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Understanding Ancient Israel (Free PDF)

A book recently published by Oxford is currently available for free download in pdf format.

Understanding the History of Ancient Israel is edited by H. G. M. Williamson and sells for $99, but you can download the individual chapters in restricted pdf format without charge.

As you can see from the list of chapters below, there is quite a mix of archaeologists and biblical scholars. It is an interesting reality that archaeologists typically are more conservative than biblical/historical scholars. On the more conservative side are Mazar, Younger, and Lemaire. Those sometimes identified with the “minimalist” perspective include Whitelam and Davies. All will be thought-provoking, no doubt.

As far as I can tell, there are a couple of downsides to the offer. 1) You have to download each chapter separately, and each one requires about five clicks. (It worked a little faster for me in IE than Firefox.) 2) The pdf files are all locked so that you can’t combine them into a single file (or otherwise copy any of the text; commenting and printing is allowed). I’m guessing that the publisher is offering this as a service to the larger public who wouldn’t purchase this book. Some will discover through this that the book is worth purchasing. It seems like a win-win situation to me, and I am appreciative to the publisher for doing this.

H. G. M. Williamson: Preface; List of Abbreviations
J. W. Rogerson: Setting the Scene: A Brief Outline of Histories of Israel
Keith W. Whitelam: Setting the Scene: A Response to John Rogerson
Hans M. Barstad: The History of Ancient Israel: What Directions Should We Take?
Philip R. Davies: Biblical Israel in the Ninth Century?
Lester L. Grabbe: Some Recent Issues in the Study of the History of Israel
T. P. Wiseman: Classical History: A Sketch, with Three Artefacts
Chase F. Robinson: Early Islamic History: Parallels and Problems
Amélie Kuhrt: Ancient Near Eastern History: The Case of Cyrus the Great of Persia
David Ussishkin: Archaeology of the Biblical Period: On Some Questions of Methodology and Chronology of the Iron Age
Amihai Mazar: The Spade and the Text: The Interaction between Archaeology and Israelite History Relating to the Tenth–Ninth Centuries BCE
Christoph Uehlinger: Neither Eyewitnesses, Nor Windows to the Past, but Valuable Testimony in its own Right: Remarks on Iconography, Source Criticism and Ancient Data-processing
M. J. Geller: Akkadian Sources of the Ninth Century
K. Lawson Younger, Jr: Neo-Assyrian and Israelite History in the Ninth Century: The Role of Shalmaneser III
André Lemaire: West Semitic Inscriptions and Ninth-Century BCE Ancient Israel
Marc Zvi Brettler: Method in the Application of Biblical Source Material to Historical Writing (with Particular Reference to the Ninth Century BCE)
Graeme Auld: Reading Kings on the Divided Monarchy: What Sort of Narrative?
Rainer Albertz: Social History of Ancient Israel
Bernard S. Jackson: Law in the Ninth Century: Jehoshaphat’s ‘Judicial Reform’
Nadav Na’aman: The Northern Kingdom in the Late Tenth–Ninth Centuries BCE

Oxford has more on the book here. The short description reads:

In popular presentation, some treat the Bible as a reliable source for the history of Israel, while others suggest that archaeology has shown that it cannot be trusted at all. This volume debates the issue of how such widely divergent views have arisen and will become an essential source of reference for the future.

HT: Tell es-Safi/Gath Weblog

Tagged Resources

Excavation Opportunities in 2008

If this is your summer to volunteer on an archaeological excavation, then a great resource is FindADig.com from the Biblical Archaeology Society. Many digs around Israel and in other countries are listed, with details on dates, cost, and requirements. There are many good options, but if pressed my top recommendations would be Hazor, Gezer, and Gath. If you don’t have much money or time, check out the Temple Mount sifting operation. Most excavations are summer projects, but you can dig on Mount Zion in March.

Excavations at Gezer, June 2006

Tagged Opportunities

Bethlehem Brawl

I suppose that Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas without the monks at the place of Jesus’ birth duking it out.

For a quarter of an hour bearded and robed priests laid into each other with fists, brooms and iron rods while the photographers who had come to take pictures of the annual cleaning ceremony recorded the whole event.

