Israel and the Nations Quotes

“Horses, as we shall see,13 were scarcely used in Israel until the reign of Solomon.”
― F.F. Bruce, Israel & the Nations: The History of Israel from the Exodus to the Fall of the Second Temple

“One of Gideon's sons, Abimelech by name, did not share his father's views about kingship. (He, however, was the son of a Canaanite woman and had been brought up with his mother’s relatives at Shechem.) After his father’s death he attempted to succeed to his power, and killed off most of the other members of Gideon’s family in the process. For three years he reigned as king from Shechem, but his kingdom did not extend beyond Western Manasseh.”
― F.F. Bruce, Israel & the Nations: The History of Israel from the Exodus to the Fall of the Second Temple

“monarchy, if it was like the monarchies which governed Israel’s neighbors, was alien to the ideals which they had learned in the wilderness. Let Yahweh alone be acknowledged as King in Israel. Let him use as his agents not one particular family, but the men whom from time to time he might choose, giving them special powers, to rule his people and defend”
― F.F. Bruce, Israel & the Nations: The History of Israel from the Exodus to the Fall of the Second Temple

“crops. These “Midianites” or “Ishmaelites”, as they are called in the biblical record, would have made life impossible for the Israelites; but an Israelite man named Gideon, from the tribe of Manasseh, took leadership and led a small and mobile band against the invaders, took them by surprise, pursued them across the Jordan and killed many of them. The grateful tribesmen invited Gideon to become their king and to found a hereditary monarchy, but he refused.”
― F.F. Bruce, Israel & the Nations: The History of Israel from the Exodus to the Fall of the Second Temple

“was not only Canaanite cities in the land itself that tried to make them virtual slaves. From time to time they suffered raids from beyond the Jordan, by their own kinsmen of Moab and Ammon and Edom, and more disastrously by the Bedouin from more distant parts of Arabia, who, riding on camels, raided their territory year by year at harvest time and destroyed their”
― F.F. Bruce, Israel & the Nations: The History of Israel from the Exodus to the Fall of the Second Temple

“When the danger which caused them to call upon the God of the covenant receded, the tendency was strong to slip back into conformity with the way of life of their Canaanite neighbors, to intermarry with them, to imitate their fertility rites in order to secure regular rainfall and good crops, and to think of Yahweh rather as a ba’al or fertility god than as the God who had delivered them from Egypt and made his nature and will known to them in the wilderness. The bond”
― F.F. Bruce, Israel & the Nations: The History of Israel from the Exodus to the Fall of the Second Temple

“alliance of five military governors of Canaanite citadels attempted to bar the Israelites from turning south from Gibeon and the other cities of the Hivites in the central hill country, which had submitted to them as subject allies. But the alliance was completely defeated, and the road to the south lay open to the invaders.”
― F.F. Bruce, Israel & the Nations: The History of Israel from the Exodus to the Fall of the Second Temple

“Closely related to these nomadic groups was another called the Amalekites, but they were hated as bitter enemies of Israel. The hatred lasted for centuries, and it can best be explained if they were guilty of some breach of covenant.”
― F.F. Bruce, Israel & the Nations: The History of Israel from the Exodus to the Fall of the Second Temple

“This attitude we may call practical monotheism. Whether other gods—the defeated gods of Egypt or the gods of the Canaanites or of other nations—might have some sort of existence was not a question about which either Moses or his followers were likely to trouble themselves.”
― F.F. Bruce, Israel & the Nations: The History of Israel from the Exodus to the Fall of the Second Temple

“therefore, men and women who were holy to him, reserved for him, must reproduce these qualities in their own life and conduct.”
― F.F. Bruce, Israel & the Nations: The History of Israel from the Exodus to the Fall of the Second Temple

“he would have to have been invented to account for the rise and progress of the nation of Israel. The”
― F.F. Bruce, Israel & the Nations: The History of Israel from the Exodus to the Fall of the Second Temple

“Israelites saw the controlling power of the patriarchs’ God, as he intervened for the deliverance of their descendants. And indeed, Moses in the ordinary way could neither have foreseen nor controlled these phenomena. The fact that they occurred just at that time confirmed God's instructions given to him in his vision and made possible Israel’s escape from Egypt in the way in which Moses assured them it would happen.”
― F.F. Bruce, Israel & the Nations: The History of Israel from the Exodus to the Fall of the Second Temple

“The land of Canaan, he was told, had been divinely promised to these ancestors, and their God had not forgotten his promise; indeed, God had observed the affliction of their descendants.”
― F.F. Bruce, Israel & the Nations: The History of Israel from the Exodus to the Fall of the Second Temple

“But what is given in the following pages may, I hope, serve in some sort of prolegomena to the volumes in the Paternoster Church History series.”
― F.F. Bruce, Israel & the Nations: The History of Israel from the Exodus to the Fall of the Second Temple

“Certainly I am confident that he would not share the very skeptical approach to Old Testament history of several recent writers. He did not believe that biblical authors, simply because they had theological purposes, were unreliable as historians.”
― F.F. Bruce, Israel & the Nations: The History of Israel from the Exodus to the Fall of the Second Temple

“Jews constitute but one quarter of one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. . . . (But they are) as prominent on the planet as any other people, and their importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of their”
― F.F. Bruce, Israel & the Nations: The History of Israel from the Exodus to the Fall of the Second Temple