This study shows how the true history of ancient Palestine has been obscured by the search for Israel. The author demonstrates how ancient Israel has been invented by scholars in the image of a European nation state, influenced by the realization of the state of Israel in 1948. The text explores the theological and political assumptions which have shaped research into ancient Israel by Biblical scholars, and contributed to the network of scholarship which Said identified as Orientalist discourse. This study concentrates on two periods from the end of the late Bronze Age to the Iron Age, a...

The Invention of Ancient Israel shows how the true history of ancient Palestine has been obscured by the search for Israel. Keith W. Whitelam shows how ancient Israel has been invented by scholars in the image of a European nation state, influenced by the realisation of the state of Israel in 1948. He explores the theological and political assumptions which have shaped research into ancient Israel by Biblical scholars, and contributed to the vast network of scholarship which Said identified as 'Orientalist discourse'.
This study concentrates on two crucial periods from the end of...

The quest for the historical Jesus has invariably tried to make senseof his world by constructing what it considers to be the historiclandscapes that he inhabited. These essays explore how we do notcreate an actual past or rediscover an actual landscape with its townsand villages but 'imaginary homelands' that allow us to inhabit andpossess the past.The papers in this volume explore the ways in which constructionsof the Holy Land as homeland have been mediated through historytextbooks, geographies and maps, and continue to exert an influenceon contemporary scholarship. The complex...