The Last Legacy of Roland de Vaux

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To English-speaking readers, the late French scholar Roland de Vaux, is known mainly as the author of Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions,1 that massive, erudite, skillfully synthesized, and panoramic treatment of the various forms through which the social, political and religious life of the people of Israel found expression in Biblical times. This standard reference work could only have been written by someone who was at once an accomplished historian of the ancient Near Eastern world, a creative Biblical exegete and a practiced archaeologist. De Vaux was all three. And his long association with the Dominican École […]

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Footnotes

See “Abraham in History,” BAR 03:04.

These stand for Yahwist (J), Elohist (E), the priestly source (P), and Deuteronomist (D).

Of course de Vaux wrote before the discovery of the Ebla archive; on the possible effect of the Ebla materials on the authenticity of Genesis 14, see “Syria Tries To Influence Ebla Scholarship,” BAR 05:02. But see “Ebla Evidence Evaporates,” BAR 05:06.

Endnotes

McGraw Hill, New York, Toronto, London, 1961.

A History of Israel, 2nd edition, Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1972.

A History of Israel, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1958.

Thomas Aquinas Collins, “Père de Vaux and the Old Testament,” BAR 03:02.

Compare Genesis 26:23–25; Genesis 46:5.

Genesis 11:28, Genesis 31; Genesis 15:7; Nehemiah 9:7.

Genesis 41:45, Genesis 41:50; Genesis 46:20.

Genesis 47:13–26.

Exodus 2:21.

10.

Compare Numbers 25:6–9, 16–18; Judges, chapters 6–8.

11.

George Mendenhall, Law and Covenant in Israel and the Ancient Near East, Pittsburgh, 1955; K. Baltzer, The Covenant Formulary, Philadelphia, 1971; D. J. McCarthy, Treaty and Covenant, Rome, 1963; D. R. Hillers, Covenant: The History of a Biblical Idea, Baltimore, 1969.

12.

Das System der zwolf Stamme Israel Stuttgart, 1930; History, op. cit., pp. 85–137.

13.

Compare Joshua, chapter 24.

14.

Compare the list in Numbers, chapter 2.

15.

Compare Harry M. Orlinsky, Oriens Antiquus, I (1962), pp. 11–20.

16.

Compare Judges 17:5; Judges 21:25.