as both the textual and
archaeological evidence demonstrate, we should not expect to recover very
much. The fact, as all archaeologists know, is that in the damp winter climate of
most of Palestine, organic materials like fragile papyrus simply do not survive.
Fortunately, other written materials do.

Ostraca

From all appearances it seems that the more important documents in ancient
Israel - such as official decrees, land deeds and other records of legal
transactions, and whatever literature that may have been produced - were written
on papyrus, even though it was perishable. Simpler transactions, however, were
often recorded by writing in ink or scratching on the broken pieces of pottery
(potsherds) that were lying about everywhere on the ground (Isa. 45:9) and came
conveniently to hand. It is often implied that Hebrew ostraca (sg. ostracon) are
as rare as other epigraphic materials. In the early days of archaeology they were
indeed relatively unknown. But the Harvard excavations at Samaria in 1908-
1910 discovered an archive of some 102 ostraca from the early 8th century - our
earliest such archive (dating probably to the reign of Jeroboam II, 785-740, to
judge from year-formulae of the ostraca themselves). They were found on the
floor at an administrative complex attached to the palace built by Omri and Ahab
a century earlier. These ostraca, written or scratched in cursive Hebrew on large
potsherds, are mostly receipts for taxes paid by wealthy landholders in various
commodities, such as oil or wine.56

Ostraca no. 17 from Samaria, "from `Azoh to Gaddiyaw," and dealing with
"refined oil," early 8th century (G. A. Reisner, C. S. Fisher, and D. G. Lyon,
Harvard Excavations at Samaria)
 Here we have clear evidence of centralized administration in the capital of
the northern kingdom. Moreover, there are several interesting convergences with
biblical texts. The personal names are usually similar to those known in the
Hebrew Bible, consistent even to the short form of the divine name, -yaw in
northern compound names, compared with -yahu in Judah. Scholars have
observed, however, that the proportion of personal names compounded with the
name of Baal here in the "pagan" north, rather than with Yahweh, is higher than
the ratio in the Bible: 6 of 15 compound names feature Ba`a1, 9 Yahweh. That
datum, however, accords well with the biblical portrait, biased or not, of the
northern kingdom as much more heavily influenced by Phoenician religion.
Another convergence lies in the fact that a relatively few taxpay ers show up
again and again on the Samaria receipts, no doubt evidence of large agricultural
estates being owned and managed by landed gentry. Such a socio-economic
situation provides us with a setting into which we can place the protest of the
prophet Amos against the idle nobles who feel secure in "the mountain of
Samaria"; who "trample on the poor and take from them extractions of wheat"
(Amos 5:11; 6:1-6). And Micah complains of those who "covet fields, and seize
them; houses, and take them away" (Mic. 2:2).

The second major find of Hebrew ostraca was made by British excavators in
1935-38 at the great Judean border fortress of Lachish. There an archive of 23
ostraca was found on the floor of the guardroom of the city gate, among the
ashes of the Babylonian destruction wrought by Nebuchadnezzar in 587/586.
These ostraca are letters written to Lachish on the eve of its destruction. Letter
no. 4 is particularly poignant; it is a last-minute plea for help from an outlying
village, saying that they can no longer see the fire-signals of nearby Azekah but
are watching desperately for a signal from Lachish. Letter no. 4 also refers to an
unnamed prophet; and letter 6 alludes to a prophet who "weakens the hand," i.e.,
gives a discouraging oracle - the latter phrase exactly the same as a
contemporary expression in Jeremiah (38:4). Letter no. 3 is also pertinent to our
discussion of literacy, since in it one Hawshiyahu expresses his hurt feelings
over the fact that his correspondent, Ya'ush, has accused him of "not knowing
how to read a letter." He protests that not only does he read every letter without
any assistance ("nobody has ever tried to read me a letter!"), but he reads it
immediately and remembers everything in it.57

A third major discovery of ostraca, the largest archive yet, with more than
100 8th-6th-century letters, was made by the Israeli archaeologist Yohanan
Aharoni at Arad, near Beersheba.58 Mostly in Hebrew, but a few written in
Aramaic, the Arad ostraca are painted in ink on sherds of large jars. All those
from Stratum VI belong to an archive of correspondence of "Eliashib, son of
Ishyahu," apparently commander of the garrison in the late 7th century, stationed
here to guard the desert borders with Edom. Many of these ostraca are rather
banal, having to do with the transfer of various provisions. One, how ever, no.
18, is of unusual interest in that it assures the reader that "the house (i.e., temple)
of Yahweh is well; it endures." This may be a reference to the earlier tripartite
temple of Arad brought to light by Aharoni, or it may refer to the temple in
Jerusalem. If the latter is the case, we have here the only surviving nonbiblical
reference to Solomon's temple apart from the broken ivory pomegranate
mentioned above (the name "Yahweh" partly missing).59

Ostracon no. 4 from Lachish, early 6th century (Inscriptions Reveal, Israel
Museum)
Ostracon no. 18 from Arad, mentioning the House of "Yahweh," ca. 7th century
(Yohanan Aharoni, Arad Inscriptions)

A number of individual ostraca are also now known, enough to show

beyond doubt that extensive written materials did exist in ancient Israel besides
official archives, that is, that many besides elites could read and write.
Particularly significant are the 8th-century inscriptions painted on pottery
(although not strictly "ostraca") discussed above.60 The 8th-century fortress at
`Ajrld was really out in the boondocks, miles away from civilization. Yet people
residing there, or frequenting the place as travelers, left behind quite a corpus of
written material. Some of the short messages written on the plastered walls of
the gate shrine may be considered more "graffiti" than the work of a trained
hand; but that confirms my suspicion that even many ordinary folk in ancient
Israel were at least "functionally literate," that is, they could manage simple
business transactions and the like.

One isolated ostracon deserves special mention here. It was found by Itzhaq
Beit-Arieh in his 1982-88 excavations at Horvat `Uza in the eastern Negev
desert. Dating to the 7th century, it is written in Hebrew but also contains a list
of Egyptian hieratic signs for numbers. Many of these same Egyptian hieratic
numerals are found in other 8th-7th Hebrew inscriptions, even on sheqel-weights
(below), indicating that for some reason an Egyptian system of numerals was
preferred and used throughout Israel and Judah. Nadav Na'aman has recently
suggested that this system must have been adopted from Egypt by the 10th
century; it cannot have been borrowed from Israel's Semitic neighbors, since
none used it. And it is conspicuously unattested in Egypt itself in the 8th-7th
centuries, so it must derive from an earlier time. Finally, the Egyptian system is
used in both the northern and the southern kingdoms. Thus Na'aman concludes:
"These hieratic signs must have entered the Hebrew script before the division of
the monarchy - namely in the tenth century B.C.E." Na'aman - a highly critical,
at times radical, historian who cannot be dismissed as a "biblicist" - concludes
overall that the historical, written, and archaeological evidence now at hand
requires the historian to take seriously the biblical concept of a Davidic-
Solomonic "kingdom," in the 10th century, complete with a temple in
Jerusalem.61

Inscribed Objects

The reader will have noted that much of the inscribed material I have discussed
thus far has been brought to light relatively recently. Before such discoveries,
biblical scholars like the revisionists might have gotten by with arguments from
silence, but no longer. One very important category of inscribed objects was not
known at all until about 30 years ago, and not well understood until the past
decade. I refer to pottery vessels that are inscribed with the name of the
individual owner - a practice that is inexplicable unless we assume at least
rudimentary literacy. One of the first inscribed 8th-century Judean water
decanters to be discovered is the vessel that I recovered in 1968 from Iron Age
tombs at Khirbet el-Qom (discussed above for the tomb inscription mentioning
"Asherah").62 Its owner's Hebrew name, Yahmol, is not a careless graffito of
some sort, but was carefully carved onto the upper shoulder after firing with a
vee-shaped chisel - a technically demanding technique. When I published the el-
Qom decanter in 1970 it was a rare example, paralleled only by one found earlier
by Kathleen M. Kenyon in Jerusalem (reading "Belonging to `Eliyahu [Elijah]"),
so I did not realize the importance of the chisel-carved technique. In 1972,
however, Avigad pointed out other examples of this technique in publishing
another Judean decanter that read "Belonging to Yehazyahu; dark (?) wine."
Then in 1981 a well-stratified 8th/7th-century water decanter was published by
Aharoni from his excavations at Arad, reading "Belonging to Zadok."63

Inscribed 8th-century water decanter from Khirbet el-Qom (William G. Dever,

HUCA 40-41 [1969-1970]: 139-204)
 Still more recently, Robert Deutsch and Michael Heltzer have published a
typical northern or Israelite example of an 8th-century decanter bearing a most
interesting phrase: "Belonging to Mattanyahu; wine for libation, one-fourth."
First, the Hebrew word nesek, "libation," is the same term that is used in several
biblical passages for the libation offerings that are prescribed for the temple.64
The libation vessels, however, that were to be used have not yet been
convincingly identified with any surviving vessel known to us. That may be
because those made specifically for temple-service were of precious gold and
silver (as some texts specify), and so would long ago have been looted and
melted down. We must suppose, on the other hand, that many ordinary folk also
made libation offerings at local sanctuaries or at household shrines. Such rites
are not alluded to directly by the biblical writers, of course (particularly the
Deuteronomists), because they were considered "non-Yahwistic." But if such
rites did exist, what vessels did most people use for libation offerings of oil or
wine? The answer is obvious: ordinary household ceramic vessels, perhaps set
aside or "consecrated" for special use by being inscribed. Now we actually have
just such a libation vessel, specifying wine-libations. But there is more
information on the new decanter: the liquid measure of the wine to be offered,
"onequarter." The larger unit is not noted, probably because it was so well
known that it was assumed. Here we have, however, a direct convergence with
such biblical texts as Exod. 29:40 and Lev. 23:13, which specifically state that
the libation offering is to be "a quarter of a hin of wine." From other texts, as
well as from excavated ceramic vessels and their evidence, we can calculate that
the biblical liquid measure hin was equal to one-sixth of a bath. Thus, since the
bath equaled about 5.5 gal., the hin was a little less than 1 gal. Deutsch and
Heltzer report that their "one-quarter" decanter has a liquid capacity when full of
1270 cm., or about 1.31. (a little more than 5 cups). "One-fourth" of a hin of ca.
1 gal. would be about a quart - not only within the range of a 5-cup decanter, but
a suitable amount for a small libation, especially if we are dealing with the daily
offerings of poor folk. Once again, we must pose some hard questions for the
revisionists. Are these and the other Iron Age decanters "fakes" too? If not, how
can we explain their use of "Biblical" Hebrew in the 8th-7th centuries, if such
Hebrew is a "late, artificial, scribal" language invented by the literati who wrote
the Bible in the Hellenistic-Roman period? A final ostracon for our purposes
here is the late 7th-century letter found in 1960 at Mesad Hashavyahu, a small
fortress on the coast south of Tel Aviv, near ancient Jamnia.65 The text, which is
complete, is a complaint dictated to a scribe by a poor field laborer whose outer
garment or cloak (Heb. beged) has been seized because of his alleged theft of
goods or poor performance. This letter is to be sent to the local governor in
hopes of redress of this injustice. One is struck, of course, by the similarity of
this case to what must have been frequent practice, which the 8th-century
prophet Amos denounced bitterly, pronouncing doom upon those who "lay
themselves down beside every altar upon clothes (pl. begadim) taken in pledge"
(2:8).
 Tomb Inscriptions

Hebrew inscriptions somewhat more monumental than those discussed thus far
have been found in several Iron Age tombs. One of the 8th-century tombs that I
excavated at Khirbet el-Qom, biblical Makkedah, has been discussed above
because of its inscription referring to "Yahweh and his Asherah."66 Tomb I also
had two Hebrew inscriptions, both around the doorway of one of the three burial
chambers. The first read: "Belonging to `Ophai, the son of Nethanyahu. This is
his tomb chamber." The second, over the doorway, read: "Belonging to `Uzzah,
the daughter of Nethanyahu." Not only are these all good Judean names, well
known from the Hebrew Bible (Ophai means "swarthy one," or "Blacky"), but
this is an excellent example of a typical Judean bench-style tomb that was used
by a single family over an extended period of time, sometimes producing dozens
of successive burials over a century or so. Under the back bench of each
chamber is a large recess cut into the rock, where the bones of earlier burials
were deposited in large piles. This recalls, of course, the common Israelite
practice of referring to the death of an individual as being "gathered to the
fathers," or joining one's ancestors. "Minimalists" might attempt to explain away
such a phrase by saying that it is simply a general metaphor for the afterlife of
the deceased. It is absolutely clear, however, that there was no such belief in
Israel in biblical times, only some dim notion of Sheol. The doctrine of the
"immortality of the soul" is the direct result of Greek influence and appears in
the Hebrew Bible only perhaps in the book of Daniel, one of the latest books and
probably Hellenistic in date.67 Being "gathered to the fathers" means just what it
says: having one's remains interred in an ancestral tomb that was designed
specifically to receive and perpetuate them. Such tombs with communal
repositories are typical in the Iron Age, but to my knowledge they do not appear
in Palestine in the HellenisticRoman period. Again, we have an exclusively Iron
Age setting for a biblical practice and form of speech.

Doorway inscription from Tomb 1 at Khirbet el-Qom, reading "Belonging to

`Uzzah, the daughter of Nethanyahu" (William G. Dever, HUCA 40-41 [1969-
1970]: 139-204)

A curious footnote can now be added to my publication of the Khirbet

elQ6m material nearly 30 years ago. In 1994, Deutsch and Heltzer included in
their publication of a group of antiquities a stone slab that had come originally
from elQom at the time I was attempting to stop tomb robbing there, but lay
unknown for years in a private collection.68 Written in nearly the same hand on
this stone was the phrase: "Blessed be your stonecutter; may he lay old people to
rest in this!" This stone, like all the other stonework in the el-Qom tombs, shows
excellent masonry skills. More to the point, however, is that here we have
unusual evidence of the high esteem in which those who carved rock-cut tombs
were held - a further manifestation of the respect for the dead that is implied in
many biblical texts.

Stonecutter's inscription from Khirbet el-Qom (Robert Deutsch and Michael

Heltzer, Forty New Ancient West Semitic Inscriptions)

A Judean bench tomb very similar to the one I excavated at el-Qom was
found in 1961 by Joseph Naveh at Khirbet Beit Lei, some 7 miles east of
Lachish in the Judean Shephelah. The tomb was a typical late Iron Age bench
tomb, reused in the Persian period but no doubt originally dug in the 7th/6th
century or so. There were several fragmentary inscriptions, really graffiti; but the
main inscription is complete and reasonably well executed in a cursive Hebrew
script. Naveh translates it:

Yahweh (is) the God of the whole earth; the mountains of Judah
belong to him, to the God of Jerusalem. The (Mount of) Moriah
Thou hast favored, the dwelling of Yah, Yahweh.

What is noteworthy about this tomb inscription is that it is not a banal blessing
formula, as expected, but has a truly literary quality. Furthermore, its "Jerusalem
temple theology" is fully consistent with that of the Deuteronomistic history in
Kings, with which the inscription is contemporary.69

Khirbet Beit Lei inscription, ca. 7th-6th century (Joseph Naveh)

One of the best-known Judean tombs is a monumental rock-cut tomb of

elaborate architectural style that is still visible in the Arab village of Silwan
(biblical Siloam), just across the Kidron valley southeast of the Temple Mount.
In 1870 a badly damaged inscribed stone was cut out and removed to the British
Museum. It lay there collecting dust until it was brilliantly deciphered in 1953 by
Avigad.70 The inscription reads:

1. "This is [the sepulchre of ...] yahu who is over the house. There
is no silver and no gold here

2. but [his bones] and the bones of his slave-wife with him.
Cursed be the man

3. who will open this!

Avigad dated the inscription to the late 8th century on the basis of
paleography (the comparative shape of the letters). He saw at once the
connection of the phrase "who is over the house" (Heb. 'aser `al-habbayit) with
the identical phrase in 1 Kgs. 4:6; 16:9; 18:3, etc., clearly a technical term for
"royal chamberlain." In Isa. 22:15-19 we meet a certain "Shebna, who is over the
house" in Hezekiah's time, succeeded by Eliakim son of Hilkiah (Isa. 22:20-25;
36:3; 37:2). Avigad suggested that the broken Hebrew name of the beginning of
the inscription should be restored as "Shebnayahu" (the typical Judean long-form
of names compounded with the name of the deity), and all subsequent scholars
have agreed. In that case, the impressive Siloam tomb is the very tomb of
Shebna, King Hezekiah's royal chamberlain. As though that were not
convergence enough, we apparently have a direct biblical reference to this tomb
in Isa. 22:15, 16, where the prophet rebukes this same Shebna for having himself
such a visible and ostentatious tomb in the cliffside, in full view of the temple -
"a sepulchre on high." Shebna's tomb is still visible there today; but the Arab
villagers of Silwan use it as a garbage dump. Isaiah would no doubt think this
appropriate divine retribution.

The "Royal Steward" tomb and inscription, late 8th century (Amnon Ben-Tor,
Archaeology of Ancient Israel)
 When Avigad published the "Royal Steward" inscription in 1953 it stood
alone, both in coming from the first preexilic inscribed tomb to be dated
accurately, and also in exhibiting for the first time outside the Bible the title
"who is over the house" Today we have a number of seals with Hebrew personal
names and that title. Avigad himself has adduced several from the hoard of
bullae he published in 1986, with such well-known biblical names as Adoniyahu
(three examples, two by the same engraver) and Natan. Needless to say, this
hitherto rare title "royal chamberlain," now so well attested in both our biblical
and archaeological sources, occurs exclusively in the Iron Age, and it could not
possibly have been known to biblical writers in the Hellenistic-Roman period
unless they were working with very ancient records."l

There is a final inscription to be considered here, although it is from a ref

uge cave rather than a burial cave. It was discovered in 1974 by Pesah Bar-
Adon, written elegantly in ink on a huge stalactite-like stone column on an
isolated cliff overlooking the Dead Sea near `Ein-gedi, and dating to ca. 700. It is
not all legible, but much of it clearly has to do with formulaic curses and
blessings, including the phrase "blessed be Yahweh." What is significant here is
the curious circumstance (a refugee, fleeing to the wilderness, seeking
salvation?), but also the fact that here in the most remote area imaginable some
anonymous Judean in dire circumstances was capable of such elegant
handwriting. An "illiterate" society?72

Commerce and the Economy: Weights

One does not have to be a Marxist, or a "vulgar materialist," to recognize the fact
that economic concerns are paramount in any human society. Collective ideology
may help to shape history; but unless individuals can shelter, and clothe, and
feed themselves, there is no history, since no one will survive to write it. As one
distinguished contemporary, Norman K. Gottwald, put it in his The Tribes of
Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, ca. 12501050 B.C.E.:
"Only as the full materiality of ancient Israel is more securely grasped will we be
able to make proper sense of its spirituality."73

We shall look at ancient Israel's economy from the vantage point of our two
usual sources, texts and artifacts. The biblical sources on the overall economy
are, however, too numerous and too diffuse for us to summarize all the data here.
I have chosen therefore to focus on two classes of basic data that may have
archaeological correlations, namely the evidence for commerce that weights and
measures may provide.

The basic unit of currency in the Hebrew Bible is the sheqel, the Hebrew
term deriving from a root meaning "to weigh," that is, to pay by weighing out
silver. Sheqel units are mentioned in many biblical passages. The booty from the
Israelite conquest of `Ai was reckoned in sheqels (Josh. 7:21). Similarly,
Goliath's armor is evaluated in sheqels (1 Sam. 17:5; cf. 2 Sam. 21:16), as is
Absalom's hair (14:26). The prices of various commodities are also given in
sheqels: fields (1 Chr. 21:25; Jer. 32:9), oxen (2 Sam. 24:24), measures of barley
(2 Kgs. 7:18), and daily rations of food (Ezek. 4:10; 45:12). When an ox gores a
slave, recompense is figured in sheqels (Exod. 21:32). In addition, tribute in
given in units of sheqels (2 Kgs. 15:20; Assyrian tribute). Sheqel weights of
varying systems are mentioned, such as "gold" sheqels (2 Chr. 3:9). Sheqel
weights could be altered; Amos (8:5) protests the "enlarging" of weights in the
merchants' favor. Special sheqel weights "of the sanctuary" are mentioned
(Exod. 30:13, 24; Lev. 5:15; Num. 3:47, 50; 7:13).

Sheqel fraction weights are also mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, that is,
specific weights smaller than 1 sheqel. Thus we have references to weights of a
half-sheqel (Exod. 30:13-15; 38:26), of a one-third sheqel (Neh. 10:32), and of a
one-quarter sheqel (1 Sam. 9:8). Smaller fractions are also mentioned, or gerahs,
of which there were 20 to the sheqel (Exod. 30:13; Lev. 27:25; Ezek. 45:12).
Several specific fraction-weights are mentioned by name in biblical texts: the
beq`a, or half-sheqel (Heb. beq`a, "to split"), and the pim (only in 1 Sam. 13:2 1,
etymology unknown).

In addition to references mentioning shegels, we have, as expected, texts

referring to the balances with which the sheqel weights were used. The Hebrew
term for balance is me'oznayim, a dual noun which really means "ears" -
apparently from the fact that the flanking balance-pans could be seen as
resembling two ears. A number of biblical passages refer to balances in general,
such as Ezek. 5:1, describing how the prophet's severed hair was weighed. Lev.
19:36 mentions balances in connection with sheqel weights, and Prov. 16:11
mentions "balances" in parallel with "scales." Some biblical passages, however,
refer specifically to "false balances," that is, balances that were tampered with in
order to favor the merchant. Thus Prov. 11:1 compares both "just" and "unjust"
balances and weights; and 20:23 protests "false scales" and "diverse weights."
Mic. 6:10-11 denounces mercantile practices that were corrupted by "wicked
scales" and "a bag of deceitful weights."

The above texts reflect a consistent system of sheqel weights, fraction

weights, and balances in the Hebrew Bible. Now let us turn to archaeology to see
whether there are any convergences with the biblical texts. If the revisionists are
right, we should expect to find coins but no evidence of sheqel weights and
balances: they, like all the rest, are literary "inventions" of writers in the
Hellenistic-Roman period. In fact, we now have more than 350 Iron Age shegel
weights and fraction weights, as well as a number of balances and parts of
balances, all from late 8th-7th-centuries Judah.74

The larger sheqel weights are dome-shaped, carved usually in soft lime
stone, and inscribed with both a symbol that obviously denotes "sheqel"
(resembling a small pouch, in which silver was carried) and Egyptian hieratic
symbols for numbers. At present, we have examples of inscribed stone sheqel
weights in denominations that we can distinguish as 1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 16, 24, and 40
- that is, mostly in multiples of 4 or 8. As noted above, the numerical system is
undoubtedly Egyptian, and it may have been introduced into Israel as early as
the 10th century. Inscribed sheqel weights that we actually possess, however, all
date from the mid-8th to early 6th century, or the Divided Monarchy, to judge
from the stratified examples. Numerous studies of these shegel weights have
been undertaken, including my own based on 10 weights from Khirbet el-Qom.
It appears that the "standard" sheqel was equivalent to ca. 11.35 grams; but there
is some evidence for a parallel "heavy" (possibly royal) system of weight.
Similar inconsistencies exist with dry and liquid measures, so we cannot entirely
fathom the "logic" of the overall system of weights and measures in an cient
Israelite commerce. Part of the difficulty may be due to the fact that both
Egyptian and Mesopotamian schemes, and even numerical signs, were
borrowed, but never consistently applied in practice or fully standardized.
Finally, ancient "science" was not all that precise, and especially with weights
and capacities and the like there was much room for unintentional error, not to
mention manipulation of the system (which the prophets thought not so
"innocent"). One interesting fact is that some weights are "chiseled" (below).
The Judean sheqel-weight system (Raz Metter)
 Most of the known examples are, not surprisingly, the smaller 1 to 8 sheqel
weights, which would obviously have been much more common in daily use. It
is by weighing and comparing the hundreds of weights now known that scholars
have been able to work out how the system once functioned. The most recent
study by Raz Kletter has shown that while the overall system has a ca. 3 percent
deviation from the projected standard, the deviation of the more common 1 to 8
sheqel weights is a mere 0.5 percent - an astonishing uniformity, indicating
almost certainly royal supervision of the system. On the basis of the careful
comparisons made by Metter, an average for the standard sheqel comes out to
11.33 gm. (11.33249 gm. to be exact).75

Three units of fraction-sheqel weights are known: the nesep, pim, and beq`a,
the latter two of which are mentioned in the Hebrew Bible (above). The nesep
weights, of which 46 are known, average 9.659 gm., or about 5/6 of a sheqel.
The pim weights, 42 in all, average 7.815 gm., or 2/3 of a sheqel. The beq'a
weights (Heb. "half"), some 29 known, should represent a half-sheqel, and at an
average of 6.003 gm. they are reasonably close. Smaller denominations, or gerah
weights, are known from biblical references (20 to the sheqel) as well as in some
70 archaeological examples, but they are less well understood. For instance, the
numerical signs differ somewhat, still Egyptian-based, but perhaps now more
"Hebraized." Also, the gerah weights deviate considerably from the 1/20 of
11.33 gm., or ca. .57 gm. that they ideally should weigh, often being heavier.
Kletter has suggested that while a 20-gerah system could have been in operation,
a 24-gerah system, analogous to that of Mesopotamia, could also have been in
use.76

What are the implications of the textual and artifactual data above, that is,
what convergences do we see, and what do they imply? Here Kletter's
exhaustive analysis makes things clear beyond doubt. (1) In the first place, it is
obvious that the sheqel system emerged only in the 8th century in Judah. All but
five of the 353 known weights come from there; and those that are well stratified
cannot antedate the 8th century, most being in fact mid-8th to 7th century in
date. (2) The overall system now appears to be far more standardized than
formerly thought, with relatively few "exceptions" and only rare glimpses of
another "royal" weight system. (3) The numerical signs were borrowed from
Egypt, partly due to strong Egyptian influence in Judah in this period, and partly
to facilitate international trade. (4) Royal initiation and supervision of such a
standardized system must be presumed, beginning probably under Hezekiah in
the mid-late 8th century in Judah, i.e., after the fall of the northern kingdom. (5)
The continuing and widespread use of the sheqel weight system in Judah
throughout the 7th century indicates use not only by a centralized government
but by the entire population of Judah.

Metter observes, as others before him, that some convergence might be

sought between data provided by the sheqel weights and biblical notions of
"reforms" and "justice." However, like so many Israeli (hardly "biblical")
archaeologists, he declines to enter the discussion of biblical parallels. He does
note, however, that "as relatively little is known from biblical sources, the
weights actually aid in elucidating the biblical text, rather than vice versa." He
thinks that is partly because the biblical writers are biased in favor of elites,
international relations, and political history, whereas "the Judean weights, on the
other hand, reflect daily trade and economy." 77 Precisely my point. But what do
they reflect? And do the now precise date and well-established context of the
sheqel weights tell us anything about an actual, Iron Age historical setting for the
biblical texts? Here Kletter's reticence robs him of a golden opportunity; and,
unfortunately, it indicates once again how little dialogue there has been between
archaeologists and biblical scholars.

I would argue that it cannot be a mere coincidence that a standardized

system of weights based on a "royal sheqel" emerges exclusively in Judah,
precisely in the long reign of Hezekiah (715-686), then peaks in the reign of
Josiah (640-609). These are the two "reform" kings of whom the prophets and
the Deuteronomistic writers approve - indeed, the only two in all of Israel's and
Judah's later history. Presuming that the biblical descriptions of the reigns of
these two kings are not altogether "propaganda," is it not likely that basic to any
reform measures would have been the attempt to eliminate corrupt business
practices by standardizing weights and measures under royal administration?
Certainly that is what prophetic protests such as those of Hosea, Amos, and
Micah are all about - all of them reformist figures who were active in the 8th-7th
centuries. Micah, a Judean prophet who lived during the reign of Hezekiah and
probably advised the king on religious matters, thundered (6:11): "Shall I acquit
the man with wicked scales, and with a bag of deceitful weights?"

Kletter brushes aside such clear reference to deceitful weights (Heb. 'eben
we-'eben, or "stones and stones") by asserting that in an individual community
"any deviation is neutralized if the same weights are consistently used: one wins
as one buys, then loses as one sells."78 Of Mic. 6:11 specifically, he says that
any cheating implied there lay in using different, not "false," weights. Yet he
himself has shown that the actual weights we have do not differ significantly
within each category. Did the unwary buyer not know the difference between a
1-sheqel weight marked "1" and a 2-sheqel weight marked "11" in the balance
pan? Not only is Kletter's notion of local trade facile, but he neglects to mention
the fact that a number of the known sheqel weights show chiselmarks on the
underside, as I pointed out in publishing the el-Qom weights.79 Why is that?
The explanation is quite simple: the stone weights were probably cut slightly
oversized, then adjusted to conform to the standard as necessary by shaving off
the bottom a bit. However, a "heavy" weight that would be to the merchants'
advantage - the old "butcher's thumb on the scale" - could easily be produced by
not shaving off quite enough. The fact that ancient weights were often altered is
exactly the source of our English term "to chisel" someone. This practice in
ancient Judah is surely what Micah is referring to: not "different" or various
weights, but "differing" or altered weights. Does this prove that Hezekiah's or
Josiah's reforms actually took place, and that the standardized sheqel system was
part of their economic policies? No; but it does provide a very plausible setting
and thus lends historical credibility to the biblical narratives, whatever their
theological agenda may have been.
 Pim sheqel weight from Khirbet el-Qom (William G. Dever)

Another significant datum is overlooked by Metter, namely the fact that the
biblical reference to a pim weight in 1 Sam. 13:21 is the only occurrence of this
term in the Hebrew Bible. It therefore gives us a terminus post quem (or "date
after which") for the final editing, if not the composition, of this passage: it
cannot be earlier than the 8th century, although the story is set in the Philistine
era. On the other hand, 1 Sam. 13:21 cannot be much later, for the simple reason
that the sheqel system of which it was an integral part went out of use
completely with the fall of the Judean kingdom in 587/586 (as Kletter has
shown), presumably replaced by a Babylonian/Persian system. The point for our
purposes here is that the story about a pim weight in 1 Sam. 13:2 1, told almost
nonchalantly because everyone knew what a pim weight was, cannot possibly
have been "invented" by writers living in the Hellenistic-Roman period several
centuries after these weights had disappeared and had been forgotten. In fact,
this bit of biblical text from an original Iron Age setting was handed down intact,
although the unique, enigmatic reference to a pim was no longer understood -
indeed, would not be understood until the early 20th century A.D., when the first
actual archaeological examples turned up, reading pim in Hebrew. If the biblical
stories are all "literary inventions" of the HellenisticRoman era, how did this
particular story come to be in the Hebrew Bible? One may object, of course, that
the pim incident is "only a detail." To be sure; but as is well known, "history is in
the details."

Before leaving our discussion of the sheqel weight system in ancient Israel,
we need to note that fragments of the scales or balances that were used with
them have also been found. One of the best pieces of evidence comes from
Lachish, where a well-stratified mid-8th-century ivory balance beam was found
in 1972 among the remains in a residential unit. Significantly, it is clearly of an
Egyptian type that was used throughout the New Kingdom and the Iron Age -
another example of Egyptian influence on the Judean system of weights and
measures. A similar ivory (or bone) balance beam was found long ago at
Megiddo, dating in all probability to the 10th-9th centuries. At a number of other
sites remains of Iron Age scales have been brought to light, especially bronze (or
bone) scale-pans, as well as bits of chains, at sites such as Megiddo, `Ein-gedi,
Ashdod, and elsewhere.80 Thus the 14 references to "balances" in the Hebrew
Bible (above). It is clear that silver was the preferred medium of exchange,
usually in the form of scraps (Judg. 5:19) that were "paid/weighed" out in one
balance-pan, the stone weight or weights being placed in the other (Jer. 32:9-10).
The merchant held the scales in one hand and adjusted them with the other, just
as street peddlers still do in Jerusalem today. It was easy, as the biblical prophets
knew, to cheat and be cheated (as in the "chiselling" of weights noted above).
 Balance beam and reconstructed scales, from Lachish (Gabriel Barkay)

Measures of Volume in the Divided Monarchy

Many references in the Hebrew Bible mention various units of liquid and dry
measures, if only in passing, since the biblical writers are interested primarily in
the larger picture, not daily life. In principle, we might isolate and quantify a
"vocabulary of measures," then determine whether the Hebrew terminology in
the Bible would fit better, for instance, in a preexilic or a postexilic setting. In
practice, however, this is difficult. For one thing, the terminology of
measurements is universally conservative by definition, and thus it may not
change significantly over long periods of time. When we come to our question
here - "What did the biblical writers know; and when did they know it?" - we
face a peculiar difficulty. It is likely that the latest editors did have some older
archives to draw upon. But ironically, they did not have our modern advantage:
they had no extant examples of measures to reconstruct how the system worked.
The ancients possessed traditions, but they did not have access to the complex
set of information and techniques that would make it possible for the modern
scholar to make history, rather than "story," out of the ancient evidence.8'

The question is whether we can make history out of the biblical data. I
would argue that it is only with the assistance that archaeology can provide that
we stand any chance of doing that. Before citing that evidence, let us give a sort
of consensus view that represents what we can reasonably reconstruct of the
system of liquid and dry measurements from the biblical sources alone (using
typical modern American, rather than metric, values).

