Beyond Ancient Israel: Towards a Historiography of the Southern Levant in Pre-Hellenistic Antiquity

EMANUEL PFOH

Roma

Conferencia; Conference 'Beyond Ancient Israel: Towards a Historiography of the Southern Levant in Pre-Hellenistic Antiquity', Università degli Studi di Roma 'La Sapienza' (Roma, Italia), 7 de marzo de 2023; 2023

Università degli Studi di Roma

The 'history of Israel' as a historiographical genre in ancient Near Eastern and Biblical studies has had an undisputed dominance over the way in which the past of the Southern Levant was accounted for during the past 150 years. In other words, we know about the past of the region during the late second millennium and the whole first millennium BCE in some way or the other through biblical lenses: the biblical narrative dictates to a greater or lesser degree preliminary chronologies and periods, themes, topics and events, and even cognitive research maps. However, since the 1970s, and especially since the 1990s, a new paradigm for the ancient history of the region has emerged, setting the biblical narrative aside of the historical reconstructions, at least as a main primary source for the historical past of the Southern Levant. This communication explores the meaning of this new historical paradigm for the history of the region in pre-Hellenistic times, its dislocation of 'ancient Israel' as a central concern in this past, and the revised ways in which a new kind of historiography, integrating the Hebrew Bible and the archaeology of the region, may be pursued.