Ebonmuse

I'm currently reading William Dever's What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It?, which is interesting though not quite what I expected - it's more of a book-length polemic against the biblical minimalists than a positive summation of Dever's own position and the evidence supporting it. I had hoped for the latter, but it's actually proving worthwhile in a different way: if he is to be believed, then the minimalists are not trustworthy regarding their claims about biblical history.

I agree with what Dever says about the absurdity of "deconstruction"-type literary criticism, which claims, among other things, that no text has any inherent intended meaning; that each reader can derive any meaning he wants from any text; and that all such meanings are equally valid. If the minimalists really do espouse such a ridiculous view, that would, in my mind, be grounds against them.

I also recall Dever claiming that one minimalist book in particular (I believe it was Thompson's The Mythic Past), despite being several hundred pages in length, has no references and no footnotes. Can anyone confirm this? If it is true, it seems to me that it would be a sufficient reason to dismiss that book out of hand.

What I found most convincing, however, was Dever's listing of some of the most notable claims of prominent minimalists, including: their contorted reinterpretations of textual references to ancient Israel such as the Merneptah and Moabite stelae, Thompson's assertions that there were no Bronze Age cities in Palestine and no Judaism until the second century CE (!), Lemche and Thompson's claim that the Tel Dan inscription mentioning the "House of David" is a deliberately planted forgery, Davies' argument that the Siloam inscription of Hezekiah's water tunnel was a Hellenistic hoax, and most incredibly, Thompson's accusation that Dever deliberately suppressed and destroyed evidence at Gezer that was incompatible with his intent to find a "Solomonic" city gate there (how does he know this?).

Granted, I haven't read any of the minimalists' own works yet, but after reading Dever, I'm becoming less sure that I should even bother. As far as I can tell, all these assertions are not only baseless, they are ludicrous (and slanderous, in the case of the last). If anyone is better informed than I, I'd appreciate some responses to this. Are Dever's claims about the minimalists accurate? If so, is there any reason why I should read any of them? Do any of them know what they're talking about better than he represents?

Toto

What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It?: What Archaeology Can Tell Us About the Reality of Ancient Israel

The Mythic Past (one of the reviews complains about a lack of references.)

There is a page of articles on the whole issue of minimalism here, which can probably say things better than I could ever hope to try:

Essays on Minimalism from Bible and Interpretation

Cretinist

Yes, it is true (well, there are some here and there). I’m guessing that he did something like Howard Zinn did for his A People’s History of the United States, basically making his reading recommendations his footnotes and references.

I don’t see why this means one should dismiss his book out of hand. References are generally only needed to backup a point you don’t really plan to go into detail about in the text.

And I second reading the essays at bibleinterp.

Ebonmuse

I'm confused now. Are there footnotes or aren't there? Does the book have a list of "recommended reading" at the end, and does it cite any of those works in the body of the text?

Yes, but you should have something to prove you're well-versed in the relevant fields and show where you're getting your information from. I know Thompson is not an archaeologist himself; it seems a total mystery to me how one could write a book about the archaeology of Palestine without ever having done any digs and without referencing the work of anyone who has.

I have checked them out, but unfortunately they don't seem very informative to me. I will say that the minimalists do seem more moderate and reasonable than Dever depicts them, but I was looking for them to give real evidence supporting their views, and didn't come across any. Most of what I got from that site was them complaining about how mean old people like Dever have mistreated them, without any actual defense of their position. Even the essays by Gottwald and Isbell on the Davies-Dever exchange say the same thing - enough polemic, let's get to the facts already.

If anyone cares to volunteer an answer, allow me to add another question to my original post: What is the strongest argument the minimalists make, on an issue where they disagree with archaeologists like Dever?

DrJim

The really good "minimalist" stuff is already a bit old before it all degenerated into a shouting match. Davies etc have made some catastrophic blunders (shiloam tunnel, accusations of forgeries) that really should not have been made. From my understanding of Thompson is that he is "fundamentalist" for the cause, setting himself apart from not only "maximalists" but his fellow-travellers too. Even worse is Dever. It seems sometimes he would agree with anyone BUT Davies that the Exodus never happened, Abraham etc. are legendary. Its all got personal.

Perhaps the best statement of objections to standard historical critical work on the HB and ancient Israel is davies "In Search of Anicnet Israel". It too is polemic as can be, but he does lay out his complaints rather well.

He says the standard approachs are essentially circular: the frequent premise is that there is a kernel in each biblical story that actually dates to the events the episode is describing. Reconstruction of the event goes hand in hand with the reconstruction of the purported original text: the result is that both are made to confirm each other.

Davies makes a very sharp distinction between the historical Israel, the "Biblical Israel", i.e., the nation as described in the text, and the "Ancient Israel" that is the object of historian-theolgoical research adn is a hybrid of the two other Israel's.

