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The Creation of History in Ancient Israel
The Creation of History in Ancient Israel demonstrates how the historian can start to piece together the history of ancient Israel using the Hebrew Bible as a source.
417 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 14, 1995
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October 2, 2011
This book was something of a disappointment. It is essentially six largely-unrelated essays pulled together under an ostensibly overarching premise, all of which is prefaced by a wordy introductory apologetics for the author's particular approach to Biblical criticism.
I don't have any beef with Mr. Brettler's critical methodology. However, I did feel that his introductory chapters presented an author more interested in these methodologies and in their acceptance by the intellectually hip among his peers than he actually is in the results produced by these methodologies.
The individual chapters which display his critical approach in practice - separate analyses of Chronicles, Genesis, Deuteronomy, the Ehud story in Judges, Samuel, and one small section of II Kings - do have their moments of interest. Brettler is a keen close reader of Biblical texts and is able to make compelling cases when delineating between the various sources that have been pulled together to create the Biblical texts with which we are now familiar. Unfortunately, Brettler does little of interest with these close readings. Instead, his primary thesis is simply that the various authors of the Biblical texts had "ideologies." That's it. Even in 1995, when this book was first published, this was not ground-breaking news.
This thesis is re-stated in the concluding chapter of the book - a chapter which pretty much covers everything that the book has to offer. In short, The Creation of History in Ancient Israel is a 144 page book (not counting the copious endnotes - a majority of the material in the book is rightfully credited to other writers) that could have been reduced, without any significant loss of information, to an essay of 10 pages.
I don't have any beef with Mr. Brettler's critical methodology. However, I did feel that his introductory chapters presented an author more interested in these methodologies and in their acceptance by the intellectually hip among his peers than he actually is in the results produced by these methodologies.
The individual chapters which display his critical approach in practice - separate analyses of Chronicles, Genesis, Deuteronomy, the Ehud story in Judges, Samuel, and one small section of II Kings - do have their moments of interest. Brettler is a keen close reader of Biblical texts and is able to make compelling cases when delineating between the various sources that have been pulled together to create the Biblical texts with which we are now familiar. Unfortunately, Brettler does little of interest with these close readings. Instead, his primary thesis is simply that the various authors of the Biblical texts had "ideologies." That's it. Even in 1995, when this book was first published, this was not ground-breaking news.
This thesis is re-stated in the concluding chapter of the book - a chapter which pretty much covers everything that the book has to offer. In short, The Creation of History in Ancient Israel is a 144 page book (not counting the copious endnotes - a majority of the material in the book is rightfully credited to other writers) that could have been reduced, without any significant loss of information, to an essay of 10 pages.
Displaying 1 of 1 review