William G. Dever and the Existence of Solomon’s Kingdom

In a recent lecture at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, archaeologist William G. Dever defended the existence of an Israelite state in Palestine during the 10th century B.C., the biblical era of Solomon's reign.

The following in an excerpt from Dever’s lecture:

"Tonight, I want to talk about the age of Solomon, but before I do that, I want to set it up by telling you something about a school of European biblical scholarship," Dever said. "These people call themselves revisionists because they are rewriting the history of ancient Israel, but when they finish, there is no history. They call themselves revisionists. I call them nihilists."

According to Dever, the revisionist scholars deny that an Israelite united monarchy, like the biblical kingdom that flourished under Solomon, ever existed. Dever contested this claim, arguing that the archaeological evidence confirms the existence of a centralized Israelite state in 10th century Palestine.

According to a "wonderful, detailed description" in 1 Kings 9:15-17, the Egyptian pharaoh attacked and destroyed the city of Gezer, Dever said. The pharaoh then gave the city as a dowry to his daughter when she married Solomon. The passage then states that Solomon fortified or refortified four sites: Hazor, Megiddo, Gezer and Jerusalem.

"Wouldn't it be wonderful if we had archaeological evidence from those sites for an early stage? Well, we do," Dever said. "And what do you suppose the revisionists make of this evidence? They just ignore it, because it is inconvenient for their theories."

Dever reported that excavations, especially at Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer, have uncovered "monumental architecture" that cannot be explained without reference to a centralized government. The architecture of each of these cities is adapted to topography for strategic military advantage, but all the cities show the same structural patterns, such as six-chambered gates, double or casemate fortification systems, similar palace structures and Phoenician masonry (according to 1 Kings, Solomon utilized Phoenician craftsmen in his building projects).

These architectural structures can be dated to the 10th century B.C., Dever said, with reference to stratigraphy, ceramic typology and ancient Egyptian chronology. This process is aided by the discovery of destruction levels, filled with rubble and showing evidence of fires "so fierce that it melted the limestone and it flowed down like lava." According to Dever, the destruction can be attributed to the military invasions of the Egyptian Pharaoh Sheshonq, that is, the biblical Shishak (1 Kings 14 and 2 Chronicles 12).

"At one time, there stood a monumental Egyptian inscription at the site of Megiddo celebrating the destruction by Shishak," Dever said. Shishak was the first pharaoh in the 22nd Egyptian dynasty, and archaeological evidence shows that he raided Palestine in the late 10th century B.C. Amid the rubble of destruction, archaeologists also have discovered the hand-burnished pottery characteristic of the 10th century. According to Dever, this implies that the monumental architecture that Shishak and his army destroyed "must have been built a generation or so earlier -- and that places us precisely in the middle of the reign of Solomon."

"Of course, the revisionists argue that, 'Well, you've never found anything from the 10th century, nothing monumental in Jerusalem.' That's true, because we never were able to excavate [in Jerusalem]," Dever said. Jerusalem was the fourth city that Solomon refortified, and it was the center of his kingdom. Despite the lack of access to the archaeological evidence that lies below modern Jerusalem, Dever argued that biblical descriptions of Solomon's Temple resemble other 10th-century temples in the Middle East.

"All the descriptions in the Hebrew Bible," Dever said, "make good sense in the light of what we know about ancient architecture."

Revisionist scholars also contend that a centralized state could not have existed in 10th century Israel because literacy was not widespread, and the knowledge of reading and writing is necessary for the administration of a kingdom. Archaeological evidence like the Gezer calendar, however, has shown that even in rural areas young boys were learning to read during the 10th century and earlier, Dever said.

To read the article in its entirety as published in the Baptist Press, click here.

To learn more about Southwestern Seminary's involvement in biblical archaeology, visit http://www.swbts.edu/ or http://www.gezerproject.org/.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary


Tags: Archaeology, Solomon, Minimalists, William Dever

Mario Liverani and the History of Ancient Israel

Israel’s History and the History of Israel by Mario Liverani. London: Equinox Publishing Ltd, 2003. xx + 427 pp. $60.00. ISBN 1-904768-76-8.

