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http://www.bibleinterp.com/PDFs/Biblical%20Archaeology2.pdf 

William Foxwell Albright (1968) and Roland de 2 Vaux (1965)

 Albrecht Alt (1966) and Martin Noth (1960).

One of the main themes of Finkelstein’s theory is that the biblical narrative is largely shaped by apologists, i.e. the apology for King David’s behavior or the apology of the second Deuteronomist who had to explain the destruction of the First Temple and the Kingdom of Judah and the Babylonian exile (Finkelstein, 2006-2007; Finkelstein and Silberman, 2001).

At times, Finkelstein finds a connection between now and then: ‘The kings of Israel were scoundrels,’ the people of Judah said, ‘but as for the people there, we have no problem with them, they are all right.’ They said about Israel what an ultra-Orthodox person would say about you or me:

‘Israel, though he has sinned, is still Israel’ (Finkelstein in Lori, 2005).  

The excavations at the old city of Jerusalem, and the City of David site south of the Temple Mount are directly connected to national and international politics and they are in the focus of the media. Even a simple discovery can trigger the national propaganda machine. For instance, in September, 2013, Mazar announced that her expedition at the Ophel, a site located between the Temple Mount and the City of David, had found gold treasure from the late Byzantine period (around the 7th century CE). The treasure includes a gold medallion with images of a menorah (the national symbol of the state of Israel), a shofar, and a Torah scroll, and it immediately became a major topic in the news (Reinstein, 2013; Hasson, 2013b). The news reports on the discovery were followed by the usual talkbacks about the Jewish right to the land and the Palestinian fiction. Right wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Mazar and congratulated her. The Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs published the discovery, as it usually does in cases of archaeological finds that relate to Jewish history in Israel. A

The expedition at the City of David uncovered a Large Stone Structure which Mazar identified as King David’s palace. Below the large structure there is a stepped-stone structure on a slope which was uncovered in previous excavations (the stepped-stone structure is the largest Iron Age structure in Israel). Mazar believes that the stepped-stone structure supported the palace. The stones of the palace were placed on an earthen landfill (the site was an open flat area, before the palace was built). Mazar dates the majority of the pottery found on the landfill to Iron Age I, or to the 12th -11th centuries B.C.E., the period before the conquest of Jerusalem from the Jebusites by David. The large stone structure, according to Mazar, was built later. A second phase of construction was discovered in two rooms in the northern section of the large stone structure. On the northeast edge of the building there may have been a third phase of construction. Pottery related to these phases was dated to Iron Age IIa, that is, 10th -9 th centuries B.C.E. Hence the first phase of construction can be dated to “the beginning of Iron Age IIa, probably around the middle of the tenth century B.C.E., when the Bible says King David ruled the United Kingdom of Israel.” Pottery from Iron Age IIb (8th -6 th centuries B.C.E.) was found in the northeastern corner of the building, indicating that the building remained in use until the end of the First Temple period. In addition, the excavators have found a seal of Jehucal son of Shelemiah, son of Shovi, a man who is mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah as official in King Zedekiah’s court (597-586 B.C.E.) (Mazar, 2007; Mazar, 2006b).

Mazar’s conclusions are constantly under attack for being political. Robert Draper, a correspondent for National Geographic, describes an 16 incident in which Mazar noticed a tour guide, a former student of hers, who brings tourists to the site and explains to them that Mazar did not find King David’s palace and that the excavations at the City of David are part of a right-wing agenda to promote the settlements and displace the Palestinians. Mazar confronted him. She got upset and angry. Following the incident, Draper observed that “In no other part of the world does archaeology so closely resemble a contact sport” (Draper, 2010).

When Mazar announced that she had found King David’s Palace at the City of David site, Finkelstein defined it as a “messianic outburst” and said, Once every few years, they find something in Jerusalem that seems to confirm the biblical description of the magnitude of the kingdom in the time of David. After a while, it turns out that there is no real substance to the findings, and the excitement subsides, until the next outburst” (Finkelstein in Shapira, 2005).

Finkelstein and his colleagues rejected Mazar’s interpretation of the finds at the City of David and her conclusions. Their alternative interpretation is based on three assertions: (1) the walls unearthed by Mazar do not belong to the same building (2) the more elaborate walls may be associated with elements uncovered in the 1920s and can possibly be dated to the Hellenistic period (3) there are at least two phases in the construction of the stepped-stone structure that supports the slope: the lower part is earlier, possibly dating to the Iron IIA in the 9th century B.C.E., while the upper part, which connects to the Hasmonaean First Wall upslope, can be dated to the Hellenistic period.

