Giovanni Garbini

His indecision was overcome after he took Hebrew and comparative Semitic languages courses with Phoenician and Punic civilizations expert Sabatino Moscati in 1951–1952 in the Italian Institute of Oriental Studies.

Garbini was an avid student and was fondly remembered by his teachers Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, Alfonsa Ferrari, Margherita Guarducci, and Massimo Pallottino.

In 1956 Garbini's monograph L'aramaico antico (The ancient Aramaic) was published at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei; that same year he assumed the role of assistant to Moscati.

[1] In 1960, Garbini obtained the chair of Semitic philology at the Oriental Institute of Naples, and he continued to hold courses at Rome's Sapienza and to participate in excavation campaigns organized by Moscati.

[2] In 1977, at the urging of former professor Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli, Garbini moved to the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, where he worked as a teacher of Semitic epigraphy; it was during this period that he developed his interest in biblical studies.

Garbini thereafter explains that the story of Moses and the exodus from Egypt are older than, and independent from, those of Abraham and the Patriarchs;[11][12] he also advanced that a united Davidic-Solomonic monarchy would have been only a literary construction since the Aramaic tribes that settled in Palestine would not have constituted the Kingdom of Israel until the birth of the Omrid dynasty around 900 BC.

After the defeat suffered by Ramses III, the "Peleset" Philistines would have been allowed to settle in the land of Canaan, which was at the time under Egyptian rule and to which they subsequently gave their name (Palestine).

He was also of the opinion that the finds of sub-Mycenaean ceramics on Italian soil (Frattesine, Torcello, Campo di Santa Susanna near Rieti, various sites in Sardinia and Sicily, etc.)