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Studying the Ancient Israelites: A Guide to Sources and Methods is unavailable, but you can change that!

The Old Testament was not written in a vacuum. It was written by and to a specific people who lived within specific social, historical, political, and literary contexts—contexts not only of their own culture but also of the surrounding peoples. Clearly, an understanding of ancient Israel and the ancient Near East is essential for proper interpretation of the Bible. Unfortunately, as students...

Looking at the very dense prose found in both Joshua’s account of the division of the land and Amos’s circular prophecy can be a bit intimidating for most readers. For our purposes, it may be more useful to look at a narrative in the history of the kings of Israel. Before we begin, however, let me point to spatiality theory, which I discuss in more detail in chapter 4. To summarize, space can be divided into “first space” (physical reality), “second space” (imagined space), and
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