Exodus-Conquest Archives - Page 7 of 7

The Implications of an Altar on Mount Ebal

I intended to ignore this article (as I do many others), because I doubt that the identification is accurate and this article in Israel Hayom is but a popular presentation of a discovery now 25 years old. So you’re not reading this here because I agree that the “altar” on Mount Ebal is “the world’s most important Biblical archaeological site” and the “the Holy Grail of Biblical archaeology.” But the article helpfully points out scholarly biases that affect interpretation.

One of the people on the tour asks whether there are researchers – colleagues – who support him. Zertal names the late Professor Benjamin Mazar, who “supported me to an extent, but it was difficult for him because he was part of the mainstream. If you support a revolutionary idea, you pretty much cut off your relationships with certain people in positions of power.” Once again, he quotes Professor Lawrence Steiger of the Harvard Museum of Semitic Studies who said at the end of the 1980s: “If the ruin on Mount Ebal is what Adam Zertal says it is, the effect on archaeology and Biblical studies will be revolutionary; we will all have to go back to kindergarten. But that’s a big if.”
He mentions scientists whose revolutionary ideas met with vigorous rejection by the contemporary establishment, which ostracized them, from Galileo to Daniel Schechtman. “Put yourself in the shoes of professors who wrote books for decades, and suddenly along comes some pipsqueak from the Ha-Shomer Ha-Tza’ir movement who discovers an altar that matches, point for point, what is written in the Bible. What would you do? Ze’ev Herzog writes an article entitled ‘The Bible – No Findings on the Ground.’ An entire career was built on the theory of ‘no data.’ And suddenly there are facts! Incidentally, an American researcher by the name of William Dever says that there were only ‘proto-Israelites’ here. It’s not really clear what that means. But we found 420 Israelite sites from the settlement period (the Iron Age I period).”

While this is a most simplistic presentation (“suddenly there are facts!”), his evaluation that this discovery must be ignored because it undermines a particular scholarly perspective is important. A similar approach has been taken with regard to Bryant Wood’s analysis of the pottery at Jericho.

The reason that I doubt that Zertal has found Joshua’s altar is because his claim that the altar “matches, point for point, what is written in the Bible” is false. His evidence dates the altar to 1200 BC, two hundred years after the time of Joshua. Other objections have been raised by various archaeologists concerning the nature of the structure as well. But there are some intriguing things that may well have been ignored because his interpretation would send liberal biblical scholars “back to kindergarten.”

HT: Joseph Lauer

Mount Ebal from Mount Gerizim

Tagged Analysis, Exodus-Conquest, Samaria

Biblical Archaeology in 2011

For several years now, Brian Janeway has reported on major presentations and discussions at the Annual Meetings of the American Schools of Oriental Research in order to engage the armchair archaeologist who is unable to travel to the November conference. He has now posted his review at the website of the Associates for Biblical Research, summarizing sessions on the Philistines, the state of biblical archaeology, the Conquest narratives, biblical meals, Caesarea, and the wine of Jesus.

One subject of particular interest is Joshua’s conquest and how this is interpreted by one self-identified “maximalist.”

Perhaps it was fitting then, that Dr. Daniel Browning from William Carey University, following in the Rainey tradition, mounted a spirited critique of the findings of Dr. Bryant Wood in “Hazor versus Jericho and Ai: Dealing with Mixed Archaeological Data in Evaluating the Joshua Narrative.” Coming from a scholar who styled himself a “maximalist” regarding the Biblical text, the paper was both surprising and disappointing—the former for its contemptuous dismissal of any “maximalist” (literal) reading of Joshua—and the latter for its utter lack of reference to physical evidence presented by Wood and others. All attempts by evangelicals to interpret the data (at Jericho, Ai, and Hazor) differently than Kenyon and others are reduced to “tactics,” all of which fail on the level of presupposition—failing to see the text as a theological and not a historical one. The real key to understanding Jericho and Ai is in the figures of Rahab and Achan, who are juxtaposed to drive the underlying theological agenda. Only at Hazor can archaeological finds be made to fit the conquest narrative. In singling out Bryant Wood, Browning’s failure to cite the ceramic and stratigraphic basis of Wood’s thesis is intellectually dishonest. His largely literary approach deserves a learned archaeological response, which was not provided in San Francisco. Perhaps it is time for Dr. Wood to mount a defense of his own at the next ASOR Meetings?

In my opinion, it is an elementary error to assume that literary artistry precludes accurate historical recording.

Janeway’s full report is here.

Jericho (Tell es-Sultan) from the east

Tagged Excavations, Exodus-Conquest, Lectures

Wednesday Roundup

The news report was that Tel Shiloh would receive about $1.3 million for renovation and preservation of the site, besides an additional $2.5 million from private sources. Only a few bloggers seem to note the new archaeological excavation underway on the southwestern side of the tell, with work scheduled to begin on the proposed tabernacle site in a few weeks.

Arutz-7: “Muslims hurled stones and shoes at police escorting Jewish and Christian visitors on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City on Tuesday.”

