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Monday, July 16, 2018

Davies on (mental) biblical maps

THE BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION:
Mapping Palestine

The effort of rationalizing biblical time-maps into the semblance of a critical modern history, as was the custom until late in the twentieth century, has thus been abandoned by all but a few scholars. Instead, we are obliged to see biblical narratives of the past as testimonies to the ways in which the creators of those texts imagined worlds and stories where their Israel and its deity played out their identities and their destinies—and would continue to do so.

Chapter from: History, Politics and the Bible from the Iron Age to the Media Age (T&T Clark, 2018).

By Philip R Davies (1945-2018)
Palestine Exploration Fund
Emeritus, University of Sheffield
July 2018
For more on the work and career of the late Philip R. Davies, see here and links.

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