Judaism
When Was the Bible Written? In the Persian Era!
Abstract
How Darius I Invented Judaism
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, 22 June 2009
Is the Bible Historical?
Even most biblicist scholars accept that the biblical stories of David and Solomon could not have been written much before 600 BC, though they speak of events three or four centuries earlier. The “scholars” get round this uncomfortable truth by admitting that the history of Judah, of which it purports to be a part, is the outcome of the patching together of earlier sources by later editors. It satisfies the flocks but no one can be sure whether the earlier stories were history, myth, legend or just fireside fairy tales. It does not matter. To the “scholars” they were historical. Thus one can read in David and Solomon, a book co-authored by probably the best of modern biblical archaeologists, the question:
When were these ancient historical works written?I Finkelstein and N A Silberman
So these authors regard these as “historical works” even though they admit the problem remaining of their actual historicity—their historical reliability. It seems obvious that history written four hundred years after the event—at a time when writing, even marks of identification on pots, was a novelty—cannot have been too reliable. Most of Homer’s works, The Iliad and The Odyssey, once the bible of the ancient Greeks and written in the same chronological period, are considered to be myths or at best legends.
Yet, biblical scholars thought the parts of Samuel and Kings concerning David and Solomon were contemporary accounts written by a scribe actually in the court of these kings. The courts were like the courts of the kings of great empires or wealthy countries like Assyria and Egypt respectively, with ministers, secretaries and scribes, including a court historian who dutifully wrote more advanced forms of history than did Herodotus, the world’s “first historian”, but half a millennium earlier! Regrettably, none of this fable is backed up by archaeology, though, surprisingly, Finkelstein and Silberman, attempt a biblicist justification (David and Solomon, 2006) of the biblical myths of David and Solomon in a manner more typical of W F Albright and his school.
Not much of the history of Greece depends on deductions from the Greek myths, even though occasional clues have come from them. In the same way, king Arthur is not listed as a king of England, or his exploits and those of his courtiers recorded as history. Like the stories of David and Solomon, stories of Arthur were not set down until half a millennium later. Other myths like those of Robin Hood and Aeneas are similar. They are foundation myths and myths of “communal identity”.
The Biblical History of Judah
There is no evidence at all outside the bible of an original United Monarchy. Finkelstein and Silberman suggest the time the two states were united was by the marriage of Athaliah, sister or daughter of Ahab of Israel, and Joram (Jehoram) of Judah (2 Kg 8:18). A Jehoram is the king of both countries for about 12 years before Jehu usurps the throne of Israel, when Alathiah becomes queen in Judah. If there is any truth in this, it is the only proof of a truly united monarchy, and it too depends on the bible. Conceivably, Judah had at some stage achieved a nominal independence as a sort of principality, but generally benefited from being under the protection of its wealthier neighbour. If the Tel Dan stele is genuine, Judah in those days was “the House of David”, implying it was founded by someone called David. The Tel Dan stele, though, assuming bytdwd means House of David, reads:
…killed […]iahu […]g of the house of David…
the hiatuses being then filled to suit the bible.
Solomon, Rehoboam, Abijam, and Asa are listed in the book of Kings as David’s successors, and we have no independent evidence either to confirm or challenge this sequence.I Finkelstein and N A Silberman, David and Solomon
All the kings of Judah to Hezekiah, who is confirmed, could be fictional, unless the Tel Dan stele proves to be genuine, when another can be added. The external evidence other than this suggests that Judah only became independent of Israel when the latter was about to succumb to Assyria. Hezekiah was an Assyrian puppet king of a rump state. Previously Israel must always have ruled or dominated the region where Judah later was.
Israel disappeared from history when Samaria was annexed to Assyria as the province Samarina, the Israelite leaders being deported and colonists from elsewhere being sent in. Archaeologists have found seventh century cuneiform tablets at Gezer with Babylonian names and an Aramaic papyrus confirming that colonists were settled at Bethel—in Samarina but just a few miles north of Jerusalem. If the dating of these artifacts is not assured, they could be from the Persian period, over 200 years later when the bible says people from Babylonia came to Judah.
