Chipping Away at the Past
By Abraham Rabinovich
jpost.com
<<< The conventional view of Israel's formation - which he had previously shared - saw the Israelites settling in the land in the late 13th century BCE. About two centuries later (1000 BCE), King David mounts the throne of Judah and incorporates the 10 northern tribes, Israel, into a united monarchy. He and his son, Solomon, rule for about 70 years, the kingdom splitting in two with Solomon's death.
The potsherds, however, told a different story. Israel was seen to have been a well-developed state by the early ninth century BCE, but Judah contained only half a dozen inhabited locations, all tiny, from the 10th century BCE to the eighth century BCE. Its major site, Jerusalem, was distinctly unimpressive.
"It was a small, poor, unassuming highland stronghold, not very different from other hill country [settlements], as my colleague David Ussishkin has shown," says Finkelstein. This was strange for the capital of a united kingdom whose northern half, Israel, boasted a palatial government center in Samaria, sizable fortified sites, and a well-developed hierarchy of small, medium, and large settlements that indicated a politically and economically mature entity. It was stranger still considering that Jerusalem was supposed to be the political and administrative center of what the Bible describes as an empire stretching from the Euphrates in today's Iraq to the border of Egypt.
What the potsherds say to Finkelstein is that the Bible got it wrong - that Judah was not a kingdom or a center of empire during this period, but a modest chiefdom. This, of course, does not preclude the likelihood that the chiefs were David and Solomon. "A small elite ruled from a small mountain stronghold [Jerusalem] with a limited number of inhabitants over a population made up of a few sedentary communities in the midst of a large number of pastoral camps," he would write.
The potsherds showed Judah emerging as a vibrant state towards the end of the eighth century BCE. This, scholars believe, is due to the fall of Israel to the Assyrians in 722 BCE. >>> |
