The Neo-Assyrian empire -- the first large empire of the ancient world -- has attracted a great deal of public attention ever since the spectacular discoveries of its impressive remains in the 19th century. The southwestern part of this empire, located in the lands of the Bible, is archaeologically speaking the best known region in the world, and its history is described in a plethora of texts, including the Hebrew Bible. Using a bottom-up approach, Avraham Faust utilises this unparalleled...

Saul, David, and Solomon are dominant figures in the Hebrew Bible, rulers of an expanding Israelite polity before it dissolved into two separate kingdoms. Saul's paranoid jealousy, David's killing the Philistine champion Goliath with a slingshot, and Solomon's meeting the Queen of Sheba are familiar stories to many people, but what is the truth behind the texts? While scholars long believed these three monarchs to have been historical personalities, over the past three decades many have qu...

Winner (for best semi-popular book) of the 2008 Irene Levi-Sala Prize for publications on the archaeology of Israel. The emergence of Israel in Canaan is a central topic in biblical/Syro-Palestinian archaeology. However, the archaeology of ancient Israel has rarely been subject to in-depth anthropological analysis until now. 'Israel's Ethnogenesis' offers an anthropological framework to the archaeological data and textual sources. Examining archaeological finds from thousands of excavation...