by
Damien F. Mackey
Archaeologists such as Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University and Bill Dever of the University of Arizona were interviewed on actual sites where they could point directly to stratigraphical levels where they thought the evidences for Joshua, the Conquest,
or king Solomon, ought to be; but where there was in fact a complete lack of such relevant archaeological data. Whilst doing this they were often, as I believe,
or king Solomon, ought to be; but where there was in fact a complete lack of such relevant archaeological data. Whilst doing this they were often, as I believe,
‘standing upon’, so to speak, the very levels in which the data can be found.
Chapter Five (Volume One, beginning on p. 119) of my university thesis:
A Revised History of the Era of King Hezekiah of Judah
and its Background
commences with this section on the chronology of King Hezekiah (here modified and with some comments added):
Restoring the Hezekian Chronology
With regard to ancient Israel, the problem that confronts historians has truly become an enormous one. It is not simply a case here of alignment and chronological precision. Judah and Israel need in fact to be rescued completely from oblivion in some quarters. Far from Israel’s being, as Isaiah had envisaged it (19:24), “the third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth …”, Israel’s life-giving river … has, in the minds of some archaeologists, almost entirely dried up. Professor Heinsohn is not really exaggerating when he writes in his historical revision: …. “Mainstream scholars are in the process of deleting Ancient Israel from the history books. The entire period from Abraham … in the -21st century … to the flowering of the Divided Kingdom in the -9th century … is found missing in the archaeological record. ...”. Such a bold conclusion about “9th century” archaeology, especially (we already discussed this era in a revised context in Part I), must surely impact also upon the archaeology of the Era of Hezekiah [EOH] in the C8th BC (conventional dating).
My comment: This conventional dating will need to undergo a massive overhaul now if I am correct in my - {later than my thesis} - identifying of King Hezekiah with King Josiah.
See my article on this:
High profile archaeologists excavating in Palestine have, in recent publications and media interviews, been casting doubt upon much early Israelite history as recorded in the Bible. Sturgis, in a book that became a TV documentary … - featuring Beirut hostage victim, John McCarthy, interviewing leading archaeologists currently digging in Israel - set out to determine whether the Exodus and Conquest, or David and Solomon, were historical realities. Archaeologists such as Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University and Bill Dever of the University of Arizona were interviewed on actual sites where they could point directly to stratigraphical levels where they thought the evidences for Joshua, the Conquest, or king Solomon, ought to be; but where there was in fact a complete lack of such relevant archaeological data. Whilst doing this they were often, as I believe, ‘standing upon’, so to speak, the very levels in which the data can be found.
That huge slice of pre-Hezekian history, from the C21st – C9th century BC, “found missing” [sic] - by the archaeologists. Rohl, quoting from Sturgis’s book, tells of some of the conclusions reached by these archaeologists and historians: ….
- Ze-ev Herzog on the Exodus – ‘a history that never happened’.
- Bill Dever on Jericho – ‘Joshua destroyed a city that wasn’t even there’.
- Sturgis on Davidic Jerusalem – ‘After a century and a half of surveying, digging and sifting, almost no clear archaeological evidence for King David’s capital has come to light’.
- Israel Finkelstein on United Monarchy Jerusalem – ‘There is almost no evidence for the tenth century. There is almost no evidence for Solomon. Jerusalem at this time was probably a very small village, or a very poor town’.
And so on and on it went. These archaeologists actually have their historical sights set at the entirely inappropriate Late Bronze Age - the era to which David and Solomon did actually belong - for the Exodus, and the Conquest by Joshua, and at a most impoverished archaeological phase during the Iron Age for evidence of the glorious era of David and Solomon. Whilst they tend to write off Solomon, they are forced to concede at least the existence of king David - though greatly diminished - due to the Tell Dan evidence of the ‘House of David’. …. (I discussed this document on pp. 115-116 of the previous chapter). Without Solomon, however, one wonders how, based on 1 Chronicles 3:10-13, there could have been a Hezekiah, who is named there amongst “the descendants of Solomon”. The attack on Israel’s rôle in antiquity has been launched in various ways in the past century and a half; for example by:
- dismissing the patriarchs and early kings as virtually a complete myth.
