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THE LIVES OF ORDINARY PEOPLE IN ANCIENT ISRAEL: WHERE ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE BIBLE INTERSECT. By William G. Dever. Pp. x + 436. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012. Paper, $25.00.
William Dever's most recent book Hie Lives of Ordinary People in Ancient Israel: Where Archaeology and the Bible Intersect does much more than merely recount evidence for daily life in the biblical world. In this volume, Dever, long considered an elder statesman in the archaeology of the southern Levant, takes on the complexities of biblical historiography and connects a huge amount of archaeological evidence to a conceptual framework.
In the 1980's, Dever was one of the loudest voices in the debate about redefining the discipline of "biblical archaeology." He successfully proposed that scholars stop using that term, because calling oneself a "biblical archaeologist" presupposes that archaeological evidence must fit into a biblicallybased rubric. He advocated for more neutral terms instead, some of which, such as "archaeology of the southern Levant," have caught on and are in use today. Dever returns to this topic in the current volume, and also confronts another major disciplinary concern that he tackled in the 1990's- refuting minimalist (revisionist) arguments about the historicity of biblical events.
The title of the volume requires explanation, as it only reflects a small part of what Dever wants to accomplish. Other archaeologists have written about everyday life-how a household is run from dawn to dusk, how domestic cults might have functioned, how agricultural villages divided labor, etc. (O. Borowski's Daily Life in Biblical Times and J. Ebeling's Women 's Lives in Biblical Times both come to mind, and are cited in the volume.) But Dever has a grander aim. This is Dever's attempt to create a picture of Israel and Judah by looking at the evidence on the ground first, and only afterwards incorporating relevant biblical texts, and then only if they fit. He uses the metaphor of a potential "divorce" between archaeology and biblical scholarship, or at least a "trial separation" (p. 369), to see if they can live without each other. They can.
Dever focuses his attention on a discrete slice of time-the eighth century B.c.E. He selects the eighth century for several reasons, but most notably because the tremendous amount of well-published archaeological evidence...