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This chapter explores the potential use of visual sources, together with the methods employed for studying them, such as iconography or iconology, for the history of ‘ancient Israel’. It describes the theoretical and conceptual framework, particularly the notion of ‘eyewitnessing’, and considers the method, particularly iconography. The chapter also presents case examples chosen from monuments which are so well known to historians of ancient Israel that they are well suited to illustrate both the pitfalls of more conventional interpretations and the potential of alternative approaches. Before turning to the sources – namely visual evidence that may be related to the history of ancient Israel and Judah – the chapter discusses the state of the art among fellow historians in neighbouring disciplines, including those belonging to the so-called ‘humanities’ (or arts and letters). It also considers visual art and history, the metaphor of legal investigation, the balancing of testimony, and the particular status of an eyewitness.

This essay discusses how biblical texts that may reflect events of the ninth pre-Christian century may be used to reconstruct select ‘real’ events of that century. Using several examples, it reflects on method, namely, the problems that these texts present to the modern historian of ancient Israel. The modern historian of ancient history should approach the texts dealing with the ninth century in the same way he or she would approach earlier or later periods. This essay considers two types of texts: those that explicitly mark themselves as primarily didactic, and those that are marked as symbolic. The texts from the first group are from the Psalms, while Jonah, Job, and Ruth comprise the second group. There may be other sources beyond Kings that need to be considered for reconstructing the history of the ninth century, including Chronicles and the Pentateuch. Different Mesopotamian sources mention kings of Israel and Judah, usually in the context of the offering of tribute.

The historical approach to the Bible with explicit reference to the social sciences (including sociology, cultural anthropology, archaeology, economics, social psychology, and political science) became popular among biblical scholars and archaeologists during the 1970s, often induced by social turmoil in several countries. Any endeavour to reconstruct a societal development according to a sociological or anthropological model without using as much historical data as possible, be it from textual, iconographic, or archaeological sources, is very risky. Sociological models will never reach the degree of unambiguity that is a distinguishing feature of scientific models. Therefore, a model that is not permanently tested against data can be misleading. This chapter discusses the social history of ancient Israel, arguing for a careful balance between sociological theory and anthropological knowledge on the one hand, and exegetical and historical investigation on the other. It also examines social-historical perspectives on the early monarchy in Israel and Judah up to the ninth century, along with social-historical perspectives on problems associated with religion and politics during the period.

This is the fourth of six chapters on the Old Testament and its authors, and addresses the history and foundations of Israel (the next chapter looks at the later history of Israel). It starts by noting the huge change that has taken place in the study of Israelite history so that while at the beginning of the 1990s it was possible to complain of a situation of complacency and sterility, at the end of the 1990s this situation has changed out of all recognition, even though the parameters of the discussion have changed little: the nature and historicity of the Hebrew Bible in comparison with the relevance of archaeological data remain at the fulcrum of the debate. The periods of Israel's emergence and of the Judaean and Israelite monarchies are seen as the foundational periods of Israelite history (rather than the periods of the patriarchs or exodus), and it is around these that the battle lines have been drawn in the historical search for ancient Israel. The different sections of the chapter discuss: the textual and material foundations of Israelite history—the history of the gaps; the emergence of ancient Israel; the Israelite monarchy; and text in context.

This chapter provides an overview of methodological approaches used in the book and briefly introduces the culture and history of ancient Israel. The methodology is both cross-cultural and interdisciplinary, and important to the study are verbal and nonverbal forms of cultural expression that feature portrayals of hair. Treatments of hair in African art provide an excellent model for the exploration of hair in ancient Near Eastern art, including works produced in Egypt, Assyria, Persia, and ancient Israel. The contributions of anthropologists, sociologists, art historians, and scholars of religion also frame the work, including Victor Turner’s observations about rites of passages, Gananath Obeyesekere’s emphasis on the emotional, personal, and psychological roots and dimensions of embodied symbols, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock’s examination of “the social body” and “the body politic.”

