Biblical minimalism, also known as the Copenhagen School because two of its most prominent figures taught at Copenhagen University, is a movement or trend in biblical scholarship that began in the 1990s with two main claims:
that the Bible cannot be considered reliable evidence for what had happened in ancient Israel; and
that "Israel" itself is a problematic subject for historical study.[1]
Minimalism is not a unified movement, but rather a label that came to be applied to several scholars at different universities who held similar views, chiefly Niels Peter Lemche and Thomas L. Thompson at the University of Copenhagen, Philip R. Davies, and Keith Whitelam. Minimalism gave rise to intense debate during the 1990s—the term "minimalists" was in fact a derogatory one given by its opponents, who were consequently dubbed "maximalists", but in fact neither side accepted either label.[citation needed]
Maximalists, or neo-Albrightians, are composed of two quite distinct groups, the first represented by the archaeologist William Dever and the influential publication Biblical Archaeology Review, the second by biblical scholar Iain Provan and Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen.[2] Although these debates were in some cases heated, most scholars occupied the middle ground, evaluating the arguments of both schools critically.
Since the 1990s, while some of the minimalist arguments have been challenged or rejected, others have been refined and adopted into the mainstream of biblical scholarship.[3]
Background
By the opening of the 20th century the stories of the Creation, Noah's ark, and the Tower of Babel—in short, chapters 1 to 11 of the Book of Genesis—had become subject to greater scrutiny by scholars, and the starting point for biblical history was regarded as the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and the other Hebrew patriarchs. Then in the 1970s, largely through the publication of two books, Thomas L. Thompson's The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives and John Van Seters' Abraham in History and Tradition, it became widely accepted that the remaining chapters of Genesis were not historical. At the same time, archaeology and comparative sociology convinced most scholars in the field that there was little historical basis to the biblical stories of the Exodus and the Israelite conquest of Canaan.[4]
By the 1980s, the Hebrew Bible's stories of the Patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt and Conquest of Canaan were no longer considered historical, but biblical histories continued to use the Bible as a primary source and to take the form of narrative records of political events arranged in chronological order, with the major role played by (largely Judean) kings and other high-status individuals. At the same time, new tools and approaches were being brought to bear on scholars' knowledge of the past of ancient Canaan, notably new archaeological methods and approaches (for example, this was the age of surface surveys, used to map population changes which are invisible in the biblical narrative), and the social sciences (an important work in this vein was Robert Coote and Keith Whitlam's The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective, which used sociological data to argue, in contradiction to the biblical picture, that it was kingship that formed Israel, and not the other way round).
Then in the 1990s a school of thought emerged from the background of the 1970s and 1980s which held that the entire enterprise of studying ancient Israel and its history was seriously flawed by an over-reliance on the biblical text, which was too problematic (meaning untrustworthy) to be used even selectively as a source for Israel's past, and that Israel itself was in any case itself a problematic subject. This movement came to be known as biblical minimalism.[5]
Biblical minimalism
The scholars that have come to be called "minimalists" are not a unified group, and in fact deny that they form a group or "school": Philip Davies points out that while he argues that the bulk of the Bible can be dated to the Persian period (the 5th century BCE), Niels Peter Lemche prefers the Hellenistic period (3rd to 2nd centuries BCE), while Whitelam has not given any opinion at all. Similarly, while Lemche holds that the Tel Dan stele (an inscription from the mid-9th century BCE which seems to mention the name of David) is probably a forgery, Davies and Whitelam do not. In short, the minimalists do not agree on much more than that the Bible is a doubtful source of information about ancient Israel.[6]
Bible as a historical source document
The first of the minimalists' two central claims is based on the premise that history-writing is never objective, but involves the selection of data and the construction of a narrative using preconceived ideas of the meaning of the past—the fact that history is thus never neutral or objective raises questions about the accuracy of any historical account.[7] The minimalists cautioned that the literary form of the biblical history books is so apparent and the authors' intentions so obvious that scholars should be extremely cautious in taking them at face value. Even if the Bible does preserve some accurate information, researchers lack the means to sift that information from the inventions with which it may have been mixed.[8]
The minimalists did not claim that the Bible is useless as a historical source; rather, they suggest that its proper use is in understanding the period in which it was written, a period which some of them place in the Persian period (5th–4th centuries BCE) and others in the Hellenistic period (3rd–2nd centuries).[9]
Historicity of the nation of Israel
The second claim is that "Israel" itself is a difficult idea to define in terms of historiography. There is, firstly, the idealised Israel which the Bible authors created—"biblical Israel". In the words of Niels Peter Lemche:
The Israelite nation as explained by the biblical writers has little in the way of a historical background. It is a highly ideological construct created by ancient scholars of Jewish tradition in order to legitimize their own religious community and its religio-political claims on land and religious exclusivity.
