Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- I INTRODUCTION TO THE PROBLEMS
- II SOME METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES
- III AROUND THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN IN THE IRON AGE
- IV JORDAN IN THE IRON AGE
- V ISRAEL IN THE IRON AGE
- VI HISTORICAL CONSIDERATIONS
- 23 Stamp-Seal Amulets and Early Iron Age Chronology: An update
- 24 Problems in the Paleographic Dating of Inscriptions
- 25 Some Methodological Reflections on Chronology and History-Writing
- 26 David Did It, Others Did Not: The creation of Ancient Israel
- VII CONCLUSION
- Index
26 - David Did It, Others Did Not: The creation of Ancient Israel
from VI - HISTORICAL CONSIDERATIONS
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- I INTRODUCTION TO THE PROBLEMS
- II SOME METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES
- III AROUND THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN IN THE IRON AGE
- IV JORDAN IN THE IRON AGE
- V ISRAEL IN THE IRON AGE
- VI HISTORICAL CONSIDERATIONS
- 23 Stamp-Seal Amulets and Early Iron Age Chronology: An update
- 24 Problems in the Paleographic Dating of Inscriptions
- 25 Some Methodological Reflections on Chronology and History-Writing
- 26 David Did It, Others Did Not: The creation of Ancient Israel
- VII CONCLUSION
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The absolute dating of the Iron Age is based on a solar eclipse together with calendrical continuity into the Roman era and thereafter. Correlating literary sources to the chronological framework poses few problems, especially since our continuous Biblical historiographic sources conform to epigraphic chronological evidence to an extraordinary extent. So two issues arise in the attempt to connect text to mound: what does the Biblical or epigraphic evidence imply for a particular, dated, period, and what does the archaeological horizon imply for its particular concatenation of occupations? Typically, attempts to correlate the archaeological to the historical record have been facile. The textual evidence must be taken critically—neither endorsed nor dismissed, but evaluated—before such a correlation can be suggested. How, then, do we correlate archaeological horizons with textual indices? Do the absolute correlations offer any control on the dating of archaeological horizons between them?
I
When Arnold Toynbee published A Study of History (1956), the reviews were both many and varied. Scholars of all sorts of subjects contributed the reviews, from Indology and Sinology to American history. Most of the reviews ran more or less like this: this work is a real contribution. In my field, it is not very good, but on every other front it is brilliant.
Everyone enjoys truly multi-disciplinary conferences, for those are the venues in which scholars in other disciplines reveal their disagreements, and the logic actuating their positions.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Bible and Radiocarbon DatingArchaeology, Text and Science, pp. 422 - 438Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2005