Bible Review

Artur Weiser, The Psalms, Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962), p. 109.

P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., I Samuel, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), p. 178.

Semeia, vol. 14.

Hermann Strack and Paul Billerbeck, in Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch, 6 vols. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1922–26).

J. Maxwell Miller, Israelite and Judean History, Old Testament Library Series (London: SCM and Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977), p 279.

George E. Mendenhall, “The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine,” Biblical Archaeologist 25 (1962), pp. 66–87; reprinted with slight revisions in The Biblical Archaeologist Reader 3, ed. Edward F. Campbell and David Noel Freeman (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1970), pp. 100–120.

The following summary is adapted from chapter 4 of my book, Understanding the Old Testament, 4th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1986).

Since completing this review I have spoken with colleagues at various schools where the book has recently been adopted as a text. All express some degree of concern about its length, and one or two predict that it will prove unwieldy as a classroom text. So perhaps I have underestimated this problem.

To be sure, the oldest written source, the so-called Yahwistic or J narrative, dates from the age of kings and serves as a “national epic” for monarchical Israel (p. 137), but for Gottwald the underlying traditions are those of the earlier period of what he calls retribalization.

Cultural Materialism (New York: Random House, 1979).