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

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

William Dever: The Lost Tomb of Jesus Is A Publicity Stunt

IN THE NEWS

An article in the Washington Post today declares that the claim that the lost tomb of Jesus has been found is only a publicity stunt.

Alan Cooperman, reporting for the Washington Post writes:

Leading archaeologists in Israel and the United States yesterday denounced the purported discovery of the tomb of Jesus as a publicity stunt.

Scorn for the Discovery Channel's claim to have found the burial place of Jesus, Mary Magdalene and -- most explosively -- their possible son came not just from Christian scholars but also from Jewish and secular experts who said their judgments were unaffected by any desire to uphold Christian orthodoxy.

I'm not a Christian. I'm not a believer. I don't have a dog in this fight," said William G. Dever, who has been excavating ancient sites in Israel for 50 years and is widely considered the dean of biblical archaeology among U.S. scholars. "I just think it's a shame the way this story is being hyped and manipulated."

The Discovery Channel held a news conference in New York on Monday to unveil a TV documentary, "The Lost Tomb of Jesus," and a companion book about a tomb that was unearthed during construction of an apartment building in the Talpiyot neighborhood of Jerusalem in 1980.

James Cameron, the filmmaker who explored the wreck of the Titanic and directed an Oscar-winning feature film based on its sinking, is executive producer of the documentary. Its claims are based on six ossuaries, or stone boxes for holding human bones, found in the tomb.

The filmmakers contend that the inscriptions on the boxes say Yeshua bar Yosef (Jesus son of Joseph), Maria (Mary), Yose (Joseph), Matia (Matthew), Mariamene e Mara (Maria the Master) and Yehuda bar Yeshua (Judah son of Jesus). They maintain that "Mariamene e Mara" is Mary Magdalene and that Yehuda bar Yeshua may be her son by Jesus.

Simcha Jacobovici, the film's Israeli-born director, said in a telephone interview yesterday that he commissioned four statistical studies that concluded that the odds of those particular names appearing in a single family tomb from the 1st century are "somewhere between 600 and 2.4 million to one."

Jacobovici also said tests on the patina, or surface residue, of the "James Ossuary," which surfaced in 2002, indicate that it also came from the Talpiyot tomb. Israeli authorities have pronounced the James Ossuary, which purportedly held the bones of a brother of Jesus, a forgery and are prosecuting its owner. Jacobovici, who made a 2003 Discovery Channel film about it, maintains it is real.

Dever, a retired professor of archaeology at the University of Arizona, said that some of the inscriptions on the Talpiyot ossuaries are unclear, but that all of the names are common.

"I've know about these ossuaries for many years and so have many other archaeologists, and none of us thought it was much of a story, because these are rather common Jewish names from that period," he said. "It's a publicity stunt, and it will make these guys very rich, and it will upset millions of innocent people because they don't know enough to separate fact from fiction."

Similar assessments came yesterday from two Israeli scholars, Amos Kloner, who originally excavated the tomb, and Joe Zias, former curator of archaeology at the Israeli Antiquities Authority. Kloner told the Jerusalem Post that the documentary is "nonsense." Zias described it in an e-mail to The Washington Post as a "hyped up film which is intellectually and scientifically dishonest."

Jodi Magness, an archaeologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, expressed irritation that the claims were made at a news conference rather than in a peer-reviewed scientific article. By going directly to the media, she said, the filmmakers "have set it up as if it's a legitimate academic debate, when the vast majority of scholars who specialize in archaeology of this period have flatly rejected this," she said.

Magness noted that at the time of Jesus, wealthy families buried their dead in tombs cut by hand from solid rock, putting the bones in niches in the walls and then, later, transferring them to ossuaries.

She said Jesus came from a poor family that, like most Jews of the time, probably buried their dead in ordinary graves. "If Jesus' family had been wealthy enough to afford a rock-cut tomb, it would have been in Nazareth, not Jerusalem," she said.

Magness also said the names on the Talpiyot ossuaries indicate that the tomb belonged to a family from Judea, the area around Jerusalem, where people were known by their first name and father's name. As Galileans, Jesus and his family members would have used their first name and home town, she said.

"This whole case [for the tomb of Jesus] is flawed from beginning to end," she said.

Read also:

“Scholars Criticize Jesus Documentary” by Karen Matthews.

Dever’s authoritative words should put to rest the claims of the producers of "The Lost Tomb" that this is the tomb of Christ.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: James Camerom, Jesus’Ossuary, The Lost Tomb, Simcha Jacobovici, William Dever