King David was a nebbish

Marcus says that Finkelstein is "difficult to dismiss because he's so much an insider in terms of his credentials and background. He's an archaeologist, not a theologian, and he is an Israeli. It's hard to say that someone who was born in Israel and intends to live the rest of his life there is anti-Israeli." In her mind, Finkelstein's work parallels a broader change in Israeli society led by those who, like Finkelstein, were born after the task of state building had been accomplished. "They're not as wedded to the mythology of Israel," she says "Their identities are not as caught up in toeing to the traditional narratives. This group of historians has gone into the archives and done a lot of research and come up with new interpretations of Israel's recent past. Israel Finkelstein is part of that, but he's looking at Israel's ancient past." Marcus calls this group of scholars "new historians"; others have dubbed the trend "post-Zionism."

Here, also, there are striking similarities between contemporary politics and the way ancient history gets studied. Many of the new dating methods used by Finkelstein and others to undermine the historicity of certain Bible stories involve seeing the first Israelites as part of the fabric of Middle Eastern life rather than as a remarkable exception. "The Bible Unearthed" notes that in the 1970s, archaeologists began to use long-term anthropological models, which were built by scholars who compared many cultures to see how civilizations tend to develop along predictable lines. Certain artifacts -- monumental buildings, administrative correspondence, royal chronicles and national scripture like the Bible -- are almost always "a sign of state formation, in which power is centralized in national institutions like an official cult or monarchy."

That kind of state didn't exist in Jerusalem during David and Solomon's time, so Finkelstein and Silberman argue that the Old Testament must have been written (though perhaps "compiled" is a more accurate term) later. They peg a king descended from David, Josiah, who ruled over a much more developed Jerusalem more than 300 years after David, as the one who ordered its transcription. Josiah, according to "Unearthing the Bible," needed a national scripture to cement a strictly monotheistic religious orthodoxy and to promote the idea that only a king of Davidic lineage could reunite the lost empire. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Old Testament is still used to forge a national identity for today's Israel, since according to Finkelstein and Silberman, it was created to do just that in the ancient world.

The Old Testament is also a story about how special Israel is, singled out from its neighbors by God's orders. Archaeology used to mimic that separatism. "For a long time the archaeology of Israel was studied in isolation," says Marcus. "Israel Finkelstein sees modern and ancient Israel as part of the broader Middle East  I consider him part of an emerging common ground. He's an archaeologist starting to look at the past in a different way." Finkelstein, when asked about the comparison to the new historians, replied, "The general atmosphere in this country, and in my generation, is very different now from that of, say, 20 or 50 years ago. There is a strong cultural activity going on here, and part of it is a fresh thinking about the past -- distant and more recent." Techniques like the long-term anthropological models Finkelstein prizes pull ancient Israel and, metaphorically, modern Israel, back into the texture of Middle Eastern life, so it's no wonder they're associated with a new, more pro-peace process current in Israeli culture.

How those views will weather the current faltering of the process and the probable election of hard-liner Ariel Sharon is uncertain. The election of Sharon, who many believe ignited the current intifada when he provocatively visited the Temple Mount, a site sacred to both Jews and Muslims (and who is quoted in the pages of the Jan. 29 issue of the New Yorker saying "the Koran doesn't mention Jerusalem once  In the Bible it is mentioned 676 times"), may reflect a more general retrenchment on the subject of Israel's symbolic underpinnings. Finkelstein remains unfazed by his critics: "I am sure that no educated Israeli or American Jew for that matter, would want me to silence the results of my research. We are an open, democratic society, and we need to face these things -- both on the distant past and on the more recent one. In fact, this makes us a stronger society! And I really don't think -- let me know if I am wrong -- that there is a committee sitting somewhere in, say, Switzerland, and deciding the fate of nations according to historical or biblical research."

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