ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a number of functional problems that are relevant to the study of the historical periods. The lack of documentary sources is an especially serious problem for the earliest periods of Jewish history. This problem of the dearth of source materials is not limited only to the earliest periods of Jewish history, the era prior to the establishment of the monarchy. Thus it is virtually impossible to write a historiography of ancient Israel independent of the Biblical tradition. Most contemporary historians state that the First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in the year 586 bce, but the sages of the Talmud, basing themselves on the chronology of Rabbi Jose ben Halafta’s Seder Olam Rabba, assign its destruction to the year 421 bce, a disparity of 165 years. The chapter cites the conventional academic dates and suggests that the reader use caution when reading that the Talmud ascribed a statement or a development to a certain rabbi.