Until recently, most pastors and seminary students were exposed to the history of Israel through books that described and summarized the biblical events as they appear in the Bible. One good example is John Bright’s, A History of Israel (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1980), a classical work which summarizes the history of Israel from the period of the patriarchs to the rise of Judaism.

In the past two or three decades, the method of writing a history of Israel has shifted from using the biblical text as a basic outline to develop a history of Israel to an approach that begins with the premise that the biblical text has been highly influenced by an ideology of the post-exilic community of the Persian period.

This volume by Mario Liverani, professor of ancient-Near-East history at the University of Rome, summarizes the views and perspectives of this new approach to understanding Israel’s history. Liverani believes that most of the history of Israel found in the Old Testament is a creation of the post-exilic community written to justify the resettlement of the people who returned from the exile in Babylon during the Persian period.

Liverani’s book is divided into two major parts, with an intermezzo. Part I, which is composed of nine chapters, deals with “The Normal History” of Israel. This section uses the results of archaeology to discuss what was actually happening in Israel and in the nations surrounding Israel during the Iron Age. The Intermezzo discusses “The Axial Age,” “The Diaspora,” and “The Abandoned Landscape.” The Axial Age is his discussion of several events in the sixth century that contributed to the formation of Israel’s basic religious traditions.

Part II of the book deals with what Liverani calls “The Invented History of Israel.” The history of Israel from the days of the patriarchs to the end of the United Monarchy was invented to justify the occupation of the land by the “returnees,” the people who returned from exile after the decree of Cyrus, king of Persia, in 537 BCE.

According to Liverani, the biblical text is not actual history, but it is historiography, an ideological rereading of the past in order to under gird political realities in post-exilic Judah. This invented history served as a strategy to implement a program of national recovery at the end of the exile. The result of this process of national recovery was the rewriting of the history of Israel based on the text of the Deuteronomic history that begins with the exodus and the conquest and includes the period of the monarchy.

Liverani believes that the first section of this history, from the conquest under Joshua up to the united monarchy under Solomon, is mostly folkloristic and legendary, chronologically vague, and historically not very reliable. Then, from the divided monarchy after the death of Solomon until the deportation of Judah in 587 BCE, the historians had official documentation at their disposal which proved to be reliable sources of information.

The returnees are called “Zionists.” They were the elite who had been deported while the remainees were the poor people who were left behind to cultivate the land after the fall of Jerusalem. The returnees called the remainees “the people of the land” and used this pejorative term to define the people who had neither been deported nor emigrated as well as the non-deported Israelites from the North.

According to Liverani, the biblical stories are foundational myths written to justify the legal possession of the land: the returnees had property rights but the remainees actually occupied the land. Since the returnees did not have a justification to take possession of the land from those who occupied it, they needed authoritative traditions assigning possession of Canaan to the tribes of Israel and identifying the returnees, not the remainees, as the legitimate heirs of those tribes and of the promises to the patriarchs.

The foundational myth most appropriate to show the rights of the returnees were the promise made to the patriarchs and the conquest of the land. Thus, the archetypical migration of Abraham from Babylon illustrates the plight of the returnees from Babylon. The migration of Abraham reflects the situation the returnees would encounter as they returned to Canaan. The promise Yahweh made to Abraham represents God’s legitimation of the returnees to take possession of the land of Canaan, as discussed in Chapter 13: “Returnees and Remainees: The Invention of the Patriarchs.”

Although the returnees had rights to the land, for them to actually acquire the land in its totality, they needed another model. The Exodus from Egypt serves as the foundational myth that provides legitimation of the possession of Canaan by the arrival of a group of people from the outside that seek to conquer the land in fulfillment of the divine promise. The conquest of Canaan serves as the foundational myth for the occupation of the land by the returnees during the Persian period. Joshua becomes the archetypical leader in the post-exilic community. (See Chapter 14: “Returnees and Aliens: The Invention of the Conquest.”)

