Ancient Conquest Accounts: A Study in Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical History Writing

Works on Old Testament historiography, the “Conquest,” and the origins of Israel have burgeoned in recent days. But while others have been issuing new reconstructions, this novel work presents a close reading of the biblical text. The focus is on the literary techniques that ancient writers employed in narrating stories of conquest, and the aim is to pinpoint their communicative intentions in their own contexts. This reading is enhanced by engagement with the important discipline of the philosophy of history. Ancient Conquest Accounts, replete with extensive quotations from Assyrian, Hittite, and Egyptian conquest accounts, is a learned and methodologically sensitive study of a wide range of ancient Near Eastern texts as well as of Joshua 9–12.