Thomas Evan Levy - Historical Biblical Archaeology and the Future: The New Pragmatism

The New Pragmatism

The New Pragmatism

edited by

Thomas E. Levy

First published 2010 by Equinox, an imprint of Acumen

Published 2014 by Routledge

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Thomas E. Levy 2010

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Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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Typeset by Forthcoming Publications Ltd

Visionary, patron of archaeology in the Levant, and dear friend

With affection

TEL

Thomas E. Levy

I.
INTO THE FUTURENEW TRENDS IN HISTORICAL BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY

Thomas E. Levy

Shlomo Bunimovitz and Avraham Faust

Avraham Faust

David Ilan

Aaron A. Burke

II.
SOME APPLICATIONS

Miroslav Brta

Aaron J. Brody

Assaf Yasur-Landau

Ann E. Killebrew

Eveline J. van der Steen

Daniel A. Frese and Thomas E. Levy

III.
FROM TEXT TO TURF

Tara Carter and Thomas E. Levy

William M. Schniedewind

Ronald Hendel

Baruch Halpern

Jodi Magness

IV.
IN PERSPECTIVE

Aren Maeir

Richard Elliott Friedman

David Goodblatt

Jodi Magness

Alexander H. Joffe

William G. Dever

Thomas E. Levy

The archaeology of the southern Levant is synonymous with the Holy Landthe region that includes modern Israel, Jordan, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Syria, and the Sinai Peninsula. This land bridge between Africa and southwest Asia and the two core areas of ancient Near Eastern civilizationEgypt and Mesopotamiahas played a central role in the evolution of human societies from the emergence of modern humans in the Middle Paleolithic over 200,000 years ago to the changing dynamics of global politics today. Relatively recently in this long sequence of social change, some 6,000 years ago, scholars begin to trace the origins of Monotheism and the Abrahamic tradition that is so central to three of the great world religionsJudaism, Christianity, and Islam. To be fair, there are other Holy Lands around the world from Indias fertile Tamil Nadu region to the peak of Mt. Shasta in northern California. However, statistics from the Encyclopedia Britannica indicate that over 50% of the world population belongs to one of the monotheistic religions whose roots are in the ancient Near East. The Hebrew Bible or Old Testament is central to these three great religions in different ways and levels of commitment. Written primarily in Biblical Hebrew and some Aramaic, the Hebrew Bible is the Jewish Bible. In Christianity, the Old Testament forms the first of the two-part Christian Biblical canon. For Islam, both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament are regarded as divinely revealed works and Muslims are especially familiar with biblical personages and events as presented in the Koran. This very short apologia is a simple testimony to the fact that there are an incredibly large number of people on the planet who have a direct or indirect relationship with the Hebrew Bibleas a sacred text that continues to play an unusually powerful role in Western and Middle Eastern culture from religion to the arts. For these reasons, there is a huge audience, religious and secular, interested in the historicity of the Hebrew Bible.