There are many gems in this book that will explain otherwise difficult biblical texts. The authors are interested in using the latest archaeological data to shed light on the Scriptures (see, for example, King's earlier commentary on Jeremiah). It will take time for all of the information in this book to make it into popular biblical commentaries (it is cutting edge information, as the authors themselves are active archaeologists). This book is a concentrated collection of journal quality insights written at a popular level.

Before I bought this book, I heard one of the co-authors (Dr. Stager of Harvard) lecture on his contribution to the book. He is a master investigator of the ancient near eastern ideas of temple and garden. Stager brilliantly communicates how Israel's Temple and Garden Story relate to (and are informed by) their original contexts. Adjective fail me, I can only say that his work is staggering.

I would be remiss if I did not make this plug: the pictures alone are worth the price of the book. The book is printed completely on photo quality paper with full color images throughout.

This book is a must have for any student of archaeology, the Bible or Israel.

Though written for the layperson, this book is still an excellent resource for the scholar in Bible, ancient Near Eastern studies, or any study of culture. Life in Biblical Israel describes the setting of the Hebrew Bible, but not in terms of wars, leaders, and elite society. Professors King and Stager recognize, like Fernand Braudel and Annales historians, that a large part of society is often neglected by its own histories. Thus, they seek to describe how that silent majority lived their everyday lives. The authors of Life in Biblical Israel attempt to describe all of the aspects of the lifeways of the Israelites - how they produced their food, built their houses, procured water, defended their cities, organized their society, kept themselves healthy, expressed themselves through clothing, art, and music, and how they interacted with the divine.

For those skeptical of the Bible's credibility, the book may seem to be a simple attempt to draw archaeological correlations, that is artifactual evidence, for Biblical terminology. Certainly, the book does this, but not out of any theological or apologetic attempt to prove the Bible as accurate. Accepting that the archaeological record and the Bible provide two types of descriptions of the same society, King and Stager gather all of the information they can from both sources. The many photographs and drawings in the book show many examples from the archaeological source. A quick glance at the Scriptural Index at the back of the book shows how thoroughly the authors combed the Biblical text. At the same time, the authors use each source to supplement the defficiencies of the other. For example, artifacts can often be identified as to their uses, but they have no names in their native languages, and how they are used is often not known. King and Stager do an excellent job with the details of exactly how the ancient people accomplished what they did.

There have been very few other attempts to so document ancient Israel as a cultural and social entity. Previous works using both the textual and archaeological evidence in concert mostly have focused on one aspect of the culture, usually something relevant to the upper classes or the political or military establishment. Others have subsumed their archaeological and biblical discussion beneath other arguments, in which case they have reduced the amount of evidence and increased the number of conclusions to be drawn. King and Stager, on the other hand, have written a book which deals primarily with the culture of all of Israel as expressed through its material and literary remains; they have no other axe to grind, and they present more data and fewer conclusions. Instead they are working first and foremost to describe as best they can how people lived in the Iron Age in Israel.

This book will serve as an excellent textbook both in archaeology and Bible courses. It can also serve as a reference work both for the layperson and the scholar interested in either subject. Perhaps the best reason to use this book, however, is that it succeeds in its aim of portraying the details of ancient Israelite life. The many illustrations truly enable readers to visualize each aspect of the culture.

Life in Biblical Israel, despite its conversational tone and appealing visual layout (it contains copious and remarkable photographs, many of them in color), rests on a simple premise: great ideas are as much an expression of a culture as the shape of the pots it uses for wine or the letters it uses for writing. This is the central tenet that undergirds the excellent new volume by L. E. Stager (Harvard) and P. J. King (Boston College). In the case of Biblical Israel, of course, the main artifact bequeathed by the Israelite culture to the modern era is the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures, or Old Testament. The idiom of the texts that comprise the canon, King and Stager argue, is as much rooted in the reality of Iron Age western Asia (1200-540 B.C.E.) as are habits of personal adornment (ingeniously illuminated by the authors) or domestic architecture. Biblical texts, therefore, at once express the culture of the Iron Age which archaeologists can reconstruct and are illuminated by that culture. For readers who recognize the productivity of this dialogue and seek the means to enhance it, they can do no better than acquire this book. Ancient interpreters, beginning with biblical authors themselves (who glossed alien terms of antiquity with ones familiar to their audience) and continuing with such seminal figures as Philo and Origen, wrestled with the language, customs, and manners described in the texts. Why? Because texts are not disembodied, even when long traditions of interpretation continuously make those texts meaningful in new contexts. Thus, for anyone who takes the texts seriously, engagement with them requires engagement with the realia of Biblical Israel, from calendars, to family structure, to the implements of war, and the names of pots (ill. 70a-b). These and many other topics are meticulously presented by King and Stager, with insights that go beyond recitation of the data available in standard reference works (including not a few interesting philological observations about the meaning of Hebrew words). This book, then, presents the highest caliber of scholarship in a package that is readable, enjoyable, and very important. It also demonstrates persuasively that the culture of ancient Israel in the Iron Age II-not in the Persian or Hellenistic periods-was the one in which the greater part of the Hebrew Scriptures was conceived and transmitted.

