1996

At a meeting of the Nordiberische Arbeitsgemeinschaft in the spring of 1993, as I presented the first draft of the article ‘Is It Still Possible to Write a History of Ancient Israel?’, Klaus Koch correctly drew the conclusion that, after having removed most if not all of Israel's pre-state history, it was natural and logical to take aim at the so-called United Monarchy. There is no longer any reason to consider this a period, which, from a historian's point of view, is acceptable as presented in the Old Testament.

At this conference, several contributors had already addressed the question of how Israel became a state. The sophistication of their approach differed from scholar to scholar, but the general outcome was that a naive acceptance of the biblical story as history cannot be accepted anymore. Scholars, especially, should no longer be dragged around by the nose by pietistic colleagues, or even by biblical storytellers who, far better than modern readers, knew the importance of a story, and who probably never had been interested in giving us historical facts about the ‘days of old’.

As I wrote this paper, I did not have more than a vague idea of the other contributions to this conference and, accordingly, I will here only refer to what has already been published elsewhere. The two studies of David Jamieson-Drake and Michael Niemann are of special interest as they both reached almost the same conclusion – though by different approaches – that there was no state in Judea during the tenth century BCE.