Minimalist

And have you read Athas' book or are you still clinging to the Biran/Naveh translation?

Cesc

Lemche is pretty extreme, that's how he is, he thrives on academic infighting it seems to me, likes to push things and provoke a little (he's my professor).

Concerning the Tel Dan inscription he likes to refer to the arguments made by Russell Gmirkin ("Tool slippage", SJOT, 16:2, 2002) about it being a forgery based on (pretty blurry) photographs.

Lemche in an upcoming article proposes that the OT is a composition by Hasmonean propagandists using older material, in that context notably Samaritan traditions. Personally my position is also way more "centralist" than Lemche on most points.

Minimalist

I agree with Lemche primarily because once the Davidic Empire nonsense is disposed of we only have two periods in the entire first millenium when Judah is a more or less independent entity pursuing a foreign policy. In the late 7th century BC as the Assyrian Empire was crumbling and the Hasmonean period. As they did not fare well in the late 7th century the next time we have an actual kingdom, not a province of the Babylonian, Persian or one of the Hellenistic empires, is the Hasmoneans c 130-100 BC. After that they too start to go down the crapper of dynastic squabbling but it is long enough.

outhouse

I don't think anyone credible follows the Davidic empire nonsense.


The United Monarchy is pretty much done with academically unless your bound to some poor apologist.

Tenorikuma

What article is this? I must check it out.

A Hasmonean for much of the OT makes loads of sense, providing an actual Sitz-im-leben with a priestly class based in Jerusalem that would have been capable of writing it.

DCHindley

Ten,

If I recall correctly, in the 1990s R Gmyrken and others were posting quite a bit of info on the old Orion e-list to the effect that battle tactics described in books of the Law and perghaps the early "prophets" (Joshua to 2 Kings in RSV) most closely resembled the tactics attributed to the Greeks in non-Jewish/Christian writers. The archives are still available here. Maybe this is an off-shoot of that.

Here is an article (by Luke Ueda-Sarson) that attributes to Russ G. the composition of the War Rule (War scroll) to around 163. (the author says a published version was printed in the Slingshot, 228, May 2003, pages 1-13, but the following source has an entry for him as follows: The Maccabean Army as Portrayed in the War-Rule of The Army of the Sons of Light (227/10-13, Luke Ueda-Sarson))

Russ responded to Luke's introductory post on Orion (Thu, 10 Jan 2002 05:52:48 -0800 ) and referred back to his published article "The War Scroll and Roman Weaponry Reconsidered", DSD [Dead Sea Discoveries] 3 (1996) 89-129).

FWIW, Luke is really into realistic war gaming, based on either real armies and or made-up ones, in a game scenario called "De Bellis Multitudinis." Here is a link to his web page on the matter.
DCH

Minimalist

Be careful not to apply your own rationality to irrational people, my friend. There is an agenda to find the "Davidic Empire" in every rock they dig up.
Yossi Garfinkle has made it his mission to take a single, virtually illegible and pointless inscription on a single ostracon at Khirbet Qeiyafa into "evidence" that Judah was a major population center in the 10th century and fortified the town in question against the Philistines.

http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/d...irbet-qeiyafa/

More likely it was a Philistine fort that they built to control the nomadic tribes who inhabited Judah at the time.

outhouse

Thank you

Minimalist

You're welcome.

Cesc

It's an article on the topic of the OT as cultural memory as opposed to historiography. Unfortunately it's in Danish and is set to be published in the Danish journal Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift (DTT) this year. Here's the English abstract though. Remember, it's unpublished so far, so it's not "official".