Jerusalem, in the tenth century B.C., is an inhospitable place for farmers but a strategic location for men on the run. Human settlement in the Judean highlands is sparse: five thousand people, spread out in hamlets of about fifty families each. The landscape is rugged, veined with ravines and thicketed with oaks. Rain is unpredictable. To the east lies the desert, hushed and empty. To the west—teasingly close—are the lush lowlands of the Philistine city-states, with their seaside trade routes and their princely homes. Cut off from these coastal plains, life in the hill country is severe. Homes are made of unworked stone; sheep and goats are quartered indoors. There are no public buildings, no ornate furnishings in the shrines. Bands of fugitives, landless laborers, and tax evaders rove the Judean wilderness. These rebel gangs—viewed by the neighboring Egyptians as both a nuisance and a threat—maraud the nearby villages. They collect protection money and pillage the locals, making off with their women and their cattle. They terrorize the Philistines, and then, in a sudden turnaround, offer their services to a Philistine king in exchange for shelter.
Their leader is a wily, resourceful man from Bethlehem, who decides that his people are meant for more than lightning raids and mercenary stints. He sends his men to rout an advancing force, then shares the loot with the highland elders. This wins over the highlanders, and, in time, they make him chieftain of the southern hill area. He takes over the tribal center of Hebron, and later captures Jerusalem, another hilltop stronghold. The chieftain moves his extended family to the main homes of the Jerusalem village, and settles in one himself—a palace, some might call it, though there is nothing extravagant about it. He rules over a neglected chiefdom of pastoralists and outlaws. His name is David.
Israel Finkelstein’s vision of King David—the vagabond, the racketeer—helped make his career as an eminent Biblical archeologist. But, when he began his research in the area, he was interested less in the Bible than in migration patterns. In 1993, Finkelstein was a newly tenured professor at Tel Aviv University, forty-four years old and known as something of an iconoclast. He was working on a book called “Living on the Fringe,” which took up questions of human habitation in the ancient southern Levant—particularly Canaan, the site of what is now Israel. Finkelstein argued that the first settlers came there as a result of internal changes in the region; nomadic societies became sedentary for a few generations during periods of successful trade, then uprooted themselves, then settled again. The Israelites, he claimed, were “of local stock”—that is, Bedouin nomads.
The Bible, of course, tells it differently. In the Old Testament story, Canaan is where the Hebrews ended their exodus, and where David secured for his people a glorious kingdom. From about 1,000 B.C., he and his son Solomon ruled over a vast monarchy that encompassed four defeated kingdoms, stretching as far north as the Euphrates River and as far south as the Negev Desert. (Archeologists derive the date from an inscription on a portal gate in the Egyptian city of Karnak, which lists the military conquests of King Shoshenq—thought to be the same king mentioned in the Bible as Shishak.) The United Monarchy, as it is known, represented the golden age of ancient Israel; though it probably lasted no more than a generation or two, its legacy has persisted for thousands of years. For Jews, Finkelstein told me, David “represents territorial sovereignty, the legend of the empire.” For Christians, he is “directly related to Jesus and the birth of Christianity.” For Muslims, he is a righteous prophet who preceded Muhammad. The story of David, Finkelstein added, “is the most central thing in the Bible, and in our culture.”
The Bible depicts David as a brilliant but flawed figure, capable of unspeakable violence but also of remorse and tenderness—perhaps humanity’s first antihero. He is anointed by God to replace Saul, the first king of Israel, whose short rule was marked by bouts of rebellion. David is a handsome shepherd; he has a way with the lyre and a way with women; he slings a fatal stone at a giant. So far, these are the familiar tropes of the ancient hero. But David is also said to have impregnated Bathsheba—a married woman—and sent her husband off to die in battle.
Nadav Na’aman, an authority on Jewish history and a colleague of Finkelstein’s at Tel Aviv University, describes David’s story as “extraordinary fiction.” But he believes that it contains kernels of truth, preserved as the tale was passed down by oral tradition. The story, for instance, frequently mentions the Philistine city of Gath, which was destroyed in the late ninth century B.C.—a clue to its origins.
In the long war over how to reconcile the Bible with historical fact, the story of David stands at ground zero. There is no archeological record of Abraham, or Isaac, or Jacob. There is no Noah’s Ark, nothing from Moses. Joshua did not bring down the walls of Jericho: they collapsed centuries earlier, perhaps in an earthquake. But, in 1993, an Israeli archeologist working near the Syrian border found a fragment of basalt from the ninth century B.C., with an Aramaic inscription that mentioned the “House of David”—the first known reference to one of the Bible’s foundational figures. So David is not just a central ancestor in the Old Testament. He may also be the only one that we can prove existed. Yet to prove it definitively would be exceptionally difficult; Jerusalem of the tenth century B.C. is an archeological void. “I can take a shoebox and put inside everything we have from that period,” Yuval Gadot, an archeologist from Tel Aviv University, said.
Finkelstein has pushed Israeli research to the forefront of science, employing precision radiocarbon dating, DNA analysis, and image processing that can examine a three-thousand-year-old potsherd and determine how many ancient scribes were involved in its making. An archeology lab run by Tel Aviv University and the Weizmann Institute of Science has employed the chief forensic investigator of the Israel Police. Despite their advanced technology, these researchers are still engaged in questions that have persisted for more than a century. From where did the early Israelites emerge? When do we first see signs of a centralized cult with a single deity? More prosaically, but no less crucially, who was David? Was he the all-powerful king described in the Bible? Or was he, as some archeologists believe, no more than a small-time Bedouin sheikh?
