Another history of ancient Israel? Are there not enough of them already? And what if its author is not even a professional Alttestamentler, but a historian of the ancient Near East? It is true: we already have many (perhaps too many) histories of ancient Israel, but they are all so similar to each other because, inescapably, they are all too similar to the story we find in the Biblical text. They share its plot, its way of presenting facts, even when they question critically its historical reliability.

The history of ancient Israel has always been presented as a sort of paraphrase of the Biblical text. At first the theological relevance of the revealed word made it difficult to accept a rational critique that could, even at great pains, open the way to a secular approach. Even the archaeological discoveries in Palestine were not at first so sensational as to allow a complete rethinking of the history of the area on the basis of ancient and original sources, as was the case in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Hittite Anatolia. Indeed, towards the end of the nineteenth century, archaeology began to be used as ‘proof’ of the reliability of the Biblical text, while that text was already being questioned at the time by the literary criticism of German philologists.