Liverani’s history of Israel is a typical example of the minimalist approach to the biblical text, understanding that the Bible does not provide any reliable historical information for the reconstruction of the history of ancient Israel. Rather, Israel’s history was an invention of the post-exilic Jewish community. They also believe that since the biblical narratives do not provide reliable information for reconstructing the history of ancient Israel, scholars must rely on evidence provided by archaeological discoveries and on information derived from anthropological and sociological models.

Liverani’s book provides valuable information synthesizing the work of archaeologists, but it is a book for scholars who are interested in the academic discussion of the origins of ancient Israel and the formation of the biblical traditions. The minimalist view may be an acceptable issue for discussion in academic circles, but their views have nothing to say to pastors and seminary students who accept as a matter of fact that God has entered human history and made his presence known in the historical events that gave birth to biblical Israel.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Note: This book review was published in the Review and Expositor 105 (Summer 2008), 511-513.

To subscribe to the Review and Expositor, visit R&E Home Page.

Tags: Ancient Israel, Mario Liverani, Minimalists

Mario Liverani and the History of Israel

During the Christmas break I finished reading Mario Liverani’s Israel’s History and the History of Israel (London: Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2003). Last week I finished writing a review of the book that I will submit to a major journal for publication. The review is also part of the commitment I made to Chris Brady at Targuman to submit a scholarly work for publication during the Biblical Studies Academic Writing Month. The content of the present post is different from the review I wrote for publication and different from my previous post on Liverani’s book.

Liverani’s book is divided into three sections. In Part I, Liverani presents a description of the different archaeological periods of Israel’s history. In this section, which he calls “The Normal History,” Liverani studies the textual and archeological evidence that contribute to the proper understanding of what was actually happening in Israel and in the countries that form the land of the Bible during a time period that includes Palestine in the Late Bronze Age up to the Babylonian invasion and the exile of Judah in 587 BCE.

The second section is an Intermezzo, a section in which he discusses events that were happening in other parts of the world in the sixth century BCE, a time which he calls “The Axial Age.” In the Intermezzo, Liverani also discusses the diaspora and the myth of the empty land.

The third section, Part II of his book, Liverani discusses the “Invented History of Israel.” By invented history, Liverani means the ideological rereading and rewriting of the Deuteronomic history in order to undergird the political realities of post-exilic Judah. According to Liverani, the rewriting of Israel’s history served as a strategy to implement a program of national recovery that would provide political and religious legitimacy for the people who made a commitment to return and re-colonize Judah after the edict of Cyrus, king of Persia, allowed the exiles to return home.

Liverani makes a distinction between two groups of Jews in post-exilic Judah. Those Jews who were returning home from exile were the “returnees.” The returnees are also called “Zionists.” Those Jews who did not go into exile and remained in the land are called “the remainees.” The remainees are called “the people of the land” by the returnees. This pejorative term was used by those returning from exile to describe all those Jews who did not go into exile.

According to Liverani, the returnees needed a legal justification to take possession of the land that belonged to the remainees. Since the remainees occupied the land, the returnees needed an authoritative tradition assigning ownership of the land of Canaan to the tribes of Israel. This tradition needed to identify the returnees as the legitimate heirs of the land and declare that the remainees should be dispossessed of their land.

Thus, according to Liverani, those Jews returning from exile rewrote the Deuteronomic history and created a set of foundational myths that legitimized the claim of the returnees as the legitimate heirs of the promises of God.

The migration of Abraham from Babylon to Canaan and the promise of God to give Abraham the land of Canaan as an inheritance became the foundational myth to legitimize the returnees’ claim that God brought them from Babylon and gave them the land of Canaan. This idea is covered in Chapter 13: “Returnees and Remainees: The Invention of the Patriarch.”

Although the myth of the patriarchs gave the returnees a promise of the land, they needed another authoritative tradition that allowed them to actually take possession of the land. Thus, the foundational myth of the Exodus provided the returnees with the legitimation for a group of people from the outside to take possession of the land. The foundational myth of the Conquest provided the returnees with the legitimation to take the land from the remainees by force, if necessary. This idea is developed in Chapter 14: “Returnees and Aliens: The Invention of the Conquest.”

