Israel Finkelstein is an archaeologist who argues that many Old Testament tales are fictitious, while remaining an advocate for a Jewish state in the Holy Land who observes Jewish traditions. No wonder he is a controversial figure. He explains to David Cohen how he has no trouble squaring this circle, and why he goes on digging as the rockets fall
SIX giant 3000-year-old urns stare down from the top shelf in ‘s office in Tel Aviv University, like sentinels guarding a rebel headquarters. It’s a fitting atmosphere. Finkelstein, an award-winning professor of archaeology, has earned a reputation for being something of a revolutionary.
Over the past decade he has spearheaded a movement in biblical archaeology that flies in the face of the interpretation of the Bible as a largely historical document. He argues that the traditional dating of many archaeological finds relating to biblical events is out by up to one-and-a-half centuries. His conclusion is uncompromising: many famous biblical stories are probably pure fiction. The exodus of the Israelites from Egypt never happened, and Joshua never attacked Jericho, let alone brought its walls down. “There is no evidence that Jericho even had city walls at that time,” Finkelstein says. David and Solomon were not great kings who ruled over the ancient land of Canaan in the 10th century BC from a palace in Jerusalem, as the Bible portrays; at best they were minor chieftains of some small-time tribe in that area. Their memory was later inflated and mythologised in the 7th century BC to serve particular political and military agendas, he says.
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Finkelstein has arrived at these conclusions by studying biblical texts and comparing them with archaeological evidence unearthed at in northern Israel. The site, which has been excavated for over a century, is an archaeological gold mine containing the ruins of more than 30 cities from different times. This week Finkelstein and his volunteers will return to start a new season of excavations.
Finkelstein is highly regarded in his field. He has lectured and been a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, Harvard and the Sorbonne, and has chaired Tel Aviv University’s Institute of Archaeology for seven years. “Nobody is more energetic and industrious than Israel,” says Sam Wolff, an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority. “He has written more than anybody else in the field in the last 15 years. He’s done us a great service by questioning our traditional beliefs.” But this doesn’t mean that Finkelstein’s ideas have been widely accepted. The latest issue of the French journal Le Monde de la Bible may describe the growing body of evidence in support of his ideas as “La revolution Finkelstein”, but Wolff says: “I can’t name more than a handful of archaeologists who accept his theory. It has made more waves in the popular media than it has in academic circles.”
In this part of the world, where the ancient and the modern meet in everyday political discourse, his findings can be inflammatory – and, much to his annoyance, have been used by some as ammunition against the right of a Jewish state to exist in the area. Others dismiss his work as ideologically motivated. In one barbed attack, William Dever, a specialist in the region’s archaeology at the University of Arizona, accused him of being a fashion-led “post-Zionist” who is caught up in a race to push the writing of the Bible into more recent times. This incensed Finkelstein. “What does he know about me?” he says indignantly. “Is he with me and my wife in the bedroom? In the beginning I used to be furious when people made such accusations, now I’m only amused.”
Why the anger? Despite being firmly on the left of Israeli politics (“I am prepared to swap land for peace with the Palestinians”) Finkelstein considers himself to be “an old-guard, conservative Zionist, which means I strongly believe in the right of the Jewish people to have a state and homeland in the historic land of Israel”.
What really gets to him is the response from his own secular end of israeli society. “It’s the beach bums in Tel Aviv who say ‘I always knew the Bible was not important, and now Finkelstein has proved it’ that make me depressed.” As Finkelstein sees it, the Bible does not have to be a historically accurate document for its handed-down set of stories to be “the root of my identity”.
Finkelstein is about as Israeli as they come. Born in the small town of Petah Tikva close to Tel Aviv, he can trace his family’s roots in the area back to 1850, almost a century before the foundation of the Jewish state. “My family arrived in the mid-19th century from Grodno [in what is now Belarus] to Hebron. I don’t need any more legitimacy than that, nor does the state of Israel need the Bible to justify its right to exist,” he says. He has lived in the country all his life and counts himself a traditional Jew. “I’m not a believer, but we keep kosher at home, and I celebrate all the festivals.” Even the Passover festival, which celebrates the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and their journey to the promised land – biblical stories he believes are pure fiction. “Of course! Why not? This is my identity. I do it gladly.”
Isn’t that a contradiction? “Not at all. I can separate my convictions about my culture and my identity on the one hand from my research on the other. I think this is critical for archaeology. If you cannot make this separation you are finished. Unfortunately, most people who work in biblical archaeology fail to make this separation. It’s a serious problem.”
A striking demonstration of how his cultural convictions can sometimes clash with his thirst for archaeology occurred two years ago during the war in which Israeli troops engaged with Hezbollah forces in Lebanon. Finkelstein was in the middle of an excavation in Megiddo – where the urns in his office were unearthed – when the fighting broke out. Hezbollah rockets rained down on the area, some falling on the town of Afula only a few kilometres from the dig.
“It was difficult, the bombs got closer and closer,” Finkelstein recalls. “I discussed it with my colleague David Ussishkin – co-director on the excavation – and we decided to take the example of the British in the second world war: we would just get on with our work. I could not take a rifle and go to fight in Lebanon, but I could play my role as an Israeli citizen and continue the excavation. Megiddo wasn’t a target and we didn’t think we were in any great danger, so we decided that we’d continue digging together even if it ended up being just the two of us.”
That doesn’t mean he is gung-ho when there is real danger. In 1987, during the first Palestinian intifada (uprising), Finkelstein was in the part of Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory known as , conducting a survey of potential digs in the region, once home to the capital of the biblical Kingdom of Israel. “All of a sudden a crowd emerged from a nearby village chanting and shouting. They headed for us and began to throw stones. They saw we were carrying guns so they kept their distance,” he says. Finkelstein’s group withdrew peacefully. “We made it back to the jeeps and got out of there.” The incident ended his efforts to excavate in the Samarian highlands. “There are very few places I’d give up Megiddo for. Samaria is one of them, but at the moment, it’s just too dangerous. I don’t want to kill or be killed for archaeology.”
“Samaria is just too dangerous. I don’t want to kill or be killed for archaeology”
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Israel Finkelstein is professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and co-director of excavations at Megiddo. Born in Petah Tikva, Israel, he completed his PhD thesis in 1983 on the Izbet Sartah excavations, and in 1996 became director of the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University. In 2005 with for his work in archaeology. His latest book is David and Solomon: In search of the Bible’s sacred kings and the roots of the western tradition (Free Press, 2006)