Theology

Story and History

The Kings of Israel and Judah in Context
Ed. by Johannes Unsok Ro

[Erzählung und Geschichte. Die Könige Israels und Judas im Kontext.]

2019. XI, 190 pages.

Forschungen zum Alten Testament 2. Reihe 105

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Published in English.
Is the Hebrew Bible still an important source that contains significant evidence and trustworthy information about the historical reality of ancient Israel? Or has most, if not all, of the historicity of the Hebrew Bible simply collapsed so that we can no longer use it as a historical source at all? This volume provides insightful findings concerning these questions.
In recent centuries, and especially the last decades, critical scholarship on the Hebrew Bible has brought to light a large gap between biblical portrayals of the historical reality of ancient Israel (story) on the one hand, and historical-critical reconstructions of the actual past (history) on the other. The scientific presentation of ancient Israel's history can no longer be considered as a more or less critical narration of the accounts in the Hebrew Bible. The problems the so-called »minimalists« and »maximalists« struggled to solve still remain unsettled, and students as well as scholars of the Hebrew Bible cannot ignore or even remain indifferent to the gap and overlap between story and history. Could and should Hebrew Bible scholarship in the future move beyond the milieu of the debate between minimalists and maximalists? This volume, consisting of nine articles by authors with different institutional and religious backgrounds, articulates that there are ways to overcome the increasing gap between story and history.
Survey of contents
Johannes Unsok Ro: Introduction: The Gap and Overlap between Story and History – Israel Finkelstein: History, Historicity and Historiography in Ancient Israel – Shuichi Hasegawa: The Qualification of Evaluations of the Kings of Israel and Judah in the Books of Kings – Thomas Römer: Biblical Historiography and History: The Books of Kings – Jin H. Han: Josiah's Death in Megiddo: A Touchstone Case of Historiography – Konrad Schmid: The Conquests of Jerusalem 597 BCE and 587 BCE in History and in Biblical Interpretation (2 Kings 24–25) – Johannes Unsok Ro: Did Jeremiah Preach at the Temple of Jerusalem in the Year 609 BCE? – An Inquiry into the 'Deuteronomistic Editorial Layer' in the Book of Jeremiah – Yigal Levin: The Chronicler as an Historian: The Chronicler's Reinterpretation of the Deuteronomistic History of Israel – Yoshinori Sano: The Meeting of Croesus and Solon in Herodotus' Histories I
Authors/Editors

Johannes Unsok Ro Born 1971; 1998 MA in Theological Studies; 2002 Dr. theol. in Old Testament; 2007 MDiv; currently Professor of Biblical Studies and Director of the Institute for the Study of Christianity and Culture at International Christian University, Japan.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1835-3093

Reviews

The following reviews are known:

In: Journal for the Study of the OT — 45 (2021) (George Nicol)
In: Review of Biblical Literature — https://www.bookreviews.org/ (6/2020) (John W. Herbst)
In: Etudes Théologiques et Réligieuses — 96 (2021), pp. 391–392 (Francisco Martins)
In: Old Testament Abstracts — 43 (2020), S. 536 (C.T.B.)
In: Theologische Literaturzeitung — 145 (2020), pp. 633–635 (Kristin Weingart)
In: The Polish Journal of Bibl. Research — 18 (2019), pp. 192–195 (Zdzislaw J. Kapera)
In: Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (ZAW) — 132 (2020), S. 201 (Uwe Becker)
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