Because of the strong link between pre-classical
archaeology in Israel and the study of biblical history and texts, research
priorities in Israeli academia have shifted over the past seven decades,
accommodating the shifting frontier between “reliable” and “mythical”
historical traditions. In the first three or four decades of nationhood, the
biblical archaeology paradigm established by W.F. Albright and his school was
dominant among Israeli archaeologists. Under this paradigm, it was asserted
that biblical history, extra-biblical texts and archaeology could be reconciled
from the beginning of the second millennium BCE onward, and that this
reconciliation could best be effected through meticulous stratigraphic
excavations and the creation of cultural typologists at large archaeological
mounds. The first major tell excavation in Israel was conducted by Yigael Iadin
at Hazor (Tell el-Qedah) in 1955-1958 and its results were considered to
confirm a portrait of second-millennium Canaan that melded biblical and extra-biblical
sources into a consistent picture of “the Patriarchal period.” (B. Mazar, The
World History of the Jewish People, Vol. II: Patriarchs [New York:
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1964]) The late second-millennium conquest
of Canaan by Joshua was also considered by Yadin and others as historically
accurate and archaeologically verifiable. In recent decades, however, a
critical shift in biblical-historical combined with new interpretations of
ancient settlement patterns based on extensive surveys (conducted largely in
the occupied West Bank) have led many scholars to relegate both the patriarchal
narrative and the Israelite conquest to the status of historical fable. The
frontier between conservative and deconstructionist archaeologists/historians—that
is, between those who uphold the historical authenticity of traditions relating
to the Israelite ethnogenesis and state formation and those who reject it—has
shifted, for the most part, to the first millennium, leaving the second
millennium outside the mainstream debate and in a state of relative
intellectual quiescence (the third millennium, or Early Bronze Age, had never
been seen as more than a prelude to biblical history). (W. G. Dever, What
Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? [Grand Rapids,
Mich.: Eerdmans, 2001]; I. Finkelstein and N. Silberman, The Bible Unearthed
[New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002]) Nonetheless, a strong tradition of
data accumulation and descriptions (excavation, archiving and publication)
continues to contribute incrementally to the archaeological reservoir, while
interpretive approaches remain underdetermined and tend to combine political
historical, historical geography and elements of processual archaeology’s
social and geographical theory. (Raphael Greenberg, The Archaeology of the
Bronze Age Levant: From Urban Origins to the Demise of City-States, 3700-1000
BCE [Cambridge World Archaeology; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2019], 10-11)
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