Jerusalem has always been in our heart. From the oldest text we know of about Jerusalem, Ps 137, Jerusalem is something we remember. This is not different even when poems are written about Jerusalem by people living in the city. Should it remain in our heart? Is the Jerusalem in our heart more important than the Jerusalem of reality?

Time is concept with more than one meaning. We have the precise reckoning of time, e.g., when does a train leave or arrive, and we have different idea about the time as the right moment of something. The second use is also a narrative phenomenon when time is used to structure a narrative. We find ideas about time in the Bible where we also find examples of the importance of imagined time to create history.

Justice was the key concept in the Ancient Near East. Even God had to abide to its rules, thus when he created the world. Justice existed before creation. It demanded that, in Akkadian, kittum and mišarim, in Hebrew ṩedeq and mišpåṭ, “right and justice”, should prevail among humans.

Handel’s oratorio “Messiah” is founded on the Book of Isaiah, or rather on the messianic interpretation of the book before the introduction of historical critical analysis of the Bible. However, what if it is really a book inspired by messianic theology and not a book written by a prophet who lived in the 8th century B.C.E.? The present revolution in Old Testament studies points in the direction of an messianic understanding already when the book was composed, not in Jerusalem around 800 B.C.E but many centuries later.

It has always been popular to study how biblical literature was rewritten in later writings beginning with Jewish rewriting from antiquity. The focus in this chapter is rewriting within the Old Testament itself which both involves the rewriting of stories of the Bible but also in the rewriting of Israel’s history in Chronicles based on the deuteronomistic version. However, also non-biblical literature was rewritten, such as the Gilgamash epos in the story of the flood in Genesis.

Does Ps 2 have its background in the time of King David, or does it belong to the times of the Ptolemaic Empire? Or perhaps sometime in between? We clearly find elements of the Egyptian royal ideology in Ps 2, but also of other ideas about royalty prevalent in Western Asia. In light of the present rewriting of the history of Israel the psalm is hardly from the time of a non-existent Israelite empire in the 10th century BCE. It more likely belongs to the Ptolemaic period. Then issue arises: Is the psalm messianic?

In continuation of the discussion about the origins of Ps 2 in the previous chapter, the discussion here centres on the issue of the function of Ps 2 as an introduction in combination with Ps 1 to the collection of psalms. The key issue centres around the address at the beginning of Ps 2 to the king as messiah. Maybe it is a link to the idea that the collection should be read as a messianic collection.

Sociology helps to create a sociological type of a prophet which differs totally from the prophetical figures which we encounter in the Old Testament. The material from the Ancient Near East – not least Mari – describes a prophet as a religious specialist not very highly regarded by the religious establishment. The biblical prophets are preachers, not really prophets. They are the creation of literary imagination.

What is the difference between cultural (or – perhaps – collective memory) and history? Basically the difference is a modern invention dependent on the emergence of modern historical method since the 19th century. Before c. 1800 history was story, and the story had educational purposes: It had as its task to establish a feeling of cohesion within a society. Biblical historiography is accordingly not history in any modern sense; it is cultural memory.

Biblical scholars of the old school, i.e. exclusively subscribing to historical-critical methods, have seldom been interested in sociological matters. They never understood the changes that had taken place on twenty century scholarship where the most interesting advancement has been the development of the behavioral sciences, not least sociology. Instead they created a meta-universe of ancient Israel, a society that never existed except in their own fantasy.

In Homer the probably only reference that points at something left over from the Mycenean world is the wild boar helmet in the home of Meriones (Iliad X, 260–271 ). Otherwise the Homeric epic is made up of sundry fragments and small stories joined together without any regard for the historical background. In Old Testament historical research the scholars have tried to distinguish between primary and secondary sources in the best historical-critical tradition. But without much success. Although here and there we are confronted with historical information (e.g. Tiglatpileser III’s reaarangements in western Syrie in around 730 BCE, and Sennacherib’s attack on Jerusalem in 701 BCE), the biblical narrative is quite useless as a historical source of the past. The narrative is obviously constructed by its authors from bits and pieces with their own prehistory.

