Azure no. 27, Winter 5767 / 2007

Digging Themselves Deeper

Since the dawn of archaeology in the land of Israel and the Near East, people have wondered whether archaeological findings may prove or disprove the stories contained in the Bible. Rarely, however, have archaeological findings proved decisive: Different scholars, though working with the same data, have reached widely different conclusions. Nevertheless, if we organize schematically the Bible’s basic historical narrative into discrete time periods, we can reach a partial consensus. Most scholars would agree, for example, that regarding the periods of the patriarchs and the Israelites’ bondage in Egypt, archaeology can neither prove nor disprove the events described in the Bible. Nor is it likely to be able to do so in the future, since not only are these events not the sort to have left the kind of evidence archaeologists might discover today, but the lack of such a discovery is not sufficient proof that these events did not take place.

Most scholars also acknowledge that the Bible’s description of the periods of the divided kingdom and the exile are, by and large, accurate. The reason is simple: A short time into the divided kingdom period (about 850 B.C.E.), the neo-Assyrian—and later, neo-Babylonian—empire began to expand westward toward the land of Israel. Both the Assyrians and the Babylonians set down accounts of their exploits on clay tablets and stone stelae, which have withstood the vagaries of time. These accounts of interactions with the Israelites and Judahites largely conform to the Bible’s narrative.

Thus, the controversy in biblical archaeology today centers mainly on those periods that lie in the middle: The time of the Israelites’ wanderings in the wilderness and their conquest of Canaan; the premonarchic period of the Judges; and the united kingdom of David and Solomon. Whether scholars like it or not, the question of how similar these periods were to the biblical narrative—if they were indeed similar at all—is one with enormous religious, cultural, and political implications. This means that the debate is often fierce, and always interesting.

In 2001, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman entered this fray with their popular book The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (Free Press). Finkelstein is a controversial Israeli archaeologist who, at the time of his book’s publishing, served as the director of Tel Aviv University’s Institute of Archaeology. Silberman is a Belgium-based expert on the history of archaeology and a frequent writer on archaeological topics. In The Bible Unearthed, the authors went beyond the issue of the historicity of the Bible, asking moreover what archaeology can tell us about the context of and motivations for the biblical stories. Their original (and rather extreme) answer to these questions was that most of the biblical historical narrative is political propaganda composed in Judah at the end of the seventh century B.C.E., during the reign of King Josiah. Consequently, it contains very little historical value for the earlier periods it purports to describe, though it can illuminate the period in which it was composed.

David and Solomon, Finkelstein’s and Silberman’s second joint project, is a natural continuation of The Bible Unearthed, and focuses on the biblical narrative for the period of the united kingdom of Judah and Israel (the tenth century B.C.E.) under David and his son, Solomon. The books of Samuel and Kings describe these figures as leading the kingdoms of Judah and Israel out from under the yoke of Philistine domination and into a vast, powerful, and wealthy monarchy whose influence reached as far as the Euphrates River. Finkelstein and Silberman ask: Did this narrative in fact originate in the tenth century B.C.E., and is it accurate? And if not, when was it composed, and why?

Interestingly, the stories they so identify tend to deal with the earliest period of the David and Solomon narrative. They include many of the stories known in biblical research as “The History of David’s Rise,” which depicts future-king David and his band of outlaws roaming the wilderness of Judah while fleeing David’s predecessor and tormentor, the Israelite king Saul. Clues here include the prominence given to the Philistine city of Gath, which was destroyed in the ninth century B.C.E. Also included is the basic description of the kingdom of Saul himself: Saul’s territory is described as being centered in the Benjaminite highlands north of Jerusalem and extending to the Jabbok River area in Transjordan. The authors believe that this description matches demographic trends reflected in the archaeological record, and is backed up by a careful reading of the famous stele of the Egyptian king Sheshonq I, commemorating his campaign in Canaan.

Finkelstein and Silberman continue by arguing that the rest of the David and Solomon narrative does not make sense in a tenth-century-B.C.E. context: David’s supposed conquests in and control over the land of Israel are not reflected in the archaeological record, and the soldiers required for his far-flung battles—battles as far away as Aram-Damascus—could not have been supplied by Judah, which was, at the time, no more than a “sparsely settled hinterland.” Moreover, it is inconceivable that Solomon’s supposedly vast wealth and international power could have been centered in Jerusalem, which was then no more than a “highland village,” nor could he possibly have ruled over a large kingdom in the land of Israel, which lacked the level of literacy and urbanization necessary for such an administration. 

