Bloomsbury Academy Autumn Conference 2009
Archaelogy and the Bible
Review by TIM RADFORD
Archaeologists are revising the story told in the Bible, the world's best-selling book. The great king of united Israel may not have been David, the boy who slew Goliath, or Solomon, who built the temple. Instead, the glory should go to the despised Ahab and his notorious wife Jezebel, according to a BritishMuseum expert.
Jonathan Tubb, curator of the Ancient Levant, told a Bloomsbury Academy conference on biblical archaeology in London on October 24 that excavation had failed to reveal any physical trace of King Solomon. But it had established Ahab as a world leader, based not in Jerusalem in the kingdom of Judah, but in Samaria in Israel to the north. Ahab, according to the Bible, was hounded by the prophets and involved in the illegal seizure of somebody else's vineyard. He was overthrown, and his queen, the Phoenician princess Jezebel, met a gruesome fate.
"What do we know about Ahab? The biblical texts with their anti-northern-kingdom-of-Israel agenda paint a very negative picture of rather a weak and gullible ruler easily led into sin by his atrociously evil wife Jezebel. But again, if we strip away these colourful but inaccurate stories of encounters with the prophet Elijah, Naboth's vineyard and even the manner of his death, we are left with a rather different picture of a competent and strong ruler of international renown," said Dr Tubb.
"What do we really know about Jezebel? Leaving aside the lurid accounts in the Bible, truly nothing, but at least we can give her some sort of context," said Dr Tubb. "Again, according to the Bible after the coup that brought Jehu to the throne, Jezebel was thrown from a window and her body fed to the dogs. Colourful, not very nice and probably not very true."
Ahab, King of Israel, along with his 2,000 chariots and 10,000 infantry, is mentioned in Assyrian records of a campaign in 853 BC. He had clearly turned a petty Canaanite kingdom into a significant geopolitical force. In the Bible chronology, he is the eighth king of a united Israel. In the archaeological record, Ahab son of Omri emerges as the second king. Massive fortifications once attributed to King Solomon in the 10th century are now believed to have been built by Ahab and other Omride kings, more than a century later. There is no reliable archaeological evidence of either David or Solomon.
"It is not as if we haven't been looking," said Dr Tubb. "I don't think we can have missed a whole phase of history which is described as really quite extensive and opulent, there is just not room in the archaeological record. I think it is simple as that. Whatever way you want to cast David and Solomon, if you want to keep them in the 10th century, they didn't build much and they didn't do much."
The book now known as the Bible began to take shape in the 6th century BC and Ahab may have been the victim of revisionist propaganda by a religious and political faction from the rival territory of Judah to the south, on their return from exile in Babylon after conquest by Nebuchadnezzar.
"I believe and many other people believe, the Bible was fundamentally devised, constructed, compiled, edited, by a Judahite intellectual elite. This is the time the Judahites become Jews, living not unhappily in Babylonia. This is a formative period," said Dr Tubb.
He and other researchers presented a picture of change, ferment, negotiation and rivalry among petty kingdoms and competing empires in the Levant, and confirmed the Bible as a great literary construction, a document of faith, a series of cautionary tales and an account of one people's contract with Yahweh or Jehovah. But it was not a reliable chronology of events from the distant Bronze Age to the years of Alexander the Great.
"We are not here to prove or disprove the Bible," said Dr Tubb. "It was important to realise for whom it was written. It wasn't written for everybody, it was written for the Judahite audience by Judahites, with the intention that they would return to that polity and re-establish it, and re-establish the temple and everything else. In those terms, episodes like David and Solomon make very good sense. You need a golden age, you need something which is pivotal, which establishes your kingdom."
Other biblical revision
Exodus and the story of Moses. There is no ancient Egyptian mention of a Hebrew slave population, nor of Moses, the 10 plagues, or the loss of pharaoh and his chariots in the Red Sea. But there is archaeological confirmation that instead it was the Egyptians who left Israel: they once held imperial sway in Canaan, but were forced to withdraw in the 12th century BC. This exodus plunged the local Canaanite population into economic recession for more than 200 years. "It still is a revelation to some people that we don't accept an Exodus any longer, that we don't accept that process as being essential for the development of historical Israel," said Dr Tubb.
Sodom and Gomorrah and fire from heaven. Archaeologists have identified five small "cities of the plain" near the DeadSea, whose inhabitants would have commercially exploited natural sources of bitumen and sulphur. Such settlements would have been at risk from fire and brimstone, but they were probably deliberately deserted. "The economy of the Levant depended on trade with Egypt, and about this same time the Old Kingdom in Egypt collapsed. The trade collapsed. The whole economy of the country collapsed. The towns were abandoned. It made the Great Depression look paltry," said Rupert Chapman of the British Museum.
Exile in Babylon. Only a small number of Jews were taken into exile in Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar deported the king, the court, senior administrators and artisans but left most of the people of Judah where they were, to till the crops and raise revenue for the Babylonian empire. The exiled elite were well treated. Babylonian clay tablets recorded the daily rations of food issued to the Jewish captives. "They took the leaders back to Assyria, back to Babylon, in order to indoctrinate them in Mesopotamian life and thinking so that they could no longer be troublesome," said Irving Finkel, of the British Museum.
