There is a long history of scholarship that attributes the origins of the Hebrews to a nomadic lifestyle and that explains manifold biblical norms and literary features as direct reflections of such a society. Roland de Vaux’s classic Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions (1961) is chock full of comparisons to Arab and Bedouin cultures. In 1975, Morris S. Seale, a Christian missionary in Syria and Lebanon and an Arabist, published his book The Desert Bible: Nomadic Tribal Culture and Old Testament Interpretation, where he sought to explicate biblical practices, passages, and terms on the basis of Arabian culture. […]
