Date 07-01-2009
GMTime 13:56:58
How Darius Founded Judaism
Joshua, Josiah and the Deuteronomic Historian 1
The believer may well point to a verified event and say, “Behold! The work of God!” But there is nothing in the event itself which confirms that it is the word of God. The perception of an event as an act of God may still be an illusion.George W Ramsey
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, 20 May 2002
Abstract
The Honesty of Biblicists
The whole of the subject of the “Conquest” of Canaan is infected with a mass of rabid speculation described by Jewish and Christian commentators as “scholarship”. The minutest details of the texts of Joshua, Judges and Numbers is examined and leprous theories of absolutely no basis or consequence are discussed in “learned” biblical works that seem to exist merely to show that the bible is so important that people cannot stop writing about it. The trouble is they rarely want to write the truth about it.
The “scholars” often speculate about utterly different periods of “conquest” being unable to agree on an accepted paradigm. That is thought of as a blessing of God because it allows them to write endless masses of unadulterated tripe and unforgiveable mendacity for the benefit of the gullible nod-heads in the churches, and continue to draw large salaries for doing nothing even slightly useful.
Joel Drinkard explains to us why the Exodus might have been in 1440 BC. 1 Kings 6:1 says the Solomonic temple was built in the 480th year after the Exodus. “Scholars” date the temple of Solomon to c 960 BC, even though there is no historical evidence of either the temple or of Solomon. It is all taken from the bible, and so, the conquest must have been about 1440 BC, on this biblical evidence. Drinkard thinks this fits some history! The rise of Joseph to prominence in Egypt could be explained as related to the Hyksos rule when Asiatics ruled Lower Egypt for 150-200 years until c 1550 BC, although the narrative gives no impression that the pharaoh is anything other than Egyptian. The new king who knew not Joseph (Ex 1:8) must have succeeded at the expulsion of the Hyksos about 1550 BC with the restoration of native Egyptian rule.
John Garstang dated a destruction level at Jericho to c 1400 BC, possibly a sign of Joshua’s conquest, but Kathleen Kenyon, re-excavating Jericho in the 1950s, using meticulous stratigraphic methodology, showed this destruction layer dated to c 1560 BC, too early for the time of Joshua, regardless of the dates proposed for the conquest. In the thirteenth century when the walls were supposed to have been falling down, despite Drinkard, according to the best guesses of the biblicists, the town was uninhabited, apart from a tramp and his family! W F Albright, faith in the inerrant unshaken, declared the evidence had slipped from the top of the tell by erosion. That would leave evidence in the scree. There was none.
Anyway, Albright challenged 1440 as the date of the Exodus. He put it about 1290 BC and the conquest at 1250-1200 BC, based on the archaeology of Palestine, which he decided showed widespread destruction around 1250-1200 BC. It seemed to mark the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age. Albright, Wright, Bright and others adopted this dating scheme. The transition was evidence of the entry of the Hebrews into the land under Joshua’s leadership, presumably because these slaves understood the use of iron, but no one else did! They thought the Israelites in Canaan had taken with them a distinctive new architectural structure, the four room house, and a distinctive new pottery form, the collared rim jar. These were considered “markers” of Israelite settlements. Even Roger Moorey, who tries to be honest, dissimulates: “Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not”! He seems not to notice that that means they are not markers! Anyway, the 1290 BC date eclipsed the 1440 BC date for the Exodus. William Dever says:
Only one thing is certain, and that is that the scant Egyptian evidence at least points unanimously to a 13th century BC date for an Israelite “exodus”, if any.
Albright offers a brazen example of biblicist trickery when he says:
Since Israel was already menacing the Canaanite towns in force before the following year, according to the famous Israel stela of Marniptah, we may safely date the fall of Canaanite Lachish in 1220 or shortly thereafter.
