RT Article
T1 Merneptah’s ‘Israel’ and the Absence of Origins in Biblical Scholarship
JF Currents in biblical research
VO 13
IS 3
SP 293
OP 329
A1 Nestor, Dermot
LA English
PB Sage
YR 2015
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1775178056
AB This article examines the Merneptah Stele and its role in recent efforts to reconstruct Israelite history and identity. Though necessarily concerned with the issues of translation and location as they relate to the entity named in the stele, this review is dominated by an assessment of the various ways in which biblical scholarship has related to this singular reference. To that end, issues of theory and method, both archaeological and anthropological, are prioritized as the review appraises the various attempts to isolate this entity as the Archimedean point of Israelite historical and ethnic development. Though certainly critical of what it perceives as the sterile reproduction of long-held beliefs, it is a review that, in its appeal to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, looks to identify prospects for further study of the stele, rather than foreclose the very questions that it raises.
K1 Causality
K1 cultural continuity
K1 Israelite monarchy
K1 Israelite origins
K1 Israelite identity
K1 Biblical Archaeology
K1 Ethnicity
K1 Hebrew Bible
K1 early Israel
K1 Merneptah Stele
DO 10.1177/1476993X14534792