THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF ANCIENT ISRAEL PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Amnon Ben-Tor, R. Greenberg | 460 pages | 23 Feb 1994 | Yale University Press | 9780300059199 | English | New Haven, United States ANE TODAY - - Genetics and the Archaeology of Ancient Israel - As noted by a reviewer on Salon. Ze'ev Herzog , professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University , wrote a cover story for Haaretz in in which he reached similar conclusions following the same methodology; Herzog noted also that some of these findings have been accepted by the majority of biblical scholars and archaeologists for years and even decades, even though they have only recently begun to make a dent in the awareness of the general public. Early biblical archaeology was conducted with the presumption that the Bible must be true, finds only being considered as illustrations for the biblical narrative, and interpreting evidence to fit the Bible. Some archaeologists such as Eilat Mazar continue to take this "Bible and spade" approach, or, like the journal Bible and Spade , attempt to treat archaeology as a tool for proving the Bible's accuracy, [ citation needed ] but since the s most archaeologists, such as Kenneth Kitchen , [3] [ original research? The Bible Unearthed begins by considering what it terms the 'preamble' of the Bible—the Book of Genesis —and its relationship to archaeological evidence for the context in which its narratives are set. Archaeological discoveries about society and culture in the ancient Near East lead the authors to point out a number of anachronisms, suggestive that the narratives were actually set down in the 9th—7th centuries BCE: [6]. The book comments that this corresponds with the documentary hypothesis , in which textual scholarship argues for the majority of the first five biblical books being written between the 8th and 6th centuries. The book remarks that, despite modern archaeological investigations and the meticulous ancient Egyptian records from the period of Ramesses II , also known as Ozymandias 13th century B. Although the Hyksos are in some ways a good match, their main centre being at Avaris later renamed 'Pi-Ramesses' , in the heart of the region corresponding to the 'land of Goshen', and Manetho later writing that the Hyksos eventually founded the Temple in Jerusalem , [17] it throws up other problems, as the Hyksos became not slaves but rulers, and they were chased away rather than chased to bring them back. Finkelstein and Silberman argue that instead of the Israelites conquering Canaan after the Exodus as suggested by the book of Joshua , most of them had in fact always been there; the Israelites were simply Canaanites who developed into a distinct culture. The authors take issue with the book of Joshua 's depiction of the Israelites conquering Canaan in only a few years—far less than the lifetime of one individual—in which cities such as Hazor , Ai , and Jericho , are destroyed. Finkelstein and Silberman view this account as the result of the telescoping effect of the vagaries of folk memory about destruction caused by other events; [22] modern archaeological examination of these cities shows that their destruction spanned a period of many centuries, with Hazor being destroyed to years after Jericho, [23] [ citation needed ] while Ai whose name actually means 'the ruin' was completely abandoned for roughly a millennium "before the collapse of Late Bronze Canaan. Like Jericho, there was no settlement at the time of its supposed conquest by the children of Israel. Although the Book of Samuel and initial parts of the Books of Kings , portray Saul , David and Solomon ruling in succession over a powerful and cosmopolitan united kingdom of Israel and Judah , Finkelstein and Silberman regard modern archaeological evidence as showing that this may not be true. Archaeology instead shows that in the time of Solomon, the northern kingdom of Israel was quite small, too poor to be able to pay for a vast army, and with too little bureaucracy to be able to administer a kingdom, certainly not an empire; [25] it only emerged later, around the beginning of the 9th century BCE, in the time of Omri. There are remains of once grand cities at Megiddo , Hazor and Gezer , with archeological evidence showing that they suffered violent destruction. The Tel Dan Stele , the Mesha Stele , the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser , and direct evidence from excavations, together paint a picture of the Omride kings ruling a rich, powerful, and cosmopolitan empire, stretching from Damascus to Moab , [33] and building some of the largest and most beautiful constructions of Iron Age Israel; [34] by contrast, the Bible only remarks that the Omrides 'married foreign women' presumably to make alliances and upheld Canaanite religion, both of which it regards as wicked. The Book of Kings, as it stands today, seems to suggest that the