Monotheism is addressed in the context of the polytheisms of ancient Ugarit and early Israel. Within the Bible, monotheism is not a separate stage of religion in ancient Israel, as it is customarily regarded. It was in fact a kind of ancient rhetoric reinforcing Israel’s exclusive relationship with its deity. Monotheism is a kind of inner community discourse using the language of Yahweh’s exceptional divine status over and in all reality (“there are no other deities but me”) in order to absolutize Yahweh’s claim on Israel and to express Israel’s ultimate fidelity to Yahweh in a world where political boundaries or institutions no longer offered sufficiently intelligible lines of religious identity. In its political and social reduction in the world (first because of the rise of foreign empires in the seventh century, followed by its exile in 587–538 ), Israel elevated the terms of its understanding of its deity’s mastery of the world. Put summarily: Israel was now no nation, but the gods of other nations, including the greatest powers, were not really gods; and Yahweh was the sole force over both.

Together with material archaeology and the literary tradition of the Hebrew Bible, epigraphy is one of the main sources for the history of ancient Israel in the ninth century BCE. Although limited in number, West Semitic inscriptions throw some light on the history of this period. This chapter examines ninth-century West Semitic inscriptions and the historical information they contain regarding the history of ninth-century Israel. It starts with the Hebrew inscriptions, followed by inscriptions in the neighbouring southern Levant countries as well as Aramaic inscriptions from Upper Mesopotamia. The chapter deals first with inscriptions in ‘Canaanite’ dialects before analysing inscriptions written in Aramaic dialects. The Mesha and Tel Dan steles are the main West Semitic inscriptions that help us understand the history of Israel and Judah during the ninth century BCE.

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.

John Rogerson's review of works on the history of ancient Israel from Humphrey Prideaux to Martin Noth is a fine illustration of Ecclesiastes' observation (1.9): ‘What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun’. The current debates on the history of Israel are often presented as part of some paradigm shift or, at the very least, a new and savage phase in the study of Israelite history. The publication of recent works such as A Biblical History of Israel by Provan et al. and Kenneth Kitchen's On the Reliability of the Old Testament take us back to the starting point of Rogerson's paper and the work of Prideaux before the development of biblical studies as a critical discipline in the nineteenth century. Norman Cantor's observations on the invention of the Middle Ages by twentieth-century scholarship are just as applicable to biblical scholarship and its pursuit of ancient Israel.

There can be little doubt about the enormous importance of the work of Fernand Braudel and the French Annales tradition for the academic study of history. Together with its many ramifications, the Annales ‘school’ constitutes what is known today as the (French) ‘New History’. In France, the scientific nature of history was never really doubted. History formed (as it does today) a part of the social sciences. For this reason, Braudel stressed the necessity of using empirical data, often quantifiable, to be able to identify the structures underlying social and cultural phenomena. Later, this was referred to as histoire sérielle. The reason why Annales should be considered in some detail in the present context is that some biblical researchers have claimed that the Braudel heritage may be useful for the study of the history of ancient Israel. Knowledge of climate, biology, geography, population movements, and economic trends in Palestine during the Iron Age is relevant to the student of the history of ancient Israel.

The Chronicler attributes to Jehoshaphat of Judah (874–850 BCE) the appointment of royal judges in all the fortified cities of his kingdom, and the establishment of a central court in Jerusalem (2 Chron. 19.5–11). This chapter examines the issue of anachronism from the standpoint of the history of biblical law, and asks whether the Chronicler paints a picture coherent with law as it is likely to have functioned in the ninth century. The problem, however, does not commence in the ninth century. Almost universally, 2 Chron. 19.4–11 is taken to be a ‘judicial reform’, which assumes the existence of a preceding judicial system. Unlike some parts of the ancient Near East, ancient Israel was weakly institutionalized. Regular law courts and applying written rules (and thus assuming the presence of literate personnel) backed by state enforcement was a matter for the future.

