Quotes from Israel Finkelstein

Yet all agree that the Pentateuch is not a single, seamless composition but a patchwork of different sources, each written under different historical circumstances to express different religious or political viewpoints.

What the Deuteronomistic historian wanted to say is simple and powerful: there is still a way to regain the glory of the past.

is now evident that many events of biblical history did not take place in either the particular era or the manner described. Some of the most famous events in the Bible clearly never happened at all.

from various periods but (since its site was obliterated

And the patriarch Jacob declared in his last will and testament that the tribe of his son Judah would rule over them all

The most important of these texts are the Nuzi tablets from northern Iraq, which date to the fifteenth century B.C.E. To cite just a few examples, in Nuzi a barren wife is required to provide a slave woman for her husband to bear his children—a clear parallel to the biblical story of Sarai and Hagar in Gen 16.