A-1. Introduction

The biblical story of the history of the Kingdom of Judah, as told in the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, describes the point of view of the Jerusalem elite: what it knew, what it wanted to tell and what served its political, religious and economic interests.

In this podcast I we will try to find out what the authors of biblical history didn't tell.

First, they could not include information that they themselves didn’t know, especially regarding events from the distant past. On the other hand, they also left out things that happened out of sight and out of mind – far from Jerusalem and the borders of Judah. And here we get to the more interesting part: the biblical authors also left out and didn't tell about events that they, and also the people for whom they wrote the historical descriptions, knew of, and maybe even knew very well, but preferred not to include in their story. They didn’t want to include whatever didn’t fit their ideological narrative, their political and religious goals, the centrality of Jerusalem to their story, and their uncompromising emphasis on the belief in the eternal nature of the House of David, Jerusalem and the Temple of Solomon.

Archaeological and historical studies, as well as a critical reading of the biblical text, allow us to not only understand the stories we have been told, but also to uncover the untold stories surrounding them, which contain additional layers of the messages that the text conveyed to its contemporaries, who knew the ancient reality and understood both what they had been told about it and what the texts ignored. This is what will be done in the different chapters of this podcast, and it's going to be a fascinating journey.