[Avodah] Evidence of the United Monarchy

[Lisa Liel via Avodah]

Aside from his name being Schiffman, and not Fishman, I have to disagree 
with his identifications.  The Iron II remains he's talking about are 
not from the United Monarchy.  Rather, they are from the Assyrian 
occupation and Samaritan settlement.  And in fact, they *match* the 
Assyrian occupation and Samaritan settlement, but do not in any way 
match the United Monarchy, which is why he had to give the caveat that:

/The elimination of these more extreme, minimalist views of the period 
of the United Monarchy does not give us an excuse to adopt a simplistic 
or fundamentalist reading of the biblical historical accounts and the 
archaeological evidence. Rather, it calls upon us to ask how, when taken 
together, the age-old historical traditions of the Jewish people can be 
melded with archaeological evidence from the Land of Israel and evidence 
from surrounding cultures in the ancient Near East. Our challenge, 
therefore, is not to ask whether or not biblical accounts and 
archaeological evidence are true or not, but rather how, when taken 
together, the evidence available to us can allow us to reconstruct a 
sense of what the society was like that produced the biblical traditions 
that we have received.//
/
This is a roundabout way of saying that the remains don't match the 
biblical narrative, but we can, if we try really hard, kinda see how the 
remains were later enlarged into the biblical fantasy.  He also says:

/In the monarchic period a uniformity of architectural forms throughout 
Judah/Israel has been discovered... Architecturally the public city 
gates of Gezer, Megiddo, and Hazor are strikingly similar: the walls are 
very thick and feature casemates where people lived or that were used 
for storage... The uniformity of the features of the great public 
buildings in these cities suggests a royal administration./

Substituting Iron II for the incorrect "monarchic period", this is 
understandable, since the uniform architecture was the result of local 
governors from the same Assyrian empire.  But of course, the 
architecture of Solomon was on a scale far above that of the Iron II 
buildings.  Interestingly enough, the cities where these uniform city 
gates were found are, each of them, in the regional capitols of areas 
conquered by Assyria.  He leaves off Lachish, which has the same gates, 
and which was the Assyrian capitol of their province of Judea in the 
time between their conquest of all Judea other than Jerusalem and their 
withdrawal after they were struck down before the gates of Jerusalem.

Lisa

On 4/5/2016 1:17 PM, Micha Berger via Avodah wrote:
> By Dr Lawrence Fishman
> <http://lawrenceschiffman.com/the-united-monarchy-rereading-the-bible-and-the-archaeological-evidence>
> or <http://j.mp/1YcZHhB>. Teaser, taken fom MosaicMagazine.com:
>
>