Thus, to Liverani, the history of Israel as presented in the biblical text is an invented history. He also deals with “The Invention of the Judges,” The Invention of the United Monarchy,” “The Invention of the Solomonic Temple,” and “The Invention of the Law.” In describing the aim of his work, Liverani wrote:

In the present work I have tried to write– at least in the form of a first draft–a new version of the history of Israel, starting from the results of textual and literary criticism as well as from data collected by archaeology and epigraphy. In doing so I felt free to change the Biblical plot, while keeping a properly historical approach.

Liverani’s history of Israel is a typical example of a minimalist approach to the history of Israel. The minimalists deny this historicity of the biblical narratives. Biblical minimalists say that the history of the patriarchs, the exodus, the conquest, the giving of the law, together with the historicity of Moses and Joshua and the existence of a united monarchy under David and Solomon are post-exilic inventions that were created to justify the political and religious aspirations of a group of Zionists who desired to take possession of the land from of group of people who had lived in the land for almost a century. So, the minimalists feel “free to change the Biblical plot” in order to sustain their presuppositions.

To biblical minimalists, the biblical narratives reflect a rewriting of history that created an ideal past in order to justify the realities as they existed in the seventh and six centuries BCE. To many minimalists, these stories were first created by the people who were involved in the reforms of Josiah in the seventh century. Others believe that some of these stories were “invented” in the sixth and fifth centuries to provide political and religious legitimacy to the post-exilic community of Yehud.

However, if Abraham, Moses, and the patriarchs never existed and if these stories were “invented” in the sixth century, how can we explain the mention of the names of some of those invented people in the prophetic literature of the eighth century?

For instance, in the eighth century BCE, the prophet Micah mentions Moses, Aaron, and Miriam and the exodus from Egypt (Micah 6:4). The Exodus from Egypt is also mentioned by Amos (Amos 2:10; 3:1) and Hosea (11:1) in the eighth century. In addition, Amos speaks of Israel sojourning forty years in the wilderness (Amos 2:10). All the eighth century prophets, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah, mention the patriarch Jacob.

In the Elijah narratives, a source most scholars believe to be independent from the Deuteronomist, when the prophet Elijah (ninth century BCE) seeks to go back to the source of Israelite religion, he goes back to Horeb, the Northern name for Mount Sinai (1 Kings 19:8).

If Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob never existed, then it is almost impossible to understand Jesus’ words when talking about the resurrection: “And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living” (Matthew 22:31-32). How can God be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and how can they be alive when Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob never existed?

The problem with the minimalists is that they use the same approach atheists use when they deny the existence of God. Atheists say to theists: “God does not exist. Now, prove to me that God exists.” Minimalists say that these stories are invented; now the burden of proof is with those who say that they are historical.

James Hoffmeier, in his book Israel in Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 10, talks about the insistence of minimalists that a claim made in the Bible must be corroborated before the statement can be considered historical. Hoffmeier wrote: “[The] assertion that the burden of proof does not rest on the critical (minimalist) historian has become the prevailing attitude in biblical scholarship for the past several decades.”

The matter of the historicity of the biblical text is what prompts the debate between those who are called maximalists and those who are called minimalists. The minimalists accuse the maximalists of accepting the historicity of the biblical text because they presuppose divine intervention in human affairs. They demand proof of the historicity of the events narrated by the text. On the other hand, the maximalists accuse the minimalists of being skeptics and radical ideologues. They say that the minimalists reject Israel’s understanding of its own religious traditions as irrelevant because their views are based primarily on a literary interpretation of the text.

I would like to put the burden of proof on the other side. For once, I would like to see the minimalists prove that Moses did not exist.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Abraham, Mario Liverani, Maximalists, Minimalists, Moses, Patriarchs

Bill Dever Criticizes Minimalists

In an article published in the Jewish News Weekly of Northern California, William Dever criticized scholars who have adopted a minimalist view of the biblical traditions and mounted a strong defense of ancient Israel. Dever made his criticism during a recent presentation at the Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco.