(a) Abraham (Abram)
We saw above, quoting Heinsohn, that a huge slice of Israel’s history, beginning with
Abraham, is under question today because of the apparent lack of archaeology to support it. Yet this Abraham was also the father of Isaac, the father of Jacob who became Israel, and thus the father of the twelve tribes of Israel with all the attendant history associated with these tribes. Abraham is also considered to have been the father of the monotheistic religions. Relevant to king Hezekiah, Abraham was also the ancestor of the royal tribe of JUDAH from which this Hezekiah would of course later spring. Moreover, as the ancestor of the tribe of LEVI, Abraham was the father of the Israelite priesthood. Hence St. Paul can speak of Levi as being “in the loins” of Abraham (Hebrews 7:10). From this priestly Levi came the many Levites listed in Kings, Chronicles and Isaiah for the EOH (2 Chronicles 29:12-14), and, presumably, “the high priest, Joakim” of Judith 4:6. (For more on this Joakim, see VOLUME 2, Part II).
From the tribe of SIMEON, there arose Judith herself (Judith 8:1), and also Isaiah as I shall be proposing in the same Part II.
And from the northern tribe of NAPHTALI, came Tobit and his son, Tobias, and also Tobit’s nephew, Achior (var Ahikar) (Tobit 1:1, 9, 22); an official who will figure most
prominently again in this same Part II. Hence these four tribes (JUDAH, LEVI, SIMEON
and NAPHTALI) in particular will be of utmost importance in my reconstruction of EOH.
(b) Jacob (Israel)
Jacob also must disappear from history if certain contemporary archaeologists are to have their way. Judith will refer back to an incident in the life of Jacob concerning the latter’s daughter, Dinah, who was raped by a Canaanite prince and then avenged by her brothers; most notably, in Judith’s case, by her ancestor Simeon. This brief story narrated in Genesis 34:1-31, which separates Jacob’s arrival at Shechem from his return to Bethel - and which precedes the beginning of the Joseph narrative (37:2b) by three chapters – will be recalled a full millennium later by Judith as an heroic deed by her ancestor Simeon against the Hivite prince, Shechem. Actually it was both Simeon and Levi, not Simeon alone, who subsequently slaughtered, not only the chief culprit, Shechem, but all the male Canaanites in the city; a fact that the parochial Simeonite Judith seems to have overlooked. She also failed to note that Jacob had been less than impressed with Simeon and Levi for their violent retaliation: ‘You have brought trouble on me by making me odious to the inhabitants of the land …’; an incident that Jacob will actually recall on his deathbed, there cursing the anger of Simeon and Levi (cf. 34:30 & 49:5-7).
Judith however will re-cast her ancestral history in favour of Simeon when, in her prayer before entering the camp of the Assyrians, she prays that Dinah’s fate will not befall her, too, at the hands of Holofernes (Judith 9:2-4).
(c) Moses
Meyer had, in 1906, cast serious doubt upon the historicity of Moses:
…. “After all, with the exception of those who accept tradition bag and baggage as historical truth, not one of those who treat [Moses] as a historical reality has hitherto been able to fill him with any kind of content whatever, to depict him as a concrete historical figure, or to produce anything which he could have created or which could be his historical work”.
In arriving at this conclusion, as in many other ways, Meyer may have been a victim of his own system; for one of the unhappy consequences of Sothic displacement is that historical characters are sought for in kingdoms or eras where they do not belong.
Shoshenq I as ‘Shishak’ is, I believe, one classical example of this.
Just as the memory of Joseph’s contribution to Egypt was forgotten - that is, by ‘not recognising’ what Joseph had done) - by the ‘hostile new king who arose over’ the land (cf. Exodus 1:8& Judith 5:11), so apparently has the identity of the Moses, who was born during the reign of this same inimical ruler (cf. Exodus 1:8 & 2:2), been ‘forgotten’ to historians; buried under the immense rubble of the Sothic chronology.
