The Fight for History
In the Holy Land, archaeology itself is a battleground. Will the Bible win out?
SETTLING THE PROMISED LAND. As the book of Joshua tells it, the Israelites took possession of the Promised Land swiftly and violently. After wandering 40 years in the Sinai wilderness, they crossed the Jordan River from the east and invaded Canaan, destroying city after city until the land was theirs. It is a story amplified--some say contradicted--in the book of Judges, where the settlement of Canaan is depicted as a long and arduous struggle marked by military and moral setbacks for the Israelites.
It is also a story that has not held up well under archaeological scrutiny. Citing a lack of evidence of sudden destruction at several key sites--such as Jericho and Ai, neither of which appears to have been occupied at the time--mainstream scholars for years have rejected the biblical description of a military conquest of Canaan. Instead, many now theorize that ancient Israel arose out of a gradual and generally peaceful infiltration, or perhaps as a result of internal social upheaval.
Such theories raise significant historical questions. Were the Israelites a people of distinct ethnicity and religion who arrived in the land sometime in the Late Bronze or Early Iron Age? Or were they indigenous people, counterculture Canaanites whose customs evolved in response to social and economic conditions and who eventually came to dominate the region as a people known as Israel?
So far, archaeology has provided no clear answers. During the past two decades, archaeologists have found what some think may be the figurative footprints of early Israelite settlers--evidence of hundreds of small agricultural villages suddenly appearing in the sparsely populated hill country west of the Jordan River during the late 13th and 12th centuries B.C. Based on studies of those sites, experts estimate the region's population grew rapidly--from about 12,000 to about 55,000 by the 12th century B.C., and to about 75,000 by the 11th century B.C. Such a population explosion simply cannot be accounted for by birthrate alone, says Arizona's Dever. The evidence, he says, points to "large numbers of people migrat[ing] here from somewhere else, strongly motivated to colonize an underpopulated fringe area of urban Canaan," which by then was in decline.
Whether or not the settlements are Israelite is still debated. And even if they are, scholars say, it is impossible from current archaeological data to confidently link their sudden appearance to either a sweeping military invasion or one of the alternative settlement scenarios. Clearly, a significant influx of newcomers had arrived. But do new villages and population indicate a "new people"? Since the 1960s, some scholars have speculated that the settlers were Canaanite peasants who revolted and fled to the hill country to forge their own egalitarian society and religious identity.
But so far, archaeologists have found little to shed light on the newcomers' cultural identity--their language, religion, and burial practices. They have, however, uncovered one revealing detail about the settlers' dietary habits: They didn't eat pork. While pig bones were commonly found in Philistine coastal villages of the period and at sites east of the Jordan, says Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University, none were found in the new highland villages. That, says Finkelstein, "may, in fact, be the only clue that we have of a specific, shared identity among the highland villagers."
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