Below are 5 of the 10 from 10 Times Archaeology Has Disagreed with the Biblical Narrative written by Joshua Schachterle, Ph.D, posted April 7th, 2025. The sentences after the items were also extracted for the books and scholars he referenced. There is more info in his paper.
- History and identity of the Israelites – In Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?, William Dever writes that the ancient settlements found in the land of Canaan show no sign of armed conflict.
- There was no mass exodus from Egypt – In her commentary on Exodus, Carol Meyers notes that there is no archeological evidence, either for a large Israelite presence in Egypt or for a mass exodus.
- Jerusalem in the time of King David – In their book The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, Finkelstein and Silberman write that there is little evidence to indicate that Jerusalem, David’s capital city according to the Bible, was “more than a typical hill country village” during David and of Solomon’s time.
- Monotheism in ancient Israel – However, in 1968, William Devers discovered an ancient inscription in an Israelite cemetery that forced him to question this assumption. The inscription said of the deceased man “blessed may he be by YHWH and his Asherah.” Asherah was a Canaanite mother goddess. However, archeologists continued to find more and more Hebrew inscriptions linking YHWH and Asherah, leading them to conclude that in early Judaism, Asherah was considered YHWH’s consort and therefore an important deity in her own right.
- Camels in the time of the Patriarchs – Genesis 12 and 24 both say that Abraham owned camels. However, Erez Ben-Yosef and Lidar Sapir-Hen of Tel Aviv University say that according to carbon dating of the earliest camel bones found in Israel, camels were not introduced into Israel until about the 9th century BCE, approximately 1,000 years after the patriarchs were said to have lived.
