A book recently published by Oxford is currently available for free download in pdf format. 

Understanding the History of Ancient Israel is edited by H. G. M. Williamson and sells for $99, but you can download the individual chapters in restricted pdf format without charge.

As you can see from the list of chapters below, there is quite a mix of archaeologists and biblical scholars.  It is an interesting reality that archaeologists typically are more conservative than biblical/historical scholars.  On the more conservative side are Mazar, Younger, and Lemaire.  Those sometimes identified with the “minimalist” perspective include Whitelam and Davies.  All will be thought-provoking, no doubt.

As far as I can tell, there are a couple of downsides to the offer.  1) You have to download each chapter separately, and each one requires about five clicks.  (It worked a little faster for me in IE than Firefox.)  2) The pdf files are all locked so that you can’t combine them into a single file (or otherwise copy any of the text; commenting and printing is allowed).  I’m guessing that the publisher is offering this as a service to the larger public who wouldn’t purchase this book.  Some will discover through this that the book is worth purchasing.  It seems like a win-win situation to me, and I am appreciative to the publisher for doing this.

• H. G. M. Williamson: Preface; List of Abbreviations
• J. W. Rogerson: Setting the Scene: A Brief Outline of Histories of Israel
• Keith W. Whitelam: Setting the Scene: A Response to John Rogerson
• Hans M. Barstad: The History of Ancient Israel: What Directions Should We Take?
• Philip R. Davies: Biblical Israel in the Ninth Century?
• Lester L. Grabbe: Some Recent Issues in the Study of the History of Israel
• T. P. Wiseman: Classical History: A Sketch, with Three Artefacts
• Chase F. Robinson: Early Islamic History: Parallels and Problems
• Amélie Kuhrt: Ancient Near Eastern History: The Case of Cyrus the Great of Persia
• David Ussishkin: Archaeology of the Biblical Period: On Some Questions of Methodology and Chronology of the Iron Age
• Amihai Mazar: The Spade and the Text: The Interaction between Archaeology and Israelite History Relating to the Tenth–Ninth Centuries BCE
• Christoph Uehlinger: Neither Eyewitnesses, Nor Windows to the Past, but Valuable Testimony in its own Right: Remarks on Iconography, Source Criticism and Ancient Data-processing
• M. J. Geller: Akkadian Sources of the Ninth Century
• K. Lawson Younger, Jr: Neo-Assyrian and Israelite History in the Ninth Century: The Role of Shalmaneser III
• André Lemaire: West Semitic Inscriptions and Ninth-Century BCE Ancient Israel
• Marc Zvi Brettler: Method in the Application of Biblical Source Material to Historical Writing (with Particular Reference to the Ninth Century BCE)
• Graeme Auld: Reading Kings on the Divided Monarchy: What Sort of Narrative?
• Rainer Albertz: Social History of Ancient Israel
• Bernard S. Jackson: Law in the Ninth Century: Jehoshaphat’s ‘Judicial Reform’
• Nadav Na’aman: The Northern Kingdom in the Late Tenth–Ninth Centuries BCE

Oxford has more on the book here.  The short description reads:

In popular presentation, some treat the Bible as a reliable source for the history of Israel, while others suggest that archaeology has shown that it cannot be trusted at all. This volume debates the issue of how such widely divergent views have arisen and will become an essential source of reference for the future.

HT: Tell es-Safi/Gath Weblog

The Israel Antiquities Authority has posted the preliminary report (pdf) of the Qumran excavations (1993-2004) by Yitzhak Magen and Yuval Peleg.  You may recall that a recent article in Biblical Archaeology Review indicated that these archaeologists conclude that Qumran was a pottery manufacturing site, not the home of the Essenes.  They state their motivation for this report in the preface:

We felt it necessary to separately publish this article due to the fact that until now, most of the discussion regarding our new theory on the nature of the site has been in newspapers–in articles not initiated by us–and has been based upon unsubstantiated evidence from certain scholars.

The report is well written and illustrated with many beautiful photographs and drawings.

In yesterday’s Asia Minor Report, Mark Wilson has good news for those books you can buy only in Turkey:

Purchasing books published in Turkey has been difficult for scholars not living in Turkey.  However, Ahmet Boratav of Ege Yayınları has just made ordering such books easier. His web site (www.zerobooksonline.com) is now available in English and features thousands of books, journals, and magazines. The home page features the Bookseller’s Choices as well as recent releases.

Registered surface shipping is included in the price for orders placed from anywhere outside of Turkey.

I sent out the December 2007 issue of the newsletter today.  If you thought you were subscribed but did not receive it, here are a few suggestions:

1. Check your spam box.  Despite the fact that neither I, nor the newsletter distribution company, ever practice anything but the highest ethics in regard to email, some spam filters stop the newsletter.

2. Consider whether you are subscribed at your current email address.  If you’ve moved in the last year and changed addresses, you can fix that easily by subscribing with your new address here.

3. Maybe you never subscribed at all.  There’s an easy fix here.

Even if you do #2 or #3, you will not get today’s newsletter automatically sent to you.  If you would like that, you can send me an email at tbolen81 at bibleplaces dot com [spelled out because I get and hate spam too], and I’ll send you one.  But I won’t be able to send it until the end of the week, as I’m busy until then.

I love Google Earth, and with the help of a friend, have located most important biblical sites and many other historical sites as well.  I have hopes of getting them in sufficient order to share, but time has not yet permitted.  (I know that there are places on the web that distribute files with the locations but some that I have looked at are not reliable.)  But a friend just let me know that some of the terrain is Turkey is much improved.  So if you’ve looked in the past, you might try again.  Ephesus looks great, and there’s finally sufficient resolution to see Colossae.  A few more for fun: Laodicea, Antioch on the Orontes, Haran, and Carchemish.  (The links are kmz files which you can import into Google Earth for the site’s location.)

I’ve updated the post about this below, listing the differences with it and The Sacred Bridge.  Eisenbrauns skipped the Evangelical Theological Society conference in San Diego last week, so I didn’t get to see the book myself.  I hope this doesn’t mean that Eisenbrauns is losing interest in the evangelical market.