Modern scholars have taken aspects of biblical Israel and married them with data from archaeological and non-biblical sources to create their own version of a past Israel—"Ancient Israel". Neither bears much relationship to the kingdom destroyed by Assyria in about 722 BCE—"historical Israel". The real subjects for history-writing in the modern period are either this historical Israel or else the biblical Israel, the first a historical reality and the second an intellectual creation of the biblical authors. Linked with this was the observation that modern biblical scholars had concentrated their attentions exclusively on Israel, Judah, and their religious history, while ignoring the fact that these had been only a fairly insignificant part of a wider whole.[10]
Important works
In Search of Ancient Israel (Philip R. Davies, 1992)[11]
Davies' book "popularised the scholarly conversation and crystallised the import of the emerging scholarly positions" regarding the history of Israel between the 10th and 6th centuries—in other words, it summarised current research and thinking rather than proposing anything original. It was, nevertheless, a watershed work in that it drew together the new interpretations that were emerging from archaeology: the study of texts, sociology and anthropology. Davies argued that scholars needed to distinguish between the three meanings of the word Israel: the historical ancient kingdom of that name (historical Israel); the idealised Israel of the biblical authors writing in the Persian era and seeking to unify the post-exilic Jerusalem community by creating a common past (biblical Israel); and the Israel that had been created by modern scholars over the past century or so by blending together the first two (which he termed ancient Israel, in recognition of the widespread use of this phrase in scholarly histories). "Ancient Israel", he argued, was especially problematic: biblical scholars ran the risk of placing far too much confidence in their reconstructions through relying too heavily on "biblical Israel", the Bible's highly ideological version of a society that had already ceased to exist when the bulk of the biblical books reached their final form.[12]
The Invention of Ancient Israel (Keith Whitelam, 1996)[13]
Subtitled "The Silencing of Palestinian History", Whitelam criticised his peers for their concentration on Israel and Judah to the exclusion of the many other peoples and kingdoms that had existed in Iron Age Palestine. Palestinian history for the period from 13th century BCE to the 2nd century CE had been ignored, and scholars had concentrated instead on political, social, and above all religious developments in the small entity of Israel. This, he argued, supported the contemporary claim to the land of Palestine by the descendants of Israel, while keeping biblical studies in the realm of religion rather than history.[14]
The Israelites in History and Tradition (Niels Peter Lemche, 1998)[15]
The subtitle of the US edition of The Mythic Past was "Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel", a phrase almost guaranteed to cause controversy in America. The European title, The Bible in History: How Writers Create a Past, was perhaps more descriptive of its actual theme: the need to treat the Bible as literature rather than as history—"The Bible's language is not a historical language. It is a language of high literature, of story, of sermon and of song. It is a tool of philosophy and moral instruction." This was Thompson's attempt to set the minimalist position before a wider public; it became the cause of a rejoinder by William Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It?, which in turn led to a bitter public dispute between the two.
