Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? by Lester Grabbe

Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? by Lester Grabbe is an overview of archeological, ancient inscriptions, and in general, extra-biblical evidence for the events depicted in the Bible.

For years, Europeans took the bible as the inerrant word of God, as history in the largest and broadest sense.  Beginning in the Age of Enlightenment, this view gradually eroded.   

Advances in philology enabled scholars to see the bible as a patch-work of sorts, a book composed of many documents stitched together by some unknown redactor. 

As a consequence, over the years, the historicity of the bible has been rolled back.  Geology and evolution destroyed the notion of Adam, Eve, Eden.  The pre-flood events in the bible were viewed simple folk stories.  The patriarchs survived for a while, as did the exodus from Egypt, but eventually they succumbed to a lack of evidence.  Without extra-biblical confirmation, events in the bible can’t be viewed as indicative of any verifiable historical event.

This brings us to Grabbe’s book.  He gets us up to speed on all those elements. Taken simply on raw data, Israel, as an entity, can only be verified from evidence outside the bible.  What we get is rather slim. Take the first outside reference to Israel in the the Merneptah Stele, about 1203 BCE.   The next mention of Israel is of King Omri, who ruled the Northern Kingdom of Israel, often known as Samaria, in the Mesha Stele, set up around 840 BCE.

In those 363 years, there is no mention in external sources of a Kingdom of Judah, a united Kingdom of Israel and Judah, David and Solomon.  Grabbe’s intent is clear: without extra-biblical support, it appears that Omri’s Kingdom of Israel-Samaria became a nation before Judah to the south. This is a complete turnaround from the biblical text!

Grabbe gives you this and more.  He shows the reader that what can be proved as reasonably accurate in the biblical text, and what is conjecture or legend, is often miles apart.

Arabaesques - Anton Shammas

Anton Shammas is a Palestinian Christian Arab.  He is well known for the novel Arabesques, written in Hebrew and chronically the history of the Shammas family in both Palestine, Israel and Lebanon.

The novel created a splash when it first came out in the 80s.  Here was Shammas, an Arab writer, writing in the language of Israel’s majority.  The novel also reflects the kind of aesthetic of certain 80s novels, with elements of magic realism and a post-modern structure.   

As the title implies, this book is not only about Arabs, but about arabesques: intricate patterning and motifs.  They often loop around each other, join, and depart.

This makes Arabesques a somewhat complex novel to read, yet Shammas, with his great concern for character and shades of emotional meaning, softens the blow.

No Hour is Identical to Another

Like most Bratslaver literature, Meshivat Nefesh, Restore My Soul, concentrates on uplifting the individual Jewish person from a lowly  to a higher state.

This is done primarily through the knowledge that these “falls and descents and confusions that one is obliged to pass through... before one enters the gates of holiness, all the true tzaddikim and G-d fearing people went through… this.”

In other words, the fall, the descent, is vital to spiritual growth.  This is because God is found in every place in the universe, even in those places typically thought devoid of God.  In those places, the sparks of God are “very hidden, and covered by many garments.”

Rebbe Nachman stresses that a person constantly has the power to “renew and become a truly new creation, for G-d makes new creations every day, and no hour is identical to another.”

Meshivat Nefesh, translated here by Rebbe Yisroel Odeser, contains this germ of Bratslaver Hassidus.  We fall, but we must rise up.  When we rise up, we must bring the fallen sparks of divinity up with us, raising them to the new level.  Prompting them to greater holiness.