Liquid measures:

Dry measures:
 It must be acknowledged that actual surviving examples of the vessels that
were used in making these measurements are rare. That is to be expected,
however, since many of the containers may have been perishables like baskets.
Others, mostly common pottery vessels used to measure, were probably not
inscribed with the name of the unit in question, since it was familiar and taken
for granted. In short, we confront again a relative lack of written evidence. Yet
there is some.

Storejar neck from Lachish Stratum III, reading "royal bath" (Drawn from
Olga Tufnell, Lachish IV)

Long ago Albright found at Tell Beit Mirsim in southern Judah a fragment
of a large storejar inscribed in Hebrew bt, "bath," a unit of liquid measure
mentioned in such passages as Ezek. 45:11, 14, which was equal to the ephah
and equivalent to about 51/2 gal. Another, reading "royal bath," comes from
Level III in Lachish, dated now precisely to the destruction of Sennacherib in
701; this is either an "official" or a somewhat larger unit of measure. The
issaron, equivalent to an omer, can be illustrated by the discovery of a storejar at
Arad (and Beersheba) inscribed omer, which has a capacity of just over 2 qts.
That would fit approximately with the note in Ezek. 45:11-14 that an omer is
equivalent to "1/io of an ephah," the latter being approximately 1/2 bushel.82

Pottery in Ancient Israel

Archaeologists everywhere seem preoccupied with the study of pottery. Their

fascination, however, is easily explainable. Pottery was almost universally used
in antiquity and is abundant at every site. It broke easily, but if fired was
virtually indestructible, so it provides us with thousands and thousands of little
con temporary "time-capsules" Finally pottery's very plasticity made it an ideal
vehicle for expressing technological innovations, aesthetic norms, various
functional ideas, and even religious notions. Pottery, as one distinguished
archaeologist put it, "is our most sensitive medium for perceiving shared
aesthetic traditions in the sense that they define ethnic groups, for recognizing
culture contact and change, and for following migration and trade patterns."83

To begin with biblical texts that mention ceramics in general, I would note
frequent references to clays (Heb. homer) and clay processing for making
pottery (e.g., Isa. 41:25, the "potter treading, kneading, clay"); potter's wheels
('abnayim, the dual form, because of the upper and lower wheel), like the one in
the famous parable of the potter's workshop in Jer. 18:3-6; pottery molds (hotam,
lit., "seal," but here something carved, engraved); pottery kilns (tanner, "oven"),
as in Neh. 3:11; 12:38; and broken potsherds (heres) strewn on the ground, as in
Isa. 45:9, or even a gate in Jerusalem named the "potsherd gate" (Jer. 19:2). In
these and other biblical passages, however, it must be acknowledged that there is
little that can be related to pottery and ceramic production in general, that is,
nothing that could place these texts in a specifically Iron Age context. For
instance, dual pottery wheels, with a lower kick-wheel and an upper forming
wheel, are known from ca. 3000 on.

A more fruitful avenue of inquiry does exist, however, namely the analysis
of particular Hebrew terms for various kinds of ceramic vessels. It may surprise
many readers (and most biblical scholars as well) to learn that there are more
than 30 such Hebrew terms in the Bible. Here we have a challenge that would
seem obvious, indeed irresistible, namely to do a careful analysis of these terms
and their etymologies, as well as a detailed exegesis of all the passages where
they occur. It would then be pertinent to see whether any connection can be
made between these technical terms for ceramic vessels and the actual pottery
we have excavated from Iron Age (or later) Palestine. Obvious or not, it has
never been done - perhaps because once again there has been so little dialogue
between specialists in biblical and in archaeological studies. The only attempt
ever made was by James L. Kelso, a seminary professor who worked both with
Albright at Tell Beit Mirsim in 1920-1932 and then collaborated later (1948)
with a professional potter in studying the Tell Beit Mirsim Iron Age pottery.84
Kelso, however, was not a professional archaeologist, and his work was done
long before the Iron Age pottery of Palestine was well understood.

What I have done in the following is based on the philological and

exegetical analysis recommended above. To summarize the results in a
nontechnical way, I have put them in chart form, giving the Hebrew term; the
general functional description apparent from a composite of all the references;
and, most important for our purposes here, an example of a typical Iron Age
vessel that I think the term may refer to. I stress that this analysis, while original,
is still speculative and preliminary; I certainly do not claim that by this use of a
certain Hebrew term the writers of the Hebrew Bible meant this actual vessel
and no other. Again, we are trying simply to deduce, from all the evidence
available, how much the writers of the Hebrew Bible actually knew about daily
life in the Iron Age - how much, and perhaps how little.
Sources: 1-4, 7-16 (Ruth Amiran, Ancient Pottery of the Holy Land); 5 (Moshe
Dothan, Ashdod II-III, 6, 17 (Yohanan Aharoni, Beer-sheba); 18 (Ze'ev Herzog
et al., Excavations at Tel Michal, Israel)
 It is significant that all the best ceramic parallels above come from
welldated 8th-7th century sites, almost all in Judah. This strongly corroborates
mainstream scholarly opinion that the biblical texts that mention these vessels -
mostly the J, E, and D sources - were largely composed and edited in
penultimate fashion precisely in that period, i.e., in the late Monarchy. It is
noteworthy that a few rare and enigmatic biblical terms, such as those for
"frying-pan," are attested only in Late Hebrew or in Aramaic parallels, and also
occur only in the P or "Priestly" source, the final editing of which scholars have
dated late. And it is precisely these forms that are completely and conspicuously
absent from the earlier Iron Age ceramic repertoire. Such forms do occur,
however, in the Hellenistic period, confirming the late editing of the references
in the P materials. Once again, the ceramic repertoire with which the original
writers of the J, E, and D traditions were familiar is that of the Iron Age or
Monarchy - and no other period.85 The text may have been edited late, but most
of its contents are early.

Art in Ancient Israel

Discussing art in ancient Israel, according to most biblical scholars until recently,
should be relatively easy: there was none. The attitude of most biblicists may
have been unduly influenced by a naive presupposition that the Second
Commandment - "You shall have no images" - should be and was taken
seriously as "historical fact." Nevertheless, the presupposition is wrong.86 But
what does "Israelite art" consist of? And why would more conventional biblical
scholars not be aware of its existence?

In answer to the first question, Israelite art of the period of the Divided
Monarchy consisted primarily of engraved seals, some of which have been
discussed above, although largely for their onomastic information (personal
names); and carved ivory panels, mostly inlays for wooden furniture, of both
Syrian and Phoenician styles.

Seals

Much more could be said about the seals, or "glyptic art," beyond the onomastic
evidence discussed above, important though that is. Biblical scholars, however,
philologically (and theologically) oriented, have rarely had much interest in or
empathy with art history. A notable exception is the group of European biblical
scholars headed by Othmar Keel of Fribourg University in Switzerland. The
"Fribourg school" has created an impressive body of works intending to
illuminate the history and religions of ancient Israel by studying ideology
through its art and iconography, situating them in the broader context of ancient
Near Eastern art and iconography. In addition to Sylvia Schroer's volume on
ancient Israelite art in general, distinguished recent books in this genre include
Urs Winter, Frau and Gbttin (English, Woman and Goddess).87 Especially
noteworthy are a number of works by Keel himself: several large volumes on
seals, in German, as well as synthetic works including The Symbolism of the
Biblical World.88 A basic handbook is that by Keel and his student Christoph
Uehlinger, Gods, Goddesses, and Images of God in Ancient Israel.89

The corpus of artistic motifs in common use in ancient Israel and her
neighbors that the Fribourg school has brought to our attention is so vast and so
rich in parallels that I can only allude to some items here. In particular, Keel and
Uehlinger have shown us how the several thousand seals they have collected can
help to illuminate ancient Israelite religion. They have demonstrated, for
instance, that most of the motifs of the 10th-8th-century seals are borrowed,
either directly from Egypt, or more often via the medium of Phoenician art,
which was characterized by a mixture of Egyptian and Mesopotamian themes.
Later on, in the late 8th-6th centuries, Neo-Assyrian and NeoBabylonian motifs
predominate, as expected. Common motifs on the Phoenicianizing seals include
lions, bulls, sacred trees, dung-beetles, and other themes from nature, most with
known religious connotations. The later group features much more astral
imagery - sun, moon, stars of the heavens - as well as specifically Mesopotamian
themes.

Here we have both convergences and divergences with the biblical texts. On
the one hand, such art ought not to have existed at all in light of the Second
Commandment: "You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any
likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or
that is in the water under the earth" (Exod. 20:4). On the other hand, a number of
the motifs are found in the biblical descriptions of the temple and its furnishings,
which I have argued above should be taken quite literally. I suspect that
whatever date one assigns to the Ten Commandments in their present form
(many scholars think they date roughly to the 8th century), there was always a
certain ambivalence about representative art in ancient Israel. This was
especially because Israel had no native artistic traditions and thus usually
borrowed art from its "pagan" neighbors, which led to conflicting associations
and ultimately to the religious syncretism that the later Yahwistic parties so
vigorously denounced.

A typical Late Judean seal bearing only a personal name, "Hoshiyahu, son of
Shelmiyahu" (Helga Weippert, Paldstina in vorhellenisticher Zeit)

However uncertain much of the picture of Israelite art may be, I find two
aspects of our data on seals suggestive. (1) The early period is heavily influenced
by Syrian, specifically Phoenician, art, and most of it is found in the north. That
is entirely in keeping with the main biblical tradition, which condemns the north
for succumbing to "foreign gods." One recalls in particular the vehement
opposition of the Deuteronomists to Ahab, and especially to his Phoenician
queen Jezebel, who brought with her to Samaria an entire Baal cult and its
entourage of priests and priestesses. Of course our view of this singleminded
wrath must be tempered by the acknowledged Phoenician influence on the
construction and furnishings of the Solomonic temple, of which the editors of
Kings do not disapprove. (2) It also strikes me as significant that by the 7th6th
century the vast majority of Israelite (now really Judean) seals have no symbols
or artistic motifs at all, only personal names. In short, they, like the later
"official" tradition of the Deuteronomistic school, are now severely aniconic. Is
this merely coincidence? I doubt it. Such an overwhelming change to an austere,
"anti-representational" style on the engraved seals of the late period suggests to
me that the "religious reforms" claimed by the Deuteronomists are not wholly
propagandistic. There does seem to be a tendency to purge Israelite art, if it can
still be called that, of foreign elements, particularly in the late 7th/early 6th
century. The Avigad and Shiloh hoards of bullae alone would confirm that; the
seals used to make these bullae are almost all severely aniconic (and the personal
names, as well, are mostly compounded with the name of Yahweh). I do not take
this necessarily to mean that there was a sweeping "religious revival" in Josiah's
time, much less that it succeeded, since many of the seals and bullae may
represent only the elites in Jerusalem and in other royal centers. Popular religion
in the countryside probably remained highly syncretistic, as I have argued
above.90

Ivories and Ivory-carving

The second major class of ancient Israelite art, again strongly Phoenician in
character, consists of a series of carved ivory inlays of the 9th-8th centuries.
These are found mostly in the northern kingdom, at administrative centers such
as Hazor, and especially at Samaria, the capital. The large collection of burned
fragments found on the floors of the palace at Samaria was undoubtedly what
remained from booty taken in the Assryian destruction in 722/721. Ivory
fragments in the same style, some with Hebrew letters engraved on the back,
have been found at the Assyrian capital at Nimrud.

The carved ivory panels found in Israel all belong to an international style
of art, mostly of north Syrian and Phoenician manufacture or style, that spread
all over the Mediterranean world in the 9th-8th centuries. Large hoards have
been discovered at Arslan Tash, Til Barsip, and other sites in Syria, as well as at
sites from Carmona in Spain to the Neo-Assyrian capital at Nimrud and
elsewhere.91

The group of ivories known from Israel comes mostly from Samaria (over
500 fragments), some 9th-century pieces kept as heirlooms, others closer in date
to the final destruction of the Israelite palace in 722/721. It is clear that most of
these small, individual low-relief carvings, some partially inlaid or gilded, were
designed to make up attached panels for costly wooden furniture. Many of the
panels are half-scenes, or one of a matching pair, and others have tabs at the top
and bottom for attaching them. That they are inlays is now shown from well-
preserved examples of just such ivory-inlaid wooden beds and chairs from
Phoenician tombs at Salamis in Cyprus, of the late 9th or early 8th century. The
major artistic motifs of most of the Israelite ivories known are typically
Phoenician: lions, bulls, cherubs, palmettes, lilies, lotus blossoms, etc. As with
the seals, we have here a convergence with the candid biblical notion that there
was little native Israelite art, so that Solomon had to resort to Hiram, king of
Tyre on the Phoenician coast, to design, build, and furnish his temple in
Jerusalem. Phoenician influence also continued later, as reflected in the stories of
Ahab, Jezebel, and the temple of Baal at Samaria.

Carved ivory inlays from Samaria, with lion and stylized "sacred tree" (John W.
Crowfoot and Grace M. Crowfoot, Early Ivories from Samaria)
 It is in fact at Samaria that we find the most instructive convergence of the
ivories with biblical texts. In a passage that remained enigmatic until the
discovery of the ivories in modern times, the prophet Amos rebukes the idle rich
who live in "great houses," "houses of ivory" (3:15). 1 Kgs. 22:39 specifies that
the "house or palace" of Ahab at Samaria was built of ivory (cf. Ps. 45:8), where
in fact most of the ivories were found. These references as they stand make little
sense, since one could not possibly construct a house of the small ivory panels
that elephant or boar tusks would yield. The writers or editors of 2 Kings do not
mention ivory-decorated couches and armchairs, or the elephant hides and tusks
given to Sennacherib as bounty by Hezekiah in 701 in order to spare the temple,
but we know of these from Sennacherib's own tribute lists.92 These latter
references obviously denote smaller items, for which ivory inlays would indeed
be suitable. We also read in 1 Kgs. 10:18 (cf. 2 Chr. 9:17) of Solomon's "great
ivory throne." And again a passage from Amos (6:4) comes to mind: "Woe to
those who lie upon beds of ivory!" An even more striking convergence, just
because it is such a seemingly casual footnote, is found in Amos 3:12, in which
the prophet refers to the "remnant" that will be saved from Yahweh's wrath in the
coming destruction of Samaria, "rescued, with the corner of a couch and part of a
bed." This text has little meaning unless Amos is speaking of luxury items that
may be valuable enough to be salvaged, like ivoryinlaid furniture - and the
"beds" we have noted above.

The relevance of the 9th-8th-century ivories for our purposes here is

obvious. The passages we have cited from such biblical sources as the prophets
and the Deuteronomistic editors of Kings find astonishingly close and detailed
convergences in the ivories that archaeology has brought to light - of the 9th8th
centuries - and only then. These distinctive Levantine Iron Age ivories passed
out of use by the 7th-6th centuries, as did the custom of inlaying wooden
furniture. It would be incredible to suggest that the biblical references were
"invented" by writers living in the Hellenistic or Roman period. They must have
had ancient sources, in this case records going back at least to the 8th century, if
not earlier.

Secondary "Royal Residences"

In any discussion of convergences between biblical texts and archaeological

artifacts, it would be particularly desirable, of course, to investigate the two
ancient capitals, Jerusalem and Samaria. Of Iron Age Jerusalem we admittedly
know very little (but see above); and we have already discussed the palace of
Omri and Ahab, the ostraca, and the ivories from Samaria. The kings of both
Israel and Judah, however, had not only a principal palace in their capital, but
also smaller summer and winter residences elsewhere. Two of them are relevant
to our discussion here.

Jezreel

A story of the type routinely dismissed by the revisionists as fiction is the

wellknown account of Naboth's vineyard in 1 Kgs. 21. The story recounts how
Ahab, taunted by Jezebel, conspired to seize a vineyard of a small landowner,
one Naboth, at Jezreel where the kings of Samaria had an auxiliary residence.
This was probably a winter palace, since the high hill of Samaria can be bitterly
cold in winter, but Jezreel, beautifully situated on the south rim of the Jezreel
valley at a lower altitude, enjoys a mild winter climate. As we have already seen,
Amos says in the same breath as his denunciation of "the houses of ivory" that
Yahweh will "tear down the winter house as well as the summer house" (Amos
3:15).

The ancient site of Jezreel, presuming that the story in 1 Kings may have
had a historical background, has long been identified with a small but strategic
mound near the modern Arab village of Zer`in, on the southern heights
overlooking the Jezreel valley. The Jezreel references in the Hebrew Bible have
been much discussed by biblical scholars, but the proposed site was never
extensively investigated until salvage excavations were carried out by Ussishkin
and colleagues in 1990-91. The results provide another remarkable convergence
with biblical accounts.93

There is some scattered occupation of the hilltop of Jezreel and in the

vicinity in the 10th century, just as we now know was the case at Samaria. The
major construction, however - an enclosure of ca. 10 acres surrounded by
casemate walls with corner towers - dates to a single phase of use, in the 9th
century. This fortified acropolis was destroyed sometime later, and the site of
Jezreel was never again extensively built up.

The remarkable size of the enclosures, the deep, elaborate constructional

fills on which it was erected, the casemate defense walls, and the use of
alternating "pilasters" of dressed ashlar masonry are all typical features that
would be found only in royal constructions. Indeed, similar architecture has been
brought to light thus far only at Hazor, Megiddo, and Samaria in the north, and at
Gezer and Ramat Rahel in the south - all but Ramat Rahel royal constructions of
the 10th-9th centuries. Ussishkin modestly (and correctly) postpones direct
connections with the specific biblical texts. As an archaeologist (and one praised
by the revisionists, for his separation of biblical and archaeological data),
Ussishkin concludes:

It would appear that the enclosure at Jezreel was built either by Omri
(882871 B.C.E.) or by Ahab (873-852), and was then used by Ahab's sons
Ahaziah (852-851) and Jehoram (851-842). The destruction of the enclosure
should be assigned to Jehu's coup d'etat in 842 B.C.E. and is probably
reflected in Hosea 1:4.94

My point in adducing the data here is simple. Once again, the direct
correspondences indicate that the final editors of the Deuteronomistic history in
Kings did not imagine a "winter palace" at Jezreel in Ahab's time; they knew
about it from much earlier sources, in this case sources that can scarcely be
much later than the 9th century.

Ramat Rahel

Another example of a royal palatial estate is biblical Beth-Haccherem, or "The

house/palace of the vineyards," identified with the small mound of Ramat Rahel
just north of Bethlehem. Beth-Haccherem is not mentioned by name but is
apparently alluded to in Jer. 22:13-19, where the prophet denounces Jehoiakim,
the son of Josiah, for defrauding the poor to "build his house by
unrighteousness." This palace does not appear, however, to be the main palace in
Jerusalem; but it may be, like Jezreel, a country estate or retreat. This palace is
described as "a great house, with spacious upper rooms," having "cut-out
windows" and paneled with cedar and "painted with vermillion" (Jer. 22:14).

The site of Ramat Rahel, on a prominent hilltop overlooking terraced

vineyards with Jerusalem visible on the horizon, was excavated by Yohanan
Aharoni between 1954 and 1962.95 The site was founded in the 9th century and
was then occupied principally in the later Iron Age and the Persian periods. The
major structures belonged to Stratum V-B of the 8th century, and Stratum V-A of
the late 7th/early 6th century. A large perimeter wall with its own gate enclosed
an area of ca. 800 sq. m., most of it apparently not built up. The single structure
inside the walls was a large multi-roomed citadel with its own casemate walls, a
large central court, and many adjoining rooms. The construction was unusually
fine, featuring dressed ashlar masonry laid in header-stretcher style - the only
known example of such royal masonry after the 10th-9th century. As with ashlar
buildings elsewhere, at Ramat Rahel there were palmette or "Proto-Aeolic"
capitals. A unique find was a stone window balustrade with several short
palmette-columns with drooping fronds, topped with stylized palmette capitals
joined to form a continuous window rail. That this was originally a window
balustrade is shown by almost identical windows and balustrades on typical 8th-
7th-century Phoenician ivories - often with a woman leaning over the balustrade,
which is apparently meant to depict the secondstory window of a palace or
temple. Significantly, the columns and capitals bore traces of red paint.
Plan of the "Palace" and enclosure at Ramat Rahel, ca. 7th-6th century (Helga
Weippert, Palastina in vorhellenisticher Zeit)
 A carved ivory from Nimrud, 8th century (Othmar Keel, The Symbolism of the
Biblical World)

Here the convergence between the description of a royal palace in Jer. 22

and the archaeological evidence from Ramat Rahel is striking. The Stratum V B-
A enclosure and principal structure are certainly palatial, built on far too grand a
scale and embodying too costly construction to be of domestic character. The
ashlar masonry alone makes this a "royal" establishment. The fenestrated
window and balustrade fit the biblical description of a "cutout window"
astonishingly well, just as the traces of red paint correspond to the house
"painted in vermillion." All these architectural features had disappeared, were
buried and long forgotten, after the destruction at Ramat Rahel by the
Babylonians in the early 6th century. A Persian administrative building occupied
the hilltop later, but it cannot have given rise to the detailed biblical description
of a "great palace" of the kings of Judah. Once again, it defies credulity to
suppose that the biblical writers or editors in the Hellenistic or Persian period
"invented" the Iron Age palace at Ramat Rahel.
It has been my contention thus far that there is a crisis in the current study of the
history of ancient Israel. The implication is that this crisis should be of concern
not only to theologians and clerics, but also to intelligent lay folk, and indeed to
all who cherish the Western cultural tradition, which in large part derives from
values enshrined in the Bible. Yet the gravity of this particular crisis can be
appreciated only by seeing it as part of a larger dilemma that characterizes
modern intellectual and social life in every area, particularly in the Western
world.

The Western Tradition and the Enlightenment under Attack

The modern dilemma may be described most simply by regarding it as the "loss
of innocence." This stage of consciousness represents the denouement of a long
process. The opening up of the vast frontiers of knowledge that began with the
Age of Reason in the 17th- 18th centuries swept away the old order of credulity,
of naivete, forever, but what has it left in its place? Richard Tarnas, in his
sweeping survey, The Passion of the Western Mind, remarks:

Perhaps the most momentous paradox concerning the character of the

modern era was the curious manner in which its progress during the
centuries following the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment brought
Western man unprecedented freedom, power, expansion, breadth of
knowledge, depth of insight, and concrete success, and yet simultaneously
served - first subtly and later critically - to undermine the human being's
existential situation on virtually every front: metaphysical and
cosmological, epistemological, psychological, and finally even biological.'

In short, our long quest for objective knowledge of the nature of the
universe and of the human condition has, despite measurable progress, brought
us not to the point of confidence, but of increasing skepticism and even despair.
What can we know? And, moreover, what can we trust as "true," whether for our
own sense of self or for the foundations of society? These are the fundamental
doubts that plague what is called the "postmodern condition," which we
examined briefly in Chapter 2 above - "modern" meaning up to about the
mid20th century, and "post" everything thereafter.

The postmodern malaise that seems to grip intellectuals is seldom felt by

most people, for whom daily life goes on marked by countless nagging little
worries, but scarcely any overwhelming, cosmic Angst. This apparent normalcy,
this ordinariness, may, however, be deceptive. The old order, on which our
familiar civilization was founded, really is gone - and with it, the certainties that
most people still take for granted and in which they presume to find comfort.

Even though "postmodernism" never makes headlines, there are signs that
the public is becoming more aware of changes it has brought about. While I was
completing this book, the Atlantic Monthly published an excellent article on
"The Academy vs. the Humanities," 2 in which Frank Kermode reviewed John
M. Ellis' Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities.'
Both here and in his previous work, Against Deconstruction,4 Ellis expresses his
alarm at the extraordinary changes that various "post-Enlightenment" ideologies
have wrought in American universities. The "disinterested" study of literature for
its intrinsic values is now "politically incorrect," subject to incredible abuse. The
traditional curriculum must be replaced by one that advocates that the ultimate
purpose of all inquiry is political, that the proper objects of study must be race,
gender, and class. Academics now routinely rail against "the Western tradition"
in thought and literature, often without any real credentials in the requisite
disciplines, full of anti-establishment and Utopian fantasies. One simply mines
the literature looking for evidence of oppression, which Ellis finds a corruption
of the very idea of disinterested inquiry and criti cal dialogue. Of one of the
leading architects of the modern academy, Fredric Jameson, Ellis states that he
"appears to lack any moral sensibility." Jameson's influence, despite outrageous
pronouncements, "derives neither from the power of his argument nor from the
moral force of his position but only from his having furnished what seems to
those who use it a serviceable underpinning for the victim-centered criticism that
has overtaken university literature departments."5 In short, I would say, honest
inquiry, scholarly documentation, and reasoned discourse have been replaced by
ideology and politics in many social science disciplines. And that is precisely
what I am arguing here has happened in many seminary and university
departments of religion and theology. I invite the reader to go back now and read
Davies, Thompson, and Whitelam; it will be obvious where they are coming
from.

Even Time magazine has taken notice of the corrosive effects of post
modernism in the academy. The July 7, 1997 issue carried an article on Robert
Alter, a distinguished Hebraist and pioneer in newer literary critical approaches
to the Hebrew Bible. Alter, now at Berkeley and president of the recently formed
Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, is opposing the powerful
professional Modern Language Association (30 thousand members) for turning
"grievance politics" into a method. Alter's group has set out to defend traditional
academic and literary values against the prevailing trends of deconstruction,
multicultural studies, and gender studies. Alter and his colleagues, including
many distinguished writers, believe according to Time that "obsessions with
race, gender and sexuality reduce imaginative writing to the sum of its crimes
against humanity, losing sight of the ambiguous and magical ways in which
novels, poems and plays really operate."6 Yet Alter may be a voice crying in the
wilderness. The newer generation of academics seems totally committed to the
"politics of dissent" in the academy, to what Time labels "ideological lit-crit.'

Also, the New York Times carried a review by Michik Kakutani of Alvin
Kernan's edited volume, What's Happened to the Humanities?7 It is no secret by
now that support for and interest in the humanities - literature, classics, art
history, philosophy, and religion - has been waning for nearly a generation.
Kernan's distinguished collaborators all tend to connect this decline with the fact
that "the humanities have become a noisy battleground in the culture wars, a
battlefield on which debates over deconstruction, multiculturism and gender
studies continue to rage," as Kakutani puts it. The younger generation of
academics, raised on the radical politicization of scholarship that began with the
Vietnam War in the 1960s, is committed to the proposition that "all choices are
political choices, that every intellectual interest serves some social end," as one
of the authors, Yale's David Bromwich, says. Bromwich says further that it has
now become fashionable for radical historians not only to question "consensus
history," but also to "pardon the defeated conspicuously and withhold all pardon
from the victors."8 (Perhaps it is pertinent to note here that, perhaps not by
coincidence, Thompson has attacked me specifically as one who "does history
by committee," who practices a form of "Harvard censorship" to suppress him
and other "liberation historians.") Finally, in this volume another writer, Gertrude
Himmelfarb, author of On Looking Into the Abyss,9 argues that empow ered by
deconstruction's emphasis on the indeterminacy of texts and Michel Foucault's
theory of hegemonic power, the "new historians" enshrined subjectivity over
objectivity, and in the process they made relativism more and more an end in
itself (in Kakutani's summary).1°

The Impact of Postmodernism

The sheer ambiguity, indeterminacy, and relativism that characterize the

postmodern mind have affected every field of inquiry today, every discipline
both practical and professional, not just the humanities. To take but one
discipline in more detail, we might note the revealing self-analysis of
anthropologists George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, in Anthropology
as Cultural Critique. While their primary concern is the epistemological crisis in
current anthropology, they observe that other disciplines are also in crisis, indeed
essentially the same crisis. As they say at the outset:

At the broadest level, the contemporary debate is about how an emergent

postmodern world is to be represented as an object for social thought in its
various contemporary disciplinary manifestations.)l

In Chapter 1 they characterize an identity crisis - their rather optimistic

"experimental moment" - in many disciplines. We have already noted the radical
challenge of New Literary Criticism. In philosophy, one sees a turning away
from the centuries-old discussion of abstract, universal systems of knowledge,
discourse, or morality to a preoccupation with "epistemology": not what can we
know, but how we can know anything at all. In art, music, and architecture, we
have moved far beyond even surrealism: nothing is real, not even in terms of
shock value, so without any consensus the "postmodernist aesthetic" is endlessly
and tiresomely debated. In law, traditional and authoritative models of legal
reasoning are subjected to withering critique by the Critical Legal Movement. In
linguistics, the very nature of language is held by many authorities to be
indeterminate, so that one focuses rather on "language games." Even the natural
sciences have been affected, as witness the currency of Werner Heisenberg's
"principle of indeterminacy" in physics, or "chaos theory" in mathematics. Of
anthropology itself - perhaps the discipline closest to archaeology - Marcus and
Fischer comment on "the extreme fragmentation of research interests and the
theoretical eclecticism of the best work, which seem to us to be the most
compelling traits of anthropology today." But they also note that anthropology as
a discipline is in crisis, a crisis of uncertainty about how to "represent social
reality," as with many other disciplines.12

Another anthropologist, David I. Kertzer of Brown University, declares:

Doubting objectivity, disdaining objectivism, and not knowing what to

make of the other, American anthropologists have recently suffered from a
self-absorption bred of epistemological malaise. The crisis of ethnographic
authority threatens to turn ethnography into a denial of anthropology's claim
to be anything more than either conduits for more authentic (native) voices
or simply an exotic locus for psychoanalysis. The malaise, though, goes
beyond epistemology into Politics, for the cris de coeur that punctuate any
gathering of anthropologists these days stem less from questions of
epistemology than from issues of power and morality.13

All those disciplines in crisis - including archaeology and biblical studies -

have two things in common: a loss of confidence in their ability to "represent" in
any convincing way the reality with which they supposedly deal - indeed, doubts
about whether there is any objective reality "out there"; and fundamental distrust
of all "metanarrative" discourse, of all "totalizing visions." What I would call the
fundamentally "nihilistic" thrust in all the fields of inquiry is implied in Marcus
and Fischer's perceptive comment: "Present conditions of knowledge are defined
not so much by what they are as by what they come after."14 Thus we confront
the postmodern mind, i.e., post-Enlightenment, post-positivist, now even post-
Marxist.

Yet the very term "postmodern" is disturbing to me. The mindset here is
reactionary, negative, and finally impotent. We know what postmodernism is
against; but what is it for? Furthermore, there is a lamentable tendency to
narcissism in postmodernism. Having rejected the possibility of any vision of
objective reality, the observer becomes preoccupied with his own "way of
seeing"; in the end, it is only the individual's perception of self in a text (for
instance) that matters. We have observed above, with others, that such a
celebration of subjectivity soon mires one in the morass of relativism (see further
below). Finally, I am offended by the arrogance that is implied in the
postmodernist stance. Having outgrown all previous pretense to knowledge (for
so it was), we have finally arrived at the apogee of human intellectual and social
evolution. Presumably "post-modern" is about as avant garde as one can get! (Or
is it "radical chic"?)

Since the "post" in "postmodern" takes as its point of departure the

Enlightenment, we need to examine further the causes of the disillusionment. If
the Enlightenment enshrined reason, the postmodern era dethrones it -
constitutes, in fact, a "flight from reason and science," as Harvard's
Administrative Dean of Arts and Sciences Nancy Maull recently put it in a
review-article entitled "Science Under Scrutiny: Can Pure Knowledge and
Democracy Beneficially Coexist." The new "anti realists" - "social
constructivists," as she terms them - address as their main question precisely the
issue posed throughout our discussion: "whether the cognitive content of science
is determined by nature out there, or is merely the temporary construction of
social entities and processes." Maull thinks that "controversy invoked by these
new sociologists of science has turned out, rather surprisingly, to be the major
preoccupation of fin de siecle metascience." She quotes Paul R. Gross, one of the
editors of The Flight from Science and Reason, as saying that "rejection of
reason is now a pattern to be found in most branches of scholarship and in all the
learned professions." Yet I would ask: What is there to be learned, if there are no
facts? In any case, Maull concludes:

The social constructivists are quite hard to pin down: either they are saying
that science is influenced by social forces (ho-hum) or that scientific
knowledge is only the product of social forces, and therefore "relative" (wait
a minute). As the volume's philosophers of science point out, no acceptable
defense of the relativist implications of social constructivism has, so far,
been made.''

