When the Babylonians conquered ancient Judah in the 6th century B.C.E., sending many Israelites into exile, Hebrew gradually ceased to be spoken. It became primarily a written language, used in ...

In my recent book on early Israel I characterize ... Dever: The portrait of Israelite religion in the Hebrew Bible is the ideal, the ideal in the minds of those few who wrote the Bible—the ...

Another section of the Hebrew Bible consists of ... of them may be very ancient indeed. The books of Psalms, for instance, contains many hymns from Israelite temple worship from the monarchic ...