Any writer who grows up in Camden N.J. and still manages to climb up the ladder to Rockaway Beach is obviously excellent.Note: All Stuyvesant H.S. students should be sure to read Me and Brenda

On the surface, this is the story of a scam perpetrated against an Atlantic City hotel. It's a neat scam, and fun to read about, and in the end you realize that it's about more than what appears on the surface.

Don't let the title of this book mislead you-this is a brilliant work of scholarship that illuminates many aspects of life in Bible times, and especially focuses on the theory and practice of warfare as indicated in biblical law and thought-a subject that leads to surprising insights through the wonderful analysis by the author. This is, incidentally, a subject that has been much misunderstood, and little that was in print could have been considered useful until the publication of this path-breaking work.

Philip Brutton's A CAPTAIN'S MANDATE is a serious tome, written with flair and attention to detail worthy of Churchill. I ate it for lunch on a flight from Paris to New York, 2 days before the destruction of the World Trade Towers, amazed now at how relevant it was and how necessary it is now to evaluate our history of religious aggression in a forum ostensibly without bias, collusion or any undercurrent of abhorrence directed towards either camp. Brutton achieves this. A Captain's Mandate leaves room for discussion. It's one man's story. It's also the story we all have to consider. Philip Brutton's voice is clear and original. Read up on your WWII era history first though. This book is not for neophytes.

I just visited Jerusalem in March 2000. After I returned I read this book. Oh, do I wish I had read the book before I left or had the book to read in Jerusalem. We had a guide at $200 a day and he was not as good as this book. It is excellent to understand the present situation in the city. It gives great background on all the churches, etc that you view. It is a great historical guide, providing wonderful quotes from people who were visiting in 333 CE or 1800's or in the last few years. A must read if you plan on going to Jerusalem or obtaining a better understanding of the present political circumstances of the city.

Roth is the undefeated (probably undefeatable) champion of literary experimentation, and Operation Shylock is perhaps his most successful, most outrageous experiment to date. The author-as-character, fact-as-fiction-as-fact motif has been done before, but rarely with such skill and never with such hilarious results. It's part international espionage, part political commentary, part cultural exposition, part farce, and all parody; Roth's egotistical, though often self-depracating voice keeps the story chugging powerfully along. Par usual, Roth's greatest zinger of all is saved for the last few pages. I would award Shylock five stars, if it were not for the fact that I simply can't (and never have been able to) get used to his hyperbolic style--all the ranting and raving and melodrama can occasionally be tiresome. But one doesn't normally read Roth for his elegant prose; one reads him for his ingenuity, his outrageousness, and his courage. And in this regard, Shylock certainly will not disappoint.

Philip Roth's novel "Operation Shylock" presents a two-sided controversial discussion about the justification of the existence of the state of Israel. The protagonist is Roth himself, who has just overcome a period of Halcion-induced depression and is preparing to fly to Israel on a journalistic assignment to interview a Holocaust-surviving author. Coinciding with this event is the trial of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian American citizen extradited to Israel, who is alleged to have been a sadistic SS guard branded Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka death camp during World War II.

Just before making his trip, Roth hears that somebody in Israel is using his name to promote a new Diaspora, imploring the Ashkenazi Jews to return to Europe to reclaim their cultural heritage. Once in Israel, it's not long before he encounters his impersonator after attending a session of Demjanjuk's trial. The impersonator tells Roth that he is a private detective from Chicago and that he runs a counseling service to "cure" anti-Semites, similar to Alcoholics Anonymous in its purpose. Accompanying him in Israel is his girlfriend and a former anti-Semite, a confused American woman with a checkered past, who was his nurse when he was a cancer patient.

Roth's impersonator sees himself as the influential equal and ideological opposite of Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism. He advocates Diasporism because he fears that the state of Israel is perceived by the world as Jewish tyranny over Arabs and will lead to a second Holocaust. How the real Roth reacts to this premise develops the rest of the novel, which, as the title implies, shapes itself into a subtle spy story. Some interesting supporting characters are introduced to contribute to the debate and clever plot devices are employed for intrigue.

