Israel is laid waste and his seed is not

 

The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Sacred Texts by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman does an admirable job in presenting a possible ancient history of the people known as Israel.  As a culture, we have gone from believing the bible told the entire truth about history as the unerring word of God, to seeing it as a human production that tells a story shaped by the time of its composition and redaction, and that bears no resemblance to what we consider modern history.

The problem with this approach is that ultimately we’d like to eliminate the bible in seeking out a history of Israel but we never can; there is a paradox at the heart of biblical history and this book falls into it like all others. While seeking to show the bible is not history invariably some parts of the bible will be shown to be history, or at least worthy of historical seriousness.  

A prime example is the discovery of the Book of the Law in the Temple during the reign of Josiah.  Scholars believe this is the book of Deuteronomy, or an early version of it, but we have zero evidence that this is the case.  Yet so many histories of Israel use this as a vital crux, or historical pivot point.

All we have are hard points of fact outside the bible that most scholars agree are authentic.  The earliest is the Egyptian Merneptah stele which explains that a people known as Israel, most likely semi-nomadic and living in the hills of Canaan in 1270 BCE were completely destroyed.  Any statement beyond this basic fact is some kind of conjecture. 

Israel is laid waste and his seed is not;