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Title: The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts
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Manufacturer: Free Press
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| The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts by Free Press A must for the layman or student | The thesis set forth in this book is not new for those who have been following modern research on the Tanach (Hebrew Bible), and the bibliography is not the kind one would expect in a serious scholarly treatise.
However, the book was not written with the intention of being an original contribution to the scholarly discourse - ecen so, in some ways it is - but to provide the educated reader with the latest theorization about the origins of the Tanch, in particular its historiographical literature, and this it does with great success.
The writing is lucid and readable, the ideas clearly presented. The bibliography at the end of the book is basic, but it includes some of the most important biblical research literature.
I recommend this book to all my Bible students (in its Hebrew translation), and in one of my courses, several chapters are required reading.
Dr. Jonathan D. Safren
Dept. of Biblical Studies
Beit Berl College
Beit Berl, Israel | | The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts by Free Press Excellent perspective | | This is one of the books by Finklestein and Silberman. Based on verified archaeological finds, they reconstruct the history of the early Bible and show it did not happen in the time period or in the way claimed by the Bible. The conservative Christian will not like this book, because it contradicts much of hat many consider to be the history of the Bible. I found the book to be scholarly and very well documented. If Abrah, Isaac and Jacob did not exist, or did not exist in the appropriate Biblical history, if David and Solomon are historically questionable and the Biblical claims are fairy tales, where does this leave Christianity, initially based on the early Jewish texts? | | The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts by Free Press The Bible Unearthed | | Book was promptly delivered in excellent condition, just as I have learned to expect from Amazon. | | The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts by Free Press Every book is biased to some extent | | Many reviewers claim that this book is biased...well duh. Obviously Finkelstein and Silberman have an opinion/theory and they are presenting that in this book. You only have to read the back cover to figure that out. I enjoyed this book. It adds another perspective in which to view an extremely important document and historical period. Most of the theories are very reasonable, that does not mean they are correct or incorrect. The authors freely admit that the history of the bible does at times fit the physical evidence and at other times it does not. They do occasionally make the mistake of saying,"It MUST have happened this way" or,"That could NEVER have happened", or similar statements. But these statements are easily ignored. Nothing in this book is extremely radical and most of their claims are very reasonable, again this does not mean they are true or untrue, just reasonable. I would not recommend this book to religious fundamentalists OR devout atheists either, as material like this just pisses them off and causes them to write annoying reviews sighting other questionable sources such as readers digest and such. (Sorry had to slip that in) I would recommend this book to those like myself who are interested in the study of humanity. I also feel that this book ought to be read concurrently with the bible as it can improve ones understanding of both books. And finally, one should also study the history of the other cultures in the area at that time, as again this provides a greater understanding and puts things into a larger context. I also recommend these, all are books that I have read recently or am in the process of reading.The Dead Sea Scrolls - Revised Edition: A New Translation, Torah/Pocket Edition, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, The Essential Koran: Heart of Islam, The, The Koran, Dune, 40th Anniversary Edition (Dune Chronicles, Book 1) | | The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts by Free Press It's all about archaeological evidence | "The historical saga contained in the Bible -- from Abraham's encounter with God and his journey to Canaan, to Moses' deliverance of the children of Israel from bondage, to the rise and fall of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah --was not a miraculous revelation, but a brilliant product of the human imagination."
I will provide some problems that this book provides about the Biblical story:
"1 - According to the Biblical chronology, Abraham and the patriarchs of Genesis were active roughly 2000 BCE. The stories make repeated mention of camel caravans. However, archaeology has shown that camels were not domesticated until much later; camel caravans were no earlier than 1000 BCE.
2 - There is no evidence for the Exodus as the Bible describes it. The Bible does not give an exact date for the Exodus, nor refer to the pharaoh of the time by name. There is a stele of Pharaoh Merneptah mentions a people named Israel living in Canaan by 1200 BCE, so the Exodus should have occurred some time before that. However, there is no Egyptian documentation of any large group of slaves of any ethnicity leaving Egypt during a likely time frame. The population of Egypt was not over 5 million at the time, and it is out of the question that nearly 1 million people could leave without some kind of record or evidence.
3 - There is no evidence for a swift, decisive military conquest of Canaan by Israelites by 1200 BC. And it does seem implausible that a ragtag group of slaves, however numerous, could have managed a well coordinated attack on an entire region after 40 years of wandering in the desert.
4 - According to the bible, King David and his son Solomon reigned over a large territory, from Mesopotamia to Egypt, and had the wealth to build impressive temples and palaces. This monarchy would have had to have ruled in the range of 1000 to 900 BCE or so. Yet archaeologists have not found any monumental architecture at all dating to this time in Judah. Apparently Jerusalem was a rather small village at the time."
| | The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts by Free Press Product Description | | In this iconoclastic and provocative work, leading scholars Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman draw on recent archaeological research to present a dramatically revised portrait of ancient Israel and its neighbors. They argue that crucial evidence (or a telling lack of evidence) at digs in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon suggests that many of the most famous stories in the Bible -- the wanderings of the patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt, Joshua's conquest of Canaan, and David and Solomon's vast empire -- reflect the world of the later authors rather than actual historical facts. Challenging the fundamentalist readings of the scriptures and marshaling the latest archaeological evidence to support its new vision of ancient Israel, The Bible Unearthed offers a fascinating and controversial perspective on when and why the Bible was written and why it possesses such great spiritual and emotional power today. | | The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts by Free Press Amazon.com's Best of 2001 | | The Bible Unearthed is a balanced, thoughtful, bold reconsideration of the historical period that produced the Hebrew Bible. The headline news in this book is easy to pick out: there is no evidence for the existence of Abraham, or any of the Patriarchs; ditto for Moses and the Exodus; and the same goes for the whole period of Judges and the united monarchy of David and Solomon. In fact, the authors argue that it is impossible to say much of anything about ancient Israel until the seventh century B.C., around the time of the reign of King Josiah. In that period, "the narrative of the Bible was uniquely suited to further the religious reform and territorial ambitions of Judah." Yet the authors deny that their arguments should be construed as compromising the Bible's power. Only in the 18th century--"when the Hebrew Bible began to be dissected and studied in isolation from its powerful function in community life"--did readers begin to view the Bible as a source of empirically verifiable history. For most of its life, the Bible has been what Finkelstein and Silberman reveal it once more to be: an eloquent expression of "the deeply rooted sense of shared origins, experiences, and destiny that every human community needs in order to survive," written in such a way as to encompass "the men, women, and children, the rich, the poor, and the destitute of an entire community." --Michael Joseph Gross |
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