Demythologizing the Satan Tradition of Historical-Criticism: A Reevaluation of the Old Testament Portrait of שָׂטָן in Light of the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha

This book continues the excellent work begun in Thompson's first book, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives. In trying to find a context for the Bible, T. rightly focuses on the literary, theological, and ideological content of the biblical text. He well illustrates how recording history (from a modern point of view) is not the concern of the biblical writers. On the other hand, as he shows, to deny that the Bible is true historically is not to deny its truth in other areas. Although often agreeing with T. and applauding much that is in the book, the reviewer found certain areas of concern or disappointment. He feels that T. is often inconsistent, sometimes seeming to reject the use of literary sources almost altogether, yet still quietly using them when it suits his purpose. For example, the sources for the conquests of Alexander the Great have some of the same weaknesses as Josephus, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and even some of the narrative texts of the Bible, yet T. seems to accept that these still tell us something about Alexander. An area of weakness is T.'s grasp of the Hellenistic and Roman period where the sources andscholarship have not been mastered, and certain original sources are both explicitly rejected and then covertly used as a basis for many assertions. This is not a main part of T.'s argument, but it has implications for trying to put the writing of the Bible in the Hellenistic/Roman period. An area judged to be actually tendentious is T.'s argument that ''Jews'' and similar terms are only religious designations and carry no ethnic content. Despite these criticisms (which do affect T.'s approach and conclusions in crucial areas) the reviewer nevertheless accepts much that T. says and appreciates the attempt to give a holistic argument on this complex question. Especially appreciated is T.'s positive reconstruction of the history of Palestine based primarily on archaeology in a central section of his book.     

The Name Game: Archaeologies of the Land of the Bible,Eretz Yisrael,the Holy Land and Palestine

In post-modernist terms, archaeology, like history, is not practiced for itself but for someone or something. That much is clear with the archaeology of the cis-Jordanian region of the Near East where it has served to sustain anthropological-ethnological models driven by biblical and nationalistic-based theories. Words, terms, labels and names have meanings that not infrequently are consequential thus, constructing an archeology-abetted past of spaces named Holy Land, Eretz Yisrael and Land of the Bible belies the discipline’s claim to scientific neutrality. No less, naming the cis-Jordanian territories of the Bronze and Iron Ages a “Palestine” is anachronistic and not uniformly acceptable. As long as Archaeology is tasked with proving the veracity of ancient epigraphy and texts and legitimizing claims of ancestral privilege and ur-ownership of ancient lands, the more glaring its failure and the greater the impediment to settling the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.     

Archaeology and the Bible Revisited: A Review Article

David and Solomon, a new book by Israel Finkelstein and Niels Asher Silberman, through their discussion of Palestinian archaeology's current understanding, proposes to provide evidence to prove the accuracy of Frank Cross's more than 30 year old revision of Martin Noth's theory of a “Deuteronomistic History.” The authors attempt to confirm the history of the redaction of the biblical narratives about Saul, David and Solomon, involving seven distinct oral and four written strata of tradition. Their argument moreover claims the warrant to assert the historicity of each of these legendary kings of Israel. The present article argues to the contrary that the “archaeological evidence” proposed does not support such a redaction history nor establish the historicity of either the biblical figures or their stories, but that the harmony of biblical and archaeological issues is circular and illegitimate by the standards of historical research. It argues, moreover, that the claim of an oral tradition, reflecting original memories of an historical David or Saul is an entirely unnecessary and unlikely explanation for the origins of both the figures and their tales in the stories of 1-2 Samuel and 1 Kings. It moreover argues that the hypothesis of a redaction history in a succession of four cumulative revisions, beginning in the eighth century and completed in the sixth to fourth century, BCE—lacking as it does reference to a readable text—is neither critical nor falsifiable. Finally, Finkelstein and Silberman's book is judged as an unsuccessful attempt to return to the methods of “biblical archaeology” that were legitimately impeached in the mid-1970s.     

