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Index
Foreword
Abbreviations
1. The Bible as History, Literature, and Theology
2. The Current School of Revisionists and Their Nonhistories of Ancient Israel
3. What Archaeology Is and What It Can Contribute to Biblical Studies
4. Getting at the "History behind the History": What Convergences between Texts and Artifacts Tell U
5. Daily Life in Israel in the Time of the Divided Monarchy
6. What Is Left of the History of Ancient Israel, and Why Should It Matter to Anyone Anymore?
Conclusion
For Further Reading
Index of Names
Index of Scripture References
Index of Subjects
and read it from beginning to end, as a connected story with a structured plot and believable charac
have recently undertaken what they sometimes allude to as "revisionist" histories of ancient Israel.
When we are challenged as to whether there is any "history" in the Hebrew Bible, we ought to reply f
Yet even most professional biblical scholars (and, I fear, nearly all archaeologists) have scarcely
The first full-scale critical study of historiographic issues in dealing with ancient Israel in Engl
followed in 1988 by Baruch Halpern's provocative The First Historians: The Hebrew Bible and Histor
The first publications, by a biblical or Syro-Palestinian archaeologist (for the terms, see below)
Here it may be instructive to compare two recent books, announced in the same issue of the catalogue
The other volume results from an international seminar held by archaeologists in America the same
Salem in 1995, published in 1996 as The Origins of the Ancient Israelite States.10
The opening address was a scathing, personal attack on me by Thompson, who asserted among many oth
The latest "exchange" of views was at the 1996 Dublin methodology seminar, to which apparently we di
Another deplorable development, one hailed by Thompson, was the 1996 publication by Keith W. Whitela
Before moving on, we need to be aware of the "shorthand" that is developing to categorize the protag
Such name-calling is perhaps inevitable in the heat of the battle; but it certainly seems silly to
For the "revisionists," however, one must make a choice: we are constrained to regard the Bible eith
back nearly 30 years. What distinguishes the "new" literary approach from the traditional? According
According to these leading proponents of the method, who are among the first to set it forth expli
Clines ends his essay by musing: "I have often wondered what one should do after deconstructing a te
All of this would seem a counsel of despair. Clines is a belated borrower of the notions of Stanley
If a metaphor seems to suppress its (the word's) implications, we shall catch at that metaphor. We s
at a volume of essays stemming from a 1994 conference of mostly "liberation theologians" in Pretoria
Even a recent mainstream handbook on methods in biblical scholarship - To Each Its Own Meaning: An I
thereafter, the applied meaning is tentative and is not possessed of the same "authority" that the t
Rarer still is a straightforward, reasoned exposition of any theory of "literary production." Thus R
That is simply untrue. We know a great deal about the political crisis provoked in Judah by the Ne
It is significant that those scholars who do have such training, like Robert Alter, a distinguishe
more persuasive, precisely because they do not necessarily exclude other readings, even historical
Having made this necessary qualification, I must nevertheless hasten to say that we cannot simply se
or Davies' Whose Bible Is It Anyway?3°
To eliminate, however, the very element that is the irreducible core of the Hebrew Bible - its dee
Bible to be true. My own mentor at Harvard, George Ernest Wright, was a prominent biblical archaeolo
In Chapter 1 we explored the nature of the biblical narratives as "history," noting briefly the skep
It is my contention here that behind the revisionists' program lurks a hidden agenda. This agenda, i
In the past decade or so, the deconstructionist mode of textual analysis - especially in the form of
The quotes above are all taken directly from the current literature; and I can supply numerous other
That my paraphrase above fairly represents the revisionist position in general is easy to document
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