Philip Davies afirma, em artigo publicado por The Expository Times 2007 119: 15-21, The History of Ancient Israel and Judah, que uma história política do Antigo Israel, que preencha os requisitos da moderna historiografia, caberia em apenas dez páginas. Mas isto teria um custo: o abandono da Bíblia, o produto cultural mais importante (de Israel)…
“… [a] modern political history of Ancient Israel [which would] satisfy modern criteria of history writing … might stretch to ten pages. But the cost is to abandon the most important historical product, the Bible, and to leave it without explanation.”
Coloque este trecho do artigo no contexto da dificuldade em identificar o Israel bíblico com o Israel histórico, já discutido por Philip R. Davies em seu livro In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’, e a polêmica afirmação começa a ficar mais clara.
E não se esqueça dos dois livros de Philip Davies que serão publicados em breve.
Cito o resumo do artigo The History of Ancient Israel and Judah de Philip R. Davies, publicado por The Expository Times, Edimburgo, Escócia:
Writing a `history of Israel’ is a task that is vastly different to writing history of modern events, yet this distinction is often not recognized. There are limitations in the written sources, the archaeological record is unable to locate a `biblical Israel’ in differentiation from the various cultures that inhabited Palestine in the same period and the bible itself was written with a particular theological agenda many centuries after the events it purports to report. Rather what is preserved in the biblical texts is a collection of snapshots of how Israel has been remembered. This `cultural history’ allows for the appropriation of the stories of communities of faith. It is within such layers of memory that the resources can be found to refashion the understanding of the biblical story in a way that finds meaning for successive generations.