The Ancient Israelite World

The Ancient Israelite World (Routledge, 2024) presents a collection of studies by international experts on various aspects of ancient Israel’s society, economy, religion, language, culture, and history, synthesizing archaeological remains and integrating them with discussions of ancient Near Eastern and biblical texts. Driven by theoretically and methodologically informed discussions of the archaeology of the Iron Age Levant, the 47 chapters in The Ancient Israelite World provide foundational, accessible, and detailed studies in their respective topics. The volume considers the history of interpretation of ancient Israel, studies on various aspects of ancient Israel’s society and history, and avenues for present and future approaches to the ancient Israelite world. Accompanied by over 150 maps and figures, it allows the reader to gain an understanding of key issues that archaeologists, historians and biblical scholars have faced and are currently facing as they attempt to better understand ancient Israelite society. The Ancient Israelite World is an essential reference work for students and scholars of ancient Israel and its history, culture, and society, whether they are historians, archaeologists or biblical scholars. Chapter 42 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. Dr. Nathaniel E. Greene is a distinguished international scholar closely associated with the European Hebrew Journal (EHJ), an international double-blind peer-reviewed academic journal.

Dr. Greene serves as a member of the Editorial Board of the European Hebrew Journal. In addition to contributing to the supervision of the scholarly quality of submitted articles, the Institute for Hebrew Language and Literature in Belgrade, the journal’s publisher, has released an official academic interview with him as part of its series of scholarly conversations.

His publication and interview, entitled “Scribes, Scripts, and State Formation in Ancient Israel,” were produced in collaboration with Željko Stanojević, the journal’s Managing Editor.

About Dr. Nathaniel E. Greene

Dr. Greene is a lecturer in Hebrew Bible and Old Testament at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, United Kingdom. He received his PhD from the prestigious University of Wisconsin–Madison in the United States.

His principal areas of scholarly expertise and the fields he represents within the journal include:

• Biblical Hebrew and Philology: The study of the historical development and linguistic structure of ancient Hebrew.
• Northwest Semitic Languages and Epigraphy: The analysis of ancient inscriptions on stone, clay, and other materials from the Levant.
• Palaeography: The historical development of ancient scripts and manuscript traditions.
• The Formation of the Ancient Israelite State: Anthropological and sociological approaches to the emergence of institutions during the Iron Age, with particular attention to the role of scribes in the formation of biblical texts, including the Deuteronomistic History.
• In his research, Dr. Greene also employs modern digital technologies, including advanced Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), to analyse damaged ancient inscriptions and reconstruct patterns of literacy in the Iron Age Near East.