Israel
Finkelstein and his hermeneutics of suspicion
Israel
Finkelstein unfortunately carries the name of a group of Hebrews that were
faithful to their God, not operating with the German bred hermeneutics of
suspicion that was nurtured in the period of Rationalism, Deism, Enlightenment,
changing colors in Modernism all with the attempt to work toward agnosticism
and finally nihilism. There is nothing. And that is the article of Finkelstein
on the wall of Nehemiah. He objected to the numbers of people, the
archaeological evidence of the walls, you name it. Every time I get upset with
Finkelstein it is because he lost sight of the holistic view of archaeology and
wants to major with the minors. Let me make the principle clear again: one
cannot dig 5-10% of a city and then present this as if it is the final total
mass of information that one can get ever on this topic. He did it with the
settlement patterns of Israel and he did it with this topic on the wall of
Nehemiah again. His methodology, like that of Eichrodt on Old Testament
Theology, sinks with the attempt to think that minor evidence means minor
reality and quantitatively many data means increase of the reality. This axiom
does not work and is bound to misrepresent the past or will be in conflict with
the data from Scriptures. It is like cutting one piece of a cake and say: there
is definitely not a single ant in this cake. What an assertion. And thousands
of scholars are running after this kind of superficial reasoning. It does not
matter how eloquent you present the case, or how friendly, or how humble, if
there is not there out there, there is nothing to be called or denied “there”.
He denied it. Others affirms it, me included.
Source:
I.Finkelstein,
“Jerusalem in the Persian(and Early Hellenistic) Period and the Wall of
Nehemiah”. BASOR 1994.