Biblical Israel in the Ninth Century?

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
PHILIP R. DAVIES
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Critical History ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
United Monarchy ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Crucial Part

Most archaeologists of ancient Israel still operate with a pro-biblical ideology, while the role that archaeology has played in Zionist nation building is extensively documented. Terms such as ‘ninth century’ and ‘Iron Age’ represent an improvement on ‘United Monarchy’ and ‘Divided Monarchy’, but these latter terms remain implanted mentally as part of a larger portrait that may be called ‘biblical Israel’. This chapter argues that the question of ‘biblical Israel’ must be regarded as distinct from the kingdoms of Israel and Judah as a major historical problem rather than a given datum. ‘Biblical Israel’ can never be the subject of a modern critical history, but is rather a crucial part of that history, a ‘memory’, no doubt historically conditioned, that became crucial in creating Judaism. This realization will enable us not only to write a decent critical history of Iron Age central Palestine but also to bring that history and the biblical narrative into the kind of critical engagement that will lead to a better understanding of the Bible itself.

Die Sogenannte Joaschinschrift – Echt Oder Falsch?

2005 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-74
Keyword(s):  
Ninth Century ◽  
Hebrew Text ◽  
Geological Investigation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
Good Accordance ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of

AbstractThe inscription consists of a sandstone plate, in the size of 24 times 30 cm and about 8 cm thick. The plate is broken at the upper edge and has, as it now is at hand, fifteen lines of Hebrew text. The text of the inscription is throughout written without internal matres lectionis, in good accordance with the custom of the ninth century B.C. A palaeographic comparison shows that the alphabet of the inscription is not copied from any other inscription, but the forms of the letters show an inclination to somewhat older forms. According to the original geological investigation, the stone with its inscription is genuine, but many scholars in the field of Hebrew epigraphic are sceptical. If the inscription is a fake, we also must ask, who made it and why was it made. If it is genuine, we stand before a completely singular document, which in the future will be very important for the study of the Bible and history of Ancient Israel.

The Spade and the Text: The Interaction between Archaeology and Israelite History Relating to the Tenth-Ninth Centuries bce

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
AMIHAI MAZAR
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Wide Spectrum ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Late Time ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Archaeological Data ◽  
United Monarchy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Sources

There exists today a wide spectrum of views concerning the process of the writing and redaction of the various parts of the Hebrew Bible, as well as the evaluation of the biblical text in reconstructing the history of Israel during the Iron Age. An archaeologist must make a choice between divergent views and epistemological approaches when trying to combine archaeological data with biblical sources. There are five major possibilities, one of which is to claim that the biblical sources retain important kernels of ancient history in spite of the comparatively late time of writing and editing. Archaeology can be utilized to examine biblical data in the light of archaeology and judge critically the validity of each biblical episode. This chapter examines why we should accept the historicity of the biblical account regarding ninth-century northern Israel and discredit the historicity of the United Monarchy or Judah. It also discusses Jerusalem as a city during the tenth to ninth centuries and its role in defining state formation in Judah.

Understanding the History of Ancient Israel

2007 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Ninth Century ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Early Islamic

In recent years, the study of the history of Ancient Israel has become very heated. On the one hand there are those who continue to use the Bible as a primary source, modified and illustrated by the findings of archaeology, and on the other there are some who believe that primacy should be given to archaeology and that the Biblical account is then seen to be for the most part completely unreliable in historical terms. This book makes a contribution to this debate by inquiring into the appropriate methods for combining different sorts of evidence – from archaeology, epigraphy, iconography, and the Bible. It also seeks to learn from related historical disciplines such as classical antiquity and early Islamic history, where similar problems are faced. Chapters focus on the ninth century BCE (the period of the Omri dynasty) as a test case, but the proposals are of far wider application. The book brings together in mutually respectful dialogue the representatives of positions that are otherwise in danger of talking across one another.

Global Thefts of Biblical Narrative

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald West
Keyword(s):  
Third World ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
African Experience ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Family Resemblances ◽  
African Perspective ◽  
The Subject

This chapter takes its starting point from the African experience, across a range of African contexts, of Africa as both the subject and object of biblical narrative. When the Bible came to Africa, it came with well-established colonial metanarratives, constructed in part from biblical narratives. These colonial metanarratives were in turn partly reconstructed by the engagement with African others, from both a European and an African perspective along two diverging trajectories, with biblical narrative making a contribution to both. This chapter focuses on the capacity of biblical narrative, biblical story, to be both incorporated into “local” metanarratives and to shape these metanarratives. The contexts that are the focus of this chapter are largely “third world” contexts, across which there are significant family resemblances and important contextual differences.

