VELIKOVSKIAN, Vol. II, No 1, (extracts)
Martin Sieff
Was Shishak of the Bible really Thutmose III as Immanuel Velikovsky claimed? Or was he really Ramses II, as claim Peter James, David Rohl and other proponents of the historical model long pushed by publishers of the British-based Catastrophism and Chronology Review? Did the Exodus occur at the end of the Middle Bronze Age, as they and John Bimson argue, and as Velikovsky himself believed? Or did it take place at the end of the Early Bronze Age, as Donovan Courville, Tom Chetwynd, Stan Vaniger, Emmett Sweeney, Brad Aaronson and I have argued?
Over the years, it seems that detailed new models for the radical revision of ancient history have been falling faster than leaves in the New England autumn... However, amid this babel of tongues and theories, much significant work has emerged within the past five years or so; from both the academic mainstream and revisionists camps...
It is my contention that the thrust of this work establishes a coherent model that solves many major problems of the revision of ancient history and opens fruitful roads of research to exploring many more...
Professor Anati, who teaches paleoethnology at Italy’s University of Lecce and directs the Centro Camuno di Studi Preistorici, is probably the world’s leading expert on prehistoric rock art. He summarized his work in Biblical Archaeological Review article [“Has Mt. Sinai Been Found?”, BAR, July/August 1985, pp. 42-57], than wrote richly-illustrated book, The mountain of God [New York, 1986] which described... Mount Karkom in Israel’s southwest Negev Desert, a sacred site of immense popularity throughout the Early Bronze Age but deserted thereafter. In his book, Anati recorded an astonishing array of finds that appeared to correlate with the book of Exodus’s account of the Israelite experience at Sinai...
Dr. Cohen, former Director of Antiquities of the Negev, published an article in Biblical Archaeological Review [“The Mysterious Middle Bronze I People”, BAR, July/August 1983, pp. 16-29], where he discussed the mysterious inhabitants of the Negev who were there no more than two generations, possibly less, during the Early Bronze/ Middle Bronze transition period... In his article, Cohen did not come out and actually say that “the Mysterious Middle Bronze I people” were the Israelites of the books of Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, but he relentlessly piled up one striking parallel after another...
A new book, The Lost Bible [Tel Aviv, Israel, 1992] by Yehoshua Etzion, goes far beyond the work of Anati and Cohen, providing the most detailed archaeological reinterpretation yet of the Israeli strata.
Etzion’s work follows the general outlines of Courville’s work, which he acknowledges... However, Etzion excelled in the rigor, scholarship and detail of his work. He studied the original excavation reports of all the major digs in Israel during this century and quoted extensively from them. When his work appeared, published in Israel, it could not be ignored. Published by Schocken Books, Israel’s largest publisher, his book sold well, attracting both pro and con articles in the mainstream Hebrew press. Some leading Israeli archaeologists, in an eerie echo of the “Velikovsky Affair”, actually threatened Schocken Books with an academic book boycott if that company published the book. This provoked widespread outrage and, unlike the Macmillan Publishing Company, Velikovsky’s first publisher, Schocken Books stood firm, put out the book and made a handsome profit from it.
A few mainstream archaeologists publicly praised Etzion’s handling of the material in their own areas of specialty, and Professor Abraham Negev, one of the world’s leading authorities on the archaeology of Israel, welcomed the book as an important contribution to the archaeological debate.
Etzion’s work has yet to be published in English translation, but any historical revisionist who can read Hebrew should order a copy as soon as possible. I believe that it is the most outstanding work published by any revisionist since Ages in Chaos, volume I, came out 41 years ago. Etzion very carefully limits the scope of the work to Israeli, or Palestinian archaeology, and does not suggest how the chronologies and stratigraphical interpretations of neighboring lands are affected by his work. This is not to duck the issue; as the reader will see, others have already started to take up that challenge.
What Etzion does achieve is to produce a work that, in its depth, scope, command of sources and documentation, is likely to prove as authoritative as Claude Schauffer’s Stratigraphie Comparee [London, England, 1948], a book that influenced Velikovsky greatly. Etzion produces a coherent model fitting the historical record to the archaeological strata over more than 2,000 years, starting with the Chalcolithic period, which he indetifies with the time of the patriarch Abraham...
Etzion produces an original and radical interpretation of the Iron Age, long a stumbling block for the revisionists... Radical as [his] approach is, it solves many problems. The mystery of the “missing” Persian period - the dearth of remains from the Persian period - is resolved... On the immensely complicated archaeological problems of Jerusalem, Etzion is even more radical and dramatic in his conclusions. He argues... that the biblical Jerusalem of the kings and prophets from David to Jeremiah was not the small Iron Age city, as is universally accepted, but that it was virtually identical in size and location to the Old City, as it has been defined over the past 2,000 years.
Etzion’s work... has forever changed the terms of the revisionist debate. No future stratigraphical model can hold any credibility unless it embraces or manages to convincingly refute his conclusions. Etzion gives more credibility to the radical revisionists than anyone, including Velikovsky, has ever done before. He has made radical revisionism intellectually respectable in the Israeli archaeological mainstream so that the leading Israeli archaeologists, including Professor Abraham Negev, are for the first time procured to debate the subject in an open and fair manner. This is a development whose importance cannot be overly estimated. Etzion’s work also opens up rich and rewarding lines of research for the radical revisionists. I am personally convinced that any future radical consensus will have to coalesce around his work.