Steven Weitzman > Quotes

“shares much in common with Wellhausen’s approach. Like Wellhausen, it too is highly skeptical of biblical texts as a historical source, especially their testimony about the origin of Israel. Another parallel with Wellhausen is the fact that Davies and other scholars want to see the Persian period as a critical era in the formation of biblical literature. By treating biblical Israel as a figment of Persian-era imaginations, their thesis even calls to mind Wellhausen’s description of postexilic Jews as a people that has fabricated its connection to the past, though they apply”
― Steven Weitzman, The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age

“Documentary Hypothesis to reconstruct the origin of Judaism in the way Wellhausen did, but there may be an even more basic reason that the source-critical study of the Hebrew Bible has lost its methodological power in this regard. The use of source criticism in this way, as we have”
― Steven Weitzman, The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age

“a record of the real experiences of a real people from before the Babylonian exile; it is the past as imagined by immigrants newly settled in the Persian province of Yehud. There did exist a historical Israel—the”
― Steven Weitzman, The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age

“Hebrews as a simple and spontaneous people. Others have noted that his portrait of D bears the imprint of the liberalism of his day and”
― Steven Weitzman, The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age

“the Merneptah Stele and other extrabiblical sources from the Iron Age. But the Persian-era community of Yehud did not directly develop out of that Israel, inventing its memories of”
― Steven Weitzman, The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age