As part of our program, every other Friday we have archaeological field trips. This past week we went to Megiddo and Aphek and Betsarta (a small village near Aphek) and Migdal Tsedek. It was especially great to get back to Megiddo, since I spent all of last field season there! It was crazy busy with tourists. I also felt slightly out of place as a tourist. It really felt as though I should be in my dig clothes with my trowel with me. It will be so great to get back next season though!
So those are all pictures of Aphek, since last year I already took like millions of pictures of Megiddo. But if you want to see them and I haven't showed you, I will definitely show you again, because I obviously love talking about my experiences there.
Today we started our Iron Age Archaeology class sequence (the Iron Age comes after the Bronze Age chronologically). I absolutely love the class so far. I'm much more interested in the Iron Age than I am in the Bronze Age, since it is in the Iron Age that Israel rises up as a state. We talked a lot about biblical history and how much we can actually trust the bible as a historical source, which actually isn't a whole lot, which I'm sure some of my conservative readers will find controversial. But seriously in the book of Joshua, it details the Israelites' "conquest" of the Canaanites at Jericho in the Late Bronze Age, but there wasn't even a large settlement at Jericho in the LBA according to archaeological evidence. This is not to say that we cannot rely on the biblical texts to tell us about ancient traditions.
Anyway, there are a few general rules to approaching such research. First, no texts, since biblical texts cannot really tell things as if it is an actual historical description. An example of this is that the entire book of Judges pretty much serves as an introduction to the Davidic dynyasty later on. Second, one has to be careful to not detach these processes from the general picture in the Ancient Near East. You have to remember the Edomites, Arameans, etc, as well as the Israelites. Third, you have to look at the long duree of history. It's impossible to gain an accurate picture and understanding if you're not looking at thousands of years of history. Fourth, one also has to bear in mind the differences between the urban sectors and the rural sectors. And last, it's also important to know what you mean when you talk about "Israel." A person? A nation? A geographical area?
We also talked a bit about the layers of the Book of Joshua, and how one can relate examining a biblical text like archaeology and look at the stratigraphy of the text and peel it back, layer by layer. Like in Joshua, there are vague memories of the past such as when it mentions that "Hazor formerly was the head of all those kingdoms," perhaps alluding to a time in the past when Hazor was the greatest of all the kingdoms. Another example of such memories is the Song of Deborah in the Book of Judges. It might be recalling memories of unrest in the northern valleys during the 10th century BCE, which is attested in a destruction layer of Megiddo VIA in the 10th c. BCE. A second layer is etiological stories. Joshua mentions a city called "Ai," which literally translates to "ruins." Perhaps the people around Ai passed the ruins everyday and that's how the city got its name. And the last layer is the reality and ideology of the time of the authors. Maybe the descriptions of the conquest in Joshua are more collected stories and traditions and myths, and the people put them together to advance their own ideology.
This is not all to say that I don't think that the Bible shouldn't be used as a basis of many faiths, quite the contrary actually. There is a big difference as having a text as part of your liturgical canon and viewing it as a historical source in academia, where you're supposed to view every text with a critical eye and look for extra-biblical sources (which do exist). It's all super interesting to me, and it's eventually what I would like to do further study in in later school!!!
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