In fact, one of the philosophers of science in the volume under review, Harvard's
Mallinckrodt Professor of the History of Science and of Physics, Peter Galison,
has written a devastating empirical critique of relativism, How Experiments
End.16 They end by invalidating some theories, but nonetheless confirming
others - not by denying that any empirical knowledge is possible, as the
postmodernists' caricature of any science would have it, including their own
"pseudo-science."
 One of the most amusing and devastating spoofs of postmodernist
pretensions was a fabricated, nonsensical "scientific" article planted by Alan
Sokal and Jean Bricmont in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of the trendy
postmodern journal Social Text. The article was apparently accepted by the
journal's reviewers and editors because its authors expressed a politically correct
view with which they agreed, namely cultural and even scientific relativism. The
article, replete with scholarly citations, "proved" that the physical laws of
science are historically and culturally contingent, and therefore subject to
criticism and rejection from any position, say, for example, a feminist or
minority point of view. Subsequently there appeared Sokal and Bricmont's
popular expose of their prank, entitled Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern
Intellectuals' Abuse of Science.'7 According to one reviewer, Columbia
University's Alexander Alland, the primary purpose of the book was:

to awaken American intellectuals and their students who, the authors feel,
have been seduced away from clear thinking by a group of naive
postmoderns. The message to these readers is clear: don't let obscurantist
prose replete with esoteric citations buffalo you into accepting a dangerous
version of radical relativism that denies the possibility of any stable
reality.18

Alland, who entitled his review "Don't Cut the Pi Yet!" applauds Sokal and
Bricmont's hope that, in place of faddish postmodern "discourse," there will be
the development of a truly intellectual culture that will stick to the rules of
rationalism but will eschew dogmatism; that will be scientifically rigorous but
capable of avoiding scientism; that will be open-minded but not frivolous; that
will be politically progressive without committing the sins of sectarianism.19 I
concur. It is precisely this balance that extreme postmodernism and biblical
"revisionism" lack.

Part of the extremism is the love of "word-games," which often obscures

any sensible point postmodernists might wish to make. For example, one of the
leading postmodernist thinkers, whom Sokal and Bricmont quote, is the French
social theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard, who in The Postmodern Condition defines
his position as follows:

The conclusion we can draw from this research ... is that the continuous
differential function is losing its preeminence as a paradigm of knowledge
 and prediction. Postmodern science - by concerning itself with such things
as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by
incomplete information, "fracta" catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes - is
theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable,
and paradoxical. It is changing the meaning of the word knowledge, while
expressing how such a change can take place. It is producing not the known,
but the unknown. And it suggests a model of legitimation that has nothing
to do with maximized performance, but has as its basis difference
understood as paralogy.20

This is a good example of what Sokal and Bricmont mean by "fashionable

nonsense." An example closer to home is the definition of postmodernism
recently adopted approvingly by the American biblical scholar George Aichele,
again from Lyotard:

The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the
unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of
good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share
collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new
presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger
sense of the unpresentable.21

In his work Sign, Text, Scripture: Semiotics and the Bible, Aichele thinks that he
can "deconstruct" the Gospel of Mark and thereby enhance its theological
significance. His definition of theology, a typical "postmodern statement," is
instructive:

Concrete theology as a deconstructive theology must reveal its proper

nonpresence in the dispersed materiality and violence of inscription, in a
dissemination beyond historical univocity or structural polysemy, in a
fundamental (but never original) undecidability.... In order to exceed the
limits, theology must uncover the not-itself which lies unnamed at its center,
its hidden eccentricity and non-identity: it must become concrete.22

I'm not sure what any of this means, but then if "postmodernists" are right there
is no "meaning."

I agree with Oxford's Oriel and Laing Professor John Barton at the
conclusion of his book Reading the Old Testament:

I find postmodernism absurd, rather despicable in its delight in debunking

all serious beliefs, decadent and corrupt in its indifference to questions of
truth; I do not believe in it for a moment. But as a game, a set of jeux
d'esprit, a way of having fun with words, I find it diverting and entertaining:
I enjoy the absurd and the surreal, and postmodernism supplies this in ample
measure. Postmodernist theory is much like postmodernist knitting. You
begin to make a sock, but having turned the heel you continue with a
neckband; then you add two (or three) arms of unequal length, and finish
not by casting off but simply by removing the needles, so that the whole
garment slowly unravels. Provided you don't want to wear a postmodern
garment, nothing could be more entertaining. But when the knitter tells us
that garments don't really exist anyway, we should probably suspend our
belief in postmodernist theory, and get back to our socks.23

As I have observed elsewhere, all this "postmodern piffle" leaves

"revisionist" biblical scholars like Davies, Thompson, Lemche, Whitelam, and
other historians without any history; philologians without any texts that are
pertinent; would-be archaeologists with no comprehension of material culture;
ethnographers with no field experience; anthropologists with no theoretical
framework; and, finally, social engineers with no blueprint. In an age of
skepticism and relativism, it is tempting to flirt with nihilism, but this is where it
must always end: If we can know nothing, then we cannot even know that we
know that. I will settle for the "happy delusion" that there are such things as
facts; that they do not always deceive us; that some facts matter; and that on
such facts we can gradually build cumulative knowledge.

The Biblical Revisionists as Postmodernists

What I suggest in all moral earnestness is that the revisionist historians of

ancient Israel with whom we have dealt here are best understood as closet
"social constructivists," of precisely the type just described above. The Hebrew
Bible is the "metanarrative" that is to be rejected. The basic premise in treating
the biblical texts, as we saw above, is that these texts are not historical at all,
only ancient and modern "social constructs"; and furthermore that our supposed
knowledge of an ancient Israel in a real time and place is also such a "social
construct," and no more. To be sure, most of the revisionists have carefully
avoided the term "postmodern" to describe their agenda, for obvious reasons. Yet
Thompson has used the term now and then, even if only in an off-hand
manner.24

What is more significant than terminology, however, is the emergence of

revisionism as a self-conscious "school," with its own explicit method and
agenda, all of it decidedly in the deconstructionist mode. Although Thompson
has recently denied that there is such a school, on the ground that its
practitioners are not monolithic in their approach, that is disingenuous.
Thompson resists labels of any sort (and he and the others have certainly chafed
at my label "neonihilist"), but he himself coined the term "revisionist" that I use
here.25

The new revisionist school even has its own headquarters. The University of
Sheffield in England has become a sort of institutional support center for the
revisionist school. Several leading revisionists and New Literary Critical
practitioners teach in the Department of Biblical Studies there, including Philip
R. Davies, J. Cheryl Exum, D. J. A. Clines, and Diana V. Edelman. Davies
helped to launch the newer approach with his In Search of "Ancient Israel"
(1992); and Exum and Clines are editors of the standard handbook, The New
Literary Criticism and the Hebrew Bible (1993). Sheffield University Press
began publishing its seemingly endless series of books in our fields (now nearly
700) in 1985 under the imprint of the Almond Press, dubbed by some the "nut
press" for the trendy themes it preferred (now JSOT Press or Sheffield Academic
Press). Similarly postmodern is the Press's Journal for the Study of the Old
Testament (edited for many years by Davies and Clines), begun in 1976.
Founded specifically to keep abreast of "state-of-the art" trends in biblical
studies is Sheffield's annual journal Currents in Research: Biblical Studies,
launched in 1993. The press now publishes a number of journals (at least 10 in
our field), most recently Gender, Culture, Theory (1996), edited by Exum.
According to the publisher's announcement, the journal will self-consciously
"employ postmodern approaches," including "critical theory, gender studies,
cultural criticism, metacommentary and media studies."

A recent Sheffield catalog reveals an astonishing variety of catchy titles,

many of the recent ones having to do with the heavily ideological and
programmatic issues that divide our disciplines, issues upon which I have
focused here because they are timely. Perhaps a few recent titles will best give
the "flavor" of the Sheffield series.

D. J. A. Clines, Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of

the Hebrew Bible

Athalya Brenner, ed., A Feminist Companion to Exodus-Deuteronomy

Melissa Raphael, Theology and Embodiment: The Postpatriarchal

Reconstruction of Female Sexuality

J. Cheryl Exum, Plotted, Shot, and Painted: Cultural Representations of

Biblical Women

Philip R. Davies, Whose Bible Is It Anyway?

Lester L. Grabbe, ed., Can a "History of Israel" Be Written?

David J. Chalcraft, ed., Social-Scientific Old Testament Criticism: A

Sheffield Reader

George Aichele, Sign, Text, Scripture: Semiotics and the Bible

Lori L. Rowlett, Joshua and the Rhetoric of Violence

Michael Prior, The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique

I do not mean by this listing of recent Sheffield titles to belittle the press or
to depreciate its contribution to our field, for it has consistently published
valuable "state-of-the-art" works. I simply point out Sheffield's reputation now
as the press for trendy stuff. That the press and the University of Sheffield are
now widely considered the home of the revisionist school and other radical new
approaches to biblical studies may be indicated by the fact that a kind of
"intellectual (or `political'?) history" of the Sheffield group and of
"socialscientific" criticism has been put forward by David Gunn.26

The secondary institutional home of revisionism is the University of

Copenhagen, in whose Department of Theology Niels Peter Lemche and
Thomas L. Thompson teach. Colleagues there who are of a similar bent include
Frederick H. Cryer in Semitic languages as well as a number of graduate
students who are already publishing. Although not as blessed as Sheffield with
long momentum and their own press, the "Great Danes" (as they jokingly call
themselves) have a more self-conscious and determined agenda, and in
Thompson they have the most prolific and doctrinaire spokesman of the revi
sionist school. Thompson himself, in attempting to define various schools, may
have pointed out something significant: the revisionists and their colleagues are
all European scholars. In North America, only David W. JamiesonDrake could
possibly be identified with this school; but after his book Scribes and Schools in
Monarchic Judah: A Socio-Archaeological Approach was either largely ignored
or unfavorably reviewed, he left university teaching.27 Thus I would agree with
Thompson in suggesting that the heated controversies being aired here in
popular format are not only generational, but in large part are transcontinental.
That makes dialogue even more difficult; it also makes the attempt more crucial
than ever.

The Revisionists as Typical Postmodernists: Ideology, Politics, and Rhetoric

Despite the flood of ink that the revisionists have spilled in the past five or six
years, revealing an ever-clearer ideology and agenda, mainstream biblical and
especially archaeological scholarship seem almost to have ignored the threat
they pose.28 On the issue of ideology - where I think the revisionists are most
vulnerable, yet at the same time most menacing - only one biblical scholar has
dared to challenge them directly, lain Provan. His scathing attack, "Ideologies,
Literary and Critical: Reflections on Recent Writing on the History of Israel,"
was published in the venerable Journal of Biblical Literature, which has
traditionally stuck to philological and exegetical issues and studiously avoided
theological or even broader historical issues. Provan's attack was spirited and
correctly focused on ideology, together with related issues of competence and
historical method. Nevertheless, I fear that Provan's initial shot across the bow
missed the mark. It did, however, provoke a rambling, polemical, often simply
bewildering response in the same issue of JBL by Thompson, as well as an irate
but generally provocative response from Davies, entitled appropriately "Method
and Madness: Some Remarks on Doing History with the Bible."29

Provan, to his credit, sees the growing trend to view the Bible merely as
"literature" as the crucial issue. As he puts it, this creates a problem, for then
"history is played off against ideology." And, as Provan implies, history is
always the loser. But Provan is surely wrong in seeing the revisionists as
ideologues of the radical right; they are as far to the radical left as one can get.
Similarly, they are hardly "positivists," as Provan thinks, but fiercely
antipositivist. Yet his conclusion is right to the point when he analyzes the basic
contradiction in the work of a "historian" like Davies. Provan points out that in
Davies' In Search for "Ancient Israel" we find that everyone else's "historical
Israel" is rejected as compromised by theological biases, while Davies
confidently proclaims his own "Israel" as based on "real historical research." As
Provan observes, here "we are encountering a confession of personal faith,
lightly disguised as a job description." In short, he asks, is all this a scheme that
is "part of an elaborate deception whose purpose is to highlight the ideology of
others (i.e., both the biblical and modern interpreters), while concealing one's
own?" Even if Provan is accusing the revisionists of bad faith, I fear that here he
has hit the nail right on the head. If there were any doubts, Thompson's candid
and extremely defensive response in the journal removes them.

Perhaps, then, Provan has done us all a service by "smoking Thompson

out." But there is so much more evidence of Thompson as an ideologue, a
polemicist. His response to Provan is an attempt at self-justification, alternately
condescending and vicious. (1) First, it is full of contradictions. Thompson
bristles at Provan's raising the issue of scholarly credentials (i.e., Thompson's as
a real historian); yet he says "this issue relates to competence." He complains
about Provan's "debating style of polemic," but almost immediately concedes of
his own writing that it is "often originally designed as much to provoke as to
enlighten" He stresses everywhere the "subjective" nature of knowledge, yet he
claims himself to be doing Wissenschaft, or "scientific" study of the Bible. He
implies that Provan's disagreement with him stems from Provan's being a
theologian (of the "neofundamentalistic-literary" persuasion and of "church-
oriented biblical scholarship"), yet he claims that he and Lemche "both
understand ourselves as theologians," and are in fact committed to "a renewal of
theological interest in OT studies." As proof of his being a "theologian,"
Thompson sides with Lemche in quoting a German passage from Schiller, which
translates: "For some, it is a matter of heavenly gods; for others, it is the efficient
cow who provides them with milk and butter." Somehow, such New Age theo-
babble does not give me much confidence in Thompson the theologian.30
 (2) Beyond the many contradictions, there are outright dissimulations in
Thompson's response to Provan. Of one of his passages cited by Provan,
Thompson says that he is certainly capable of writing this, but that he did not
write it; however, Provan has correctly cited Thompson, word for word.
Thompson brings up Clifford Geertz's well-known description of "thick" and
"thin" histories and claims that his source is a symposium where he and another
panelist had discussed this; however, the published papers show that it was only
my paper that brings up and discusses Geertz's "thick-thin," and Thompson's
never mentions Geertz (nor cites me). In vociferously denying that he and his
colleagues constitute a "school," Thompson claims a great diversity for his
"group" of "dozens of participants who live and work on four if not five
continents." He then proceeds in a long footnote to list many scholars,
supposedly of his persuasion - many of whom could not possibly be considered
revisionists or on Thompson's side at all. (Elsewhere he has claimed a long list
of Israeli archaeologists as supporters, most of whom have scarcely heard of
Thompson and in any case would be horrified at his misuse of archaeology.) 31

(3) Throughout his response to Provan, Thompson's arrogance is apparent.

Provan is simply "ignorant of the process of scholarly discussion that has
occurred in our field," guilty of "bad scholarship," of quoting Thompson "out of
context," and so on. Provan and the others who stand in the way of the
"revolution" are merely obscurantists or alarmists - "consumers of knowledge or
visitors of ideas." Thompson and his colleagues are the "real" historians"; the
"objective" scholars, not "ideologues"; the masters of biblical "science"; the ones
who are "denying authority to old opinions and institutions"; harbingers of the
brave new world, who "never gave up the hope that we could do something
positive for this world," especially since "1968" (whatever that means).
Thompson closes his rambling diatribe against all who would oppose him with a
pronouncement that I find ominous:

There is no more "ancient Israel." History no longer has room for it. This we
do know. And now, as one of the first conclusions of this new knowledge,
"biblical Israel" was in its origin a Jewish concept.... The field as a whole is
no longer in crisis. For Wissenschaftler, however, for those committed to
science - and this is hardly a naive use of this term - it is a very exciting
time in which to work.32

Little comment is needed for the reader of any sensibilities. All the
hallmarks of the revolutionary ideologue are here in Thompson, as well as in
much of the writing of Davies and Whitelam. Without documenting them in
detail,33 I would note the following characteristics of the "ideologue,"
everywhere present in the works of the revisionists though they decry ideology
and usually imply that they have none (are they dishonest, or merely naive?).
Consider these hallmarks:

1. The reaction against the Enlightenment and "positivism" generally, a

postmodern stance simply being assumed and no philosophical defense of it
offered.

2. The rebellion against the perceived Establishment and indeed against all
"authority," all "hegemonic domain assumptions," all "totalizing paradigms
and discourse" (in their typical jargon); theirs are beleaguered "voices from
the margin," opposing oppression, "patrimony and power."

3. The rejection of "objective," reasoned argument in favor of repeated

dogmatic assertions, polarization of issues, demonization of opponents,
revolutionary slogans, and claims to represent the triumphant New Order.

4. The radical re-reading of classical texts so as to "interrogate" them and

expose their self-contradictions, their ideological biases, and their use to
suppress the masses; "social context," not the recovery of what it was really
like in the past, is all that matters.

5. The adoption of cultural relativism as the modus operandi; there is no

"truth" (except ours); we can change our minds about anything at any time,
without feeling constrained to explain or even to admit the change.

6. The declaration that in the end the "search for knowledge" is all about
ideology, not "facts," always political; scholarship is not "disinterested" but
must be political critique, social and ideological warfare.

7. Utopian ideals; liberation rhetoric; claims that victory is imminent.

One of the surest signs that it is ideology that drives the revisionist school is
the fact that they frequently change their minds, but rarely with any acknowl
edgment that they have done so, and, more to the point, without citing any new
evidence that has compelled them to do so. When scholars modify their views
and revise a hypothesis on the basis of new data, as archaeologists are constantly
doing, that is commendable - indeed essential to ongoing, honest scholarship and
rational discourse. But when a scholar does an about-face without citing any new
reasons for rejecting a former opinion, much less evidence for the latest
argument, we are entitled to suspect that it is not new knowledge that is at work
here, but simply new dogma.

Much of the "new knowledge" claimed by the revisionists is transparently

ideology. Thus Thompson a decade ago wrote as if there were an "early Israel,"
even an early state; now neither exists. Lemche wrote two excellent books on
"early Israel" in 1985 and 1988, both of which he now repudiates as too
dependent upon the biblical text. Whitelam wrote some years ago several studies
of early and Monarchical Israel, the very Israel he now says never existed.34 At
least Davies has been consistently a minimalist: he was an iconoclast from the
beginning, and is quite candid, if sometimes outrageous, about that.

Even the Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, no revisionist but claimed

by them, has fallen into "the latest is the best" mode of argumentation. It was
primarily his Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement (1988) that produced the
hard evidence from extensive surveys in the West Bank that forced most of us to
abandon conquest models of Israelite origins and think in terms of indigenous
origins. It must be stressed that there have been no significant surveys or
excavations in the West Bank since the late 1980s, due to the intifada, so the
basic data today remain precisely what they were a decade ago. Yet Finkelstein
now maintains that there was no "early Israel." What evidence led him to such a
radical about-face? Or was it an ideological revelation, as one of his own Israeli
archaeological colleagues, Amihai Mazar, has implied recently?35

The above cannot be dismissed as caricatures; they are drawn, verbatim,

from various of the revisionist manifestoes (although not all would subscribe to
all points). The "flight from reason," the "triumph of ideology," the pervasive
"political correctness," all will be obvious to most readers. I would simply
highlight some of the philosophical contradictions of revisionism, which I think
pose not only unresolvable intellectual problems but a very real danger to our
society, constituted as it has been on the premises of the Enlightenment and the
Western tradition.
 Deconstructing Deconstructionism

All of the "minimalist" historians I am reviewing here, of whatever school, have

in common their rejection of the Hebrew Bible as a source of history-writing for
the Iron Age, largely because of its predominantly theological character, that is,
its basic theme of "salvation-history" (German Heilsgeschichte). Yet the
deconstructionist and New Literary Critical approaches adopted by all the
minimalists end up by reading out of the texts the specifically biblical "liberation
theology," only to replace it with their own, usually quite arbitrary "liberation
theologies," often sympathizing with Third World Theology. As we have noted
at several points above, minimalist scholarship focuses not on what are
supposedly the historical issues of the Hebrew Bible, but rather on such modern
issues as totalitarianism, social justice, economic oppression, gender, race, and
above all political power, privilege, and coercion. The "biblical worldview" is
portrayed in such a one-sided and exaggerated way as to make it appear to be on
the wrong side, the "politically incorrect" side, of all these, the "real" issues.

One wonders what would happen if the minimalists would simply forgo
their usual hostility to the texts and read the Hebrew Bible with enough empathy
to see that its real message is often more pertinent to social justice than their
own. The biblical message is also more honest, in that the biblical writers
usually do not pretend to be anything but elites, a few prophets like Amos being
the exception. Compare this with the sorry spectacle of the revisionists - all
highly-educated privileged professors, at prestigious universities, protected by
tenure - championing the cause of the disenfranchised of this world. At the very
least, such "populism" is hypocrisy. It is also a form of radical social engineering
without so much as a blueprint. If everything is "ideology," as the revisionists
and others adamantly insist, why is theirs any better than the biblical or any
other traditional ideology?

The violently antitheological revisionist ideology outlined above is,

ironically, itself what Jon D. Levenson of Harvard calls a "secular analogue to
religious revelation." His essay "Historical Criticism and the Fate of the
Enlightenment Project" points out that secularity is no guarantee of religious
neutrality.36 And despite Thompson's indignant insistence that "we do strive to
be objective scholars and are not ideologues,"37 I am unconvinced. Their
position seems to me like a new quasi-religious vision, and they certainly exhibit
all the typical fervor of new converts. Those who know Davies tell me that his
sometimes outrageous polemics are best understood as possibly a delayed
reaction against his own conservative background. Whitelam's apparent pacifist
Quaker background may help to explain his antipathy to the "militant" modern
state of Israel. The fact that Thompson is a graduate of the University of
Tubingen may account partly for his jaundiced view of Judaism.38 We all have
our biases; but honest scholars do not mask theirs as "objectivity," or confuse
scholarship with advocacy of social causes.

Finally, there are nagging epistemological issues posed by the revisionist

school, not simply the contradictions that abound, but rather what appear to me
to be fundamental yet largely unexamined presuppositions. Let me put my
misgivings in the form of questions, questions that I do not mean to be simply
rhetorical.

1. The revisionists contemptuously dismiss the Enlightenment, yet they

presume to be more "enlightened"; but on what basis, since reason is passe?

2. They vilify the whole history of biblical interpretation for its privileged and
isolated "realms of discourse"; but their whole program consists of an
elaborate "realm of discourse," usually inbred to the point of intellectual
incest. Why is their "realm" preferable or superior?

3. As postmoderns, they reject "positivism"; yet their pronouncements are at

least as dogmatic; they reject "ideology," yet are ponderously ideological,
what some have called "secular Fundamentalists."

4. As purists, they protest the "manipulation" of the biblical texts by traditional

scholarship; yet they do not hesitate to appropriate the same texts for their
program of intellectual and social reform.

5. Since the Hebrew Bible does not reflect the actual reality of life in Palestine
in the Iron Age, they intend on their own to "reify" the past (a favorite term
of New Literary Critics); but on what basis, except sheer imagination, since
there are no "facts"?39

I do not think that the revisionists and other minimalist biblical scholars can
answer these questions - at least, they have not done so thus far. If I am off-base
in my indictment, let them show that.
 Where the Revisionists and Deconstructionists Are Wrong

Now, to put matters in a more positive way, let me attempt to countermand some
of the presuppositions (they would say "conclusions") that the revisionists and
their minimalist confreres have put forward in a more or less deliberate way
(although not as straightforwardly as they should have).40

(1) They contend that texts are not "time-space conditioned," at least in any
way we can determine, so they can be interpreted any way we moderns choose.
But texts, precisely like archaeological artifacts, are very much "timespace"
bound in their original context; and the task of interpretation, while it will
always be influenced by "subjective" factors, is to strive to understand that
original context as far and as objectively as possible, simply in the interests of
honest inquiry.

(2) Language is not "indeterminate," but terribly specific, even if the

meaning of words may change, or when our perception may be different from
that of those who first used the words. The fact that literary texts may possess a
diversity of legitimate meanings for the sensitive reader does not mean that there
was no single, original, preferable meaning, or that one implied "meaning" is as
good as another. To argue that an author's words did not or do not convey
specific intent is absurd, and if true would make sheer chaos of human
communication, which does take place by and large despite inherent difficulties.
Texts have an intrinsic "meaning," or else the authors were fools, and we are
greater fools to pay any attention to them.

(3) The "distance" that is asserted between their world and ours, both
objectively and subjectively, does indeed exist, and it poses in some ways a
barrier to understanding. The way to deal with that distance, however, is not to
ignore it and to coerce ancient texts into saying what we may want them to say,
but rather to use the tools of modern critical scholarship - particularly
archaeology and its ability to recover original context - to transcend the distance.
The hermeneutics of suspicion and hostility - trying to "stand the text on its
head" - will never bring us within understanding distance.

(4) To argue that how texts "signify" is more important than what they
signify is nonsense. It certainly would be news to the ancient authors. Here is
where the "sophistication" of modern literary critics simply outstrips the
evidence. Their theory of literary production (if any) imputes to ancient writers,
like the authors of the Bible, a polymorphism, a preoccupation with hidden
symbols, that I find incredible. Sometimes, as Freud might have said, "A cigar is
just a cigar." A text sometimes means just what it says, no more and no less.

(5) Something of the "semantic universe" of the ancient author may indeed
be necessary to know; but if it is unrecoverable, what is the point of the inquiry?

(6) If, as many of the New Literary Critics maintain, it is largely

"intertextuality" that sheds light on a given biblical text - the interaction with
other earlier and later texts - then we, from our perspective, can know more
about what a text "means" than the original author. That seems a curious conceit
to me.

(7) The biblical texts, and in particular the history of Jewish-Christian

biblical interpretation, are accused of having been "tools of oppression" - the
"Great Metanarrative" that must be rejected. Yet I would observe that the misuse
of biblical texts by later interpreters is scarcely to be blamed on the biblical
writers themselves; and the fact that we have allowed such "domination" by the
texts says more about our own insecurities, and about the failure of critical
scholarship, than it does about anything in the texts themselves. Now the
revisionists declare that "theology must liberate itself from 1,41 history. Exactly
where does that leave theology? Perhaps it should, instead, reclaim history, even
if that is a somewhat truncated, more realistic history (below).

An Indictment

In summary, my own indictment of all the "minimalist" approaches to the

Hebrew Bible and to the history of ancient Israel is as follows.

(1) The minimalist approach is hardly innovative, much less

"revolutionary"; it is simply another of the fads that so often prevail in our
uncertain and cynical times - "New Age pap" that stems largely from a failure of
intellectual and theological nerve.

(2) It is arrogant and pretentious in its claims to "new knowledge" - not so

much "post-Enlightenment" as anti-Enlightenment, anti-reason, anti-good sense,
and ultimately anti-social despite its Utopian goals. As a supposedly intellectual
movement, it is so incestuous that it is breeding simple-mindedness.

(3) It is ultimately frivolous, parroting slogans and exalting cleverness

above sensibility (note the catchy titles of publications). Its deliberately
provocative style and other outrageous declarations amount to little more than
"offing the establishment." It is so lacking in any attempt at serious engagement
that it is tempting to dismiss all this as so much "postmodern piffle."

(4) The revisionist agenda masquerades as "progressive" scholarship, but it

is really demagoguery.

(5) The minimalist approach in practice does amount to nihilism; this is not
name-calling, but simply recognizes that this school has no epistemological
foundations, no rational justification for its assertions. But if no objective
knowledge is possible, then it is not possible even to know that. The fact that
nihilism is a "dead-end" with which most people in the real world cannot live
(that is, the world outside the academy) is beginning to be recognized. I would
go so far as to say that the "revolt against reason," if carried through resolutely,
opens the way first to intellectual and social anarchy, then to Fascism. Fascist
tendencies are already evident in some of the more extreme polemics of the
revisionists, particularly in Thompson's diatribes.

As a leading proponent of biblical deconstruction, William A. Beardslee,

recently remarked, in an essay on "Poststructuralist Criticism," "Deconstruction
is a particularly rigorous form of poststructuralism, because taken by itself it
does not offer any alternative structure to the pattern it deconstructs." Yet, as
Beardslee notes, that is becoming increasingly intolerable, even to the most
intrepid intellectual and social theoreticians. Some framework for human
thought and action must be found, even if not an absolute one. Thus Beardslee
observes that "a recognition of this is part of the reason that college and
university departments of literature and philosophy are moving away from
deconstruction toward neopragmatism."42

Here is what I would call a wicked irony: avant-garde as they fancy

themselves, the revisionist school in biblical studies, barely a decade old, is
already one fad behind. In the remainder of this chapter, I shall adopt a working
model of "neopragmatism" myself, in order to point a better way to approach the
reality of "ancient Israel" and to suggest ways of appropriating its meaning for us
today. If this is positivism, so be it.

What Is Left? A Historical "Core" in the Hebrew Bible

The objective throughout this book has been to use the "external data" provided
by archaeology as a tool for isolating a reliable "historical core" of events in the
narrative of the Hebrew Bible, despite its theocratic nature. These events should
enable us to characterize a real Israel in the Iron Age, not a "Biblical Israel" that
the revisionists claim was conjured up by Jewish scribal schools in the
Hellenistic era. Since I have already outlined a historical sketch of several major
epochs in Chapters 4-5 above, a brief summary will suffice here.

(1) Early Israel. There can be relatively little doubt today that the 12thI ith
century B.C. complex of highland villages and agrarian life sketched in Chapter
4 above reflects not only the "Israel" of the late 13th-century Merneptah stele,
but also the "Israel" of the Hebrew Bible's "period of the judges," my "Proto-
Israelites."43 Here the "convergences" of the recent archaeological data and the
narrative accounts of the book of judges (and much of 1-2 Samuel) are striking.
The parallel account in Joshua, however, is now seen to be based largely on the
folktales glorifying a Joshua, which although perhaps of early date are mostly
fictitious. Thus archaeology largely confirms one of the two biblical accounts
that have come down to us, even if it tends to discredit the other. There was an
"early Israel"; and we now know that the Hebrew Bible's basic historical
framework of an age-old cultural struggle as "Israelites" sought to distinguish
themselves from the "Canaanites" is authentic. Whatever late, tendentious, or
miraculous elements there may be in the stories of Israel's origins and emergence
in Canaan, the actual multi-ethnic and socio-cultural situation of Iron I Palestine
- and no other era - is faithfully reflected in the Hebrew Bible's overall account.

(2) The United Monarchy. Of the reigns of Saul and David, the first two
"kings" of Israel in the late 11th and 10th century, we can still say little
archaeologically. Yet the revisionists' cavalier dismissal of such early statehood
is based either on arguments from silence, which further excavation will likely
demolish, or on ignoring what evidence we do have. One thing is self-evident to
all archaeologists. By ca. 1000, the highland village culture was rapidly being
transformed into a "proto-urban" society that was much more highly centralized.
It is enlarging its territory; it is engaging in limited international trade; and it can
now be easily recognized by its emerging and increasingly homogeneous
material culture, which surely reflects Israelite "peoplehood," if not a full-
fledged nation-state.44

It may be that David, and particularly the still-shadowy Saul, were in fact
closer to what socio-anthropologists would call "chiefs" than they were kings as
we tend to think of the latter. But it is still reasonable to visualize David, and
even Saul, as local "kings" of petty states-in-the-making, for which there are
innumerable historical and ethnographic parallels. Even if the revisionists were
right in their demographic projections (and as we have seen above, they are way
off-base), the relatively small-scale nature of the socio-political entity of the
early Iron II archaeological period is irrelevant for an analysis of state-formation
processes.4s

I would also note that however folkloric the stories of Saul's and David's
amours, wars, misadventures, and heroic deeds may seem to be (and probably
are), they nevertheless have the ring of truth about them in many regards.
Among the likely historical aspects that we can now place in a comprehensible
archaeological context, I would single out the following: (1) Wars against the
Philistines, which were devastating at first, but saw the tide gradually turning in
Israel's favor, as we know from well-documented destructions at several sites ca.
1000.46 (2) The ambivalence in early Israel about the institution of kingship,
which Samuel and the Deuteronomistic editors faithfully reflect (at least in one
strand of the tradition); the potential instability of the incipient monarchy; and
the uncertainty about dynastic succession. All these features of the biblical
narratives, however late in their present form, are not only credible in
themselves, but would fit very well into the stratigraphic sequence and the
archaeological data now actually in hand from several late Iron I/early Iron II
sites.

In short, there is nothing inherently improbable in the main outline of the

biblical story as it now stands. There is no reason, for instance, to dismiss the
"era of David" as no more historical than many regard the tales of King Arthur
(as Thompson does). Despite many embellishments by the later Deuteronomistic
redactors, the main elements of the story probably derive from ancient sources
and depict actual conditions at the time.47 It is difficult, if not impossible, to
explain how Jewish writers living in Palestine in the 3rd-2nd centuries, when the
remnants of Israel had not experienced kingship for some three or four centuries,
could have made up such complex stories about kingship out of whole cloth.

