Modern Biblical Scholarship and the Evolution of a Palestinian National Narrative

Both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism have their roots in the late 19^th century.  While Zionism derived its historical inspiration and justification from Biblical narratives, Muslim Palestinians drew on Islamic sources and history.  Nevertheless, they found it necessary to move beyond the 7^th century origins of Islam to the pagan and biblical past of the territory they sought.  Palestinian nationalists were aware that Zionist claims anti-dated the Arab/Muslim conquest of the 7th century CE, establishing thereby, a prior claim to Palestine.  They were also aware that Zionist ideology, based as it was on the Biblical accounts, resonated among leading European, Christian statesmen raised on the Old Testament, establishing thereby sympathy with Zionist aims.  Arab intellectuals, Muslim and Christian, felt compelled to create a still evolving counter-narrative, based on a school of revisionist biblical scholarship that originated largely in Copenhagen and Sheffield and that, in essence, rejects earlier Christian biblical beliefs and scholarship that questions the historicity of the biblical narrative, and calls into question the very existence of the ancient Israelites.  Some revisionist scholars themselves have become active in promoting the cause of Palestinian nationalism. These scholars, who focus is in biblical scholarship rather than in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, provide an apparently scholarly justification through articles and papers given at professional meetings for an anti-Zionist perspective that distances Jews of the present from those of the past and either eliminates or minimizes the Jewish or Hebrew presence in the contested land.

This paper articulates the aforementioned Palestinian narrative, situates it within the context of modern biblical scholarship, and evaluates its likely effect on the narrative of the Arab Conquest in the 7^th century and the eleven hundred years in which Muslims ruled a land sacred to them as well as to Jews.