The Bible Unearthed
Dust-jacket for The Bible Unearthed
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| Author | Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Archaeology |
| Publisher | Free Press |
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Publication date
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2001 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 385 pp |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 44509358 |
| 221.9/5 21 | |
| LC Class | BS621 .F56 2001 |
The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, a book published in 2001, discusses the archaeology of Israel and its relationship to the origins and content of the Hebrew Bible. The authors are Israel Finkelstein, Professor of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, and Neil Asher Silberman, an archaeologist, historian and contributing editor to Archaeology Magazine.
The methodology applied by the authors is historical criticism with an emphasis on archaeology. Writing in the website of "The Bible and Interpretation", the authors describe their approach as one "in which the Bible is one of the most important artifacts and cultural achievements [but] not the unquestioned narrative framework into which every archaeological find must be fit." Their main contention is that:
On the basis of this evidence they propose
As noted by a reviewer on Salon.com the approach and conclusions of The Bible Unearthed are not particularly new. Ze'ev Herzog, professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, wrote a cover story for Haaretz in 1999 in which he reached similar conclusions following the same methodology; Herzog noted also that some of these findings have been accepted by the majority of biblical scholars and archaeologists for years and even decades, even though they have only recently begun to make a dent in the awareness of the general public.
Early biblical archaeology was conducted with the presumption that the Bible must be true, finds only being considered as illustrations for the biblical narrative, and interpreting evidence to fit the Bible. Some archaeologists such as Eilat Mazar continue to take this "Bible and spade" approach, or, like the journal Bible and Spade, attempt to treat archaeology as a tool for proving the Bible's accuracy, but since the 1970s most archaeologists, such as prominent Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen, have begun instead to interpret the evidence only in the light of other archaeology, treating the Bible as an artifact to be examined, rather than as an unquestioned truth. This approach has led to results both in favor and against the historicity of the old Testament.
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