A history of biblical Israel
Subtitle: the fate of the tribes and kingdoms from Merenptah to Bar Kochba
By: Ernst Axel Knauf and Philippe Guillaume
Contributors: Guillaume, Philippe, 1960- author
Series: Worlds of the ancient near East and Mediterranean; Worlds of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean
Publisher: Equinox
Published: 2016
Place of publication: Sheffield, UK; Bristol, CT
Language: eng
Number of pages: 266
ISBN-13: 9781781791417; 9781781791424
Subjects: Historiography; Bible; Criticism, interpretation; Antiquities; History of Biblical events; History
Description: There was probably only one past, but there are many different histories. As mental representations of narrow segments of the past, "histories" reflect different cultural contexts and different historians, although "history" is a scientific enterprise whenever it processes representative data using rational and controllable methods to work out hypotheses that can be falsified by empirical evidence. A History of Biblical Israel combines experience gained through decades of teaching biblical exegesis and courses on the history of ancient Israel, and of on-going involvement in biblical archaeology. "Biblical Israel" is understood as a narrative produced primarily in the province of Yehud to forge the collective memory of the elite that operated the temple of Jerusalem under the auspices of the Achaemenid imperial apparatus. The notion of "Biblical Israel" provides the necessary hindsight to narrate the fate of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah as the pre-history of "Biblical Israel", since the archives of these kingdoms were only mined in the Persian era to produce the grand biblical narrative. The volume covers the history of "Biblical Israel" through its fragmentation in the Hellenistic and Roman periods until 136 CE, when four Roman legions crushed the revolt of Simeon Bar-Kosiba. (Publisher).
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 232-253) and indexes.
Table of contents: title: Part I. The pre-history of biblical Israel. From Merenptah to Ramses VI; title: From Ephraim to Mamre: the tribes in the early Iron Age; title: From Saul to Jeroboam I: state formation; title: From Omri to Jeroboam II: the consolidation of Levantine kingdoms; title: From Tiglath-Pileser to Ashurbanipal: the integration of Levantine kingdom in the Neo-Assyrian realm; title: From Nabopolassar to Nebuchadnezzar; title: Part II. The formation of biblical Israel in Yehud and Samaria in the Persian period. From Nebuchadnezzar II to Xerxes I: Mizpah, Samaria, and Jerusalem's first "Second Temple"; title: From Artaxerxes I to Ptolemy I: the second "Second Temple" and Torah; title: Part III. The disintegration of biblical Israel. From Ptolemy II to Antiochus III: the Bible in Greek; title: From Antiochus III to Salome Alexandra; title: "Pax" Romana and Jewish wars.