Biblical History and Israel's Past: The Changing Study of the Bible and History. By MEGAN BISHOP MOORE and BRAD E. KELLE.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This book is not an attempt at reconstructing a ‘history of Israel’; indeed the authors wonder whether a comprehensive history of this kind is possible or even desirable. It is rather a survey of the scholarly method in dealing with questions of the history of ancient Israel in recent years. In particular, the book shows how the interaction between the study of the Old Testament and disciplines like archaeology has changed. Although it does reach back further, the discussion of method begins with the schools of Albright and Alt and builds from there. The book is written in a measured, eirenic style which does much to take the unwelcome heat out of the maximalist/minimalist debate with which it engages. It makes considerable use of recent archaeological evidence as well as perspectives from the social sciences, which strengthens its discussion. Each chapter considers a period in Israel’s history, beginning with the patriarchs and matriarchs (this is how they title the chapter) and ending with the Persian period. Within the chapter the survey of methods ends with reflections on ‘interpretive issues’ which broadens the survey out into considerations of possibilities and challenges. Within each chapter are text boxes which focus on one particular area for further elucidation (examples are ‘Discoveries at Ebla, Mari and Nuzi’, ‘Sources referred to in the DH’). This is clearly done with the student beginning study of the area in mind. Each chapter ends with questions for reflection.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".