Neil Asher Silberman
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Neil Asher Silberman (born June 19, 1950, Boston, Massachusetts) is an archaeologist and historian who serves as director of the Ename Center for Public Archaeology and Heritage Presentation in Belgium. He is a contributing editor for Archaeology Magazine, and is the author of several books, including The Hidden Scrolls, The Message and the Kingdom, and Digging for God and Country.
With Israel Finkelstein, he is also the author of The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts where he makes bold assertions about the origin of the Hebrew Bible.
The assertions of the book depend upon a "low chronology" which would shift dates a century. In the July-August 2006 issue of the conservative, non-academic Biblical Archaeology Review, Michael Coogan of Stonehill College, editor of The New Oxford Annotated Bible, contends that Finkelstein and Silberman "move from the hypothetical to the improbable to the absurd."
Finkelstein's revised chronology is "not accepted by the majority of archaeologists and biblical scholars," Coogan questionably asserts, citing four scholarly anthologies from the past three years.
However, Professor Baruch Halpern, one of the scholars on whom Coogan relies, praised The Bible Unearthed, as "the boldest and most exhilirating synthesis of Bible and archaeology in fifty years." Professor David Noel Freedman, editor of the authoritative Anchor Bible series, called it "readable and revolutionary."