The "Age of Solomon" I have treated in considerable detail in Chapter 4. It

is revealing that none of the revisionists has confronted the extensive
archaeological evidence now available. They continue to repeat that Solomon
had no "empire that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates." This is
disingenuous at the least; I know of no archaeologist (and very few biblical
scholars) who ever believed that he did amass such an empire. Such hyperbole is
all too typical of revisionist arguments. What the majority of archaeologists are
now saying is that by the mid-late 10th century Israel had indeed achieved
fullfledged statehood, and that a king of "Solomon's" stature and achievements
must be presupposed on the basis of the strictly archaeological evidence of
Israel's increasing centralization and growing prominence. Of the archaeological
revisionists, only Finkelstein differs, and that only by down-dating some
elements of these changes to the early 9th century. He still speaks, however, of a
"United Monarchy" in the 10th century. In short, archaeology cannot comment
on the biblical stories about Solomon's fabled wisdom, his coffers of gold, his
many wives and concubines, the visit of the Queen of Sheba, or the role of
Bathsheba in Solomon's succession. Archaeology can, however, document in the
mid-late 10th century an era of relative peace with the Philistines, a highly
centralized administrative system in operation throughout most of Western
Palestine, a growing and increasingly prosperous population, and the
construction of such monumental architecture as impressive city fortifications at
many sites and in all likelihood a national temple or shrine in Jerusalem that was
modeled on similar structures in the surrounding Canaanite-Phoenician regions
of the Southern Levant. The biblical writers did not "invent" Solomon, although
they have aggrandized him out of their intent to glorify the Davidic line of kings.
Nevertheless, if they had not described him, we archaeologists would have to
imagine a "Solomon by another name," simply to account for the actual evidence
of kingship that we now have.

(3) The Divided Monarchy. In Chapter 5 I have described some of the

archaeological evidence we now possess for the "political history" of the 9th-6th
centuries, as well as illustrating patterns of daily life in ancient Israel and Judah
in the Iron II period. I must emphasize here that the evidence I have presented is
but a fraction of that now well known to archaeologists and to those few biblical
scholars who, though nonspecialists, do make an effort to keep up with the
burgeoning archaeological literature. Once again, I am not attempting in any way
to "defend" the writers and editors of the Hebrew Bible, much less their
convoluted "history." All I am arguing is that the overall historical and
chronological framework of the books of Kings (perhaps much of Chronicles)
and of most of the prophets actually reflects what we know of the archaeological
Iron II period - and no other. The physical and cultural setting of the biblical
stories, the "life-setting" that we have sought here, is that of the Iron Age in
Palestine, and the context cannot be arbitrarily transposed to the Hellenistic,
much less the Roman period, and still make any sense at all. Even a now
relatively conservative date in the Persian period is ruled out for most of the
biblical material in its original form. These are stories from the Iron Age, not
arbitrarily set there by later writers, although in their final edited form in the
Hebrew Bible they are the product of a long history of transmission.

The nature of religion and cult in the Divided Monarchy was surveyed
extensively in Chapter 5. Once again, as with the biblical accounts of the
settlement process, the Hebrew Bible in its present, composite form contains at
least two portraits of ancient Israelite religion. The one that prevails in the minds
of the Deuteronomistic editors who shaped the final version of the history
sometime after the fall of Jerusalem is the "normative" one - not only for those
who produced the Hebrew Bible, but for nearly all Jews and Christians who
followed them, and indeed for the vast majority of biblical commentators up
until recently. This portrait paints Israelite belief and practice from the beginning
as monotheistic, the worship of the one God Yahweh, from the formative age of
Moses in preIsraelite times until the end of the Monarchy (and even beyond).
Polytheism was merely a lapse from an original, pure Mosaic monotheism. Yet
we now know, largely from archaeological data that enable us to reconstruct
"popular religion," that the "official" portrait in the Bible is highly idealistic,
reflecting largely the view of the elite, orthodox, nationalistic sects and parties
that produced the versions of the traditions that we happen to have in the Hebrew
Bible.

Another version, however, far more realistic and more representative of the
masses in ancient Israel, can be reconstructed by reading "between the lines" in
the Hebrew Bible's denunciation of popular, "pagan" cults. It is that version of
ancient Israelite religion which is corroborated by a mass of recent
archaeological data, as we have seen. Yet the conventional distortion of the
religious reality of ancient Israel is due not principally to the biblical writers'
biases, obvious though they are. It derives rather from our own simplistic, and I
fear wistful, reading of the biblical texts. We have, unwittingly or otherwise,
bought into the propaganda of the Deuteronomistic historians; but archaeology
can now rescue us from the illusion and force us to confront the reality of the
religions of ancient Israel, in all their variety and vitality. If all along we had read
the biblical texts with more sophistication, and fewer biases of our own, we
might have gained these insights long ago. The prophets knew what they were
talking about when they condemned non-Yahwistic practices as widespread.
That is not a moral judgment on my part, but simply a historical one: it is a fact,
one now well established by archaeology.

What Kind of History Does the "Core" Make the Bible?

I have been arguing here that we can isolate a "historical core" in the Hebrew
Bible by singling out certain events where the textual and archaeological data
happen to "converge." I do not, as Thompson charges in his pejorative term
"harmonizing-literary" approach, create these "convergences." I merely observe
them where they occur, and then try to ask what they mean in terms of
evaluating our available sources for history-writing. That is called synthesis,
what any good historian does with all his or her sources.

In further pursuit of honest scholarship, we need at this point to look not

only at "convergences," but also at divergences, or instances in which our best
understanding of a particular biblical text seems to be contradicted by the
archaeological evidence. We have already acknowledged a number of such
instances, where the archaeological data must prevail, so that the biblical
account cannot be taken at face value as historical. Indeed, most of the biblical
narrative falls without question into this category, consisting as it does of
miraculous tales, legends, folktales, sagas, myths, and the like. But even many
passages in Joshua-Kings that purport to be straightforward historical accounts
must be regarded with some suspicion, because the basic narrative is overlaid
with many elements that will appear to most modern readers not only as
embellishments, but as fanciful or even totally fantastic. It is for that reason that
many biblical scholars of the mainstream - not only radicals like the revisionists
- regard the Hebrew Bible as basically "rationalized myth," "fictionalized
history," "historicized fiction," "story," or simply "pious fiction."
 In Chapter 2 I addressed these issues generally, preferring the term
"theocratic history," with many biblical scholars. In that view, the Hebrew Bible
is a peculiar kind of history, typical of the premodern world. As Baruch Halpern
has shown in The First Historians, the biblical writers "had authentic antiquarian
intentions" and indeed adhered to the sources they had. We must approach the
biblical literature with serious questions, but we cannot legitimately suppose a
priori that it is all "fiction" or "romance." As I would put it, despite the
overriding theological agenda of the final editors of the Hebrew Bible, both the
basic framework of the narrative and many of the original sources that lay
behind the final redaction may be regarded as "historical," at least within the
parameters of the history-writing that prevailed in the ancient world generally.
That is all that we can expect, since it is unreasonable to demand that the ancient
writers should have been modern, scientific, and academic historians, or that
they should have written the history we want. Judged by the standards of the
time, as Halpern argues, the Deuteronomists were every bit as much real
"historians" as Herodotus, Thucydides, and other ancient writers - indeed more
factual when they chose to be.48

Such a position on the historiographical issues aired here is neither

"minimalist" nor "maximalist" - certainly not the "neo-Fundamentalism" that
Thompson charges - but instead conservative in the proper sense: moderate,
practical, sensible, middle-of-the-road. This approach can perhaps be described
in terms of the recent trend noted above toward "neopragmatism" in literary-
critical studies. It might also be compared with certain new "criticalhistorical"
approaches in history. These would include the renewed emphasis of basic field
ethnographic work in anthropology, and also the "postprocessual" and new
"cognitive-historical" schools in archaeology. Even in the natural sciences,
research proceeds in the face of "indeterminancy" theories. The majority of the
particles presupposed by theoretical physicists cannot even be shown to exist;
but that does not impede pragmatic science. The existence of the planet Mars
cannot be demonstrated by the unaided conceptual powers of the human mind;
but in the summer of 1997 we landed there anyway. The lack of absolute
certainty about many of the details of the history of ancient Israel need not
preclude our being confident that there was such a history.

What the revisionists have done is to make a pronouncement that is oldhand

and banal - no "objective" history of ancient Israel is possible - and from that
they jump to the extreme and totally unwarranted conclusion that there was no
"ancient Israel." The "neopragmatic" approach advocated here attempts to
counter that extremism, as well as the equally untenable position of
Fundamentalism, for which all the biblical history is literally "true."
Unfortunately, the moderate position taken here is not likely to satisfy extremists
on either side; but in my view it is the only sound and sensible way to approach
the Hebrew Bible and the problem of writing a history of ancient Israel at the
present time. Yet the question of when to date the writing of the source-materials
on which we must base a history of Israel has yet to be worked out.

Dating the "Historical Core"

The point of the foregoing attempt to outline a "historical core" of the Hebrew
Bible in the Iron Age is simply to answer the question of our title: "What did the
biblical writers know, and when did they know it?" They knew a lot; and they
knew it early, based on older and genuinely historical accounts, both oral and
written. One simply cannot force all the biblical texts down into the Persian,
much less the Hellenistic, period.

One of the fundamental flaws of the revisionists' attempt to compress the

composition of all the Hebrew Bible into the Persian or Hellenistic period must
be pointed out here. They have presented no actual proof for the
PersianHellenistic period as the only literary setting. They have neither internal
evidence, in the form of allusions in the text to actual conditions of that era in
Babylon or Palestine (or "anachronisms"), which surely even the most ingenious
"forger" could not have avoided, nor external evidence in other texts of the
period.49 Despite the assertion of Thompson that the Hebrew Bible and "ancient
Israel" were in their origin "a Jewish concept" of the Persian-Hellenistic period,
he now informs us that there was no "Judaism" until the 2nd century A.D.: the
many earlier "Judaisms" are all "a literary fiction."50 Should we then not move
the composition of the Hebrew Bible down to the 2nd century A.D., when there
was a Jewish religious community capable of producing such a literary work?
Thompson never really addresses a key problem: the existence of the Septuagint,
or Greek translation of much of the Hebrew Bible ca. 200 B.C. - a translation of
a nonexistent Hebrew "Bible."

As for Davies, who prefers a Hellenistic date for the composition of the
Hebrew Bible (as Thompson also allows most recently), he has neither a Sitz im
Leben nor a Sitz in Literatur (or "setting"). Again, Davies does not show any real
familiarity with Hellenism or Judaism in the Hellenistic period (ca. 322-67). He
can only speculate that "scribal schools" attached to the "temple in Jerusalem"
produced this literary corpus (in effect again a "pious fraud").51 What"temple"
in Jerusalem in this era? The only evidence of such a Persian-Hellenistic temple
is from such texts as those of 1-2 Maccabees, which surely Davies would trust
even less than the biblical texts. And the supposed "temple" of that era is not
even counted by the Jewish (or any other) community; it is the later Herodian or
Roman temple that is called the "Second Temple." A small sanctuary may have
existed in Jerusalem in the Hellenistic period, but there is no evidence
whatsoever that it was an "academy" of the sort that Davies' scenario would
require. Furthermore, Davies' attempt to characterize the language of the Hebrew
Bible as a late, "artificial scribal language" has been shown by competent
Hebraists to be absurd. Biblical Hebrew is not "archaizing"; it is genuinely
archaic.52

What Would the Hebrew Bible Look Like If It Had Been Written in the
Hellenistic Period?

The revisionists' picture of a Hebrew Bible written almost entirely in the

Hellenistic period, the date they now increasingly prefer, is a "scenario." Not
only is such a scenario unlikely, indeed wholly imaginary, but the revisionists
have never thought through the issue of what the Hebrew Bible would look like
if it actually had been a literary product of the Hellenistic-early Roman era in
Palestine. The revisionists seem to know very little of such a world - an
exceedingly rich mileu that gave rise to Rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity.
This complex field is hardly the domain of Old Testament scholars, and it would
require at minimum the mastery of Classics, the archaeology of Late Antiquity,
Jewish apocryphal and pseudepigraphic ("intertestamental") literature, and New
Testament studies. Thompson's History does not even cite the basic
archaeological handbook, Ephraim Stern's The Material Culture of the Land of
the Bible in the Persian Period, 538-332 B.C.,53 or for that matter such standard
works as Francis E. Peters' magisterial Harvest of Hellenism.54 Equally
conspicuous by their absence from revisionist discussions and citations are
fundamental works on the cultural, intellectual, and spiritual milieu of nascent
Palestinian Judaism, such as Martin Hengel's monumental Judaism and
Hellenism.55

Let me suggest briefly some aspects of the world of Hellenistic Palestine

that would inevitably have been reflected in the biblical literature, had it actually
been composed then. (1) The impact of the Greek worldview - rational,
empirical, and "Western" - would surely be seen, at least as a backdrop, and
probably as a foil for the biblicists' propaganda. Yet the outlook of the Hebrew
Bible is pervasively Oriental and "mythopoeic," reflecting an old order unaware
of the new order of Hellenism.

(2) The everyday life of 4th-1st century Palestine would also be reflected if
the Hebrew Bible stemmed from that period. This was a world of Greek poleis,
of cities planned de novo and their cultural institutions; of cosmopolitan tastes in
science, philosophy, literature, religion, and the arts; and, above all, of the spread
of the Greek language as a cultural vehicle alongside the commonly spoken
Aramaic. Yet the Hebrew Bible betrays no trace of such a world, apart from the
book of Daniel (below). Its relatively isolated world is still that of vil lages and
small walled towns atop the old Bronze Age mounds. The Hebrew Bible knows
nothing of the complex multi-ethnic and multicultural mix of Hellenistic
Palestine; it reflects rather the old Iron Age population of Israelites, Philistines,
Canaanites, Phoenicians, Aramaeans, and finally Samaritans. The starting point
for all the revisionists' rejection of the Hebrew Bible as a source for the history
of a real Iron Age Israel is that it was written almost entirely later, in the
Hellenistic era, and thus yields an accurate portrait of only that period. I
challenge the revisionists to show anyone a single fact or facet of life in the
Hellenistic world that we can glean from the Hebrew Bible (save one; below).

(3) Most significant of all, if its writers really meant it to be understood in

this era, the Hebrew Bible would have been written mostly in Greek, which
already in the Persian period had replaced Hebrew as the vernacular language in
Palestine, or perhaps in Aramaic. Yet only portions of Ezra and Daniel, admitted
as being late by all scholars, are written in Aramaic; and there is no trace
whatsoever of Greek. The Hebrew Bible is written almost entirely in Hebrew;
and Hebraists have shown convincingly that this is not "late Hebrew," much less
Davies' "artificial scribal" language of the Second Temple. It is the standard
Hebrew of the Iron Age, as attested in hundreds of archaeologically well-dated
ostraca, inscribed objects, seals and seal impressions, and even a few remains of
monumental stelae.56
 (4) Finally, the Persian-Hellenistic temple, and especially the Hasmonean
wars, centered around this shrine in the 2nd century B.C., would have provided
the religious setting of the Hebrew Bible had it been a product of those times.
Yet the "temple" is always Solomon's; and the stories of wars reflect nothing of
the Hasmoneans and their struggle against Hellenization.

In asking what the Hebrew Bible would look like if it were really a
Hellenistic religious document, we need to recognize that we actually have such
literature. First, there is the biblical book of Daniel, almost certainly written in
the context of the Hasmonean wars of the 2nd century, although of course
artificially set in the Babylonian-Persian period for literary effect, as was
customary in much ancient literature. And it is no coincidence that the last
chapter of Daniel clearly presupposes the Greek notion of the "immortality of the
soul" totally foreign to ancient Israel, and therefore conspicuously absent in all
the rest of the Hebrew Bible. Daniel is what a "Hellenistic Bible" might look
like; and it is atypical, indeed unique, in the corpus of the Hebrew Bible. The
books of 1-2 Maccabees are even better comparisons.

Finally, we must confront the dilemma that the revisionists pose, but have
never acknowledged. If the writers of the Hebrew Bible lived in the 4th-Ist cen
turies, and they succeeded in producing a "story" that was artificially and
deliberately projected back into the Iron Age, several conclusions must be
drawn. (a) They did so without a trace of any anachronisms that would have
given them away, that is, implicit or explicit references to conditions of their
own day. (b) They wrote this purportedly historical account without any of the
historical records that we take for granted, since most of these had disappeared
with the end of the Iron Age (i.e., Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian records)
and were not recovered until the 19th-20th centuries A.D. The biblical writers
simply "invented" the story of an ancient Israel in the Iron Age and got right
virtually every detail that we can now confirm. (c) Finally, if the revisionists'
view of the nature and origins of the literary traditions of the Hebrew Bible were
correct, the biblical "fiction story" of an ancient Israel would constitute the most
astonishing literary hoax of all time and the most successful, too, since it fooled
almost everyone for 2000 years. Possible? Yes: but not very likely.

Theories of Literary Production

In fact, one of the weaknesses of Davies' method is that he has no clear and
persuasive theory of "literary production" - a must for anyone embracing any
aspect of the New Literary Criticism. The same conspicuous lack is seen in the
works of the other revisionists. They all simply presume that because the final
editors of the Hebrew Bible were influenced by the cultural situation of the
Jewish community in the Persian-Hellenistic era, that situation - the "social
context of knowledge" again - produced the overriding ideology of the Hebrew
Bible. But "situations" do not produce literature; authors do. Cultural context
helps to shape literature; but it does not "cause" it. Here is where the revisionists'
arguments are weakest; not only are they over-simplistic, but they fall into the
trap of all mechanistic and reductionist schemes: they lack an adequate
explanation of "causation." For anthropologists and archaeologists - indeed for
all historians who seek to go beyond description - explanation of the historical
and cultural process is the ultimate goal. That goal may never be fully achieved,
but it certainly cannot be ignored. The irony here is that the revisionists, despite
their heavy stress on ideology, minimize the innovative ideology of the original
biblical historians, denying to them any truly creative role in the way they
shaped their history of ancient Israel. They assume that their own practice is
"truer than the practitioners' practice."57

The revisionists are naive in another sense. They seem unaware that the
formative Jewish community, which did indeed "produce" the Hebrew Bible in
its final form, did not spring fully developed out of nowhere. This "New Israel"
(a term of which Thompson is fond) evolved directly out of the "Old Israel"
sketched here, or it would otherwise have been completely inexplicable. The
revisionists, in speaking, as we all do, of "tradition" (something "handed down"),
overlook the fact that in a historical or even in a literary tradition, there must be
something to be handed down. In short, authors and historians never simply
invent de novo, but draw rather upon long, shared cultural traditions, for this
alone gives their work credence and currency. If the Hebrew Bible and its story
of ancient Israel had been "invented" out of whole cloth by writers living in the
Persian or Hellenistic period, as the revisionists claim, it would have been
meaningless to those living at the time, and would shortly have passed into
obscurity.

At this point one of Lemche's and Thompson's pronouncements reveals how

poorly they understand either the literary or the historical process: "The Bible is
not history, and only recently has anyone ever wanted it to be."58 The fact is that
almost everyone for the last 2000 years and more wanted it to be, thought it was,
and valued it precisely for that reason. If in our sophistication we wish to move
beyond that point, that is understandable; but first let us understand as well what
the Bible was, and what its creators thought it was. Modern critical scholarship,
to be progressive, does not need to caricature the Hebrew Bible as a "pious
fraud" - for that is what it would be if the revisionists' view of its literary
production were correct. Such contempt for ancient histories is neither good
historiography nor a very sound basis upon which to build a theology of any
sort.

I cannot resist pointing out that here, once again, the revisionists reveal how
scarcely innovative they are, indeed how out of touch with developments in
many allied fields. For instance, "biblical" archaeology's attempts to deal with
the question of the historicity of the Hebrew Bible have often been compared
with Classical archaeology's struggle with the "Homeric legends." A generation
ago, even a decade ago, Classicists and ancient historians would have dismissed
Homer as a mythical figure and would have argued that the tales of the Trojan
Wars were mainly "invented" by much later Greek writers. (Sound familiar?) Yet
the most recent collection of essays on this topic, by distinguished scholars
honoring the retirement of Emily Vermeule from Harvard, shows a rather
surprising about-face.59 It is now thought that those stories of warfare do not
simply reflect the situation of Greece in the 8th-7th centuries, but go much
farther back to a genuine historical situation of the 13th-12th centuries, that is, to
the period of the movements of the various "Sea Peoples" across the
Mediterranean (including the biblical "Philistines"). Thus, it is now argued, a
long oral tradition, preserving many authentic details of earlier Greek history,
persisted down until about the 8th century, at which time these traditions were
finally reduced to writing. There are indeed many obvious mythological
elements in Homer, which no one would wish to deny; but there is also a "core"
of genuine history, and it is a history recoverable largely through the progress of
archaeology. Two observations may be in order: (1) The Classical authorities
here can hardly be dismissed as "Fundamentalists." (2) The parallels with the
early history of Israel and the growth of the biblical tradition and literature are
clear, even extending to the chronology of events. If Homer can in a sense be
"historical," why not the Hebrew Bible?
 Oral and Literary Traditions

It is significant that the revisionists totally ignore the role of the oral aspect in
the tradition itself and in the creation of the written legacy, even though
numerous studies of oral tradition in Israel and in the ancient world generally
over the past two generations have shown how significant a factor it was.
Recently Susan Niditch has surveyed the extensive evidence. Her arguments
alone, neither theological nor archaeological, would demolish the
presuppositions of the revisionists regarding literary production.

Niditch takes quite seriously new approaches such as ideological criticism,

but she intends as a social historian to shift the focus away from those with
power and the events they instigated and to the everyday realities experienced by
the vast majority of the population. (The similarity to my approach here is
obvious.) In so doing, Niditch deals with the fact that "large, perhaps dominant,
threads in Israelite culture were oral, and that literacy in ancient Israel must be
understood in terms of its continuity and interaction with the oral world."60

Niditch's work then explores in depth the evidence for literacy in ancient
Israel; remains of oral style in the biblical literature; attitudes toward writing;
evidence for records, annals, and archival sources; and finally the interplay
between orality and literacy, or the "oral mentality and the written Bible."

Niditch is exploring an entire "prebiblical" world, where a real history of the

majority of those living in Iron Age Israel was narrated, preserved, cele brated,
and passed on in oral traditions. And these early oral traditions can easily be
shown to have survived almost intact for centuries in ancient Israel, as elsewhere
in many preliterate cultures. Even if they survived only until the 8th7th centuries
or so, when most scholars believe the Deuteronomistic tradition began to be
written down, they would have had a significant if not decisive impact on the
story of "ancient Israel" as told in the main strand of the Hebrew Bible.

It seems to me that henceforth the burden of proof in denying the role of

earlier oral tradition in biblical historiography must fall on the revisionists and
other minimalists. They are fond of saying that ancient Israel was "no different"
from other peoples and the ancient world. Precisely; and there, too, narrative
history was passed down to subsequent generations largely in the form of oral
tradition, whose reliability as "history" cannot be dismissed simply because it
was not yet written down. The Bible and Homer do not stand alone in
incorporating older oral traditions that have preserved many genuine historical
memories and events. Again, the final redactors of the Hebrew Bible did not
work in a vacuum. They had much older sources.

Niditch's conclusions are must reading for anyone who wishes to confront
issues of literature and history in the Hebrew Bible.

Recognition of Israelite attitudes to orality and literacy and of the complex

interplay between the two forces us to question long-respected theories
about the development of the Israelite literary traditions preserved in the
Bible.... Given this assessment of Israelite aesthetics and the importance
placed on the ongoing oral-literate continuum, source-critical theories
become suspect, as do other theories about the composition of the Hebrew
Bible that are grounded in modern-style notions about Israelites' uses of
reading and writing.61

Compare this sophisticated theory of literary production, from a scholar well

grounded in the original sources, with the facile statements of Thompson and the
other revisionists. They mistakenly take the relative scarcity of early Iron Age
written remains as evidence that all of the Hebrew Bible was written later, and is
therefore "unhistorical." Simply put, they do not understand that late editing does
not necessarily mean late composition, much less a late origin for the tradition as
a whole.

Are a "Secular History" of Ancient Israel and a "Nonhistorical Theology"

Adequate?

In the foregoing discussion of various topics, I have argued that while the
Hebrew Bible is not "history" in the modern sense, it nevertheless contains at
least the outline, as well as many details, of a real "ancient Israel" in the Iron
Age. Yet my extended defense of a certain kind of "historicity" in the Hebrew
Bible admittedly results in what will be a disappointment for some. That is
because the "core history" set forth here is not "maximalist" (despite the
revisionists' attempt to stick this label on me and other consensus historians); not
literalistic ("the Bible is the Word of God, and every word is true"); and
especially not theologically motivated, or even necessarily providing a sound
basis for any theology (not authoritative Scripture, but simply an outline of the
history that produced the literature). The latter - history and theology - is the
point at which we now need to draw matters to a conclusion in this final chapter
on "why the Bible still matters."

Throughout this book, the question lurking insistently just under the surface
has always been: "Is the Bible true?" And if so, in what sense? I am arguing that
there are historical truths preserved here and there throughout much of the
Hebrew Bible. But my definition of "truth" is largely historical, not theological.
The result is something like what Robert Oden advocates in his provocative little
book, The Bible without Theology. But is that possible? Is such a Bible, stripped
of its essential proclamation of "God who acts in history," not robbed of all its
religious power and moral meaning?

The answer lies partly, I think, in recognizing that theology, religion, and
morality are not one and the same - indeed can and should be separated. And all
must be separated from the category of "history." History-writing, even when it
allows us to reconstruct the past in some detail, even (and especially) when it is
biblical history that is at issue, can at best tell us something of what happened in
the past. But it cannot tell us what the events meant then, much less what they
may mean now, at least beyond mere suggestion. Thus the biblical writers set
forth certain "facts of history," based on the experience of events in their time.
And sometimes we may be able to confirm that the events actually happened,
through independent archaeological or other means of investigation. Yet the
major thrust of the Bible is not the "story," but rather the principal actor, God;
not "what happened," but rather a certain theocentric interpretation of the events.
The biblical writers and editors are making statements of faith. And faith is not
knowledge; it cannot by definition be indisputably proven or disproven, and is
not so much irrational as supra-rational. As Gertrude Stein might have put it:
"Faith is faith is faith." The real question is whether the faith of the writers of the
Hebrew Bible can any longer be ours. For some it can be; for others not.

Faith and History

Here we must confront squarely the essential dilemma of the modern reader of
the Hebrew Bible, a dilemma that nearly all writers today acknowledge. Does
critical study of the Bible inevitably undermine religious faith, perhaps more
importantly, diminish the value of the Bible as the basis for cultural and moral
values?62 For Fundamentalists, or even for many conservative Christians, Jews,
and others, the answer is: Yes. These folk must then reject modern literary and
other critical methods, although I have assumed here that such methods are to be
taken for granted by any well-informed reader in the modern world. There is an
irony here. In North America and in places in Europe, archaeology is accepted,
even enthusiastically embraced, because it is mistakenly thought that it will,
after all, "prove that the Bible is true." But in Israel, Orthodox Jews - Israel's
Fundamentalists - are violently opposed to archaeology. This is ostensibly
because archaeology disturbs what are thought to be (but rarely are) Jewish
burials; but I suspect that actually it is because the Orthodox fear any modern
scientific investigation of their tradition. The truth of the matter, as I have sought
to show throughout this book, is that archaeology by definition cannot "prove"
the Bible's theological interpretation of events, can at best only comment on the
likelihood of the events in question having happened historically. But, if it is any
comfort to believers, archaeology, by the same token, cannot disprove the Bible's
assertions of the meaning of events.

The "secular" approach to the Bible advocated here may seem radical, even
heretical. But it is one taken today by virtually all archaeologists; by most
biblical scholars, at least those who teach in universities, rather than in
seminaries; and indeed by a surprising number of educated laypeople. Why is
that thought to be a problem? What apparently disturbs many is the fear that
approaching the Bible with skepticism about it as "history" puts one on a
slippery slope, one that inevitably leads to the rejection of the Bible altogether -
as, in effect, a "pious fraud." How can such a fraudulent literature be the basis
for any system of belief, morality, or cultural value?

Again, I suggest that we may separate history from theology, theology from
religion, religion from morality, and perhaps even morality from culture. Such a
separation would be, however, partly heuristic - that is, for the practical purposes
of honest inquiry and clear articulation of issues. It may be desirable, and
perhaps possible in the end, to reintegrate the concerns of all these avenues of
knowledge (for that is what they are). But let us assume for the purpose of
argument that the separation is valid. Where does that lead us? And how, then,
does the core history of ancient Israel, which I have sought to disentangle from
the overriding theological framework of the Hebrew Bible, become relevant for
the modern critical reader, who wishes to "salvage" something from the Bible?

Here two old notions, which have been around from the very time when the
Hebrew Bible was first being composed, may be helpful.

(1) The first notion embraces the possibility that reading the Bible's stories
too literally may miss the real point. Reading the text simplistically -
mechanically, as it were - may enable one to understand individual words, but it
may fail to apprehend the message and intent of the text as a whole.
Furthermore, such a literalistic approach is superficial: it is not only pedestrian,
but it is guilty of the classic fallacy of "reductionism," which errs by not seeing
the sum as greater than the whole of its parts. In reading the Bible, as with all
great literature, one must see beyond the words, which are, after all, merely
imperfect symbols, to the deeper reality of the author's vision of life. That is the
level at which the real "meaning" of the text begins to appear. And to grasp it,
one must read with empathy, intuition, imagination - and, may I say, with the
spirit as well as with the mind.

In the case of stories in the Bible that are obviously myths, most of us
intuitively recognize the truth of the foregoing. As we said in Chapter 1, we all
understand that Genesis 1-3 are not just naive, amusing folk-tales about a
garden, some fig leaves, a snake, and an apple. Beyond their entertainment
value, these are profound and moving descriptions of the universal human
condition. To take these stories literally would indeed be to miss the point. And I
happen to think that even some of the ancients were sophisticated enough to
understand that. Looking for the Garden of Eden on the map is misguided.

But with the later, supposedly "historical" stories of the Hebrew Bible, we
sometimes get so bogged down in questions of philology, context, and literal
meaning - historical exegesis - that in our myopia we lose sight of the larger
truth that the biblical writers ultimately wanted to convey. And this "larger truth"
may still be valid even if the biblical writers got some of the details of their story
or its chronology wrong, as they exaggerated the events - even if the story's
religious "propaganda" seems to overwhelm the history. In short, even a flawed
historical narrative can convey moral truths.

Faith and "Meaning"

Let me illustrate what I mean here. Take, for instance, the biblical story of the
call of Abraham, a story that attempts to account for the ultimate origin of the
Hebrews by relating Abraham's migration from Mesopotamia to Canaan. There
is, however, no archaeological or historical proof that such a migration ever took
place, or indeed that a historical figure such as Abraham actually lived anywhere
back in the Bronze Age. Archaeologists like myself have long since given up the
"quest for the historical Abraham." But what is the Genesis story really all
about? It wants to portray Abraham not so much as an immigrant, an innocent
abroad, but as "the Father of the faithful." It is a universal story about faith as
risk - daring to set out for a Promised Land. Again, this Promised Land is not to
be found on any map, for it is a condition of the mind and the soul. And I believe
that the biblical story was originally read that way by many in ancient Israel -
certainly so by the latter rabbis. Is the story "true"? Of course it is, whether
literally or not.

Even with accounts that are certainly more historical, or based on some
historical events, like the great cycle of dramatic stories about David, we must
look past the biblical writers' propaganda. Then, instead of focusing on David
"God's Anointed," we are able to see David the man, deeply flawed, a tragic yet
heroic figure. And that David teaches us that while the greatest gifts can be
squandered, renewal (dare I say redemption?) is possible. Such a reading of the
text is morally edifying. Debating endlessly about whether David was a real
"king" or merely a "tribal chief" is not, not even for scholars.

Above all, the enduring message of the classical Hebrew prophets of the
8th-6th centuries transcends academic debate about whether individual prophets
by such names as Amos or Isaiah actually lived and delivered their oracles in the
context that we have in the Bible, or whether later "schools" produced these as
composite literary works.63 There is a real history or setting here. The words
attributed to the prophets may have come to form in part propaganda for the
various "Yahweh-alone" movements of late Israel and Judah. But the portentous
historical situation and real-life theological crises of the Assyrian and
Babylonian era produced an eloquent call for reform - for social justice - that is
found nowhere else in the literature of the ancient Near East. In that sense, the
prophets were indeed "inspired," and their message remains vital today.

(2) The second notion that may help us to read the Bible intelligently -
critically yet sympathetically - is that of "the multiple meanings of Scripture."
Earlier orthodoxies had insisted upon a single, all-encompassing, "correct"
reading, something that the New Literary Critics rightly questioned. Their
challenge was hardly new, however, because there is already an inner dialogue
going on among the writers and editors of the Hebrew Bible within the biblical
period. Later texts do not hesitate to amplify earlier texts, reinterpreting them in
the light of new social situations. That such a practice was acceptable, even with
Scripture, should not be surprising. All great literature has many "layers" of
meaning and is thus rich in possibilities for interpretation, which is why it
becomes immortal. That does not mean that there is no intrinsic meaning in
texts, as the revisionists insist, but that on the contrary there are many meanings
that are both possible and legitimate. Thus the Bible can be "true" on many
levels, some not so much ahistorical as supra-historical.

