Should bible studies remain in Israeli public schools? Teachers' attitudes towards bible teaching as a mandatory subject

Religious Education, Spring 2003 by Idalovichi, Israel

One can observe even declared secularists asserting their belief in the Bible, taking recourse in historical revelation or sacred history as a source of legitimacy and support to the nation's territorial claims. Jewish nationalism as embodied in the Zionist movement has been gradually distancing itself from judaism as a religion for at least 200 years, while the Bible-and bible studies in the classroom-serves as the remaining "growth medium" for nurturing Israeli nationhood. Bible teachers keenly follow the work of scholars of biblical criticism and archeologists who maintain that the Bible is a religious-spiritual composition edited hundreds of years after the occurrence of the events it describes, that it was compiled from five different ancient sources and its role in the service of the ideology of the Jewish religion makes it a dubious historical source (Pritchard 1969; Bright 1972). Nonreligious bible teachers, however, adopt the new archeological findings as well as literary, linguistic, or narrative techniques and raise them in their classrooms (Amit 1997), while religious bible teachers, although they are aware of new findings and new methods, reject them outright and ignore them in their teaching.

The influence of archeological findings in Israel has a heightened affect not merely on scholars, but on the public at large. Animated public debate erupts periodically surrounding the historical authenticity of biblical narrative. Even if the critical questions about archeology in the Land of Israel have yet to trickled down to grassroots public consciousness, theories that biblical reality cannot be substantiated by archeological findings and most of the biblical stories may be inventions or exaggerations continue to be the subject of academic and media debates (Herzog 1989,2000; Lancet 1992; Silberman 1982).

The school of biblical criticism was the first to challenge the "reality" of scriptures, claiming that biblical historiography was formulated and in large measure actually "invented" during the Babylonian exile. These scholars claimed that the history of the Hebrew people, as a continuum of events beginning with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and proceeding through going down into Egypt, enslavement, and exodus, culminating with the conquest of the Promised Land by the tribes of Israel, was no more than a later reconstruction of events for theological purposes (Herzog 1989,2000; Lancet 1992; Zartal 1999,2000).

Biblical archeology and other research in Land of Israel studies tried to establish a harmonious relationship between Holy Scriptures and modern scientific findings. Many archeological finds shed light on the Bible, but paradoxically, in the last years the glut of findings that have emerged have begun to undermine the historical credibility of biblical narratives instead of reinforcing their descriptions of historical events. One spectacular example is the thesis that many secular historians and archeological bible experts hold that, at best, the sojourn in Egypt and the exodus involved a small number of families and that their private story was later expanded and "nationalized" to fit the needs of theological ideology (Zartal 1999, 2000; Zerubavel 1994).