Studying the Ancient Israelites: A Guide to Sources and Methods (review)

How can students new to the study of Ancient Israel conveniently acquire a foundational competence in the discipline? This is a problem that every instructor of ancient Israelite culture and literature has asked explicitly or pondered implicitly. One part of the solution is now this modest book from the pen of Victor Matthews, which surveys a broad range of basic facts, modern and ancient sources, and theoretical issues related to the study of Israel and the Hebrew Bible. Topics covered include historical geography (Chapter 1), archaeology (Chapter 2), literary study of the Hebrew Bible (Chapter 3), social scientific methods (Chapter 4), and Israelite history and historiography (Chapter 5). Let us consider each chapter in turn.

Regarding geography, Matthews provides an overview of the various regions and geographical features in Israel, as well as an introduction to ecological factors like climate and water sources. Trade routes, political entities, and major cities and towns in the region are also described. In chapter two, on archaeology, Matthews colorfully describes the actual process of planning and carrying out an archaeological dig and helps readers understand the logic of ceramic typologies and their use in dating archaeological strata. The chapter also includes a brief discussion of Israelite architecture—both rural and urban—and of ancient textual finds that enlighten our reconstruction of ancient Israelite society and our reading of its texts. Chapter three turns to the Hebrew Bible itself, focusing on the interpretive methods employed by modern scholars in their study of the Bible. On the menu are literary criticism, folklore studies, textual criticism, source criticism, form criticism, tradition criticism, narrative criticism, structural criticism, rhetorical criticism, reader-response criticism, canonical criticism, and ideological criticism (including feminist criticism). In the course of the discussion, readers are further introduced to various points of debate and discussion in the discipline, such as the vigorous dispute between "minimalists" and "maximalists" about the Bible's value as a historical source. The chapter on social sciences will probably be the densest for uninitiated readers. An assortment of sociological concepts and terms are introduced here, including ritual, liminality, socially shared cognition, emic/ etic distinctions, sociological models (e.g., Radcliffe-Brown's "structural-functionalist" approach), endogamy and exogamy, patrilineal/agnatic descent, and patron/client relationships. The final chapter on history and historiography is less theoretical, excepting the introduction to Charles Pierce's "semiotics of history." The balance of the chapter orients readers to the nature of the ancient sources available for reconstructing history. The scant but telling evidence for Israelite archives is supplemented by the Old Babylonian evidence from Mari, where thousands of contracts, receipts, and letters illustrate the kinds of materials that ancient Israelite historians may have used as sources for their work. The historical value of the Israelite historical narratives is then tested by a comparison of those narratives with archaeological sources and texts from elsewhere in the ancient Near East. This exercise, which compares the Neo-Assyrian and biblical accounts of Sennacherib's attack on Judah in 701 BCE, reveals that the biblical texts are tolerably close to events that actually took place at the time. But in both the Neo-Assyrian and biblical stories one notices the subtle ways in which political ideology shaped and distorted the historical presentation. Though Hezekiah was soundly defeated by Assyria, his version of the history accentuated the fact that Jerusalem was not sacked; conversely, in the Assyrian version Sennacherib claims to have trapped Hezekiah in Jerusalem "like a bird in a cage," which sounds like a victory but actually implies that the Assyrian siege of the city failed.

Matthews often illustrates the theoretical discussion of his chapters by applying it to test cases from the history and literature of ancient Israel. So, for instance, chapter one applies the insights of historical geography to the story of Absalom's revolt in 2 Samuel 15–17. Similarly in Chapter 5, the methodological discussion of historiography is elucidated by applying that discussion...