The Invisibility of the Early Israelites
Why is there so little archaeological evidence of the Israelites from the time of the Exodus until that of Solomon or even later?... Archaelogical evidence comes in various flavours, but it depends primarily on pottery, buildings and burials. Pottery styles help with the cultural identification and dating of occupation periods; buildings (or at least the act of rebuilding) indicate activity, which can often be at least tentatively dated with the help of pottery or organic material (e.g. ash layers from destruction events); the style of burials and their associated burial offerings can also be used to identify and date cultures. I suggest in this post that there are good reasons why these should be largely absent for the early Israelite nation, leading to their effective invisibility. As the well-known aphorism puts it, 'Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'. The Exodus The Biblical accounts of the Exodus describe a mass migration of people and livestock numbering a