Abstract

If an excavator believes from the scriptures that an ancient mound must contain buildings from Solomon’s reign, it is almost certain that sooner or later he will find structures that fit the bill. The spurious air of biblical authority given to such a discovery can then make the identification stick, despite any evidence to the contrary. In the meantime a small tourist industry may even have grown up around this “confirmation” of the Bible.

Peter James

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, May 22, 2001
Tuesday, 6 November 2007

Post-Exilic Period

A more surprising dark age is the one that occurs in Judah after the exile and the supposed return of Zerubabel and Joshua. The gap is almost a century until Nehemiah and Ezra get active from the middle of the fifth century on, although nothing much is known from archaeology for hundreds of years after even this. Was this dark age real or was it a product of biblicist chronology? In the early twentieth century, there had been sites attributed from its pottery to this interval but Albright and his school reclassified them all as pre-exilic. Albright himself noted that it “left something of a void behind”. Such scholarship begins to look deliberately perverse.

Beth Shemesh has LH IIIa and LH IIIb Mycenaean pottery in Level IVb, and Philistine pottery in Level III. Level IIa is dated 1000-950 BC, and Level IIc is the final Iron Age stratum, 825-586 BC. They can be dated by “bit hilani” architecture and imported Cypriote jugs to the seventh century, but the excavators says ninth and tenth. Level III, with its Philistine pottery, must end in the eighth century, but the author must have it as thirteenth century. The author declares that after Level IIc the site was abandoned until Level I is characterized by Hellenistic pottery. Now Level IIc has a tomb in it that has Persian bowls, lamps and jugs identified as fourth to sixth century. Seals in Level IIc are plainly Persian, even reflecting names mentioned in Ezra. The author is left incoherent.

B S J Isserlin (The Israelites, 1998) says the pottery chronology developed between the wars by W F Albright, and elaborated by R Amiram is still the basic standard. Since Albright paid little or no regard to the “void” he had created in post-“exilic” period, the continuing use of this standard must be perpetuating error, and is even more perverse than the original crime. The error is that much of the pottery of the Persian period is assigned to the Assyrian period with an error of at least 200 years.

Lachish was devasted by the Assyrians and remained unoccupied until the time of Nehemiah when he says it had a remnant of Israel. Excavation at Lachish revealed a set of ostraca written in Hebrew script—the oldest examples known. They were letters from a local commander, Hoshaiah to his general, Yaosh. They were found in a burnt layer (level II) immediately beneath the mid-fifth century Persian layer.

A biblicist declared that, to judge by the names, the letters were written at the time of Jeremiah. This misled researchers for decades until a closer look showed that the names actually fitted the post-exilic period better. One clue to this is obvious if it is accepted that the Persians promoted the name Saviour because they claimed to be saviours of people and gods. Both Hoshaiah and Yaosh include the word “Saviour”.

Unarguable evidence however is that one of the letters actually relates events found in the book of Nehemiah, speaking of a “servant of the king” (“servant” in Nehemiah) called Tobiad. The destroyed layer at Lachish therefore must have been caused by internal dissent under the Persian governor in Persian times and not at the conquest of the Assyrians as had been thought.

The next layer (Level III) at Lachish is also burnt but, from various seals, seems to be dateable to the conquest by Nebuchadnezzar. The Assyrian Palace Ware, as Petrie had called it, was shown to be neo-Babylonian, not Assyrian, so these strata previously assigned to the end of the eighth century were actually from the sixth. This fits in with the Archaic Greek pottery found in north Palestine. That leaves Level IV as the layer of the Assyrian conquest and that one was not incinerated. Assyrian records do not claim that Lachish was burnt and it makes more sense for them to have left the town in the care of their vassals, the Philistines, as a fortress against the Egyptians.

The corollary is that the Assyrian conquests have to be found in strata previously assigned to the ninth century. It is another of those curiosities of biblical archaeology that clearly Assyrian objects offering the chance of unequivocal dates, never come from careful excavations but from disturbed ground or rubbish pits. It is all dubious, casting a poor light on the honesty of people who excavate with their bibles instead of scrapers. A century ago, an Assyrian tablet with a precisely identifiable date of 651 BC was found by Macalister in layers he preferred to date in the “time of Solomon”. Pottery of an identifiably Assyrian style is commonly found in strata dated two centuries before Tiglath-Pileser came a-conquering in 733 BC. All of this matches the misdating of Cypriot black on red ware.

See Peter James’ website for astonishing evidence of sheer dishonesty among ancient historians. James cannot see that the bible accounts of the early kings are mythical, and himself desparages the biblical minimalists for demanding firm evidence for them, just as orthodox ancient chronologers disparage him. It seems that none of them can be consistently scientific and presumably James is himself a biblicist of sorts.

Revising the Chronology

The debates on biblical chronology among biblical archaeologists of the last two decades of the twentieth century have been vigorous but mainly on the best adjustment to the dating of Albright in the twenties and thirties. William G Dever of Arizona university seems satisfied with this, while others would say that Albright made a pig’s ear out of biblical archaeology.

For the Bronze Age, we are now debating issues regarding a century or so, usually much less, and dependent as always on the synchronisms with astronomically fixed Egyptian chronology.

William G Dever

The chronology of the Iron Age remains fixed within rather narrow margins by Egyptian and Mesopotamian synchronisms, together with biblical data.

William G Dever

For Dever, there is no room here for doubt, yet we have seen there is a great deal of room for doubting Egyptian chronology in this time and room enough for doubting Assyrian dates before the eighth century. As for speaking about astronomically fixed Egyptian chronology, presumably meaning the Sothic system, it is utterly discredited.