Tagged Not an April Fool's Joke

Qumran Excavation Report

The Israel Antiquities Authority has posted the preliminary report (pdf) of the Qumran excavations (1993-2004) by Yitzhak Magen and Yuval Peleg. You may recall that a recent article in Biblical Archaeology Review indicated that these archaeologists conclude that Qumran was a pottery manufacturing site, not the home of the Essenes. They state their motivation for this report in the preface:

We felt it necessary to separately publish this article due to the fact that until now, most of the discussion regarding our new theory on the nature of the site has been in newspapers–in articles not initiated by us–and has been based upon unsubstantiated evidence from certain scholars.

The report is well written and illustrated with many beautiful photographs and drawings.

Tagged Resources

Excavations of Herodian Ruins at Dhahab (Penuel/Mahanaim)

Many will probably quickly skip over this article, but those who have visited or studied the sites of Penuel and Mahanaim will be interested, though the article mentions neither possible identification. Excavations have (finally!) begun at Tall adh-Dhahab, often identified by biblical scholars as the place where Jacob wrestled with the angel, where David fled from Absalom, and where Jeroboam built his Transjordanian capital. But what was not known (at least to me) was the Herodian attraction to the site. This makes perfect sense, given its history. A professor of theology at Technische Universität Dortmund began work last year. From their recent press release.

This year Thomas Pola, professor for theology at TU Dortmund, and his team have continued the excavations in the East Jordan Land. With their findings on the mountain Tall adh-Dhahab (West) in the Jabbok Valley the archeologists could substantiate one assumption: everything points to the fact that the building remains from the Hellenistic and Roman era, found in 2006, were part of a yet unknown monumental building of Herod the Great (73-4 BC).
This assumption is based on the floors of one of the discovered peristyle yards (yards enclosed by continuous columns) which the archeologists were able to excavate. Prof. Pola sees the parallels with the architecture of Herod’s West Jordan Alexandreion as prove that there also was a monumental building of Herod the Great on the plateau of the mountain Tall adh-Dhahab. That would mean that in addition to his reign over the West Jordan Land, the Jewish king had a security system with which he could have controlled the ancient long-distance traffic in the middle Jordan Valley and the access ways to the plateau of the East Jordan Land.
Above that, the team of Prof. Pola for the first time discovered a layer from the late Bronze Age or the Early Iron Age on a natural terrace directly underneath the plateau. The ruins of a tower from the city wall at least show three building phases. “On the level of the oldest building phase we took samples from a burnt layer. A C14-analysis carried out by Prof. Manfred Bayer (Physics at TU Dortmund) showed that the charcoal originates from the time 1300 to 1000 BC. At this location we will continue to work in 2008.”
Finally Prof. Pola’s team discovered the purpose of the monumental military facility half way up the mountain: it is a casemate wall. It is supposed to have been finished in Roman times. This is yet another argument for the identification of the mountain with the stronghold Amathous mentioned in the ancient world. The historian Josephus (37 to 100 AD) described Amathous as the biggest stronghold in the East Jordan Land.

The press release continues here.

Tall adh-Dhahab West, identified by some as biblical Mahanaim and by others (including myself) as Penuel

Tagged Discoveries

Dead Sea Scrolls to be Re-Photographed

This story is from the Financial Times. The best sentence is the last.

The Dead Sea scrolls, the most potent source of our knowledge of Judaism and early Christianity, are to be digitised for the internet in a project that could take up to five years. It will involve the manipulation of some 15,000 scraps of leather or papyrus, some no bigger than a speck of dust. Project leader Simon Tanner, of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London, said the difficulty of photographing the scrolls would be deepened by the fact that in many cases there is little contrast between the writing and the material on which it is written. The team would be using a digital camera offering up to 20 times more resolution than a conventional model and an infra-red camera that would enable the script to be more easily read against the background. Tanner said he had worked on more than 450 digitisation projects and the scrolls were the most technically challenging he had faced. The Israel Antiquities Authority faced complex handling and conservation issues in making the scrolls available for digitisation. The publication of the scrolls was completed in 2001 after a period of 35 years in which they were monopolised by a group of scholars. They have been photographed only once before, in the 1950s. Now the intention is to make them available to amateurs and professionals alike, allowing people to manipulate the images of the fragments in a number of different ways.

HT: Joe Lauer