Sustenance and Survival in Biblical Narrative

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer L. Koosed
Keyword(s):  
Religious Identity ◽  
Food Production ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
Adam And Eve ◽  
Early Judaism ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
Class Status ◽  
Cultural Code ◽  
Shape Characterization

Food is a comprehensive cultural code. In ancient Israel and early Judaism, food production and preparation structured lives; what one did in the process was determined by gender and class status and sometimes even marked by ethnic and religious identity. Food also serves to structure narrative, shape characterization, and add layers of symbolic signification to story. In the Bible, the drama of the first few chapters revolves around proper versus improper eating, and the final book portrays God as a lamb sacrificed for the Passover meal. Between picking and tasting the forbidden fruit, and slaughtering and eating God, a whole host of food-related plots, characters, and images proliferate, many of which revolve around the most important of foodstuffs: bread. This chapter explores the centrality of bread in the story of Adam and Eve, the book of Ruth, and the gospels of Jesus.

The Artist as Reader of the Bible. Visual Exegesis and the Adoration of the Magi

2005 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 337-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin O'Kane
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
Image Viewer ◽  
The Bible ◽  
History Of ◽  
Entire History ◽  
Visual Exegesis ◽  
Textual Meaning

AbstractThe article explores the processes at work in a painting's engagement of its viewer in biblical subject matter. It accentuates the role of the artist as an active reader of the Bible and not merely an illustrator of biblical scenes, the dynamic that occurs in the text-reader process as paradigmatic for the image-viewer relationship and the important role of the developing tradition that felt the need to change or rewrite the biblical story. The processes are explored in terms of hermeneutics and exegesis: hermeneutics defined as 'the interweaving of language and life within the horizon of the text and within the horizons of traditions and the modern reader' (Gadamer) and exegesis as 'the dialectic between textual meaning and the reader's existence' (Berdini). Applied to the visualization of biblical subject matter, the approaches of Gadamer and Berdini illumine the key role given to the viewer in the visual hermeneutical process. The biblical story of the adoration of the Magi (Matt. 2: 1-12), the first public and universal seeing of Christ and one of the most frequently depicted themes in the entire history of biblical art, is used to illustrate their approach. The emphasis in the biblical narrative on revealing the Christ child to the reader parallels a key concept in Gadamer's hermeneutical aesthetics, namely Darstellung, the way in which a painting facilitates its subject matter in coming forth, in becoming an existential event in the life of the viewer.

Interlude: Helium, Argon, and Creationism

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Time Span ◽  
The Other ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
Fort Lauderdale ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Creation Science ◽  
Strict Interpretation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scientific Creationism ◽  
The Subject

Henry M. Morris, widely regarded as the founder of the modern creationist movement, died February 25, 2006, at the age of eighty-seven. His 1961 book The Genesis Flood, subtitled, The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications, was a cornerstone of the movement. Many more books followed, including Scientific Creationism; What Is Creation Science?; Men of Science; Men of God; History of Modern Creationism; The Long War Against God; and Biblical Creationism. In 1970 he founded the Institute for Creation Research, which continues to be a leading creationist force, now headed by his sons, John and Henry III. In 1982 I debated the subject with him at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale in front of a sellout crowd of several thousand. He had emphasized in our initial contacts that the debate would be based on science, not religion, but when he opened his remarks with this same statement and the audience responded with loud cries of “Amen!” and “Praise Jesus!” I knew I was in for a long night. Both of us steered away from the biological arguments, I because I’m not a biologist and he presumably because the Biblical side of that is so evidently silly—if he had tried to describe how Noah brought two mosquitoes or two fleas aboard he might have got away with it, but the whole panoply of billions of species of submicroscopic creatures was obviously a problem. Instead he concentrated on the physical side, in particular on the age of the earth, and that was fine with me. As noted in the previous chapters, the earth’s age is central to Darwin’s argument. A strict interpretation of the Bible gives a limit of thousands of years, which is clearly not enough time for evolution to take place. Radioactive dating, on the other hand, gives Darwin his needed time span of billions of years, and so a cornerstone of the creationist argument is its necessary destruction. Morris was a wonderful motivational speaker, and spent a long introduction wandering through the Bible to show how wonderfully reasonable it is.

