Israel in Kanaan: Zum Problem der Entsehung Israels.

• Author: Miller, J. Maxwell

This thin volume (fewer than ninety pages of text) consists of eleven short chapters and two excursus which combine to support Rosel's view of Israel's origins, which he summarizes in a concluding chapter. Essentially ancient Israel emerged from the heterogenous population of Canaan during the opening centuries of the Iron Age, according to Rosel, although the catalyst for this development, and the source of Israel's most distinctive traditions (including the worship of Yahweh), was a group which entered the land from outside and preserved that memory. The patriarchal stories in Genesis reflect a very early stage of this development; the conquest account in the book of Joshua reflects the end of the development, which occurred on the eve of the establishment of the monarchy and apparently involved military actions. The narrator of the Joshua account, living during the time of the monarchy and thus relatively soon after the military actions, assumed that the whole thing had been a military conquest. Rosel thinks that the term "Israel" probably referred originally to a group associated with the cultic shrine at Shiloh. Later the term came to be used more inclusively for tribal elements in the north-central hill country, and eventually for the Israelite-Judean monarchy.

On the whole, Rosel's view of Israel's origins comes close to that advanced by G. E. Mendenhall in 1962, although Rosel is less inclined to think in terms of a violent "peasant's revolt." Regarding the possible details of its occurrence, Rosel comes close on many points to the depictions advanced in the three most recent...