Professor Keith Whitelam is author of The Invention of Ancient Israel, the Silencing of Palestinian History and Palestine, the Bible and the Imperial Imagination.

He writes “Biblical studies, as a discipline, has evolved a rhetoric of representation which has been passed down without examination and has dispossessed Palestinians of land and a past… The struggle for the Palestinian past is only just beginning. For it to succeed, it will be necessary to expose the political and religious interests which have motivated the invention of ancient Israel within the discourse of biblical studies.”

 http://sheffieldpsc.org.uk/content/events/invention-ancient-israel-silencing-palestinian-history