William Albright, the father of Biblical archeology, seemed ill-suited to field work. Born in 1891, to Methodist missionaries from Iowa, Albright suffered from extreme myopia—likely the result of typhoid fever in infancy—and a left hand that had been mangled in a farming accident. At ten, though, he cobbled together enough money to buy a two-volume history of Babylon and Assyria. By sixteen, he was teaching himself Hebrew. In college, he studied Greek, Latin, Akkadian, Ancient Ethiopian, Syriac, and Arabic, with breaks to travel to New York for meetings of the American Oriental Society.
“For next Father’s Day, we’ll get you a tie clip.” Cartoon by Tom Toro Link copied
Albright was a faithful Christian, and the inerrancy of the Bible was then under attack. Critics, mostly in Europe, argued that the first five books of the Old Testament were written not at the time of Moses, as the Scriptures claim, but by authors working centuries apart, weaving a patchwork of tales from early Judeans and later priests, and even from Babylonian myths. For Albright, the Bible was nevertheless a compendium of verifiable fact. In 1919, he arrived in Palestine, and began scouring the land of ancient Israel for findings that would illustrate and historicize the Scriptures.
In 1936, Albright named a successor in Palestine: Nelson Glueck, an American who is said to have boasted of digging “with a Bible in one hand and a trowel in the other.” He surveyed hundreds of sites in Transjordan, and found evidence of an ancient copper industry so extensive that he nicknamed the area “the Pittsburgh of Palestine.” By comparing potsherds he found there with those from other sites, Glueck grew convinced that the mines dated to the tenth century B.C. For Biblical archeologists, this was akin to striking gold—“the ultimate fantasy,” one told me.
In the nascent State of Israel, there was real currency to research that could demonstrate the Jewish people’s connection to their ancestral land—especially if it ignored the other people living there. David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister, said, “Jewish archeology present-tenses our past and shows our historic continuity in the country.” His Army’s legendary chief of staff, Yigael Yadin, became the country’s leading archeologist. In 1955, Yadin began an epochal excavation of the ancient city of Hazor, which, in the Bible, is destroyed by Joshua during his conquest of Canaan, and later rebuilt and fortified by Solomon. Yadin approached the dig like a military operation. He employed two hundred diggers, mostly immigrants from North Africa, and installed a network of field telephones and a miniature railway for transferring dirt. His men unearthed a six-chambered gate made of ashlar stones, which looked identical to a gate that Yadin had previously discovered in Megiddo—another city thought to have been built by Solomon. Here was evidence of a grand design, Yadin concluded. “Both gates were built by the same royal architect,” he wrote in 1958.
Finkelstein was nine years old at the time, and the romance of such finds was helping to inspire what one historian described as a “popular national cult” of archeology. The cult didn’t extend to Finkelstein’s house. He was raised outside Tel Aviv, in a family of citrus farmers. His father was a talented athlete and, he says, a “big macho,” who emigrated from Ukraine, joined his in-laws’ orchard business, and went on to become a successful sports executive. At age four, Finkelstein was considered a math prodigy. But, he said, “my parents did what you’re not supposed to do, which is to show off my skills with a slide rule in front of guests.” His father wanted him to be a nuclear physicist, and was baffled by his decision to go into archeology: “Until his last day, he couldn’t understand why someone would pay me a salary—‘Who cares? What good does it do?’”
After serving in the Israeli Air Force, Finkelstein landed, in 1970, in the archeology department at Tel Aviv. The field was embroiled in debate. “There was a world war going on over whether Abraham was historical,” he said. “Then there was a big debate over the conquest of Canaan. Today, there isn’t. We know these things didn’t happen. But that’s how it all went—the salami method.” The most momentous events in the Scriptures were being pared away, one after another. Finkelstein found it easy to wonder whether any of the Biblical narrative was based on historical fact.
Thomas Römer, the head of the Collège de France, told me that Finkelstein developed “a reputation as one of the young generation who were about to challenge the traditional way of how Israel was doing archeology.” He also developed a reputation as a playboy. “I needed to calm down in every respect” is how he puts it. He was married when he accepted a two-year teaching position in Chicago, in the mid-eighties, but the marriage collapsed soon after his return home. He met his second wife, Joëlle Cohen, a Parisian émigrée, on a dig in southern Israel. By then, he was forty—and calmer.
After years of researching the highlands, Finkelstein wanted to take on a site in the lowlands, to see whether social structures emerged differently there. He chose Megiddo, Yadin’s old territory. It was the “switchboard of the Levant,” Finkelstein told me one afternoon a few months ago. We were in his office in the Tel Aviv University humanities building. He had settled in a lime-green armchair, and gestured for me to sit on a wooden daybed. An electric bicycle, which he calls his “Mercedes,” was parked in a corner. At seventy-one, Finkelstein is six feet two, bearded, with a deep baritone and elegant hands that always seem to be conducting an invisible orchestra. (I heard a janitor on campus address him as “Sean Connery.”) He is generous, witty, courtly, overwhelmingly charming—and he knows it. “Israel Finkelstein is Israel Finkelstein’s greatest fan,” one scholar told me. More than once, when we spoke, he compared himself to Baruch Spinoza, “a great Jew,” who, in 1656, was excommunicated for challenging Biblical orthodoxy. In conversation, Finkelstein often refers to himself as “your slave,” “your loyal slave,” or “your wretched slave,” which has the strange effect of further elevating his self-image.
