19 - Changing perspectives on the history of Palestine

Summary

1991–2011

Since the mid-1970s, the conviction among scholars has steadily grown that the biblical archaeological agenda of creating a historical synthesis of the biblical narrative with archaeological results is no longer viable. A convergence of the biblical tradition with historical and archaeological remains is very limited, and progress in historical reconstruction follows closely our ability to develop historical questions, which are independent of the allegorical world of biblical narrative. The problems of reading the Bible as a history of Palestine's past are today well known. Nevertheless, there are still many biblical scholars and archaeologists who unfortunately continue to work within the biblical archaeological agenda in their efforts to develop what Megan Bishop Moore insists on calling ‘a critical history of ancient Israel,’ but which is rather an essentially tendentious biblical history that has at best been rationalized rather than corrected and confirmed through extra-biblical sources. The agenda itself is no better than that furthered in the work of William Foxwell Albright throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, most of the efforts to develop what is often called a ‘middle ground’ in the current debate about Palestine's history – in recent books such as those by Mario Liverani, Nadav Na'aman, Israel Finkelstein, Amihai Mazar and others – share the goal of creating a synthesis of historical and biblical studies by correcting the Bible's story, but, nevertheless, make little effort to understand the biblical discourse from within its own context.