King David was a nebbish

Into this incendiary territory steps Finkelstein, a prominent and well-respected Israeli archaeologist. Although his staunchest critics, including William Dever, professor of Near East archaeology and anthropology at the University of Arizona, and Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review, have called him a "minimalist," his defenders scoff at the label. "The Bible Unearthed" does observe that "from a purely literary and archaeological standpoint, the minimalists have some points in their favor," but it concludes that "archaeology has shown that there were simply too many material correspondences between the finds in Israel  and the world described in the Bible to suggest that the Bible was  fanciful priestly literature, written with no historical basis at all."

Nevertheless, Finkelstein is an iconoclast. He established his reputation in part by developing a theory about the settlement patterns of the nomadic shepherd tribes who would eventually become the Israelites, bolstering the growing consensus that they were originally indistinguishable from the rest of their neighbors, the Canaanites. This overturns a key element in the Bible: The Old Testament depicts the Israelites as superior outsiders -- descended from Abraham, a Mesopotamian immigrant -- entitled by divine order to invade Canaan and exterminate its unworthy, idolatrous inhabitants. The famous battle of Jericho, with which the Israelites supposedly launched this campaign of conquest after wandering for decades in the desert, has been likewise debunked: The city of Jericho didn't exist at that time and had no walls to come tumbling down. These assertions are all pretty much accepted by mainstream archaeologists.

Finkelstein's latest and most controversial claim, however, concerns the dating of certain ruins, including those at a site where he co-heads an ongoing excavation: Megiddo. Megiddo is thought to be the location of the final, future battle of Armageddon, but it is also named in the Bible as one of the major provincial capitals in the united kingdom of Israel under the reigns of David and Solomon. When archaeologists discovered the remains of monumental structures at Megiddo in the 1920s and 1930s, they promptly attributed them to Solomon's time. In "The Bible Unearthed," Finkelstein and Silberman present Finkelstein's argument for redating these structures, including the massive "Solomon's Gates" found in several similar cities, to a period about 100 years later, and they give credit for building them to King Ahab, husband of the notorious heathen Jezebel and a ruler much reviled for his apostasy in the Old Testament.

Some of his colleagues find this theory unacceptable. Dever declares that Finkelstein is "the only archaeologist in the world" who advocates the redating. Lawrence Stager, a professor of the archaeology of Israel at Harvard and director of the Harvard Semitic Museum, says "Ninety-five percent of the specialists in the field would disagree with him" and dismisses Phyllis Tribble, a professor of biblical studies who enthusiastically reviewed "The Bible Unearthed" in the New York Times Book Review, as someone who "doesn't know much about the Old Testament and archaeology."

And while Baruch Halpern, a historian who was a co-director of the Megiddo excavation with Finkelstein, describes the book as "excellent" and "challenging," he remains unconvinced by Finkelstein's redating of the Solomonic ruins because the theory relies overmuch on pottery seriation, a technique for dating sites using ceramic remains, which he distrusts. Nevertheless, Halpern expresses surprise at the extent of the ire Finkelstein's theory has evoked. "This touched an incredibly vital nerve ... They can't abide the thought that the consensus might be mistaken. If one of the only absolute anchors between archaeology and the text is removed, they are thoroughly at sea."

Ordinarily, the precise dating of buildings erected 3,000 years ago in a kingdom that long ago passed away into ancient history would preoccupy only a small group of specialists. Once the Bible's involved, though, all bets are off; its influence on contemporary Israeli identity is still tremendous. "It's used as a deed, as an outline of what people are going to do, as a way of proving your genealogy," says Amy Dockser Marcus, former Middle East correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and author of "The View From Nebo: How Archaeology Is Rewriting the Bible and Reshaping the Middle East."

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