Finkelstein estimates the population of Israel before the Assyrian annexation to have been 225,000, and Sargon boasts of resettling 27,500, so almost 90 per cent of the population were not deported. The Assyrian colonists will have been put in charge of the native Israelites as a ruling class, but a lot of Israelites can be expected to have escaped south as refugees, settling in Judah, which experienced a sudden expansion in population and economic activity, some of which will have been the result of the influx of more sophisticated Israelites, and some the result of new opportunities of trading with Assyria. Judah was an Assyrian client state, and Assyrian influence is clear.
The Philistine coastal cities were also client kings of the Assyrians. David’s Philistine ally in the bible was Achish, king of Gath. Excavations at Tel Miqne in 1996 unearthed an inscription on a limestone block with the name on it of Ikausu. He is also recorded as paying tribute to Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, kings of Assyria. Tel Miqne is thought to be Ekron. Gath had already been reduced to a village, but some argue that Ikausu was a Philistine title, equivalent to mayor or king, or was at least a traditional throne name, and Gath and Ekron are neighbouring cities, and so with closely similar traditions. Assyrian records are unlikely to repeat the error of naming the king of a wrong city, so whoever wrote the stories regarded Ekron as Gath.
When Gath was reduced, many Gathites must have fled to Ekron, and maybe the two cities had been joined in a mini-state called Gath after the main one, which continued as Gath even when the lesser city became more important. So Gath became the city state of Ekron rather as the city state of Jerusalem was called Judah. All of this is possible, but more probable is perhaps that the authors did not know that Gath had become insignificant, and continued to use its name even though the main city of the district had actually become Ekron. Whether the error was accidental or deliberate, it could not have been made within memory of the time the change happened, so must have been much later on.
Finkelstein and Silberman admit that the start of the development of Judah is not certainly known, but they reckon it must have started about 730 BC in the time of Ahaz, and then continued under Hezekiah. Israel was, of course, annexed in 722 by Assyria, so the rise of Judah and the fall of Israel both coincided with the expansion of the Assyrians into Palestine. Curiously, while northern Samaria was not depopulated, the southern reaches of it, abutting Judah, were. Here the population collapsed by three fourths. A plague is mentioned in the bible at the time as affecting the Assyrian army sieging Jerusalem. Perhaps it decimated the population of southern Samaria, just a few miles north of the besieged city. The evidence of Babylonian colonists at Gezer and Bethel in this area might be because they had to be brought in to replace the Israelite population which had either died in the plague or fled south.
Avigard, Reich and Shukron have shown that now, in the 600s BC, Jerusalem suddenly grew tenfold in area and in population to 150 acres and 12000 people respectively, though the population estimate is based on the area covered. Local farmsteads also multiplied to serve the Jerusalem urbanites. The city was fortified and the Siloam water tunnel was constructed, efforts that must have needed slaves or corvee labour to complete, and skilled engineers to design, and that must have been beyond the capabilities of the Judahites alone. The Assyrians must have provided the engineers, and perhaps the corvee labour was some of the Israelites forced to build the city, then left there to fend for themselves. In any event the population of Judah doubled in not many years.
Judah first appears briefly in history in its own right with the characteristics of a trading nation. Archaeology at Tell Jammeh near Gaza, an important Assyrian trading post has revealed a lot of camel bones, a mixture of mature and juvenile animals. Here then is sure evidence camels were being used as beasts of burden by merchants trading in the Assyrian empire. Previously camels had not been common. Archaeology can give dating termini to its findings, the dates before and after which something was possible. Plainly, the Assyrians popularized the usage of camels from the seventh century onwards. Yet the bible confidently has Abraham, a thousand years earlier, depicted as a wealthy camel owner. If he was a wealthy camel owner, he lived after the seventh century BC. More certainly, the biblical stories about him were written after the seventh century BC, but it could have been any time after, and the Persian period is the most likely.
