Sheba

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