This Should Be A Good Read

[Justtristo]

I have read The Bible Unearthed and that is a damn good book. Although it has been a while since I have read it and do need to read it again sometime.

I tend to favor archaeological books because they deal with tangible items rather than the somewhat endless prattle of religious assholes debating the wording in their fucking bible. Ehrman is an exception to that. He deals with actual texts and examines the differences between them....a tactic which pisses off fundies no end.

The trouble with archaeology books is that they can be fucking sleep inducing because archaeologists are not Indiana Jones. They can write pages on a pottery shard that they found. Still, there are some that are exceptions and I will give you those.

1 The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman. Finkelstein is the archaeologist and I suspect Silberman put it into layman's terms. The premise of the book is that the OT is a pile of shit...right up to the 7th century, BC.

2. In Search of Ancient Israel by Philip R. Davies. The premise of this book is that the OT is a pile of shit concocted in the aftermath of the Persian conquest of Babylon. Davies is a bit heavier to wade through than Finkelstein-Silberman but compensates by writing a much shorter book.

3. Who Were The Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From by William G. Dever...who loves long titles. Dever is an odd duck but his writing style is better than most archaeologists. He mainly agrees with Finkelstein on the issues although he quibbles a bit about the founders.

4. Did God Have A Wife by Dever, again. This is a good one once you have a background from the others. Dever's argument...which actually fits in with Finkelstein...is that while the "Israelites" may have arisen in the Eastern Hill Country at the close of the Late Bronze Age there is nothing that suggests they were "Jewish" as we understand the term. In fact, they seem to have been similar to other Canaanites of the period worshipping Yahweh as a kind of local head god with Asherah as his consort. Dever has inscriptions and fertility statuettes to support his theory.

5. David and Solomon by Finkelstein and Silberman. Fills in some of the details left out of Book I. For example... the bible claims that the Egyptian pharaoh Shishak ( Sheshonq I, apparently) invaded Palestine for the express purpose of attacking Jerusalem. Finkelstein points out that Sheshonq's account of the campaign fails to mention attacking Jerusalem but does clearly lay out a campaign to the north (which was always far wealthier than Judah). Sheshonq's campaign also seemed to have been little more than a raid with no lasting effect but that is beside the point. IN any case, there is a clear break between the biblical account which has Jerusalem as the target and Sheshonq's account in which he does not even seem to know he attacked the town.

6. The View from Nebo by Amy Dockser Marcus. Marcus is not an archaeologist herself but has compiled a nice little book of recent archaeological finds in particular some recent evidence about how well the "Jews" were doing in Babylon. It does tend to support Davies' vision.

That should keep you busy for a while on the OT.

On the New Testament, in addition to Ehrman, try The Myth of Nazareth by Rene Salm. Like Marcus, he is not an archaeologist but seems willing to wade through archaeological studies to support the notion that Nazareth did not exist in the early first century AD.

If you don't mind reading on computers, PM an e-mail address and I'll send you the 3 books of Ehrman's that I've got.

Then....in a completely unrelated field....there is 1491 by Charles Mann and discusses the situation in the Americas prior to Columbus' landing.

[Minimalist]

There's another book called The Quest for the Historical Israel. It's a series of moderated essays by Finkelstein and another Israeli archaeologist, Amihai Mazar. Mazar, not to be confused with his cousin Eilat, seems to have come around to Finkelstein's point of view on the "centrist" position but even more to the point he agrees with Dever about the henotheistic nature of Judahite society in the period before the Babylonian assault.

I didn't want to overwhelm Summer by making the list too long but if you've already read Bible Unearthed than this one is well worth your while.

What happened between the publication Bible Unearthed and Quest for Historical Israel is that C14 surveys which not only confirmed Finkelstein's "low chronology" but actually made it a bit lower than even he thought, were published in Radiocarbon Magazine.

Dever famously commented a few years ago "I began writing to oppose the minimalists and ended up joining them." The C14 dating survey was apparently the last straw for real scientists.

Shithead bible-thumpers, of course, can never be dissuaded.

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

Min; I seem to remember seeing something recently to the effect that( if he existed at all) King David was probably only a village headman. IE there was no Davidic kingdom. The source of the proposition was a female archaeologist,talking about a recent dig. Sorry I don't remember any more.

[Minimalist]

Excavations and surveys in Judah have found that in the 9th and 10th centuries...the time of any "David" or "Solomon" Jerusalem was a miserable little village of less than 1,000 people. Those surveys also showed that Judah was a poverty-stricken region of perhaps 20,000 people...mainly herders...with a few settlements scatttered across the landscape.

There is no way in hell such an insignificant region could have conquered any sort of empire. In fact, it wasn't until they obtained a measure of wealth and population under the auspices of the Assyrian Empire that they became targets for other nations. Before that, they weren't worth conquering.

Finkelstein goes into all this.