Israel Finkelstein’s The Forgotten Kingdom invites us to reconsider the archaeology and history of the northern kingdom of Israel in an effort to integrate the most recent textual and archaeological approaches. It is an ambitious work that few would attempt—or be capable of. Such an effort is commendable; this might be the first book-length treatment to try to give us an archaeological and Biblical text-critical synthesis of ancient Israel’s history.
Prior works on the archaeology of ancient Israel, which are now more than 20 years old, largely sought to catalog archaeological finds without rewriting or recasting the accepted historical narrative of the Bible for the Iron Age. Such approaches are unsatisfying for a lack of rigorous engagement with a wide range of methodologies common in Biblical studies. As he explains in the introduction, Finkelstein instead seeks to use archaeology to provide a sense of the historical development of the northern kingdom of Israel (the “forgotten” kingdom of his title), which lost much of its identity to Judah in the Biblical account. To do this, Finkelstein musters not only a wide geographical scope of data, but he also takes a longer historical perspective. He draws heavily on his own personal accomplishments, which are highlighted as “the personal perspective”—not only his excavations and surveys but more recently his “Exact Sciences” research initiative.
At the outset Finkelstein describes what we might call the background of power in the northern highlands. This is an important starting point for Finkelstein’s entire premise, namely the independent character of the northern kingdom of Israel. The underlying goal is to articulate an evolutionary trajectory for Iron Age political organization in the northern highlands that is independent of the traditional understanding of the northern kingdom’s relationship to a United Monarchy of Israel, as depicted in the Biblical narrative, which is centered instead on Jerusalem. Finkelstein reconstructs a so-called Shechem polity during the Late Bronze Age, which is intended to reveal a long historical trajectory of political and socio-economic developments that evolves into the Iron Age kingdom of Israel, long before the appearance of the southern kingdom of Judah.
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The Aarna Letters, a collection of more than 300 Late Bronze Age cuneiform tablets discovered at el-Amarna in Egypt, record the royal correspondence of mid-14th-century pharaohs Amenophis III and his son, Akhenaten, with local rulers of various Canaanite city-states. The letters frequently mention “the land of Shechem” and a character named Labayu, who led an insurgency against Egypt. Israel Finkelstein believes that Labayu ruled Shechem and its territory, which was a powerful polity of the northern highlands long before the southern kingdom of Judah existed. Reviewer Aaron Burke points out that the Amarna letters never explicitly identify Labayu as the ruler of Shechem. Thus this “central tenet” of Finkelstein’s argument collapses.
The Egyptian 14th-century B.C.E. Amarna letters, from a time when Egypt controlled Canaan, play a central role in Finkelstein’s discussion. The problem, however, as Finkelstein recognizes, is that although “the land of Shechem” appears prominently in the Amarna correspondence, it is impossible to identify it with any certainty as the central and strongest polity in the northern highlands, particularly since neither Labayu, the leader of an insurgency against Egyptian rule, nor his sons is ever identified as ruler of Shechem and its territory. Consequently, this central tenet of Finkelstein’s argument in support of the prominence of a polity in the northern highlands (and all of Finkelstein’s speculation therefrom) does not follow from the evidence he adduces. Indeed, it seems that Finkelstein’s Labayu tradition here serves only as a surrogate to support the origin of the Iron Age northern kingdom of Israel. Finkelstein simply uses Labayu to replace the role of the United Monarchy in the tenth century as the origin of Israel (and Judah). This reconstruction, while entirely plausible, does not replace the explanatory framework provided by the Davidic tradition in the Bible. The fact is that we know next to nothing about the northern highlands in the early Iron IIA, as Finkelstein’s own review makes plain.
The textual record for this early period is very limited; therefore, archaeological evidence and a wider regional perspective are essential to the reconstruction Finkelstein is attempting here. Nevertheless, his treatment remains entirely textual. Only passing references are made, for example, to pre-Iron Age settlements at Judahite Shechem, Jerusalem and Hebron, each of which experienced comparable, developmental trajectories as Shiloh, as revealed in their archaeological records. Only Shiloh, which is never identified as a Bronze Age polity and is important only as a cult center in later Biblical tradition, receives any substantive discussion by Finkelstein.4
From the Iron Age I onward, Finkelstein’s discussion centers largely on an acceptance of the lowest version of his famous “low chronology.” For those who may not recognize immediately what is at stake here, to put it simply, if one shifts the dates of archaeological phenomena later in time, one will be required to identify different sets of events to which these phenomena correlate. Consequently, if one cannot accept these dates, there is little basis to accept most of the nuances of Finkelstein’s ensuing analysis. Unfortunately, his chronology continues to rest exclusively on Megiddo, his own site, with very limited acknowledgment of the results of his discussion with Amihai Mazar, Bronk Ramsey and others from sites such as Rehov, Khirbet en-Nahas and Tel Dor. This is strange since the book’s framework otherwise concedes a less-than-fully-realized “low chronology.” Indeed, Finkelstein’s positions in this book are sometimes tortuously maintained in the face of contravening data.5
I conclude by turning to Finkelstein’s persistent minimizing of the role played in the northern kingdom’s development by a historical David and a United Monarchy, however short-lived it may have been. Finkelstein must do this, however, to create a lacuna that can then be filled by the northern kingdom of Israel, despite the absence of evidence for any such process occurring in the northern highlands until the ninth century B.C.E. Since Finkelstein is unable to demonstrate an unequivocal basis for the indigenous origins of political power in the northern highlands, his central argument fails.
Few Biblical archaeology discoveries have attracted as much attention as the Tel Dan inscription, the first historical evidence of King David from the Bible.
Even if one adopts a more limited view of David’s accomplishments than the Bible gives him, he remains a foundational figure of the United Kingdom. Finkelstein’s analysis, both textual and archaeological, cannot be reconciled with a founding Biblical figure (David), whose existence is already corroborated by extra-Biblical inscriptional data, that is, the Tel Dan inscription.b This inscription evidences not only David’s existence but also the dynasty he established.
Concededly, a clear fingerprint of David’s patrimonial kingdom may be elusive, contrary to earlier scholarly expectations, but how is this any less the case for what is lacking in the north to illustrate the legacy of political legitimacy in the northern highlands, as Finkelstein asserts? Finkelstein makes allowances in his reconstruction of an early Iron IIA polity in the north, but he is unwilling to do that for the southern highlands. This is a major weakness of his work.
Although Finkelstein’s greatest career achievement may be the demonstration of the value of hard sciences to traditional Biblical archaeology, in this book he wades deep into the morass of traditional text-critical studies of the Bible only to demonstrate how unsatisfying the results can be. The book is replete with speculative reconstructions that depend on a series of assumptions about chronology and Biblical history that cannot be substantiated. Thus his book lacks an articulated methodology. His effort here to integrate Biblical text-studies with archaeology only reveals both how difficult such an enterprise is and fundamentally how uncertain the results will be. Most of all, it reminds us that we must take a more evenhanded approach to the application of the assumptions and the allowances we make when attempting historical reconstructions of the Biblical periods.
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