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4. A Brief History of Israel
- Jewish Publication Society
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4 A Brief History of Israel This book attempts to understand the Bible as it was understood in the periods in which its books were first written and read, from approximately the twelfth century B.C.E. (the Song of Deborah in Judges 5) through the second century B.C.E. (the Book of Daniel).1 Thus, we need to know some basic facts about history before exploring biblical texts.2 But we would run a strong risk of being misled if we simply opened a history book and believed everything we read there. Because of relatively recent reassessments in the field of history, some of the most popular and well-known histories of the biblical era are now obsolete. Consequently, we must first pause briefly to assess historians’ assumptions and methods, taking note of the importance of point of view. History as It Used to Be Told Writing a history of the biblical era may sound like a simple venture, and until the latter part of the twentieth century, it was. Many books with the words History of Israel in their title were available, and they all more or less told the same story.3 These works differed somewhat concerning the earliest history of Israel. However, from the period of David onward they were quite similar— typically paraphrasing the biblical story, removing the language of divine causality that is found throughout the Bible, and putting the biblical account within the context of ancient Near Eastern texts and cultures. Starting in the mid 1970s, this began to change. Two main shifts happened that disturbed this consensus. In the first part of the twentieth century, a large number of cuneiform tablets were unearthed and published. Several scholars discovered in these tablets, especially those from the periphery of Mesopotamia, descriptions of various institutions that seemed to confirm details of the biblical account. For example, E. A. Speiser suggested that 19 an institution existed at Nuzi, where a husband could adopt his wife as a sister, thereby explaining the so-called wife-sister stories in Genesis 12, 20, and 26. According to Speiser’s reconstruction, a wife could be adopted as a sister as a special sign of affection.4 Speiser was not alone; William Foxwell Albright, considered the dean of biblical scholarship and archaeology, outlined many correlations between the history that the Bible tells and what we might know about this history from external sources.5 In general, the scholarly climate, at least in America, was that the Bible is to be trusted as a historical source until disproven by a reliable outside source. Shifting the Burden of Proof As scholars began to more carefully evaluate the evidence, however, this picture began to shatter. Two books published in the 1970s reflect this change in attitude : The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives, by Thomas Thompson,6 and Abraham in History and Tradition, by John Van Seters.7 These works and others showed that the many analogies brought between the so-called “Patriarchal Period” and the Bronze Age of the second pre-Christian millennium were specious . For example, scholars realized that Speiser was incorrect in reconstructing many institutions at Nuzi, including the adoption of a wife as sister—this was based on a misreading of cuneiform texts that was influenced by the Bible. Furthermore, they pointed out that the arguments brought by Speiser, Albright, and others were specious. That is, just because it has a second-millennium-B.C.E. parallel does not prove that a biblical passage is early or accurate, especially if it also has a (more recent) first millennium parallel—as most of them do. In other words, a number of scholars argued that these texts are not accurately reflecting the second millennium, but are projecting backward first millennium realities— and in some cases, coincidentally, these realities match the second millennium as well. Finally, the new scholars began to emphasize the anachronisms of Genesis. Earlier scholars had seen these anachronisms as exceptions, as a small number of adjustments that crept into the text as it was transmitted. Newer scholars, however , saw these as a fundamental part of the textual fabric, indicating that the text as a whole was not reliably reflecting a Bronze Age milieu. The continued archaeological excavations and surveys, particularly those after the 1967 Six-Day War, also began to influence the way the Bible was seen as a historical source. In the early parts of the century, excavations were typical20 How to Read the Bible [3.230.128...