Biblical Archaeology Review

See de Vaux, Early History of Israel, p. 196.

For other archaic aspects of patriarchal religion, see Cross, Canaanite Myth, pp. 1–75, 177–186. Compare the minimalist position of John Van Seters, “The Religion of the Patriarchs in Genesis,” Biblica 61 (1980), pp. 220–233; and Rainer Albertz, A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period, vol. 1 (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1994), pp. 28–29.

See Frank M. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge: Harvard Univ., 1973), pp. 1–75; and John Day, “Ugarit and the Bible: Do They Presuppose the Same Canaanite Mythology and Religion?” in G.J. Brooke, A.H.W. Curtis, and J.F. Healey, eds., Ugarit and the Bible: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Ugarit and the Bible (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 1994), pp. 35–52.

This point is stressed by Albrecht Alt, “The God of the Fathers,” in Alt, Essays on Old Testament History and Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968; German original 1929), p. 7.

Aharoni, Land of the Bible, p. 329.

See Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000–586 B.C.E. (New York: Doubleday, 1990), pp. 390–397.

See, recently, Moshe Weinfeld, The Promise of the Land (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 222–264.

John Van Seters, Abraham in History, p. 41.

Hoch, Semitic Words, pp. 18, 205.