In order to explain when (and why) these descriptions were composed, the authors turn to the archaeological data. By splitting the biblical narrative into different strata, they are able to assign each stratum a context in some later period over the next 400 years. Thus, it emerges that the stories of David’s conquests and kingdom were more likely composed in ninth-century-B.C.E. Judah, then a vassal state of neighboring Israel, the far more powerful of the two kingdoms. The Judahite court, the authors explain, sought to show that the “united kingdom” of Israel and Judah had actually originated a century earlier, under the leadership of Judah, and not Israel. So, too, do the descriptions of Solomonic grandeur originate in early-seventh century-B.C.E. Judah, with the goal of providing a precedent for King Manasseh’s integration of Judah into the Assyrian international economy, and the grandiose depiction of the Temple in Jerusalem is actually from the late eighth century B.C.E., when Jerusalem’s authority needed shoring up in the face of an incoming flux of refugees from nearby Israel.

The first claim—that of the fictitiousness of the David and Solomon narrative—is crippled by the archaeological assumptions upon which it is based. Most important in this regard is Finkelstein’s assessment that urbanization in the land of Israel, together with large-scale and centralized building, began not in the tenth century B.C.E., but rather only in the ninth. Other archaeologists, however, disagree with Finkelstein, citing, for example, the well-known matching-gate complexes at Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer, all of which date from the tenth century B.C.E. and illustrate the existence of urbanization and centralization at the time. Finkelstein, for his part, dates these finds to the ninth century. While the controversy over what has come to be known as “Finkelstein’s low chronology” is far too complex to discuss here, it is important to note that, as American archaeologist William Dever concluded in 2003, “Finkelstein’s idiosyncratic ‘low chronology’ is not supported in print by a single other ranking archaeologist.” (Emphasis mine.) Of course, it is possible that Finkelstein is right and the rest of the archaeological world is wrong, but shouldn’t he at least engage the mainstream opinion in debate if he expects to convince the reader to reject it, as well? Though the authors do explore the issue of dating archaeological finds in some detail in an appendix, they fail to refute—or even acknowledge the existence of—a single one of their contemporary opponents’ arguments.

A second contention on which this claim rests is that of the nature of Jerusalem in the tenth century B.C.E. Finkelstein and Silberman maintain that Jerusalem was an insignificant village at that time, and thus could not have been the capital of the large kingdom described in the Bible. Although the archaeological remains found in Jerusalem from this period are indeed scant, other archaeologists have been more cautious in their declarations, pointing to large structures that have been found, such as a stepped-stone structure with a system of terraces. They further note that determining the size of Jerusalem during any historic period is problematic, on account of the difficulties of digging in a densely populated, living city. Moreover, the fact that Jerusalem has been continuously inhabited throughout the millennia means the constant destruction and reconstruction of roads and buildings, further complicating dating. But Finkelstein and Silberman sidestep these realities, asserting that “over a century of excavations” ought to have revealed more.

An ironic twist of fate has recently demonstrated just how treacherous silence can be when used as evidence. In the summer of 2005, just as David and Solomon was going to press, a team led by Hebrew University archaeologist Eilat Mazar and supported by the Shalem Center was in the midst of excavating an enormous public building in Jerusalem which was apparently connected with the aforementioned stepped-stone structure. Pottery found at the site strongly suggests that this building too was occupied during the tenth century B.C.E. (even according to Finkelstein’s dating system), probably having been built at that time or slightly earlier. Mazar suggested that this complex could in fact be David’s palace: The location, style, size, and dating of the building all match the textual description in the Bible, and there are no finds that suggest the contrary. Most importantly, the building appears in an ancient world in which such constructions were extremely rare, and would have represented the greatest sort of public works. By the time the book hit the shelves, Mazar’s find had already been reported in popular media and scholarly journals. Many of Finkelstein’s and Silberman’s readers were likely scratching their heads, wondering how many mere “villages” in the tenth century B.C.E. contained structures of this magnitude.

The authors’ second argument—in which they attach later political contexts to the David and Solomon narrative—also falls short, plagued as it is by the lack of a coherent theory of literary production and a failure (except in rare cases) to address potentially illuminating comparisons with other bodies of literature, ancient and modern. Although Finkelstein and Silberman are certainly not the first to make this mistake, it is particularly damaging here because of the counterintuitive hypothesis they present: Namely, the claim that entire histories (and not just new perspectives on existing stories) can be cynically cooked up by political groups, and then sold to a public naive enough to incorporate them into its national consciousness as fact.