Even biblicists have to respect the termini, though when they feel they cannot without losing some important part of the biblical myth, they invent ingenious and even miraculous excuses! Otherwise, they try their utmost to push the limits as far as they can to accommodate the bible. The visit of the queen of Sheba (Saba) to Solomon is an example. Sheba is in southern Arabia, the source of precious incense, spices and gold, and was a country often ruled by queens. It all fits the Solomonic legend, but what does not fit is that the Sabians had not settled in southern Arabia at the time Solomon is meant to have lived. Saba in modern Yemen did not exist before the eighth century BC, or did not make any impression on the world until then, 200 years after Solomon supposedly flourished.
Biblicists are, therefore, forced to to accept that the story of the visit of the queen of Sheba must have been added as an embellishment to the story of Solomon, when it was written down, and that was in the eighth century, as soon as Sheba became significant. In short, they will take the earliest possible date that will suit their beliefs. But Sheba is unlikely to have leapt from obscurity to international significance as soon as it began trading. Here historians will look at probabilities. The time the story is likely to have been added is when Sheba was an established trading force in the region, or even later, when even that had been magnified by legend—when the queens of Sheba had themselves become legendary! Combined with the advanced literary skills involved in recording the tale, it could not be dated before the Hellenistic era, or, at the earliest, the Persian period.
When was the Bible Written?
If you are a believer, you will believe in biblical prophecy. If you are sane, you will see it as a storyteller’s ploy. When the bible reports prophecies as true, it is not a sign of God’s finger, but a sure sign that the story was simply written after the event, assuming the event is a real one at all.
An anonymous prophet in the time of the idolator, Jeroboam I, proclaimed that his sins would be avenged and reversed by a good king called Josiah. The bible relates that a good king called Josiah does it 300 years later around 620 BC. The prophecy was made therefore in or after the time of Josiah, and it shows that the earlier narrative ending with the dissolution of the united monarchy could not have been written before Josiah.
The reversal prophesied was realized in Josiah’s reformation of the temple, repression of Canaanite religion, and centralization of Yehouah worship in the temple of Jerusalem. There is little evidence that any such reforms happened so early as the seventh century. When it did happen was in the Persian period when the temple was rebuilt by Persian colonists under Nehemiah, then sanctified by Ezra. Josiah’s supposed reforms were written into Jewish history to justify the actual reforms introduced by the Persians as a restoration of correct worship! The reference to Josiah’s reforms implied in the story of Jeroboam shows it was not written until after the Persians had invented Josiah’s reforms!
The authors of the Jewish history in the bible are fond of saying something or other was so “to this day”, proof that it was not a contemporary account of events but a much later one. Finkelstein and Silberman take this phrase to signify that the bible was not written until the seventh century BC—in the time of Josiah—still a remarkably early date. Judah only emerged into real history late in the eighth century BC, yet only a century later, on this thesis, it is producing astonishingly refined narrative as history—and long before Herodotus!
The evidence seems to suggest otherwise, except perhaps for the biblical references to kings of Judah. Judah only seems to have had kings from the eighth century, previously being part of Israel, and later part of Babylon’s empire. Thereafter the only kings were when the Maccabees set themselves up as kings in the second century BC. It seems certain that at that time they will have edited the Jewish scriptures, laid out by the Persians, the Ptolemies and then the Seleucids to suit their own interests. An emphasis on Jewish kingship would have been among them. This then could have been when the extensive references to the Jewish kingdom were introduced.
If the biblical history was written in the seventh century BC, how could it have included the Babylonian conquest, the exile and the so-called return under Nehemiah and Ezra, events taking the story down to the fifth century BC. The apologists’ answer is that these later books were added later. Once it is admitted that the books were edited at a later date, then there is a problem of knowing how much of it was added, indeed why all of it could not have been written in and after the Persians. Actually, that is where the evidence points.
