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John Bright

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A History of Israel (1959)

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chapters

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Age of the Patriarchs

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Exodus and Conquest

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Period of the Judges

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United Monarchy of Saul, David and Solomon

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Divided Monarchies of Israel and Judah

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Exile, Return, Restoration

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a conservative history which for the most part replicates the Biblical story

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since the 80s and 90s most historians are skeptical about the historicity of the first two periods

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the age of the patriarchs

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the exodus/conquest period

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many allow and exodus from Egypt on a small scale

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but it is doubtful that

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this group comprised the entire people of Israel

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that this group descended directly from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob

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Ephraim Speiser (1902-1965)

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a group of scholars thought they could prove the historicity of Genesis by showing how various institutions and practices described in these texts appear in documents found in a city in Northern Iraq called Nuzi

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documents date from 1450-1350

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long after the Biblical patriarchs (ca. 2000)

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leading paradigm and theories with which archeologists and historians work when reconstructing the origins of ancient history

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for many years, there were two models:

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1. peaceful infiltration

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Albrecht Alt

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Martin Noth

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Yohanan Aharoni (1919-1976)

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Israelites entered Canaan as semi-nomads

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coalesced gradually into a united people

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originated somewhere in the Transjordan, today Jordan

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2. conquest

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conservative reaction to the peaceful infiltration model

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William Foxwell Albright (1891-1971)

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Yigael Yadin (1917-1984)

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Israel was already a unified people before they entered Canaan by military force and conquest

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takes its point of departure from the Biblical accounts

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very few scholars would defend this view today

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the main reason is that the various layers which Albright and Yadin all date from very different periods

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peaceful view has persisted in modern scholarship but has been subjected to changes

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1. social revolution model

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Israelites were originally an under-privileged and oppressed class of Canaanites

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rose up in rebellion

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abandoned the urban centers

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moved outside urban areas in hills

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where they joined with a small group which had recently made an exodus from bondage in Egypt

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established an egalitarian society

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George Mendenhall

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Norman Gottwald

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2. sedentary / nomadic / sedentary

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Israel Finkelstein

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Shlomo Bunimovitz

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the population which became Israel were local animal herders who gradually made a transition from being nomads to sedentary land owners

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began as sedentary Canaanites, became nomads in the 16th century BC when Canaan was destroyed

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by 1200 BC when Israel starts to emerge as a people, they begin a sedentary existence again

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most scholars think of Israel's origins as a gradual process of identity formation

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elicited by social, political and ecological factors

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may have originated in Canaan proper

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or they may have migrated from the east of the Jordan

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1200 BCE, the Merneptah Stele attests to the existence of a people called Israel

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doesn't contain any information about how Israel was constituted

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no mention of how large the group was

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or even if Merneptah's armies had encountered them firsthand

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there is also reason that these inscriptions would be unreliable, e.g. for kings to boast of battles they never won and peoples they never conquered

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the maintenance of a social organization does not necessarily imply any sort of cultural continuity

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just because there is one group called Israel in one period and another group called Israel in another period, doesn't necessarily imply tight, cultural connection between the two