“My treatment of the history of ancient Palestine in this book takes Jerusalem as a starting and ending point, and as the axis around which the entire research revolves. This is in an attempt to remove the veil of myth from this city and reveal its true history, as well as the history of Palestine buried beneath a mound of biblical tales and other mounds of historical research afflicted with biblical colorblindness.”

The research covers a period of more than two thousand years of the history of Jerusalem, in the context of the history of Palestine, and also covers three thousand years of the history of Greater Palestine in the general context of the history of Syria and the ancient East in general. Our goal in all of this is to answer a few specific questions: - Who are the Jews? When was the Jewish ethnicity formed in Palestine? - When, where, and how did the Jewish religion arise? - Did the Jews have a political entity in Palestine? What was the temporal and geographical scope of this entity, if it existed? - Was Palestine ever Jewish? - What is the relationship between Jewish history, which began in the fifth century BC, and the history of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah in particular, and the history of Greater Palestine in general?