Merneptah is now conventionally dated to 1212-1202 BC, but apart from that, any student who made such gross assumptions and deductions in history or archaeology would be failed by their examiners. A professor who said any such thing would be sacked, or quietly retired if it were considered a failure of the mind through age. Albright was a famous and highly respected “scholar” of biblical history for half a century. Christians prefer to have their holy scriptures upheld rather than discredited, even if it means accepting deception instead of honesty.
The stele of Merneptah does not say that Israel was menacing Canaanite towns. Albright says it because he believes his bible. The Merneptah stele, if the hieroglyphs for Israel are correctly read, says that Israel was so badly defeated that all its menfolk were wiped out!
Israel (Hieroglyphic determinant: people) is laid waste, his seed are not.
Hurru (Hieroglyphic determinant: land) is become a widow because of Egypt.
The fact that the Israelites were wiped out confirms the invasion and conquest of Israel by them, according to biblicist logic! And Albright uses this fantasy to date the conquest! The poetic pairing of Israel, a people, with a land called Hurru, left as a widow because her menfolk are dead (a pun of Hurru as the Egyptian word for widow) implies that the Israel of the stele inhabit the Hurrian kingdom, but by this time the Hurrians and Hittites were intermingled and the name was retained only as an alternative name for Canaan. Israel means “Sons of the God El”, a reference to the high god of the Canaanites.
This is just one example of the way professional Christianity-mongers have duped Christians over thousands of years, and before that how professional Judaism-mongers were duping the Jews. These people should be laughed to derision. They are fakes and liars and do untold harm to the study of near eastern history, yet the universities have whole departments devoted to them. If there are any devoted Jews or Christians out there who value truth as indispensible to the divine will, they will demand that these people are replaced by honest scholars. Needless to say, they will not. Expediency, evidently a synonym for faith, is all that matters to them.
If any of it mattered more widely, these bogus scholars would never have gotten away with it for so long. It does not matter whether the Leah tribes entered from the south or the centre of Palestine, or whether God landed them there by a miracle, because it is all mythology as archaeologists have shown, but evidence will never stop these “scholars” whirling around and around in their dervish dance of insane biblical justifying. Offer them certain proof that the biblical accounts are mythological and they will not cease their head-banging behaviour.
Why do these sad people, unable to study anything useful, think their God wants to make archaeology tell a different story from their so-called history? Why do they think a god interested in saving people wants to make his holy word incompatible with independent investigation? Father de Vaux, excavator of Khirbet Qumran, confessed:
If the historical faith of Israel is not in a certain way founded in history, this faith is erroneous and cannot command my assent.
They are terrified that to accept the plain evidence and reject biblical history as myth will show they lack faith and so God will not admit them to the balmy place. If God is surreptitiously testing their honesty, then they have failed and will end up in a hot place anyway!
The Conquest of Canaan
The Israelites, in the bible, invaded Canaan with their superior religion but were unable to impose it on the native Canaanites for 1000 years until some returned from a fifty year exile in Babylonia. Students of history have many examples of conquests and invasions in which there are two possible outcomes—the culture and religion of the conquerors prevail, or the conquerors, despite themselves, are assimilated to the culture and religion of their subjects. Either process happens quickly. The only significant case, supposed historic, of it not happening quickly, but instead a continuous battle ensuing for centuries is that of the conquest of Canaan as told in the bible. G Garbini notes this as a cause for suspicion although it is no cause in itself for disbelief—it could be a unique instance. But the details of the scriptural account are additional cause for doubt!
Christians believe that Joshua entered Canaan over the Jordan River (Josh 3:1-4:13), set up a camp at Gilgal (Josh 4:19-24), and from there spoiled Jericho with God’s help, then rampaged over the rest of the country in a series of blitzkrieg attacks that delivered up Canaan for the Israelites (Josh 6-11). The war was swiftly concluded. In this campaign, the God of Love had no mercy. The Canaanites were all destroyed, except for the Gibeonites who became perpetual slaves of Israel—drawers of water and hewers of wood. Of the people of Jericho who, until then, had imagined that the city was their own, Joshua “left none remaining but utterly destroyed all that breathed as the Lord God of Israel had commanded (Josh 10:40)”.
They utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.Josh 6:21
This is the Christian God at work. The Christian cross is their sword! The biblicist Frank Moore Cross said:
I prefer a complex explanation of the origins of Israel in the land to any of the simple models now being offered.
Yet this—God’s own account in the bible—is a simplistic one! The scriptures themselves testify to the falsehood of the romanticized accounts in Joshua 1-12. Joshua 1-12 presents the invasion of Canaan as a military conquest by all twelve tribes acting together. The full narrative, gleaned from Numbers and Judges as well as Joshua, suggests a more complicated process than the swift campaign Joshua conducted with the help of the divine finger stirring humanity’s affairs. There was no national campaign of conquest by all the tribes of the nation in alliance. Instead, the land was allocated to the tribes and they occupied them as best they could by infiltration or conquest.
How many Israelite tribes were there? Twelve? In the Jewish scriptures, there are thirteen tribes, although Levi did not have any land and was not “registered”, but even then there were thirteen territories because Manasseh had two portions, one east of the Jordan and one west. Moreover, Joseph, who ought to have been a tribe, was not—his two sons Ephraim and Manasseh replaced him when Levi was not “registered”. In the first chapter of Judges, there are only ten tribes, even though Joseph and his two sons are all among them. Levi, Reuben, Issachar and Gad are not among them. In the Song of Deborah (Jg 5), there are also only ten tribes, though Manasseh is called Machir, and Gad is called Gilead, and the missing tribes are now Judah, Simeon and Joseph.
Later, in the division of the putative royal monarchy into two, the northern kingdom, Israel, has ten tribes, and the southern one only two, Judah and Benjamin, but the country is called Judah, as if Benjamin did not matter or did not really exist. The story of the prophet Ahijah (1 Kg 12:20) divides Judah alone from the rest, but the rest consists of only ten tribes, so, it seems, that Benjamin did not exist. Nor could Simeon and Reuben have been part of the northern kingdom because they were southern tribes which ought to have been associated geographically with Judah. If the split between the tribes was ideological, as the bible maintains, then Judah would have been surrounded by Israel! In fact, there was no such split until Samaria was finally swallowed up by Assyria, leaving Judah as a “remnant”.
When the bible was being written, it does not disguise that Levi was not a tribe, but a caste of priests. Simeon had also disappeared accounting for their curse by Jacob in the myth of his legacy. Simeon also was not blessed by Moses. These actions did not fate or anticipate an outcome but simply registered a fact. When the stories were written the authors had no extant signs of any such tribes!
Indeed, even if these tribes did exist in ancient times, it is hard to see why the different people would have retained their tribal identities when they had merged into the two small nations of Israel and Judah. The bible itself is clear enough that the people intermixed, so why the tribes meant anything other than a place where someone was born, in the sense that an American can call himself a Texan is unclear.
By the time that Israel, known as Samaria, was taken over by the Assyrians, had its own rulers deported and was re-colonised, it covered only the areas allocated to Ephraim and Manasseh. The bible says (2 Kg 15:29) that Tiglath-pileser III had conquered all the places supposed to have belonged to the other tribes, and their citizens had already been separately deported, thus cutting down Samaria to a rump, if ever those other places had ever really been occupied by Israelites. The inscriptions found in these northern regions are written in Phœnician, not in the Hebrew dialect.
Judges shows that Israel did not capture and occupy all the land (Jg 1:1-3:6), the land was not taken quickly but by individual tribes acting essentially independently, or smaller groups of tribes. Judah went up against the Canaanites in Judah’s territory (Jg 1:3-20), and Judges shows Canaanites still living in the land, even offering a theological understanding of it:
God left the Canaanites in the land. Israel was unable to expel or destroy all the Canaanites because of Israel’s sin.Jg 2:1-6; 3:1-6
Scattered fragments elsewhere suggest separate expeditions by single tribes or small coalitions. In Joshua 8, Israel settles around Shechem with no opposition. Which is it to be? Christians will answer, “All of them”, but it seems plain that Joshua 1-12 was composed to unite a set of disparate traditions that had previously all been accepted.
