The History of Ancient Palestine from the Palaeolithic Period to Alexander's Conquest.

• Author: Beckman, Gary

A history of ancient Palestine with 906 pages of text is certainly an event for Oriental and Biblical Scholars alike. The wealth of detailed information collected by the author (who did not live to see the completion of his work) is astonishing, and this is an obvious asset for scholar and student. In one sense, however, length is a liability, as the author risks describing trees and bushes, forgetting the forest. This seems to be hinted at by Diana Edelman, the editor (who, by the way, did an amazingly good job), when she says: "the sheer amount of detailed information that Professor Ahlstrom has synthesized ..." (p. 12). The impression conveyed by the book is therefore somewhat chaotic; it lacks a synthetic approach. This is easily explained: Ahlstrom probably did not have the strength to trim his work or to confine certain issues to appendices, and the editor could obviously not perform such a task.

There can be hardly any doubt that Ahlstrom's work is in many ways revolutionary. The differences between ancient oriental and modern historiography are duly stressed in the introduction; religion cannot but use mythic language, a statement rendering so many modern contentions obsolete (p. 29); no reliable information on the MB period can be gathered from Genesis (p. 186), nor did the Biblical texts know much about settlement patterns (p. 335); the Iron Age in the region shows no signs of the settlement of new ethnic groups except the Philistines (p. 337); an amphictyony or similar institution never existed (p. 353), as is clearly shown by Judges 5 (Ahlstrom does not mention my proposal that Israel and Judah were two separate ethnic and political entities from the start, although he seems to hint at it here...