The later Synagogue and Church understood this phenomenon very well
and perpetuated the idea of "multiple meanings." The Synagogue proceeded
under the guise of constant rabbinical reformulation, which was held to be just as
authoritative as Scripture (as in the Talmud and the Mishnah, or halakah), even
more so. The Church, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, promulgated the
doctrine of "progressive revelation," in which God himself was said to have
made possible new meanings to the biblical text, not essentially changing the
texts themselves, but revealing new meanings to the sensitive reader of later
times.

However salutary these new-old ways of reading the biblical texts maybe, it
is tempting to ask whether they do not in effect beg the question of "historicity."
Moreover, they seem to sink us in the same morass of relativism for which we
castigated the New Literary Critic: "the text means whatever I want it to mean."
Once again, however, Synagogue and Church long ago faced this dilemma, in
the form of the "allegorical meaning," attributed to various difficult biblical
texts. In its more extreme form this became "spiritual exegesis," which ignored
historical context and meaning altogether and claimed to possess hidden or
esoteric insights known only to believers (of one's own persuasion, of course).

The antidote to both relativism and allegorical flights of fancy lies in

understanding that, however multifaceted the biblical texts may seem now, they
originated in a real historical setting, not merely a literary and cultural milieu.
Therefore there are boundaries - or legitimate realms of possibilities - within
which biblical hermeneutics must proceed if it is not to violate the integrity of
the text. We must grasp what the text did mean in its own time and place, before
we venture to say what it can and does mean for us today. And the juxtaposition
of the two interpretations must not be so forced as to strain one's credulity. The
Exodus story, for example, may be about "liberation from spiritual bondage,"
and a re-reading of it may help to sensitize us to the plight of oppressed peoples
today. But that is not primarily what the biblical story "means," since it cannot
have been what it meant to those who experienced the original events, whatever
they were. Yet, because the text is not static but dynamic, it can come to mean
that. Here is an illustration of how we must separate history and proper historical
interpretation from theology. Both are legitimate avenues to understanding, but
they differ, and the integrity of each must be respected.

Toward a Bible without Theology?

At this point, it might be helpful to outline in chart-form the two basic

approaches to the Hebrew Bible and its interpretation that I have advocated, one
theological, as traditional; the other a more modern, critical "secular" approach.
As with all charts, however, juxtaposing the two in such sharp contrast is
somewhat overly simplistic; and in doing so I do not wish to imply that an
individual must choose. It is likely that many people can and do combine
elements of both approaches. More likely, most of us are ambivalent - a theist on
some occasions, more an agnostic on others. Perhaps that is because we are
dealing here with questions of ultimate concern - the very nature of reality -
where there can be little certainty.

If the above dichotomy represented the only possibilities for approaching

the Hebrew Bible, I as an archaeologist, historian, and academic would come
down on the side of the right-hand column. Here I would have to agree with
Philip R. Davies, one of the principal revisionists, who in his book Whose Bible
Is It Anyway? describes himself as "humanistic about scriptures; agnostic about
deities." Nevertheless, as Davies correctly points out, such a stance vis-A-vis the
Bible "does not diminish one's joy in reading the Bible," nor does it "deprive one
of a sense of right and wrong." Davies then goes on to argue for the strict
separation of the two approaches I outline above, even to the extent of regarding
them as two distinct (although legitimate) disciplines, one belonging in the
Church, the other at home in the academy. In answer to the question in the title
of his book, Davies concludes:

Whose B/bible is it? It is yours - and mine. And theirs. It is especially for
anyone who wants to argue about it with anybody else - and can use the
discourse to do so.64

It is astonishing to me that very few biblical scholars have been as candid as

Davies. My impression is that many are "closet agnostics," or even atheists;
many others have simply never examined their consciences; and a few seem to
be schizophrenics. But are we not entitled to know what professional biblical
scholars, whether they are clerics or not (most no longer are), after a lifetime of
study and reflection have come to believe about the Bible, that is, about its
ultimate claims? After all, this is precisely the dilemma that has been
precipitated by a century-and-a-half of modern critical study of the Bible, and is
now widely acknowledged: "What can we believe any longer?" Or, to put the
question in my deliberately more "secular" language: "What value does the
biblical tradition any longer have for the Western cultural tradition?" Then one
would have to ask further: "Could that tradition be sustained without the Bible,
or at least without traditional understandings of the Bible?"

The latter become crucial questions, because it is clear that we cannot turn
the clock back; we cannot, out of nostalgia, seek to return to the premodern era,
when the literal meaning of the Bible was taken for granted. What then are we to
do if we wish to maintain a position of high prestige and value for the Bible in
the modern world? (The revisionists, along with other postmodernists, say
simply that we cannot.) Finally, of specific concern here, is archaeology of any
help in this crisis of knowledge, of confidence?

To their credit, a few biblical scholars have addressed the above issues
recently. From the conservative or evangelical Christian perspective, one might
cite such works as The Bible in Modern Culture by two Lutheran theologians,
Roy A. Harrisville and Walter Sundberg. Yet for all their courageous attempt to
embrace the historical-critical method - it can "neither destroy nor support faith"
- they lose courage in the end. Their final sentences affirm "God's saving act in
Christ," then conclude that "insofar as historical-critical method brings us before
this central truth of Christian existence, it is not the enemy of the church, but its
austere teacher, even its friend."65 That, it seems to me, is wanting to have it
both ways - precisely what I have argued that we can no longer do. It blurs and
even obscures the necessary separation of inquiries.

A more critical attempt to defend traditional biblical interpretation is the

series of essays edited by Alan R. Millard, James K. Hoffmeier, and David W.
Baker, Faith, Tradition, and History. Here several of the authors do make use of
modern archaeological data, unlike Harrisville and Sundberg, even engaging in
dialogue at least with me, if not with many other archaeologists. Particularly
noteworthy is the chapter "Story, History, and Theology," by Millard, a
wellknown British scholar from Liverpool University of evangelical personal
persuasion. In a statement not far from mine here, Millard concedes:

Many of the books (of the Bible) themselves were clearly written to present
and explain Israel's history from a particular point of view: they are,
therefore, forms of propaganda.66

Millard's way out of the dilemma is to distinguish "narrative theology" from

"historical narrative proper," only the former being normative for faith. That is
not unlike the separation of disciplines that I have proposed, although Millard is
a theist and I am not.67

In a much more popular vein, and representing the vantage point of liberal
Anglican theology, is John Shelby Spong's best-selling Rescuing the Bible from
Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture.68 Whether
Spong is successful in "rescuing the Bible," readers will have to judge for
themselves. In any case, however radical his approach may seem to many
churchgoers, it is still church-centered, a far cry from the "secular humanist"
approach that I as an archaeologist and historian take here.

One churchman and Old Testament scholar who has wrestled productively
with the "faith and history" issue is James Barr, former Oriel Professor at
Oxford. In his seminal book The Bible in the Modern World, as well as in more
recent works, Barr has battled Fundamentalism eloquently and persuasively,
while still trying to retain the Bible as "authoritative" for Christian faith, as well
as for the Western cultural tradition. Barr argues frankly for a selective and
pluralistic interpretation of the Bible:

The Bible is not in fact a problem-solver. It seems to me normal that the

biblical material bears upon the whole man, his total faith and life, and that
out of that total faith and life he takes his decisions as a free agent.69

In many recent scholarly discussions, the perennial "faith and history" issue
has surfaced in the form of the question: "Is a critical and historical biblical
theology possible?" One position, very close to mine here, is that of John J.
Collins, in a provocative article entitled "Is a Critical Biblical Theology
Possible?" Collins, a distinguished Roman Catholic biblical scholar and
theologian, says that biblical theology cannot in fact be "historical." That is, not
only is the biblical interpretation of "saving events" not historically verifiable,
but the modern critical "principle of intellectual autonomy" precludes the church
or the state prescribing for the scholar which conclusions he or she should
reach.70

A leading biblical scholar of conservative Jewish persuasion, Jon D.

Levenson agrees with Collins that a separation of theology from criticalhistorical
study is desirable - but for an altogether different reason. In his essay "Historical
Criticism and the Fate of the Enlightenment Project," written partly to counteract
Collins' "Christian" perspective, Levenson rejects the "biblical theology"
approach altogether, as a spurious, largely Protestant enterprise. Levenson argues
that while scholars in the academy and in modern intellectual life generally must
be committed to critical-historical methods, they still should and can be
committed to a believing community as well - in his case, Jewish. Yet Levenson
candidly acknowledges elsewhere that historical criticism can undermine both
faith and religious identity. In other words, he too wishes to separate the
disciplines of history, biblical studies, and theology. But it is not clear to me,
despite Levenson's many incisive and perceptive observations on the use of the
Bible in the modern world, whether he is really consistent or, for that matter,
how he thinks the separation of inquiries can actually be accomplished. His ba
sic conclusion is that "the secularity of historical criticism represents not the
suppression of commitment, but its relocation." While it is clearly not his own
solution to the problem, Levenson does allow for the possibility of substituting
"a cultural for a religious motivation." This will "center on the importance of the
Bible in Western civilization," a defense of which in the current climate will then
become "imperative"71 I could not agree more. But, unlike Levenson, I believe
that a nonconfessional, "secular" approach is not only viable for many, but is the
most defensible approach. In that case, Church and Synagogue will be freed to
promote their own theological agendas, quite apart from any need for historical
proofs, including those thought to derive from archaeological "confirmations of
Scripture." This approach recognizes that archaeology may, at its best, be able to
answer such historical questions as Who, What, When, and Where. But it cannot
answer the philosophical and theological question: Why?

Preserving the Bible in the Western Tradition?

If the place of the Bible in the Western cultural tradition is to be considered

seriously, as Levenson supposes, it must be acknowledged that the Bible has had
a place in that tradition. This should be obvious to any but the most radical
postmodernist, and that it indeed has had a central place. I would suggest that the
Western, or so-called "Judaeo-Christian," tradition takes for granted the
following notions and cultural values, nearly all of them derived from one or
another interpretation of the worldview of the Hebrew Bible (and, to a lesser
degree, from the New Testament, much of it dependent upon the Hebrew Bible).

1. The absolute worth of the individual (the right of self-determination)

2. The rule of law and justice (democracy)

3. The immutable authority of morality (virtue)

4. Liberty and justice as the foundations of politics (public morality)

5. A free, entrepreneurial market (capitalism)

6. The power of the mind to dominate nature and grasp truth of a higher order
(science)

7. Government as ordained (the rule of law and order)

 8. The importance of tradition and its meaning (religious and cultural values)

9. History as purposeful (progress)

10. Universalism as the ultimate goal (triumphalism)

Perhaps the question is not whether the Western cultural tradition is

biblically based, but only whether the above concepts deserve to survive; and
whether they can do so without still being undergirded by at least the "history"
(if not the theology) set forth in the Bible. Some may regard these as nonissues,
certainly the more radical revisionists and other postmodernists, who are in
effect social engineers without a blueprint, intent upon overthrowing the Western
tradition, which they think has "privileged" itself. It has done so, they say,
largely by appealing to traditional readings of the Bible for legitimization, and
by having used the Bible's "totalizing discourse" to disenfranchise the masses.
Once again, however, as we saw above, the search for the truth of the matter -
for a balanced and judicious resolution - is supplanted by ideology, rhetoric, and
politics. And in the process, the survival of the Bible in cultural life, the life of
Church and Synagogue; the fundamental value of the Western cultural tradition;
and indeed all dispassionate and intelligent discourse are threatened. Perhaps the
Western tradition is not "superior" in the long run. But it is our tradition, at least
for the majority of us. It has served us well for centuries, and it has within it the
seeds of renewal. To demonize and jettison the Western cultural tradition and
offer nothing in its place is irresponsible. The revisionists are not
"revolutionaries"; they are demagogues. Their agenda, if it could be carried out,
would in my opinion see not the advent of a secular Utopian "Brave New World"
but rather of anarchy, chaos, and ultimately those conditions of despair that have
often historically led to Fascism. That is why I abhor revisionism in all forms.

One of the most penetrating recent analyses of the history of the Western
cultural tradition is that of the Classicist and medievalist David L. Gress, in his
book From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents. Gress
eloquently demonstrates that the postmodernists' wholesale rejection of the
Western tradition, of its "Grand Narrative," as he phrases it, is based largely on
ignorance of the roots of that tradition, i.e., of its complex and multifaceted
character; and on caricatures of the tradition, emphasizing only the distortions
and excesses.
 Gress also exposes the "revolutionary zeal" of postmodernism since the
1960s for what it really is: a thinly-disguised and hypocritical "antinarrative" of
the West, compounded with New Left political activism, multiculturalism,
communitarianism, and universalism (and, he adds, doctrinaire feminism and
environmentalism). Above all, Gress points out, the postmodernists were not the
emancipated social commentators that they claimed to be, "liberated from all
political narratives," but were in fact moralists of the very sort that they
themselves decried.

The late liberal and multiculturalist heirs of the radical Enlightenment did
not throw out the Columbia model of the Grand Narrative because there was
no truth, but because they believed they had a higher and fairer truth than
the allegedly Eurocentric and biased version of the Grand Narrative. That
was not a postmodernist argument, but a highly moralistic modern
argument.72

Gress concludes: "Postmodernists pretended to be the ultimate skeptics; in fact,

most of the leading spokesmen of the movement were moralists in the tradition
of Voltaire and Rousseau." To this radical legacy they added only a touch of
nihilism. Yet, as Gress puts it:

But if postmodernism was merely nihilism, it offered nothing other than a

new name to distinguish itself from the far more serious and better-defined
nihilism analyzed by Nietzsche and Spengler.... If postmodernism
concealed, under a facade of nihilism, yet another version of the radical
attack on the legitimacy of the West, that again was nothing new, merely a
tedious and repetitive recital of the same grievances and errors denounced
by Rousseau, Marx, and their followers for two centuries. The sole
contribution of postmodernism as a label or a movement was to sow further
confusion by combining anticapitalist and antimodern resentments.73

Gress's prescription for the ailing Western tradition is partly to recognize

that "what was at bottom a struggle to enforce, or condemn, the legacy of the
radical Enlightenment became in 1980s and 1990s America a fight within moral
and religious traditions."74

I could not agree more wholeheartedly, but curiously enough, Gress does
not see that the "moral and religious traditions" of the West rest upon biblical, as
well as Classical and Enlightenment foundations. The presumption is that there
was a "biblical world" that really existed, in whose actual experiences in history
these traditions are rooted, a history that alone gives them any "meaning" they
may have. Take away the historicity of the central events narrated in the Bible -
our "core history" here - and you undermine the foundations of the Western
cultural tradition.

Gress's own hope is that the best of the Western tradition can somehow be
salvaged, although radically reformulated. For him, relativism is "a cultural
luxury, not a genuine philosophical choice." He ends his book by observing:

The skeptical Enlightenment needs to be protected against its radical,

impatient, and moralistic counterpart. And in the age of illusory
universalism, the way to restore that balance is to recover the Old West in
its full color and passion, not as a caricature to be rejected, but as the source
of one's social and cultural being.75

Gress ends by quoting Virgil; I agree with his diagnosis, even his
prescription, but I would prefer to quote biblical philosophers who preceded
Virgil by centuries.

In Defense of "Secular Humanism" - with the Bible

In many ways, what I am advocating here is a kind of "secular humanism,"

which, however: (1) takes the Bible seriously, as both a historical and a cultural
tradition; and (2) does not deny the transcendent and its role in human life, but
rather celebrates it. If the reader thinks these two tenets self-contradictory, let me
refer to the perceptive essays of a distinguished Harvard historian of
comparative religion, and nominal Christian, Wilfred Cantwell Smith. In his
essay "Shall the Next Century Be Secular or Religious?" Smith points out that
"secularism" as a concept originated only about 150 years ago; that it is often
misconstrued as being the antithesis of "religion" and as opposed to the concept
of a transcendent realm; and that it can be nihilist. Smith argues, however, that
our choice in future is not between a naive "religiousness" or a nihilist
"secularism." He concludes:

It is because I am a secular humanist - but not in the nihilist or any negative

sense - that I have come to recognize that we are, and the world is, in
 profound trouble unless we are also and deeply what my fellow secular
humanists call religious.76

Another vision - this time that of a scientist, rather than a humanist - at the
turn of the millennium is similar. Harvard's eminent Research Professor, Curator
in Entomology, and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Edward O. Wilson recently
published a provocative work entitled Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.
Wilson observes that Enlightenment thinkers knew a lot about everything,
today's specialists know a lot about a little, and postmodernists doubt that we can
know anything at all. Wilson believes, however, that "it is worth asking,
particularly in this winter of our cultural discontent, whether the origi nal spirit
of the Enlightenment - confidence, optimism, eyes to the horizon - can be
regained." He thinks that it can and must be, because "a vision of secular
knowledge in the service of human rights and human progress . . . was the West's
greatest contribution to civilization." Wilson offers a bold and refreshing vision
of the future by concluding that knowledge is not a "social construct"; that we
can know what we need to know; and that our new knowledge in future will lead
us to the discovery that underlying all forms of truth, scientific and humanistic,
there lies a fundamental unity (thus his "consilience."). Wilson is that rare
scientist who also values the humanities - including the creative arts, philosophy,
and religion - which he thinks together with science will be the "two domains
(that) will continue to be the two great branches of learning in the twenty-first
century." 77

Is this vision of a natural scientist not better than the atomistic, fractious,
and tiresome rhetoric that currently infects the social sciences, and which in the
form of biblical "revisionism" threatens to undermine one of the pillars of the
Western cultural tradition?78
My intent in writing this book was not to save the Hebrew Bible from its many
detractors in our postmodern era, not least from the "revisionists," although I
believe that we must take seriously their attempt to undermine the Bible's
credibility as a source of historical facts and moral truths. The Hebrew Bible,
however, will be read and cherished long after these "troublers of Zion" (if one
will forgive a biblical phrase) are gone and forgotten.

What I have attempted to do throughout this book is twofold. First, I have

focused on methodology, in order to unmask the revisionists' ideology and the
postmodernist paradigm that lies partly hidden behind it, and in so doing to
expose their faulty methodology in approaching the texts of the Hebrew Bible.
Second, I have sought to counter the revisionists' minimalist conclusions by
showing how archaeology uniquely provides a context for many of the narratives
in the Hebrew Bible. It thus makes them not just "stories" arising out of later
Judaism's identity crisis, but part of the history of a real people of Israel in the
Iron Age of ancient Palestine. As the title puts it: "What did the biblical writers
know, and when did they know it?" They knew a lot, and they knew it early.

My method in going about the inquiry here has been that of good historians
everywhere, namely to sift through all the available data, however limited and
faulty they may seem, in search of facts - especially those that can be established
as such by "convergences." These convergences can be seen wherever the textual
and the archaeological data, viewed independently, run along the same lines and
point ultimately to the same conclusions. This is not oldfashioned "biblical
archaeology," as the revisionists charge, nor does it presume to "prove" the
Bible's historical claims, much less its theological propositions. It is simply
sound historiographical method, which always depends upon the critical
evaluation of numerous potential sources for history-writing and seeks to isolate
a "core history" that is beyond reasonable doubt.

My chief complaint is that the revisionists tend to distort or even ignore

what many now see as our primary source for writing history of ancient Israel,
namely modern archaeology. At the same time, they approach their only source
of data, the texts of the Hebrew Bible, with such overwhelming suspicion that
they end up seeing the Hebrew Bible's narratives and ancient Israel largely as
"fictions." As an archaeologist, I could easily write a 1000-page, richly
documented history of an "ancient Israel" in the Iron Age and early Persian
period. None of the revisionists, working with their methodology and data, could
produce more than a handful of pages. That is why I say that they are, practically
speaking, nihilists.

I suggest that the revisionists are nihilist not only in the historical sense, but
also in the philosophical and moral sense. Here their basic approach to the texts
of the Hebrew Bible gives them away as all-too-typical postmodernists.

One of postmodernism's fundamental devices is seen in the way in which

the classical texts of the Western cultural tradition, including the Bible, are
approached. To use typical language, this employs the "hermeneutics of
suspicion." The texts are to be read as "metanarratives" that are subversive and
must be resisted; as nothing more than "social constructs" that must be
deconstructed. In postmodernism's extreme forms the texts are analyzed only to
expose their ideology and to delegitimize their claims to knowledge and power.
To use a typical slogan, "all readings are political." There is no truth or beauty to
be found here; these are "texts of terror."

The revisionists read the Hebrew texts of the Hebrew Bible in much the
same way. For them, the Hebrew Bible is only "literature"; but they have a tin
ear and a foggy lens. They read the entire Hebrew Bible - not just the obvious
mythological literature - as flat, monolithic, all the product of a brief time period
and an extremely narrow cultural context. It is all a "social construct" of
Hellenistic Judaism, little more than pious "survival literature," as Thomas L.
Thompson calls it.

Nowhere in the revisionist literature do I find any appreciation of the sheer

literary beauty or the lofty moral aspirations of the Hebrew Bible at its best. If
the revisionists had their way, if the "indeterminacy" of the Bible texts were
always highlighted, virtually no one except a few religious fanatics would bother
to read the Hebrew Bible anymore. It is what seems to me the revisionists'
latent(?) hostility to the Hebrew Bible and its worldview that troubles me most,
not only because it inhibits critical inquiry and honest scholarship, but because it
leads to aesthetic and moral devaluation.
 Several of those who have waded through the flood of revisionist literature
have observed an overall methodology that might be described as "creeping
skepticism." I have noted this as well, in pointing out that nearly all the
revisionists had written more or less confidently about an "early Israel" a few
years ago, but have now repudiated their own works. Since there are few new
data in the last decade (none textual), this seems clearly to mark an ideological
shift, not any genuine progress of knowledge. But skepticism does not constitute
a scholarly method, especially when it involves one in dubious presuppositions
and leads to consistently negative results.' Skepticism should be no more than
one aspect of a scholar's general attitude toward data, namely the desire to be
"critical" in the proper sense, that is, discriminating. It maybe unfair, but I cannot
escape the feeling in reading revisionist treatments of ancient Israel that the
conclusion is foregone: there cannot have been an "ancient Israel," because that
would be inconvenient for the theory. "Special pleading" for such an Israel is bad
scholarship; but so is "special pleading" against it, and for the same reasons.

Throughout this book, as well as in much of my writing elsewhere over the

past 35 years, I have sought to find and defend a middle ground. By
temperament and conviction I am neither a positivist nor a nihilist; neither a
credulist nor an atheist; neither a maximalist nor a minimalist. Where the
progress of our knowledge of ancient Israel and a more enlightened and humane
view of the Hebrew Bible are concerned, I am a "modest optimist" rather than a
"creep*ing skeptic." Although common in today's climate of skepticism, the
picture of "scholars" vying with each other as to who knows and believes the
least about the past is to me a sorry spectacle. Would you consult a physician
who thought good health only a "social construct"? Or a lawyer who was intent
only upon overthrowing the legal establishment? There was a time when
professional biblical scholars - those presumably best qualified to read and
understand the texts handed down to us - could be looked to for some sort of
moral enlightenment and leadership. The revisionists, even when they presume
to be constructive, are not able to make much sense of the biblical texts or of
archaeology. Instead, they have become demagogues. They do not grasp a
simple truth: the Hebrew Bible does not have to be literally true, in every
historical detail, to be morally true or edifying.

One contention of the revisionists, however, is true, although banal.

"Ancient Israel" is indeed in some ways a "social construct," of both the writers
and editors of the Hebrew Bible, as well as of later Jewish and Christian
commenta tors, and indeed of modern scholars of any persuasion. But that is true
of all claims to knowledge; the only question is whether such claims rest on
some objective facts or are entirely fanciful. We may even grant the revisionists
one of their favorite terms, "invention," as in Keith W. Whitelam's The Invention
of Ancient Israel. But one should be reminded of the etymology of the English
verb "to invent"; it is from the Latin invenire, "to come upon, to meet with"
(Note: not to "make up" something that is not there, but to "discover" something
that is).

Ancient Israel is there, a reality perhaps often hidden in the idealistic

portraits of the Hebrew Bible or obscured by its overriding theocratic version of
history, and also hidden in the dirt awaiting the discoveries of the archaeologist.
It is archaeology, and only archaeology, that gives back to all those ordinary,
anonymous folk of the past - those who "sleep in the dust of the earth" (Dan.
12:2) - their long-lost voice, allowing them to speak to us today. Their
knowledge of the larger world around them was circumscribed; and their
experience of truth was limited, even if some of the more literate among them
thought that in that experience they had heard the Word of the Lord. But these
people, this Israel, must not be written out of history.
Ackerman, Susan. "Under Every Green Tree": Popular Religion in Sixth-
Century Judah. HSM 46. Atlanta: Scholars, 1992.

Amiran, Ruth. Ancient Pottery of the Holy Land. Jerusalem: Masada, 1969.

Ben-Tor, Amnon, ed. Archaeology of Ancient Israel. New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1992.

Bunimovitz, Shlomo. "How Mute Stones Speak: Interpreting What We Dig Up."
BAR 21/2 (1995): 58-67, 96.

Coogan, Michael D., J. Cheryl Exum, and Lawrence E. Stager, eds. Scripture
and Other Artifacts: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Honor of
Philip J. King. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994.

Coote, Robert B., and Keith W. Whitelam, eds. The Emergence of Early Israel in
Historical Perspective. Social World of Biblical Antiquity 5. Sheffield:
Sheffield Academic, 1987.

Davies, Philip R. In Search of "Ancient Israel." JSOTSup 148. Sheffield: JSOT,

1992.

Whose Bible Is It Anyway? JSOTSup 204. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995.

"Whose History? Whose Israel? Whose Bible? Biblical Histories, Ancient and
Modern." In Can a "History of Israel" Be Written?, ed. Lester L. Grabbe,
104-22.

Dever, William G. "Archaeology and the `Age of Solomon': A Case-Study in

Archaeology and Historiography." In The Age of Solomon, ed. Lowell K.
Handy, 217-51.

"Archaeology, Ideology, and the Quest for an 'Ancient' or `Biblical' Israel." NEA
61 (1998): 39-52.
. "Biblical Archaeology: Death and Rebirth." In Biblical Archaeology Today,
1988, ed. Avraham Biran and Joseph Aviram. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration
Society, 1993, 706-22.

. "Histories and Nonhistories of 'Ancient Israel."' BASOR 316 (1999): 89-105.

. "Impact of the `New Archaeology."' In Benchmarks in Time and Culture: An

Introduction to Palestinian Archaeology, ed. Joel F. Drinkard, Gerald L.
Mattingly, and J. Maxwell Miller. SBL Archaeology and Biblical Studies 1.
Atlanta: Scholars, 1988, 337-52.

"On Listening to the Text - and the Artifacts" In The Echoes of Many Texts:
Reflections on Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Dever and J. Edward
Wright. Brown Judaic Studies 313. Atlanta: Scholars, 1997, 1-23.

. Recent Archaeological Discoveries and Biblical Research. Seattle: University

of Washington Press, 1990.

. "Syro-Palestinian and Biblical Archaeology." In The Hebrew Bible and Its

Modern Interpreters, ed. Douglas Knight and Gene M. Tucker. Chico:
Scholars, 1985, 31-74.

. "Unresolved Issues in the Early History of Israel: Toward a Synthesis of

Archaeological and Textual Reconstructions." In The Bible and the Politics
of Exegesis, ed. David Jobling, Peggy Lynne Day, and Gerald T. Sheppard.
Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1991, 195-208.

. "`Will the Real Israel Please Stand Up?' Archaeology and Israelite
Historiography: Part I." BASOR 297 (1995): 61-80.

. "`Will the Real Israel Please Stand Up': Part II: Archaeology and the Religions
of Ancient Israel." BASOR 298 (1995): 37-58.

Exum, J. Cheryl, and D. J. A. Clines. The New Literary Criticism and the
Hebrew Bible. JSOTSup 143. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993.

Finkelstein, Israel. The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement. Jerusalem: Israel

Exploration Society, 1988.
. "Bible Archaeology or Archaeology of Palestine in the Iron Age? A Rejoinder."
Levant 30 (1998): 167-74.

Friedman, Richard E. Who Wrote the Bible? Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall,
1987.

Fritz, Volkmar, and Philip R. Davies, eds. The Origins of the Ancient Israelite
States.OTSup 228. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996.

Garbini, Giovanni. History and Ideology in Ancient Israel. New York:

Crossroads, 1988.

Gelinas, Margaret M. "United Monarchy - Divided Monarchy: Fact or Fiction?"

In The Pitcher Is Broken, ed. Steven W. Holloway and Lowell K. Handy.
JSOT Sup 190. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995.

Grabbe, Lester L., ed. Can a "History of Israel" Be Written? JSOTSup 245.
Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997.

Halpern, Baruch. "The Construction of the Davidic State: An Exercise in

Historiography." In The Origins of the Ancient Israelite States, ed. Fritz and
Davies, 44-75.

. "Erasing History: The Minimalist Assault on Ancient Israel." BR 11/6 (1995):

26-35, 47.

The First Historians: The Hebrew Bible and History. San Francisco: Harper &
Row, 1988. Repr. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1996.

Handy, Lowell K., ed. The Age of Solomon: Scholarship at the Turn of the
Millennium. Leiden: Brill, 1997.

Hodder, Ian. Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in

Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

King, Philip J. American Archaeology in the Mideast: A History of the

American Schools of Oriental Research. Philadelphia: American Schools of
Oriental Research, 1983.
Knauf, Ernst Axel. "From History to Interpretation." In The Fabric of History:
Text, Artifact and Israel's Past, ed. Diana V. Edelman. Sheffield: JSOT,
1991, 26-64.

Lemche, Niels Peter. Ancient Israel: A New History of Israelite Society.

Sheffield: JSOT, 1988.

"Clio Is Also Among the Muses! Keith W. Whitelam and the History of
Palestine: A Review and a Commentary." In Can a "History of Israel" Be
Written?, ed. Lester L. Grabbe, 123-55.

. "Early Israel Revisited." Currents in Research: Biblical Studies 4 (1996): 9-34.

The Israelites in History and Tradition. Louisville: Westminster John Knox,

1998.

and Thomas L. Thompson. "Did Biran Kill David? The Bible in the Light of
Archaeology." JSOT 64 (1994): 3-22.

Levenson, Jon D. The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical
Criticism. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993.

Levy, Thomas E., ed. The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, 2nd ed.
London: Leicester University Press, 1998.

McKenzie, Steven L., and Stephen R. Haynes, eds. To Each Its Own Meaning:
An Introduction to Biblical Criticisms and Their Application. Louisville:
Westminster John Knox, 1993.

McNutt, Paula M. Reconstructing the Society of Ancient Israel. Library of

Ancient Israel. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1999.

Miller, J. Maxwell. "Is It Possible to Write a History of Israel Without Relying

on the Hebrew Bible?" In The Fabric of History, ed. Edelman, 93-102.

. "Reading the Bible Historically: The Historian's Approach." In To Each Its

Own Meaning, ed. McKenzie and Haynes, 11-28.

and John H. Hayes. A History of Ancient Israel and Judah. Philadelphia:

 Westminster, 1991.

Moorey, P. R. S. A Century of Biblical Archaeology. Louisville: Westminster

John Knox, 1991.

Niditch, Susan. Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature.
Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996.

Provan, lain W. "Ideologies, Literary and Critical: Reflections on Recent Writing

on the History of Israel." JBL 114 (1995): 585-606.

Shanks, Hershel. "Face to Face: Biblical Minimalists Meet Their Challengers."

BAR 23/4 (1997): 26-42, 66.

Thompson, Thomas L. "Defining History and Ethnicity in the South Levant." In

Can a "History of Israel" Be Written?, ed. Grabbe, 166-87.

. Early History of the Israelite People from the Written and Archaeological
Sources. SHANE 11. Leiden: Brill, 1992.

. "Historiography of Ancient Palestine and Early Jewish Historiography: W. G.

Dever and the Not So New Biblical Archaeology." In The Origins of the
Ancient Israelite States, ed. Fritz and Davies, 26-43.

. The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel. London: Basic
Books, 1999.

. "A Neo-Albrightian School in History and Biblical Scholarship?" JBL 114

(1995): 683-98.

Van Seters, John. In Search of History: History and Historiography in the

Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1983; repr. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1997.

de Vaux, Roland. "On Right and Wrong Uses of Archaeology." In Near Eastern
Archaeology in the Twentieth Century, ed. James A. Sanders. Garden City:
Doubleday, 1970, 64-80.

Weippert, Helga. Paldstina in vorhellenistischerZeit. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988.

Whitelam, Keith W. The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of
Palestinian History. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Wright, George Ernest. "What Archaeology Can and Cannot Do." BA 34 (1971):
70-76.

