Iron age chronology and biblical history rejoinders: The late bronze/iron age transition, Tel ʿEton and Lachish

ABSTRACT

In this article, I review three recent articles. In the first, Asscher and Boaretto (2018. ‘Absolute time ranges in the plateau of the Late Bronze to Iron Age transition and the appearance of Bichrome pottery in Canaan, Southern Levant’, Radiocarbon 60, 1–25) suggest that the Late Bronze/Iron I transition occurred in neighboring sites a century and more apart. In the second, Faust and Sapir (2018. ‘The “Governor's Residency” at Tel ʿEton, the United Monarchy and the impact of the old-house effect on large-scale archaeological reconstructions’, Radiocarbon 60, 801–820.) date the construction of a solid building at Tel ʿEton to the tenth century bce and interpret this as validation for the historicity of the United Monarchy of ancient Israel. In the third, Garfinkel et al. (2019a. ‘Lachish fortifications and state formation in the Biblical kingdom of Judah in light of radiometric datings’, Radiocarbon 61, 1–18) announce the discovery of a city-wall belonging to Level V at Lachish, and affiliate it with the building operations of King Rehoboam of Judah, described in 2 Chronicles. Scrutiny of the methods and facts dismisses all three theories.

KEYWORDS:

• Tel ʿEton
• Lachish
• Late Bronze Iron I transition
• Radiocarbon dating
• Judah
• United Monarchy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Israel Finkelstein is Professor Emeritus of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and a foreign member of the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. He finished his PhD in 1983, taught at the University of Chicago and the Sorbonne and spent research years at Harvard and the Hebrew University. Finkelstein conducted many field projects, among them the excavations at biblical Shiloh and the celebrated site of Megiddo. Finkelstein is the author of many books and almost 400 articles. Notable among the books are The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement (1988), Living on the Fringe (1995), The Bible Unearthed (2001), David and Solomon (2006—the latter two with Neil Asher Silberman), The Forgotten Kingdom (2013, won of the Prix Delalande Guérineau, 2014, of the Institut de France, l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres) and Hasmonean Realities behind Ezra, Nehemiah and Chronicles (2018). In 2005 Finkelstein won the Dan David Prize in the Past Dimension. In 2009 he was named Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture. In 2010 Finkelstein received a Doctorate honoris causa from the University of Lausanne and in 2017 he received the MacAllister Field Archaeology Award of the American Schools of Oriental Research. In 2009–2014 Finkelstein directed the European Research Council-funded project titled ‘Reconstructing Ancient Israel: The Exact and Life Sciences Perspective’.

Notes

1 Faust and Sapir suggest that the fortification of Tel ʿEton was also constructed in the tenth century bce. This conclusion is reached according to pottery and two short-lived radiocarbon samples found in the ‘layers abutting the city wall’ (2018, 811). There are no details about the nature of these layers and if the samples were uncovered inside or outside the city-wall.

2 When this article was ready to be submitted to publication, an article by David Ussishkin (2019) appeared, in which he argues similarly. Ussishkin adds supportive evidence—of a similar revetment detected by the British excavators in 1933 in their western section.

3 My colleague Eliezer Piasetzky and I entered the new Lachish, Khirbet er-Rai and Khirbet Qeiyafa radiocarbon determinations (Garfinkel et al. 2019a) into our Shephelah model (Finkelstein and Piasetzky 2015). For the date of Lachish Level V, the results are almost the same: 918–905 (mean of the beginning and end dates) in our old model; 914–893 with the new data.

4 Garfinkel et al. state that ‘Some progress has been made toward an agreed chronology for the northern kingdom of Israel (Levy and Higham 2005; Sharon et al. 2007; Mazar 2012), however, it is still not the case for the southern kingdom of Judah … . Some studies have tried to overcome this problem by modeling the dating of periods with the help of data from the entire southern Levant, lumping together Judah, Israel, and Philistia. These dating models assume that cultural changes occurred in different places at the same time, an assumption that largely overlooks regional variations. Our study, on the contrary, deals with one small region: the Judean lowland’ (2019a, 1). These statements are wrong on two grounds: First, a detailed model for Northern Israel was published by Toffolo et al. (2014); second, a detailed model for the south, comprising results from sites located in a limited area of ca. 20 × 10 km (exactly the area where Garfinkel et al. extracted their samples) was published twice (Finkelstein and Piasetzky 2007, 2015). Neither were cited in the article.