Prof. Dever’s Last Tome: Much Ado about Things and Nothing?

In his recently published book, professor Dever breaks no new ground and adds no new insights into the ever-elusive remote past of the Israelites. Rather, he not only persists in his decades-old, and by-now pointless, scholarly tiff with the European minimalist school of biblical interpretation, but argues, unconvincingly, for the superiority of archeological things as primary sources for writing a true history of ancient Israel. Confusingly, he ends his tome with a plea for integrating [minimalist] biblical hermeneutics with archaeological findings as a way forward to hopelessly construct yet another, but the truest of all histories.     

Archaeology and Politics in the Holy Land: The Life and Career of P. L. O. Guy

Abstract

Philip Langstaffe Ord Guy's (1885–1952) career in archaeology began as Woolley's assistant at Carchemish and as Chief Inspector for the Department of Antiquities of Palestine during the 1920s. He is best known as director of the Megiddo Expedition (1927–1934), where he employed innovative techniques in balloon photography, and provided a highly influential identification of the pillared buildings found there as stables. He dated these buildings to the Solomonic era, sowing the seeds of a long-running debate over the role of the Bible in archaeological interpretation. Guy was later appointed director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (1935–1939), initiating the short-lived Archaeological Survey of Palestine. After World War II and Israel's War of Independence, Guy became a senior figure within the fledgling Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums as Director of Excavations and Surveys. Active involvement in Zionist politics through his marriage into the Ben-Yehuda family was a controversial factor that impacted on his career within 1920s and 1930s Palestine. Recent archival research allows an assessment of Guy's double life as archaeologist and political activist and the degree to which these areas intersected. His name can be added to the diverse spectrum of archaeologists working in the Holy Land during this formative but turbulent colonial and post-colonial era.     

Rethinking the Historiographical Impulse: The History of Ancient Israel as a Problem

The first part of this paper provides some insights into the problematic nature of the genre “history of ancient Israel”, both in terms of historiography and of historical epistemology. It is argued that the concept “history of ancient Israel” is essentially valid within a particular modern theological or biblical historiographical context. As such, this history of ancient Israel may indeed progress and generate new understandings but is nonetheless seriously limited by its main concern with “biblical Israel”. It is also proposed that in order to overcome these thematic and epistemological historical limitations, a wider history of ancient Palestine or the Southern Levant should be envisioned, into which to understand the epigraphic and archaeological realia of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, together with other contemporary polities in the region, and the later development of biblical traditions and texts. The second part of the paper addresses questions of ethnogenesis, socio-political organization and identity in the light of the previous discussion, setting the stage for an alternative history of Israel and other historical realities in ancient Palestine.     

Defending the Concept of Time in the Hebrew Bible

Abstract

Due to the scarcity of reflection on time as an independent subject in the Hebrew Bible, there has been a scholarly tendency to consider biblical time conception more limited than our own_perhaps even nonexistent. This article confronts the scholarly skepticism regarding the ability of the biblical authors to think about time, defending the presence of time conceptualization in the Hebrew Bible. In the article I discuss central research contributions to the subject of biblical time, in particular Sacha Stern’s thesis that the concept of time is entirely absent from the Hebrew Bible and from ancient Judaism more widely. I explore linguistic and anthropological assumptions which underpin large parts of the discussion on time within biblical studies, arguing that one cannot assume on the basis of either that the biblical authors lacked a concept of time. Finally, I suggest that the ability of the biblical writers to coordinate unrelated processes according to a temporal axis is a strong argument in favour of their awareness of time.     

