The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein

Author:Israel Finkelstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

A Closer Look at Israel’s Later History

Archaeologists often speak of long periods of time in which little is changed—but only because the nature of their finds makes it hard to identify chronological divisions. There is, after all, no human society that can remain substantially unchanged for as much as two hundred years. Yet that was the traditional archaeological understanding of the northern kingdom, for since the 1920s archaeologists have excavated some of the most important sites of the kingdom of Israel taking note of no significant change except for its ultimate destruction. As was the case with the archaeological study of the Omrides, the post-Omride era of Israel’s independent history was not considered formative or particularly interesting from an archaeological point of view. In an unconscious echoing of the Bible’s theological interpretations, archaeologists depicted a rather monotonous continuity followed by inevitable destruction. Very little attention was given to the inner dynamics of the kingdom and its economic history (except for some speculation on a single collection of crop receipts from Samaria). As we will see, these are crucial areas of research if we are ever to move beyond the Bible’s exclusively theological interpretation of Israel’s history—that its demise was a direct and inevitable punishment for its sins. The 120 years of Israelite history that followed the fall of the Omrides was, in fact, an era of dramatic social change in the kingdom, of economic ups and downs and constantly shifting strategies to survive the threat of empire.

One of the main reasons for this misunderstanding was the conventional dating system, according to which the entire history of the northern kingdom—from rise to fall—tended to be lumped into a single chronological block. Many important centers in the Jezreel valley and on the nearby Mediterranean coast, such as Megiddo, Jokneam, and Dor, were believed to contain only a single stratum spanning the entire history of the kingdom of Israel, from Jeroboam I (in fact, from the Shishak campaign in 926 BCE) to the fall of Samaria in 722 BCE. This despite the evidence of major changes and military defeats that took place during this long period—among the most important of which was the invasion of Israel by King Hazael of Damascus, as recorded in the Bible and on the Dan stele by the scribes of Hazael himself.

Something was wrong in the conventional archaeological understanding: how could it be possible that Hazael captured Dan and spread havoc in the territories of the northern kingdom but left no perceptible archaeological trace of destruction?

TABLE FOUR

ASSYRIAN KINGS INVOLVED IN THE

HISTORY OF ISRAEL AND JUDAH*

Shalmaneser III

859–824 BCE

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