The Exile and Return
The theme of the whole of the Jewish scriptures is that of Deuteronomy—the theme of apostasy from proper worship of the true God, consequent punishment, and the restoration of proper worship by a remnant before the cycle starts again—and the exile and return are the key to it, the culmination of it, with worship thereafter properly centralized in Jerusalem, and the whole of the people considered as righteous. The messiah in this story was Cyrus (Koresh), the shah of Persia, and the whole scheme was imposed by Ezra, who seems to have been a senior Persian chancellery minister. He read out the law, and so must have been the one who was introducing it. In the bible it is now called Deuteronomy. In fact, the “returners” were not those who had gone into exile, but colonists deported into Judah to set up a temple state, as part of Persia’s geopolitical policies. They were depicted as “returners” to suit the theme of Deuteronomy, and that theme was to suit the Persian policy of “restoring” religions.
Finkelstein and Silberman repeat the old canard that Cyrus was tolerant of local cults, and let them do as they wished. It is manifestly unrealistic, and, if it was ever true, later shahs changed it. Cyrus and the Persians tolerated and accommodated those of their subjects who were cooperative. They were utterly intolerant of those who were not, but they knew the importance of perceptions, and used propaganda exquisitely. It was a Persian policy to appear helpful and tolerant, but they were ruthless when people rebelled against them. These rebels were considered people who worshipped false gods, divas, the word being the root of our word “devil”. Persians destroyed the tower of Babel once the Babylonians rebelled, though Cyrus had taken Marduk by the hand initially.
What happened was what the bible describes—pacification by deportation. It was for long the way conquering nations in the ANE dealt with unruly subjects. Their leaders were deported away, and a new set of leaders were deported in, charged with the task of restoring the culture that had been corrupted by the diva gods. In the case of cooperative people, the policy was nominally to recognize the local culture, but the Persians offered all their help and expertise to purge local religions of distortions introduced by bad kings and priests, thereby again “restoring” the cult to its pristine purity. Darius the Great had his advisers helping the Egyptian priesthood in the schools of life to sort out Egyptian religion. The Egyptian priests remembered the lesson and used it later to help the Jews publish their scriptures, taking the chance to “restore” them. Toleration of local cults meant help in restoring them, but “restoration” was really changing the cult into a form that suited Persian rule. That is what Darius II did in Judah.
The leader of the first “returners” was named as Zerubabel, a Babylonian name meaning “seed of” or “son of” Babylon. Yet this man was, we are invited to believe, not only a Jew but of the royal line of David. Jews, even though they were slaves and captives in Babylon, had assiduously retained their traditions so that they were able to “return” with them forged and refined by 70 years of much deeper thought than they had previously devoted to them. Yet with all this national devotion and piety, the royal prince had not retained a Jewish name.
Finkelstein and Silberman have to recognize the obvious—that the Jews had actually assimilated to Babylonian culture “in just a few decades”. The “just a few decades” was actually 70 years even according to the bible—a whole human lifetime, and about three natural generations. It would have been peculiar if they had not assimilated, and so what really is peculiar is the biblical story that they fervently kept their traditions. And, if they had assimilated, then why would they have wanted to return? Babylon was a lush country, rich and cultured. Few who had assimilated to it would have wanted to return to a poor, tiny, arid, limestone outcrop. The invitation to return fell on deaf ears, few returned, and those who did failed. Eventually, a return was enforced, but it is unlikely that those who “returned” had had anything to do with those who had left Judah.
Excavations show that Jerusalem was systematically destroyed and it and its surroundings were sparsely populated for a long time. The question is, “Was it the Babylonians who destroyed Jerusalem or the Persians?”. The only answer ever offered is, “the Babylonians”, because the Babylonians are known to have sacked Jerusalem. But the biblical books, Nehemiah and Ezra, suggest that Jerusalem was still derelict in the mid to late fifth century, long after the supposed “return”. The explanation could be that the Persians had further devastated Jerusalem as a punishment, perhaps after a rebellion, and two are known about this time, the Egyptian rebellion, and the one by Megabyzes, about the mid fifth century.