The Role of Faith in Historical Research

The implied strategy and the history projected in the new book of Jens Bruun Kofoed, Text and History, fails to measure up to the critical principles of both theology and science established by Thomas Acquinas' centuries' old distinction between faith and reason. An apologetic intention in Kofoed's book attempts to demonstrate that the biblical history of his evangelical faith is not unreasonable. Thomas Thompson, on the other hand, thinks it is necessary to hold the line between faith and science, which St. Thomas drew some seven centuries ago. What Kofoed argues in an effort to project a history of Israel, which would be an alternative to that of the “Copenhagen school” is not science. Nor are his rules of evidence those that the world of secular history requires. Led by an apologetic rhetoric and understanding of historical argument, Kofoed's revised Århus dissertation is dominated by a critique of the “Copenhagen school,” which attempts to show that an alternative answer is not impossible. Although emphasizing the historical methods of Thompson and Niels Peter Lemche in his critique, Kofoed neglects to include in his discussion their discussions of method or, in Lemche's case, anything he has written before 1991. His understanding of their dependency on the Annales school is clearly mistaken as is his understanding of the debates about the relationship between historicity, genre and composition. Finally, his discussion of the comparative method is misleading and ill informed.     

Writing Witness History: The Historiography of the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania

From their humble origins as small, loose‐knit groups of Bible students in Pennsylvania in the 1870s, Charles Taze Russell and his followers laid the foundations of a highly visible, and frequently controversial, worldwide religious organisation known since 1931 as the Jehovah's Witnesses. Despite the Witnesses' broad historical role in defining and shaping understandings of religious tolerance, freedom of conscience, and civil liberties around the world, historians have paid very little attention to the Witnesses, with the notable exception of their treatment in Nazi Germany and the United States and Canada in wartime. The paucity of historical knowledge is all the more surprising given their visibility and notoriety. This article aims to initiate discussion of this under‐researched history by addressing what has been written, by whom, and for what purpose. It represents the first effort to evaluate the English‐language historical literature on the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society.     

LESTER GRABBE AND HISTORIOGRAPHY: AN APOLOGIA

This response to Lester Grabbe's review of Th.L. Thompson's The Bible in History marks out substantial differences in their approach to history. It argues that Grabbe appears to overlook the book's intention to offer a critique of historicism and its rhetoric of objectivity. Particularly, Grabbe's understanding of the Bible as historiographical is disputed, and the understanding of social-historians and their concentration on Tendenz critique - a commonplace in ''second temple'' studies - is not shared by the author. Accepting a loss in both detail and accuracy, he rather recommends an approach which uses anthropological and archaeological insights, supplemented by the unwritten implications of texts, geo-political trends and intellectual history. Against Grabbe's strong objections, the necessity of caution in accepting the historicity of specific unconfirmed kings in the synchronisms of Judean and Samaritan kinglists, implied by 2 Kings, is re-asserted. On the other hand, Grabbe's charge of casting greater doubt on biblical texts in contrast to his treatment of extra-biblical texts is falsified by the author's Historicity of 1974 and subsequent known practice. He corrects Grabbe's misunderstanding of his treatment of the deity Yahweh, and, after objecting to the personally derogatory innuendoes of Grabbe's presentation of his understanding of early Judaism, he addresses the question of whether stories lie by addressing the rhetoric of story. In closing, a brief exegesis of Mark 7, 31-37 is offered as an illustration of how historicism has distorted biblical scholarship.     

The Lost Loci of Tell El-'Ajjul: Petrie's Area C

Abstract

Flinders Petrie excavated the site of Tell el-'Ajjul in southern Palestine over five seasons between 1930 and 1938, with publication of his finds following swiftly on the heels of his fieldwork. These reports were only ever meant to be a preliminary investigation into the potential of this rich site, and often raised as many questions as they answered. This material is now the subject of the Petrie Palestinian Project, based at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, which aims to re-evaluate Petrie's finds in the light of more recent research. In the course of this work a detailed study of Petrie's field practices has helped clarify a number of issues relating to this site, which remains of major importance to the Bronze Age archaeology of Southern Palestine. One of the more problematic of these issues has been chosen for discussion here: the location of Petrie's area C.     

