Endnote 11 – Were the Early Israelites Pastoral Nomads?

There is the additional difficulty that the patriarchal traditions simply do not lend themselves to synchronization with specific historical or archaeological periods, as recently revealed in detail by Thomas L. Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: the Quest for the Historical Abraham (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974) and John Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven: Yale, 1975).