These rebellions happened, but whether Jerusalem was involved is not known. If it had been involved, then the Persians would have had cause to savage the city again in a punitive expedition, leaving Nehemiah musing about its sorry state. The upshot was the colonization of the city, and the construction of what is now always called the Second Temple, about 417 BC. As the dedication of this temple, according to the bible, happened in the reign of Darius, it is habitually dated too early, in the reign of Darius the Great, about 516 BC, when it really was dedicated in the reign of Darius II. When it was resettled by the colonists, Jerusalem was only about 5 hectares in area compared with 60 before the Babylonian conquest almost 200 years before.
Hypothesis of a Late Authorship
Finkelstein and Silberman admit that Chronicles was written much later than their guess of the seventh century BC. 1 Chronicles 29:7 mentions a Persian coin introduced by Darius the Great around 500 BC, the Daric. Chronicles, they think was written in the fourth century, when Jews had suddenly appeared all over the ancient world, despite the tiny population of Judah itself in the whole of the preceding period since the seventh century, when briefly it had ballooned to a few myriad. Apologists attribute this uncannily immense generation of millions of diaspora Jews—long before any Jews had ever been dispersed—to the ten lost tribes of Israel, deported by the Assyrians. Never mind that those people were not Jews but Israelites, they had decided to be Jews instead, we are told.
The fact is that Jews were followers of the God Yehouah, as Chronicles emphasizes, not inhabitants of Judah, but even then the people deported by the Assyrians, like the people deported by the Babylonians, could never have retained their original religion. They too will have been obliged to do as they were told, and must have assimilated into the local population of wherever they had ended up. The Persians invented Judaism for their subject peoples, setting up the temple state of Jerusalem as its focus, run by colonists sent from Mesopotamia charged with being a nation of priests, among the nations of Abarnahara, to represent before an ethical god, Yehouah, those subjects of Persia who were not Iranians and so could not worship Ahuramazda.
Josephus says the Samaritan temple at Mount Gerizim was set up in the time of Alexander, who had settled some of his Macedonian veterans there. Samaritans said their temple was built at the same time that the Persians built the Jewish temple at Jerusalem, but Samaritans only accepted the five books of Moses, and not the rest of the Jewish scriptures as being holy. Therefore they did not have the myths of David and Solomon about the early construction of their temple. The Elephantine correspondence suggests that Samaria and Judah were of equal importance to the Jews there around the time the Persians set up the Jewish temple state. It could imply there was a Samarian temple as well as the Jewish one, as the Samaritans claim, and both were considered as authoritative to the Egyptian Jews. Both branches must have been willing to accept the Ptolemaic revisions of the Persian bible, but the Samaritans refused to accept the addition of stories like those of David and Solomon, or rejected them at some stage. The careers of David and Solomon have features in common with the rise and success of the Hasmonaeans. Y Magen has excavated at Gerizim and identified the remains of a temple there as Persian, almost identical to the Jerusalem temple and dedicated to the same God.
Psalms, Song of Songs, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are all accepted by scholars as Persian or post-Persian, the latter being obviously Hellenistic and written around 200 BC. Psalms and Ecclesiastes have been associated with David, and the others with Solomon. David and Solomon reflect the characteristically Greek notion of “cultured” or “philosopher” kings, wise men who value practical knowledge and the good of the nation, and use their wealth and knowledge for it.
The king with whom the Jews established a covenant—the one that brought with it the law—was Darius. A scroll found in the Dead Sea collection (4Q505) sees David as the king with whom God had established a covenant. Rabbis consider David to have been a profound Torah scholar, though there is not much in the scriptures to suggest it. Darius is a more plausible king behind this legend, taken to have been a Torah scholar because he had set up the temple state.