Refraining the Meaning of “Political” in Research with Adolescents

Abstract

The Gettysburg Address contains no direct quotations from the Bible; nevertheless, it is replete with biblical phrases and themes. Lincoln, who had an intimate and thorough knowledge of the King James Bible, used the Bible in ways essential to the mission and message of his brief address delivered on November 19, 1863, at the dedication of a national cemetery at Gettysburg. The unifying theme of his speech was the conception, birth, and death of the nation, which parallels the life of Jesus as recounted in the New Testament. This theme climaxes with the nation's “new birth of freedom,” secured through the sacrifice of the Civil War, especially through the shed blood and death of the “brave men” on Gettysburg's battlefield. Lincoln invoked biblical cadences, phrases, and themes to solemnify the occasion for his speech and to infuse the great sacrifice of the dead and wounded with profound meaning.     

The History of the Jehovah's Witnesses: An Appraisal of Recent Scholarship

Zoe Knox's analysis of the English‐language historiography of the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society was published in this journal in 2011. It assessed four types of historical writing on the organisation: the Watch Tower Society's own publications; material produced by two categories of detractors, namely ex‐Witnesses and Christians writing from other denominational perspectives; and academic studies. There are vast quantities of all but the last of these. Her article thus concluded with a call for scholars to take this religious community more seriously as an historical subject, echoing an appeal made by Rodney Stark and Laurence Iannaccone to social scientists in 1997. This review essay is intended to supplement Knox's historiographical analysis by appraising recent publications on the history of the Jehovah's Witnesses. As we shall see, although scholarship on this topic remains sparse, particularly given the organisation's visibility, since 2011 several important books have appeared alongside others which make contributions to the limited sum of our knowledge of the origins and emergence of the organisation and the way it has operated in different historical contexts. In short, the field requires reappraisal in light of these publications.     

THE CONCEPT “SYSTEM OF PHILOSOPHY”: THE CASE OF JACOB BRUCKER'S HISTORIOGRAPHY OF PHILOSOPHY1

In this essay I examine and discuss the concept “system of philosophy” as a methodological tool in the history of philosophy; I do so in two moves. First I analyze the historical origin of the concept in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thereafter I undertake a discussion of its methodological weaknesses–a discussion that is not only relevant to the writing of history of philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but also to the writing of history of philosophy in our times, where the concept remains an important methodological tool. My first move is to analyze Jacob Brucker's employment of the concept in his influential history of philosophy, Historia critica philosophiae, dating from 1742–1744. To Brucker, a “system of philosophy” is characterized by the following four features: (a) it is autonomous in regard to other, non‐philosophical disciplines; (b) all doctrines stated within the various branches of philosophy can be deduced from one principle; (c) as an autonomous system it comprises all branches of philosophy; (d) the doctrines stated within these various branches of philosophy are internally coherent. Brucker employed the concept on the entire history of philosophy, and he gave it a defining role in regard to two other methodological concepts, namely “eclecticism” and “syncretism,” which he regarded as more or less successful forms of systematic philosophy. My second move is to point out the weakness of the concept of “system of philosophy” as a methodological tool in the history of philosophy. I argue that the interdisciplinary nature of much premodern philosophy makes Brucker's methodological concept “system of philosophy” inadequate, and that we may be better off leaving it behind in our future exploration of premodern philosophy.     

Church,State, and the Holy Land: British Protestant Approaches to Imperial Policy in Palestine, 1917–1948

British Protestants had long held to the notion of a legitimate Protestant interest in the Christian ‘Holy Land’, a concept that helped bolster Britain's political claim to Palestine in the aftermath of the First World War. Evangelical Protestant visions of the return of the Jews to their biblical homeland encouraged imperial support for Zionism and helped define the unique conditions of British mandate rule. But once the British actually assumed power over Palestine, British Protestants began to find themselves seriously at odds over their moral and political obligations in the new possession their interests had helped to shape. This article explores three broad Protestant attitudes towards the question of Britain's policy towards Palestine during the mandate period, demonstrating the ways in which Lambeth Palace, Protestant metropolitan mission institutions, and Protestant church workers in Palestine itself developed radically different conceptions of their religious and political responsibilities in what they regarded as their ‘Holy Land’.     

