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John Lee

The Bible Unearthed

by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman

Free Press $200

FOR CENTURIES, the Bible was regarded as a sacred text that could not be questioned.

With the Enlightenment, the inexorable march of scientific discovery and the Industrial Revolution, sceptics began to speak up. Few of them within the Christian or Jewish faiths doubted the existence of God, just the blind obedience of fundamentalists to the biblical text.

So much of what was described flew in the face of scientific reason and what was being learnt about the origins of civilisation. The sceptics opened a door that could never be closed and the debate about the veracity of the Bible continues unabated.

In this interesting and well-researched book, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman try to ascertain how much of it really happened.

Does it stand up to the acid tests of historical and archaeological analysis? Can carbon-14 dating prove the existence of the Exodus, or the tumbling walls of Jericho?

The authors confine themselves to a study of the Old Testament, which they refer to as the Hebrew Bible given that most of it was originally written in Hebrew and tells of the struggles of the ancient Israelites.

Drawing on historical analysis of contemporary inscriptions, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics, information gleaned from more than 100 years of archeological excavations and the countless works of biblical scholars, they have concluded that much of what is described in the Hebrew Bible probably did not happen and that it was written far later than was originally supposed.

They believe the earliest version of the Bible was written during the reign of King Josiah of Judah (639-609BCE, that is, before the Common Era) and that those who composed it had strong political motivations.

King David's unified Israelite nation had split into two kingdoms and when Israel to the north was conquered by the Assyrians in 720BCE, only Judah was left.

Josiah wanted to keep alive the pan-Israelite dream, which faced the dual threat of a belligerent Assyria and a resurgent Egypt under Psammetichus I. So it was important to call back from the mists of time the ancestral stories of Abraham and his sons, the Exodus from Egypt and David's heroic military victories, to give them a contemporary patina to which 7th-century-BCE Israelites could relate.

The domain of the pharaoh who persecuted Moses, as described in the Bible, closely resembled the actual territories ruled over by Psammetichus.

As the authors put it: 'Images and memories from the past now became the ammunition in a national test of will between the children of Israel and the pharaoh and his charioteers.'

Josiah's political gamble failed. He was assassinated and the kingdom finally fell apart after the capture of Jerusalem in 597BCE by Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon.

While many of Josiah's former subjects were forced to leave Judah, their religious beliefs survived intact in exile. When Babylon was defeated by the new regional power Persia, they were allowed to return.

The Davidic dynasty was not restored and so, in the absence of a king, the priests, their restored Temple of Jerusalem and their monotheistic faith took on added importance.

During this 'post-exilic' period, say Finkelstein and Silberman, the scriptures 'underwent far-reaching additions and revisions, arriving at what was substantially their final form'.

The finished article 'must be considered more a historical novel than an accurate historical chronicle', they write.

There is no archaeological proof of the Exodus. Someone called David did exist, but he was probably a chief ruling over a small clan, rather than an all-conquering general who vanquished the mighty Philistines.

However, Finkelstein and Silberman are not iconoclasts. They emphasise that their revelations do not in any way detract from the importance of the Hebrew Bible, which is, they say, 'the single most influential literary and spiritual creation in the history of humanity'.



When the word of God is not enough