What is also remarkable about Joshua 1-12 is that it refers exclusively to the territory of Benjamin with only four exceptions, probably glosses, one of them plainly being a marginal note. Everything centres on Gilgal, a place which appears elsewhere in the scriptures associated with Benjaminites like Saul (1 Sam 11:1ff), and seems to have been a Benjaminite sanctuary of unknown location. Benjamin seems simply to be an alternative name for Yehud. Yehud is the “Son of the South”.
Even Joshua is not consistent, and denies that all the land was conquered—the coastal plain was not taken, nor was the lowland heartland of Canaan around the Jezreel valley—the region of Megiddo, Taanach, Beth-Shean (Josh 13:1-6; 15:63; 16:10; 17:11-18). Joshua captures Hebron (Josh 10:36) but then Caleb has to do it (Josh 14:6-15;15:13-14). Though Joshua’s campaign is presented as a huge success, twenty vitally important Canaanite cities could not be defeated. Even Jerusalem was not taken at that time (Josh 15:63). Since they were all later part of the country, Judges must be the original account and Joshua was written later to rationalize the facts as the inhabitants found them.
Even Jewish scholars like Yigael Yadin and Abraham Malamut do not doubt that both books were written long after the supposed time of the events. Typically biblicist, Yadin and Malamut cannot bring themselves to say the scriptures are wrong, so they say they are right “in broad outline”. Their theory is that the biblical stories will meet the archaeological evidence, if it is smeared out broadly enough. They smear it out as broadly as they can… then declare that the archaeological evidence upholds the scriptures! It really is remarkable the way the inspiration of this God makes otherwise normal human beings into cheats.
Jericho also was abandoned through much of the Late Bronze Age. A few burials suggest a small settlement from c 1400-1300 BC, most likely unwalled. The source of the Jericho story in Joshua is given as the Book of Jashar (Josh 10:12-13), one of the lost sources of the Jewish scriptures. The same book is mentioned in 2 Samuel 1:18, introducing David’s Song of the Bow. If the Book of Jashar contained stories about David, it could not have been written before the time of David. So the story it had of the fall of Jericho was a minimum of 200 years after the event. In fact these were written much later—some of their military perspectives reflecting the time of the Maccabees.
The ‘official’ view of Israel’s history writers who lived hundreds of years after the settlement in Canaan thus became the ‘biblical’ view of a military conquest of Canaan.Joseph A Calloway
Archaological Evidence of Conquest
Joshua describes the capture and destruction of key sites such as Jericho, Ai, Debir, Lachish and Hazor by the Israelites. Excavations at Lachish and at Tell Beit Mirsim (which Albright identified as biblical Debir) in the 1930s showed a destruction around 1250-1200 BC. Hazor, excavated by Yigael Yadin in the 1950s and re-excavated in an on-going work by Amon Ben Tor, has a massive destruction and subsequent burning at the end of the thirteenth century BC in agreement with the biblical description in Joshua 10. Ben Tor says only the Israelites could have destroyed Hazor because there is no sign of the Philistines, and Egyptian and Canaanite figurines were destroyed, counting them out. Since nothing positively identifies the Israelites either, why should they be preferred to the Philistines, who also might have destroyed Egyptian and Canaanite idols?
Multiple sites were destroyed, though over half a century or more. Joshua’s was a slow blitzkrieg! At et-Tell, biblical Ai, French archaeologist, Judith Marquet-Krause from 1933 to 1936 found that Ai lay abandoned from about 2400 BC until about 1200 BC when it reappeared as a small village, so was not a city able to be attacked as it was in Joshua. Did the Israelites attack a pile of ruins? Dr Joseph A Callaway of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary trained under both G Ernest Wright and Kathleen Kenyon, the leading American and British archaeologists respectively. His first chance at his own excavation in 1964 was at Ai, offered the chance to follow up the excavations by Judith Marquet-Krause which had not been published properly when she died. Callaway said:
I must admit that I entertained notions of bridging the widening gulf between the biblical accounts in Joshua 7-8 and the actual evidence of the ruin itself.
