The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, a book by Israel Finkelstein, Professor of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, and Neil Asher Silberman, an archaeologist, historian and contributing editor to Archaeology Magazine published in 2001 by Simon & Schuster using its imprint The Free Press and reprinted in 2002 using its Touchstone imprint, discusses the archaeology of Israel and its relationship to the origins and content of the Hebrew Bible.
Finkelstein and Silberman contend that the composition of the Bible began in the Iron Age, centuries after the events of Israel's founding myths—the patriarchs and the Exodus from Egypt. They argue that numerous biblical passages conflict with the Bronze Age and Iron Age archaeological record of the Land of Israel, and that the text reflects an authorship bias toward the Kingdom of Judah at the expense of the Kingdom of Israel. They also reject the historical plausibility of a prosperous united kingdom of Israel and Judah ruled by David and Solomon from Jerusalem in the 10th century BCE, instead positing this narrative as an ideological construct promoted by late Judahite kings such as Hezekiah and Josiah. The book was both praised and criticized by biblical scholars for its reconstruction of ancient Israel's history.
Methodology
The methodology applied by the authors is historical criticism with an emphasis on archaeology. Writing on the website of "The Bible and Interpretation", the authors describe their approach as one "in which the Bible is one of the most important artifacts and cultural achievements [but] not the unquestioned narrative framework into which every archaeological find must be fit." Their main contention is that:
On the basis of this evidence they propose
As noted by a reviewer on Salon.com the approach and conclusions of The Bible Unearthed are not particularly new. Ze'ev Herzog, professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, wrote a cover story for Haaretz in 1999 in which he reached similar conclusions following the same methodology; Herzog noted also that some of these findings have been accepted by the majority of biblical scholars and archaeologists for years and even decades, even though they have only recently begun to make a dent in the awareness of the general public.
Content
Early biblical archaeology was conducted with the presumption that the Bible must be true, finds only being considered as illustrations for the biblical narrative, and interpreting evidence to fit the Bible. Some archaeologists such as Eilat Mazar continue to take this "Bible and spade" approach, or, like the journal Bible and Spade, attempt to treat archaeology as a tool for proving the Bible's accuracy, but since the 1970s most archaeologists, such as Kenneth Kitchen, have begun instead to interpret the evidence only in the light of other archaeology, treating the Bible as an artifact to be examined, rather than as an unquestioned truth. This approach has led to results both in favor and against the historicity of the Old Testament.