Zevit, Ziony. The Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallelactic

Approaches. New York: Continuum, 2001.
 1. The relevant literature is vast; but for the nonspecialist a number of recent
"handbooks" are most helpful, among them Howard Clark Kee, Eric M. Meyers,
John Rogerson, and Anthony J. Saldarini, eds., The Cambridge Companion to
the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Michael D.
Coogan, ed., The Oxford History of the Biblical World (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998). Also recommended is Richard E. Friedman, Who Wrote
the Bible? (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1987).

2. On the "meaning" of the Bible, an older but still useful work is that of
James Barr, The Bible in the Modern World (1973, repr. Philadelphia: Trinity,
1990); from a much more conservative (if not evangelical) perspective, see Roy
A. Harrisville and Walter Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture: Theology and
Historical-Critical Method from Spinoza to Kasemann (Grand Rapids: Wm. B.
Eerdmans, 1995). See further William G. Dever, "Philology, Theology, and
Archaeology: What Kind of History Do We Want, and What Is Possible?" in The
Archaeology of Israel: Constructing the Past/Interpreting the Present, ed. Neil A.
Silberman and David Small. JSOTSup 237 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic,
1997), 290-310; and references in Chapter 4, n. 16. See also Michael Fishbane,
Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (New York: Oxford University Press,
1985); Jeffrey H. Tigay, ed., Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985).

3. See further Dever, "Philology, Theology, and Archaeology."

4. (New York: Crossroads, 1988), 2.

5. (1983; repr. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1997).

6. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988).

7. See, e.g., "Unresolved Issues in the Early History of Israel: Toward a

Synthesis of Archaeological and Textual Reconstructions," in The Bible and the
Politics of Exegesis: Essays in Honor of Norman K. Gottwald on His Sixty-Fifth
Birthday, ed. David Jobling, Peggy Lynne Day, and Gerald T. Sheppard
(Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1991), 195-208; and "`Will the Real Israel Please Stand
Up?' Archaeology and Israelite Historiography: Part I," BASOR 297 (1995): 61-
80 and literature cited there.
 8. Lester L. Grabbe, ed., Can a "History of Israel" Be Written? JSOTSup
245 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997).

9. See n. 2 above.

10. Ed. Volkmar Fritz and Philip R. Davies. JSOTSup 228 (Sheffield:
Sheffield Academic, 1996).

13. (New York: Routledge, 1996).

11. Cf. Thomas L. Thompson, "Historiography of Ancient Palestine and

Early Jewish Historiography: W. G. Dever and the Not So New Biblical
Archaeology," in Fritz and Davies, 26-43, esp. 27-29, 37; and Baruch Halpern,
"The Construction of the Davidic State: An Exercise in Historiography," 44-75.

12. The first two quotations here are from Thompson's original manuscript,
which he sent to me, and differ somewhat from the published version. The latter
quotation is from Grabbe, Can a "History of Israel" Be Written? 180.

15. Halpern, The First Historians, 23, citing Jacob Burckhardt, letter to
Gottfried Kinkel, 7 Feb 1845, in Briefe, ed. Fritz Kaphahn (Leipzig: Kroner,
1935).

14. The epithet of "Zionist" has now indeed been applied to me, at least
implicitly, by Niels Peter Lemche. See "Response to William G. Dever,
`Revisionist Israel Revisited,"' Currents in Research: Biblical Studies 5 (1997):
9-14, esp. 12: "Dever is defending a political agenda found within a certain
strand of modern Zionism, which considers biblical history to legitimate the
politics of the present state of Israel...:. Thompson's rhetoric in "Historiography
of Ancient Palestine" is no less inflammatory. For a perceptive review of
Whitelam's The Invention of Ancient Israel, see Benjamin D. Sommer, Middle
East Quarterly (March 1998), 85, 86. See further Chapter 2, n. 43; Chapter 6, n.
15.

16. See Niels Peter Lemche and Thomas L. Thompson, "Did Biran Kill
David? The Bible in the Light of Archaeology," JSOT 64 (1994): 18.

17. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993), 11.

 18. Exum and Clines, 12-20.

19. Quotations from D. J. A. Clines, "A World Established on Water (Psalm

24): Reader-Response, Deconstruction and Bespoke Interpretation," in Exum
and Clines, 87, 90.

20. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), esp. 167-73.

22. Stanley E. Porter and Thomas H. Olbricht, eds. JSOTSup 131

(Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996). The quotations here are typical of most
of the essays, but they are perhaps most explicit in the piece by Harvard Divinity
School's Elizabeth SchiisslerFiorenza, "Challenging the Rhetorical Half-Turn:
Feminist and Rhetorical Biblical Criticism," 28-53.

21. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1976), lxxv.

23. Steven L. McKenzie and Stephen R. Haynes, eds. (Louisville:

Westminster John Knox, 1993). See esp. the essays of Daniel Patte, "Structural
Criticism," 153-70; and William A. Beardslee, "Poststructuralist Criticism," 221-
35.

24. Krister Stendahl, "Biblical Theology, Contemporary," IDB 1:418-32.

25. Robert P. Carroll, "Intertextuality and the Book of Jeremiah:

Animadversions on Text and Theory," in Exum and Clines, 62.

26. Exum and Clines, 13.

27. (New York: Basic Books, 1981).

28. Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the
Book of Judges (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

29. Robert A. Oden, Jr., The Bible Without Theology: The Theological
Tradition and Alternatives to It. New Voices in Biblical Studies (San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1987).

31. Niels Peter Lemche, "Early Israel Revisited," Currents in Research:

Biblical Studies 4 (1996): 9.

32. SBT 8 (Chicago: Regency, 1952), 126, 127. For a critique, see William
G. Dever, "Syro-Palestinian and Biblical Archaeology," in The Hebrew Bible
and Its Modern Interpreters, ed. Douglas Knight and Gene M. Tucker (Chico:
Scholars, 1985), 54-59.

30. JSOTSup 204 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995).

1. For the term "new nihilist," which I coined, see my first foray into the
"revisionist" controversy, "`Will the Real Israel Please Stand Up?' Archaeology
and Israelite Historiography: Part I," BASOR 297 (1995): 61-80; and for more
recent treatments, with full references to recent literature, cf. "Archaeology,
Ideology, and the Quest for an 'Ancient' or `Biblical' Israel," NEA 61 (1998): 39-
52; "Histories and Nonhistories of 'Ancient Israel,' BASOR 316 (1999): 89-105.
For a sharp reaction, see Robert P. Carroll, "Madonna of Silences: Clio and the
Bible," in Can a "History of Israel" Be Written? ed. Lester L. Grabbe, 89. On
ideology, see further Chapter 1, n. 11; Chapter 2, nn. 6, 24; Chapter 6, no. 1-20,
23, 3739; and discussions below on the ideology of the revisionists. The scant
more recent revisionist literature would include Niels P. Lemche, The Israelites
in History and Tradition (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998); Prelude to
Israel's Past: Background and Beginnings of Israelite History and Identity
(Peabody: Hendrickson, 1998); and Thomas L. Thompson, The Mythic Past:
Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel (London: Basic Books, 1999).

2. For an introduction to postmodernism, see the incisive critique of David

Gress, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents (New York:
Free Press, 1998); and cf. Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind:
Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View (New York:
Harmony, 1991). See also the devastating casestudies in postmodern
historiography in Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary
Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past (New York: Free Press,
1997); Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell,
1997). For a more sympathetic view, see Charles C. Lemert, Post-modernism Is
Not What You Think (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). See in much more detail
Chapter 6. For documentation of the revisionists' postmodern stance, see Dever,
NEA 61 (1998): 39-52; cf. also lain W. Provan's independent and somewhat
different expose in "Ideologies, Literary and Critical: Reflections on Recent
Writing on the History of Israel," JBL 114 (1995): 585-606. Thompson's tortured
reply to Provan is, I think, the best clue to his own ideology; see Thomas L.
Thompson, "A Neo-Albrightian School in History and Biblical Scholarship?,"
JBL 114 (1995): 68398. Note that the editor of a collection of essays by the
largely revisionist European Seminar on Methodology in Israel's History
candidly admits that there is "strong agreement that the implications of
postmodernism for the historical question need to be accepted"; see Lester L.
Grabbe, "Reflections on the Discussion" in Can a "History of Israel" Be Written?
189.

3. Virtually all Syro-Palestinian archaeologists - American, European, and

Israeli - instinctively feel the isolation of their discipline from biblical and
theological studies; and a few even rejoice in that fact, such as Israel Finkelstein,
"Bible Archaeology or Archaeology of Palestine in the Iron Age? A Rejoinder,"
Levant 30 (1998): 167-74. For a tacit admission of the lack of dialogue from a
biblicist, see Baruch Halpern, "Text and Artifact: Two Monologues?" in The
Archaeology of Israel, ed. Neil A. Silberman and David B. Small, 311-40. Note
that a recent collection of basic essays, Israel's Past in Present Research: Essays
on Ancient Israelite Historiography, ed. V. Phillips Long (Winona Lake:
Eisenbrauns, 1999), contains 33 chapters, but not one by an archaeologist,
although several of us have written extensively on the subject.

4. The above agenda is perhaps seen most succinctly in Lemche, Currents in

Research 4 (1996): 9-34; see my reply in the same issue, "Revisionist Israel
Revisited: A Rejoinder to Niels Peter Lemche" (35-50). The agenda is also quite
clear in Lemche and Thompson, "Did Biran Kill David? The Bible in the Light
of Archaeology," JSOT 64 (1994): 3-22; and Thompson, JBL 114 (1995): 683-
98. For the other revisionist literature - all of it rather explicitly programmatic -
see nn. 1 and 2 above.

5. See further below in this chapter.

7. JSOTSup 148 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1992).

6. See further Provan, JBL 114 (1995): 585-606; and Tina Pippin, "Ideology,
Ideational Criticism, and the Bible," Currents in Research: Biblical Studies 4
(1996): 51-78 and full literature cited there. See also V. Phillips Long, "The
Future of Israel's Past: Personal Reflections," in Long, Israel's Past in Present
Research, 580-92.

9. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988).

11. Cf. Lemche and Thompson, JSOT 64 (1994): 3-22; Frederick H. Cryer,
"Of Epistemology, Northwest-Semitic Epigraphy and Irony: The
`BYTDWD/House of David' Inscription Revisited," JSOT 69 (1996): 3-17;
Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of AncientIsrael, 166-69. On the genuineness
of the inscription and its significance, see most recently Andre Lemaire, "The
Tel Dan Stela as a Piece of Royal Historiography," JSOT 81 (1998): 314.

12. See references in Chapter 5, n. 49.

10. See Avraham Biran and Joseph Naveh, "An Aramaic Stele Fragment
from Tel Dan," IEJ43 (1993): 81-98; "The Tel Dan Inscription: A New
Fragment," IEJ45 (1995): 118; and cf. the devastating rebuttal by Anson Rainey,
"The `House of David' and the House of the Deconstructionists," BAR 20/6
(1994): 47. See also n. it below.

8. In Search of `Ancient Israel," 24 n. 4.

13. See his Whose Bible Is It Anyway? (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic,

1995); cf. "Method and Madness: Some Remarks on Doing History with the
Bible," JBL 114 (1995): 669-705.

14. The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the
Historical Abraham. BZAW 133 (New York: de Gruyter, 1974).

15. Thompson, JBL 114 (1995): 696.

16. See Thompson, JBL 114 (1995): 694, n. 32.

18. Thompson, The Mythic Past, xiv, xv, 13, 32, 234, 305, 387. Thompson's
book contains no footnotes or documentation.

17. See Thomas L. Thompson, Early History of the Israelite People from the
Written and Archaeological Sources (Leiden: Brill, 1992); JBL 114 (1995): 683-
98; "Historiography of Ancient and Early Jewish Historiography: W. G. Dever
and the Not So New Biblical Archaeology," in The Origins of the Ancient
Israelite States, ed. Volkmar Fritz and Philip R. Davies, 26-43; "Defining History
and Ethnicity in the South Levant," in Grabbe, Can a "History of Israel" Be
Written?, 166-87; The Mythic Past.

19. See William G. Dever, review of Thompson, The Mythic Past, BAR 25
(1999): 6466. See Chapter 3, n. 60.

20. See Thompson, "Historiography of Ancient Palestine," passim. Such

undocumented charges are all too typical of revisionist discourse. Its frequent
substitution of rhetoric for fair and balanced judgment is a telling fault.

21. Most of the quotations here come from Thompson's most programmatic
(and revealing) work, JBL 114 (1995): 683-98.

22. Social World of Biblical Antiquity 5 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic,

1987); Whitelam, "The Identity of Early Israel: The Realignment and
Transformation of Late Bronze-Iron Age Palestine," JSOT63 (1994): 57-87; see
William G. Dever, "The Identity of Early Israel: A Rejoinder to Keith W.
Whitelam," JSOT 72 (1996): 3-24.

23. See Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel, esp. chs. 2-6, from
which the following quotations are taken.

24. For Finkelstein's early about-face on "Israelite ethnicity," see "The

Emergence of Israel in Canaan: Consensus, Mainstream and Dispute," SJOT 5
(1991): 47-59. See further the discussion on early Israel in Chapter 4. On
Whitelam's caricature of the surveys carried out principally by Finkelstein, the
final report has now appeared in Israel Finkelstein, Zvi Lederman, and Shlomo
Bunimovitz, Highlands of Many Cultures. The Southern Samaria Survey: The
Sites (Tel Aviv: Institute of Archaeology, 1997); see my review, completely
vindicating Finkelstein and others from the charge of "pro-Israel" bias, in
BASOR 313 (1999): 87, 88. For my critique of Whitelam generally, see BASOR
316 (1999): 89-105. For other about-faces, see references in Chapter 6, n.34.

25. See, e.g., the review of Benjamin D. Sommer, Middle East Quarterly
(1998): 85, 86, who speaks of "the political agenda that dominates his book"
(85). See also Baruch A. Levine and Abraham Malamat, IEJ 46 (1996): 284-88,
who conclude that "ideological scholarship is flawed scholarship, no matter who
engages in it." According to Levine and Malamat, Whitelam's book "comes
close to being a political manifesto" (288). For my own review, see BASOR 316
(1999): 89-106; and for Lemche's almost embarrassingly laudatory review, see
"Clio Is Also Among the Muses! Keith W. Whitelam and the History of
Palestine: A Review and a Commentary," in Grabbe, Can a "History of Israel"
Be Written?, 12355.

26. For the article, see JSOT 8 (1994): 163-88. For the more recent books,
see n. 1 above; the quotation here is from The Israelites in History and Tradition,
155.

27. Currents in Research: Biblical Studies 4 (1996): 9-34. I replied to

Lemche, a friend of long standing, in the same issue, 35-50.

28. BAR 21 (1995): 50-55, 70.

29. For the quotations from Lemche, see Currents in Research 4 (1996): 9,
10.

30. Currents in Research 4 (1996): 27, 28.

31. See Lemche and Thompson, JSOT64 (1994): 3-22. For the symposium,
at a joint meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research and the Society
of Biblical Literature, see Hershel Shanks, "Face to Face: Biblical Minimalists
Meet Their Challengers," BAR 23/4 (1997): 26-42, 66.

32. Ernst Axel Knauf, "From History to Interpretation," in The Fabric of

History: Text, Artifact and Israel's Past, ed. Diana V. Edelman (Sheffield: JSOT,
1991), 49.

33. See, most recently, Levant 30 (1998): 167-73.

34. (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1988). This was a preliminary

report of the field surveys; for the final report and its significance, see
Finkelstein, et al., Highlands of Many Cultures. For my own characterization of
the settlement complex revealed by the Israeli (and other) surveys, see Chapter
4.

35. William G. Dever, "Archaeological Data on the Israelite Settlement: A

Review of Two Recent Works," BASOR 284 (1991): 77-90.

36. Cf. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel, 156-60; Philip R.

Davies, "Whose History? Whose Israel? Whose Bible? Biblical Histories,
Ancient and Modern," in Grabbe, Can a "History of Israel" Be Written?, 108,
109; Lemche, "Clio," 145-47; Thompson, "Defining History and Ethnicity," 167-
70.

37. See n. 24 above. For a critique of Finkelstein's more recent ideological

stance, see William G. Dever, "Why the Biblical and Archaeological
`Revisionists' Are Wrong - And Why We Should Be Concerned" (forthcoming in
the proceedings of a University Museum, University of Pennsylvania
symposium, November 1998, ed. B. Routledge).

38. Cf. Israel Finkelstein, "On Archaeological Methods and Historical

Considerations: Iron Age II Gezer and Samaria," BASOR 277/278 (1990): 109-
19 (but cf. my rebuttal, "Of Myths and Methods," 121-30); "The Archaeology of
the United Monarchy: An Alternative View," Levant28 (1996): 177-87;
Levant30 (1998): 167-73; "State Formation in Israel and Judah: A Contrast in
Context, A Contrast in Trajectory," NEA 62 (1999): 35-52, with full
bibliography. See also n. 40 below and Chapter 4, nn. 30-32.

39. Lemche, The Israelites in History and Tradition, 54; Thompson, cited in
Shanks, BAR 23/4 (1997): 34, 35. On Finkelstein's continued insistence on a
10th-century "state" of some sort, with its capital in Jerusalem, see most recently
Levant 30 (1998): 172, 173. This is a position that Finkelstein has consistently
maintained; yet I have not found a single revisionist citing him for this
"inconvenient" opinion.

40. On the controversy over "10th or 9th century," Finkelstein still stands
alone in the current literature, although his Tel Aviv colleague David Ussishkin
generally supports him in public remarks. For strong rebuttals to the "low
chronology," see Amihai Mazar, "Iron Age Chronology: A Reply to I.
Finkelstein," Levant 29 (1997): 157-67; "The 19971998 Excavations at Tel
Rehov: Preliminary Report," IEJ49 (1999): 1-42; Amnon Ben-Tor and Doron
Ben-Ami, "Razor and the Archaeology of the Tenth Century B.c.E.," IEJ 48
(1998): 1-38; Anabel Zarzeki-Poleg, "Hazor, Jokneam and Megiddo in the Tenth
Century B.c.E.," TA 24 (1997): 258-88. For my detailed defense of a 10th-
century Israelite state, see William G. Dever, "Archaeology and the 'Age of
Solomon': A Case-Study in Archaeology and Historiography," in The Age of
Solomon: Scholarship at the Turn of the Millennium, ed. Lowell K. Handy
(Leiden: Brill, 1997), 217-51, with full bibliography, including my own views
going back to 1990. For full discussion of the early Israelite monarchy, see
further Chapter 4.

41. See Davies, In Search of `Ancient Israel," 21-74. Elsewhere, Davies

protests that critics who have charged that he has no real "historical" Israel are
wrong; cf. "Whose History?," 107. Yet nowhere in his writing will one find
anything more than the rather grudg ing admission that we do have the biblical
king-lists, plus a few nonbiblical textual correlations. Davies' "history" would
run to about 10 pages at most; note that his section on the Israelite and Judean
states in In Search of `Ancient Israel" runs to about three pages (6670). See
further below and n. 48.

42. The revisionists' fundamental dependence on the notion of "social

construct," like that of all postmodernists, rests on a specious epistemology. For
an expose of the folly of "social constructivism," see the discussion in Chapter 6
below.

43. More than a century ago Julius Wellhausen - whom Thompson is fond
of quoting - said most of what Thompson and the other revisionists have
trumpeted. Note his off-quoted statement:

We attain to no historical knowledge of the patriarchs, but only of the time

when the stories about them arose in the Israelite people: this latter age is
here unconsciously projected, in its inner and outward features, into hoar
antiquity, and is reflected there like a glorified mirage. (Prolegomena to the
History of Israel [Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1985], 318)

See further Robert Oden, "Historical Understanding and Understanding the

Religion of Israel," in Community, Identity, and Ideology: Social Science
Approaches to the Hebrew Bible, ed. Charles E. Carter and Carol L. Meyers
(Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1996), 201-29.

44. The revisionists grant these points, indeed insist upon them. But they
fail to see that even "myth" may contain some genuine history. See Alan R.
Millard, "The Old Testament and History: Some Considerations," Faith and
Theology 110 (1983): 41.

45. On the failure to utilize archaeological data, at least properly, see further
below.

46. Curiously, they seem able to make this discrimination easily enough
when dealing with the nonbiblical texts from the ancient Near East. Is there
some animus here against the Hebrew Bible?

47. The most common epithets nowadays seem to be: traditionalist vs.
revisionist, maximalist vs. minimalist, positivist vs. nihilist, credulist/theist vs.
skeptic, neo-conservative vs. scientific. I agree with several of the revisionists
who have objected that these epithets are not helpful; but note that it is they who
have engaged in the most egregious name-calling, especially Davies and
Thompson. Cf. Davies, In Search of "Ancient Israel," 47; JBL 114 (1995): 669-
705; "Whose History?," esp. 108, 109; Thompson, JBL 114 (1995): 683-98;
"Historiography of Ancient Palestine." More recently Lemche has labeled me a
"Zionist," despite the fact that there is scarcely a word on Middle Eastern politics
in anything I have written in the past 30 years; cf. Currents in Research 5 (1997):
12; cf. Norman K. Gottwald's generally helpful attempt at mediation in the same
issue, "Triumphalist versus Anti-Triumphalist Versions of Early Israel," 15-42
(although I am certainly not a "triumphalist"). Thompson has implicitly labeled
me a "crypto-Fundamentalist"; I think that he may be a "neo-supercessionist."
Surely all this is a reflection that the current debate is not only about historical
methodology, but about ideology and belief as well. See further Lemche, "Clio,"
142-48; Dever, NEA 61 (1998): 39-52; and further below. My term here,
"revisionist," is taken from Lemche and Thompson themselves and is not used in
a neces sarily pejorative sense; see Lemche, The Israelites in History and
Tradition, 157; Lemche and Thompson, ISOT 64 (1994): 17. See further Chapter
1, n. 11.

48. Davies, In Search of `Ancient Israel," 24, 60-74. Cf. n. 41 above.

49. Lemche, The Israelites in History and Tradition, 166.

50. VTSup 37 (Leiden: Brill, 1985); popularized as Ancient Israel: A New

History of Israelite Society (Sheffield: JSOT, 1988).
 51. Cf. "Clio," 146-48.

53. "Defining History and Ethnicity," 176-78.

54. Thompson, The Mythic Past, 7.

55. Thompson, "Defining History and Ethnicity," 178-79.

56. Whitelam, The Invention of Israel, 35.

52. Thompson, The Mythic Past, 158-68; cf. 9, 252.

60. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1999).

58. For an excellent introduction to these methods, including reference to

some of the revisionists like Lemche, see Carter and Meyers, Community,
Identity, and Ideology, and the many essays there, esp. Carter, "A Discipline in
Transition: The Contributions of the Social Sciences to the Study of the Hebrew
Bible," 3-36.

59. If the revisionists are correct that the composition of the Hebrew Bible
belongs early in this era, and that they are leading biblical scholars, then they
ought to be producing such a study. It is obvious, however, that they do not have
even an elementary knowledge of the required disciplines: the early Classical
period in the Levant, early Rabbinic Judaism, intertestamental studies, and the
archaeology of late antiquity. See further Chapter 6 below.

57. Cf. Davies, In Search of `Ancient Israel," 17, 55, 63, 66-69, 73; Lemche,
"Clio," 128, 140, 141, 153; The Israelites in History and Tradition, 51-55, 62-64,
81-85, 155, 166; Thompson, "Defining History and Ethnicity," 176-78; The
Mythic Past, xv, 9, 11-15, 15860; Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel,
160-74. Lemche accepts the reading "Israel" on the 9th-century Mesha and Dan
inscriptions, and even the clear reference to "Ahab of Israel" on the inscription
of Shalmaneser III following the Battle of Qarqar in 853. Nevertheless, he
argues that "it is simply Samaria that is used as the name of the country" (The
Israelites in History and Tradition, 52, 53). Cf. also Thompson's astounding
assertion that the reference on the Moabite stele of King Mesha to "Omri, King
of Israel" "belongs to the world of stories"; "it is quite doubtful that it refers to an
historical person" (The Mythic Past, 13). This is either ignorance or dishonest
scholarship. For a convenient correlation of Israelite and Judean kings with Neo-
Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian texts and kings, see Baruch Halpern, "Erasing
History: The Minimalist Assault on Ancient Israel," BR 11/6 (1995): 26-35, 47;
esp. 32. See also generally, Nadav Na'aman, "The Contribution of Royal
Inscriptions for a Re-Evaluation of the Book of Kings as a Historical Source;"
JSOT 82 (1999): 3-17. See further Chapter 5, n. 1.

61. For devastating critiques of the revisionists' methodology and agenda,

from leading biblical scholars, see Halpern, BR 11/6 (1995): 26-35, 47.
According to Halpern, none of them is trained as a "real historian"; "their
exposure to history as it is practiced with respect to other times and other places
is almost always marginal." Halpern states further: "The most extreme forms of
this new historiography do not even engage the archaeology in an intellectually
honest fashion. They appeal to archaeology, instead, to subvert the validity of the
textual (biblical) presentation" (28-31). Furthermore, "at the extremes, the
reaction against tradition is emotional, not intellectual"; "at the base of the
extremism of contemporary `minimalism' lies a hysteria" (23, 26). See also Sara
Japhet, "In Search of Ancient Israel: Revisionism at All Costs," in The Jewish
Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians, ed. David N. Meyers
and David B. Ruderman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 213-33,
which is less polemical than my remarks here, but deftly exposes the
superficiality and biases of the revisionists. See also R. N. Whybray, "What Do
We Know About Ancient Israel?," ExpTim 108 (1996): 71-74; Peter B.
Machinist, "The Crisis of History in the Study of the Hebrew Bible,"
forthcoming in the proceedings of a symposium at the University of Hartford in
September 1998; Marc Brettler, "The Copenhagen School: The Historiographical
Issues," forthcoming in the proceedings of a Northwestern University
symposium in October 1999 on "The Origins of the Jewish People in
Contemporary Scholarship," ed. J. Lassner. My own paper, also forthcoming in
the volume, is entitled "Archaeology and the Emergence of Israel in History:
Why the Revisionists Are Wrong." See further Chapter 6, nn. 1-2, 28-30, 39, 42.

2. See now the critical re-analysis of Schliemann in D. A. Traill and I.

Bogdanov, "Heinrich Schliemann: Improbable Archaeologist," Archaeology
Odyssey 2/3 (1999): 30-39.

1. Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery, eds., History from Things: Essays
on Material Culture (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1993).
 3. On early explorations in Mesopotamia, see Seton Lloyd, Foundations in
the Dust: The Story of Mesopotamian Exploration, rev. ed. (London: Thames &
Hudson, 1980); and on Egypt, see John A. Wilson, Signs and Wonders upon
Pharaoh: A History of American Egyptology (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1964). For accounts of the early history of the British, French, and
German schools in Jerusalem, see several of the essays in Benchmarks in Time
and Culture: An Introduction to Palestinian Archaeology, ed. Joel F. Drinkard,
Gerald L. Mattingly, and J. Maxwell Miller (Atlanta: Scholars, 1988). For the
American school, now the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research,
see Philip J. King, American Archaeology in the Mideast: A History of the
American Schools of Oriental Research (Philadelphia: American Schools of
Oriental Research, 1983). On the general history of "biblical archaeology" in the
Middle East, see P. R. S. Moorey, A Century of Biblical Archaeology
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991).

4. For the following, in addition to Moorey, see my more detailed critique of

early work in Palestine in William G. Dever, "Syro-Palestinian and Biblical
Archaeology," in The Hebrew Bible and Its Modern Interpreters, ed. Douglas A.
Knight and Gene M. Tucker (Chico: Scholars, 1985), 31-74.

5. See "Syro-Palestinian and Biblical Archaeology" and references there;

also "Impact of the `New Archaeology,"' in Drinkard, Mattingly, and Miller,
337-52; "Archaeology, Syro-Palestinian and Biblical," ABD 1:354-67.

6. On the following, see William G. Dever, "The Impact of the `New

Archaeology' on Syro-Palestinian Archaeology," BASOR 242 (1981): 15-29,
and extensive literature cited there.

8. This can be seen simply by browsing through the principal Israeli journal,
the Israel Exploration Journal. See also the introductory remarks of Amihai
Mazar, in the standard Israeli handbook, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible,
10,000-586 B.C.E. (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 33, n. 1.

7. See references in nn. 4-6 above.

9. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969).

 10. See n. 6 above.

11. The phrase is that of Kent V. Flannery, in "The Golden Marshalltown: A

Parable for the Archeology of the 1980s," American Anthropologist 84 (1982):
265-78.

12. The phrase is still used mostly of the prehistorical periods; for an
excellent casestudy of Palestine in the Early Bronze Age (late 4th-3rd
millennium B.C.), see Alexander H. Joffe, Settlement and Society in the Early
Bronze I-II Southern Levant (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993). For the 2nd
millennium, see William G. Dever, "The Rise of Complexity in Palestine in the
Early Second Millennium B.c.B.," in Biblical Archaeology Today, 1990: The
Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Biblical Archaeology, Pre-
Congress Symposium: Population, Production and Power, ed. Avraham Biran
and Joseph Aviram (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1993), 98-109.

13. An excellent introduction is the series of essays in Reader in

Archaeological Theory: Post-Processual and Cognitive Approaches, ed. David S.
Whitley (New York: Routledge, 1998). For an earlier orientation, see the essays
in Processual and Postprocessual Archaeologies: Multiple Ways of Knowing the
Past, ed. Robert W. Preucel (Carbondale: Center for Archaeological
Investigations, Southern Illinois University, 1991). See also n. 15 below.

14. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

15. See William G. Dever, "Biblical Archaeology: Death and Rebirth," in

Biran and Aviram, Biblical Archaeology Today, 1990, 706-22. See also n. 13
above.

16. For the analysis here, as well as references to this and other literature,
see William G. Dever, "On Listening to the Text - and the Artifacts," in The
Echoes of Many Texts: Reflections on Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed.
Dever and J. Edward Wright (Atlanta: Scholars, 1997), 23.

17. For references to Leroi-Gourhan and Hawkes, as well as further

discussion, see Margaret Wright Conkey, "The Structural Analysis of Paleolithic
Art," in Archaeological Thought in America, ed. C. C. Lamberg-Kazlousky
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 135-54. For Cowgill, see
Lamberg-Kazlousky, 74. See also references in n. 13 above.

18. The following section is adapted from my "Archaeology, Texts, and

HistoryWriting: Toward an Epistemology," in Uncovering Ancient Stones:
Essays in Memory of H. Neil Richardson, ed. Lewis M. Hopfe (Winona Lake:
Eisenbrauns, 1994), 105-17. Epistemology is one of the most urgent issues in
general archaeology today, yet there is virtually no literature in our field. Israeli
archaeologists, in particular, seem uninterested; but see, provisionally, Shlomo
Bunimovitz, "How Mute Stones Speak: Interpreting What We Dig Up," BAR
21/2 (1995): 58-67, 96.

19. 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

20. See further William G. Dever, "The Silence of the Text: An

Archaeological Commentary on 2 Kings 23," in Scripture and Other Artifacts:
Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Honor of Philip J. King, ed. Michael D.
Coogan, J. Cheryl Exum, and Lawrence E. Stager (Louisville: Westminster John
Knox, 1994), 143-68. The title of the volume is taken from the metaphor used in
my chapter.

21. David Noel Freedman, quoted in "The Relationship of Archaeology to

the Bible," BAR 11/1 (1985): 6.

22. On General Systems Theory and its possibilities for application to our
branch of archaeology, see William G. Dever, "The Collapse of the Urban Early
Bronze Age in Palestine: Toward a Systemic Analysis," in L'urbanisation de la
Palestine a 1'dge Bronze ancien, ed. Pierre de Miroschedji (Oxford: BAR, 1989),
225-46. General Systems Theory has recently been criticized by
postprocessualists for its supposedly functionalist and deterministic biases, but I
find a moderate and sensible application still useful.

23. This adopts the approach of Fernand Braudel and other annales
historians who emphasize the importance of la longue duree. Cf. Dever, "Impact
of the `New Archaeology.

24. John Van Seters, In Search of History; Baruch Halpern, The First
Historians; Giovanni Garbini, History and Ideology in Ancient Israel. For a
review of the literature on historiography and its relevance to our branch of
archaeology, see William G. Dever, "`Will the Real Israel Please Stand Up?"'
BASOR 297 (1995): 61-80. I omit the biblical revisionists here because I do not
think that they have sufficiently addressed the issue of historiography, and by-
and-large their works are nonhistories.

25. Both are standard, up-to-date handbooks. More sophisticated and

comprehensive is the collection of essays in The Archaeology of Society in the
Holy Land, ed. Thomas E. Levy, 2nd ed. (London: Leicester University Press,
1998).

27. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1991).

26. See n. 23 above.

28. Lewis R. Binford, For Theory Building in Archaeology: Essays on

Faunal Remains, Aquatic Resources, Spatial Analyses, and Systemic Modeling
(New York: Academic, 1977), 110.

