Israel Finkelstein

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Israel Finkelstein

Israel Finkelstein is an Israeli archaeologist. Born in Petah Tikva, he is currently a Professor of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, where he also serves as the director of the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology. He is currently the co-director of the renewed excavations at the important archaeological site of Megiddo in northern Israel.

Together with Yuval Goren and Nadav Na'aman, Finkelstein has coordinated the petrographic analysis of the Amarna tablets.

With Neil Asher Silberman, he is also the author of The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts.

The assertions of the book depend upon a very disputed "low chronology" which would shift dates a century. In the July-August 2006 issue of the Biblical Archaeology Review, Michael Coogan of Stonehill College, editor of The New Oxford Annotated Bible, contends that Finkelstein and Silberman "move from the hypothetical to the improbable to the absurd."

Finkelstein's revised chronology is "not accepted by the majority of archaeologists and biblical scholars," Coogan asserts, citing four scholarly anthologies from the past three years.

However, Professor Baruch Halpern, one of the scholars on whom Coogan relies, praised The Bible Unearthed, as "the boldest and most exhilirating synthesis of Bible and archaeology in fifty years." Professor David Noel Freedman, editor of the authoritative Anchor Bible Series, called it "readable and revolutionary."

[edit] Publications

The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement, Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1988.
Living on the Fringe, 1995.
The Bible Unearthed : Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, 2001, ISBN 0-684-86912-8.
David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition, 2006, ISBN 0-7432-4362-5.