Sabrina Bonfert reviewed The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein
The Tale of Ancient Israel and Judah
5 stars
Archeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman dissect the Hebrew Bible's tales starting with the myths about the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and end with the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.
For each topic, they discuss the Bible's account of the events, the previous attempts of archeologists to harmonize the archeological data with the biblical account, as well as a description of the revised archeological consensus as of the publication of the book in 2001. Among the way, the authors rehabilitate kings that the Bible decried as heretics, while giving us a fascinating view of how archeological findings are combined to form our theories of ancient civilizations.
While we can reject the historicity of the Exodus and the united monarchy under King David because of the available evidence to the contrary, we do learn a lot about the real history of the divided kingdoms of Israel …
Archeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman dissect the Hebrew Bible's tales starting with the myths about the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and end with the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.
For each topic, they discuss the Bible's account of the events, the previous attempts of archeologists to harmonize the archeological data with the biblical account, as well as a description of the revised archeological consensus as of the publication of the book in 2001. Among the way, the authors rehabilitate kings that the Bible decried as heretics, while giving us a fascinating view of how archeological findings are combined to form our theories of ancient civilizations.
While we can reject the historicity of the Exodus and the united monarchy under King David because of the available evidence to the contrary, we do learn a lot about the real history of the divided kingdoms of Israel and Juda, and how that division can be seen a long time before there even is a people called the Israelites and a language called Hebrew, back to the settlement patters of the hill country in the Early Bronze Age.
The civilization-destroying effects of the Late Bronze Age collapse left the people of 7th century Judah no choice but to paint their history in very broad strokes that gets less accurate as we go further back in time. The rhetorical needs of a country under threat of invasion by the great powers of the Ancient Near East, Egypt, Assyria and Babylon, dictated how that golden age of mythical past needed to be designed.
What really happened under Kings Hezekiah and Josiah? This book opens the curtains to reveal the real history of the prosperous kingdom of Ancient Israel, its ultimate fall to the Assyrians, and how the kingdom of Judah was left over to pick up the scraps. It's a timeless story of joy, determination, struggle, and ultimately failure, ruin, and rebirth.