Thus Meyer was being perfectly logical, according to his own artificial context - with its subsequent misalignment of the early history of Israel - when issuing his bold challenge to gainsay the traditional view that Moses was a real historical person. And Meyer was entirely correct too back then, in 1906 (a full century ago), when stating that “not one of those who treat [Moses] as a historical reality has hitherto been able to fill him with any kind of content whatever …”. For Meyer’s chronology, as promoted by the Berlin School of Egyptology, and later by Sir Henry Breasted, which had become the standard, had made it quite impossible for scholars even to locate Moses in that complex scheme, let alone “to fill him with any kind of content”. Whilst an independent-minded historian like Sir Flinders Petrie might try valiantly to make a major adjustment to Sothic chronology - though still unfortunately based on that system’s faulty premises, by adding an extra Sothic period - he did not like what he eventually saw and so had to reject his novel idea. …. Meyer’s Sothic chronology therefore survived the challenge and prevailed.
Today, for those who do give some credence to the story of Moses and the Exodus
account, the favoured era is, as it was in Meyer’s day, the 19th Ramesside dynasty, Sothically dated to the C13th-C12th’s BC – but still two or more centuries after properly calculated biblical estimates for Moses. Ramses II (c. 1279-1212 BC, conventional dates) is now generally considered to have been the Pharaoh of the Exodus; though no evidence whatsoever for a mass exodus of foreigners can be found during his reign.
Fortunately, the work of revision is serving to resurrect some long-lost biblical characters of great import. I have already shown in fair detail in Part I how C9th BC biblical characters, for instance, emerge in some profusion when a Velikovskian-based revision is carefully applied to the well-documented EA [El Amarna] period. And Ramses II came into being more than half a millennium after Moses. He was certainly not the pharaoh of the Exodus.
Just as Abraham cannot be so easily brushed aside, with so much history attached to him, neither can one simply erase Moses as Meyer had thought. For, intricately connected with Moses, and with his older brother, Aaron, are detailed genealogies of Israel that, running from the sons of Jacob (Israel), and passing through EOH, course all the way down to the Babylonian Captivity, and even beyond (e.g. Matthew 1:2-17). Thus we read in Numbers 1, in the case of the first census of Israel, of Moses and Aaron being commanded to enroll the people “company by company” (v. 3). In this task, the brothers were assisted by men selected from each of the twelve tribes; the leader selected from the Simeonites being “Shelumiel son of Zurishaddai” (v. 6).
And these two Simeonite names are the very same ones that head the list in the Simeonite Judith’s own genealogy: “Salamiel son of Sarasadai [son of Israel]” (Judith 8:1). In other words, the author of the Book of Judith details Judith’s genealogy of about sixteen generations extending all the way back to the time of Moses.
The selection from the tribe of Judah, given in the very next verse (v. 7), was “Nahshon, son of Amminadab”; Nahshon and his father being regal ancestors of David, who was in turn a regal ancestor of Hezekiah (cf.1 Chronicles 2:10-15 & 3:1-13).
And the Levites, too, have genealogies extending from Levi, through Aaron, brother of Moses, all the way down to the time of Solomon, and on down to the Babylonian
Captivity (e.g. 1 Chronicles 6:1-15), including specific reference to EOH (4:41).
Moreover, all of these individuals belong to eras that have their own attendant history;
some of it very detailed. So there is some real traditional “bag and baggage”, to quote
Meyer, in support of the historical authenticity of Moses, and so, for one to be properly
convincing in challenging such a tradition, one would need to overthrow, not only Moses, but the attendant genealogical “baggage”.
It was not until about half a century later than Meyer, with the publication of Volume 1 of Velikovsky’s Ages in Chaos series (1952), that, as far as I see it, there first became available a basic model for the proper alignment of ancient Egypt with ancient Israel. This prepared the way for an historical identification of Moses himself; though Velikovsky, for his part, hardly mentioned the great man, let alone tried to identify him. Velikovsky did, however, point to some stunning parallels between various Middle Kingdom payrii (e.g. Ipuwer, Ermitage) and the biblical description of the Ten Plagues. …. In more recent times Dr. Rudolph Cohen, Deputy Director of the Israeli Antiquities Authority, seems to have accepted this basic sort of scenario, in a 12th dynasty context, and he has also supported Courville’s view that the Israelites were the Middle Bronze I people. ….Professor Emmanuel Anati, an archaeologist of the University of Lecce, has added his weight to the argument for the historical reality of Moses and Joshua by pointing to the appropriate archaeology, including his now famous identification of the true Mount Sinai: Har Karkom. ….
