The central argument of The Bible Unearthed, a book published in 2001, is that the Bible was written in the seventh century BC, centuries after the widely accepted dates, as a manifesto of a nationalist movement, headed by King Josiah, and that its wording is clearly designed (and conveniently manipulated) to reach the Judaist audience of that era. The first thing to say about its authors, Finkelstein and Silberman, is that by imitating Josiah they wrote a book to win the praise of their contemporaries, or some of them, such as Kamala Harris, Noam Chomsky and Bernie Sanders.
The authors contend that Josiah and his scribes manipulated a series of earlier accounts, essentially to give an idea of great antiquity to a political document of the seventh century BC written in Judah (the southern kingdom), when Israel (the northern kingdom) had ceased to exist, and whose doctrinal core is the Book of Deuteronomy, which stems from the Book of the Law discovered in the restoration works of the Temple of Jerusalem, in 622 BC, under the reign of Josiah.
If the hypothesis of Finkelstein and Silberman is right, it would have very important implications because it would mean that the Patriarchs did not exist, that the Exodus did not take place, that Joshua’s Conquest was not true, and that David and Solomon did not exist.
Finkelstein and Silberman’s arguments are based on hypotheses from NON-PARADIGMATIC disciplines, such as archaeology, economics, and history. These disciplines, unlike physics, chemistry, or mathematics, which give rise to single truths (generally accepted paradigms as defined by Thomas Kuhn), and are unanimously assumed by all the specialists of each discipline in question. NON-PARADIGMATIC disciplines give rise to conflicting explanations, not unanimously accepted by specialists, and produce shaky explanations, but they are flexible, ideal for constructing chimerical stories, so much to the liking of active politicians and of the general public that follows current fashions.
Our authors’ primary archaeological argument is that the Israelites were actually Canaanites, who were shepherds in the central hills of Israel. When the inhabitants of the bordering coastal plain (the Shfela) stopped producing cereal, due to a systemic crisis, the nomadic herders of the hills were forced to produce their own cereal and become farmers, transforming the hills and highlands they occupied in central Israel, from north to south, into farmland for sedentarised populations. This phenomenon occurred, as we are told, at three historical moments when the Shfela (the cereal plain) stopped producing cereal, in the Early Bronze Age (3500 to 2000 BC), the Middle Bronze Age (2000 to 1150 BC) and the Early Iron Age (1150 to 900 BC). According to Finkelstein and Silberman, the use of the then novel extensive archaeology (which uses territorial administrative units, such as a municipality, as a framework for action, and the exploration proceeds to the inspection of the land that focuses on points of special archaeological potential) is what led to the hypothesis of shepherds turning into opportunistic farmers in the central hills of Israel (what is now Samaria and Judea).
In fact, Finkelstein and Silberman use a very questionable idea from an already outdated approach to archaeology, which supports the linear idea that we were first nomadic shepherds and then we naturally became sedentary farmers. Göbekli Tepe, and other similar discoveries, have debunked this school of thought and reconfirm the idea that sedentism and agriculture are historically unrelated processes, and that it was the advent of organised religion and places of worship that preceded and led to sedentism. Other archaeological schools of thought, ignored by our authors, highlight the millennia-long resistance of nomads to becoming farmers, for the simple reason that being a farmer requires much more work than being a pastoral nomad. It is also generally accepted that “new and inexperienced farmers” from nomadic livestock farming initially achieve very poor yields in cereal crops for long periods of time. Finally, the idea that nomads become farmers is a historical chimera as expressed by the Berber saying “Raiding is our agriculture“, cited by James C. Scott in Against the Grain.
However, there is a fact demonstrated by extensive archaeology, which neither Finkelstein, nor Silberman, nor Ilan Papé have been able to hide, and which, even when mentioning it, they fail to explain. In the bones of domestic animals recovered in excavations in the central mountain ranges of Israel (Judea and Samaria), there is no trace of PIGS being eaten or raised. In the same historical period, the Early Iron Age (1150 to 900 BC), excavations in the settlements of their Philistine, Ammonite, and Moabite neighbours show a surprisingly high proportion of pig bones. Why do our authors fail to explain this unparalleled fact in global archaeology? Obviously, neither Finkelstein, nor Silberman, nor Ilan Papé are interested in this archaeological investigation, which leads to very embarrassing conclusions.
The Bible and The Iliad are the founding documents of Western Civilisation, and in our authors’ hypothesis they were written very close in time, around 740 BC for Homer’s Iliad (Robin Lane Fox) and the 7th century BC for Josiah’s Bible. The Iliad is an epic by an illiterate person (Homer), created for illiterate people (the Greeks of 740 BC) and intended to be recited (not read) by professional memorisers on the occasion of religious festivities or to armies gathered before a battle. The mere existence of this literary masterpiece created by an illiterate for other illiterates invalidates another of the fallacious arguments of Finkelstein and Silverman, the fact that “the existence of widespread literacy in Judah in the seventh century BC” as a prerequisite for the creation of the Bible by Josiah and his scribes.