Furthermore, the particular political contexts to which the authors attribute stories are often dubious. For example, I Samuel 27 contains a story in which David, still a fugitive from Saul, puts himself in the service of Achish, the Philistine king of Gath, for whom he supposedly carries out raids against the Judahites. Rejecting the possibility that this account is authentic, Finkelstein and Silberman settle on a late-seventh-century-B.C.E. context, when the Philistines had a thriving olive-pressing industry in Ekron, whose king was himself named Achish. They explain that Judah, which had always been an important olive-growing region, must have created an economic relationship with Ekron whereby olives were grown by the former and pressed by the latter. The David-Achish alliance, claim the authors, was invented to provide a precedent for a relationship with the Philistines, thus legitimizing it. Yet a quick analysis reveals just how strange this explanation is: The “economic relationship” in question would basically have consisted of Judahites selling unpressed olives to the Philistines. Would this really have required justification, in an area where inter-ethnic trade was common? And even if so, would the best way to provide such justification really be to invent a story in which a Philistine king listens with glee to stories of the slaughter of one’s own people?

An interesting way to test the plausibility of any explanation for the composition of a particular piece of literature is to ask whether, by using the same type of logic, a future historian could attribute this literature to our era. I would like to suggest, for the benefit (or confusion) of such a future historian, that the David-Achish alliance story was actually composed in Israel of 2006, the context being as follows: The State of Israel had recently removed its citizens from a section of the southern coastal plain inhabited mainly by a rival ethno-political group. Opponents of this procedure, still bitter over its having taken place, wrote a propaganda piece with the intention of showing that a minority community of Israelis (Israelites) could have actually been viable among a majority of Palestinians (Philistines) in that same area. Even the mythological hero David and his men had done it millennia before! Of course, we happen to know that such an explanation is absurd, though to a historian 3,000 years from now it could make as much sense as Finkelstein’s and Silberman’s. Indeed, the only limit to such “explanations” is the limit of one’s imagination, since without a coherent theory of literary production, attempts at contextualization are little more than a game of association, intellectually entertaining but historically useless.

Particularly puzzling is the authors’ third argument, which insists that stories of David’s and Solomon’s courts could not have been written down by tenth-century royal scribes in Jerusalem (as claimed by most biblical scholars), since we have evidence of widespread literacy in Judah only from the end of the eighth century. But widespread literacy is unnecessary for the existence of court scribes; rather, only some literacy is needed. We know, for example, that already in the fourteenth century B.C.E., Abdi-Heba, the Canaanite ruler of Jerusalem, was writing letters in cuneiform to the Pharaoh in Egypt; six of these letters were found in Pharaoh Akhenaten’s archive at Tel El Amarna. There are also plenty of examples of Hebrew-type writing in the land of Israel from the twelfth to the eighth centuries B.C.E., most notable of which is the ‘Izbet Sartah ostracon, an eleventh-century pottery shard with the alphabet and various other jottings scribbled on it in ink. Clearly, someone was writing at this time. Would it not make sense for that someone to find his way to a job in a palace, even a small one?

The book’s most important contribution, however, is in demonstrating what archaeology can reveal about the process of the Bible’s composition. Until now, most biblical archaeologists have tended to confine themselves to shedding light on the Bible’s “finished product,” and most biblical scholars have failed to avail themselves of all that archaeology has to offer. In other words, David and Solomon is a refreshing attempt to apply archaeology to biblical source criticism. Unfortunately, its success is seriously hampered by Finkelstein’s idiosyncratic views and the absence of a theory of literary composition.

Finkelstein’s and Silberman’s previous book suffered from the same problems, and most of their peers in archaeology and biblical studies strongly rejected its conclusions. Granted, one would hardly know this from the media whirlwind that surrounded the book’s publication in Hebrew. It is often hard to escape the feeling that in Israel, theories in any field that are perceived to be “myth-smashing” receive disproportionate attention and insufficiently cautious acceptance. In our case, this bias might be partially countered with a popular Hebrew book by a more mainstream scholar who asks the same questions yet provides very different answers. Unfortunately, such a book has yet to appear. Perhaps it is time for the all too quiet majority to raise its voice loud enough for the general public to hear.