It is more than ironic that the controversy between the School of Tel Aviv (the city that represents secular Israelism) and the School of Jerusalem (the city that represents conservative Judaism) revives in a new form the rivalry and struggle between the two ancient kingdoms: the northern Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah. In general, the Faculty of Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is much more conservative than the Faculty of Humanities at Tel Aviv University. Intellectual trends of new history, postmodernism and post-Zionism are much more common in Tel Aviv than Jerusalem. It was not an accident, then, that the new current in biblical archaeology developed in the biblical archaeology department at Tel Aviv University, while the biblical archaeology department at the Hebrew University is dominated by a more conservative current. In the ancient world the Kingdom of Judah, which was destroyed after the Kingdom of Israel, eventually had the upper hand in the writing of history. Today there is a renewed struggle over the rewriting of history. The biblical struggle is revived on new ground which is made of carbon-14. Finkelstein speaks in the name of the Forgotten Kingdom of Israel: “Here is the dilemma: How can one diminish the stature of the ‘good guys’ and let the ‘bad guys’ prevail?” (Finkelstein, 2005: 39; Finkelstein, 2013). Yosef Garfinkel, on the other hand, tries to protect the “achievements of the Kingdom of Judah” (Garfinkel, 2012- 2013).

Over the last few years, the focus of the debate is on Khirbet Qeiyafa, a site overlooking the Valley of Elah, twenty miles southwest of Jerusalem. Excavations at the site exposed a small fortified city from the early Iron Age. The expedition that worked in Qeiyafa between 2007 and 2013 was directed by Yosef Garfinkel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Saar Ganor of the Israel Antiquities Authority. Garfinkel believes that Qeiyafa was one of three centers of the kingdom of David and Solomon, in addition to Jerusalem and Hebron. Did the United Monarchy exist? Garfinkel argues that the question will be decided through sites in Northern Israel. He rejects the Low Chronology of Finkelstein in Judah by identifying Qeiyafa as a Judahite city and questions the analysis of Finkelstein, who lowered the date of finds in the northern sites from the time of David and Solomon to the end of the 10th century B.C.E.- the beginning of the 9th century B.C.E., i.e. to the rise of the northern kingdom of Israel and the Omride Dynasty (Garfinkel and Ganor, 2008a; Garfinkel, 2011; Garfinkel, 2012-2013). Other suggestions have been made regarding the identity of Qeiyafa. Na'aman (2008) suggested that Qeiyafa is a Philistine site. Later Na'aman (2012) suggested that Qeiyafa 19 is a Canaanite site. Finkelstein and Fantalkin (2012), as well as Levin (2012), suggested that Qeiyafa is an Israelite site.  

Despite the differences between the biblical scholars from Copenhagen and Sheffield and the archaeologists from Tel Aviv, Garfinkel puts all his rivals together and defines them as developers of Minimalist Strategies. First they suggested the “Mythological” Paradigm and questioned the existence of David. Yet, according to Garfinkel, this paradigm collapsed after the discovery of the Tel Dan stela in 1993-1994, since the inscription mentions the “House of David” only 100–120 years after the reign of David. Garfinkel rejects other interpretations of the text, which he defines as “paradigm-collapse trauma” as well as the claim that the existence of the Davidic dynasty does not prove the existence of David. After the collapse of the first paradigm, “a new strategy was developed by the minimalists,” the “Low Chronology” Paradigm which, according to Garfinkel, was disconfirmed by the dating of Khirbet Qeiyafa. Instead of giving up, the minimalists adopted another strategy: the “Ethnographic” Paradigm. According to this strategy, the inhabitants of Qeiyafa were not Judahites but Philistines, Canaanites or Israelites from the Kingdom of Saul (Garfinkel, 2011; Garfinkel, 2012-2013).

Biblical archaeology is a discipline in which the political, cultural and religious aspects are clearly evident. In a lecture to students, Garfinkel put things on the table: What does it matter whether or not Qeiyafa is Philistine? Right? So it is Philistine; it does not affect us... Even if it is the northern Kingdom of Israel; it had been destroyed; it does not affect [us]. Judah, with the Bible, with monotheism, with all these things - they actually continue to this day. Therefore, this issue, which is actually the most important and the main contribution of the Land of Israel to the world history and culture, is always under attack. Because why should anybody care about the Canaanites [or] Philistines? All of these things had already passed. Interesting. Notice, then, that it is not an accident that the disputes focus on the kingdom of Judah because it is actually the most important thing that happened in this place throughout human history (Garfinkel, 2012-2013: Lecture 11).

