ABSTRACT
Historical investigations into the southern Levant’s ancient past continue to be galvanized by the recovery of meaningful new evidence from the region. The steady publication of excavation reports and epigraphic finds in the past half-century have brought forth a wealth of data for historians to mine, leading to the development of important studies that have challenged dominant assumptions about the peoples and processes once active in the eastern Mediterranean world during antiquity. The willingness to contest previous historical conclusions on the basis of this new evidence and explore alternative historical explanations has seldom been matched, however, by efforts to reflect on the philosophical commitments and theoretical paradigms that have long guided the way in which the history of the southern Levant has been written.2 Thus, from Heinrich Ewald’s monumental historical undertaking in the mid-19th century to the work of Martin Noth and John Bright a century later, from the influential historical overview by J.M. Miller and John Hayes to the recent, erudite analysis of Mario Liverani,3 historical approaches toward the ancient history of the southern Levant have been marked by a stark linearity in their form and traditional, 19th-century historical interests in their content: the origins of an ethnic community, the rise of the nation-state, the evolutionary trajectory of religious thought and practice, and the influence of “world-historical” figures.4 Among these works, one methodological concern has come to dominate the discussion: the value of the Hebrew Bible as a source for the ancient history of those peoples and cultures referred to within it.
