Finding Myth and History in the Bible - Scholarship, Scholars and Errors - Lukasz Niesiolowski-Spano
“Historical” Israel and “biblical” Israel, or ethnicity as a symbol
Finding Myth and History in the Bible - Scholarship, Scholars and Errors - Lukasz Niesiolowski-Spano
Gian Luigi Prato [+]
Università degli Studi di Roma Tre
Gian Luigi Prato teaches Hebraism and Hebrew language at the Università degli Studi di Roma Tre. He is interested particularly in the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, in the history of Ancient Israel and the relationships between biblical and historical Israel and the civilizations of the Ancient Near East. Some of his essays on this last field are collected in two recent books: Identità e memoria nell’Israele antico. Storiografia e confronto culturale negli scritti biblici e giudaici (Biblioteca di storia e storiografia dei tempi biblici 16; Brescia: Paideia 2010), and Gli inizi e la storia. Le origini della civiltà nei testi biblici (Frecce 151; Roma: Carocci 2013). [email protected] [email protected]
Description
The "biblical" identity of Ancient Israel is a historiographical construction, based on a particular self-consciousness of a people ethnically distinct from the others. This idea of ethnicity is therefore symbolic. We would try to trace the origin of such ethnical identity in some texts of the jewish apocryphal (or deuterocanonical) literature (Ben Sira, Tobit, Judith, Esther) and in the "national" historiography of some Judeo-Hellenistic authors.