Archaeology of Ancient Israelite Knowledge

Robert S. Kawashima is Associate Professor at the University of Florida in the Department of Religion and the Center for Jewish Studies. He is author of Biblical Narrative and the Death of the Rhapsode.

Many biblicists have compared ancient literatures to illuminate the Bible, but Robert Kawashima is arguably the main modern scholar to use the Hebrew Bible as a foundational text for comparative literature itself. From his groundbreaking first book, on how and why the Hebrew Bible presents the ancient Mediterranean's first extended works of imaginative prose, to regular publications in journals, he avoids simply applying preexisting interpretive techniques. Instead, his Archaeologyof Ancient Israelite Knowledge proposes a new kind of comparative history of ancient literature and, astonishingly, often succeeds.- Seth Sanders- University of California (Journal of Religion)

• AcknowledgmentsList of Abbreviations1. Introduction2. The Early History of "God"3. The House of God4. The Discovery of the Self in Israelite Literature5. Alienation and the Tragic Adventure of Biblical History6. From Autochton to Alien7. The Dawn of ApocalypticismBibliographyIndex