Since 1948 the Israeli state has encouraged a conception of an ethnocentric identity on the basis of the land and conquest traditions of the Hebrew Bible, especially on the book of Joshua and those dealing with biblical Israelites' origins that demanded the subjugation and destruction of other peoples. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the book of Joshua is required reading in Israeli schools. Although (as we shall see in the Conclusion) the Israelite “conquest” was not the “Blitzkrieg” it is made out to be in the book of Joshua, this book holds an important place in the Israeli school curricula and Israeli academic programmes partly because the founding fathers of Zionism viewed Joshua's narrative of conquests as a precedent for the establishment of Israel as a nation (Burge, 2003: 82). While the account of the Israelites' enslavement in ancient Egypt as described in the book of Exodus is generally recognized as a myth, in Israelis schools and universities this is treated as actual history.

The “creation of a usable (biblical) past” (Peled-Elhanan, 2012: 12) by the Israeli educational system and the Israeli biblical academy has been examined by several Israeli academics and authors, including Nurit Peled-Elhanan (2012: 12–47), Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi (1992), Shlomo Sand (2011), Meron Benvenisti (2002) and Gabriel Piterberg (2001: 31–46; 2008).