The Book List provides short reviews of up to 500 books a year. It includes publications not only on the Old Testament directly but also on many related areas, including archaeology, epigraphy, Hebrew and related Semitic languages (especially Northwest Semitic), relevant ancient Near Eastern history and literature, the Hellenistic world, early Judaism, and social anthropology. The main value of the Book List is its comprehensiveness and its immediacy, in that it is usually among the first periodicals to review a book.

Urbanism in ancient society has now become an important topic for both classical and ancient Near Eastern scholars. Equally, the question of prophecy as social institution and literary corpus has been increasingly problematized. The essays in this volume bring together these crucial aspects of modern biblical research, the scope ranging from methodological issues about sociology and urbanism to Assyrian prophecies and specific biblical texts. An introductory chapter surveys recent anthropological study on urbanism, summarizes the essays, and places the different contributions in...

In a methodological discussion of this issue, the contributors cover a range of topics, from ancient poltics to modern ideology. The entity known as 'the Exile' has had an extremely forceful influence in Old Testament scholarship, both as an event and as a symbol. But was there an 'Exile'? And if so, how did it fit into the pattern of population deportations that characterized the imperial strategies of the ancient Near East? In a major methodological discussion of this issue, the contributors to this symposium of the European Seminar in Historical Methodology cover a range of topics, from...

For more than a decade the European Seminar in Historical Methodology has debated the history of ancient Israel (or Palestine or the Southern Levant, as some prefer). A number of different topics have been the focus of discussion and published collections, but several have centered on historical periods. The really seminal period--one of great debates over a number of different topics--is the four centuries between the Late Bronze II and Iron IIA, but it seemed appropriate to leave it toward the end of the various historical periods. It was also important to give a prominent place to...

This is the second volume of the projected four-volume history of the Second Temple period. It is axiomatic that there are large gaps in the history of the Persian period, but the early Greek period is possibly even less known. This volume brings together all we know about the Jews during the period from Alexander's conquest to the eve of the Maccabaean revolt, including the Jews in Egypt as well as the situation in Judah. Based directly on the primary sources, which are surveyed, the study addresses questions such as administration, society, religion, economy, jurisprudence, Hellenism...

Lester L. Grabbe provides a concise and up-to-date introduction to the books of Kings, covering all the historical and interpretative issues. Grabbe pays particular attention to how the history of ancient Israel can be reconstructed (or not as the case may be) through the text, and introduces students to the key ways of reading the books of Kings as religious and political history.

Grabbe takes a chronological approach (according to the text) and provides overviews of the key periods of Israel's history. The nature of the 'Deuteronomistic History' and how well this theory of...