Uncovering Israel’s Past

[Geee]

Front Page Magazine:

It seems that many educated liberals who wish Israel didn’t exist are turning to archaeologists to succor their agendas.

 

These archaeologists are called biblical “minimalists,” and loosely affiliate themselves with the “Copenhagen School” of archaeology. They believe that the scientific evidence in the dirt is irrefutable—there was no Moses, there was no Exodus, there was no period of the “Judges,” there was not a Conquest of Caanan by Joshua or anyone else, and there was no glorious “United Monarchy” of King David and Solomon to guide Jewish hopes for the future of Jerusalem. There was no Ark of the Covenant with its Ten Commandments.

 

 

For example, in his 2001 wild bestseller, co-written with Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, Professor Israel Finkelstein argued that “an archaeological analysis of the patriarchal, conquest, judges, and United Monarchy narratives [shows] that while there is no compelling archaeological evidence for any of them, there is clear archaeological evidence that places the stories themselves in a late 7th-century BCE context.” David and Solomon were really “tribal chieftains ruling from a small hill town, with a modest palace and royal shrine.” He has declared that those who disagree with his conclusions are like those “who think the earth is flat. And at that point, I cannot argue with them.”

 

A more stringent Copenhagen-school advocate is Prof. Thomas L. Thompson, once from Detroit and now a Danish subject. Claims Thompson, “The linguistic and literary reality of the biblical tradition is folkloristic in essence.”