ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses recent scholarly contributions to the history of Palestine in Western academia. The heated debates about the historicity and use of the Bible for archeological, epigraphic, ethnographic and sociological interpretations have not left much room for the still more pertinent debate of “history of Palestine” versus “history of Israel”. It is ironic that a majority of both maximalist and minimalist titles contain the name “Israel”, “Ancient Israel” or “Biblical Israel” when, in most cases, the ancient historical Israel is discussed only within the perimeters of a paradigmatic and literary all-Israel ideology. The limited few titles containing the name “Palestine” or “Canaan”, dealing with ancient history, confirm the matter. The disproportionate attention given to “biblical” and “Israelite” history, in most cases told from a “Judean” perspective, over against other peoples in Palestine, is still prevalent. Scholarly focus on Ancient Israel has silenced Palestinian history and served agendas promoting the formation of modern Israel. Ancient Israel, however, is neither biblical nor historical, but a creation based on historical investigation of a literary product: “In seeking to impose what is literary upon a time and place that are historical, biblical scholarship and its own “ancient Israel” betray both literature and history” (Davies 1992: 16). It is, however, not only “non-Jewish”, history which has been silenced, but histories also of the Bible’s own peoples, and here, perhaps most notably, those of the descendants of the ancient kingdom of Israel. Advising that a true distinction be made between a Historical Israel, Biblical Israels and Ancient Israel, this article attempts a departure for a history of Palestine based on sound academic premises rather than the ideologically based conflation and harmonization of sources, which today dominates the field.