29. William G. Dever, "The Importance of Research Design," in

Archaeology's Publication Problem, ed. Hershel Shanks (Washington: Biblical
Archaeology Society, 1996), 37-48.

30. See above and n. 14.

31. One can count on the fingers of one hand the efforts at replication of
structures, assemblages, or even individual artifacts in archaeology in Israel. A
notable exception is the full-scale reconstruction of an Iron Age Israelite house
and its furnishings in the Municipal Museum in Tel Aviv (formerly the Ha-Aretz
Museum).

32. Cf. Roland de Vaux, "On Right and Wrong Uses of Archaeology," in
Near Eastern Archaeology in the Twentieth Century, ed. James A. Sanders
(Garden City: Doubleday, 1970), 64-80; G. Ernest Wright, "What Archaeology
Can and Cannot Do," BA 34 (1971): 70-76.

33. Reading the Past, 170.

34. History and Ideology, 7.

 35. (Sheffield: JSOT, 1993).

36. (Leiden: Brill, 1992). See my brief reviews in "Will the Real Israel
Please Stand Up?"

40. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

38. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949).

39. 4th ed. (1979, repr. Nashville: Nelson, 1985).

37. Ernst Axel Knauf, "From History to Interpretation," in The Fabric of

History, ed. Diana V. Edelman, 49.

41. See further Dever, "On Listening to the Text," 1-23.

42. See Dever, "On Listening to the Text."

43. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970).

44. See Dever, "On Listening to the Text," and references there.

45. See further William G. Dever, "Philology, Theology, and Archaeology,"

in Silberman and Small, The Archaeology of Israel, 290-310.

46. See William G. Dever, "Unresolved Issues in the Early History of

Israel," in Jobling, Day, and Sheppard, The Bible and the Politics of Exegesis,
195-208.

47. Thomas L. Thompson, The Origin Tradition of Early Israel, 1: The

Literary Formation of Genesis and Exodus 1-23. JSOT Sup 55 (Sheffield: JSOT,
1987), 39.

48. Knauf, "From History to Interpretation," 44.

49. 2nd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 46-47.

52. The Origin Tradition of Early Israel, 27.

53. Dever, "Will the Real Israel Please Stand Up?" 62-65.
 50. Knauf, "From History to Interpretation," 46.

51. J. Maxwell Miller, in Edelman, The Fabric of History, 93-102, quotation

on 96.

54. Knauf, "From History to Interpretation," 41.

55. Knauf, "From History to Interpretation," 47.

56. Knauf, "From History to Interpretation," 39.

57. On the royal stamped jar handles, see H. Darrell Lance, "Stamp, Royal
Jar Handle," ABD (1992), 6:184-86.

58. See references in Chapter 5, n. 82.

60. See references in Chapter 5, n. 12. If it should be argued that the

storejar's "nationality" is unknown, the Egyptian Merneptah inscription
mentioning "Israel" in central Canaan is sufficient rebuttal. Niels Peter Lemche
(The Israelites in History and Tradition, 57, 76) mentions the existence of the
Merneptah inscription twice, but acknowledges only that it may refer to
"unsettled or discontented demographic elements in the central highlands of
Palestine." Thompson (The Mythic Past, 78-81) makes the incredible claim that
the mention of an "Israel" in the inscription "is hardly the same as evidence for
the historical existence of the Israel of the Bible" (79). He argues that the term
"Israel" refers to a "metaphorical parent" of a town in Canaan destroyed by the
Egyptians (81). The leading Egyptologists I have consulted say that this is
ludicrous. For a devastating critique of The Mythic Past by a fellow member of
the European Seminar on Methodology in Israel's History, a generally revisionist
group, see Lester L. Grabbe, "Hat die Bibel doch Recht? A Review of T. L.
Thompson's The Bible in History [British title of Thompson's book]," SJOT 14
(2000): 117-39. Thompson's rejoinder (140-61) gives the best insight yet into his
tortured reasoning.

59. See Eilat Mazar and Benjamin Mazar, Excavations in the South of the
Temple Mount: The Ophel of Biblical Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Institute of
Archaeology, 1989), 29-48 (the "Royal Building").

3. Cf. William G. Dever, "Is There Any Archaeological Evidence for the
Exodus?" in Exodus: The Egyptian Evidence, ed. Ernest S. Frerichs and Leonard
H. Lesko (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1997), 67-86. On Moses as the putative
"founder of Israelite religion," see, e.g., Susan Niditch, Ancient Israelite
Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), which barely mentions the
possibility of a historical Moses (cf. 7, 8, 28, 37, 38, etc.). See further P. Kyle
McCarter, "The Origins of Israelite Religion," in The Rise of Ancient Israel, ed.
Hershel Shanks (Washington: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1992), 119-36. The
"indigenous origins" theory advanced below renders the question of a Moses
(and Israel) in Egypt largely irrelevant. On the other hand, see the more positive
view of Baruch Halpern, "The Exodus from Egypt: Myth or Reality?" in Shanks,
The Rise of Ancient Israel, 87-113.

2. "The Patriarchal Traditions" in Israelite and Judean History, ed. John H.

Hayes and J. Maxwell Miller (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977), 70-120. For one
of the few updates, by a biblical scholar, see Ronald S. Hendel, "The Patriarchal
Age: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob," in Ancient Israel: A Short History from
Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple, ed. Hershel Shanks, rev. ed.
(Washington: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1999), 129. There are a few
sporadic attempts of more conservative scholars to "save" the Patriarchal
narratives as history, such as Kenneth A. Kitchen, "The Patriarchal Age: Myth or
History?" BAR 21/2 (1995): 48-57, 88-95. By and large, however, the
minimalist view of Thompson's pioneering work, The Historicity of the
Patriarchal Narratives, prevails. Thompson claims that I had earlier advocated
the historicity of the patriarchs, placing them in the Early Bronze IV period, ca.
2300-2000, but that it was he who overturned this notorious use of "biblical
archaeology"; cf., among other references, Thomas L. Thompson,
"Historiography of Ancient Palestine," in Volkmar Fritz and Philip R. Davies,
The Origins of the Israelite States, 26-30. The fact is that I have never situated
the biblical patriarchs in any archaeological period, quoting and essentially
agreeing with Thompson from the beginning; cf. my "Patriarchal Traditions."

1. No scholar, revisionist or otherwise, thinks these materials anything other

than "myth." But even myths can have meanings that are in some sense
historical, i.e., reveal an actual setting of the authors in time, place, and
mentality. For a perceptive re-reading of the creation story, see Carol Meyers,
Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988). For the Pentateuchal literature as a whole, see Douglas
A. Knight, "The Pentateuch," in Douglas A. Knight and Gene Tucker, The
Hebrew Bible and Its Modern Interpreters, 263-296. See also several essays in
The Pentateuch: A Sheffield Reader, ed. John W. Rogerson (Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic, 1996).

4. For orientation to the prophetic literature, see The Place Is Too Small for
Us: The Israelite Prophets in Recent Scholarship, ed. Robert P. Gordon (Winona
Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1995).

5. The literature on the Deuteronomistic history is vast; but for orientation,

see Gary Knoppers and J. Gordon McConville, eds., Reconsidering Israel and
Judah: Recent Studies on the Deuteronomistic History (Winona Lake:
Eisenbrauns, 2000); and on Deuteronomistic theology, cf. Andrew D. H. Mayes,
"Deuteronomistic Ideology and the Theology of the Old Testament," JSOT82
(1999): 57-82. See also Bernhard Lang, Monotheism and the Prophetic Minority:
An Essay in Biblical History and Sociology (Sheffield: Almond, 1983).

6. Among other "lost works" specifically mentioned are the Book of Dasher,
the Age of Solomon, and the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel and Judah. Cf. n.
47 below.

7. VTSup 42 (Leiden: Brill, 1991). See also lain W. Provan, I and 2 Kings.
Old Testament Guides 11 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997); Knoppers and
McConville, Reconsidering Israel and Judah.

8. Again, the literature is extensive. For general orientation, see several of

the essays in Knight and Tucker, The Hebrew Bible and Its Modern Interpreters;
and update by reference to the excellent essays in Steven L. McKenzie and
Stephen R. Haynes, To Each Its Own Meaning (Louisville: Westminister John
Knox, 1993). What was sometimes called "literary criticism" is now usually
called "source criticism"; for the more recent (since ca. 1970) school of "literary
criticism," see the essays in Paul R. House, ed., Beyond Form Criticism: Essays
in Old Testament Literary Criticism (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1992). For the
still newer "social sciences" approach, see Charles E. Carter and Carol Meyers,
Community, Identity, and ideology.

9. See references in nn. 1, 5, 7 above, and n. 10 below.

 13. See Richard E. Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?

10. Rolf Knierim, "Criticism of Literary Features, Form, Tradition, and

Redaction," in Knight and Tucker, The Hebrew Bible and Its Modern
Interpreters, 144.

11. Knierim, 144. For attempts at a "sociology of ancient Israel," see Carter
and Meyers, Community, Identity, and Ideology; and add the pioneering work of
Paula McNutt, Reconstructing the Society of Ancient Israel, discussed in
Chapter 2.

14. Cf. John Bintliff, The Annales School and Archaeology (Leicester:
Leicester University Press, 1991). For an anthropological perspective, see
George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique:
An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986), 95-108.

12. Thomas L. Thompson, Early History of the Israelite People, 392.

16. The literature on historiography and the Hebrew Bible/ancient Israel is

vast. But among the works I have found most useful are Baruch Halpern, The
First Historians; Ernest Axel Knauf, "From History to Interpretation," in Diana
V. Edelman, The Fabric of History, 26-64; J. Maxwell Miller, "Reading the Bible
Historically: The Historian's Approach," in Steven L. McKenzie and Stephen R.
Haynes, To Each Its Own Meaning, 11-28; Marc Z. Brettler, The Creation of
History in Ancient Israel (London: Routledge, 1995); Hans M. Barstad, "History
and the Hebrew Bible," in Lester L. Grabbe, Can a "History of Israel" Be
Written?, 37-64; Lester L. Grabbe, "Are Historians of Ancient Palestine Fellow
Creatures - or Different Animals?" in Can a "History of Israel" Be Written?, 19-
36. None of these scholars, however, uses my "courtroom" metaphor. On the
perhaps related issue of "faith and history," see Barstad and Grabbe. By contrast,
Thompson's theological naivete is embarrassing; in The Mythic Past he
cavalierly dismisses the entire issue, remarking that "the Old Testament is no
longer believable and offers really no difficulty to theology" (386). His 100-page
treatment of the Bible's "theological and intellectual world" is a tortured
excursus in New Age theology (293-397). For essays on the "faith and history"
theme from a conservative, often evangelical viewpoint, see Faith, Tradition, and
History: Old Testament Historiography in Its Near Eastern Context, ed. Alan R.
Millard, James K. Hoffmeier, and David W. Baker (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns,
1994), especially the essays by Millard and Edwin Yamauchi. See also Chapter
2, n. 44.

15. Indeed, Thompson and others of the revisionists have reacted to my

earlier suggestions along these lines by dismissing all this as "harmonization of
the Bible and archaeology," as "credulism," or even "thinly disguised
Fundamentalism" - in short, an "improper method"; Thompson, JBL 114 (1995):
695-96; "Historiography of Ancient Palestine," passim.

17. Thomas L. Thompson, "Defining History and Ethnicity";

"Historiography of Ancient Palestine," 32: my "history by committee." Perhaps
what really bothers Thompson is that he is not on the committee, since elsewhere
he complains that this is "a form of Harvard censorship" On New Literary
Criticism, see Chapter 1, esp. nn. 17-19.

18. This approach is hardly that ascribed to me by Thompson, who writes of

my "search for harmonistic scenarios with which to wed [one's] own hardly
independently derived phantasms" ("Historiography of Ancient Palestine," 37);
"archaeology and history (i.e., Biblical) were for him a single discipline" (28).

19. The literature on Israelite origins has burgeoned in the past decade, too
much so to document the following in detail. See, however, with full
bibliography, Israel Finkelstein, The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement
(Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1988); Finkelstein and Nadav Na'aman,
eds., From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of
Early Israel (Washington: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1994); William G.
Dever, "Unresolved Issues in the Early History of Israel"; "How to Tell a
Canaanite from an Israelite," in Shanks, The Rise of Ancient Israel, 27-56;
"Ceramics, Ethnicity, and the Question of Israel's Origins," BA 58 (1995): 200-
13; "The Identity of Early Israel: A Rejoinder to Keith W. Whitelam," JSOT 72
(1996): 3-24; Shmuel Ahituv and Eliezer D. Oren, eds., The Origin of Early
Israel - Current Debate: Biblical, Historical and Archaeological Perspectives
(Beersheba: Ben-Gurion University Press, 1998); Lawrence E. Stager, "Forging
an Identity: The Emergence of Ancient Israel," in Michael D. Coogan, The
Oxford History of the Biblical World, 123-75. For an overview for
nonspecialists, see John J. McDermott, What Are They Saying about the
Formation of Israel? (New York: Paulist, 1998). The article of Stager referred to
here is "The Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Israel," BASOR 260 (1985):
1-35.

20. Marshall D. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine, 1972), 95.

21. See Brian Hesse and Paula Wapnish, "Can Pig Remains Be Used for
Ethnic Diagnosis in the Ancient Near East?" in Neil A. Silberman and David B.
Small, The Archaeology of Israel, 238-70.

22. See Aaron Demsky and Moshe Kochavi, "An Alphabet from the Days of
the Judges," BAR 4/3 (1978): 23-30.

23. See Thompson, "Defining History and Ethnicity," 175; Niels Peter
Lemche, The Canaanites and Their Land, JSOTSup 110 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1991),
152.

24. Mark G. Brett, ed., Ethnicity and the Bible (Leiden: Brill, 1996); cf.
Sian Jones, The Archaeology of Ethnicity (London: Routledge, 1977); Diana
Edelman, "Ethnicity and Early Israel," in Brett, Ethnicity and the Bible, 54, 55;
Niels Peter Lemche, "Clio," 154; Thomas L. Thompson, "Ethnicity and the
Bible: Multiple Judaisms or the `New Israel"' (unpublished manuscript, courtesy
of the author). Kenton L. Sparks, Ethnicity and Identity in Ancient Israel
(Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1999), has nothing to do with archaeology. For the
differences between Finkelstein's more negative views on "ethnicity" and my
more positive views, see Israel Finkelstein, "Ethnicity and Origin of the Iron I
Settlers in the Highlands of Canaan: Can the Real Israel Stand Up?," BA 59
(1996): 198-212, an answer to my "`Will the Real Israel Please Stand Up?"'
BASOR 297 (1995): 61-80.

25. The definitive study is now that of my student Michael G. Hasel,

Domination and Resistance: Egyptian Military Activity in the Southern Levant,
ca. 1300-1185 B.C. (Leiden: Brill, 1998). For a map of Canaan at the time of the
Merneptah raid, see Frank J. Yurco, "3,200-Year-Old Pictures of Israelites Found
in Egypt," BAR 16/5 (1990): 34. See also Chapter 3, n. 60.

27. See further Chapter 1, n. 14; Chapter 2, n. 47.

26. Joseph A. Callaway, "Response," in Biblical Archaeology Today:

Proceedings of the

International Congress on Biblical Archaeology, Jerusalem, April, 1989, ed. J.

Amitai (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1985), 72-78.

28. Dever, NEA 61 (1998): 39-52 and literature there.

29. BASOR 260 (1985): 1-35.

31. Margaret M. Gelinas, "United Monarchy - Divided Monarchy: Fact or

Fiction?" in The Pitcher Is Broken: Memorial Essays for Gosta W. Ahlstrom, ed.
Steven W. Holloway and Lowell K. Handy. JSOT Sup 190 (Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic, 1995), 228. Nowhere has Thompson shown significant acquaintance
with the vast literature on "state formation processes" in archaeology and
anthropology, nor have most of the other revisionists; see n. 30 above.

30. See references in no. 31, 32 below; also Chapter 2, nn. 38, 40. Cf.
Christa SchaferLichtenberger, "Sociological and Biblical Views of the Early
State," in Fritz and Davies, Origins of the Israelite States, 78-105. By contrast,
see the extensive discussion of the literature on "statehood" in William G. Dever,
"Archaeology and the Age of Solomon,"' with full references. Also Carol
Meyers, "Kinship and Kingship: The Early Monarchy," in Coogan, The Oxford
History of the Biblical World, 221-71.

32. See NEA 62 (1999): 35-52.

33. See n. 31 above.

34. Niels Peter Lemche and Thomas L. Thompson, JSOT 64 (1994): 19.

35. Cf. Thompson in Hershel Shanks, BAR 23 (1997): 35, obviously

referring to Israel Finkelstein, Levant 28 (1996): 181, 182. Earlier Finkelstein
had estimated the 10thcentury hill-country population at ca. 65 thousand, and the
population of all of Palestine west of the Jordan at ca. 150 thousand; cf. Magen
Broshi and Israel Finkelstein, "The Population of Palestine in Iron Age II,"
BASOR 287 (1992): 55; cf. Dever, "Archaeology and the `Age of Solomon,"'
221, 222 and references there, esp. Finkelstein, The Archaeology of the Israelite
Settlement.
 36. Dever, "Archaeology and the `Age of Solomon,"' 243-51 and references
there.

37. See "Archaeology and the `Age of Solomon,"' 245-50 and references
there.

38. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). On Western Palestine,

see nn. 36,37 above. For Amman in Transjordan, see Burton MacDonald and
Randall W. Younker, eds., Ancient Ammon (Leiden: Brill, 1999). On Phoenicia
in the 10th century as consisting already of "city-states ruled by monarchies," see
Lowell K. Handy, "Phoenicians in the Tenth Century BCE: A Sketch of an
Outline," in The Age of Solomon, 154-66. On the Aramaean city-states of the
same area, see Mark W. Chavalas, "Inland Syria and the East-ofJordan Region in
the First Millennium BCE Before the Assyrian Intrusions," in Handy, The Age
of Solomon, 167-78.

39. For the agreement of Finkelstein that there was a "United Monarchy" in
the 10th century, however small, see "The Great Transformation: The `Conquest'
of the Highlands Frontier and the Rise of the Territorial States," in Thomas E.
Levy, The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, 362; also Levant 28 (1996):
185. The revisionists never cite this opinion of "their" archaeologist; like most of
the mainstream literature, it is inconvenient for their scenario.

40. See references in Chapter 2, nn. 10, 11.

42. (Jerusalem: Masada, 1969), 191-265.

43. See most recently the overwhelming evidence in Raz Kletter, "Pots and
Polities: Material Remains of Late Iron Age Judah in Relation to Its Political
Borders," BASOR 314 (1999): 19-54.

44. See Jeffrey H. Tigay, You Shall Have No Other Gods Before Me:
Israelite Religion in the Light of Hebrew Inscriptions. HSS 31 (Atlanta:
Scholars, 1986).

41. See Chapter 1.

46. "Solomon's City Wall and Gate at Gezer," IEJ 8 (1958): 80-86.
 47. For an orientation to the problem, see Dever, "Archaeology and the Age
of Solo mon,"' 225-35 and full literature, pro and con, cited there, esp. John S.
Holladay, "The Kingdoms of Israel and Judah: Political and Economic
Centralization in the Iron IIA-B," in Levy, The Archaeology of Society in the
Holy Land, 369-98. Cf. Niels Peter Lemche's effort at rebuttal of Holladay's
arguments, "On Doing Sociology With `Solomon,"' in Handy, The Age of
Solomon, 321-25. Lemche dismisses Holladay's exhaustive analysis of the
archaeological data, which begins by showing why the biblical texts do not
constitute data and must be discarded, as just another example of biblical
archaeology's "contaminated methodology" (332). For a sober critical evaluation
of the biblical sources, see Nadav Na'aman, "Sources and Composition in the
History of Solomon," in Handy, The Age of Solomon, 5780; Na'aman concludes
that Solomon was a historical character, despite the skepticism of some. See the
excellent resume in Gary N. Knoppers, "The Vanishing Solomon: The
Disappearance of the United Monarchy from Recent Histories of Ancient Israel,"
JBL 116 (1997): 19-44.

45. See the optimistic view of Na'aman in "Cow Town or Royal Capital?
Evidence for Iron Age Jerusalem," BAR 23/4 (1997): 43-47, 67; "It Is There:
Ancient Texts Prove It; BAR 24/4 (1998): 42-44; cf. Jane Cahill, "It Is There:
The Archaeological Evidence Proves It," BAR 24/4 (1998): 34-41, 63, all with
reference to the principal "minimalist" dissenting view, that of Margaret L.
Steiner. Naturally the revisionists cite only the minority view.

48. "Historiography of Ancient Palestine," 30, 31.

49. See further the detailed discussion of the Shishak-Solomon correlation

in Dever, "Archaeology and the 'Age of Solomon,"' 239-43 and references there.
Cf. two other essays in the same volume: Lemche, "On Doing Sociology With
`Solomon,"' which never once mentions this fundamental, nonbiblical datum;
and the careful analysis of Na'aman, "Sources and Composition," which points
out that the biblical writers' use of the Shishak data shows that, while writing
later, they had authentic, contemporary sources, perhaps such as the lost work
the "Acts of Solomon" mentioned in the biblical texts (59-64, 77). In The
Israelites in History and Tradition, Lemche discusses the Shishak inscription
briefly, but only for its possible chronological value, concluding that "none of
the places mentioned by Shoshenq [= Shishak] in his list, however, refer to the
central part of either Israel and Judah," so this text constitutes "absolute silence"
(56, 57). What about Megiddo, Ta'anakh, Beth-shan, Gezer, and at least 10 other
sites? Similarly, Thompson, who will accept nothing other than extrabiblical
texts, does not even mention the Shishak datum in The Mythic Past. A
coincidence? Cf. also n. 51 below, on Gelinas, who simply manipulates the
Shishak data out of existence.

50. See further Dever, "Archaeology and the 'Age of Solomon,"' 238-39;
and add the newer data in Amihai Mazar, IEJ49 (1999): 1-42. Mazar has a huge
destruction layer in his lower city Stratum I that is dated by Carbon 14 analyses
to ca. 915-832 (98 percent reliability), which he thinks may be Shishak. But the
next lower destruction, being excavated in the summer of 2000, which is also
impressive, will probably prove to be Shishak. That would make the upper one
due to Aramaean disturbances ca. 840, in keeping with the Tel Dan stele and
other evidence long known for this horizon. Cf. Chapter 2, nn. 10, 11.

51. Gelinas, "United Monarchy - Divided Monarchy: Fact or Fiction?" 230.

52. When recently confronted by the larger evidence face-to-face in an

informational magazine, Thompson remarked that the Bible is not about history,
only "about traditions, . . . a collection of traditions"; Shanks, BAR 23/4 (1997):
32.

53. For the pontification of several revisionists on ceramic typology and

chronology, see Thompson, "Defining History and Ethnicity," 177; Herrmann M.
Niemann, "The Socio-Political Shadow Cast by the Biblical Solomon," in
Handy, The Age of Solomon, 263. On the revisionists' skepticism about
archaeological chronology in general - based on their false accusation that our
archaeological chronology is based on "biblical schemes" - see e.g., Thompson,
The Mythic Past, 8, 39; Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel, 62-
64; Niemann, 260-62. Such statements make it painfully clear that the
revisionists are not even amateur archaeologists. The opinion of any of the
revisionists on the pottery of ancient Palestine (or its chronology, for that matter)
carries about as much weight as my opinion on the Hebrew imperfect verb.

54. For older literature, see Yohanan Aharoni, The Land of the Bible: A
Historical Geography, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Westminister, 1979), 309-17. Most
recently, cf. Niemann, 280-88; Nadav Na'aman, "The District System in the
Time of the United Monarchy (1 Kings 4:7-19)," in Borders and Districts in
Biblical Historiography (Jerusalem: Sinor, 1984), 167-201; Paul S. Ash,
"Solomon's? District? List," JSOT 67 (1995): 67-86. None of these scholars,
however, attempts to correlate the district lists with the archaeology now at our
disposal. Surely that would provide our only control.

55. See Frank M. Cross, Jr., and David Noel Freedman, "An Inscribed Jar
Handle from Raddana," BASOR 201 (1971): 19-22.

56. On Tirzah, see Alain Chambon, "Far`ah, Tell el- (North): Late Bronze
Age to the Roman Period," NEAEHL 2:439-40.

57. See Shlomo Bunimovitz and Zvi Lederman, "Beth-Shemesh: Culture

Conflict on Judah's Frontier," BAR 23/1 (1997): 42-49, 75-77.

58. Bunimovitz and Lederman, BAR 23/1 (1997): 75, 77.

59. See Thompson, JBL 114 (1995): 696, and elsewhere.

60. The literature on the Solomonic temple is vast; but for orientation see
William G. Dever, "Were There Temples in Ancient Israel? The Archaeological
Evidence," in Text, Artifact and Image: Revealing Ancient Israelite Religion, ed.
Theodore J. Lewis (forthcoming, 2001), and full citation there of the
documentation for the following. See also, provisionally, Volkmar Fritz, "What
Archaeology Can Tell Us About Solomon's Temple," BAR 13/4 (1987): 38-49;
Elizabeth Bloch-Smith, "`Who Is the King of Glory?' Solomon's Temple and Its
Symbolism," in Michael D. Coogan, J. Cheryl Exum, and Lawrence E. Stager,
Scripture and Other Artifacts, 18-3 1.

61. See John Monson, "The New `Ain Dara Temple: Closest Solomonic
Comparison," BAR 26/3 (2000): 20-36, 67.

62. For a portrait of a more modest, but real, historical Solomon similar to
that here, cf. the view of Ernst Axel Knauf, "Le Roi est mort, vive le roi! A
Biblical Argument for the Historicity of Solomon," in Handy, The Age of
Solomon, 81-95, esp. 95: "He did not rule from the Euphrates to the Brook of
Egypt, but rather from Gezer to Thamar, if not from Gibeon to Hebron. But he
did exist, after all." Cf. also the more mainstream but similar treatment of J.
Maxwell Miller in the same volume, "Separating the Solomon of History from
the Solomon of Legend," 1-24, with full references to the literature. It is
precisely this sensible middle ground from which the revisionists' dogmatic
extremism excludes them.

1. Any standard history of ancient Israel will cover this period in some
detail - e.g., J. Maxwell Miller and John H. Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel
and Judah (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1991), 218-436. Cf. nn. 2, 5 below. For
the correlations of the biblical kinglists with Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian
texts, see references in Chapter 2, n. 57.

2. Cf. Helga Weippert, Palastina in vorhellenistischer Zeit, 344-681; Amihai

Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000-586 B.C.E., 295-530;
Amnon Ben-Tor, Archaeology of Ancient Israel, 258-373. Add now Larry G.
Herr, "The Iron Age II Period: Emerging Nations," BA 60 (1997): 114-83.

4. See conveniently William W. Hallo and William Kelly Simpson, The

Ancient Near East: A History, 2nd ed. (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1998).

3. For general orientation, see William A. Ward, "The Present Status of

Egyptian Chronology," BASOR 288 (1992): 53-66.

5. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951); 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids:

Zondervan, 1983).

6. See most recently William H. Barnes, Studies in the Chronology of the

Divided Monarchy in Israel. HSM 48 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1991); Gershon Galil,
The Chronology of the Kings of Israel and Judah. SHANE 9 (Leiden: Brill,
1996).

9. See Richard D. Barnett, Ancient Ivories in the Middle East. Qedem 14

(Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1982); Harold A. Liebowitz, "Ivories," ABD
(1992), 3:584-87; Eleanor Ferris Beach, "The Samaria Ivories, Marzeah and
Biblical Texts," BA 55 (1992): 130-39.

7. Yigael Yadin, "Megiddo of the Kings of Israel," BA 33 (1970): 66-96.

8. Yigael Yadin, Hazor, The Head of All Those Kingdoms (London: Oxford,
1972).
 10. For the text and an illustration of the obelisk itself, see iller and Hayes,
286, 287.

11. Cf. Niels Peter Lemche and Thomas L. Thompson, JSOT 64 (1994): 3-
22; and for critical discussion and later literature, see Gary N. Knoppers, JBL
116 (1997): 19-44.

12. Cf. ANET, 287, 288; David Ussishkin, The Conquest of Lachish by
Sennacherib (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1982); "Answers at Lachish," BAR
5/6 (1979): 16-39; "The Assyrian Attack on Lachish: The Archaeological
Evidence from the Southwest Corner of the Site," TA 17 (1990): 53-86.

13. On Lachish, see n. 12 above. The location of Libnah is not certain, but it
is often identified with nearby Tell Bornat, which remains unexcavated.

14. See further Miller and Hayes, 353-65 and references there.

15. ANET, 308; on the last days of Judah, see Miller and Hayes, 377-436.

16. For details and further documentation, see my extensive treatments

elsewhere, including "`Will the Real Israel Please Stand Up': Part II:
Archaeology and the Religions of Ancient Israel," BASOR 298 (1995): 37-58;
"Folk Religion in Early Israel: Did Yahweh Have a Consort?" in Aspects of
Monotheism - How God Is One, ed. Hershel Shanks (Washington: Biblical
Archaeology Society, 1997), 27-56. A useful account of popular or "folk"
religion from a textual perspective is Karel van der Toorn, From Her Cradle to
Her Grave: The Role of Religion in the Life of the Israelite and Babylonian
Woman. Biblical Seminar 23 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1994). See also
Susan Ackerman, "Under Every Green Tree": Popular Religion in Sixth-Century
Judah. HSM 46 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1992). The latest works are again by van der
Toorn, Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria and Israel: Continuity and Change in
the Forms of Religious Life. SHANE 7 (Leiden: Brill, 1996); The Image and the
Book: Iconic Cults, Aniconism, and the Rise of Book Religion in Israel and the
Ancient Near East (Leuven: Peeters, 1997). Finally, see the seminal treatment of
Jacques Berlinerblau, The Vow and the "Popular Religious Groups" of Ancient
Israel. JSOTSup 210 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996). The best all-round
work is that of Rainer Albertz, A History of Israelite Religion in the Old
Testament Period, 1: From the Beginnings to the End of the Monarchy
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994). See now the magisterial work of
Ziony Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallelactic
Approaches (New York: Continuum, 2001).

17. Amihai Mazar, "The `Bull Site' - An Iron Age I Open Cult Place,"
BASOR 247 (1982):27-42.

19. Alain Chambon, Tell el-Fdr`ah, 1: L'Age de Fer (Paris: Editions

Recherche sur les civilisations, 1984), 66.

20. See Gordon Loud, Megiddo II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1948), 45, 46, figs. 100-2.

18. See conveniently Avraham Biran, Biblical Dan (Jerusalem: Israel

Exploration Society, 1994), 159-233.

21. Paul W. Lapp, "Taanach by the Waters of Megiddo," BA 30 (1967): 2-

27; for a good drawing of the stand see Weippert, 472, fig. 4:31.

22. William G. Dever, "Asherah, Consort of Yahweh? New Evidence from

Kuntillet `Ajrud," BASOR 255 (1984): 21-37.

23. Frank Moore Cross, "Newly Found Inscriptions in Old Canaanite and
Early Phoenician Scripts," BASOR 238 (1980): 1-20.

24. Gabriel Barkay and Amos Kloner, "Jerusalem Tombs from the Days of
the First Temple," BAR 12/2 (1986): 22-39.

25. Gabriel Barkay, Ketef Hinnom: A Treasure Facing Jerusalem's Walls

(Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1986). On magic, see Marvin Meyer and Paul
Mirecki, eds., Ancient Magic and Ritual Power (Leiden: Brill, 1995); Ann
Jeffers, Magic and Divination in Ancient Palestine and Syria. SHANE 8 (Leiden:
Brill, 1996).

26. Yohanan Aharoni, "The Horned Altar of Beer-Sheba," BA 37 (1979): 2-

6.

27. Yohanan Aharoni, "Arad: Its Inscriptions and Temple," BA 31 (1968): 2-

32; Ze'ev Herzog, Miriam Aharoni, and Anson F. Rainey, "Arad - An Ancient
Israelite Fortress with a Temple to Yahweh," BAR 13/2 (1987): 16-35; Herzog et
al., "The Israelite Fortress at Arad," BASOR 254 (1984): 1-34.

30. See works cited in nn. 16, 29.

29. For the textual evidence, see Saul M. Olyan, Asherah and the Cult of
Yahweh in Israel. SBLMS 34 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1988); and also Ackerman. For
the association of Asherah with trees, see the pioneering study of Ruth Hestrin,
"The Lachish Ewer and the `Asherah," IEJ37 (1987): 212-21.

28. See Ze'ev Meshel, Kuntillet Ajrud: A Religious Centre from the Time of
the Judean Monarchy (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1978). See my early
interpretation in BASOR 255 (1984): 21-37. There is now a considerable
secondary literature, as for instance in many of the chapters in Patrick D. Miller,
Paul D. Hanson, and S. Dean McBride, eds., Ancient Israelite Religion: Essays
in Honor of Frank Moore Cross (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987).