religion of Israel and Judah was primarily monotheistic, with one or two wayward kings such as the Omrides who tried to introduce Canaanite polytheism, the people occasionally joining in this 'apostasy' from monotheism, but a close reading and the archaeological record reveals that the opposite was true. Judah was flooded with refugees; the population of Israel had been nine times larger than that of Judah, so many small Judean villages suddenly became cities, [39] archaeology evidencing that the population of Jerusalem itself expanded by about fold, turning it from a small hilltown into a large city. By BCE, the Assyrians had captured most of Judah, and then they besieged Jerusalem ; the Bible's coverage of the events leading up to the siege is sparse, briefly listing only a few refortifications of Jerusalem, giving a passing mention to the Siloam tunnel , and briefly admitting to the loss of most of Judah's cities, but archaeology gives much more detail. For example, the fortifications of Lachish were heavily strengthened by Hezekiah, [43] but it was besieged, fell, and was then burnt to the ground; according to an illustration on the walls of the Assyrian palace at Ninevah , the Assyrians deported the city's population and religious objects before they burnt it. The Bible claims that nearly , men in the army besieging Jerusalem were slaughtered one night by an angel , causing the Assyrian king Sennacherib to relent and return to Assyria; it immediately goes on to state that Sennacherib was killed by his sons, while he was praying to his god, implying that this was shortly after the battle. However, as The Bible Unearthed points out, this contrasts with the Assyrian record on the Taylor Prism , [45] in which Hezekiah's mercenaries abandoned him, and he only then convinced the Assyrian army to leave by handing over not only vast amounts of money, jewels, and high quality ivory-inlaid furniture, but also his own daughters, harem, and musicians, and making Judah into a tributary state of the Assyrians. Hezekiah predeceased Sennacherib, dying just a couple of years after the siege. His successor and son , Manasseh , reversed the religious changes, re-introducing religious pluralism; Finkelstein and Silberman suggest that this may have been an attempt to gain co-operation from village elders and clans, so that he would not need so much centralised administration, and could therefore allow the countryside to return to economic autonomy. Hezekiah's actions had given away the gold and silver from the Jerusalem Temple , [50] impoverished his state, lost him his own daughters and concubines, [46] and reduced his territory to a small region around Jerusalem, most of the people elsewhere in Judah being deported; Manasseh had brought peace and prosperity back to the country, [51] but because the Book of Kings bases its decisions on theological prejudice, it condemns him as the most sinful monarch ever to rule Judah and hails instead Hezekiah as the great king. As recorded in the Book of Kings, Manasseh's grandson, Josiah , enacted a large religious reform soon after he became king; he ordered renovations to the Jerusalem Temple, during which the High Priest 'found' a scroll of the law , which insisted on monotheism with sacrifice centralised at a single temple—that in Jerusalem. Finkelstein and Silberman note that most scholars regard the core of Deuteronomy as being the "scroll of the law" in question, and regard it as having been written not long before it was 'found', rather than being an ancient missing scroll as characterised in the Bible; [54] Deuteronomy is strikingly similar to early 7th century Assyrian vassal -treaties, in which are set out the rights and obligations of a vassal state in this case Judah to their sovereign in this case, Yahweh. The sudden collapse of the Assyrian Empire in the last decades of the 7th century BCE offered an opportunity for Josiah to expand Judah's territory into the former kingdom of Israel, abandoned by the Assyrians. Archaeology suggests that Josiah was initially successful, extending his territory northwards towards Bethel , a cult-centre of the kingdom of Israel; [58] however he then rode out to meet the Egyptian Pharaoh— Necho —at Meggido. Necho had been merely 'passing through', leading an army to join the Assyrian civil war on the side of the Assyrian rather than Babylonian faction, [59] but Josiah was killed; the circumstances of his death are uncertain, though the Book of Chronicles claims that despite Necho's lack of enmity for Josiah, Josiah insisted on attacking him. Finkelstein and Silberman suggest that Necho may have objected to Josiah's expansionist policies, which could have threatened the Egyptian dominance of the region to the west of Judah the Philistine lands or of the strategically important Jezreel Valley to its north, or could equally have objected to the effect of the new deuteronomic social policies on the caravan routes, which ran through southern Judah.