Major funding for "The Bible's Buried Secrets" is provided by The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, and the Righteous Persons Foundation.





Additional funding for this program is provided by the Skirball Foundation and by The Solow Art and Architecture Foundation.

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Transcript

NARRATOR: In the 1970s, archaeologists started wide-ranging surveys throughout the central hill country of Canaan, today, primarily, the Palestinian territory of the West Bank.

ISRAEL FINKELSTEIN (Tel Aviv University): I was teaching at that time. We used to take students and go twice a week to the highlands, and every day we used to cover between two and three square kilometers. And this accumulates, very slowly, into the coverage of the entire area.

NARRATOR: Israel Finkelstein and teams of archaeologists walked out grids over large areas, collecting every fragment of ancient pottery lying on the surface. Over seven years he covered nearly 400 square miles, sorting pottery and marking the locations of where it was found, on a map.

ISRAEL FINKELSTEIN: In the beginning, the spots were there on the map and they meant nothing to me. But later, slowly, slowly, I started seeing sort of a phenomena and processes.

NARRATOR: By dating the pottery, Finkelstein discovered that before 1200 B.C., there were approximately 25 settlements. He estimated the total population of those settlements to be 3,- to 5,000 inhabitants. But just 200 years later, there's a very sharp increase in settlements and people.

ISRAEL FINKELSTEIN: Then you get this boom of population growing and growing. Then we are speaking about 250 sites. And the population grows, also, 10 times, from a few thousand to 45,000 or so. Now this is very dramatic and cannot be explained as natural growth. This rate is impossible in ancient times.

NARRATOR: If not natural growth, perhaps these are the waves of dispersed people settling down following the collapse of the great state systems.

Then, more evidence of a new culture is discovered, a new type of simple dwelling, never seen before. And it's in the exact location where both the Merneptah Stele and the Bible place the Israelites.

AMNON BEN-TOR: The sites in which this type of house appears, throughout the country, this is where Israelites lived. And they are sometimes even called the Israelite house or Israelite-type house.

The people who lived in those villages seemed to be arranged, more or less, in a kind of egalitarian society because there are no major architectural installations. If you look at the finds, the finds are relatively poor. Pottery is more or less mundane—I don't want to offend the early settlers or the early Israelites—very little art.

NARRATOR: Curiously, the mundane pottery found at these new Israelite villages is very similar to the everyday pottery found at the older Canaanite cities like Hazor. In fact, the Israelite house is practically the only thing that is different. This broad similarity is leading archaeologists to a startling new conclusion about the origins of the ancient Israelites.

WILLIAM DEVER: The notion is that most of the early Israelites were originally Canaanites, displaced Canaanites.

PETER MACHINIST: The Israelites were always in the land of Israel. They were natives, but they were different kinds of groups. They were basically the have-nots.

WILLIAM DEVER: So what we're dealing with is a movement of peoples, but not an invasion of armed hordes from outside, but rather a social and economic revolution.

NARRATOR: Ancient texts describe how the Egyptian rulers and their Canaanite vassal kings burden the lower classes of Canaan with taxes and even slavery.

A radical new theory based on archaeology suggests what happens next. As that oppressive social system declines, families and tribes of serfs, slaves and common Canaanites seize the opportunity. In search of a better way of life, they abandon the old city-states, and head for the hills. Free from the oppression of their past, they eventually emerge in a new place as a new people, the Israelites.

ISRAEL FINKELSTEIN: In the text, you have the story of the Israelites coming from outside, and then besieging the Canaanite cities, destroying them and then becoming a nation in the land of Canaan, whereas archaeology tells us something which is the opposite. According to archaeology, the rise of early Israel is an outcome of the collapse of Canaanite society, not the reason for that collapse.

NARRATOR: Archaeology reveals that the Israelites were themselves originally Canaanites. So why does the Bible consistently cast the Israelites as outsiders in Canaan: Abraham's wanderings from Mesopotamia; Moses leading slaves out of Egypt and into the Promised Land; and Joshua conquering Canaan from outside?

The answer may lie in their desire to forge a distinctly new identity.

PETER MACHINIST: Identity is created, as psychologists tell us, by talking about what you are not, by talking about another. In order to figure out who I am, I have to figure out who I am not.

NARRATOR: Conspicuously absent from Israelite villages are the grand palaces and the extravagant pottery associated with the kings and rich elites of Canaan.

AVRAHAM FAUST (Archaeologist, Bar-Ilan University): The Israelites did not like the Canaanite

system, and they defined themselves in contrast to that system. By not using decorated pottery, by not using imported pottery, they developed an ideology of simplicity which marked the difference between them and the Egyptian Canaanite system.

NARRATOR: If the Israelites wanted to distinguish themselves from their Canaanite past, what better way than to create a story about destroying them?

But the stories of Abraham, Exodus and the Conquest serve another purpose. They celebrate the power of what the Bible says is the foremost distinction between the Israelites and all other people, their God.

In later Judaism, the name of God is considered so sacred it is never to be spoken.

MICHAEL COOGAN: We don't know exactly what it means and we don't know how it was pronounced, but it seems to have been the personal name of the God of Israel, so his title, in a sense, was "God," and his name was these four letters, which in English is "YHWH," which we think were probably pronounced something like Yahweh.

NARRATOR: But Yahweh only appears in the Hebrew Bible. His name is nowhere to be found in Canaanite texts or stories. So where do the Israelites find their God?