Israel Finkelstein


Israel Finkelstein is an Israeli archaeologist, professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University and the head of the School of Archaeology and Maritime Cultures at the University of Haifa. Finkelstein is active in the archaeology of the Levant and is an applicant of archaeological data in reconstructing biblical history. Finkelstein is the current excavator of Megiddo, a key site for the study of the Bronze and Iron Ages in the Levant. Finkelstein's fieldwork in northern Israel and the West Bank, as well as his development of the "Low Chronology", upended prior archaeological assessments by showing that the Kingdom of Israel was substantially larger and more prosperous when it coexisted alongside the Kingdom of Judah. Finkelstein has used these insights to challenge the biblical narrative that David and Solomon ruled a united monarchy of Israel and Judah from Jerusalem in the 10th century BCE.
Finkelstein is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities an associé étranger of the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2005, he won the Dan David Prize for his study of the history of Israel in the 10th and 9th centuries BCE. In 2009, he was named chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, and in 2010, received a doctorate honoris causa from the University of Lausanne. He is a member of the selection committee of the Shanghai Archaeology Forum, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Among Finkelstein's books are The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts and David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition, co-written with Neil Asher Silberman. Also he wrote the textbooks on the emergence of Ancient Israel, titled The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement ; on the archaeology and history of the arid zones of the Levant, titled Living on the Fringe ; and on the Northern Kingdom of Israel, titled The Forgotten Kingdom. Other books deal with biblical historiography: Hasmonean Realities Behind Ezra, Nehemiah and Chronicles, Essays on Biblical Historiography: From Jeroboam II to John Hyrcanus, and Jerusalem The Center of the Universe.

Background

Family

Israel Finkelstein was born to an Ashkenazi Jewish family in Tel Aviv, Israel, on March 29, 1949. His parents were Zvi Finkelstein and Miriam Finkelstein. His great-grandfather on his mother's side, Shlomo Ellenhorn, came to Palestine from Grodno in the 1850s and settled in Hebron. He was one of the first physicians in the Bikur Cholim Hospital in Jerusalem, and is listed among the group of people who purchased the land in 1878 in order to establish Petah Tikva – the first modern Jewish settlement in Palestine outside the four holy cities. Finkelstein's father was born in Melitopol. He came to Palestine with his family in 1920.
Finkelstein is married to Joelle. They are the parents of two daughters.

Education

Israel Finkelstein attended the PICA elementary school and Ahad Ha'am High School, both in Petah Tikva. He then served in the Israel Defense Forces. He studied archaeology and Near Eastern civilizations, and geography at Tel Aviv University, receiving his BA in 1974. While there, Finkelstein was a student of Prof. Yohanan Aharoni. He continued as a research student under the supervision of Prof. Moshe Kochavi, receiving his MA in 1978. He graduated as a PhD in 1983 with a thesis titled "The Izbet Sartah Excavations and the Israelite Settlement in the Hill Country".

Academic career

From 1976 to 1990, Finkelstein taught at the Department of Land of Israel Studies, Bar-Ilan University, beginning as a teaching assistant. He spent the academic year of 1983–84 in a research group led by Prof. Yigael Yadin in the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. In 1986/1987, Finkelstein taught at the Department for Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago. In 1987 he was appointed an associate professor with tenure at Bar-Ilan University and in 1990 moved to the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations at Tel Aviv University. In 1992/93 Finkelstein spent a sabbatical year as a visiting scholar at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University. Since 1992, he has been a Full Professor at Tel Aviv University. He served as the chairperson of the Department of Archaeology and Near Eastern Studies and as Director of The Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology. In 1998–1999 Finkelstein was a visiting scholar in the Centre de Recherche d'Archéologie Orientale and the École Pratique des Hautes Études in the Sorbonne, Paris.
Finkelstein was the editor of Tel Aviv, the journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University, and the executive editor of the Monograph Series by the Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University. He is a member of editorial boards, including the Palestine Exploration Quarterly and the Archaeology and Biblical Studies series of the Society of Biblical Literature.

