Digging Up the Judges (Episode 5) As Late Bronze Age culture collapsed, culturally inferior settlements arose in place of the earlier ones. That's just what we would expect to find if semi-nomadic tribes were in the process of settling down, and it seems rather consistent with the biblical conquest narrative and subsequent period of the Israelite settlement. Yet, when it comes to the period of the biblical Judges, we find two competing camps, minimalists and traditionalists, each with serious points to make. Throw into the mix the inevitable bias and cultural baggage with which each investigator is inevitably saddled and the debate becomes very volatile indeed. Will a new generation of archaeologists, spade in hand, someday discover, once and for all, what really went down so long ago? Dr. Kenneth Hanson, http://drkenhanson.com/