Finkelstein is identified by Garfinkel as a minimalist, he uses against him the same accusations: The problem with Finkelstein is that he never agrees with what anyone else says. He always has to be original. And he always has to have a different paradigm. If I say that your coat is gray, he will say it is dark brown [Garfinkel laughs]. If I had said this was a Philistine city he would say it is Judahite (Garfinkel in ShtullTrauring, 2011).

Similarly, in an article titled The Birth and Death of Biblical Minimalism, Garfinkel asserted that “Finkelstein is not only the founding father of the Low Chronology, but also its undertaker” (Garfinkel, 2011: 50). In their article on Qeiyafa, Finkelstein and Fantalkin linked the “morbid language” of Garfinkel with eschatological motives. One can say that the article is an attempt to resolve the anomalous data from Qeiyafa in the framework of normal science. In fact, Finkelstein and Fantalkin clarify that a single anomaly cannot destroy the existing paradigm: The idea that a single, spectacular finding can reverse the course of modern research and save the literal reading of the biblical text regarding the history of ancient Israel from critical scholarship is an old one. Its roots can be found in W.F. Albright’s assault on the Wellhausen School in the early 20th century, an assault that biased archaeological, biblical and historical research for decades. This trend—in different guises—has resurfaced sporadically in recent years, with archaeology serving as a weapon to quell progress in critical scholarship. Khirbet Qeiyafa is the latest case in this genre of craving a cataclysmic defeat of critical modern scholarship by a miraculous archaeological discovery (Finkelstein and Fantalkin, 2012: 58).

Summer 2013 was the final excavation season of Garfinkel and Ganor in Qeiyafa. During the press conference, Garfinkel and Ganor announced that they had found King David’s Palace. More accurately, they have found two or three rows of stones stretching across 30 meters. According to their estimations, the palace was about 1,000 square meters in size and at least two stories high. Garfinkel asserts that “There is no question that the ruler of the city sat here, and when King David came to visit the hills he slept here.” The palace was destroyed due to the construction of a large Byzantine building in the same location 1,400 years after the palace was built. Garfinkel’s rivals doubted the dating of the palace, its connection to King David and the identification of Qeiyafa as a Judahite city. Finkelstein indirectly referred to Mazar, who claimed several years before that she had found King David’s palace in Jerusalem: “This reminds me of the fairy tale of the little girl who cried wolf. Yesterday they found King David's Palace in Jerusalem, today it’s in Qeiyafa, tomorrow they'll find it ... who knows where. Such statements exhaust the public’s attention.” Jacob L. Wright from Emory University responded in a similar way: “The most certain way to create a buzz is to claim that you’ve found something related to the reign of King David.” He added that there were other local kings and warlords in the 10th century B.C.E. highlands (that only later became part of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah). For him, the automatic attribution of finds to King David is a kind of “an impoverishment of the historical imagination” (Garfinkel, 2013; Hasson, 2013a; Fridman, 2013).

Nonetheless, the issue cannot be reduced to questions about the immediate benefit from headlines in the media, fame, academic status and funding of research. Garfinkel is not a classical maximalist, but he is still biased towards the maximalist reading of the Bible. Historically and archaeologically, we know little about King David. Yet, through a series of theoretical leaps, Garfinkel comes to the conclusion that Qeiyafa is not only Judahite city from the 10th century B.C.E., but the city of Sha'arayim. The following step of Garfinkel is to contend that if there is a palace in the city, it must belong to King David and now it is clear that “when King David came to visit the hills he slept here.” The theoretical lenses through which Garfinkel interprets data and finds were designed by the School of Jerusalem and its research tradition. Garfinkel’s academic education and career revolves around the Hebrew University’s institute of archaeology. His initial research project focused on prehistory, but when Amihai Mazar and other biblical archaeologists retired, Garfinkel was called to duty. In 2004 he was appointed head of the Biblical Archaeology department.  

http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/2014/01/gre388028.shtml Martin, great question and one that is difficult to answer as there are certainly more similarities than there are differences between Israelite and "non-Israelite" expressions of worship. Even some of the more supposedly "obvious" differences are not so easy to evaluate. Take pig remains, for instance. Though there are no pig remains among the sacrificial feasting deposits in the sacred precinct at Dan, the same absence of pig remains was observed in the "sacrificial pit" of the gate complex at nearby Aramaean et-Tell/Bethsaida dating to the same time period. That said, there were pig remains found in the palace there whereas at Dan there is almost a complete absence of pig in all of the Iron II levels that have been analyzed so far. One of the more distinctive Israelite markers, as I argued in the paper and more so in the book, would be the altar kit and especially the blood bowl. I am not aware of any comparable archaeological material from other sites.