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34 THE SEARCH FOR EVIDENCE indicates that he invaded Judah and captured several cities but not Jerusalem, where he was bought off by Reheboam. This would indicate that Jerusalem was still a wealthy and powerful city. The Egyptians either did not feel confident enough to capture the city or believed that accepting tribute would establish a precedent for future relations. This implies that Jerusalem still controlled valuable trade routes to the south, and it was better to conclude a lucrative punitive expedition than to destroy the commercial and central administrative well-being of a state that could continue to provide Egypt with wealth. This certainly does not match the archaeological remains of Palestine’s Jerusalem. Reheboam’s Jerusalem must have been elsewhere. There is no unanimity about the consequences of finding no evidence to confirm that the events of Old Testament belong to Palestine. One theory is that the change from Bronze Age to Iron Age was as undramatic as the archaeological evidence testifies. In this scenario the Promised Land was already partially occupied by an earlier but peaceful Hebrew migration; and Joshua merely moved into Hebrew territory, achieving hegemony by a show of force rather than by force itself. Another theory is that Joshua led his Iron Age pastoralists to marginalized land away from the Canaanite peasantry and later took control of them, even though marginalized land would be of no use to Iron Age smelters. A third suggestion is that there was no invasion but merely an internal power struggle. All three hypotheses maintain that the Old Testament record is therefore exaggerated or inaccurate. An interesting re-assessment by J. M. Miller and J. Hayes accepts the Old Testament account as being accurate in terms of local standards: Solomon was probably an unusually wealthy and powerful ruler by the standards of Early Iron Age Palestine. Yet viewed in the broader context of the ancient Middle East, he is to be regarded more as a local ruler over an expanded city-state than as a world class emperor. 5 A fourth suggestion is based purely on faith and maintains that, irrespective of evidence, the Old Testament not only took place in Palestine but Israelites left it to settle in northern Europe: The Jews are not the only descendants of the ancient 12-tribed nation of Israel, which includes the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic people and the British Commonwealth and certain countries in northwestern Europe. “British means “covenant man” being derived from two Hebrew words, “Brith”, meaning covenant, and “ish”, man. 6
QUEEN OF SHEBA AND BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP 35 These beliefs, strong among small Christian cults associated with the British Israel movement, are echoed in unjustified historical certainty and ideological arrogance expressed by some modern Israeli researchers, apparently based on a sort of ethnic mysticism, as if faith and local experience not only gives them intellectual superiority but also an indivisible identity with people living thousands of years ago. Shoshana Ben-Dor, a researcher on Ethiopian Judaism and the present director of the North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry, wrote to this writer on 20 October 1986: Anyone who has seen inscriptions in readable Biblical Hebrew, referring to places recorded in the Bible, pulled from the ground before their eyes is utterly convinced that Salibi [a critic] is wrong .... Finally, though I take it as a compliment the assumption that Jews influenced Africa in so many ways, I believe we cannot take all the credit you assign. In 1986, the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania published the findings of archaeological investigations undertaken between 1977 and 1981 on late Bronze age and early Iron age sites in the area of the central Trans-Jordan. The editor, Patrick McGovern, concluded that the evidence contradicted all three theories concerning Joshua’s entry to the Promised Land. There had been no violent invasion, nor infiltration by nomads who then established settlements in unoccupied land. McGovern dismissed the idea of an internal revolt, stating that society in Joshua’s era had been stable with an equitable distribution of wealth. In 1992, Professor Thomas Thompson, one of the world’s foremost biblical archaeologists, published his seminal Early History of the Israelite People from the Written and Archaeological Sources. Thompson’s survey of Palestinian archaeology cannot be faulted. He emphasizes that excavations around Jerusalem had found no evidence of significant settlement during the time of David and Solomon’s powerful and wealthy united kingdom. Conditions for such a state began to emerge a century later, but Jerusalem only became a relatively important urban center around 650 B.C.E. Thompson dismissed the notion that the area had any monarch on the scale of Saul, David and Solomon as “out of the question.” Thompson concluded that the first ten books of the Old Testament had been the invention of priests in Jerusalem during Persian rule ca. 450 B.C.E. He
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Page 3 and 4: QUEEN OF SHEBA AND BIBLICAL SCHOLAR
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MAP 8 Arabic Dialects of Western Ar
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Sheba

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