Brilliant Book

EVERY so often one comes across a gem of a book that is difficult to put down and is worth every penny of its relatively high price.

Lester Grabbe's Ancient Israel: What Do We Know And How Do We Know It? is very much in that category, at least as far as I am concerned.

Rather than being a history of Bronze Age Hebrews, it is a book setting out the various arguments that need to be addressed by anyone writing such a history.

Grabbe wanted to call the book Prolegomena To A History Of Israel, and that gives some idea of his learning, which at times he does not wear lightly, and of his intentions.

Prolegomena is the plural of prolegomenon, which is a fancy way of saying introduction or preliminary discussion.

Presumably his publishers, Bloomsbury, put their collective foot down and went for the more catchy title that the book bears.

Ancient Israel - the revised second edition, which I got by post for £27.21 from Books Etc

Grabbe, who was born in America but lectures at Hull University on the Hebrew Bible and Early Judaism, comes across as passionate but detached - in other words, someone deeply immersed in his favourite subject, but without an axe to grind.

A long-running debate on the Hebrew Bible, or what Christians call the Old Testament, divides many historians into minimalists and maximalists.

[There are extreme fringes on both sides, ie those who reckon the Bible is more-or-less a fairy tale, and those who believe it to be the direct word of God.]

Grabbe's take on this debate is to insist on the primacy of primary sources, the main one for him being archaeology.

He regards the Hebrew Bible as a secondary source and, though I doubt he would like the label, is very much a minimalist when it comes to what the Bible has to say about kings David and Solomon, and to what it has to say about what occurred before them.

But from the time of Omri, who almost 3,000 years ago ruled the northern kingdom of Israel, which the Assyrians referred to as the House of Omri, Grabbe leans much more to the maximalist side.

This is not really the to place to give my take on the debate, but I found Grabbe's discussion of the points fascinating, even when I was reluctant to accept his conclusions.

Grabbe's book is one I look forward to continually dipping back into, and can be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in ancient history, and especially anyone with an interest in biblical times.

But it certainly helps to have read the Old Testament, and so have some idea of the characters at the centre of the debate.