Diogenes, I did read the book. In fact, I read it based on the recommendation of someone on this board last year, and, as I noticed some of these issues, I took down notes. I don’t seem to have taken notes on the entire book, but I can offer some illustrative examples.
Well, as far as chronology goes, the main beef that traditional Jewish histories have against Jewish history as filtered through secular chronology/archaeology is a discrepancy of some 160 years in the date of the Babylonian exile. Based on certain histories of ancient Egypt (are the source documents for that Greek? I’ve never been able to find a clear answer on that), secular historians have fixed the date of the encounter between Pharaoh Necho and King Josiah in the late 7th century BCE, the Babylonian conquest of Judah at 586 BCE, the return of the Jewish exiles at 516 BCE, and assign a two-century period of time to Persian hegemony over the Middle East, which results in a gap of similar length in Jewish history, over which events that Jewish history say occurred during the time of Persian hegemony have been assigned to scattered dates.
Traditional Jewish chronology, on the other hand, says that the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem took place in 422 BCE, and the return from exile in 352 BCE, with Persian hegemony over the Middle East lasting for only about fifty years, and with no gap at all between the end of Biblical history and Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Middle East, following which point both chronologies agree on things. Orthodox Jewish historians have assumed interpretive error on the part of secular historians regarding the dates above.
This leads to a significant re-shuffling of dates. The F & S book, for example, finds no evidence of a strong united Jewish monarchy in the period their chronology would ascribe to Saul, David and Solomon - approximately the 11th century BCE. They do, however, write a whole chapter on what they say is evidence of a splendid and strong Omric dynasty of the Northern Kingdom in the 9th century BCE, and they specifically speak of ruins of stables that had long been ascribed to Solomon - but can’t be, because archaeological dating says they’re from much later than Solomon ruled.
Traditional Jewish dating, on the other hand, has the monarchial period beginning with Saul in 880 BCE, David assuming the throne in 877 BCE and Solomon succeeding him in 837 BCE. This would mean that the archaeologists’ 11th-century-BCE artifacts, from which they conclude that the united Israelite Kingdom is fiction, are from the relatively anarchic “Judges” period, and such evidence of a powerful kingdom as “Solomon’s stables” which they ascribe to Omri and his successors actually are from the reign of Solomon.
For reasons that may be partially or entirely connected to the above chronologal dispute, F & S and other secular archaeologists also mess around with the dating of the Patriarchal period. The book makes attempts to place Abraham in the range of 2100 BCE, and makes note of what they see as Biblical anachronisms. On the other hand, traditional Jewish chronology has Abraham born in 1872 BCE and the Biblically recorded events of his life taking place in the mid-18th century BCE and later, which would strike a blow to the “debunking.” The book also considers anachronistic the Biblical reference to Rameses in the book of Exodus, because they feel the need to ascribe an earlier date to the sojourn in Egypt than Jewish tradition does. However, traditional Jewish chronology has the Israelites leaving Egypt in 1312 BCE, several years after Rameses I ruled as Pharaoh, and thus not problematic.
Those are some of the chronological issues involved. As for assumptions: there is the issue that a nation spending 40 years in the Sinai desert would leave behind some trace of its daily life. This only holds true if one goes with the assumption that their lives were lived in a completely mundane way. But that’s not what the Bible says happened, was it? The Bible (or Biblically-based tradition) says that they ate miraculous Manna, drank water from a miraculous rock-well, and that they were surrounded on all sides by ethereal clouds. It says that they lived in tents, that their clothes and shoes miraculously never wore out, and their house of worship was disassembled and carried with them wherever they went. Their (our) deity having no visual form, no telltale icons or sculptures could be expected to be found along the route. Such a passage would clearly not leave the kind of traces archaeologists expect to see of non-miraculous sojourns.
NOTE: I AM NOT saying that it’s inherently unreasonable to disbelieve in the Biblical miracles mentioned and to instead assume natural occurrences. All I’m saying is that this CANNOT BE TAKEN AS A REFUTATION of the Biblical narrative, because the Biblical narrative, when taken in its entirety, obviates these difficulties.
Another assumption that they change is the nature of the conquest of Canaan. Because there is no evidence of the destruction of land and property that would accord with their perception of military conquest, they instead say the evidence points to a gradual migration. But the Bible itself indicates that G-d promised the Israelites that they would take over an intact country - they’d take possession of fields and vineyards they did not plant, houses they did not build, etc. The Midrash relates that when the Jews left Egypt, the Canaanites destroyed their homes and fields so the would-be conquerers would end up with nothing, and that part of G-d’s plan in making the Israelites sojourn for forty years was to induce the Canaanites to rebuild so the Israelites would have an intact country to take over. Believe what you want to or don’t want to about the Biblical/traditional history - it is consistent with the evidence, and the inconsistencies seen by F & S and others is a result of their making assumptions that are contrary to the Biblical version.
Well, it’s possible, though far from certain, that this is the altar built by Joshua during said conquest.
But more to the point: there is certainly very little evidence, but there is (according to the Biblical narrative) an expectation of little evidence, as indicated above…and that’s aside from the expectation of little evidence that comes with the distance in time. And pretty much all of what is considered in the secular archaeological community to be contradictory evidence is only so due to a disputed chronology.
Again, with the Judaic G-d having no physical form, what would you expect to be genuine evidence? And an equally relevant question is: what evidence is there that the idolatrous finds from that period represented an earlier form of what is now the Jewish religion rather than, as the Bible describes it, rampant sinning against said religion (especially in the Northern kingdom)?
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