What do historians believe about the early books of the Hebrew Bible?

Answer 1

A:Perhaps we can let some historians provide some answers to this question through the books they have published. Robert P. Carroll (The World of Ancient Israel: Sociological, Anthropological and Political Perspectives, Prophecy and society) says the Hebrew Bible contains the ideologically controlled documents which represent the Propaganda of a small religious elite. It is now well accepted that much of the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) was not written until during and after the Babylonian Exile and therefore represents the political and theological realities of that time, not of previous millennia.

Historians focus on whether the Exodus from Egypt and the conquest of Canaan actually occurred, because for them there is no historical sense in the supposedly earlier accounts in the Book of Genesis. Carol A. Redmount (The Oxford History of the Biblical World, Bitter lives) says the entire population of Egypt in the mid-thirteenth century BCE has been estimated at 2.8 million. Yet The Bible would have us believe that the departing Israelites numbered 600,000 fighting men, or at least 2.5 million in total. There is nothing in the Egyptian records that could point to large numbers of Israelite slaves, nor to their sudden departure. The overwhelming consensus of scholars is that the Exodus from Egypt did not happen as described on the Bible.

During the Late Bronze Age (1550-1200 BCE), Canaan proper was divided into more than a dozen small, weak city-states, none of which had any political influence, with Hazor, Shechem, Megiddo, Gezer, and Jerusalem the most prominent. Until the end of this period, there is no evidence of the Israelites. In fact, the Amarna letters show detailed evidence of the squabbling petty Canaanite kings looking to their Egyptian overlords for leadership and support.

Each of the Canaanite cities that can be identified, said to have been conquered by the Israelites, has been investigated. Many of them show no evidence of occupation during the Late Bronze Age time of the conquest, and in almost every other case, there is no one period when more than two cities were destroyed at about the same time. There was no unified conquest, and most historians now say that the Hebrew people arrived in the Canaanite hinterland by peaceful internal migration from the rich coastal areas. Intensive archaeological research since the 1970s has demonstrated a gradual proliferation of small rural settlements concentrated in the hill country of southern Canaan from around 1200 BCE, the beginning of Iron Age I. Accompanying these villages, many newly founded, was a material culture simpler than that of the large and cosmopolitan Canaanite cities of the plains.