Story and History: The Kings of Israel and Judah in Context

In recent centuries, and especially the last decades, critical scholarship on the Hebrew Bible has brought to light a large gap between biblical portrayals of the historical reality of ancient Israel (story) on the one hand, and historical-critical reconstructions of the actual past (history) on the other. The scientific presentation of ancient Israel’s history can no longer be considered as a more or less critical narration of the accounts in the Hebrew Bible. The problems the so-called minimalists and maximalists struggled to solve still remain unsettled, and students as well as scholars of the Hebrew Bible cannot ignore or even remain indifferent to the gap and overlap between story and history. Could and should Hebrew Bible scholarship in the future move beyond the milieu of the debate between minimalists and maximalists? This volume, consisting of nine articles by authors with different institutional and religious backgrounds, articulates that there are ways to overcome the increasing gap between story and history.