商品簡介
Complaining that the "history of ancient Israel has always been presented as a sort of paraphrase of the Biblical text," Liverani (history of the Ancient Near East, U. of Rome "La Sapienza," Italy) seeks here to present a secular reworking of the topic based on textual and literary criticism as well as from data collected by archaeology and epigraphy. The result is a history that is presented in two phases. The first is the "quite insignificant history" of two kingdoms in Palestine similar two so many others in terms of their development and later destruction by Assyrian and Babylonian conquests. The second concerns the imaginary history of Israel, so-called not because of its unreality but because of its nature as a historiographical and religious project for returning Judea exiles not assimilated to the imperial world in order to create a temple-city on the Babilonian model. This historically influential project, argues Liverani, "implied a huge and variegated rewriting of an `ordinary' history with the aim a creating a suitable context for those archetypes that they intended to revitalize: united kingdom, monotheism and single temple, law, possession of the land, holy war, and so on." Distributed in the US by David Brown Book Co. Annotation c2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
