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Case file

Ehud Ben Zvi

Wikipedia's first sentence called it “historian of ancient israel”. Today it says “argentina -born canadian historian of ancient israel focusing on the achaemenid period and a scholar of the heb”.
Measured, not asserted. Every count, date and revision on this page was taken from Wikipedia's own history and checked against the live article. The words quoted are theirs.
Machine-checked against the full current article on 2026-08-03.
We saved snapshots of this article over twenty years; you are reading the October 6, 2023 one. Red dashes: removed from Wikipedia since. Pale dots: rewritten; the numbered note shows what it says now. 1 tap a number or a side note to jump between them
The opening as it read in October 6, 2023

Ehud Ben Zvi (born 1951) is a historian of ancient Israel, esp. in the Achaemenid period, a scholar of the Hebrew Bible, with a focus on Social Memory.1 He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History, Classics and Religion at the University of Alberta . Ben Zvi graduated from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem with a BSc, the Open University of Israel with a BA, and Tel Aviv University , MA before obtaining his PhD from Emory University under Gene Tucker. He has also edited and co-edited a substantial number of collected essays volumes (e.g., Remembering Biblical Figures in the Late Persian & Early Hellenistic Periods: Social Memory and Imagination [co-edited with Diana Edelman; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013]; Centres and Peripheries in the Early Second Temple Period [co-edited with Christoph Levin; FAT, 108; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2016]) and some special issues of journals (e.g., HebAI 9/4 (2020); Thematical Issue: Tōrâ-centred Israel. He has published numerous essays on social memory studies as they pertain to Ancient Israel, the historical and prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible. A list of his works can be accessed at https://sites.ualberta.ca/~ebenzvi/ebz-publications.html and at Ben Zvi's ORCID page. Ben Zvi founded the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures in 1996 and served as its general editor until 2013. He was one of the founders and served as first chair of the SBL International Cooperation Initiative, 2006-2013, and was one of the two founding co-editors of Ancient Near Eastern Monographs (SBL). He served as president of the European Association of Biblical Studies from 2016 to 2018, and as president of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, 2001-2002 . In 2015, a Festschrift was published in his honor.2

This is Wikipedia's own text, saved in our repository. Their copy of it is revision 1149213834.
Today
Wikipedia's first sentence called it “historian of ancient israel”. Today it says “argentina -born canadian historian of ancient israel focusing on the achaemenid period and a scholar of the heb”. Read the current article and compare.
Oct '232025
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What Wikipedia says this is

Every article opens by defining its subject. This one was redefined since 2023, and today's defining sentence is their current revision.

Then

historian of ancient israel

Now

argentina -born canadian historian of ancient israel focusing on the achaemenid period and a scholar of the heb

Struck red text is no longer in the article; dotted amber text was rewritten. Every revision id links to Wikipedia's copy; the text shown is our own saved copy. Data: /data. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA; quoted for the record; not affiliated with Wikipedia.

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