Scholars Disagree: Can You Name the Panel with the Israelites?
Rainey’s Challenge
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Footnotes
B.C.E. (Before the Common Era), used by this author, is the altemate designation corresponding to B.C. often used in scholarly literature.
See Hershel Shanks,
Even the most recent fundamentalist attempts to invent a pseudo Ai (John J. Bimson and David Livingston, “Redating the Exodus,” BAR 13:05) or to prove Joshua’s conquest of Jericho (Bryant G. Wood, “Did the Israelites Conquer Jericho?” BAR 16:02 and “Dating Jericho’s Destruction: Bienkowski Is Wrong on All Counts,” BAR 16:05 respectively) are exercises in science fiction.
Endnotes
Every generation of Old Testament scholars seems to look for a new panacea around which to chase their tails. Gottwald gave them just such a panacea for the 1980s; see my review of Gottwald’s The Tribes of Israel in Journal of the American Oriental Society 107/3 (1987), pp. 541–543.
Israel Finkelstein, The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1988). See also the review by Douglas L. Esse, Books in Brief, BAR 14:05, and Israel Finkelstein, “Searching for Israelite Origins,” BAR 14:05.
In a paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research in New Orleans, November 1990. See G. W. Ahlstrom and Diana Edelman, “Memeptah’s Israel,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 44 (1985), pp. 59–61, see also Hershel Shanks, “When 5,613 Scholars Get Together in One Place—The Annual Meeting, 1990,” BAR 17:02.