The Biblical Minimalists

032

An increasingly modish—virulent?—strain of biblical scholarship concludes that the Bible is useless for reconstructing the history of ancient Israel. If this history can be reconstructed at all, it must be based solely on archaeological evidence as interpreted by anthropological models.

A recent extension—criticism, really—of this thinking argues that the attempt to locate ancient Israel even in this way fails, inevitably, because the concept of ancient Israel is simply an “invention.” The search for ancient Israel is therefore irretrievably doomed ab initio. It must be abandoned; it is, in effect, an illegitimate inquiry, nothing more than an effort by biblicists to “suppress” the real history of Palestine—that is, Palestinian history. In short, mainstream biblical scholars, if only unconsciously, are part of a contemporary Zionist cabal.

One might be tempted to dismiss as laughable the notion that the Bible cannot be used to reconstruct the history of ancient Israel—isn’t it the major source?—were it not for the fact that serious scholars subscribe to it, in one form or another, in such far-flung places as England, Scotland, Denmark and Italy; adherents in the United States teach at such prestigious institutions as the University of Chicago and the University of North Carolina. The scholars who hold these views are sometimes referred to as “biblical minimalists.” (One of the minimalists has called this a “sneering epithet.”)^a The debate between 033them and mainstream biblical scholars is becoming increasingly vitriolic.

Let it be said at the outset, these biblical minimalists are not kooks. They are knowledgeable scholars. Much of what they say is sound. Yet they end up illegitimately delegitimating the Bible. The problem is to identify the point at which their arguments weaken and become untenable. This requires some careful surgery.

For thousands of years most people (at least most Christians and Jews) accepted the Bible literally. In the past 200 years or so, this has changed considerably. The historicity of the Bible has taken some serious hits, and the trend even of mainstream biblical scholarship for the past two centuries has been to diminish the reliability of the history recounted in the Bible, from Creation to the Flood to the patriarchs to the Exodus to the conquest of the Promised Land. So the attack of the biblical minimalists often might seem nothing more than a sophisticated extension of this mainstream scholarship. Where, if at all, do the biblical minimalists veer off track?

All modern critical scholars recognize that the Bible is primarily a theological rather than a historical document and that the history it recounts is often biased as a result of these theological concerns. Can any reliable history be culled from such a source? The answer of the biblical minimalists is “ no.”

The answer of mainstream scholars is more subtle and therefore more difficult to explain, often to 034the point of sounding defensive. Some parts of the Bible are more reliable historically than others, they point out; each must be looked at separately. Past misuse of the Bible as history does not mean that no history can be found embedded in the text. As we have new evidence for biblical tendentiousness, we also have new evidence of a quite remarkable historical memory reflected in biblical texts. All this suggests that we should come to a new understanding of the biblical texts and their subtle historical value, not denigrate them as historically valueless. That is the case we will seek to make.

To appreciate the debate as it is shaping up requires some understanding of the history of biblical scholarship in the last two centuries.

The first narrative to fall was, of course, the Fall: the seven-day Creation, the separate formation of different species, the expulsion from Eden because Eve and Adam (at Eve’s urging) ate the forbidden fruit. All this is universally recognized by modern critical scholars as myth, not history, with many similarities to the creation myths of other societies. The same is true of the other narratives in Genesis 1–11: the story of Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood, the Tower of Babel.

For the biblical minimalists this particular bit of biblical unreliability provides a backdrop, a cautionary note. As one of them has observed, “ ‘Where does myth end and history begin?’ In terms of the Hebrew Bible, as is often pointed out, there is no apparent differentiation between Genesis 1–11 and what follows, either to the end of the book [of Genesis] or through to the end of 2 Kings [which marks the end of the Israelite monarchy].”¹

These early biblical episodes also provide us with instances of some of the earliest misuses of archaeology. For example, in 1929 British archaeologist Leonard Woolley, digging at Ur, stunned the world with the announcement that he had found evidence of the biblical Flood—actually a meter of mud between two occupational levels, but about a thousand years earlier than the Bible places the Flood. A few blocks away on this same site, the flood layer disappeared. It was a decidedly local flood.