Fieldwork

Finkelstein was trained as a field archaeologist in the excavations of Tel Beer Sheva and Tel Aphek. Starting in 1976, he carried out his own fieldwork in a variety of sites and regions:

Past excavations and surveys

In 1976–1978, he field-directed the excavations at 'Izbet Sartah, an Iron I–IIA village-site east of Tel Aviv. In the same years he conducted surveys of Byzantine monastic remains in southern Sinai, and directed salvage excavations at the mound of ancient Bene Beraq near Tel Aviv. In 1980, Finkelstein co-directed the excavation of Tel Ira, an Iron II site in the Beer-sheba Valley
In the 1980s Finkelstein moved to projects in the highlands. He directed the excavation at biblical Shiloh, a site which features Middle Bronze, Late Bronze and Iron I remains. Another comprehensive project was the Southern Samaria Survey, which covered an area of ca. 1,000 km2 in the highlands north of Jerusalem. In parallel, he carried out soundings at sites northeast of Jerusalem: Khirbet ed-Dawwara, an Iron I–IIA site in the desert fringe near Jerusalem; and the Intermediate Bronze site of Dhahr Mirzbaneh.
Finkelstein's most extensive field work is the excavation at Megiddo. Megiddo is considered one of the most important Bronze and Iron Age sites in the Levant.
In 2006–2020, Finkelstein was co-director of excavations and geo-archaeology work in the Iron Age sites of Atar Haroa and Nahal Boqer, and the Intermediate Bronze Age sites of Mashabe Sade and En Ziq.
In 2017–2019, Finkelstein co-directed the Shmunis Family Excavations at Kiriath-Jearim, a biblical site in the highlands west of Jerusalem associated with the Ark Narrative in the Book of Samuel.

Other projects

In 2009–2014, Finkelstein was principal investigator of a European Research Council-funded project titled Reconstructing Ancient Israel: The Exact and Life Sciences Perspectives. The project was organized into 10 tracks dealing with radiocarbon dating, ancient DNA, geoarchaeology, paleoclimate, petrography, metallurgy, daily mathematics, advanced imaging of ostraca, residue analysis and archaeozoology. Samples were taken from a large number of sites in Israel and Greece.
Another project focused on the petrography of the Amarna clay tablets ; The Archaeological and Historical Realities behind the Pentateuch ; ancient DNA of animals and Humans.
Another project is the study of 'Digital Epigraphy', in which algorithmic methods were introduced to the study of Iron Age Hebrew inscriptions, 2008–present, with Eli Piasetzky of Tel Aviv University. This study was later expanded, introducing computer science methods to the investigation of biblical texts.

Scholarly contributions

Finkelstein has written on a variety of topics, including the archaeology of the Bronze Age and the exact and life sciences contribution to archaeology. Much of his work has been devoted to the Iron Age and, more specifically, to questions related to the history of Ancient Israel.

Emergence of Ancient Israel

The classical theories on the emergence of Israel viewed the process as a unique event in the history of the region. Finkelstein suggested that it was a long-term process of a cyclical nature. He demonstrated that the wave of settlement in the highlands in the Iron Age I was the last in a series of such demographic developments – the first had taken place in the Early Bronze and the second in the Middle Bronze. The periods between these peaks were characterized by low settlement activity. Finkelstein explained these oscillations as representing changes along the sedentary/ pastoral-nomadic continuum, which were caused by socioeconomic and political dynamics. Hence, a big portion of the people who settled in the highlands in the early Iron Age were locals of a pastoral-nomadic background. Others, who originated from local sedentary background, moved to the highlands as a result of the Bronze Age collapse – which in turn was related to a long period of dry climate in –1100 BCE. Since eventually these groups formed the Northern Kingdom of Israel, they can be labeled "Israelites" as early as their initial settlement process. The same holds true for the contemporary settlement process in Transjordan and western Syria, which brought about the rise of Moab, Ammon and the Aramean kingdoms of the later phases of the Iron Age.
Finkelstein regards the biblical account on the Conquest of Canaan in the Book of Joshua as an ideological manifesto of the Deuteronomistic author/s of the late 7th century BCE, describing a "conquest to be" under King Josiah of Judah rather than a historical event at the end of the Bronze Age. He proposed that the original Conquest Account may have originated in the Northern Kingdom of Israel in the early 8th century BCE; it could have been influenced by memories of the turmoil that had taken place in the lowlands in the late Iron I, rather than the end of the Late Bronze Age.