Ushan's Reviews > The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts

Thanks to the archaeological findings of recent decades, we now know a lot more about the historicity of the Bible than we did 50 years ago. The Patriarchs seem to have never existed, and the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan never to have taken place; the stories about them are full of anachronisms that make sense only around the 7th century BCE: domesticated camels, Egypt fearing an invasion from the east, Edom being a kingdom, Joseph being sold to traders in Arabian goods. Imagine a ballad set in Kievan Rus where Ilya Muromets smokes tobacco and battles Crimean Tatars! The original Hebrews seem to have been hilltop pastoralists who were not ethnically distinct from lowlander Canaanites; their garbage pits contain no pig bones, which means that they did not eat pork; modern Jews who do not eat pork follow a very ancient archeologically attested tradition. There has in fact been a kingdom of Judah ruled by the dynasty of David, and a much richer kingdom of Israel ruled by the dynasty of Omri, which engaged in building projects rivaled only by the building projects of Herod the Great almost a thousand years later; there is no evidence that the two were ever politically unified. In the late 8th century BCE, the Assyrian Empire conquered Israel and deported a minority of its residents elsewhere; it conquered most of Judah, besieged Jerusalem but did not take it. Around 100 years later the Assyrian Empire collapsed, King Josiah of Judah decided to expand into the former kingdom of Israel, and needed an ideological-theological justification for this; it was at his court that the Deuteronomist decided to prevent the falsification of history to the detriment of Judah's interests, and assembled old stories about patriarchs, chiefs and kings into the more-or-less coherent narrative that we now know as the Hebrew Bible.