Thursday, July 25, 2024

Excerpt from Raphael Greenberg, The Archaeology of the Bronze Age Levant (2019)

  

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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