He found with Marquet-Krause that Ai had been uninhabited at the dates proposed for Joshua’s conquest—both the generally accepted date of 1250-1200 BC and the earlier date of 1400 BC:
The village appears from present evidence to have been unfortified, and occupation seems to have been interrupted by periodic abandonment, not violent destruction. Nothing in the present evidence warrants an identification of the village with the city of Ai captured by Joshua as described in Joshua 8:1-29.
For Ai, the most common explanation has been that the wrong site was excavated. As part of his excavation project, Callaway conducted a survey of all the archaeological sites in the vicinity, conducting soundings at several likely ones, but found no other possible site for Ai.
Oddly, Late Bronze Age (LBA) pottery found by Garstang at Ai and left in the care of the Albright institute went missing and has never been found. The “scholars” describe it as “lost”. Other pottery found by Garstang at Ai but not “lost” has been found not to be LBA. P R S Moorey (The Bible and recent Archaeology) concludes:
Many efforts have been made to explain away the absence of evidence at Ai for Joshua’s attack, but none is really satisfactory. On the whole, it is probable that there is no historical foundation for this account as we have it.
Bethel and Ai are only a few miles apart, just north of Jerusalem. In the conquest, they were associated, even though Ai did not exist. Curiously, they were still associated together 800 years later in the “returns” of Nehemiah and Ezra, even though Ai again did not exist because it had been finally abandoned about 1050 BC. Why should Nehemiah and Ezra even mention men from a ruin? It seems most likely that Ai was a Baal associated with the shrine of Bethel, perhaps as a son of El, just as Yehouah was. If Ai was a Canaanite god, the account in Joshua might be an allegorical account of its suppression.
Also uninhabited at this time were Gibeon, Heshbon, Jarmuth, Hormah and Arad. Only Hazor existed at the time when Joshua was supposed to have destroyed it, and it was indeed destroyed at this time (1250 BC), but Philistines were likely to have been the cause. Moreover, if Hazor was destroyed in 1250 BC, how could Deborah and Barak be destroying it again in the time of the Judges? They could not have, but the victory described there seems so important that it is described twice, in prose and in verse. Since the Israelites were unable to conquer the belt of Canaanite cities stretching across the country, effectively protecting the even bigger and more strongly fortified city of Hazor, they cannot be seen as getting to this mighty fortress let alone, managing to seige it into submission when lesser cities had resisted.
When, as here, archaeology does indicate that a city was destroyed about the right time for a thirteenth century invasion, there is no indication of the reason for the destruction, and there are more likely reasons than conquest. Even when conquest is an option, the conquerors have rarely left obvious signs of who they were, and there were more obvious choices than the Israelites. The Egyptian nineteenth dynasty was failing and ultimately left the region ungoverned so that the Egyptian colonial principalities began to fight among themselves. A destroyed city is often multiply destroyed in a short time, suiting the idea of local wars rather than Israelite invaders. There might have been limited Egyptian punitive expeditions against some of the rebels, especially in the Shephelah. Lachish was destroyed but Egyptians or Philistines are more likely to have been responsible. The favoured site of Debir shows no sign of attack in the thirteenth century, and the alternative site, though destroyed was most likely destroyed by the newly arrived sea people than the Israelites.
Bethel was burnt to a cinder at the correct historical time, but the bible does not claim this city was incinerated. It was captured by the “tribe of Joseph”. Nor is burning necessarily a sign of conquest. Serious fires can be accidental and they can be started deliberately to destroy infestations and disease. The Great Fire of London could be an example of either of these.
