The mythic past: biblical archaeology and the myth of Israel

Abstract

The Early History of the Israelite People (1992).To scholars familiar with his previous works, the words with which Thompson opens this latest book will not be surprising."Today we no longer have a history of Israel.Not only have Adam and Eve and the flood story passed over to mythology,[1] but we can no longer talk about a time of the patriarchs.There never was a 'United Monarchy' in history and it is meaningless to speak of pre-exilic prophets and their writings."In short, "the Bible is not a history of anyone's past" (p.xv).And again: "In history, neither Jerusalem nor Judah [sic!] ever shared an identity with Israel before the rule of the Hasmoneans in the Hellenistic period" (p.105)."The stories of Solomon and David, and even the story of good king Josiah, must wait for a second-century John Hyrcanus before they can find an historical context that makes sense" (p.149).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 137 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.