This chapter presents a brief outline of the history of ancient Israel, starting with Humphrey Prideaux's The Old and New Testament connected, in the History of the Jews, and neighbouring nations; from the declensions of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah to the time of Christ. The book's purpose, as the word ‘Connection’ indicates, was to set Old Testament history in the context of the history of the ancient Near East. Other similar works include Johann Gottfried Herder's Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit of 1784–1791, an interesting feature of which was a ‘secular’ account of the reason for the downfall of Judah in the sixth century; Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette's Beiträge; Heinrich Ewald's History of Israel, which argued that the Pentateuch and Joshua had reached their final form by way of at least six redactional processes; and Julius Wellhausen's Israelitische und Jüdische Geschichte of 1894 and Israelitisch-jüdische Religion of 1905; Albrecht Alt's Der Gott der Väter; and the writings of Martin Noth.

This chapter shows that history writing in the Bible was less concerned with what actually happened in the past and was more of a creative activity, different from what modern readers typically assume. This does not mean that the Bible does not describe in places what actually took place in the past, but it does mean that was not the main objective of the ancient Israelite history writers. The first part looks at the nature of ancient history writing as recent biblical scholars have defined it and illustrates the nature of ancient history writing with examples from the book of Genesis. The second part of the chapter discusses how history in the Bible was written by exploring the work of various history writers preserved in the Bible.

There is substantial disagreement between scholars about what the proper focus for the study of ‘Hebrew Bible Ethics’ or ‘Old Testament Ethics’ should be. The subject of ethics in ancient Israel and the Hebrew Bible is a difficult one to enter for a number of reasons. For example, there is considerable uncertainty about what we mean when we use an expression like ‘the ethics of the Hebrew Bible’. Are we interested in the beliefs of all or most ancient Israelites, the views of certain biblical authors, or indeed the ethical outlook of the whole Hebrew Bible? This chapter discusses ancient Israelite ethics in a social context, descriptive ethics and normative ethics, moral horizons and social groups, social stratification and moral worlds, and the social location of biblical literature.

The agon model — a theology of combat against the forces of chaos or disorder — has been the focus of the analysis on biblical myth and mythmaking. The model illustrates how the common ancient Near Eastern topos of divine combat with sea was realized in Israelite sources. Analysis shows that there is no disjunction between the pagan and monotheistic texts, and no indication in biblical materials that the sea is a fully distinct divine personality with its own biography. Biblical versions link the prototypical conflict at the beginning of the world order (Urzeit) with its recurrence within the sacred history of Israel during the exodus from Egypt, and its anticipated recurrence in new forms thereafter, up to and including the final defeat of the sea in the future (Endzeit).

A lot of people write on the history of ancient Israel, from biblical scholars to archaeologists and social scientists. However, most such writers are not historians and often do not understand what a proper historical investigation should look like. This has been the bane of the history of Israel: that most of those who write on history are ultimately not interested in history as such. This chapter examines some issues relating to scholarly debate that are not always understood because they relate to approaches and attitudes, yet which are often more important in the direction taken by debate than the actual issues of data and specific scholarly method. These issues include minimalism vs. maximalism, whether the United Monarchy ever existed, ad hominem arguments by conservative evangelicals, and the forgery of antiquities.

In early 2004, a book called ‘Crossroads to Islam’ was written by Yehuda Nevo, an amateur archaeologist, and J. Koren, his research assistant. Early Islamic history shares not only some geography with ancient Israel but also a comparable historical and historiographical trajectory, and at least some of Nevo's (and others') views seem to have been informed by the study of ancient Israel itself. In his book, Nevo reaches four principal conclusions: that the Arabs took over the eastern provinces of the Byzantine empire without a struggle; that the Arabs were pagan at the time of the takeover; that Muhammad is not a historical figure, and enters the official religion only c. 71/690; and that the Qur'an is a late compilation. These radical views subvert the narrative of Islamic origins that prevails not only amongst most Muslims, but also amongst most scholars.

Christian readers typically misunderstand prophecy in the Bible because they assume that its primary intent is to foretell the future. This chapter shows that the intent of the genre of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible was not primarily to predict the future—certainly not hundreds of years in advance—but rather to address specific social, political, and religious circumstances in ancient Israel and Judah. This means that there is no prediction of Christ in the Hebrew Bible. The writers of the New Testament and later Christian literature reinterpreted or reapplied the Hebrew prophecies. This is not to disparage these later Christian authors, however, for they were participating in a long-standing process of reinterpretation that goes back to the prophetic books themselves.