The biblical story of the history of the Kingdom of Judah, as told in
the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, describes the point of view of
the Jerusalem elite: what it knew, what it wanted to tell and what served its
political, religious and economic interests.
In this podcast I we will try to find out what the authors of biblical
history didn't tell.
First, they could not include information that they
themselves didn’t know, especially regarding events from the distant past. On the other hand, they also left out things that
happened out of sight and out of mind – far from Jerusalem and the borders of
Judah. And here we get to the more interesting part: the biblical
authors also left out and didn't tell about events that they, and also the people for whom they wrote the historical
descriptions, knew of, and maybe even knew very well, but preferred not
to include in their story. They didn’t want to include whatever didn’t fit their ideological
narrative, their political and religious goals, the centrality of Jerusalem to
their story, and their uncompromising emphasis on the belief in the eternal
nature of the House of David, Jerusalem and the Temple of Solomon.
Archaeological and historical studies, as well as a critical reading
of the biblical text, allow us to not only
understand the stories we have been told, but also to uncover the untold
stories surrounding them, which contain additional layers of the messages that
the text conveyed to its contemporaries, who knew the ancient reality and
understood both what they had been told about it and what the texts ignored. This is what will be done in the different chapters of
this podcast, and it's going to be a
fascinating journey.