The challenge to the biblical narrative reached new heights in the late 1990s, when scholars at Tel Aviv University, led by Israel Finkelstein, chairman of the university’s Department of Archaeology, began championing a theory that the unified Israelite monarchy, accounts of which occupy large portions of the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, never really existed. Finkelstein’s theory is based on what archaeologists call a “lower” dating of the period, a change in the way dates are assigned to artifacts. This approach reclassifies the archaeological finds long associated with the Solomonic building projects of the tenth century B.C.E. and dates them a century later, thus moving them to the period after the united monarchy, and leaving that kingdom with no reliable testimony. In other words, if we accept that the massive structures uncovered throughout Israel were built not by Solomon, but by his successors a century later, then the founders of the ancient Jewish state all but disappear from the archaeological record.

This contention first reached a mass audience in the Ha’aretz weekend magazine of October 29, 1999, in a cover story called “Truth from the Holy Land: After 70 Years of Digging, It Turns Out the Biblical Period Never Happened.” The author, Ze’ev Herzog, Finkelstein’s colleague at Tel Aviv University, declared that “the great unified monarchy was an imaginary historiosophic creation, invented at the end of the Judean period, at the very earliest.” Articles in Science and The New York Times followed, highlighting Finkelstein’s claim that, as he told the Times, “there is no evidence whatsoever for a great, united monarchy which ruled from Jerusalem over large territories.” King David’s Jerusalem, he added, “was no more than a poor village at the time.”

In 2001, the theory that the united kingdom was a fiction came of age with the publication of Finkelstein’s book, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, co-authored with Neil Asher Silberman. The book’s controversial thesis and its release by a major commercial publisher helped propel it onto best-seller lists in the United States. When the Hebrew edition of The Bible Unearthed appeared in Israel in the spring of 2003, it too became an instant best-seller. Riding a tidal wave of sympathetic media exposure, Finkelstein’s theory seems destined to become the common wisdom.

 

Given the magnitude of the challenge, one would expect a sustained response from the many scholars who remain skeptical of the new approach. And to a certain extent, there has been such a response. In the four years since the controversy erupted, some of the leading archaeologists in Israel have undertaken to refute Finkelstein’s theory. The efforts of the Hebrew University’s Amnon Ben-Tor and Amihai Mazar, writing in academic journals such as Levant and giving numerous scholarly lectures, have gone a long way toward convincing their colleagues that the conventional dating is in fact correct. Baruch Halpern of the University of Pennsylvania, who worked closely with Finkelstein in the excavation of Megiddo that helped form the basis for the theory, has likewise dismissed it out of hand. “In history, the issue is probability, not absolute proof,” Halpern told one newsmagazine recently, “and probability is overwhelmingly on the side of the traditional dating.”

Yet one would never know this by reading the newspapers and magazines covering the controversy. In the media, both in English and in Hebrew, the new archaeology has completely dominated. This is not so much because it has captured a consensus of archaeological opinion, but because the mainstream archaeologists who oppose it seem to lack the desire or ability to engage their opponents on the level of public debate. While Finkelstein and Herzog have made their case through books, articles, and interviews, their academic opponents have shown a remarkable unconcern, and even impatience, for what the wider public considers to be the most important questions: Does the biblical account reflect what actually happened, and how do the conclusions of archaeology affect our understanding of history?

Indeed, while the new archaeologists’ demolition of the kingdom of David and Solomon has begun to change the way Jews and Christians view their own past, Israel’s mainstream archaeologists have long abandoned the effort to produce accessible publications on the history of the period, and have focused instead on producing detailed compendia of archaeological finds. Perhaps the most important work by an Israeli archaeologist in the past two decades is Amihai Mazar’s Archaeology of the Land of the Bible (1990), a glance at which will reveal that this field has become so specialized as to abandon all pretense of contributing to the construction of a historical narrative. While this 550-page tome does break down the data according to broad periods (Neolithic, Early Bronze Age, and so on), this is where the chronology ends, and each chapter offers little more than a catalogue of findings, listed according to type (“Israelite pottery,” “metallurgy”) or location (“The Northern Negev,” “The Judean Desert”). Not only is there no effort to weave these findings into a history of the area; there is not even an attempt to synthesize an archaeological perspective on what kind of life the inhabitants of these houses and villages might have lived. Albright’s humanist approach to the ancient past is dismissed as “simplistic and fundamental,” while the current approach is praised as “professional, secular, and free from theological prejudices.”

Little better is The Archaeology of Ancient Israel (1992), edited by Amnon Ben-Tor, which is not so much a work of history as a catalogue of the material remains left by Jews, Canaanites, Philistines, and Egyptians. Despite being an ardent defender of the biblical description of the unified monarchy, Ben-Tor is nonetheless mystified by the idea that archaeology may have an impact on the public’s beliefs. Attempts to improve our understanding of biblical history on the basis of the archaeological record, he writes, are simply irrational:

For scholars like Ben-Tor, the question of what archaeology may mean for the larger issue of Jewish history is not just unimportant, but also a “violation of archaeological integrity,” a danger to the scientific standing of the discipline. The desire to determine the veracity of biblical history is, according to Ben-Tor, the “root of all evil as far as the discipline of biblical archaeology is concerned.”

With such attitudes prevailing in the academy, it is not surprising to discover that today’s mainstream archaeologists are inclined to play down finds which strike them as too highly charged with biblical or historical import. A poignant example is that of Adam Zertal, whose survey of the Samaria region is a standard in the field. In 1983, Zertal uncovered on Mount Eval a raised structure about 25 feet square, flanked by stone ramps, and filled with ashes and animal bones. This enormous sacrificial altar, which was absolutely unique for its time in the entire Near East, was located on the very mountain where Joshua was described in the Bible as having built an altar after the Israelites crossed the Jordan River, and closely matched the descriptions of that altar in both biblical and rabbinic texts. The site contained tools dating to the twelfth century B.C.E., around the time the Israelites are said to have entered the land. To top it off, the remains in the altar’s fill did not include pig bones—a marker for Israelite settlement whose validity even skeptics generally concede.

Nonetheless, the reaction of leading archaeologists ranged from dismissal to tepid agnosticism, accompanied by accusations that Zertal was motivated politically by a desire to support West Bank settlement. Zertal, a secular Jew raised on a kibbutz, was shocked not so much by the accusations as by the grim silence that followed. “After the publication of the discovery in the 1980s, there were a few debates,” he recalls, “but since the detailed report and many articles that I published concerning the excavation and the survey, silence has descended on the scholarly world.”