1. What are the “stages of social development” that Finkelstein and Silberman suggest are necessary for the Pentateuch to have been written.
Archeologists contend that the bible is such a complex book that it could not have been written during the primitive times described in Genesis and other early stories. As a consequence, bible scholars are questioning the authenticity of Biblical stories in terms of where and when the stories were written. It is plausible that the Bible as we know it is the literary product of scribes and other writers of a period in history when it was possible to document historical accounts of the patriarchs.
Finkelstein and Silberman argue that much of the archeological evidence available from biblical excavations reveal artifacts that ...