VII.—On a Collection of Antiquities from the Early Iron Age Cemetery of Hallstatt, presented to the British Museum by Lord Avebury, 1916

Archaeologia ◽  
1916 ◽  
Vol 67 ◽  
pp. 145-162
Author(s):  
C. Hercules Read ◽  
Reginald A. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
Absolute Value ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Absolute

The important series of antiquities that forms the subject of this communication was discovered at Hallstatt in the Salzkammergut, Austria, about the year 1869. The exploration was undertaken at the instance of Sir John Lubbock (afterwards Lord Avebury), and it is believed that a journal was kept of the daily results, as appears to have been the case in all instances where authorized digging took place on the site. Unluckily in the interval between 1869 and the present time the journal referring to Lord Avebury's exploration has disappeared, and we thus lack an important part of the information that it should have furnished, viz. the indications as to what objects were associated together, and whether the interments to which they belonged were by cremation or by inhumation. While this loss is much to be regretted, yet the absolute value and importance of the series is still very great, both as typical of the period which stands prominent as the classical example of a cultural turning-point in the history of the arts, and as filling a very serious gap in the evolutionary series in the national collection.

Melancthon's “Synergism.”

1889 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 185-204
Author(s):  
Frank Hugh Foster
Keyword(s):  
Large Degree ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Evangelical Church ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Great Mind ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Reformation Theology ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

The problems of anthropology depend for their solution in an unusually large degree upon psychology. While the evangelical church looks to the Bible for the materials of its theology, it still depends upon the use of human reason in the interpretation and adjustment of the materials there presented. Especially is this true in the matter of conversion and related doctrines. The language of the Bible is general, rhetorical, theological, practical, or popular, as you may choose to call it, but not strict, philosophical, theoretical, or scientific. The ultimate facts of the doctrine may be perfectly clear to the biblical student, but the adjustment of those facts in a dogmatic system will depend largely upon his ability as a thinker to see in the facts what the biblical writers have not thought fit to utter in express terms, and this upon his mental equipment for his task, or, in other words, upon his knowledge of the constitution and operations of the human mind, within which the process of conversion goes on. The history of Melancthon's “synergism” brings this peculiarity of the subject before us in a very interesting way, for clearer ideas as to the nature of the soul went, in his case, hand in hand with the alterations of the theological system; and thus his efforts to arrive at a statement of the process of conversion which should be at once true to the Scriptures and to the consciousness and the moral necessities of man, are not only interesting as the mental history of a great mind, but throw light upon the interrelations of anthropology and psychology, give us many suggestions as to the interpretation to be put upon the Reformation theology at the present day, and may serve to reveal the lines upon which all progress in respect to these questions is to be sought.

Dead Sea Levels during the Bronze and Iron Ages

Radiocarbon ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa Joy Kagan ◽  
Dafna Langgut ◽  
Elisabetta Boaretto ◽  
Frank Herald Neumann ◽  
Mordechai Stein
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Lake Level ◽  
Dead Sea ◽  
Sea Levels ◽  
The Past ◽  
Organic Debris ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead

The history of lake-level changes at the Dead Sea during the Holocene was determined mainly by radiocarbon dating of terrestrial organic debris. This article reviews the various studies that have been devoted over the past 2 decades to defining the Dead Sea levels during the Bronze and Iron Ages (≃5.5 to 2.5 ka cal BP) and adds new data and interpretation. In particular, we focus on research efforts devoted to refining the chronology of the sedimentary sequence in the Ze'elim Gully, a key site of paleoclimate investigation in the European Research Council project titled Reconstructing Ancient Israel. The Bronze and Iron Ages are characterized by significant changes in human culture, reflected in archaeological records in which sharp settlement oscillations over relatively short periods of time are evident. During the Early Bronze, Intermediate Bronze, Middle Bronze, and Late Bronze Ages, the Dead Sea saw significant level fluctuations, reaching in the Middle Bronze an elevation of ≃370 m below mean sea level (bmsl), and declining in the Late Bronze to below 414 m bmsl. At the end of the Late Bronze Age and upon the transition to the Iron Age, the lake recovered slightly and rose to ≃408 m bmsl. This recovery reflected the resumption of freshwater activity in the Judean Hills, which was likely accompanied by more favorable hydrological-environmental conditions that seem to have facilitated the wave of Iron Age settlement in the region.

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