Sublime

My interest, however, is in reading the Bible like an ancient Israelite,2 what is often called reading the Bible from a historical-critical perspective.

We have no informants from ancient Israel, so we must use other, less reliable criteria to determine whether we are reading the ancient texts correctlys

Scholars call the final editor R, for…

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Everything depends on what rules the reader uses when reading the biblical text.

the biblical authors understood all law as divine law11

Thus, developing a sympathetic understanding of ritual is crucial for understanding what biblical texts meant.

suggest that this material was not written in order to represent what actually happened, but rather, on the level of mythological material, to deal with such fundamental questions as: Why do we own this land? How should we react in the face of adversity?

Sources must be used with care: modern historians must be aware of the deep biases of the authors of these sources, and whenever possible, various sources that refer to the same event must be studied together, since they are often mutually enlightening. But these sources should not simply be discarded.

we would run a strong risk of being misled if we simply opened a history book and believed everything we read there.