Dealing with Tribes and States in Ancient Palestine

This paper offers a critique on state formation theories used in the explanation of the rise of the biblical United Monarchy. The last three decades of archaeological and biblical research have shown that there is no firm evidence for speaking of a kingdom or empire of David and Solomon in ancient Palestine. Thus what is proposed here is to evaluate the archaeological record through the data provided by the ethnological record of the Middle East, keeping the biblical stories apart from this interpretation. The analysis of the dynamics and structure of Middle Eastern “tribal states” and “chiefdom societies”, including here the practice of patronage bonds, gives us important keys for understanding Palestine's societies. The historical perspective that appears then is one different from the Bible's stories and from modern ideas such as “states” and “nations”, offering us instead a better methodology for reconstructing ancient Palestine's historical past.     

The Bible and Leo Strauss

According to Leo Strauss, the Hebrew Bible is to be regarded as being in “radical opposition” to philosophy and as its “antagonist.” This is an influential view, which has contributed much to the ongoing omission of the Bible from most accounts of the history of political philosophy or political theory. In this article, I examine Strauss's arguments for the exclusion of the Bible from the Western tradition of political philosophy (i) because it possesses no concept of nature; (ii) because it prescribes a “life of obedient love” rather than truth-seeking; and (iii) because it depicts God as “absolutely free” and unpredictable, and so without a place in the philosophers' order of “necessary and therefore eternal” things. I suggest that Strauss's views on these points cannot be accepted without amendment. I propose a revised view of the history of political philosophy that preserves Strauss's most important insights, while recognizing the Hebrew Bible as a foundational text in the Western tradition of political philosophy.     

Torah as maternal return: chiastic copulation and the reconception of sacred history. or,un(k)notting the love in the law1

Torah, the name of the first five books of the “sacred history” comprised by the Hebrew Bible, tends to be translated as “Law” and to be affiliated with the separating “Law of the Father.” But Torah means “teaching.” Venerable tradition allies this teaching with feminine Wisdom, “a tree of life.” Theories of poetic language elaborated by such scholars as Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous facilitate discovering beneath the Torah's fractured and labyrinthine surface a way of return to the mother. This way is embodied in the inversions, textuality, and concentricity of the rhetorical trope of chiasmus, which exceeds the bounds of the Law to provide a form for the expression of “woman's desire” and so for the feminine text. Exploring as such the doubly chiastic poem in which, when naming woman in Eden, a human being (adam) changes its name to man (iysh) challenges man's biblical history, while restoring the memory of interconnection with the mother and all life. Reduplications of this transformative moment expand upon sacred history in terms of the Torah's central injunction to love one's neighbor as oneself.     

The Norwegian 9/11: In the Church Without a Bible

The article identifies roles and conditions for the Bible within modern politics in the West. By comparing the official Norwegian response to the terror attack in Oslo July 22, 2011, with the similar response in the US on September 11, 2001, it is explained why the Bible is nearly absent in the official discourse of Norwegian Prime Ministers. While religion resurfaced in the process of national recuperation with the Cathedral of Oslo as a center for mass ritualization and national grief, the biblical legacy played no part in the Prime Minister's speech. The primary political leader of the Norwegian state has rarely bolstered his argument with the Bible, although this state has officially adhered to a Protestant confession from its Constitution in 1814. The Liberal Bible that appears to be operative in US presidential discourse is not playing a major role on a comparable political level in Norway.     

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ABSTRACT

This article deals with the application of Claude Lévi-Strauss's structural analysis of myths to the Hebrew Bible. By comparing the stories of Abraham and Moses with the epic of the Argonauts, and by comparing Plato's ideal State in the Laws with the laws and organisation of biblical Is-rael, I suggest that the books from Genesis to Kings were written by one sin-gle writer living during the Hellenistic era.