Nadav Na?aman, Professor Emeritus of Jewish History in the Biblical Period at Tel Aviv University, and one of today's leading historians of ancient Canaan and Israel, has published hundreds of studies and monographs in the course of an illustrious career of more than five decades. His scholarship combines biblical studies with research on geographical history, archaeology, and historiography in the ancient Near East to shed light upon the land and people of Israel in the second and first millennia BCE.
This is the first of a three-volume compilation that presents the breadth and scope of Na?aman's scholarship over the past two and a half decades. The studies on biblical narratives in this volume cover the timespan between the primeval period and the end of the so-called United Monarchy. They deal with the patriarchal narratives; the exodus; the conquest of the land; and the histories of Saul, David, and Solomon. The articles in this volume primarily address questions about the antiquity and authenticity of the memories embedded in these stories. For example: Are the patriarchal, exodus, and conquest stories authentic cultural memories of ancient Israelites, or do they reflect traditions that the narrators inherited, greatly expanded, and modified to align with their ideology and the reality of their own times? These articles display systematic efforts to answer such questions about the biblical historiography of early Israel and its potential for reconstructing both the time in which these works were written down and later scribes' perspectives on the early stages of the history of Israel.