David Arnovitz on the Tanakh of the Land of Israel
About this episode
David Arnovitz discusses the Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel and its contextual significance.
Today 's conversation is about a publishing project: the Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel . The concept of the series is that it takes the books of the Hebrew Bible and sets them back down in the world that produced them—in the Land of Israel, and in the economic, political, theological, and cultural setting of the ancient Near East. Around each verse it gathers what is known about that world: its archaeology and geography, the languages and the treaties and the pantheon of gods of the tribes and nations and empires among whom Israel was situated. In its modest form, the claim behind all this is one almost no one would dispute: to know the world a text came from can help you understand the text better. But a less modest claim is folded inside the modest one. For roughly two centuries, the academic study of the Bible used much of this same material—archaeology, comparisons with other sources from the ancient Near East—to take the text apart: to dissolve it into sources and redactors, to historicize revelation until what remained was an artifact of clumsy human pastiche. This series takes up the same tools and turns them to the opposite purpose. Here the history does not dissolve…
People in this episode
Guest: David Arnovitz
Topics covered
- Tanakh
- Hebrew Bible
- ancient Near East
- archaeology
- cultural context
Keywords
- Tanakh
- Hebrew Bible
- archaeology
- ancient Near East
- cultural setting
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel
Places: Land of Israel, ancient Near East
More episodes of The Tikvah Podcast
- Ari Lamm on Chosenness
- George Deek on Israel's Relationship with the Christian World
- Michael Doran and Hussein Aboubakr Mansour on Power, Ideology, and Understanding the Middle East
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