A Biblical History of Israel.

• Author: Lemche, Niels Peter
• Position: Book Review

A Biblical History of Israel. By IAIN PROVAN, V. PHILIP LONG, and TREMPER LONGMAN III. Louisville: WESTMINSTER JOHN KNOX PRESS, 2003. Pp. xiv + 426. (paper).

It has been a long time since the last conservative textbook on the history of Israel was published. This volume is divided into two parts, a prolegomenon (Part 1: "History, Historiography, and the Bible," pp. 3-104), and a history (Part 2: "A History of Israel from Abraham to the Persian Period," pp. 105-303). Notes are confined to the end of the book (pp. 305-88). There are indexes of biblical passages, of scholars cited, and of selected topics, but no bibliography. Bibliographical references are included in the index of scholars cited.

The first part is interesting and includes a methodological discussion well worth reading concerning historical approaches to ancient texts. The conclusion is interesting: the Old Testament provides a testimony to the past. It is a narrative and a source for the ancient history of Israel. However, other testimonies, such as ancient texts and the evidence of archaeology, always presented in a narrative form, also exist. Being a narrative, there is no reason to pay more attention to archaeology, say, than to the biblical texts. We are entitled to say that all forms of historical reconstruction, whether on the basis of textual evidence of that of artifacts, are dependent on the human ability to formulate them as a text, and thus there is no reason to prefer one version to the other. It follows that archaeology need not be accorded special importance because archaeological excavations are not especially important and cannot be of any use except when rendered into textual form. Therefore there is no reason to dismiss the testimony of the Bible as irrelevant to ancient history.

Accordingly the section on the history of Israel is planned to reinstate the biblical narrative as history, which may seem reasonable, considering the position just outlined. It could also be said that if the biblical testimony were respected for what it is--a reflection of a certain group of people on their past, this could be a very useful and respectable enterprise. The hesitation displayed by many scholars today when confronting the biblical text as evidence of Israel's ancient past may have opened an avenue for this kind of reappraisal of the ancient story of the people of God found in the Old Testament. The study of this text as a literary document from the past has been done...