Photon

Hello:

I have studied The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman and found it to be quite compelling. My question is regarding the positions of other archaeologists who rebut the minimalist position (for example in On the Reliability of the Old Testament (or via: amazon.co.uk) by K. A. Kitchen or Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (or via: amazon.co.uk) by William G. Dever ).

Does anyone have any comments on the methodology or conclusions reached by Kitchen or Dever, specifically with how their dating of the writing of the OT and dating of the early kings of Israel differs from that of Finkelstein? I mean, I'm already familiar with Finkelstein's arguments, but not so familar with Kitchen's or Dever's counter-arguments or their methodology.

Thanks!

Photon

Hmm, OK, I'll widen the scope a little: has anyone read the works by Kitchen or Dever that would like to make any comment whatsoever?

mountainman

Start with Eusebius' Chronicon - everyone else does.
But take it with a grain of salt.

rob117

Kitchen is pretty much fringe on the issue before the monarchic period- he believes much (but not all) of the Pentateuch was written by Moses or a contemporary and rejects the documentary hypothesis altogether- but his book supposedly provides a very good survey of the evidence for the Bible's reliability in the monarchic period itself. I haven't read it, but I might sometime in the future.

Dever does not address Finkelstein's arguments other than saying the burden of proof is on him; Mazar, imo does a much better job of it in several articles that can be found here and here. At this point I believe the conventional chronology has the upper hand- Finkelstein fails to address the fact that either Arad XII or XI (probably the former) must date to the 10th century BC, because the "Enclosure of Arad" of "Great Arad" (hgr-'rd) is mentioned by Shoshenq I as one of the sites he conquered in his raid, and Arad was unfortified before these strata; yet both of these strata contain Iron IIA pottery of the same type that Finkelstein insists is representative only of the ninth century. Iron IIA pottery has also been found in the pre-Omride village of Jezreel, which invalidates Finkelstein's contention that it does not pre-date the ninth century at that site. Mazar instead advocates extending the Iron IIA into the mid-9th-century to account for the fact that its pottery appears in strata indicative of both the 10th and 9th centuries.

The carbon-14 dates are less decisive in my view because both sides of the debate have produced C14 dates in their favor; until this discrepancy can be resolved I am inclined to believe the pottery evidence, which I believe is in Mazar's favor; although in the past I have believed Finkelstein, more reading has convinced me that his case is not that strong.

Also, lumping Finkelstein in with the "minimalists" is not really accurate; that label would generally only apply to scholars like Davies, Thompson, and Lemche who downdate the entire Bible to the Persian and Hellenistic periods; Finkelstein still believes the main text is Iron Age, and many textual scholars have been dating the texts later and later within the Iron Age anyway on other historical and literary evidence, regardless of what they think of Finkelstein's archaeology; other than Frank Cross (who I think is simply set in his ways on this matter due to age and reputation), for example, I don't know of any text critic who still dates J to the 10th century. Even "conservatives" like Friedman, Freedman, and Halpern give it a 9th-8th century date.

The Bishop

My problem with dating the OT and the events in it is as follows: archaeologists find no substantial remains of a mighty power and kingdom "in the Davidic/Solomonic era", taken to be the 10th Century BCE (the 1000s-900s). But what I don't understand is, how reliable is the dating within the Bible of the Davidic era? What is it in the Bible that makes the dating of David so specific? I've never really found anything that could pin it down so well, but I'm not, I must confess, much of a close Bible scholar.

Dean Anderson

The Bible gives relative dates (based on people's ages and the lengths of the reigns of various kings) for every major Biblical event between the creation of the world and the Exile. You can see chapter and verse references for this here.

Obviously, how seriously you take these dates depends on how literally you take the Bible to be.

However, even if we assume the pre-Davidic stuff to be pure fantasy, we can still easily trace back from the Exile to David via the books of Kings and Chronicles.

If we assume that the lengths of the reigns of the various kings of Judah and Israel listed in the Bible are accurate, and we assume that the Exile occurred in 597 BCE since we have independent attestation to that event, then David was born in 1077 BCE, and became king in 1047 BCE at age 30. He then reigned for 40 years, and was succeeded by Solomon in 1007 BCE.

Photon

Thanks rob117 - that was very helpful. I've read some of Mazar's stuff, but I'll be sure to include him in my studies on this topic.

rob117

However, those dates are too early. The 10th century date for David and Solomon is originally based on the Egyptian evidence for dating the Shoshenq raid to about 925 BC. This raid occured five years after the death of Solomon according to I Kings, and would thus date Solomon to around 970-930 BC, and David to c. 1000-970. This, in conjunction with the archaeological evidence for state formation at this time results in the shortening the biblical chronology of the monarchy and putting David in the 10th century, rather than the 11th that is given by the biblical dates alone, which have thus probably been inflated to some extent (which is indicated also by the fact that some of them are self-contradictory). The chronology is probably inflated mostly for the 8th century BC, which gives Pekah of Israel 20 years (impossible, since Assyrian records put his second predecessor, Menahem, on the throne in 738, put him on the throne from 734-32, and Hoshea on the throne by 731, see here). This, in combination with the unusually long reign (52 years) attributed to the contemporary Uzziah of Judah leads me to believe that if we reduce the Bible's chronology for the mid-8th century most of the problems disappear. Possibly, the figure of 20 years for Pekah was a corruption of 2, and the author of Kings, working with corrupt king-lists and not knowing the exact chronology of a period over a century before his own time, would have tried (unsuccessfully) to correct the discrepancy by assuming the corruption was with Judah's king-list (perhaps he had a nationalistic preference for a long chronology-"Our people is very ancient!", a claim that can be seen in modern-day nationalistic movements in Eastern Europe), and raising a figure of some 32(?) years for Uzziah to 52. Or vice-versa.