Content deleted Content added
Line 57:
Philip Davies claims scholars have created a false Ancient Israel, that fails to fit into the archaeologically established context of Iron Age Syria and Palestine. The Ancient Israel that scholars have reconstructed, says Davies, is false - it is not the real historical Ancient Israel from Syria-Palestine but is rather a figment of conservative scholars' imaginations.
The Minimalist approach attempts to put the archaeology in primary place and to consider in what way the history of Palestine would have been written without the presence of the Biblical text. For example [[Thomas L. Thompson]] considers this area to be part of a cyclic history of the Mediterranean mixed economy environment. For example, the highly diverse region comprises subsistence [[horticulture|horticultural]] production, extensive grain growing, commercial production of [[dates]], [[olives]], [[wine]] and nuts, and [[nomadic pastoralism]] in drier areas. In cooler, drier periods, there is a decline in commercial cropping and an increase in nomadic pastoralism, in warmer, wetter periods, commerce grows with merchants opening up markets in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Aegean, an increase in urbanisation, and then an expansion of neighbouring states so that Palestine becomes a tributary part of a regional empire. The Biblical period was a full cycle - beginning in the Middle Bronze Age urbanism, leading to the Egyptian Empire of the Late Bronze Age. A collapse into pastoralism and a beginning of a new cycle in the Iron Age, with Palestine incorporated again into regional Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman and Arab Empires, before a worstening of climates, increased pastoralism and a repeat of the cycle yet again.
==Notes==
| |||