31. For the original publication, see William G. Dever, "Iron Age
Epigraphic Material from the Area of Khirbet el-KOm," HUCA 40-41 (1969-
1970): 139-204. For more recent bibliography and interpretation, see
"Archaeology and the Ancient Israelite Cult: How the Khirbet el Qom and
Kuntillet 'Ajrud Texts Have Changed the Picture," Erlsr 26 (1999): 9*-15*.

32. See conveniently, LaMoine F. DeVries, "Cult Stands: A Bewildering

Variety of Shapes and Sizes," BAR 13/4 (1987): 27-37.

33. For a complete typology, see Seymour Gitin, "Incense Altars from
Ekron, Israel and Judah: Context and Typology," Erlsr 20 (1989): 52*-67*.

34. A large corpus of ancient Near Eastern examples is assembled in J.

Bretschneider, Architekturmodelle in Vorderasien and der ostlichen Agais vom
Neolithikum bis in das 1. Jahrtausend. AOAT 229 (Neukirchen-Vluyn:
Neukirchener, 1991). There is no English equivalent.

35. See William G. Dever, "Iron Age Kernoi and the Israelite Cult,"
forthcoming in Studies in the Archaeology of Israel and Neighboring Lands in
Memory of Douglas L. Esse, ed. Samuel R. Wolff (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2001). Cf. Menahem Haran, Temples and Temple-Service in
Ancient Israel: An Inquiry Into Biblical Cult Phenomena and the Historical
Setting of the Priestly School (1978, repr. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1985),
216-22. Haran does not even allude to any possible archaeological evidence for
libation offerings.

36. J. Glen Taylor, Yahweh and the Sun: Biblical and Archaeological
Evidence for Sun

Worship in Ancient Israel. JSOTSup 111 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1993); and cf.
Morton Cogan, Imperialism and Religion: Assyria, Judah and Israel in the
Eighth and Seventh Centuries B.C.E. SBLMS 19 (Missoula: Scholars, 1974).

37. Elizabeth Bloch-Smith, Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the
Dead. JSOTSup 123 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1992), 101-3.

38. See Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel. The most recent catalog and
analysis of the "pillar-base" figurines is that of Raz Metter, The Judean Pillar-
Figurines and the Archaeology of Asherah (Oxford: Tempus Reparatum, 1996),
and full literature cited there. Kletter's interpretations, however, must be used
with caution; he is ambivalent on the association with Asherah, but in the end he
does accept it. For more astute comparison of the archaeological and biblical
textual materials, see John Barclay Burns, "Female Pillar Figurines of the Iron
Age: A Study in Text and Artifact," AUSS 36 (1998): 23-49.

39. See n. 16 above. Van der Toorn's more recent work The Image and the
Book coins the term "book religion" in contrast to "popular religion," which I
find useful.

40. William G. Dever, "The Silence of the Text," 105-17.

41. There is now a vast literature on women in ancient Israel. On women

and the cult specifically, among the best studies are those of Phyllis A. Bird,
"The Place of Women in the Israelite Cultus," in Miller, Hanson, and McBride,
Ancient Israelite Religion, 397-419; Carol Meyers, "`To Her Mother's House' -
Considering a Counterpart to the Israelite Bet-'ab," in Jobling, Day, and
Sheppard, The Bible and the Politics of Exegesis, 39-51, 304-7.

42. See, e.g., Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the
Other Deities in Ancient Israel (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990); and cf.
the essays by Michael David Coogan, John S. Holladay, Jr., and P. Kyle
McCarter, Jr., in Ancient Israelite Religion (above, n. 28). Also Johannes C. de
Moor, The Rise of Yahwism: The Roots of Israelite Monotheism. BETL 91
(Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1990).

43. See Dever, "Folk Religion in Early Israel," 56.

46. Avraham Biran, "Two Bronze Plaques and the Hussot of Dan," IEJ 49
(1999): 4354. On the "throne platform," see Biran, Biblical Dan, 238-43.

45. Cf. William G. Dever et al., "Further Excavations at Gezer, 1967-1971,"

BA 34 (1971): 94-132. On the grain-scoops, see now the full typology and
analysis of Seymour Gitin "Scoops: Corpus, Function and Typology," in Studies
in the Archaeology and History of Ancient Israel in Honour of Moshe Dothan,
ed. Michael Heltzer, Arthur Segal, and Daniel Kaufman (Haifa: Haifa
University, 1993), 99-126. For shegel weights from gate areas, see Kletter (nn.
74, 75 below). For an example of balances from the gate area at Lachish, see
Gabriel Barkay, "A Balance Beam from Tel Lachish," Tel Aviv 23 (1996): 75-82.

44. Cf. R. A. S. Macalister, The Excavation of Gezer (London: Palestine

Exploration Fund, 1911), 218; Biran, Biblical Dan, 276.

47. See Aaron Demsky and Moshe Kochavi, BAR 4/3 (1978): 23-30; Daniel
Sivan, "The Gezer Calendar and Northwest Semitic Linguistics," IEJ48 (1998):
101-05 and literature cited there. For an excellent argument for widespread
literary in early Israel, see Alan R. Millard, "The Question of Israelite Literacy,"
BR 3/3 (1987): 22-31; "The Knowledge of Writing in Iron Age Palestine,"
TynBul46 (1995): 207-17 and literature cited there. See also Ian M. Young,
"Israelite Literacy: Interpreting the Evidence, Parts I-II," VT 48 (1998): 239-53,
408-22. In addition, see the fundamental study of Susan Niditch, Oral World and
Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature (Louisville: Westminster John Knox,
1996).

48. Cf. further Chapter 2.

49. Consider, for example, the attempt of Philip R. Davies to redate the late
8thcentury Siloam tunnel inscription to the 2nd century - immediately and
decisively refuted by a number of the world's leading epigraphers. See John
Rogerson and Philip R. Davies, "Was the Siloam Tunnel Built by Hezekiah?"
BA 59 (1996): 138-49; and cf. the devastating replies in the articles by leading
epigraphers Frank Moore Cross, Esther Eshel, Jo Ann Hackett, Avi Hurvitz,
Andre Lemaire, P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., and Ada Yardeni in "Defusing Pseudo-
Scholarship: The Siloam Inscription Ain't Hasmonean," BAR 23/2 (1997): 41-
50, 68. Can there be any doubt that the repudiation of an absolutely dated Iron
Age inscription - the very foundation of our paleographical sequence - is the
result not merely of scholarly incompetence, but also of an ideological
predisposition against there having been a real Israel in the Iron Age?

50. In short, oral tradition dominated in premonarchic Israel, as would be

expected. It is significant that the revisionists never even consider oral tradition
in their numerous attempts to discredit any real historical foundations of the later
written traditions. They completely ignore the massive evidence that Niditch,
e.g., documents in Oral World and Written Word.

51. Nahman Avigad, "The Contribution of Hebrew Seals to an

Understanding of Israelite Religion and Society," in Miller, Hanson, and
McBride, Ancient Israelite Religion, 195-208; P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., Ancient
Inscriptions: Voices from the Biblical World (Washington: Biblical Archaeology
Society, 1996), 142-50; and for recently published seals, see Andre Lemaire,
"Royal Signature - Name of Israel's Last King Surfaces in a Private Collection,"
BAR 21/6 (1995): 48-52; Robert Deutsch, "First Impression - What We Learn
from King Ahaz's Seal," BAR 24/3 (1998): 54-56, 62. For the definitive
catalogue of Hebrew (and other) seals, still in progress, see Benjamin Sass and
Christoph Uehlinger, Studies in the Iconography of Northwest Semitic Inscribed
Seals. OBO 125 (Fribourg: University of Fribourg Press, 1993); Othmar Keel,
Corpus der Stempelsiegel-Amulette aus Palastina/ Israel. OBO Series
archaeologica 10 (Fribourg: University of Fribourg Press, 1995).

52. Nahman Avigad, Bullae and Seals from a Post-Exilic Judean Archive
(Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1976); Hebrew Bullae from the Time of
Jeremiah: Remnants of a Burnt Archive (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society,
1986).

53. Avigad, Hebrew Bullae from the Time of Jeremiah, 120-30.

 54. Thompson and Lemche also doubt the Tel Dan inscription's authenticity;
see Chapter 2, nn. 10, 11. For a charge that many of the recently published seals
and bullae are fakes, see Robert P. Carroll, "Madonna of Silences," in Lester L.
Grabbe, Can a "History of Israel" Be Written? 84-103. Carroll says of the
distinguished epigrapher Nahman Avigad that "from such bits of clay he
reconstructs the world" (100). For further discussion of the problem of possible
forgeries, see Lemche, P. Kyle McCarter, and Thompson in BAR 23/4 (1997):
36-38 (Lemche suggesting specifically that the "Barukh" bulla is a forgery).

56. On written materials generally, see Andre Lemaire, "Writing and

Writing Materials," ABD 6:999-1008; K. A. D. Smelik, Writings from Ancient
Israel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991); McCarter, Ancient
Inscriptions; and cf. Niditch, Oral World and Written Word. Cf. also references
in n. 57 below. On Samaria specifically, see conveniently Gabriel Barkay, "The
Iron Age II-III," in Ben-Tor, Archaeology of Ancient Israel, 319-23. For
translations of the ostraca, see ANET, 321; Smelik, 51-62.

55. Niditch, Oral World and Written Word, 50.

57. For the Lachish and other Hebrew letters on ostraca, see Dennis Pardee,
"Letters (Hebrew)," ABD 4:282-85; and in much more detail, Handbook of
Ancient Hebrew Letters: A Study Edition. SBLSBS 15 (Chico: Scholars, 1982).
Good translations of the Lachish letters will be found in ANET, 321, 322;
McCarter, Ancient Inscriptions, 116-18; Smelik, 11631.

59. Aharoni, Arad Inscriptions, 35-38. For the pomegranate, see Andre
Lemaire, "Probable Head of Priestly Scepter from Solomon's Temple Surfaces in
Jerusalem," BAR 10/1 (1984): 24-29.

58. For the original publication, see Yohanan Aharoni, Arad Inscriptions
(Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1981), and cf. Pardee, Handbook of
Ancient Hebrew Letters, 28; Niditch, Oral World and Written Word, 52;
McCarter, Ancient Inscriptions, 105-9; Smelik, 101-15.

60. See also n. 28.

61. See Itzhaq Beit-Arieh, "A Literary Ostracon from Horvat `Uza," TA 20
(1993): 55-65; and cf. Nadav Na'aman, BAR 23 (1997): 43-47, 67.
 62. See Dever, HUCA 40-41 (1969-1970): 139-204; ErIsr 26 (1999): 9*-
15*.

63. Cf. Nahman Avigad, "Two Hebrew Inscriptions on Wine-Jars," IEJ 22

(1972): 1-9; Aharoni, Arad Inscriptions, 107.

64. Robert Deutsch and Michael Heltzer, Forty New Ancient West Semitic
Inscriptions (Tel Aviv: Archaeological Center, 1994), 23-26.

65. Joseph Naveh, "A Hebrew Letter from the Seventh Century B.C.," IEJ
10 (1960): 129-39; "More Hebrew Inscriptions from Mesad Hashavyahu," IEJ
12 (1962): 27-32; and cf. Pardee, Handbook of Ancient Hebrew Letters, 15-20;
McCarter, Ancient Inscriptions, 116. Add now K. A. D. Smelik, "The Literary
Structure of the Yabneh-Yam Ostracon," IEJ 42 (1992): 55-61.

67. John J. Collins, "Daniel, Book of," ABD 2:29-37; J. Edward Wright,
The Early History of Heaven (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 85-88.

66. See n. 31 above and references there to other tomb inscriptions. On Iron
Age tombs in general, see Bloch-Smith, Judahite Burial Practices.

68. Forty New Ancient West Semitic Inscriptions, 29-30; cf. McCarter,
Ancient Inscriptions, 111, 112.

69. See Joseph Naveh, "Old Hebrew Inscriptions in a Burial Cave," IEJ 13
(1963): 7492; cf. Niditch, Oral World and Written Word, 47, 48 and references
there.

70. Nahman Avigad, "The Epitaph of a Royal Steward from Siloam

Village," IEJ 3 (1953): 137-53.

72. Pesah Bar-Adon, "An Early Hebrew Graffito in a Judean Desert Cave,"
Erlsr 12 (1975): 77-80; cf. Niditch, Oral World and Written Word, 47.

71. See further Avigad, Bullae and Seals, 21, 22.

73. (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1979), xxv.

74. See now the definitive work of Raz Metter, Economic Keystones: The
Weight System of the Kingdom of Judah. JSOTSup 176 (Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic, 1998). I disagree, however, that these standardized inscribed weights
have nothing to do with reform measures of the late Judean monarchy. See nn.
76, 77 below.

75. See the earlier study of Raz Kletter, "The Inscribed Weights of the
Kingdom of Judah;" TA 18 (1991): 121-63.

76. TA 18 (1991): 135-37.

77. TA 18 (1991): 135-37; cf. also 137-39.

78. TA 18 (1991): 135-37.

79. Dever, HUCA 40-41 (1969-1970): 139-204.

80. See n. 45 above.

81. See generally Ovid R. Sellers, "Weights and Measures," IDB 4:828-39;
Marvin A. Powell, "Weights and Measures," ABD (1992), 6:897-908.

82. On weights and measures generally, see Metter (above, nn. 74-75);
Sellers; Powell. For the Tell Beit Mirsim and Lachish data, see William F.
Albright, The Excavation of Tell Beit Mirsim, 1: The Pottery of the First Three
Campaigns. AASOR 12 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932), 77, fig. 12;
Olga Tufnell et al., Lachish III: The Iron Age (London: Oxford University Press,
1953), 356, 357. For an analysis of the Arad and Beersheba "bath" inscriptions,
see Joseph Naveh, "The Numbers of Bat in the Arad Ostraca," IEJ 42 (1992):
52-54.

83. Robert W. Ehrich, Chronologies in Old World Archaeology, 3rd ed.

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), vii, viii. The standard handbook
on Palestinian pottery is still Ruth Amiran, Ancient Pottery of the Holy Land.

84. The results summarized in James L. Kelso, "Pottery," IDB 3:846-53.

85. Examples shown are based on Amiran. For the late terms here, cf. e.g.
marheset, a "frying-pan for meat," only in Lev. 2:7; 7:9, obviously P material;
mahabat, a "pan for frying flat cakes," only in Lev. 2:5; 6:14; 7:9, again P; and
parer, a "pan for baking mannabread," only in Num. 11:8; 1 Sam. 2:14, both
probably P. For examples of ceramic onehandled skillets from the Hellenistic
period, see Paul W. Lapp, Palestinian Ceramic Chronology. Such vessels are
absolutely unknown anywhere in the Iron Age (cf. p. 232, no. 18).

86. A German biblical scholar and art historian, Sylvia Schroer, has recently
published a book with which few American biblical scholars seem to be familiar:
In Israel Gab es Bilder? (in English, Was There Art in Israel?). OBO 74
(Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987).

87. Exegetische and ikonographische Studien zum weiblichen Gottesbild im

alten Israel and in dessen Umwelt. OBO 53 (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1983).

88. Ancient Near Eastern Iconography and the Book of Psalms (1978, repr.
Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1997).

89. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996).

90. This is shown as well by Ackerman.

91. For orientation to the ivories, see works in n. 9 above.

92. ANET 321; 287, 288.

93. David Ussishkin and John Woodhead, "Excavations at Tel Jezreel 1990-
1991: Preliminary Report," TA 19 (1992): 3-55; "Excavations at Tel Jezreel
1994-1996: Third Preliminary Report," TA 24 (1997): 6-72; and cf. Nadav
Na'aman, "Historical and Literary Notes on the Excavations of Tel Jezreel," TA
24 (1997): 122-28.

94. Ussishkin and Woodhead, TA 19 (1992): 53.

95. See conveniently Yohanan Aharoni, "Ramat Rahel," NEAEHL 4:1261-

67.

5. Kermode, a distinguished retired professor of English and literary critic,

regards all of this as an intellectual catastrophe: "There have been fads and
fashions before, and they have passed, but this one has resulted in the creation of
new, self-perpetuating university departments and has packed existing
departments with sympathizers"; Atlantic Monthly (August, 1997): 96. Kermode
hopes that "the practitioners of race-class-gender criticism will grow
discontented with their sterility, and not wishing to seem dull and ridiculous,
seek to regain contact with the fine things," but he does not think this very likely.
My complaint against the revisionists and their Bible-bashing is similar, and for
good reason. For some hope that many university faculty and leading
intellectuals are fed up with "political correctness" and the resultant "culture
wars," see J. Engell and A. Dangerfield, "The Market-Model University:
Humanities in the Age of Money," Harvard Magazine (May, 1998): 48-55, 111.
The authors warn of the consequences of raising a new generation who have
never learned from the past and have never "witnessed the treacheries and
glories of human experience profoundly revealed by writers and artists" (111) -
and, I would say, by the Hebrew Bible par excellence. See also D. K. Magner,
"10 Years of Defending the Classics and Fighting Political Correctness,"
Chronicle of Higher Education (December 12, 1997): A12-A14, a spirited
defense of the recently created "National Association of Scholars," whose goal is
"to reclaim the academy" and reaffirm the Classical tradition. The notorious
deconstructionist Stanley Fish, of Duke University, has dismissed the group as
"racist, sexist, and homophobic." Note also the resurgence of "Neo-
conservatives" (read "traditionalists") at Harvard, as reported by J. Tassel, "The
30 Years' War: Cultural Conservatives Struggle With the Harvard They Love,"
Harvard Magazine (SeptemberOctober, 1992): 57-99. Jon D. Levenson, Lisht
Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard, is quoted as saying: "Harvard Divinity
School prides itself on its liberalism and openmindedness, its embrace of
diversity, but in fact there is no diversity in these issues. Political correctness is
the new orthodoxy" (61). Similarly, I regard revisionism as in danger of
becoming the new orthodoxy. See further Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt,
Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); and especially Keith
Windschuttle, The Killing of History.

4. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

1. P. 325. This masterful intellectual history of the Western cultural tradition

puts postmodernism in context better than any work I know. Anyone reading it
will understand that revisionism really does share in postmodernism's inherent
nihilism.

2. (August, 1997): 93-96.

3. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

6. "War of Words," Time (July 7, 1997): 92.

7. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

8. David Bromwich, "Scholarship as Social Action," in Alvin Kernan,

What's Happened to the Humanities? 220-43 (quotes from 221, 224, 225).

9. Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts

on Culture and Society (New York: Knopf, 1994).

12. Anthropology as Cultural Critique, 7-16.

10. Michik Kakutani, New York Times, July 15, 1997.

11. Anthropology as Cultural Critique, vii.

13. David I. Kertzer, "Representing Italy," in Europe in the Anthropological

Imagination, ed. Susan Parman (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1998),
70.

14. Marcus and Fischer, 8.

16. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

15. Nancy Maull, "Science Under Scrutiny," American Antiquity (March-

April, 1997): 23; Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt, and Martin W. Lewis, eds., The
Flight from Science and Reason (New York: New York Academy of Sciences,
1996).

18. Alexander Alland, American Antiquity 100 (1999): 1036.

19. Alland, American Antiquity 100 (1999): 1029.

20. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on

Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 60.

17. (New York: Picador USA, 1998).

21. Lyotard, 81.

22. Interventions 1 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997), 19, quoting

Aichele, The Limits of Story. Semeia Studies (Chico: Scholars, 1985), 138-39.

23. John Barton, Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study, 2nd
ed. (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1996), 235.

24. For a devastating critique of one of postmodernism's most prominent

methods - the "deconstruction" of ancient texts and the depreciation of any
"meaning" in them, following Jacques Derrida and others - see Ellis, Against
Deconstruction. Ellis notes that since 1975 the "know-nothing" attitude of
deconstructionists, the rejection of reason as a basis of discourse, has meant that
there has been little dialogue and that most critiques of deconstructionism have
been ignored or suppressed as "politically incorrect."

25. For the term "revisionist," see Lemche and Thompson, JSOT 64 (1994):
19; Lemche, The Israelites in History and Tradition, 157. For the other labels in
this discussion, some quite acrimonious, see Chapter 1, n. 14; Chapter 2, n. 47.
Thompson alternately advocates the most outspoken "school" mentality, yet
denies that he and the other revisionists constitute a school; see particularly JBL
114 (1995): 683-98.

26. David Gunn, "Narrative Criticism," in Steven L. McKenzie and Stephen

R. Haynes, To Each Its Own Meaning, 171-95.

27. JSOTSup 109 (Sheffield: Almond, 1991). Note Lemche's apparent

dismissal of Jamieson-Drake; The Israelites in History and Tradition, 82; "Clio,"
140, 141. The only other American scholar sometimes said to be associated with
the revisionist school is John Van Seters, but he himself does not subscribe to
either the label or much of the extremist ideology. See his works dating the
Pentateuch (not the Deuteronomistic history) to the Persian period or later, e.g.,
Prologue to History: The Yahwist as Historian in Genesis (Louisville:
Westminster John Knox, 1992).
 28. See virtually the entire literature to date, cited in Chapter 2.

29. Provan, JBL 114 (1995): 585-605; Thompson, 683-98; Davies, 699-705.

30. Thompson, JBL 114 (1995): 683-98, esp. 695.

32. Thompson, JBL 114 (1995): 697-98. Perhaps even more ominous is
another recent pronouncement of Thompson: "We have already identified
`ancient Israel' as a liter ary construct, and are in the course of identifying
ancient Judaism as a religious one." Thompson says further that the Persian-
Hellenistic province of Judea (Yehud) does not reflect a distinct "people" or
ethnic group at all; that so-called Judaism was only an "intellectual and
philosophical movement of Hellenism itself"; and finally that "until the fourth-
fifth centuries Judaism was a philosophy not a religion." See "Defining History
and Ethnicity," 185 and n. 48. The first step to denying the people of ancient (or
modern Israel) any legitimacy is to make them "nonpeople."

31. Thompson, JBL 114 (1995): 684, 685,690,696; and cf. William G.
Dever, "Archaeology, Material Culture and the Early Monarchical Period in
Israel," in The Fabric of History: Text, Artifact and Israel's Past (Sheffield:
Sheffield Academic, 1991), 115.

33. See Chapter 2.

34. Cf. Thomas L. Thompson, Early History of the Israelite People; Niels
Peter Lemche, Early Israel; Ancient Israel; Keith W. Whitelam, "Israel's
Traditions of Origin: Reclaiming the Land," JSOT 44 (1989): 19-42. On the
revisionists' repudiation of their own earlier works, see Lester L. Grabbe, Can a
"History of Israel" Be Written? pp. 146-48, 178-79.

35. Amihai Mazar, Levant 29 (1997): 164, where he links him with the
revisionists. See Finkelstein's reply, suggesting that his Israeli colleague is a
"Bible archaeologist" in his "sentimental, somewhat romantic approach to the
archaeology of the Iron Age"; Levant 30 (1998): 167-74.

37. Cf. Thompson, JBL 114 (1995): 693.

38. Cf. Thompson's paper on "Hidden Histories and the Problem of

Ethnicity in Palestine" read in Amman, Jordan, a copy of which I owe to his
courtesy. See further William G. Dever, NEA 61 (1998): 39-52.

36. Jon D. Levenson in The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and
Historical Criticism (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993), 115-17.

39. See further Chapter 1.

40. See p. 51, n. 61.

41. Cf., e.g., Niels Peter Lemche, Currents in Research: Biblical Studies 4
(1996): 9, 10, whose phrase this is, and Thomas L. Thompson, The Mythic Past,
386.

42. William A. Beardslee, in Steven L. McKenzie and Stephen R. Haynes,

To Each Its Own Meaning, 231-32. Beardslee's comprehensive essay, largely on
"deconstructionism," is meant to be sympathetic but is in fact devastating.

43. See Dever, NEA 61 (1998): 39-52 and literature cited there.

44. See Dever, "Archaeology and the 'Age of Solomon."'

46. On the Philistines, see most recently Lawrence E. Stager, "The Impact
of the Sea Peoples in Canaan (1185-1050 BCE)," in Thomas E. Levy,
TheArchaeology of Society in the Holy Land, 332-48 and full references there to
the earlier literature. For the Philistines and destructions at the end of the period,
see Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000-586 B.C.E.,
296-328, 368-75.

47. On David specifically, see the fundamental work of Baruch Halpern,

"The Construction of the Davidic State," in Volkmar Fritz and Philip R. Davies,
The Origins of the Ancient Israelite States, 44-75; Nadav Na'aman, "Sources and
Composition in the History of David," 170-86. Both argue, from different
perspectives, not only that David was a historical figure, but that the biblical
writers' sources for their narratives were roughly contemporary, i.e., dating back
to the 10th century.

45. See Dever, "Archaeology and the `Age of Solomon,"' 245-50 and
references cited there.
 48. Baruch Halpern, The First Historians, 111-13. Halpern develops the
notion of "intentionality" as a criterion of genuine history-writing, i.e., did the
biblical writers (and later editors) intend to "tell the truth" about the past as they
knew it? Halpern, along with most biblical scholars, thinks that they did. The
revisionists' view of biblical literature, on the other hand, necessarily makes the
writers out to be "pious frauds," although they resent that characterization
fiercely. But what else can the biblical writers have been, since for the
revisionists virtually all their writing is not only "myth" but deliberate "fiction";
and they were obviously pious as well as orthodox? For the revisionists' attack
on Halpern, cf. several of the essays in Fritz and Davies, The Origins of the
Ancient Israelite States, esp. Davies, "Introduction," 30-37; and Thompson,
"Historiography," 30-37. See also Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient
Israel, 24-27, 32. Much of this is probably in response to Halpern's expose and
stinging critique in BR 11/6 (1995): 26-35, 47. Again and again Halpern deftly
skewers the revisionists' presuppositions, superficial arguments, and hypocrisy.
He states that "the views of these critics would seem to be an expression of
despair over the supposed impossibility of recovering the past from works
written in a more recent present - except, of course, that they pretend to provide
access to a `real' past in their own written works in the contemporary present"
(31). See further Chapter 2, n. 61.

50. See n. 37 above.

49. In both public debates and private correspondence, Davies and

Thompson have angrily denied that their view of the Hebrew Bible makes it a
"pious forgery"; but cf. n. 48 above. As for proof that they might offer of the
"late date" of the biblical texts, there simply is none, as several scholars have
pointed out. In particular see Avi Hurvitz, "The Historical Quest for `Ancient
Israel' and the Linguistic Evidence of the Hebrew Bible: Some Methodological
Observations," VT 47 (1997): 301-15; Ziony Zevit, review of Davies, In Search
of `Ancient Israel," American Jewish Studies Review 20 (1995): 155. Nowhere
that I have seen do the revisionists reply to these criticisms, or even
acknowledge them. For wide-ranging critiques of the revisionists and their
methodology in general, see Chapter 2, n. 61; also n. 47 above. On the problem
of anachronisms - which simply could not have been avoided - and the absence
of any real knowledge of the Hellenistic world among the biblical writers, see
below. For the latest, see Lester L. Grabbe, ed., Did Moses Speak Attic? Jewish
Historiography and Scripture in the Hellenistic Period (Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic, 2000).

51. Philip R. Davies, In Search of `Ancient Israel," 94-154, esp. 102-5

(Biblical Hebrew as a Persian-Period Bildungssprache, a "scholarly construct" as
Knauf had maintained) and 106-12 ("scribal schools" in temple circles). Cf. n. 48
above.

52. Scholars like Cross, Eshel, Hackett, Halpern, Hurvitz, Lemaire,

McCarter, Rainey, Yardeni, and Zevit - all distinguished epigraphers and
Hebraists - have shown that most Biblical Hebrew is not "archaizing," much less
an artificial literary argot, but genuinely archaic; and furthermore that it is the
language of the hundreds and hundreds of seals, ostraca, and other Hebrew
inscriptions from the Iron Age. See references in n. 48 above.

53. (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1982).

54. The Harvest of Hellenism: A History of the Near East from Alexander
the Great to the Triumph of Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970).

55. Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during

the Early Hellenistic Period (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974). See also n. 49 above.

56. Cf. e.g., K. A. D. Smelik, Writings from Ancient Israel; P. Kyle

McCarter, Jr., Ancient Inscriptions.

57. The latter phrase is from Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, 115; the result,
he says, is a new clerisy' of academic theorists."

58. Lemche and Thompson, JSOT 64 (1994): 18.

59. Jane B. Carter and Sarah P. Morris, eds., The Ages of Homer: A Tribute
to Emily Townsend Vermeule (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).

60. Susan Niditch, Oral World and Written Word, 1.

61. Niditch, Oral World and Written Word, 134.

62. For orientation to the vast literature, see references in Chapter 1, n. 1;

Chapter 2, n. 44; Chapter 4, n. 16.

63. The revisionists deny the Iron Age date of the prophetic literature, as
well as the historicity of the prophets themselves. There was no Israelite prophet
"Isaiah," because there was no "ancient Israel"; we have only a Hellenistic,
fictional literary composition by that name. There is no "real-life" setting. Thus
Robert P. Carroll, one of the more strident revisionists, who has devoted a
lifetime to the book of Jeremiah, states that "our knowledge of the processes that
gave rise to the book of Jeremiah in the first place is absolutely nil"; and
furthermore, "Jeremiah studies would certainly benefit greatly from the
abandonment of the search for either `the historical Jeremiah' or `the author of
the book of Jeremiah'. I believe both quests to be doomed to utter failure and
also to be a waste of time and energy." Elsewhere Carroll admits, "I still find that
that book eludes my reading of it." No wonder! Cf. "Intertextuality and the Book
of Jeremiah," 56, 62, 74.

64. Davies, Whose Bible Is It Anyway? 16, 10-55.

65. Roy A. Harrisville and Walter Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture,
273.

66. Millard, "Story, History, and Theology," in Millard, Hoffineier, and

Baker, Faith, Tradition, and History, 51.

67. Millard, "Story, History, and Theology," 37-64; on "narrative theology,"

see 6063. Elmer A. Martens provides another thoughtful treatment from a very
conservative theological perspective, "The Oscillating Fortunes of `History'
within Old Testament Theology," in Millard, Hoffmeier, and Baker, Faith,
Tradition, and History, 313-40.

68. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).

69. James Barr, The Bible in the Modern World, 142. See also
Fundamentalism (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978); Does Biblical Study Still
Belong to Theology? (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), his inaugural lecture at Oxford;
and also "Story and History in Biblical Theology," JR 56 (1976): 1-17.

70. The Hebrew Bible and Its Interpreters, ed. William H. Propp, Baruch
Halpern, and David Noel Freedman (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1990), 1-17.

71. Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, 106-26.

72. David Gress, From Plato to NATO, 476.

73. Gress, From Plato to NATO, 477.

74. Gress, From Plato to NATO, 495.

75. Gress, From Plato to NATO, 559.

76. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Modern Culture from a Comparative

Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 83.

78. As this book was going to press, the revisionist controversy broke out in
the media even more openly than it had in the previous year or two. Ze'ev
Herzog, a colleague of Finkelstein at Tel Aviv University, published an article in
the major Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz (October 29, 1999) in which he claimed
that archaeology had "proven" that the biblical patriarchs, exodus, conquest,
period of the judges, early monarchy, Israelite monotheism, the exile and reform,
etc., were all fictitious. Henceforth, Israelis who have seen in their "history"
some legitimization for their claims to the land would have to give this all up.
Earlier, the Jerusalem Post (October 11, 1997) had already broken the story of
"Historical Battleground," documenting how the newly-constituted Palestine
Authority in the West Bank had begun to use archaeology to establish its claims
to the land, even issuing revisionist elementary school textbooks to augment the
"arsenal of historical weaponry." This was followed by a much more detailed
and explicit report by Netty Gross of a clash between Israeli and Palestinian
archaeologists at a symposium in Gaza on "Who Got Here First, and Does It
Matter?"; "Demolishing David," Jerusalem Report (September 11, 2000).
Whitelam should be pleased; he and other meddling revisionists have succeeded
in undoing the efforts of two generations of Palestinian archaeologists - of all
nationalities and persuasions - to keep Middle Eastern nationalism and religious
fanaticism out of archaeology. Earlier, the magazine Science (287 [January 7,
2000]: 28-35) carried an excellent series of stories by Michael Baiter with ample
quotations from myself and other American archaeologists, from Israelis, and
from Palestinians. Unfortunately, much of the rhetoric is like shouting "fire" in a
crowded theater. See Gustav Niebuhr, "The Bible, as History, Flunks New
Archaeological Tests," New York Times (July 29, 2000).

77. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York:

Knopf, 1998). Many of Wilson's most perceptive observations are most easily
accessible in his excerpt from the book, "Back From Chaos," published in
Atlantic Monthly 28/3 (March, 1998), 41-62.

1. See William W. Hallo, "The Limits of Skepticism," JAOS 110 (1990):

187-99. This reference and the phrase "creeping skepticism" I owe to Marc
Brettler; see Brettler, "The Copenhagen School" (forthcoming).