Basically, in my view minimalism is a great idea off to a lousy start. Rather than see it as constructive, its loudest advocates have seen it as "destructive" and relished the chaos. That is why they keep producing more polemics and little in the way of actual biblical commentary. Pity, really.

There is some comming out: Ehud Ben Zvi's Micah commentary (Forms of the Old Testament Literature series), for instance treats the text as the product of a scribal institituion inscribing their ideology by constructing a book attributed to an anceint prophet. This is an approach that is as "minimalist" as can be but Ben Zvi is attempting to get the "maximum" out of his reading of the scribes as "brokers of divine knowledge" as he labels them sometimes. I studied under the guy (in fact, he was the one who told me to read Davies...) and he would NEVER let his work reduce to name-calling etc.
Teh good thing is, is B. Z. sees himself as part of the long history of biblical scholarship, even if his approach is relatively new. He does not impose any sort of discontinuity between what he does and what the rest of the biblical studies crowd has been doing for decades.

To my mind, seeing the bilbical text as a product of a community idealizing its past (which is really the position of ht eminimalst) makes a heck of a lot of sense. It does not require making huge leaps from the date of the extant MSS to the purported time of the narrated events and yet can allow for the preservation in this literatuer of really anceint material (well, Davies might in a pinch think some of it could be anceint). Still, it does not depend on the tenuous argumetns of the redactional critics to make it work.

As another major minimalist, N. P. Lemche, says, one should start with the evidence and move from there into areas we know nothing about, rather than the other way around. For him, that is later dates etc. and not early ones, the hallmark of the maximalists.

People who would be labelled "maximalists" make pretty bizzare leaps of logic too. For instance, DeVrie in his Kings commentary claimed that it was wrong to start interpretation with the final form of the text. One has to start with the original oral elements of a biblical text. How does one do that when all one really has is the final form of the text, no anceint tape recordings, and no ancient treatise on oral literatuer has yet to turn up? How does he KNOW he has such an element? But that for him is the only valid starting point.

Anyway, I think there is far more potential to the minimalism position that is evidence from the recent state of the argument.

I used to be closer to the movement than I am now. I did some work on Kings as a literary work that illustrated some aspects of post-monarchic Judean/Israelite identity which focused attention on Jerusalem's privileged status but remained open to diaspora folks and even did not shy away from admitting that Jerusalem was a bit of problematic centre. This is in reaction to another shortcoming of the minimalist position that has bugged me since I first read Davies. This is a tendency toward the "propaganda fallacy": reducing the production of all biblical literature to overt political agendas. I think the production of some of this stuff could be a way for the scribes to explore religious ideas etc that might not be perfectly in line with institutional policies: but that is just me.

Anyway, that my $0.02 worth

JRL

Vorkosigan

The lack of footnotes and references is irritating. But the text itself often gives the reference, or makes arguments that do not depend on references. In any case, Thompson quite often references the work of people who have worked in Palestine, I recall has worked on digs there, and is a prominent OT scholar. It is a book well worth reading...

Vorkosigan

Doctor X

My copy of Thompson seems to have references.

Some just do not like the implications of "minimalists." I eschew the term. One does historical analysis, and it is valid or it is not.

--J.D.

Celsus

DrJim basically sums it up quite well. I like the minimalists, because they have challenged epistemic standards in archaeology, and made the whole field interesting. On the other hand, the polemics can get tiring. I liked Lemche's Prelude to Israel's Past very much--absent the polemics and well-referenced. It also goes to show there is a vast common ground which they share before we even get to the "everything you say is wrong, so there!" polemics. Beware of Dever's caricatures--he's not innocent by any stretch.

Joel

Cretinist

I just got the book in a few days ago, and haven’t read it. Sometimes there is a foot note, but they’re rare, maybe 10 throughout the whole book (the only one I’ve come across while reading it is in the introduction).

The recommended reading is at the beginning, and consists of three pages. I imagine he cites quite a bit of work in the body of his text, but I wouldn’t know, as I’ve just begun reading it.

The guy is Professor of the Old Testament at Copenhagen....there is no need to question his credentials.

Doctor X

Prof. Thompson has been around since the late sixties. His dissertation work was or eventually served the basis for a book on the Patriarchs. It is a very detailed, footnoted--references given in German!--an analyses the linguistics of names and such.

I do not recommend it because it is so specialized that unless you really want the "nuts and bolts" of the analysis of words and their sources, you will probably find it tedious.

As with most "academically complete" works--footnotes? You want footnotes? I got ya footnotes right here!--it is dry and tedious.

I have read a wonderful essay of his from a hard to obtain book I have recommended in the past, The Triumph of Elohim.

The Mythic Past is a more "popular" book such as Who Wrote the Bible?.

I have not read Lemach's works, but from my perspective, the polemic comes not from the "minimalists" but from those unhappy with the results of recent scholarship--of the last thirty years.

--J.D.