If I Forget You, Jerusalem! - Studies on the Old Testament - Niels Peter Lemche
15. The History of Israel’s Religion and the History of Israel: Identical or Different
If I Forget You, Jerusalem! - Studies on the Old Testament - Niels Peter Lemche
Niels Peter Lemche [+]
University of Copenhagen
Description
The chapter has three main points: 1 The importance of the Old Testament as a source for the history of Israel’s religion and Israel’s general history is extremely limited: if it can be considered a source of knowledge of this religion and history at all, this source is an indirect one only. 2 The methods of reading Old Testament texts no longer rely on some kind of “archaeology of the text”, that digs into the text in order to excavate its oldest stratum in order to isolate a valid source for the study of Israelite religion. 3 Our methodology is under the influence – so-to-speak – of a certain kind of newpositivism, which maintains that we would very much like to possess evidence, facts, data or whatever you may want to call true information from the past. We cannot any longer be satisfied with guesswork, fantasy and hypotheses without basis in extant sources.