The legend of Solomon includes the tale that he had control of demons, and made them build the temple. Demons are devils, and a devil was originally a diva, as we saw, a wicked god for the Persians. So, the Solomonic myth that he used demons to build the temple seems to be a memory that the people who did the building work were considered worshippers of divas. They were people who had not been cooperative, had not perhaps yielded willingly, or had rebelled—the native Judahites.
Criticisms and Refutations
Finkelstein and Silberman, in David and Solomon, outline a minimalist hypothesis of the Jewish scriptures, similar to that adopted on these pages, then, in a mode typical of apologists, unfairly criticize it as having “both logical and archeological inconsistencies”. There is little substance in their criticism:
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Literacy was lower in the Persian and early Hellenistic ages in Jerusalem than it had been in the eighth and seventh centuries. It is a far fetched claim which they do not support with evidence. They rightly describe Jerusalem at this time as “a small, out of the way temple town in the Judaean mountains”, the literate men of which could not have…
…compiled an extraordinary long and detailed composition about the history, personalities, and events of an imaginary Iron Age “Israel” without using ancient sources.
So, they are claiming that what was not possible in this “out of the way” place in the third century BC, when literary writing as opposed to record keeping had fully emerged, was possible four centuries earlier in a truly insignificant puppet kingdom which had no literary tradition at all! This is special pleading with two fingers up!
Moreover it is tilting at a straw man, because these stories were not necessarily written by the native people of Judah, nor necessarily in Jerusalem, and were not written by people without ancient sources! It is surprising that these scholars do not answer the points actually raised rather than setting up their own targets, but sadly it is itself an ancient biblicist tradition. The original scriptures were written to back up the law, Deuteronomy, by Persian scholars directed by the Persian chancellery, and with access to Assyrian king lists, military and court records. The message was the need to obey the god of the covenant who had supplied the law, and had arranged for previous generations to be punished for their apostasy, and the faithful remnant to be rewarded always with a new start. Plainly, the scriptural history was meant to show that this is what God did. He had done it before, and He would do it again, if the people did not remain righteous—meaning obedient to the law. The ruling priesthood set up in Jerusalem were obviously literate, even if the rest of the people were not, and the subsequent choice of ancient Hebrew as a holy dialect (rather like the perpetuation of seventeenth century English by the Authorized Version of the bible) would have made it harder still for ordinary people to understand what was written, even when they began to be literate.
Only about a century later, the Persian books which, apart from Deuteronomy, the law, were probably little more than outlines, were hugely expanded and effectively rewritten, not by scribes in Jerusalem, but by scribes in Alexandria—established as a great center of scholarship in the ancient world by the Greek kings of Egypt, the Ptolemies—in collaboration with some Jerusalem priests sent for the purpose of putting the Jewish scriptures into a form suitable for publication to the world. The publishers’ editors were Egyptian priests with access to the schools of life of the Egyptian temples, and the ancient hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts.
The fact that pious Jews and Christians cannot face, but is obvious in the bible itself, is that Jews did not write it, if “Jews” is taken to mean the people of the Palestinian hill country. Nations like to flatter themselves, and omit their faults and foibles. They do not publish to the world that they are backsliders and apostates. But this formula that the Persians had imposed had proved extremely lucrative. Millions of Jews spread throughout the world were made to feel guilty, and with a need to avoid God’s wrath, so they were ready to send money to the temple and to attend in person on pilgrimages. The money was rolling in, and religions everywhere since have noted the genius of it. The Persians began it, and the Ptolemies, conniving with the Jerusalem priesthood, continued the Deuteronomic theme.
Everyone accepts that Herodotus, around 450 BC, was the first historian, but biblicists then expect us to believe that better historians lived 500 years earlier than Herodotus at the courts of king David and king Solomon. Even the revision offered by Finkelstein and Silberman that the bible was written around 700 BC, still pushes Herodotus well off his perch. Though they must have been stupendous books for the time, none of all this emerged until around 250 BC in the city of Alexandria, apparently in Greek, and no physical signs of these works appeared until a century later, with the emphasis being on Deuteronomy. The apologetic position is manifest nonsense.