- metamorphosis of Hebrew (Israelite) patriarchs into non Hebrews (Israelites).
Psychoanalyst Freud’s view in Moses and Monotheism that Moses was an Egyptian … has recently been revisited by Islamic writer Osman in a provocative book, in which he claims to have identified as 18th dynasty Egyptian characters, not only the early
patriarchs of Israel, but even the New Testament’s ‘Holy Family’. These biblical characters, some traditionally separated from others by as much as one and a half millennia, are all herded together by Osman into Egypt’s 18th dynasty. There, king David becomes pharaoh Thutmose III (and father of Isaac, no less); Moses becomes Akhnaton, the supposed founder of monotheism. But when the revision, with its solid foundations in archaeology, is applied to Osman’s major premises, almost the entire book can be shown to be nonsense.
At the request of Dr. Simms, I wrote a critique of Osman’s book; a highly unfavourable one. Now I doubt if Osman would be over-impressed by professor Thiede’s quotation, in The Wanderer, of noted biblicist Herschel Shanks, who puts a recent commentator “in the same category as those cranks who claim that Jesus was not Jewish but Egyptian”.
- late dating the Hebrew writings and making them dependent upon Babylonian
myths.
The view that Genesis and Exodus were late compilations, having been handed down by oral tradition before being committed to writing during the Babylonian Exile, was formed by biblical commentators of the C19th, when it was still thought that writing had not developed until about 1000 BC, the approximate time of king David; and before ancient scribal methods had become properly known. This approach culminated in what is known as Graf-Wellhausen’s ‘Documentary Hypothesis’. While we well know now how completely naïve in archaeological terms some of these premises were, this outdated system has - like Meyer’s Sothic scheme - tended to stick. Suffice it to say that the language and structure of the Pentateuch completely refute the Graf-Wellhausen system of Pan Babylonianism, because:
A. the language of the Pentateuch is found to be saturated with Egyptianisms - a
fact of which the Pan Babylonianists seem to be generally unaware; and
B. the Pentateuchal texts contain the most ancient of scribal structural elements,
whose colophon ‘signatures’ attest to them being very early compilations.
The Egyptologists’ lack of knowledge of - even, in some cases, contempt for - Hebrew and the Bible was the reason, according to Professor Yahuda, for their failure to appreciate the prevailing Egyptian element in the Pentateuch. Yahuda himself, who lacked expertise in neither Hebrew nor Egyptian (not to mention Akkadian), summed up the situation: …. “The Assyro-Babylonian school has undoubtedly been very successful in shedding new light on many parts of the Bible and also on some chapters of Genesis. But far from solving the problems of composition and antiquity of the Pentateuch, it rather complicated them”. And:
Egyptology, too, failed, to furnish a solution only because after the rise of the Graf-Wellhausen School some of the leading Egyptologists accepted its theories without having sufficient knowledge of Hebrew and the Bible to enable them to take any initiative in these questions. As they could not find more than any occasional connexions between Hebrew and Egyptian, they simply took it for granted that Egyptology had very little to yield for the study of the Bible … Professor Adolf Erman went so far as to affirm that all ‘that the Old Testament had to say about Egypt could not be regarded with enough suspicion’.
One cannot but pick up amongst various of these commentators (e.g. Erman, Meyer, Wellhausen) that same tendency that Martin Bernal has been at pains to identify; namely, a Western European reluctance to give credit where it is due to the east; in this case, notably, to Israel. Ironically, Israeli scholars are at the forefront of this. Thus
Heinsohn: ….
The worst enemy of Israel’s history, indeed, is biblical chronology. Whoever puts his faith in it, cannot help but be tempted to extinguish Ancient Israel from the map. This is not only true for anti-Semites and anti-Zionists and neutral researchers, but even for the best and brightest of Israeli scholars.
- ignoring clearly stated biblical syncretisms.
I gave the example in Chapter 1 of Thiele’s widely accepted, neo-Assyrian-based ‘biblical’ chronology, according to which Thiele has completely rejected - and hence lost - that triple biblical link of the 9th year of Hoshea, the 6th year of Hezekiah and the fall of Samaria. I intend now to discuss this further.
