The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology And The Myth Of Israel
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- $28.99
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- $28.99
Publisher Description
The Jewish people's historical claims to a small area of land bordering the eastern Mediterranean are not only the foundation for the modern state of Israel, they are also at the very heart of Judeo-Christian belief. Yet in The Mythic Past, Thomas Thompson argues that such claims are grounded in literary myth, not history. Among the author's startling conclusions are these: There never was a "united monarch" of Israel in biblical times -- We can no longer talk about a time of the Patriarchs -- The entire notion of "Israel" and its history is a literary fiction. The Mythic Past provides refreshing new ways to read the Old Testament as the great literature it was meant to be. At the same time, its controversial conclusions about Jewish history are sure to prove incendiary in a worldwide debate about one of the world's seminal texts, and one of its most bitterly contested regions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It is most appropriate that Thompson, who has been a professor of Old Testament at the University of Copenhagen since 1993, takes up the metaphor of Lego blocks to describe a narrative strategy common to the variety of texts that make up biblical literature: a tiny collection of simple shapes imaginatively combined to create an explosion of possible worlds. Thompson writes passionately, persuasively and provocatively, as, for example, when he notes that "it is only as history that the Bible does not make sense." He notes that history demands evidence, not plausibility. It is, in fact, fiction that demands plausibility--and this is the basis for Thompson's eloquent argument on behalf of a literary approach to biblical material. One thing the Bible does not claim to be, he maintains, is history. To read it as such is to distort it, and to inform archeological and historical research with such a reading compounds the distortion. In Thompson's words, "the misappropriation of ancient texts for purposes contrary to the tradition's intentions, which two generations of theological use of the Bible have now encouraged, is one of those common abuses of intellect" that "contributes to the pollution of the ocean of our language.". Thompson's book is sure to generate significant discussion, and it should be of interest not only to students of biblical literature but to general readers fascinated both by "how stories talk about the past" and by how they form our present.
