ReViews

The History of Biblical Israel—Major Problems and Minor Issues

Avraham Malamat (Leiden: Brill, 2001) 476 pp., $99 (hardback)

It is good to have this collection of previously published essays by the distinguished Israeli Biblical historian Avraham Malamat within the covers of one book. The History of Biblical Israel is full of trenchant insights. Yet the book also bears the hallmarks of any collection that goes back almost 50 years. It is uneven, some of the essays are dated, it can be repetitious; in short, it is not quite organized. The efforts to meet these inevitable problems in a collection of essays—the added bibliography at the back, the addition of to-be-published essays—only underscore these points. We are introduced, for example, to Goethe’s helpful concept of die Grossen Züge, “the grand sweep of matters,” several times. (It is on this grand canvas that history can be found in the Bible.)

Then, too, at the rather astronomical $99, one wonders who can afford it. Selling at this price, the book can be printed in a few hundred copies at most, purchased only by the grandest of Biblical libraries. The aim is profit, not wide distribution. These wonderful essays are hardly more accessible in this book than they are in the arcane Festschriften and journals in which they were originally published.