While it is true that the historicity of the first 11 chapters of Genesis has been thoroughly undermined, this has had little if any effect on our appreciation of these stories. They are as powerful and meaningful as ever, despite the fact that they are not historical. Bill Moyers’s TV series on Genesis is proof of that. The stories are read as profound literature. In the academic community, more and more, this is where the action is, with respect not only to Israel’s prehistory, but also to the patriarchal narratives, the sojourn in Egypt, the Exodus, the period of the Judges, and the Israelite monarchy. Literary study is in; historical study is out. Literary study of the Bible is surely laudable, yet it makes biblical 035historians a little uncomfortable. For them, at least, it is as if the Bible is not worth studying as history, only as literature.²

It is with the patriarchal narratives, however, that the biblical minimalists first find real chunks of red meat. Is there any history in the stories about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? A group of important scholars led by the towering American biblical archaeologist William F. Albright answered “yes” at mid-century. These scholars dated the patriarchal age by drawing on the narratives’ background details and comparing them to archaeological remains. According to the most popular history of ancient Israel among the generation of students after the Second World War: “The mode of life of the patriarchs, and the nature of their wanderings as these are described in Genesis, fit perfectly in the cultural and political milieu of the early second millennium…between about the twentieth and about the seventeenth or early sixteenth centuries [B.C.E.]…[The patriarchal narratives] fit splendidly in that period…They fit poorly in the ensuing period.”³

This argument was largely destroyed by two carefully reasoned books by American scholars in the 1970s. The first, by Thomas L. Thompson, is titled The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives.⁴ Thompson taught for years in the United States before moving to the University of Copenhagen, a center of leading biblical minimalists, where he is among the staunchest. The second book is by John Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition.⁵ Van Seters, now at the University of North Carolina, is a leading proponent of the anthropological approach to biblical texts as a basis for uncovering biblical history.

Thompson and Van Seters were able to show that none of the details Albright and others had relied on could be isolated in, and only in, the archaeological period to which the earlier scholars ascribed the patriarchal age.

This provided the basis for the claim that there was no patriarchal age—that the patriarchal narratives were no more historical than the stories in Genesis 1–11. The logic doesn’t follow, however. Albright may have failed to pinpoint convincingly a particular archaeological period for the patriarchal narratives, but that does not mean there was no patriarchal age or that the narratives are without historical value. Other scholars have continued the search. Some claim that other details do identify the early second millennium B.C.E. as the patriarchal age (for example, the price of slaves in the Bible’s patriarchal narratives corresponds to the price as recorded in archaeologically recovered sources of the early second millennium, not the price when the accounts are alleged to have been written down).^b Still other scholars look for various kinds of historical memories embedded in the text; for them, it is 036not yet time to declare the patriarchal narratives historically valueless, although most recognize that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are much more likely to be eponymous figures than actual individuals.

That the biblical minimalists have indeed made deep inroads is illustrated in an assessment by Professor David Merling at a conservative Seventh-Day Adventist university (Andrews University, in Berrien Springs, Michigan). The number of archaeologists who believe in a historic exodus as the Bible relates it is “very small,” he tells us. “Only those who are friendly to the biblical story would actually believe in an Exodus event.”⁶

The principal reason for rejecting any exodus from Egypt is that, at least according to the biblical minimalists, the Israelites were really indigenous 037Canaanites. Israel emerged from within; it was not the result of foreign migration. There was no conquest of the Promised Land as described in the Bible. Since early Israelites were in fact Canaanites, there was no need for an exodus from Egypt.

The question of Israel’s emergence in Canaan has been a major scholarly battleground for the last generation, even before the biblical minimalists emerged on the scene. According to the traditional explanation, grounded in the books of Exodus and Joshua, the Israelites took possession of the Promised Land by means of a lightning-quick conquest, defeating major Canaanite cities one by one, and using a variety of stratagems, such as nighttime raids, clever feints followed by surprise ambushes and psychological warfare involving trumpets.

In the 1930s British archaeologist John Garstang, digging at Jericho, found a massive destruction he attributed to the invading Israelites under Joshua. Subsequent excavations by Kathleen Kenyon and an analysis of Garstang’s reports, however, demonstrated that the destruction Garstang attributed to Joshua actually occurred about 1600 B.C.E., hundreds of years before Joshua. Subsequent efforts to lower the date of this destruction to about 1400 B.C.E.^c still leave it too early for the Israelite military leader. Jericho was subsequently abandoned; there was no city there at the time Joshua was supposed to have conquered it.

