Reception
The Bible Unearthed was well received by biblical scholars and archaeologists. Baruch Halpern, professor of Jewish Studies at Pennsylvania State University and leader of the archaeological digs at Megiddo for many years, praised it as "the boldest and most exhilarating synthesis of Bible and archaeology in fifty years", and biblical scholar Jonathan Kirsch, writing in the Los Angeles Times, called it "a brutally honest assessment of what archeology can and cannot tell us about the historical accuracy of the Bible", which embraces the spirit of modern archaeology by approaching the Bible "as an artifact to be studied and evaluated rather than a work of divine inspiration that must be embraced as a matter of true belief". Phyllis Trible, professor of biblical studies at Wake Forest University, concluded her review in The New York Times by pointing out the importance of understanding the truth about the biblical past:
| “ | Finkelstein and Silberman have themselves written a provocative book that bears the marks of a detective story. In juxtaposing the biblical record and archaeological data, they work with tantalizing fragments of a distant past. Assembling clues to argue their thesis requires bold imagination and disciplined research. The Bible Unearthed exhibits both in abundance. Imagination invariably exceeds the evidence; research makes plausible the reconstruction. Fortunately, the book does not achieve its goal: "to attempt to separate history from legend." It is better than that, for it shows how intertwined they are. What actually happened and what a people thought happened belong to a single historical process. That understanding leads to a sobering thought. Stories of exodus from oppression and conquest of land, stories of exile and return and stories of triumphal vision are eerily contemporary. If history is written for the present, are we doomed to repeat the past? | ” |
The book became and remains a major bestseller. In February 2009, Amazon.com ranked it as the 8th most popular in the fields of Old Testament Christian Theology, and the Archaeology of Christianity, as well as being the 22nd most popular book on the history of Israel. In 2006, the popularity of the text led to a four-part documentary series upon it, which was subsequently broadcast on The History Channel.
A review of the book by fellow archeologist William G. Dever published in the Biblical Archaeology Review and subsequently in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, resulted in heated exchanges between Dever and Finkelstein. Dever's review noted that the book had many strengths, notably archaeology's potential for re-writing the history of "Ancient Israel", but complained that it misrepresented his own views and concluded by characterizing Finkelstein as "idiosyncratic and doctrinaire"; Finkelstein's reaction was to call Dever a "jealous academic parasite," and the debate quickly degenerated from that point.
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