Comyns Beaumont II
Mr. Rawlinson, talking of the mineral resources of the supposed neighborhood of Ur, says: " The alluvium is wholly destitute of metals, and even of stone." He also tells us: "No permanent streams water this region; occasional wadis or torrent courses, only full after heavy rains, are found; but the scattered inhabitants depend for water chiefly on their wells, which are deep and numerous, but yield only a scanty supply of a brackish and unpalatable fluid. No settled population can at any time have found sustenance in this region, which only produces a few dates, and in places a poor, unsucculent herbage. Sand- storms are frequent, and at other times the fearful simoon sweeps across the entire tract, destroying with its breath both men and animals - Anna Wilkes
Like Anna Wilkes before him, Beaumont controversially insisted that Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine and Judea were not cradles of major civilizations. He insisted that we revise our entire view about these locations and the events said to have occurred there.

Beaumont determined that most of what we read in the Hebrew Bible about Abraham and the Israelites did not in fact occur in the Middle East, but in Europe and Britain.

Although the theory sounds spurious and outlandish, it is actually quite rational and inspired. Sadly, it has been viciously attacked and ridiculed.

However, a sane person asks what proof exists for Beaumont's revisionism. We find that there is quite a lot of evidence substantiating it. For example, a leading expert on the history of the ancient Israelites, Prof. William G. Dever, tells us:
Israel looms "larger than life" in our Western imagination because of its spiritual significance, but it was a tiny country. is some ten million in a comparable area). The few large cities cannot have contained more than about 3,000 people; and an average town would have had a population of only some 500-1,000; and most areas were rural, with a very low population density. Jerusalem in the time of Solomon had perhaps 2,000 people, and at its height in the 8th century B.C. it probably had no more than 5,000 people.

...we are dealing with an area west of the Jordan River that is about the size of the state of New Jersey. It is only 250 miles long, the southern half barren desert, and varies from about 30 to 70 miles wide.

Not only was Israel insignificant in size, it was also vulnerable because cause of its geopolitical situation. It was a small coastal strip along the bend of the Fertile Crescent, sandwiched in between the great empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia. It lagged far behind them in all the early advances of civilization.

More significantly, because of its exposed position as a "land bridge" between Africa and Asia, Palestine and later Israel were frequently trampled over, subjugated, and occupied for long periods by foreign powers. Think of the long succession of peoples who have overrun this general area along the Levantine coast in historical times: Amorites, Hittites, Hurrians, Egyptians, Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Muslims, European Crusaders, Turks (not to mention the British and French).
 
No single political entity ever ruled the area in antiquity for more than about 400 years, and that was ironically the rather feeble Israelite-Judean monarchy (ca. i,ooo-600 BC).
Professor Dever goes on to write:
Israel suffered from a lack of any natural resources that could have brought it trade, financial independence, or prosperity. The land is a geologist's ideal field laboratory, fascinating in its diversity, but it is a mostly hostile environment for human man habitation. The southern deserts were uninhabitable except for brief periods when complex technology made runoff irrigation possible, as in Roman-Nabataean times; or when the wilderness provided a desperate retreat, treat, as for Byzantine monks.

The point here is that Israel's "fractured geography" meant that for most of the time its society and political structure were "fractured" as well.

In addition to poor, thin, rocky soils, even in the best of areas, there was the problem of water. There are no real rivers except the Jordan, and that ran in a channel so deep that the waters were largely inaccessible and emptied uselessly into the Dead Sea. Elsewhere there are few perennial springs, and primitive technology could not manage deep wells.

Most of the area was devoted to dry farming. That depended upon rainfall that could vary from none in the deserts to some forty inches in upper Galilee. But it was always too little or too much; in the wrong times or places; never predictable.

The long summers from May to October are hot and dry, the rains falling only in the winter months. But droughts occur every few years, and crops even in prime agricultural areas often fail.

...even in years of bountiful harvests, as much as a third of the grain crop could not be adequately stored and was lost to dampness, rot, and vermin.

If arable land and available water were scant, other natural resources were almost nonexistent. There was timber in the upland areas, but much of the land had already been deforested by Israelite times (the process began with the first villages in the Neolithic period, ca. 8,000 BC).

Copper ore had been mined in the southern Negev desert and the Jordan Valley from the third millennium on; but the mines are isolated, in the blistering desert, far from sources for the charcoal needed for smelting. Tin, essential for alloying copper to make bronze, does not occur anywhere closer than Anatolia or Afghanistan. There are some iron deposits in Transjordan, but iron technology was primitive and inefficient, even in the "Iron Age." Nowhere are there deposits of gold, silver, precious stones, or even other useful minerals.

Ancient Palestine's poor natural environment, precarious geopolitical political situation, unreliable subsistence, fractured social structure, and political instability mean that we must keep constantly in mind one fact. Ancient Israel was a truly marginal economy and society. The country was always poor compared to its prosperous neighbors; always powerless compared pared to their might; always on the verge of extinction (as finally happened). It may be unsettling to some readers, but the fact is that ancient Israel was an obscure cultural and historical backwater of the ancient Near East.

It would have been long forgotten except for its one memorable contribution to civilization: the Hebrew Bible, and the memory of Israel's faith and vision of human destiny that it enshrines.

The majority of ancient Israelites were essentially subsistence farmers eking out a miserable existence on small plots of land.

     - Excerpts from Did God Have a Wife?
In conclusion, Professor Dever makes a crucial statement about the competence of common studies of Palestine:
...very few biblical scholars writing on Israelite religion (Chapter II) have paid any attention to the "real-life" context that we archaeologists consider the essential context.
This expert testimony is worthy of Beaumont himself. However, his brave efforts to reveal these monumentally important facts about the alleged Jewish homeland were contemptuously dismissed and ignored.

Professor Dever's revealing facts, supporting Beaumont's view, are confirmed by eminent experts such as Philip King, Lawrence Stager and Prof. Thomas Thompson, author of The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel.

The main point here is that Beaumont's deep scepticism about the origins of Judaism and Christianity, and descriptions of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, was certainly justified. His doubt resulted in his formulation of a far more intriguing and plausible hypothesis about the Israelites and their original homelands. Once we grant this, we are in position to take onboard Beaumont's theories concerning the importance of Britain in world history, and the West to East transference of the elements of civilization.

. . .