O Israel antigo em debate: uma análise da história de Israel da educação básica ao ensino superior

Abstract

This dissertation aims at problematizing the ancient history of Israel, and to do this it remits to an analysis of how the referred theme is dealt with in the country in basic education and, likewise, in higher education, specifically in the teaching programs in History. It aims at verifying the degree of actuality of the theme on screen, comparing the treatment of the issue carried out in Brazil with the specialized production produced essentially out of the country. In this sense, on the international historiographic level, a recent perception is held that the biblical text cannot be a primary source for the study of the ancient history of Israel, especially because of the broad temporal distance between the events narrated in the Old Testament and the moment of its fixation in writing. Thus, the archaeological and epigraphic evidence take priority in the attempt to reconstruct the past of the ancient uprising, due to being contemporaneous to the events, which certainly contrasts with the major portion of the historiography about ancient Israel, which, to a great measure accompanied the current story in the biblical text to the point that the religious witness of the Bible remained as an authentic historic reference to interpret the past of Israel. For an effective analysis of the mentioned theme there is need to consider the trajectory of the academic research about ancient Israel at the international level as well as in the country, which will make it possible to understand how the cited theme remained distanced from the area of Ancient History, remaining as a field absolutely dominated by professionals from the area of Theology; thus, there was the predominance of an emic perception about the past of Israel due to the fact that there was an emotional tie of the researcher/theologian with his or her source (biblical text) which was even considered imbued of divine inspiration, which certainly contrasts with the area of History, where there is no space for extra-human elements. Therefore, the alleged divine inspiration cannot be seen as a variable of an historic explanation. Thus, the historiography on the theme at hand developed without the effective participation of historiographers, which resulted in the lack of theoretical-methodological reflections specific to History. This situation affected the treatment of the ancient history of Israel in both basic education as well as in higher education. Therefore, the challenge that is presented resides in rethinking the past of Israel independently from the biblical text, which is already being done in some contexts. The attempt of historical reconstruction based on archaeological and epigraphic sources presents a mostly distinct version of the one presented in the biblical narrative.