Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article outlines my answer to the problem of the origin of ‘biblical Israel’. I look for a period when ‘Israel’ was dominant and ‘Judah’ subordinate, and a period of time in which an identity ‘Israel’ could be absorbed by a population that also saw itself as ‘Judah’ in such a way that it was irreversible. However, we do not need to look specifically for a political definition of ‘Israel’, since when it is defined so as to include Judah (especially the Pentateuch) rather than when referring to the kingdom that bore the name (especially Samuel and Kings), ‘Israel’ is used in a primarily religious (including ethnic) sense, not a political one. This accords well with its usage in the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods. For over a century, a province called ‘Judah’ was in fact governed from a territory that, as the Bible and biblical historians themselves would describe it, was 'Benjamin’. During this period the identity ‘Israel’ could very easily permeate the population of ‘Benjamin-Judah’ in such a way that the later restoration of political and cultic supremacy to Jerusalem could not challenge it, let alone remove it. But with the reestablishment of Jerusalem, Bethel was defamed and destroyed; ‘Israelite’ stories were revised and overlaid with Judean ones, and (if Blenkinsopp's reconstruction of the Judean Priesthood during the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid Periods is correct) its Aaronite priesthood was transferred to Jerusalem, thus relocating the religious centre of Jacob/Israel to the ‘city of David’. The name ‘Israel’ was thus retained and redefined: ‘biblical Israel’ was invented, with Judah at its head. The implications of the answer for the history of biblical traditions are considerable.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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".