Poor Ezra: No family, no history and no book: No family name and reputation left for him, no date of arrival indicated that can be trusted. The whole story of Ezra and his mission is a incredible mixture of unbelievable elements. The “facts” presented lead nowhere and his family links are spurious.

The first part of a resumé of “what happened” when the Copenhagen School took over. It was first published in 1994. The second half which follows here, takes up the thread, however after another twenty years. It is tripartite, with three interconnected essays on the past, the present and the future. The past gives an expression of how theories current in those days were undermined by new studies by students in Copenhagen establishing the fact “that we have all been brainwashed by the deuteronomists” –adopting uncritically their historical narrative, the second centers about the situation c.1990 when everything seemed to be in shambles, while the third part includes “prophecies” about how Old Testament studies would develop in the future.

The second part of the review of recent tendencies in biblical studies. If anything the developments have been even more marked than expected back in 1994. Every accepted position from the past is under attack.

The chapter has three main points: 1 The importance of the Old Testament as a source for the history of Israel’s religion and Israel’s general history is extremely limited: if it can be considered a source of knowledge of this religion and history at all, this source is an indirect one only. 2 The methods of reading Old Testament texts no longer rely on some kind of “archaeology of the text”, that digs into the text in order to excavate its oldest stratum in order to isolate a valid source for the study of Israelite religion. 3 Our methodology is under the influence – so-to-speak – of a certain kind of newpositivism, which maintains that we would very much like to possess evidence, facts, data or whatever you may want to call true information from the past. We cannot any longer be satisfied with guesswork, fantasy and hypotheses without basis in extant sources.

Does the ancient understanding of geography concur with modern ideas? Ancient humans did not share our ideas. They had not experienced any modern “romantic” remoulding of the nature around us – nature would rather be understood as the nature of the human mind. Nature in the ancient sense was a dangerous place to be avoided. Greek and Roman tradition shows a remarkable interest in the landscape as evidenced in Pliny the Older, Pausanias and Strabon but also in Caesar’s Commentaries. The Bible shows, however, little interest in such matters. There are very few examples of what Pierre Nora classifies as lieux de mémoire, places to remember.

It is hardly a coincidence that the discipline “the history of Israel” originated in Germany in the 19th century, in the centre of fast growing European nationalism. In this way it was German scholars who created the idea of a historical Israel not as much as a reflection over the past as a projection of their own national aspirations. In this way the wanderings of the tribes of Israel through the desert to the cultivated land could be compared to the wanderings of German tribes when Antiquity developed into the dark ages of Europe, and the conquest of Palestine by Israelite tribes could be compared to Germanic tribes assuming power in central and northern Europe.

Precisely because of modern human beings’ ideological obsession with the Bible we have been prevented from seeing the images of the Bible as ideological constructs themselves.

Sociology in stricto sensu as it is understood today means the study of behavioral patterns in contemporary – mostly Western societies. In the Anglo-Saxon world the historical ramifications of sociology developed into social anthropology, cultural anthropology as well as processional anthropology – to limit the number to three branches – there are more. These different types of sociology imply different methods, and the sociological analyses also of biblical material is dependent of the type of sociology used by the researcher. The example presented is Rainer Albertz’s use of the concept of family religion.

272 BCE is the first an until now only indisputable terminus a quo for the emergence of Old Testament literature. In 272 the Greek general Pyrrhus was killed during a street battle in the city of Argos, when a woman threw a tile from the roof of a house and hid Pyrrhus immibalizing him. Pyrrhus was eliminated by a bystander. Pyrrhus’ fate was undoubtedly the inspiration for the story in Judg 9, followed by the sacrifice of Jiphta’s daughter, so often likened to the fate of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia, and the story of Samson, very easily identified as Heracles.