Book The Historicity Of Biblical Israel Studies In 1 2 Samuel

Book Description

This book is the record of two decades of experience in Biblical sudy. Addressed as much to general readers as to specialists, it represents a new approach to the textual and historical criticism of the Hebrew Bible - an approach in which nothing is accepted on authority, and everything, except the consonantal orthography of the recieved Biblical text, is put to question. In the interest of assisting those general readers who may not be familiar with the Biblical language, all the Hebrew in this book is transliterated, the key to the transliteration system following this preface. Grammatical and syntactical explanations are also provided, wherever needed, to help clarify the arguments.

The first three chapters of the book present the theoretical framework for the work as a whole. The first surveys both the accumulated and current scholarship regarding the nature of Biblical Hebrew as a Semitic language, and the nature of the received text of the Hebrew Bible; the second addresses the question of the validity of the Hebrew Bible as historiography; and the third attempts to explain the preceived inconsistencies between different Biblical accounts of the same historical subjects, as well as the preconceptions underlying these perceptions, both within individual Biblical books, and between different books of the Biblical anthology.

The next seven chapters are essentially exercises in Biblical criticism following the theory outlined in the three introductory chapters. In each exercise, a search is made for the original material of one of the several historical narratives fused together in the received text of 1 & 2 Samuel. a text which is admittedly conflated. In each case, an attempt is made to reconstruct what could have been a original story from the various Hebrew materials entwined in the conflation. For reasons of brevity, only the principles underlying the recognition and isolation of the original material are indicated, leaving it to interested readers to follow the process in detail, if desired, by comparing the material of the reconstructed story and the received Biblical context from which it was isolated.

Of the last four chapters, the first two broach the question of the geography of the Hebrew Bible, bearing in mind that the historicity of the Bible has been thrown into doubt on mainly geographical grounds. This is because what it says regarding the history of ancient Israel remains virtually unsubstantiated by archaeological findings in Palestine, and by the topography of that land. A theoretical argument is presented in support of a West Arabian geography for the Hebrew Bible, first examining the topographical coordinates given to Dan, Gilgal, Hebron and Beersheba against the topography of Western Arabia, then concentrating on the questions of the Biblical ''Jordan'' and ''Jerusalem.'' In the last two chapters, the theory is put to a more detailed test by comparing the toponymy deducible from the seven stories earlier reconstructed from the received text of 1 & 2 Samuel with the existing toponymy of the West Arabian lands of the Hijaz and Asir.

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