The History of Israel
Older scholarship, though ‘critical’, commonly took it that the core narrative of the Old Testament, from David to the return from exile, was basically reliable as an historical source. Newer ‘revisionist’ scholarship disputes this: for it, this narrative has little or no contact with events that happened. Rather, it expresses the ideology of parties of a far later time and their quest for power. Archaeology, increasingly important, is appealed to from both sides. Traditional critical history stuck too closely to the Bible's point of view: true history should be not of Israel but of all the populations. There never was any ‘Ancient Israel’ , shaped as it is delineated in the Bible.
Keywords: Lemche, revisionism, Whitelam
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