The Iron Age settlements that succeeded the Bronze Age ones were culturally poorer than their predecessors. Amon Ben Tor’s excavations at Hazor show the unquestionably Canaanite city that existed before the Israelites could have arrived in the Palestinian hills as a sophisticated and elaborate city of wealth and grandeur. It was by far the finest and strongest city in the land, 200 acres in area and walled. The later city is much inferior, and this is the one that corresponds with the time when the Israelites are supposed to have arrived. The difference in quality of the city in the different times is much more compatible with a decline than with a conquest, though ending with a coup de grace.
For biblicists, the decline is proof that the invaders were ignorant and uncultured slaves from Egypt—the Israelites—that had wandered the deserts of the Sinai for a generation greatly improving their ignorance. Yet the transition to the Iron Age seems to have been generally accompanied by a cultural decline. The cause seems to have been climatic—drought. An incoming alien population would leave archaeological evidence in the shape of changed pots and other artifacts. The technological changes that have been noted seem associated with the drought, and attempts by people to live in arid and unfavourable conditions. Then the drought slowly began to ease.
Settlement
Regarding the so-called settlement period, some archaeologists think the evidence supports a movement into Israel of people from the east, while others cannot see it, or think the data can be explained in other ways. Adam Zertal, from about 1980, conducted a fieldwalking survey of the hills of Samaria which shows a jump in settlements from 39 in 1200—mostly based on springs or streams—to 220 in about 1000 BC. As they were in the hills, these sites were more difficult to farm than those in the valleys. Zertal concludes it is evidence of a new people coming in from outside and being obliged to farm the only land available, that on the arid hillsides. Zertal is reported as having said:
Archaeology without the bible is archaeology without a soul.Adam Zertal
It puts him firmly in the camp of biblicists, archaeologists who cannot be objective because they already believe the bible before they look at the ground. Biblicists typically find small sites close to each other and date them as being at the Bronze Age transition with the Iron Age. According to the bible, that is when the Israelites entered the Promised Land. So, these excavated sites are called Israelite! They will find other sites then, and announce that they have found sites that show there were waves of invaders.
Even the bible admits there were large tracts of land to the east of the Jordan that some of the tribes were unwilling to leave on the offchance of finding something better to the west of the river. Moses had to get them to agree to help in the conquest, or peaceful settlement of the west according to which bit of the bible you believe, even though they were happy where they were, with no need to conquer or settle anywhere else. Having found the land to the west of the river to be largely marginal, it is a wonder they did not return to the east. The more likely interpretation is that the settlers were in the west already, but in the valleys.
Zertal admits that the settlers in the west, wherever they came from would have depended for water, if nothing else, on the Canaanites in the valleys or living near springs. They would have stored it in jars such as the collared rim jars often used falsely to characterize the Israelites. Few plastered cisterns had been cut at that stage, probably because only iron tools made them practicable, and as yet were not common.
Israel Finkelstein argued that populations in marginal areas are cyclic. Economic collapse is never far off, and when it happens, the population drops quite suddenly. Finkelstein points to similar cycles in the third and second millennia, before the one at the start of the Iron Age. Marginal land was settled, the population rose and a social administrative class with it. The system proves unsustainable, a collapse occurs and the population meets the crisis by dispersing. Thereafter the land can only support seasonal nomads moving their flocks about with the rains. Then the climate or the fertility of the land recovers enough to encourage incomers to try planting vines and olives, and the cycle begins again. Zertal says the eastern Samarian slopes were settled first because the incomers were arriving from the east, by crossing the Jordan. It ignores other possibilities—the western slopes being less marginal and therefore easier to farm.
In 1000 BC, Israel was quite populated, but Judah was relatively sparsely populated. The northern country was better farmland, more fertile and less arid. Judah remained marginal, abutting the desert as it did. The surveys of A Zertal and I Finkelstein revealed some 70 settlements in the north in the LBA, but only eight in Judah at the same time. In the western foothills of the Shephelah, settlement actually declined about 1000 BC, the reasons being unknown, but might be to do with the decline of Egypt.
