The Fabric of History: Text, Artifact and Israel's Past.

• Author: Halpern, Baruch

One does not without trepidation break open a volume containing six essays on how to reconstruct Israelite history. Few subjects offer an interested reader so little opportunity for improvement as the theory of how to recover the past, especially when espoused, as it usually is, at the abstract and prescriptive level; or, as is also common, when developed in a collection of essays lacking any real coherence and uneven in quality.

With the volume in hand, such fears are not apposite. The essays, by Diana Edelman, Ernst Axel Knauf, Thomas L. Thompson, J. Maxwell Miller, William G. Dever, and the late Gosta Ahlstrom, do address questions for the most part theoretically; but they are uniformly thoughtful, reasoned, and stimulating. They do not explicitly address each other or each other's points and arguments; but their thematic coherence is remarkable. And as a whole the collection accurately sketches out a picture of contemporary discussion on the leading edge of the field of Israelite history.

The burning theoretical issues here are three: can the Hebrew Bible be used in the recovery of the past, and if so how? how can textual evidence and material-cultural evidence be combined? and, what aspects of history can we reconstruct (event, human environment, physical environment), what aspects not, with the tools at hand? Knauf also contributes a very satisfying discussion of history and public epistemology; virtually every contributor, from the opening essay by Edelman on, exhibits a surprising sophistication - in a field in which such sophistication is generally absent - about the nature of historical knowledge.

Substantively, most of the cases discussed focus on the United Monarchy. There are occasional indications that the essayists have other questions in mind, such as the narratives of the Pentateuch (principally Thompson), or the premonarchic period, or, explicitly in the cases of Dever and Knauf, the geography of the state in several dimensions.

Some of the discussion concerns the issue of whether the Bible is useful as a historical source. Thompson would prefer to dispense with it. Nearly all the contributors emphasize how Biblical presentations distort ancient reality. Of the group, only Miller actually defends the use of Biblical testimony, with the appropriate critical acumen, in a succinct and brilliant argument that focuses on how thoroughly dependent the archaeologist, historical geographer, and chronographer are on Biblical...