Modern Near East Archaeology and the Brass Plates

Contemporary Palestinian archaeology has produced two major threats to traditional interpretations of the history of ancient Israel: scientific discomfort with the exodus story as an explanation for the sudden population expansion in southern Palestine; and the glaring mismatch between the biblical glorification of David and Solomon’s “empire” and disparagement of the northern kingdom combined with the archaeological finding that the cities of the northern kingdom were far larger and more advanced than Jerusalem and the south. This discrepancy between archaeology and the biblical record provided support for the widely embraced theory that everything from Genesis through Kings had been revised to promote the political and religious preeminence of Judah above the other tribes. This second challenge does fit the archaeology and contemporary textual interpretations and provides stronger grounding for the hypothesis that Nephi’s Brass Plates could have been produced by an ancient Manassite scribal school.