History And Ideology In Ancient Israel

A classic introduction to the life-world of Israel, unmissable f or all studying the Hebrew Scriptures.

The Creation of History in Ancient Israel demonstrates how the historian can start to piece together the history of ancient Israel using the Hebrew Bible as a source.

In this volume, Niels Peter Lemche and Emanuel Pfoh present an anthology of seminal studies by Mario Liverani, a foremost scholar of the Ancient Near East. This collection contains 18 essays, 11 of which have originally been published in Italian and are now published in English for the first time. It represents an important contribution to Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical Studies, exposing the innovative interpretations of Liverani on many historical and ideological aspects of ancient society. Topics range from the Amarna letters and the Ugaritic epic, to the ‘origins’ of Israel. Historiography, Ideology and Politics in the Ancient Near East and Israel will be an invaluable resource for Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical scholars, as well as graduate and post-graduate students.

The essays in this volume deal with the (re)construction of the history of Ancient Israel and how that historywriting is influenced by ideology and informed by the evidence.

Encapsulating as it does research that has been undertaken on the sociological, anthropological and political aspects of the history of ancient Israel, this important book is designed to follow in the tradition of works in the series sponsored by The Society for Old Testament Study which began with the publication of The People and the Book in 1925. The World of Ancient Israel is especially concerned to explore in greater depth than comparable studies the areas and degrees of overlap between approaches to the subject of Old Testament research adopted by scholars and students of theology and the social sciences. Increasing numbers of scholars have recognised the valuable insights that can be gained from a cross-disciplinary approach, and it is becoming clear that the early biblical traditions about the formation of the Israelite state must be examined in the light of comparative anthropology if useful historical conclusions are to be drawn from them.

In this much-anticipated textbook, three respected biblical scholars have written a history of ancient Israel that takes the biblical text seriously as an historical document. While also considering nonbiblical sources and being attentive to what disciplines like archaeology, anthropology, and sociology suggest about the past, the authors do so within the context and paradigm of the Old Testament canon, which is held as the primary document for reconstructing Israel's history. In Part One, the authors set the volume in context and review past and current scholarly debate about learning Israel's history, negating arguments against using the Bible as the central source. In Part Two, they seek to retell the history itself with an eye to all the factors explored in Part One.

In the last several decades, interest in the Exilic and Postexilic periods of ancient Israel’s history has grown, especially as this era has been recognized to be important for the formation of the Hebrew Bible. One of the scholars at the forefront of interest in this period is Sara Japhet, now Yehezkel Kaufmann Professor Emeritus in the Department of Bible at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This volume, which is based on Japhet’s 1973 Ph.D. dissertation at the Hebrew University (published in Hebrew in 1978), was first published in English in 1989 and rapidly was recognized as a major distillation of the themes underlying the ideology of the book of Chronicles. The book of Chronicles, written at the end of the fourth century B.C.E., relates the history of Israel from its beginnings with the creation of man to the return from exile with the declaration of Cyrus. The historical and theological points of departure of the Chronicler’s description are to be found in the realities of his own day. Through this historical composition, he attempts to imbue with new meaning the two components of Israel’s life: the past, which through its sublimation and transformation into a norm was in danger of becoming remote and irrelevant, and the present, which is granted full legitimization by demonstrating its continuity with this past. The one is interpreted in terms of the other. Japhet’s study strives to reveal the Chronicler’s views and perspectives on all the major issues of Israel’s history and religion, unveiling his role as a bridge between biblical and postbiblical faith. The book has been out of print for a number of years; this edition, which has been completely retypeset (so that it is more readable), makes an important contribution to the growing body of literature that explores the development of Israelite religion during the time of the formation of the Hebrew Scriptures. Japhet’s ground-breaking work continues to make a lasting contribution to our understanding of the historical and theological position of the Chronicler.