Ethnicity and Origin of the Iron I Settlers in the Highlands of Canaan: Can the Real Israel Stand Up?

Abstract

Who settled in the hundreds of small villages that dotted the hill country of Iron I Canaan? In last December's issue of "BA" devoted to ceramics and ethnicity, William Dever identified these highlanders as a new ethnic entity, as the people Israel. In a challenge to Dever's identification, Israel Finkelstein argues that Dever is too conservative archaeologically; Dever has valued ceramics over settlement patterns. Moreover, Dever's historical reconstruction clings too tightly to the biblical story. Instead, Finkelstein depicts the rise of an ethnically distinct Israel as the latest phase in long-term, cyclic processes of settlement oscillations in the highlands. Archaeological data first place this "real Israel" on the historical stage only in the ninth-eighth centuries BCE.