The Ethnography of Palestine and the Bible: Changing Perceptions and Methodological Possibilities

EMANUEL PFOH

Basilea

Conferencia; 'Alttestamentlich-Semitistisches Kolloquium' - Universität Basel. Gastvorlesung: The Ethnography of Palestine and the Bible: Changing Perceptions and Methodological Possibilities - 2nd June 2021; 2021

Alttestamentlich-Semitistisches Kolloquium, Theologische Fakultät, Universität Basel

This communication offers, in a first place, an overview of the ethnographic notices, reports and interpretations made by Western travellers and scholars visiting and exploring Palestine during the 19th and early 20th centuries. These insights are particularly relevant considering the connection they establish between landscapes and human individuals and communities and the biblical past?belonging to both the Old and New Testaments?in the sense of providing a historicist confirmation of biblical situations and customs. This sort of connection between a textual ancient past and an ethnographic present has, however, long been criticised by social anthropologists as betraying ethnocentric interpretations. But beyond such correct criticism, it is nonetheless possible to gain some insight from this modern ´biblical ethnography´. The second part of the presentation therefore advances some arguments for overcoming the interpretive limitations and problems of this previous perception regarding (1) the possibilities of ethnographic interpretations of biblical stories, situations and themes, and (2) the possibility of producing an historical anthropology of ancient Palestine in the Iron Age as an alternative historiography to the usual ´histories of ancient Israel´.