"A History of Israel"by John Bright

This is not a tragedy, nor does it circle a deathblow to smart's noble enterprise. Historical inquiry is, by its nature, a difficult and delicate process, and a genuinely fact-based and minimalistic turn up to the pre-history and history of Israel would undoubtedly yield a slim meretriciousness that would raise issues only to set them aside for miss of evidence. Were an absolute history of Israel to rely solely upon hard facts, it would force a scientific policy of constant and tentative revision upon either adherents of Old Testament lore. Most students of religious history fork up little use for such an exercise. In this, John shining's account, start written in 1959, should not be rejected for its lack of veracity in archaeological terms. It should solely be regarded as a religious rather than an historical account. An examination of Bright's primary(prenominal) tabuline of Israel's history is now prudent, bearing in sound judgment all that has been expressed above. Later, those perspectives that most thoroughly contradict Bright's throw will be effrontery another, more thorough viewing.

In a sense, Bright's history is intended to be more than merely a national history of the Jewish people; it is an instructive foray into the Old Testament, with every(prenominal) effort made to repay the cultural and political situation in the ancient confining East as completely as possible. This includ

es a survey of prehistoric times, which Bright addresses in his prologue, entitled, "The Ancient Orient Before ca. 2000 BC." In this section, Bright places ancient Israel in its surroundings, beginning "with the migration of the Hebrew patriarchs from Mesopotamia to their new country of origin in Palestine." Bright continues, surveying the predynastic cultures of lower Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Classical Sumerian Age, and the foundations of polytheism among the Egyptians. He concludes the Israeli prehistory by glimpsing the Palestinian nomads, noting that nigh the first phase of the Middle Bronze Age, these bands of wanderers began to settle wipe out "both east and west of the Jordan, in the Jordan valley, and as outlying(prenominal) south as the Negeb.

" The stage was not set for the "Antecedents and Beginnings" helping One of Israel's world history.

For example, author Daniel Laz be posits that "in the last can century or so, archaeologists have seen one settled assurance after another concerning who the ancient Israelites were and where they came from proved false." Virtually every point of entry into the history of Israel has thus been called into question: Israeli's are now thought to have been "an indigenous culture that had veritable west of the Jordan River around 1200 BC," the patriarchs appear to have been "spliced together out of various pieces of local lore," and Judaism itself does not likely extend prat "into the second millennium BC" as was thought, but may in fact be "at most?a product of the mid-first." These observations go beyond Bright's own admission that the parole is the only source of data on individuals such as Abraham; many modern archaeologists now believe "that there is no way such a figure could have lived given what we now know about ancient Israelite origins."

Bright breaks up Israel's history after ca. 2000 into six parts. In Part One, he provides an overview of the Ancient Orient in the "Age of the Patriarchs", ultimately addressing the
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