Reception and influence
The ideas of the minimalists generated considerable controversy during the 1990s and the early part of the 21st century. Some conservative scholars reacted defensively, attempting to show that the details of the Bible were in fact consistent with having been written by contemporaries (against the minimalist claim that they were largely the work of the Persian or Hellenistic periods). A notable work in this camp was Kenneth Kitchen's On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Taking a different approach, A Biblical History of Israel, by Iain Provan, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III, argued that criterion of distrust set by the minimalists (the Bible should be regarded as unreliable unless directly confirmed by external sources) was unreasonable, and that it should be regarded as reliable unless directly falsified. Avi Hurvitz compared biblical Hebrew with the Hebrew from ancient inscriptions and found it consistent with the period before the Persian period, thus questioning the key minimalist contention that the biblical books were written several centuries after the events they describe.[17]Takamitsu Muraoka also argues against the hypothesis that the entire Hebrew Bible was composed in the Persian period, associated with some minimalists like Davies, countering that there are specifically late Biblical Hebrew features, like some rare plene spellings, that are contained in books dated to the Persian era by minimalists as well, but unusual or absent elsewhere.[18]
In the scholarly mainstream, historians of ancient Israel have partially adapted their methodologies by relying less on the Bible and more on sociological models and archaeological evidence.[19] Scholars such as Lester L. Grabbe (Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?, 2007), Victor H. Matthews (Studying the Ancient Israelites: A Guide to Sources and Methods, 2007), and Hans Barstad (History and the Hebrew Bible, 2008) simply put the evidence before the reader and explain the issues, rather than attempt to write histories; others such as K.L. Knoll (Canaan and Israel in Antiquity, 2001) attempt to include Israel in a broader treatment of Syria-Palestine/Canaan. This is not to say that the ideas of the minimalists are completely adopted in modern study of ancient Israel: Mario Liverani, for example (Israel's History and the History of Israel, 2005), accepts that the biblical sources are from the Persian period, but believes that the minimalists have not truly understood that context nor recognised the importance of the ancient sources used by the authors. Thus positions that do not fit either a minimalist or a maximalist position are now being expressed.[20]
Provan, Iain W. (1995). "Ideologies, Literary and Critical: Reflections on Recent Writing on the History of Israel". Journal of Biblical Literature. 114 (4): 585–606. doi:10.2307/3266476. JSTOR3266476. S2CID165776437.
Thompson, Thomas L. (1995). "A Neo-Albrightean School in History and Biblical Scholarship?". Journal of Biblical Literature. 114 (4): 683–698. doi:10.2307/3266481. JSTOR3266481.
The Book of Exodus is the second book of the Bible. It is a narrative of the Exodus, the origin myth of the Israelites leaving slavery in Biblical Egypt through the strength of their deity named Yahweh, who according to the story chose them as his people. The Israelites then journey with the legendary prophet Moses to Mount Sinai, where Yahweh gives the 10 commandments and they enter into a covenant with Yahweh, who promises to make them a "holy nation, and a kingdom of priests" on condition of their faithfulness. He gives them their laws and instructions to build the Tabernacle, the means by which he will come from heaven and dwell with them and lead them in a holy war to conquer Canaan, which has earlier, according to the myth of Genesis, been promised to the "seed" of Abraham, the legendary patriarch of the Israelites.
The history of ancient Israel and Judah spans from the early appearance of the Israelites in Canaan's hill country during the late second millenium BCE, to the establishment and subsequent downfall of the two Israelite kingdoms in the mid-first millenium BCE. This history unfolds within the Southern Levant during the Iron Age. The earliest documented mention of "Israel" as a people appears on the Merneptah Stele, an ancient Egyptian inscription dating back to around 1208 BCE. Archaeological evidence suggests that ancient Israelite culture evolved from the pre-existing Canaanite civilization. During the Iron Age II period, two Israelite kingdoms emerged in the region: the Kingdom of Israel in the north and the Kingdom of Judah in the south.
The Israelites were a group of Semitic-speaking tribes in the ancient Near East who, during the Iron Age, inhabited a part of Canaan. They were also an ethnoreligious group.
The Babylonian captivity or Babylonian exile is the period in Jewish history during which a large number of Judeans from the ancient Kingdom of Judah were forcibly relocated to Babylonia by the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The deportations occurred in multiple waves: After the siege of Jerusalem in 597 BCE, around 7,000 individuals were deported to Mesopotamia. Further deportations followed the destruction of Jerusalem and Solomon's Temple in 587 BCE.
The historicity of the Bible is the question of the Bible's relationship to history—covering not just the Bible's acceptability as history but also the ability to understand the literary forms of biblical narrative. One can extend biblical historicity to the evaluation of whether or not the Christian New Testament is an accurate record of the historical Jesus and of the Apostolic Age. This tends to vary depending upon the opinion of the scholar.