The following are a few excerpts of Dever’s presentation:

“Dever verbally buried a group of academics he referred to as “secular fundamentalists.”

According to Dever, the group is intent on reducing ancient Israel to “foundation myths,” and derives its impetus from a less-than-scholarly locus.

“Most of these people are not Jewish,” said Dever in response to a question after the event. “They are largely Christian theologians who come from a place [northern Europe] that’s been infected with anti-Semitism for centuries, and their ideas reflect that. They’re also almost universally anti-American.”

Dever, who wrote “What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It?” said that the work was largely a response to the group of theologians, who Dever says have called him a “Nazi” on numerous occasions.

Dever’s spirited dismissal of the group wasn’t surprising given his enthusiasm for the earth that he has excavated for almost a half-century. The professor, who sits on the editorial boards of groups ranging from the American Journal of Archaeology to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Near Eastern Archaeology, commenced his talk with a personal tribute the city.

“Fifty years ago this summer, I first visited Jerusalem, and it changed my life,” Dever said. “Jerusalem looms large as a home to me — both spiritually and temporally,” he continued, adding that no city in the world can claim to be as archaeologically complex as Jerusalem.

“But against all odds, Jerusalem prevailed, and archaeology gives the lie to people who insist that there were no ancient Jewish cities,” Dever remarked. “Archaeology brings the Bible to life in the most vivid way possible — and that’s its ultimate beauty.”

“In archaeology, if something is too good to be true — it probably is,” he said.

“One of the surest ways we can determine that we’re dealing with ancient Jewish ruins is the absence of pig bones,” Dever said. “It seems that Jewish prohibition against pork goes back a long way.”

Read Dever’s remarks by clicking here.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

UPDATE: Read Jim West's criticism of Dever here.

Tags: Archaeology, Minimalists, William Dever

Ben-Tor, Archaeology, and the Bible

In an article published in NewsMax.com, archaeologist Amnon Ben-Tor gives his views on archaeology, the Bible, and the controversy between maximalists and minimalists. The following is an excerpt taken from the article:

On one side are the so-called biblical minimalists, who argue that the Bible is simply a series of narratives with an agenda and is no basis for history. On the other side are the maximalists, closely allied with creationists, who take the Bible as literal and irrefutable historical fact.

Most archaeologists, however, fall somewhere in between these two extremes, including even those who use the Bible as a historical guidebook for their excavations, such as Israel's leading archaeologist, Amnon Ben-Tor.

"The two claims of the biblical minimalists, that ‘there is no way of knowing' and that the Bible represents an agenda, do not explain anything," says Ben-Tor, who holds the chair of renowned Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

"Records were kept, which were studied by historians of their time, which often paralleled the biblical narrative."

For one thing, many of the events, names of monarchs, and identification of places in the Bible are confirmed by nonbiblical Iron Age sources -- texts found through archaeological surveys and excavations within the area of historical Judah and Israel, and in excavations in neighboring states. But materials dating to the previous Bronze Age are rare.

Archaeologists such as Ben-Tor and Cooley operate under the assumption that "absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence." In other words, while the Bible tends to be considered guilty until proven innocent as a historical record of ancient events, these biblical scholars estimate that only about 2 percent of the potential archaeological material has been found and worked on.

"The biblical minimalists have suddenly ‘discovered' that … the Bible has a theological agenda, which supposedly makes the Bible a basis that cannot be used as a historiography reference," says Ben-Tor.

"The best way to refute the contention of biblical nonobjectivity is that there is no such thing as objective historiography. All historiography has an agenda. Read 10 books about Vietnam and you will get 10 versions of what happened. The issue at hand is to use the Bible as a reference, and to compare it with all other evidence available."

It is a good article. Read the article in its entirety by clicking here.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Archaeology, Amnon Ben-Tor, Maximalists, Minimalists