In Search of King David’s Lost Empire

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/29/in-search-of-king-davids-lost-empire

by diodorus • 6 years ago

40 43 6 years ago

newyorker.com

badrabbit• 6 years ago

https://outline.com/uPscMz

sam_goody2• 6 years ago

yawn

Choose your opinions, present them as fact. Back them up with nothing.

I worked on a dig in Israel. It was interesting.

Among other things I learnt about archeology, history, facts, opinions, and bias, is that that most what is in popular press is grounded in belief, not fact.

And that Finklestein is not respected by his peers. This article doesn't make me think any higher of him.

mxcrossb• 6 years ago

It almost seems like every one of the personalities mentioned in the article are disrespected by their peers! As an outsider I found it very fun, but I suspect that someone with inside experience like yourself would find it quite tedious.

mcphage2• 6 years ago

What is the current archaeological consensus about David and his kingdom?

simonh• 6 years ago

I think the article explains this quite well. There is no consensus.

InfiniteRand2• 6 years ago

In my educated layman guage of the field, I think midway between the minimalist and maximalists is still most respected with recent findings giving momentum to the maximalists but the maximalists are getting more inclined to over reaching claims which will likely undermine their position in the next generation or two

bobthechef• 6 years ago

So a case of "I am not in acquainted with this field, so I'll believe it, but boy did that other journalist completely mischaracterize MY field"?

Based on what I hear, many biblical scholars (like many in other fields) are looking to be "edgy" by denying this or that claim and then build entire stories out of thin air based on the consequences of that denial. Meaning, a lot of the biblical scholarship that tries to be "original" ends up suppressing the best explanations in some way simply to get proverbial clicks. Like Reza Aslan.

ithkuil• 6 years ago

Gell-Mann Amnesia effect?

coliveira4• 6 years ago

Finklestein's peers are mostly paid to establish the truth of biblical stories. That's why they don't like him.

Alex39173• 6 years ago

If you look at all the religious megaliths we have today, like the Vatican or whatever, the reasons those exist is because they were built using several hundred or even thousand years of accrued wealth. (And a significant amount of 'reappropriated' building materials.) If the second temple really was built in 586 BCE, does it make any sense whatsoever that that could have been built with only 3 generations or so of accrued intergenerational wealth? That just doesn't seem plausible. Even assuming the bible is 100% made up, common sense suggests the longer biblical timeline is probably closer to the truth.

If they'd instead stumbled into Dubai-style wealth from these copper mines or whatever only a few decades earlier, surely that would have been written down somewhere.

yyyk4• 6 years ago

It's more like 'Minimalism ended up the same position we had before it* , Finklestein's research programme was a bust and he can't admit that'.

* Basically: We have no archeological evidence for Exodus and conquest. In fact, what we have doesn't seem to match conquest at all. However, once monarchy and actual government sets in (around David's time), we get bookkeeping and the record is accurate once one takes into account the significant authorial slant.

sam_goody2• 6 years ago

There is a MUCH greater desire to disprove the Bible than to prove it.

Aside from the fame and financial interest, the personal belief of almost everyone I met is anti religious. (With the exception of Vindl Jones, but his interests are ... not archeology)

I therefor would be much more suspect of a claim disproving than proving the Biblical narative. But in either case, check the facts, not the names.

source: worked in the field, in Israel, for a period.

wl4• 6 years ago

Levantine archeologists and philologists have recommended many of Finklestein's works to me. Some adopt his low chronology while others don't. But he seems to be respected enough—even among those who disagree with him—in that sliver of academia I'm familiar with. I'd imagine the situation may be different in environments where the the historicity of the Biblical account concerning the United Monarchy is of political or religious importance.

empath753• 6 years ago

Biblical archeology is hopelessly compromised as a field. The people most interested in pursuing it and funding it are the people least interested in discovering the truth, rather than confirming their own beliefs.

NateEag5• 6 years ago

I think if that were true there would not be enough controversy in the field to write an article like this.

I know the Old Testament reasonably well and I think the majority of the researchers the article quotes deny a literal reading of it in one way or another.

Jedd3• 6 years ago

I know the Old Testament reasonably well and I think the majority of the researchers the article quotes deny a literal reading of it in one way or another.

I suspect that still aligns with GP's point -- people are generally partisan on this subject, one way or another.

empath753• 6 years ago

Because all Jews and Christians and atheists agree on the Bible?

InfiniteRand2• 6 years ago

When you deal with ancient history you’re going to end up with at least some imaginings to connect the data points into a narrative of some sort. That narrative will almost certainly be wrong in some significant way given the future discoveries not yet seen.

Moreover measuring which imagining is more true requires speculative criteria building speculation on top of speculation.

I get religious belief, I am very religious, but to hold that an assortment of artifacts, which are still being discovered, unevenly spread by luck and chance, to hold that that proves or disproves a narrative is a leap of faith.

But aside from all that, there’s a common pattern in historical research when there is a looming central question at the center of a field, historiography swings one way heavily, then swings the other way as the excesses of the previous generation are denounced, then there is an attempt to meet in the middle, again denouncing past excesses, then the middle is seen as too wish-washy and full of false equivalence and historiography swings hard in one direction again.

For other examples of this see the history of the Cold War, history of world war 2, history of the US Civil War etc.

MintelIE2• 6 years ago

There doesn't seem to be much of anything actually substantiating King David's existence. Has this changed as of late? I know it's very important to modern-day Israeli historiography.

aryehof• 6 years ago

Actually it is rather more important to Christianity. Jesus as the Messiah is predicated on his lineage from King David.

This is why the New Testament commences with proving Jesus's direct lineage from King David. Without it, Jesus is not the Messiah, and Christianity is baseless.

wl4• 6 years ago

Cyrus was the Messiah, too, but nobody pretends he was descended from King David. In any case, Jesus fails most of the Messianic criteria of Second Temple Judaism. Early Christians had to significantly revise their concept of Messiah to get Jesus to fit. Indeed, the NT makes light of the fact that Jesus was not the Messiah the Jews were expecting, although it implies they were wrong.

In any case, the basis of Christianity is that Jesus was God incarnate, died for the sins of the world, rose from the dead, and will come again to judge the living and the dead. Some early Christian polemic about interpretation of then-centries-old prophesy isn't core to that. It's a problem for fundamentalism, but that's an entirely separate issue.

MintelIE2• 6 years ago

I don't agree. It seems that Israeli archaeology is focused on the premise of being there first, above all else. It doesn't seem that Christians are heavily involved in Israel's archaeological program either.

Jedd3• 6 years ago

In the long war over how to reconcile the Bible with historical fact, the story of David stands at ground zero.

I'd suggest the historicity of Jesus is a more profound question. Absent David, you could still try to lay claim to significant tracts of the various interpretations. For decades I'd assumed the historical record (outside the bible) was exhaustive, clear, and undisputed -- but beyond the deity aspect, there's some genuine doubt over the historical Jesus. [0]

Apropos TFA - I can recommend Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou's excellent BBC 3-episode series from 2011 called 'Bible's Buried Secrets', though I think there was a similar named US series at some point. In any case, one episode is dedicated to the question of 'Did King David's empire exist?' - I won't spoil the surprise of her conclusions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zp3j3

wisemanwillhear• 6 years ago

There is an interesting book I read in college that address the timeline problem called "Centuries of Darkness: A Challenge to the Conventional Chronology of Old World Archaeology" by Peter James. He makes an argument for why the timelines of some of the ancient cultures in that region are messed up.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Centuries_of_Darkness.h...

In Search of King David’s Lost Empire

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