The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts
The Bible Unearthedis 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