Again, we are faced with an interested simplification on the part of the authors, who over and over again talk about “the existence of widespread literacy” in Judah in the seventh century, but never explain what they mean by literacy. The question of literacy is more complex, because it is a question of degrees of literacy, ranging from the ability to read a few simple words to the ability to write a long text. In addition, it is possible to learn how to read without bothering to learn how to write. The hypothesis proposed in the book THE CHOSEN FEW by Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein, in an intuition already proposed by Max Weber, is much more solid than the Jewish diaspora, due to a series of opportunist decisions related to the compulsory education of all Jewish males, which were adopted during the struggle for power among the Pharisees following the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans. In other words, four centuries after Josiah is when widespread literacy really took hold in the land of Israel. This was full literacy aimed at reading and understanding complex texts, and above all at these texts being read in public. Let’s not forget that the most widespread phobia is that of public speaking.
If David and Solomon did not exist, to whom can we attribute the impressive palatial constructions of Hazor, Megiddo, Jezreel, Gezer, and Samaria? Our authors, based on more recent archaeological dating methods, unhesitatingly attribute such monumental constructions to the OMRIDES (Ahab, Jehu, Joab, and Jeroboam II) and place them in the ninth century BC. And taking an epistemological death leap, they attribute this surge in monumental constructions to the unparalleled wealth of the northern kingdom. And they say verbatim that “Israel was definitely the state with the highest population density in the Levant“. And that “it grew to be one of the richest, most cosmopolitan, and most powerful in the region“.
How do Finkelstein and Silberman explain this Golden Age of the Omride Dynasty? Well, they affirm, in words more typical of Warren Buffet or Alan Greenspan than of Sargon II or Sennacherib, that Israel specialised in winemaking, the production of oil, and horse rearing “as it was linked to a global economy” (they refer to the economic sphere of the Assyrian Empire, its taxes, and its RAPINE). And in an reasoning that is unbecoming of any sensible economist, they infer that these raw materials unleashed a kind of “irrational exuberance” in the northern kingdom to which the prophet Hosea referred when he decried those who “make a treaty with Assyria and send olive oil to Egypt“. Evidently, they choose Hosea and not another prophet, because it gives credibility and does not contradict the central argument of the book.
The economic reasonings for the wealth of the Omrides do not hold, from the point of view of economic science itself, or of archaeology, or of common sense. James C. Scott explains in the archaeological site of Uruk (Level IV), referring to the period 3300 to 3100 BC, with a cereal-based economy much less sophisticated than that of the Omrides, that countless writing tablets were discovered with lists and more lists referring to grain shipments, to a number of workers, and to taxes. Where are the archaeological testimonies from the 9th century BC, much more recent, of Omride bureaucracy, of the richest, most cosmopolitan and powerful country of the Levant, and of the “exports” and taxes that sustained the palaces of Hazor, Megiddo, Jezreel, Gezer, and Samaria?
Any inhabitant of Spain, Greece, Italy or Türkiye knows that winemaking, the production of oil, or horse rearing give rise to low population densities in rural regions. And that it is the production of cereals that allows for greater densities of agricultural population per square kilometre. Our authors’ claim that the Northern Kingdom “had the highest population density in the Levant” is simply unsustainable.
Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman wrote a very enjoyable book to read, but with little democratic depth, as there are very few occasions when they present us with arguments that contradict their central hypothesis. Perhaps the lowest, most woke point of the book is this sentence: “the Bible arose from clear political, social, and spiritual conditions and was shaped by the creativity and vision of extraordinary WOMEN and men“. WOMEN? What kind of women, pregnant women or transexuals? There are no women among the writers of the Bible, or the Iliad, or Odyssey, or the Epic of Gilgamesh, or Ramayana, or the Aeneid, or the Poem of the Cid, or the Song of Roland. Our ancestors, both nomadic and sedentary, lived in a world in constant competition, due to the scarcity of resources. Patriarchy proved to be efficient, with both men and women accepting its values as fair. The absence of almost any rebellion against patriarchal values in historical sources, spanning four continents and five millennia, is deafening, as Ian Morris puts it. Why then this obviously false reference to “the creativity and vision of extraordinary women” among the Bible scribes? Maybe the woke toll?
In the words of Bernard Rimé, humanity has no means other than the emotions of the individuals that compose it to ensure the preservation of its constructions. This is how we understand the hypothesis built after the discovery of Göbekli Tepe, that it was organised religion that catalysed the shift from hunter-gatherers to farmers. This hypothesis, if true, totally dismisses The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Asher Silberman Silverman, leaving it as a testimony to the historical success of the Jewish people, as anti-Semitism is. Like COVID-19, it is a testimony to the historical success of the human being as a species.