Israel Finkelstein in the context of "Tel Megiddo"

In the early Iron Age, Canaan was characterized by a significant increase in a sedentary Israelite population in Samaria.

The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts is a 2001 a book by Israel Finkelstein, Professor of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, and Neil Asher Silberman, an archaeologist, historian and contributing editor to Archaeology Magazine. The book discusses the archaeology of ancient Israel and its relationship to the origins and content of the Hebrew Bible.

Finkelstein and Silberman contend that the composition of the Bible began in the Iron Age, centuries after the events of Israel's founding myths—the patriarchs and the Exodus from Egypt. They argue that numerous biblical passages conflict with the Bronze Age and Iron Age archaeological record of the Land of Israel, and that the text reflects an authorship bias toward the Kingdom of Judah at the expense of the Kingdom of Israel. They also reject the historical plausibility of a prosperous united kingdom of Israel and Judah ruled by David and Solomon from Jerusalem in the 10th century BCE, instead positing this narrative as an ideological construct promoted by late Judahite kings such as Hezekiah and Josiah. The book was both praised and criticized by biblical scholars for its reconstruction of ancient Israel's history.