Others see the downgrading of David and Solomon's reigns as positively ominous. In a response to Herzog's article in Ha'aretz, Hershel Shanks of the Biblical Archaeology Review lumped both Herzog and Finkelstein with the biblical minimalists and accused them of having "a political agenda." "[A]t the extreme," Shanks wrote, "they can even be viewed as anti-Semitic." According to Marcus, "People say that Finkelstein means well but what he's doing is giving amunition to people who are anti-Israel, and you do see some of this stuff turning up on pro-Palestinian web sites, for example." Finkelstein himself has no patience for such charges, maintaining that he has no political agenda and is just a scholar doing his job. "Nonsense," he replied by e-mail when the "ammunition" issue was raised. "Research is research, and strong societies can easily endure discoveries like this."

By comparison with today's skeptical turmoil, the early years of the modern Israeli state were a honeymoon period for archaeology and the Bible, in which the science seemed to validate the historical passages of the Old Testament left and right. As Finkelstein and Silberman relate, midcentury archaeologists usually "took the historical narratives of the Bible at face value"; Israel's first archaeologists were often said to approach a dig with a spade in one hand and the Bible in the other. The Old Testament frequently served as the standard against which all other data were measured: If someone found majestic ruins, they dated them to Solomon's time; signs of a battle were quickly attributed to the conquest of Canaan.

That confidence was not entirely misplaced; in particular, the Old Testament contains very detailed genealogies and gets high marks in geography. Eventually, though, as archaeological methods improved and biblical scholars analyzed the text itself for inconsistencies and anachronisms, the amount of the Bible regarded as historically verifiable eroded. The honeymoon was over.

According to Jack M. Sasson, professor of Judaic and biblical studies at Vanderbilt University, "There is a kind of curtain drawn across the Bible. After it you can find history, before it not. Most responsible scholars in the '20s began with Abraham. As time progressed, the curtain moved further down, and people were debating whether Exodus really happened, then the conquest. Now the big debate has slipped even further [into the present]. It has gotten down to being about the monarchy."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"