Introduction: Radiocarbon Dating and the Iron Age of the Southern Levant: Problems and potentials for the Oxford conference

Abstract

Abstract According to historical sources, the Iron Age in the southern Levant spans approximately 1200 to 586 BCE. To non-archaeologists, the ‘Iron Age’ sounds rather boring. However, this roughly 600 year period of time encompasses the history of ancient Israel and her neighbors as depicted in the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, which is the purview of what used to be called Biblical Archaeology. The archaeology of the Holy Land (Israel, Jordan, Palestinian territories, southern Lebanon/Syria, and the Sinai Peninsula), the geographic setting where most of the events and characters described in the Hebrew Bible took place, is of intrinsic importance to both believers and those interested in three of the world's great religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These religions represent more than 3.2 billion people or 52.8% of the world population today. While theology and historical fact fall between belief and the empirical world, issues concerning the historicity of the Hebrew Bible mean something to at least half the world's population. Until recently, the only extra-biblical sources for critically examining the Hebrew Bible were the limited number of contemporary Mesopotamian, Egyptian and local Levantine inscriptions (Pritchard 1969). The paucity of ancient textual data, the increase in forgeries, the problems of the relative dating of Iron Age archaeological materials and deposits from the Levant, and the lack of objective chronological tools made testing the historicity of the Hebrew Bible speculative at best.