The author responds to criticism against his prior publications on Jerusalem and Nehemiah's wall and the List of Returnees in Ezra and Nehemiah. Those summaries are provided, noting the size of Persian period Jerusalem, the lack of archaeological evidence for identifying a city wall in Nehemiah's period, that details in Nehemiah describe the construction of the First Wall in the Hasmonean period, and that some attributions in the List of Returnees were probably written in the second century. It is a debate between methodologies used by archaeologists and the assumptions of textual analysis within biblical scholarship. Finkelstein structures his response as it is directed separately to his critics Zevit, Mazar, Barkay, and Lipschits.