Criticism. Dever criticizes Zertal for drawing his conclusions from surveys, claiming, “statistics of this sort, based as they are solely on scant materials from surface surveys, are meaningless. They certainly cannot bear the weight of Zertal’s sweeping generalizations about a Transjordanian, pastoral-nomadic origin for early Israel” (Dever, “Cultural Continuity,” 32). He further argues that “surface surveys are notorious for yielding results that are statistically invalid, or even at best somewhat misleading” (Dever, “Israelite Origins,” 227).

He further criticizes Zertal’s hypothesis of an east-to-west movement of the early hill-country settlers as “fallacious.” He notes that the Type A cooking pots “occur at nearly all Zertal’s sites: only the percentages differ (over 20% to the east, 5–20% to the west).” Even at the easternmost sites there was some of the Type B pottery present, albeit a smaller percentage. Additionally, Dever argues that “if there are any early cooking pots there at all, then the site was established in the early 12th century. It may have been small, it may have grown later; but it has to have been established in the earliest phase of settlement. In short, there was no general movement of peoples from east to west” (Dever, “How to Tell a Canaanite from an Israelite,” 51).

Concluding that Zertal’s postulation of an east-to-west settlement pattern is “bogus,” Dever says Zertal has “been seduced by the later biblical notion of outside immigration, against all current archaeological evidence” (Dever, “Cultural Continuity,” 27).