'Minimalists' and 'maximalists' battle over the archeological evidence for biblical accounts of history. As DAN FALK reports, the controversy carries a political subtext for present-day Israel

It wasn't long ago that the Bible was read not just as an inspirational and remarkable collection of stories, but as history -- if not a literal account of the Israelite people, then at least a somewhat reliable dramatization.

But that confidence has eroded over the past century, and in the past decade it has nearly been destroyed. Abraham and Moses, it now seems, probably never lived at all. David and Solomon may have been tribal leaders with good PR, not great kings presiding over a vast empire.

The debate has become sharply polarized. On one side are "minimalists," who dismiss the biblical narrative as a fiction constructed for political and ideological reasons many centuries after the events they claim to describe. Opposing them are "maximalists," who assert that much of the narrative should be read as real history. And frequently, the fight really seems to be about present-day politics in the Middle East.

Few today read Genesis as history; the stories of creation, the Garden of Eden and Noah and the flood are seen as allegorical tales. Yet by the time of the Babylonian exile in the sixth century, there are ample accounts from non-biblical sources to support the basic chronology. So the question is, as we move back in time, at what point does the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament) shift from myth into history?

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The story of the Israelites is entrenched: Abraham leads his family to Palestine; famine forces their descendants to Egypt, where they are enslaved; Moses leads the Israelites through the desert to the "promised land," where they conquer the native Canaanites and eventually establish a great unified kingdom.

Yet archeology has yielded little to support those biblical tales. For Abraham, Moses and the Exodus, there seems to be no evidence at all; while the Canaanite cities were indeed destroyed, it's not clear who did it or when. Even the unified kingdom of David and Solomon is becoming mired in controversy.

The most recent supporting find is a portion of a stone structure on a hillside just outside Jerusalem, possibly the remains of the palace of King David. Equally controversial is a set of stones containing what appears to be the oldest inscription of a complete alphabet, just outside Jerusalem. Dating from the 10th century BC, it suggests a literate, educated population in the ancient capital.

Archeologists have also found scattered inscriptions from neighbouring cultures that mention the "Hebrews" or the "Israelites"; much has been made of a ninth-century BC inscription from Tel Dan, in northern Israel, that refers to the "House of David."

And then there's the indirect evidence -- a peculiar absence of pig bones at places like Beth-Shemesh, an Iron Age site in central Israel, where the ancient inhabitants were apparently already following something similar to Jewish dietary laws, in contrast to their Canaanite neighbours.

Israel Finkelstein, head of the Archeology Institute at Tel Aviv University, is caught in the middle. He's not as radical as the true minimalists, but he has been making waves nonetheless, arguing that there was no "conquest" of Canaan -- merely a gradual uprising by farmers and herdsmen against their urban-dwelling neighbours.

As for David and Solomon, he said they probably existed -- but they may have been little more than tribal chieftains, bit players in the region's history. Dr. Finkelstein has "down-dated" many of the structures once credited to Solomon: Archeological remains from Megiddo and other sites mentioned in the Book of Kings previously believed to date from the mid-10th-century BC actually date, he said, from the early ninth century -- several generations after Solomon's reign. Although Solomon may have existed, much of what the Bible attributes to him must have been the work of later rulers, such as King Ahab.

"It changes the way we look at the kingdom of Solomon," Dr. Finkelstein said. The first Israelite kings "were kind of chieftains, ruling over a small territory, from a small village in Jerusalem, which was not a monumental capital of an empire. . . . There was some sort of an entity in the southern highlands in the 10th century BC, but not that great empire described in the Book of Kings."

The more radical revisionists' arguments often seem bluntly political. Keith Whitelam of the University of Sheffield, for example, made his views clear in the title of his recent book, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History. He called the biblical account of Israel's past "a fiction, a fabrication," and complained that "biblical scholarship, in its all-consuming search for ancient Israel . . . has ignored the indigenous population and its claims to the land or the past."

Another minimalist, Thomas L. Thompson of Copenhagen, argues in The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel, that the biblical writers were "creating a past for a society that identifies itself theologically with the 'new Israel.' " He claims that the Bible was written between the fourth and first centuries BC.

U.S. archeologist William Dever, recently retired from the University of Arizona, has been leading the counterattack. At a recent conference in Toronto, Dr. Dever called the minimalists "intellectual terrorists" whose growing popularity across the Atlantic can be attributed to a rising tide of European anti-Semitism. The revisionists "are radically rewriting the history of ancient Israel . . . in such a way as to write ancient Israel out of history altogether," he said later in an interview.

The majority of scholars would agree that the Bible was written and compiled by many different people over many centuries. That doesn't necessarily mean that it is pure propaganda with no connection to history, as the minimalists argue. But it does mean that one has to carefully interpret the narrative.

Baruch Halpern, a Canadian biblical scholar and historian based at Pennsylvania State University, cited the account of the conquests of King David. According to II Samuel, Chapter 8, he says, David "didn't conquer very much." But later texts say he conquered a great deal more, "and by the time you get into seventh-century sources like Deuteronomy, he conquered to the Euphrates."

Dr. Halpern compared it to modern political spin-doctoring: The authors claim as much as they can plausibly get away with -- and the more time passes, the greater the exaggerations. "Two centuries later, you can make up anything you want."

If David and Solomon are the main figures in the debate, their capital Jerusalem has become the most scrutinized city. Elsewhere in the region, artifacts from the 10th century abound; in Jerusalem they have been nearly non-existent. For minimalists, that scarcity of remains is a primary reason to dismiss large portions of the Bible.

But archeologists who have worked on the few digs allowed in the city have a different view. Jane Cahill, a staff archeologist for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's City of David Archeological Project, said there are, in fact, major artifacts in the capital.

Jerusalem at that time was served by two complex water-supply systems, she said, and one can also see the remains of a massive edifice known as the "stepped-stone structure," which may have supported something like a fortress or a palace. Those structures, she said, predate David and Solomon, but were probably still in use during their time.

"People say, 'Well, their capital was Jerusalem, and Jerusalem at that time was either uninhabited or it was at best a very small and impoverished village. So that disproves their existence.' That's nonsense," Ms. Cahill said. "Jerusalem at the time of David and Solomon [was] not what we think of as 'urban' today . . . but for its time, it had all the features of an urban environment."

And what of King Solomon? "He was no King Nebuchadnezzar," she admitted. "He was a king in his own context." Archeologists are not allowed to dig on the Temple Mount, the presumed location of Solomon's temple, so little can be said about it.

For many religious believers, naturally, the historicity of the Bible is a major issue. But even for the less literal or devout, there is a strong sentimental attachment to biblical tales and characters. Phrases like "David and Goliath battle" and "the wisdom of Solomon" are used throughout the Western world.

As Dr. Finkelstein put it: "We archeologists are touching on a nerve of Western civilization, and of the Judeo-Christian tradition."

Dan Falk is a writer and broadcaster based in Toronto.