The Jebusites were, according to the books of Joshua and Samuel from the Hebrew Bible, a Canaanite tribe that inhabited Jerusalem, called Jebus before the conquest initiated by Joshua and completed by King David, although a majority of scholars agree that the Book of Joshua holds little historical value for early Israel and most likely reflects a much later period. 1 Chronicles 11:4 states that Jerusalem was known as Jebus before this event. The identification of Jebus with Jerusalem is sometimes disputed by scholars. According to some biblical chronologies, the city was conquered by King David in 1003 BCE.
The patriarchal age is the era of the three biblical patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, according to the narratives of Genesis 12–50. It is preceded in the Bible by the primeval history and followed by The Exodus.
The Exodus is the founding myth of the Israelites whose narrative is spread over four of the five books of the Pentateuch.
William Gwinn Dever is an American archaeologist, scholar, historian, semiticist, and theologian. He is an active scholar of the Old Testament, and historian, specialized in the history of the Ancient Near East and the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah in biblical times. He was Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Arizona in Tucson from 1975 to 2002. He is a Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology at Lycoming College in Pennsylvania.
The chronology of the Bible is an elaborate system of lifespans, 'generations', and other means by which the Masoretic Hebrew Bible measures the passage of events from the creation to around 164 BCE. It was theological in intent, not historical in the modern sense, and functions as an implied prophecy whose key lies in the identification of the final event. The passage of time is measured initially by adding the ages of the Patriarchs at the birth of their firstborn sons, later through express statements, and later still by the synchronised reigns of the kings of Israel and Judah.
Thomas L. Thompson is an American-born Danish biblical scholar and theologian. He was professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen from 1993 to 2009. He currently lives in Denmark.
What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel is a 2001 book by biblical scholar and archaeologist William G. Dever detailing his response to the claims of minimalists to the historicity and value of the Hebrew Bible. The book was also conceived as a response to Thomas L. Thompson's minimalist book The Bible in History.
Niels Peter Lemche is a biblical scholar at the University of Copenhagen, whose interests include early Israel and its relationship with history, the Old Testament, and archaeology.
The Bible in History: How Writers Create a Past,, is a book by Thomas L. Thompson, Professor of Old Testament at the University of Copenhagen. Its US title is The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel.
The origins of Judaism lie in Bronze Age polytheistic Canaanite religion. Judaism also syncretized elements of other Semitic religions such as Babylonian religion, which is reflected in the early prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible.
Philip R. Davies (1945–2018) was a British biblical scholar. He was Professor Emeritus of biblical studies at the University of Sheffield, England. In the late 1990s, he was the Director for the Centre for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He was also the publisher and editorial director of Sheffield Academic Press. He was the author of books and articles on ancient Israelite history and religion, including Scribes and Schools (1998) in the Library of Ancient Israel. Davies promoted the theory of cultural memory. He and David Clines edited the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament and its Supplement Series.
The Merneptah Stele, also known as the Israel Stele or the Victory Stele of Merneptah, is an inscription by Merneptah, a pharaoh in ancient Egypt who reigned from 1213 to 1203 BCE. Discovered by Flinders Petrie at Thebes in 1896, it is now housed at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
The Exodus is the founding myth of the Israelites. The scholarly consensus is that the Exodus, as described in the Torah, is not historical, even though there may be a historical core behind the Biblical narrative.
Yahwism, as it is called by modern scholars, was the religion of ancient Israel and Judah. An ancient Semitic religion of the Iron Age, Yahwism was essentially polytheistic and had a pantheon, with various gods and goddesses being worshipped by the Israelites. At the head of this pantheon was Yahweh—held in an especially high regard as the two Israelite kingdoms' national god—and his consort Asherah. Following this duo were second-tier gods and goddesses, such as Baal, Shamash, Yarikh, Mot, and Astarte, each of whom had their own priests and prophets and numbered royalty among their devotees.
The composition of the Torah was a process that involved multiple authors over an extended period of time. While Jewish tradition holds that all five books were originally written by Moses sometime in the 2nd millennium BCE, leading scholars have rejected Mosaic authorship since the 17th century.
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