History of Israel
By the middle of the 20th century the work of Albright and his students, notably Nelson Glueck (1900-1971), E. A. Speiser (1902-1965), G. Ernest Wright (1909-1974) and Cyrus Gordon (1908-2001), had produced a consensus that biblical archaeology had provided physical evidence for the originating historical events behind the Old Testament narratives: in the words of Albright: "Discovery after discovery has established the accuracy of innumerable details of the Bible as a source of history." The consensus allowed the writing of authoritative textbooks such as John Bright's "History of Israel" (1959). Bright did not believe that the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph could be regarded as reliable history, or that it was possible to reconstruct the origins of Israel from the biblical text alone, but he did believe that the stories in Genesis reflected the physical reality of the 20th to 17th centuries BC, and that it was therefore possible to write a history of the origins of Israel by comparing the biblical accounts with what was known of the time from other sources.