"The Bible Unearthed" is the latest salvo fired in a pitched battle between those who consider the Old Testament to contain plenty of reliable historical facts, and those who, at the opposite extreme, say it's pure mythology. The debate reached the general population of Israel, sending what one journalist called a "shiver" down the nation's "collective spine," in late 1999, when another archaeologist from Tel Aviv University, Ze'ev Herzog, wrote a cover story for the weekend magazine of the national daily newspaper, Ha'aretz. In the essay, Herzog laid out many of the theories Finkelstein and Silberman present in their book: "the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land [of Canaan] in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the twelve tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united kingdom of David and Solomon, described in the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom." The new theories envision this modest chiefdom as based in a Jerusalem that was essentially a cow town, not the glorious capital of an empire.

Although, as Herzog notes, some of these findings have been accepted by the majority of biblical scholars and archaeologists for years and even decades, they are just now making a dent in the awareness of the Israeli public -- a very painful dent. They challenge many of the Old Testament stories central to Israeli beliefs about their own national character and destiny, stories that have influenced much of Western culture as well. The tales of the patriarchs -- Abraham, Isaac and Joseph among others -- were the first to go when biblical scholars found those passages rife with anachronisms and other inconsistencies. The story of Exodus, one of the most powerful epics of enslavement, courage and liberation in human history, also slipped from history to legend when archaeologists could no longer ignore the lack of corroborating contemporary Egyptian accounts and the absence of evidence of large encampments in the Sinai Peninsula ("the wilderness" where Moses brought the Israelites after leading them through the parted Red Sea).

Herzog's article led to a nationwide bout of soul-searching. After it appeared, universities organized conferences where distressed citizens could quiz experts on the details and meanings of this new and not-so-new research; Israeli newspaper journalists wrote stories casting the theories as blows against the cultural identity and even the political legitimacy of Israel; and scholars who quarrel with the ideas of archaeologists like Finkelstein wrote fiery letters and editorials denouncing them as "biblical minimalists."

Them's fightin' words. In this field, it seems, there are few worse epithets to throw at a colleague than "minimalist." The moniker is usually applied to a controversial group of European biblical scholars, sometimes called the Copenhagen School, who have insisted that since there is, to their minds, so little corroborative evidence supporting the stories in the Old Testament, the scriptures should be regarded as a collection of legends, and figures like David and Solomon considered "no more historical than King Arthur." The inflammatory implication behind the name "minimalist" (which Finkelstein and Silberman dismiss as a canard invented by the group's "detractors") is that an emotional, religious or political agenda, rather than a judicious weighing of the facts, drives their research. Their most vehement critics accuse the minimalists of being anti-Bible and anti-Israeli, for to some any attack on the historical legitimacy of the Bible, with its grand national myth of a people chosen by God to rule in the Promised Land, is a blow struck at the legitimacy of the current state of Israel.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"