In this work, Paul Michael Kurtz examines the historiography of ancient Israel in the German Empire through the prism of religion, as a structuring framework not only for writings on the past but also for the writers of that past themselves. The author investigates what biblical scholars, theologians, orientalists, philologists, and ancient historians considered "religion" and "history" to be, how they understood these conceptual categories, and why they studied them in the manner they did. Focusing on Julius Wellhausen and Hermann Gunkel, his inquiry scrutinizes to what extent, in an age of allegedly neutral historical science, the very enterprise of reconstructing the ancient past was shaped by liberal Protestant structures shared by dominant historians from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Born 1984; 2007 BA in English, Harding University; 2010 MDiv in Hebrew Bible, Princeton Theological Seminary; 2016 Dr. phil. in History, University of Göttingen; since 2017 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow, University of Cambridge, and Postdoctoral Research Associate, Queens' College.