“For they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel” (Rom 9:6, NASB). So begins Paul’s prolonged discourse on his hopes for his own people. “They are not all ‘Jews’ who are descended from Israel” is perhaps an apt summary of Staples’s hopes for how scholars might classify the people descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. His ambitious study should accomplish nothing less than a paradigm shift in the way many in the guild think about Israelite identity. His thesis is succinct as it is well-documented: “Throughout the period covered by this book, one constant is that Israel is the name either for the tribes of the biblical northern kingdom or for the twelve-tribe covenantal people of Yhwh” (p. 339). Relatedly, this means “Jew/Judean” is not synonymous with “Israel,” and one could be an Israelite but not a Jew: “That is, ‘Jew’ continues [in the post-exilic period] to...

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