JPost: “The Tourism Ministry on Tuesday launched an online ballot where the public can vote on what shape the NIS 833 million renovation of the Dead Sea will take in the coming years.”

NASA has a photo showing the weekend’s snowfall on Mount Hermon and the ranges to the north.

Wayne Stiles connects the beauty on display at Neot Kedumim with the Passover holiday.

The Jerusalem Post has a new column named “All Out Adventure.” It begins with a rather tame outing to Sataf in the Judean hills.

Tom Powers has an interesting and well-illustrated post on the Historic Valley Railway that once connected Damascus to Haifa.

G. M. Grena teases his readers with an Arabic-English riddle. I think I can make some sense of it.

James Hoffmeier’s recent lecture on what his archaeological work in Egypt tells us about the exodus is online for viewing.

The royal garden at Ramat Rahel is described in a brief but helpful summary by LiveScience.

HT: BibleX

Recent excavations at Shiloh

Tagged Dead Sea, Egypt, Exodus-Conquest, Jerusalem, Jezreel Valley, Judah, Samaria, Temple Mount, Weekend Roundup

Your Take: Dever on Israel’s Emergence

While I’m traveling, I thought I might provoke readers with a statement written by William G. Dever in his article “Archaeology, Syro-Palestinian and Biblical,” published in 1992 in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, page 366.

Thus the book of Joshua and the works of the Deuteronomistic historians (Joshua-Kings) portray the emergence of Israel in Canaan as the result of a sudden, unified military conquest of the Twelve-Tribe League under the leadership of Joshua—a miraculous gift of Yahweh. Archaeological evidence, however, shows beyond doubt that most Late Bronze Age Canaanite sites in Palestine were not destroyed ca. 1200 B.C., and that nearly all the identifiable early Israelite settlements were established peacefully on virgin soil (Finkelstein AIS). Therefore, from the point of the secular historian, the ascendancy of Israel was part of a gradual, exceedingly complex process of socioeconomic change on the Late Bronze–Iron I horizon, not a “miracle” at all.

How many problems do you see with this statement? How does bad Bible reading lead him to faulty conclusions? What parts of his statement are true?

Excavations at Bethel (Beitin), once believed to support the late date theory of the conquest
Source: The American Colony and Eric Matson Collection, volume 1

Tagged Analysis, Exodus-Conquest

Multiple Exoduses from Egypt?

Last week I linked to Bryant Wood’s article on new evidence for Israel’s existence in 1400 BC.

According to three European scholars, an inscription mentions Israel several hundred years earlier than the Merneptah Stele.

There are several ways to respond to this proposal. James Hoffmeier, an advocate of the late-date exodus (1230 BC), says that the inscription should not be read as Israel and thus is irrelevant to the question of the exodus.

In an article published in the January/February 2012 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review (HT: G. M. Grena and Shmuel Browns), Hershel Shanks summarizes the recent studies and concludes with a discussion about multiple departures from Egypt by Israelite tribes at different times. Earlier advocates of such include Albrecht Alt, Yohanan Aharoni, and Abraham Malamat.

Such an approach is wrong-headed, I believe. In the first place, it can only be reconciled with the biblical account by considering the latter to be only an elaborate and glorious myth created hundreds of years later (and peppered liberally with shameful acts of those who devised the myth). Second, such an approach replaces one exodus for which there is no record in Egyptian sources with many exoduses for which there are no record in Egyptian sources.

A better approach is to take a step back and reconsider the issue afresh. The reason why scholars argued for a 13th century BC date for the exodus/conquest in the first place was because of an apparent lack of evidence for Israel in Canaan at an earlier time. The Merneptah Stele, paired with the appearance of hundreds of agricultural villages in the 12th century, has been considered to provide evidence for the earliest Israelites. This evidence does not, however, tell us anything about Israel’s entrance into the land. It tells us only when Israel was already in the land (and defeated by Egypt).

Last year I showed how the Merneptah Stele gives evidence for Israel’s invisible (to archaeologists) presence in the land of Canaan for some time before they settled down in the hill country villages.

The recently published inscription, if the reading of Israel is accurate, provides even earlier evidence for the nation’s existence. As with the Merneptah Stele it does not tell us anything about the exodus or the conquest. To theorize that there were multiple exoduses when these inscriptions provide evidence for none is the wrong course indeed.

The best historical reconstruction takes into account all of the evidence. Israel fled from Egypt in about 1450 BC. They arrived in Israel in about 1400 BC. They continued their pastoral way of life that they were used to from the time of the patriarchs, their time in Egypt, and their time in the wilderness. This lifestyle left relatively little discernible and distinctive archaeological evidence from 1400-1200 BC. Some factors (weather?, political turmoil?, invasions?) forced the Israelite tribes to settle down at the beginning of what archaeologists call the Iron Age. This corresponds well with the record in the book of Judges in which the first indication of a settled existence is mentioned in the time of Gideon, who led the nation in about 1200.

Merneptah Stele

Tagged Analysis, Egypt, Exodus-Conquest