The Danish archaeologist Thomas L. Thomson recently penned an attack on leading figures in biblical archaeology for paying excessive attention to ancient Israel in general and specifically to the question of whether material evidence and inscriptions can be reconciled with the Bible’s historical passages. Thomson went on to condemn some in both Israel and elsewhere for “ethnocentricity,” with ancient Jews (or Israelites) being the ethnic group in question. In his rejoinder, Alex Joffe gets at Thomson’s real objections and points to contradictions in his argument:
[W]hat bothers Thompson of course is that the Bible is, for some, scripture, and Jewish scripture at that. There has always been a self-evident quality to his biblical antipathy. There is simply too much, well, Jewish stuff, in there that connects, for better or worse, the past and present. His entire oeuvre has been a concerted effort to sever the Bible from the Jews and their Iron Age ancestors. This forces special pleading; . . . hence such odd statements as “there is in Israel today, no political room for a post-722 BCE Israel” [i.e. the northern kingdom of Israel after it was conquered by the Assyrians]. . . .
[B]alderdash. For one thing, Thompson is hardly justified in ignoring the mass of other epigraphic evidence, namely seals and sealing, which have a direct bearing on events, including the existence of biblically attested personalities and even kings, and, perhaps more importantly, on the ethnic composition of the southern Levant. . . .
Thompson’s accusations that the “non-Jewish populations,” even those of post-722 Samaria, not to speak of today, have been “silenced” as part of modern Israeli archaeology’s ethnocentricity demands that [archaeologists] “dejudaize” that which was never Jewish to begin with, only ancestral to Jews. As a result we must elevate something parallel that he cannot define archaeologically, historically, or culturally, save [for] the Idumeans. Who were they, these Iron Age non-Jewish populations? Where are they? What was their material culture, their social organization, or ideology? He cannot say. I agree they were there. They just weren’t terribly widespread or important.
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