Books in Brief

Comprehensive Study

The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement

Israel Finkelstein (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1988) 384 pp., 107 illustrations, $36.00

Archaeological research has long focused on the process of the Israelite settlement. The pendulum has swung from those heady days when archaeology was viewed as the greatest hope for an objective “clarification” of the Biblical record to the equally misguided view that archaeology can say nothing about Biblical history. It is against this background that Professor Finkelstein has produced his thorough and timely book, The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement.^a

Finkelstein is uniquely qualified to address the issue of the Israelite settlement in the central hill-country of Canaan. He has excavated two key sites of the settlement period (late 13th century B.C. through the end of the 11th century B.C.), the small farming village of Izbet Sartah and the traditional Israelite cult-site of Shiloh, and he has conducted an extensive site-survey in the hill-country area between these two sites (the Biblical region of Ephraim). In this book, he presents a detailed description of his archaeological work, as well as a useful summary of the results of previous excavators. Thus, Finkelstein’s book fleshes out, with the aid of survey, the rather bare-bones account of the Israelite settlement that one gets from most archaeological reconstructions.