The Hunt for Ancient Israel: Essays in Honour of Diana V. Edelman ed. by Cynthia Shafer-Elliot et al (review)

Reviewed by: The Hunt for Ancient Israel: Essays in Honour of Diana V. Edelman ed. by Cynthia Shafer-Elliot et al David B. Schreiner cynthia shafer-elliot, kristin joachimsen, ehud ben zvi, and pauline a. viviano (eds. ), The Hunt for Ancient Israel: Essays in Honour of Diana V. Edelman (Sheffield: Equinox, 2023). Pp. 582. 110. Diana Edelman, who retired in 2019 from the University of Olso, casts a long shadow across the landscape of biblical scholarship (see Edelman's C. V. on pp. 521–30). In this volume, she is celebrated for her willingness to "push the envelope, " as they say, whether in the form of unconventional thinking or by challenging the consensus through new modes of investigation. She is also celebrated as a colleague and mentor. But perhaps most importantly, in a field of study that is still dominated by men, she is celebrated for blazing trails and creating new opportunities for women through her innovative thinking, status as a renowned scholar, and service to the next generation. Consequently, it is fitting that this End Page 409 volume features such a diverse group of contributors and manifests the essence of Edelman's research by featuring presentations that challenge and rethink perpetual problems in novel ways. For example, Lester Grabbe ("Kings Saul, David, and Arthur: On Writing a History of the 'Dark Age, '" pp. 294–312) demonstrates a bit of unconventional thinking when he employs lessons from historiographic research centering on King Arthur as an analogy for historiographic questions centering on Israel's "dark age" during the Saulide and Davidide eras. This festschrift boasts a focus on issues of history and history writing. All essays are concerned with understanding the history, and historical presentation, of ancient Israel, although this is not to suggest that the volume is methodologically myopic. In fact, the opposite is the case. True to Edelman's own scholarship, the volume is methodologically eclectic. However, there is a notable preference for archaeological and textual methods. The result, ultimately, is a volume that provides ample opportunity to observe fledgling trajectories that are making an impact on historical and historiographic research. There are twenty-four essays in this volume, making it a rather large festschrift. In "The Covenant of Circumcision (Genesis 17) as an Identity Marker of Nascent Judaism, " Thomas Römer argues that priestly writers "invented a new function of circumcision" in the Babylonian and Persian periods as a mark of social identity (pp. 10–26). Anne-Mareike Schol-Wetter offers one of the most eclectic essays of the lot when she applies ideas from gender, trauma, and postcolonial studies to understand circumcision as a coping mechanism ("Pain, Gain, or Both? Circumcision, Trauma, and (R) Emasculation in Post-Exilic Israel, " pp. 27–49). In "Remembering the Roles of Mother, Wives and Daughter in the Formation of the Identity and Story of Israel in Genesis 25–36" (pp. 50–68), Steinar Aandahl Skarpnes examines the roles of mothers, wives, and daughters in Genesis 25–36, arguing that female characters display great influence upon the main protagonists. He then applies memory studies to the generation of women associated with Jacob. Yairah Amit then examines the Joseph cycle in terms of her already established ideas on polemical poetics in "The Joseph Story: Between a Family and a Polemical Story" (pp. 69–92). She notes that all four of her categories appear in the narratives of Joseph and are suggestive of the Persian period. Christoph Levin examines the famous shibboleth episodes with an attempt to distinguish the theological and compositional layers in the final form ("Shibboleth: Folklore and Redaction-History, " pp. 93–104). In "A Masterpiece of Early Hebrew Storytelling: The Seance at En-Dor (1 Samuel 28) " (pp. 105–25), Reinhard Müller attends to the literary history of 1 Samuel 28, arguing that the core of this text is not late but much earlier than commonly accepted as it mirrors early Northwest Semitic cultic and necromantic traditions. Most substantially, Müller argues that the storytelling is some of the best in all the OT. Pauline A. Viviano investigates the well-trodden 1 Kings 13 in "The Irrevocable Word of God (1 Kings 13: 1–32) " (pp. 126–36). She intends. . .