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Friday, October 19, 2018

Crazy academic paper of the day: "Ancient Israel and settler colonialism"



If you worry that people might look at history and see that Jews are indigenous to Israel, flipping the script of who is a colonialist and who is native, we have "scholars" who are ready to say that the ancient Israelites were also settler colonialists:

This essay looks at ancient Israel as a settler colonial society. After an introductory paragraph that describes the significance of the study of ancient Israel for the study of settler colonialism, it summarises various approaches to the study of the history of ancient Israel. It then presents evidence for seeing the Israelite documents and early history in settler colonial terms. Finally, it looks at some aspects of decolonisation of the biblical narrative based on acknowledging at least the very possibility of a settler colonial nature of early Israel.
The same author seems a little obsessed with looking at Jews, and only Jews, in settler colonialist terms. He has also written

 Ancient Israelite population economy: ger, toshav, nakhri and karat as settler colonial categories

A Commentary on Numbers: Narrative, Ritual, and Colonialism

Pitkänen, Pekka M A (2016) The ecological-evolutionary theory, migration, settler colonialism, sociology of violence and the origins of ancient Israel. Cogent Social Sciences, 2 (1). pp. 1-23. ISSN 2331-1886

Pitkänen, Pekka M A (2015) Ancient Israel and Philistia: Settler Colonialism and Ethnocultural Interaction. Ugarit Forschungen, 45. pp. 233-263. ISSN 978-3-86835-137-8

Pitkänen, Pekka M A (2015) Reading Genesis–Joshua as a Unified Document from an Early Date: A Settler Colonial Perspective. Biblical Theology Bulletin: Journal of Bible and Culture, 45 (1). pp. 3-31. ISSN 0146-1079

Pitkänen, Pekka M A (2014) Pentateuch–Joshua: a settler-colonial document of a supplanting society. Settler Colonial Studies, 4 (3). pp. 245-276. ISSN 2201-473X

A quick look at indexes of scholarly literature does not find any articles on Arab colonialism in the Middle East.

Think about that.




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