A Solid Foundation Needed for EOH
Despite this current mood in academic thinking, let us not forget that the testimony of Israel has sometimes been our only source of knowledge about a particular king, nation or event, prior to the flowering of archaeology in modern times. Thus, for twenty centuries or more, the only mention of the great Assyrian king, SARGON II, was to be found in the opening verse of Isaiah 20: “In the year that the commander-in-chief, who was sent by King Sargon of Assyria, came to Ashdod and fought against it and took it”.
Historians doubted Isaiah’s testimony that there even was such an Assyrian king, ‘Sargon’. Again, relevant to EOH, there is, as discussed in Chapter I, some interlocking chronology between the Assyrian records and 2 Kings for the incident of the fall of Samaria. These syncretisms, I suggest, should not be lightly dismissed. Potentially, they are fully preserved in my five chronological ‘anchors’ for EOH as listed in Chapter 1 (p. 28); but they are annihilated in Thiele’s chronology, despite the latter’s assertion that: ….
… never will the events of the Old Testament record be properly fitted into the
events of the Near Eastern world, and never will the vital messages of the Old
Testament be thoroughly or correctly understood until there has been established a sound chronology for Old Testament times.
Montgomery tells of the devastating effect that Thiele’s chronology has had upon the
traditional dating of Hezekiah in its relation to Hoshea of Israel and the fall of Samaria:….
Thiele’s chronology has the fall of Samaria in 722 BC, Hezekiah’s accession year in 715 BC and his 14th year in 701 BC – 21 years apart. He insists that Hezekiah and Hosea [Hoshea] had no contact at all. He says “… it is of paramount importance that synchronisms (II Kings 18:1, 8, 10) between him (Hezekiah) and Hosea be recognized as late and artificial.” [12, p174], i.e. they are false.
This is an extremely bold conclusion for Thiele to have reached in regard to an ancient document that provides us with multi-chronological links; especially given his insistence upon “a sound chronology for Old Testament times”. Admittedly though, as already noted in Chapter 1, there are problems to be sorted out in connection with the biblical link between Hoshea and Hezekiah, the beginning of whose reign is said to have occurred during Hoshea’s third year (2 Kings 18:1): “In the third year of King Hoshea son of Elah of Israel, Hezekiah son of King Ahaz of Judah began to reign”. Thiele has discussed this in several places, and has rejected the veracity of the biblical evidence. His argument firstly centres upon the fact that Hezekiah had, in the great Passover he proclaimed in his first year, sent invitations to Israel – to Ephraim and Manasseh and even Zebulun (2 Chronicles 30:1, 6, 10), leading Thiele to conclude:….
“While the northern kingdom was still in existence, it would not, of course, have been possible for the envoys of Judah to pass through the territory of Israel; so we have here a clear indication that it was no longer in existence”.
On a more general note, Thiele has offered this related objection: ….
Nowhere in the record of Hezekiah’s reign is mention made of any contact by him with Hoshea. In less serious times there was always a mention in the account of a king of Judah of some contact with the corresponding king of Israel, but none is found here. If it had been during the days of the God-fearing Hezekiah that Assyria was bringing Israel to its end, it is almost certain that Hezekiah would have had some contact with Hoshea and mentioned that contact. The deafening silence in this regard is a clear indication that Hoshea and his kingdom were no more when Hezekiah began.
This is a legitimate point. The most likely solution to the problem, in my opinion, is that Hoshea was no longer in charge of Israel.
I suggested in Chapter 1 (p. 26) that Hoshea’s revolt against Assyria, involving his turning to ‘So King of Egypt’, would have occurred close to 727 BC, the beginning of
Hezekiah’s reign. Some years earlier, with the Assyrian forces of Tiglath-pileser III “approaching the very border of Israel and … threatening to push onward to Samaria”, according to Irvine’s construction of events, Hoshea had led “a pro-Assyrian, anti-Pekah movement within Israel …”. …. But now, in the face of Hoshea’s revolt, the swift-acting Shalmaneser V (who I am identifying with Tiglath-pileser), had promptly “confined [Hoshea] and imprisoned him” (2 Kings 17:4). Hoshea was thus rendered inactive from about the beginning of Hezekiah’s reign and on into the siege and subsequent capture of Samaria. And so the Egyptian-backed Hezekiah, who had like Hoshea rebelled against Assyria, became for a time the sole ruler of the entire land, prior to the Assyrian incursions into Judah. In this way, one presumes, Hezekiah would have been able to have sent his messengers into northern Israel.
