The Hebrew Bible Reborn : From Holy Scripture to the Book of Books

This work, the first of its kind, describes all the aspects of the Bible revolution in Jewish history in the last two hundred years, as well as the emergence of the new biblical culture. It describes the circumstances and processes that turned Holy Scripture into the Book of Books and into the history of the biblical period and of the Jewish people. It deals with the encounter of the Jews with modern biblical criticism, the archaeological research of the Ancient Near East, with contemporary archaeology, the Bible-Babel polemic at the start of the twentieth century, and the use of the bible as a "guide to life" in education, culture and politics.