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The next objection is that all the genealogies, lists and details of royal administration were unnecessary for mythology. Their presence shows the history is genuine. But the stories were written as history, not as myth. Doubtless the Persian origins will have been much more sketchy than what we now have, the basic structure relied on data that only a grand civilization could have kept—the Assyrians. Detail was added by the Alexandrians and subsequent rulers, and, once the Hasmonaeans had control, they and their ruling caste of priests will have used genealogies to give themselves current (then) status. That is the real purpose of genealogies. Genealogies are constantly changed to match the ambitions of those in power, and to eliminate their enemies from history. Much in the genealogies and in administrative detail included in the scriptures is anachronistic, proving the bible is much later than any believer is ready to admit.
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Another objection offered is that if the stories were contrived, they strikingly match the realities and settlement patterns of the eighth and seventh centuries. But social realities before the establishment of the Greek hegemony barely changed from the Assyrian era, and at the grass roots probably even less. The courts of eastern potentates, from the descriptions we have, did not change much in millennia, let alone over a few centuries. Nor can the narrative of travels of people like Abraham easily distinguish them as being in any particular century BC. The commonplaces of life were timeless, although the use of camels by Abraham, we have seen elsewhere, implies sometime after the Assyrian conquests when camels were introduced as the common draught animal.
Finkelstein is an expert on settlement patterns, having slogged around Israel looking at the pottery he could see on the ground 2700 years later, but has confessed that pottery sherds are not good for distinguishing timescales from Iron II to the Persian periods, so the change of pattern of settlement from the eighth century on must be impossible to see at all clearly. In Persian and Hellenistic times, only a few centuries later, actual settlements, though abandoned, must still have been evident, and local traditions will have preserved stories about them. It is even more true of the shrines and old Canaanite centers of worship, the bamoth. Standing stones, platforms, terraces and stone altars will still have been obvious unless they had been built over, which is probably not true of many. Myths will have developed naturally about such derelict edifices, and they could have been added to the stories even after the outline and main content had been written, when the texts were in the hands of the local kings, the Maccabees. His reference to settlement patterns therefore does not stack up as evidence.
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Another argument is that extra biblical records from Assyria verify the bible. It is hardly surprising if Assyrian king lists provided the Deuteronomistic history’s main structure.
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Finally, it is argued that biblical Hebrew is late monarchical Hebrew, and post exilic Hebrew is different. Where then are the extensive texts that would prove this contention? Where are the late monarchical texts to compare the bible with? There is just not enough for useful comparisons or safe distinctions to be made. The evolution of Hebrew is based on the bible! You cannot get a more circular argument. Hebrew in Canaan had been replaced by Aramaic since Assyrian times, and the Persians adopted it as the lingua franca, the language of trade and diplomacy of their empire. Pots from the Persian era in Judah are marked in Hebrew or Aramaic, but Hebrew is simply Canaanite, and some people in Abarnahara might still have spoken Canaanite, the Phœnicians, who had overseas colonies, for example. Those who were still literate in these dying Canaanite dialects will have been valuable in translating the sources into “Hebrew”.
Hebrew seems to have been adopted by the Jerusalem priesthood as the language appropriate for a Jewish history, and to give authenticity and gravitas to the religion being developed and imposed. This criticism implies that the recording of Hebrew had immediately been standardized, so that what is seen in recorded differences must be evolution. They might be regional differences, the dialects of different authors, or even arbitrary differences caused by faulty grammar and spelling. Nothing safe can be deduced from different Hebrew forms until extensive non-biblical archives in Canaanite have been examined.
The thesis offered by Finkelstein and Silberman against the idea of the bible being late is that the historical books of Samuel and Kings were written in the 600s BC, shortly before Judah disappeared, and after it had existed as a literate country for less than 200 years, but much of Samuel is a mythical enhancement of contemporary personalities and events. The rest they admit is late, some of it fourth century, and some third. The minimalist position is simply that all of it is late.
