Fathers with venomous hatred-the Old Testament had a purely religious significance.
The Zionists, on the other hand, completely ignored the religious contents of the Hebrew Bible. They used its literary elements to create the new Hebrew culture and the new Hebrew language, but most of all, they used the "historical" story in order to establish their claim to the land. Generations of archaeologists swarmed the land in order to "prove" the correctness of the biblical descriptions. Numerous amateurs, from Moshe Dayan to Rehavam Ze'evi, turned archaeology into a kind of national sport. All were feeding the public "evidence" and bent the "findings" in accordance with their imagination and enthusiasm. The orthodox, who did not need proof for matters of faith, did not care.
But as the Zionist fervor declined, and as the existence of the Hebrew nation on the land became an established fact no longer in need of "proof," the bitter truth began to trickle out. All that vast effort on the part of those archaeologists did not unearth a single proof to attest to any truth in those biblical stories. No exodus from Egypt, no conquest of Canaan, no Kingdoms of Saul, David, or Solomon-none of these have left behind even a shred of evidence.
Learned professors, whose religious or nationalistic faith got the better of their scientific purity, were busy making up excuses for this astounding fact. Perhaps the Kingdom of David was not in the tenth century but instead in the ninth, perhaps all of David's and Solomon's buildings are actually buried under the Dome of the Rock, making it impossible for us to excavate there, and so on. But in recent years, a new crop of archaeologist has emerged, one no longer afraid to speak the truth. All those many centuries between the conquering of Canaan and the Kingdom of Solomon did not leave the slightest imprint on the land. And that is very strange indeed.
The result has been a kind of a draw: there is no evidence to support those biblical stories, but neither is there any evidence to disprove it. There are those who reasonably ask: "How is it possible that there is no shred of historical truth in so many magnificent stories?" After all, those fairy tales must have some historical kernel of truth! Moses, Joshua, David, and Solomon probably existed, albeit not exactly as depicted in the Bible. Perhaps the writers exaggerated a bit.
But this, too, is not true. Archeologists did, indeed, provide the evidence that all those stories were pure fiction. Researchers of antiquities in Egypt deciphered thousands of Egyptian documents that span the entire biblical period. The land of Canaan had always been most vital to the Egyptian national security, as well as to its foreign affairs, its econ¬