The other legitimate objection that I had noted in Chapter 1 (on p. 22) concerned Tadmor’s view, followed by Thiele, that Samaria was captured twice by Assyria; a second time in 720 BC. …. Moreover, Roux considers whether it were Shalmaneser V or Sargon II who captured Samaria as “still a debated question”. …. While van de Mieroop writes of Shalmaneser V as conquering Israel’s capital “just before his death”, adding that: “His successor Sargon II claimed the victory for himself and turned the region into the province of Samaria”. Whilst I intend to discuss in detail, in the next chapter, the neo-Assyrian chronology in its relation to Hezekiah, I should like to make some preliminary comments here, following Boutflower. Sargon, according to Luckenbill, had claimed that the fall of Samaria occurred (i.e. he caused it) in his first year: …. “[At the beginning of my rule, in my first year of reign ... Samerinai (the people of Samaria) ... 27,290 people, who lived therein, I carried away ...]”. I see no good reason though not to accept Sargon’s plain statement here. There is apparently a one year discrepancy between Sargon II’s Annals and the document that Winckler called Cylinder B, according to which the fall of Samaria could not have occurred in the reign of Sargon, but of his predecessor, Shalmaneser. Here is Boutflower’s explanation of the apparent puzzling discrepancy: ….
… the Annals make Sargon’s reign to commence in the year 722 BC., styled the rish sharruti or “beginning of the reign”, 721 being regarded as the first year of the reign; whereas our cylinder, which after Winckler we will call Cylinder B,
regards 721 as the “beginning of the reign”, and 720 as the first year of the reign.
From this conclusion we obtain the following remarkable result. The capture of Samaria is assigned by the Annals to the “beginning of the reign” of Sargon, i.e. to the last three months of the year 722, and it is recorded as the first event of the reign. But according to this new reckoning of time on Cylinder B that event would not be included in the reign of Sargon at all, but would be looked upon as falling in the reign of his predecessor Shalmaneser V.
When, then, it is objected that in 2 Kings xvii. 3-6 the capture of Samaria - which
took place in 722 - appears to be assigned to Shalmaneser … we can answer that the sacred writer is no more at fault than the scribe who wrote Cylinder B ….
It does appear from Sargon II’s Annals that Samaria revolted again even after it had been captured by the Assyrians. This action, tied up I believe with Hezekiah’s own revolt - part of an Egyptian-backed Syro-Palestine rebellion against Sargon II - was, as we shall find, followed by further such revolts, possibly also involving Samaria. It does not alter the fact that Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom, had fallen to Shalmaneser V and Sargon II in the ninth year of Hoshea, which was the sixth year of Hezekiah. When the plain testimony of Sargon II above, in relation to the capture of Samaria, is synthesized with that of 2 Kings 18:10, we gain this four-way cross-reference for c. 722 BC (conventional dating): (a) fall of Samaria; (b) beginning of Sargon’s rule; (c) sixth year of Hezekiah; (d) ninth year of Hoshea.
We can even add to this list (e) year one of Merodach-baladan as king of Babylon, according to Sargon’s testimony: … “In my twelfth year of reign, (Merodach-baladan) .... For 12 years, against the will (heart) of the gods, he held sway over Babylon ...”.
Unfortunately, as already noted, historians and biblical chronologists, notably Thiele,
have basically ignored the above four-way (potentially five-way) synchronism, (a)-(d)-(e), preferring to align Hezekiah’s regnal years to a miscalculated neo-Assyrian history [more on that in the next chapter], making Hezekiah a late contemporary of Sargon II’s, and dating the former to c. 716/5-687 BC. This means, as we also saw, that Hezekiah would have begun to reign about a decade later than where 2 Kings locates him; far too late for his having been the king of Judah during the fall of Samaria. ….
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