Beware of biblical revisionists

Dever is right. Theirs is a political agenda: they propagate their views in order to buttress Palestinian claims to the land. But these scholarly debunkers are in for an unpleasant surprise. If they proved to be correct, they might indeed undermine the religious and cultural foundations of the modern Jewish State of Israel. However, since the faith claims of both Christianity and Islam ultimately emanate from that same Hebrew Bible, these skeptics are just as surely destroying the veracity of those religions, and therefore undermining the position of the Palestinian Arabs, whose own identity - indeed, very existence as a self-conscious nation - has been shaped by the latter two traditions, especially Islam.