A masterpiece. Roth weaves a spellbinding thriller ridden with sardonic wit and the ironic guile of middle-aged man caught in the whirlpool of an identity crisis. Everything that Roth has believed in and explored in previous novels is brought to the test -- i.e. sexuality, politics, heritage. No sentimentality. Brutal observation of self. The man puts himself under a microscope. Lets the reader peek through the eyehole. Roth fragments himself because he is a fragmented man. Doesn't shy away from the shards. Only pokes himself with the razor points and lets himself bleed. Having spent Thanksgiving with Roth post the publication of Shylock, I can only testify that Roth is a study of opposites: cruel and generous, callous and tender, cynical and yet a "believer". In retrospect, this book should've garnered the Pulitzer. And Updike should've been shot

A fascinating book, and one that has had quite an impact for its length. Davies may stretch his point a bit, and can be a little too creative at times. But he not only presents his overall case well, he was about the first to do it. And no one has yet answered his primary objection to mainstream historians of 'ancient Israel': for the vast majority of the biblical literature, there is absolutely no evidence of the sort required to claim it as historically reliable -- yet they continue to treat it as if it were.

Davies want to make an argument so badly, that he ignores all of the data that contradicts him. His effort here is to prove that the bible was not just redacted (something every scholar agrees on), but was composed out of hole cloth by scribes at a very point and that the text has no historic basis. You may want to know why he wants do this, but first lets review the evidence that proves him wrong.

1- Davies tries to argue that biblical Hebrew is a scribal language created by these mysterious scribes to give the text an ancient gloss. The problem is that we have countless examples of ancient Hebrew from archeology dated 800-1000 years before the time when Davies puts the text as being composed. Moreover, why can you find no Greek rooted words in the Hebrew Bible, if that was the lingua franca when it was written?

2- The Hebrew Bible is filled with place and personal names that were not current in the Hellenistic period, but were in use in the iron age, when most archeologists place the events. If the redactors were not working from old texts, how would they know the names of places destroyed centuries before?

3- The Hebrew Bible does not represent in any way the dominant Hellenistic world view that was in place when Davies claims the text was written. In fact you can see this by looking at the book of Daniel, probably the latest book in the bible and the only one to reflect this later world view.

Why does Davies ignore all of the evidence to put forward an argument that is patently false? He is part of a fringe group of scholars, self styled 'biblical revisionists' who are looking to attack the Hebrew Bible in an effort to prove that Jews have no history or historic connection to the land of Israel. It is pathetic when serious scholars prostitute academic credentials in an effort to make a purely political argument.

For a tremendous critique of Davies and his colleagues work, see Dever's "What did the bible writers know.' It i s an awful title, but an excellent and thoughtful text.

Philip Davies has a reputation as one of the more extreme members of the recent school of Biblical minimalists/revisionists. However, in "Scribes and Schools" he keeps himself fairly well restrained and highly referenced. The result is a book that, while not conclusively definitive, intrigues the reader with a wealth of possibilities about how the canon of the Bible grew into the one we are familiar with today.

He starts by introducing us to the idea of canons generally, moves to those who controlled the technology of writing in the ancient world, a hereditary international class of scribes attached to palaces and temples, and how they operated in the fairly well-documented societies of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece. He then reviews various approaches taken by scholars regarding these issues in Judaism, and summarizes Israelite and Judean history from the monarchic to the Roman periods. The remainder of the book is devoted to specific divisions of the Bible: the Torah, Prophets, Widsom Literature and Apocryphal writings, taking into account the libraries at and around Qumran. The final chapter considers the final form: the transition of canonical collections of literature into Holy Books as we now know them.

The book is fairly short, written in a rather dry, academic style, and good enough to recommend to anyone thinking about the Bible's growth into its present form. Sometimes Davies is insightful, as when he suggests a Persian period date for the composition of Deuteronomy on the basis of its diminished notion of the role of the king, which would have been unsuitable for a monarchic state but well-adapted to a colonial one. Other times he is less so, as when he suggests that the oldest parts of 1Enoch were composed at the same time as the oldest parts of Genesis, since it is quite clear in comparing these texts that they come from totally different literary and conceptual universes! Davies also refers to obscure sources which is very interesting, at least to me.

Traces the development of scribes and the notion of canon in ancient Israel and other ancient cultures. I found it made me rethink what I thought I "knew" about the development of the canon.