Whatever faint archaeological signs the biblicists hopefully think they have found of cultural differences between the settler and the valley populations seem more likely to have been caused by poverty or adaptation to the poorer conditions. The data overall do not support the hypothesis of migration, so what is the point of trying to establish it from dubious interpretations of the settlement patterns. Even at the best of times, life in thse sparse hills was never anything other than marginal. The range of pots in use is limited and luxuries are absent. These facts are true of each of the three millennial cycles. The people in the hills always struggled to exist.
Zertal found a pile of stones to the northeast of Mount Ebal that he began excavating, and decided, in 1985, was the altar built by Joshua (Josh 8:30ff) at the instigation of Moses (Deut 27:2ff). The archaeologist thought it had been deliberately covered up within a century of it being founded. Fills of the ash of sacrificial animals, jugs, bowls, jewellery, and even the odd scarab of Thutmose and Rameses II, and a seal were found. The dating evidence seems to center on 1200 BC.
The site is above the cultic city of Shechem and remote from it, and the pottery is distinct from that found in the city, poorer and simpler. Even so, the cultic practices seemed not to differ much from those deduced at Shechem. The practice of putting pottery vessels around a ritual structure, and the sacrifice of goats, sheep and cattle, but not pigs, were common to both sites. The scarabs too seem to have been Canaanite copies of popular Egyptian originals. Thus the Thutmose scarab was not form the reign of that king but one that remained popular for long afterwards, presumably as a charm. Shechem can be seen in the valley from Ebal, but not from this cult center, if that is what it was, because it is too far to the north. Nor can Mount Gerizim be seen from the site. It therefore is not convincingly situated to be the site described in the Jewish scriptures, although it was made of unhewn stone all right.
Zevit classifies one biblical explanation related to the Ebal site as being “between that of an untestable hypothesis and a conjecture”. Biblicist explanations, not plainly false by every test available, can generally be classified in this way. Needless to say, when there are tests, biblicists reject them, finding spurious objections, or when confounded will simply say the test is indeterminate. Anyone rational, especially a believer, one would think, must wonder why God likes to be so obscure and awkward. They never seem to think that it is their beliefs that cause the obscurity, not God.
Skeletal remains in Palestine are not common, but there is no evidence from what there is of the arrival of any new people. The types found in the north (Megiddo), typical of the Canaanite population, are brachycephalic (broad headed) whereas in the south (Lachish), they are more of an Egyptian dolichocephalic (long headed) type right back into the Bronze Age.
Israel Finkelstein, a thorough archaeologist but unable to discard biblical influence, sees Joshua as depicting settlement at the end of monarchy rather than in 1200 BC, but he thinks 1 Samuel is a historical work and that no one could dispute it! He finds a sacred site at Shiloh with a supposed terraced sanctuary that William Dever, often an apologist, finds is “wishful thinking”. Finkelstein is not seeing what is in the ground but the sanctuary described in 1 Samuel. Regarding the territory of Benjamin, Finkelstein says:
The Hivites settled in the west and the Israelites in the east… we are unable to single out differences in material culture between the two ethnic identities living in the territory of Benjamin at the beginning of Iron I.
Culturally, the settlers between 1200 and 1000 seemed to have been Canaanites rather than a new people with different habits and methods. The Jewish feasts of Tabernacles, Unleavened Bread and Weeks, or Succoth, Passover and Shavuoth, were annual agricultural festivals of the Canaanities. Biblical sacrificial words are identifiable with Canaanite ones. The Canaanite High God was El, and the Jews identified him with Yehouah, El becoming the word translated as “God”. So, there is nothing in the archaeological data to show two cultures in the Judaean hills, and Finkelstein shows unusual care in his analysis, yet he still says they are there. Surely the bible ought to be conclusive for biblicists. The southern limit of Canaan in Numbers 34:3-6 is the same as the southern boundary of Judah in Joshua 15:2-4.