Dever claims that the raid of the mysterious Pharaoh Shishak biblically dated to about 925 BC is confirmed by destruction layers at two dozen sites that can be precisely dated. Since Dever seems not to know what “precise” as opposed to “relative” means, he must mean that destruction layers are found at a particular common stratum that might correspond to the biblical mention of Shishak, if you believe the bible. We are back to the sort of dubious correlationism that Albright used often to date the non-existent conquest by Joshua. It is about the right time, it is a destruction as we expect, so it must be the event that we expect. He also denies that there is any doubt about the excavations of Jericho, even writing, “What excavation?” He, lastly, denies that any archaelogists use calculations of dates based on biblical chronology “at all”.

The chronology of Israel worked out from its own internal relativities and keyed into Babylonian and Assyrian anchor points suggests a shortening of dates by at least two centuries. The Iron Age then coincides with the setting up of the statelets of Palestine in the ninth century, not with any invasion of the Israelites from the south. All the evidence is that people came into Palestine from the north or east not from the south.

The nineteenth and twentieth dynasties in the Egyptian scheme correspond with the end of the Bronze Age. If these are put forward by two or three hundred years, then voids in the historical data disappear. Nubian specialists see continuity from the twentieth dynasty to the twenty fifth Nubian dynasty even though in the conventional scheme there are four dynasties between them. It seems to be this two century gap that is wrong. These dynasties are in the so-called Third Intermediate Period—the very name implies doubt and indecision—stretching from 1070 to 664 BC in orthodox terms. It is a 400 year period full of kings that no one knows anything about and whose reigns are often given arbitrary values.

Ken (Dodd) Kitchen, the humorist who knows all there is to know about king David, is one of the modern scholars to perpetuate this travesty, devised to keep a neat space for his heroes David and Solomon. To magnify Solomon and to justify his impossible success, the scholars build an artificial void in Egyptian history literally full of ruling nonentities.

Third Intermediate Period

After the twentieth dynasty, Egypt must have had problems. Libyans began flooding into the country, not as conquerors but apparently as refugees fleeing famine in north Africa. The organisation of the social order weakened and priests and feudal lords set themselves up as local rivals to the pharaoh. By 666 BC, the Assyrians under Ashurbanipal could say that Egypt was ruled by 20 kings. The Greeks made it 12. Even Eusebius, who preserved part of Manetho’s king list, admitted that the kings in this period were not all consecutive but that some ruled locally, and the twenty second dynasty lasted only 49 years. Psamtik I (640-610 BC) united the country once more, but initally only as an Assyrian puppet. Who are these kings in the present reconstructions?

Merely to give this brief account suggests that the dynasties listed by the Egyptologists as consecutive were not, or did not even exist in such difficult times. Some twenty second dynasty pharaohs had shorter reigns on inscriptions than Egyptologists have given them! Victorian Egyptologists thought the twenty second dynasty was Assyrian not Libyan. Takelot is Tiglath, an Assyrian name, Osorkon is Sargon, an Assyrian name, and the name of the Assyrian king who first assaulted Egypt. If this elementary fact is conceded, this dynasty must have been seventh century, when the Assyrians conquered Egypt under Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, not the 946-712 dates assigned.

The high priests of Amun are listed separately, evidently as rulers in Thebes, but not constituting a dynasty. Later, Takelot II’s son, Prince Osorkon B, the high priest of Amun, held office for an extraordinarily long 54 years, suggesting he served in a time when several men were rivals, each claimed to be pharaoh, and fought a civil war. The twenty third dynasty is accepted as overlapping the twenty second. It seems also that the twenty second and twenty third dynasties overlapped the start of the twenty fifth, and the twenty fifth and twenty sixth dynasties also overlapped. Kitchen allows small degrees of overlap but keeps the scheme essentially intact even though the twenty third dynasty is nothing but a depository of otherwise undateable kings. Between Yuput I and Yuput II is a half century of “kings”.

The 400 years of the Third Intermediate Period has chunks of time when nothing seems to happen at all, no monuments, architecture, art or statuary—social breakdown is always the excuse, but nothing happening never happens. There is little to show a Libyan influence. Indeed the artistic styles are continuous with the Ramesides. The twenty first dynasty is placed as consecutive with the twenty second but scarcely anything is known about the earlier dynasty compared with the later one. Nothing outside Egypt testifies to the twenty first dynasty. Were they really just a single dynasty that had divided responsibility between two branches?

Jonathan Wade, who defends the orthodox chronology with the vigour of a witchfinder general at his site called Waste of Time, gives the following table listing the Southern Viziers of Egypt from the 21st to the 25th dynasties. His point seems to be that the list is complete and consecutive allowing no space for a concurrent dynasty with the 21st without creating concurrent southern viziers.

Certain features of this table will strike the interested observer.

1. There are only three southern viziers (mean term of office, ~35 years) in the 130 year extent of the 21st dynasty, when there were seven pharaohs (mean reign, ~19 years).
2. There are 24 southern viziers (mean term of office, ~10 years) in the 230 year period of the 22nd dynasty, when there were ten pharaohs (mean reign, ~23 years).
3. There are 16 southern viziers (mean term of office, ~7 years) in the 110 year period of the 25th Nubian dynasty, when there were six pharaohs (mean reign, ~18 years).

The mean period that each Pharaoh reigns is roughly the same but the viziers became much less permanent as time went on. While it is plain that such variations are statistically possible, they are the sort of thing that should make a scientist suspicious, because they might indicate that the lists were not truly consecutive, just as the revisionists think.

With some accepted overlap, the Pharaohs reigned 18 years on average while the viziers held office typically for 12 years, but Amenhirpamesha was in office for 80 years! Is this true? The figures suggest there is something wrong with the lists.

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