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Name: Ken Home: Edmonton, Canada My Blogger Profile Recent Posts Response to Keith Whitelam History in the Bible? Hornblower, Herodotus, and His Sources The Latest Issue of JSOT Biblical Book of the Month Cartledge and Greenwood on Herodotus The Concept of Israel in Judah Van Wees on Herodotus as Historian Did Bush Exist? Revisited The Seminal Influences on My Scholarship Tuesday, November 29, 2005   Afraid of the Evidence? 3 Comments posted by Ken @ 5:30:00 PM I recently contributed a post to Jim West's comment threads on the evidence question in which I cited the archaeology of the Neo-Babylonian period and its convergence with the biblical record. Specifically, I mentioned the Jehoiachin Food Ration Tablet found at the Ishtar Gate in Babylon, the Lachish Letters that have a record of one soldier's preparations for and reflections on the impending invasion, destruction layers in the stratigraphy of several Palestinian sites as well as the material evidence of combat (including implements of war), the Babylonian Chronicle entry for the 597 BCE campaign against Judah, the demographic surveys of the highlands that reveal a dramatic reduction and shift in population, and the archaeology of Mizpah that corroborates its emergence as one of the chief administrative centers of the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods. Shortly after posting this comment, Jim West switched his templates and thus also hid the comments, replacing them with Haloscan commenting. Subsequent to this, he posted a new blog entry in which he concludes by denouncing me. In this most recent blog entry, Jim West also rebuts any value of the Merneptah Stele as proof of the Israel mentioned in the Bible. Which other Israel he envisions to be mentioned on this stele is beyond me? One of his chief criticisms is that the stele declares that this Israel is destroyed and its seed is no more. Jim West believes that it is disingenuous to take the reference to Israel at face value and then regard Merneptah's boast about Israel's destruction as hyperbole. I can only surmise by this objection that Jim West has not spent much time reading ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian reliefs and stelae (which, incidentally, would also explain his incredulous views on the lack of a history of Israel). Anyone with even the most cursory familiarity of such reliefs and stelae knows that these texts, while containing important historical information, are generous exaggerations/inflations of the accomplishments of the king or Pharoah whom they honour. This can hardly stand in the way of the clear and very straightforward identification of Merneptah's Israel with biblical Israel; the burden of proof clearly lies on the skeptics to demonstrate that Merneptah could have meant and in fact did mean another, different Israel of which this would apparently be our only evidence. This burden is all-the-more acute in light of the recent archaeological and ethnicity studies of Ann Killebrew and Robert Miller. Both these archaeologists, who do not appear to have any significant commitments to the veracity of the biblical text and indeed freely disagree with it, carefully evaluate the distribution of sites, pottery typologies, and other material culture and each, in their own ways, draw portraits from this evidence that in many respects complement the portrait of early Israel in the Bible, especially as implied within the book of Judges and a number of other key biblical passages. In particular, Killebrew's "Mixed Multitude Theory" is a cautious, critical, and balanced assessment that reveals the continuities and discontinuities in material culture that point to a new entity of mixed origins in the highlands as well as a clear pattern of migration by groups from the Transjordan moving to the Cisjordan (2005:149-196). Also relevant to this reconstruction are the theories that Donald Redford articulated some time ago in Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times, most particularly some striking correspondences between aspects of the Shasu and biblical Israel. Naturally, our understanding of the ethnogenesis of Israel is fragmentary and incomplete but the recent works of Killebrew and Miller show that progress has been made and that the biblical text, especially in Killebrew's case, can play an important part in achieving that progress. Personally, I believe that one significantly under-investigated area of the biblical text are the geneaologies and, in the archaeology, more deliberate attention to the continuities or discontinuities between Iron I and Iron II culture. Labels: biblical studies | Permanent Link | Donate | Top NetworkedBlogs Blog: anduril.ca Topics:   Follow my blog

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