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Hi everybody, from Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History.

I'm Patrick Wyman, thanks so much for being here with me today.

When it comes to the ancient world, we're usually lucky to have a few scraps of evidence

to give us some insights into the people who lived thousands of years ago, some settlements

or burials, perhaps a monumental structure or two, and at best a couple of pieces of enigmatic

and hard to interpret written evidence.

One of the things that makes ancient Israel and Judah so fascinating, aside from their

position at the roots of religious traditions that had defined much of the last couple thousand

years and more, is that we have so many different bodies of evidence to tell us about their lives.

We have a rich body of textual evidence in the form of the biblical tradition and extra

biblical texts, but thanks to more than a century of intensive work, we also have a wealth

of archaeological evidence.

The result is that we can have insights into the practices, beliefs, and experiences of

Iron Age people in Israel and Judah and in their neighbors that are hard to see anywhere

else in the ancient world.

Today's guest is one of the world's leading experts on the archaeology of the Land of Israel

in the Bronze and Iron Ages.

Abraham Faust is professor of archaeology at the Department of General History, Bar Ilan

University.

He has written a number of books on biblical archaeology, including two of my favorites,

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