Jericho has proved a major embarrassment to those defending the literal accuracy of the biblical account (though reasonable debates about the dating of its destruction levels continue). And Jericho is not alone: The next site on Joshua’s path of conquest, Ai, is even more difficult. Excavator Joseph Callaway, an American Southern Baptist, candidly admitted that the city had already lain in ruins for about a thousand years by the time Joshua was supposed to have conquered it.

This pattern has been repeated at enough other sites to call into serious question what has come to be called the “conquest model” of Israel’s emergence in Canaan.

An Israeli kibbutznik provided some of the earliest archaeological evidence for a different model to explain Israel’s origins. In the 1950s Yohanan Aharoni conducted a surface survey in upper Galilee that produced quantities of pottery that he attributed to the Israelites’ early, gradual and peaceful entry into the land. Almost simultaneously, German scholars Albrecht Alt and Martin Noth were developing these same ideas, which came to be known as the “peaceful infiltration model,” based primarily on archaeological evidence and internal evidence from the biblical text.

The debate between proponents of the conquest model and the peaceful infiltration model involved, in essence, two different readings of the Bible, each exemplified by a different biblical book—Joshua, which presents the case for a lightning conquest, and Judges, which presents the case for a gradual, mostly peaceful infiltration over about 200 years, with important centers such as Jerusalem remaining in non-Israelite hands until David’s time.

In retrospect, it seems odd that no one suggested that Israel’s emergence was a little of both. The biblical authors were respectful enough of tradition to preserve two somewhat differing accounts in Joshua and Judges. In any event, the debate focused not so much on the reliability of the biblical accounts as on which biblical account was to be preferred.

Both the conquest model and the peaceful infiltration model, however, assume that the Israelites came from outside the land.

This basic assumption was soon to be questioned. Two American Bible scholars, George Mendenhall of the University of Michigan and Norman Gottwald of the the New York Theological Seminary, developed a hypothesis that was originally called the “peasant revolt model.” They argued that Canaanite peasants, living in an essentially feudal society, revolted against their urban overlords and took to the hills of central Canaan, where, as archaeology attests, hundreds of new villages arose in previously unoccupied areas. It is generally accepted that these new settlements, which proliferated between about 1200 and 1000 B.C.E., were built by Israelites emerging in Canaan.

When the theory of an actual peasant revolt became difficult to defend, it was refined and renamed a “social revolution.” Thus refined, the social revolution model has won widespread support among mainstream Bible scholars and archaeologists.

The debate now is no longer how the Israelites came to control Canaan—by force or by peaceful immigration—but whether the emerging Israelites came from outside Canaan or from within.

If it was an inside job, there was no exodus from Egypt. Israel’s defining moment—its escape to freedom—is a myth, a view supported by archaeologists’ failure to find any evidence of Israel’s supposed trek through Sinai. At Kadesh-Barnea, where, we are told, the Israelites spent 38 of their 40 years of wandering, the remains go back only to the tenth century B.C.E.

Nevertheless, the hint of a synthesis is now 038developing. Elements of all three models can be seen in Israel’s emergence in Canaan. Surely, some Israelites came from Egypt. No society would invent a history of slavery for themselves and give their founding hero (Moses) an Egyptian name if they had never been there. And there must have been some military action involved in Israel’s subsequent domination of Canaan. Indeed, Hazor, a major Canaanite city in the Galilee, was destroyed in a fiery conflagration that the current excavator, Hebrew University’s Amnon Ben-Tor, attributes to the Israelites. The Bible, too, he points out, recounts that Hazor was destroyed by burning. On the other hand, there was obviously some peaceful infiltration as well. Few doubt that local Canaanites accreted in large numbers to form the people we call Israelites. Indeed, the Bible itself tells us that Israel’s origin was in the land of Canaan (Ezekiel 16:3). The Song of Deborah tells us that the tribe of Dan were sailors and Asher lived on the coast (Judges 5:17). Early Israel was made up of many groups. Some surely came from outside, from Egypt; ultimately, their story became the foundation story of the nation. Many others came from within Canaan.

As these debates were taking place among mainstream scholars, the biblical minimalists began to assume a considerably more radical position: There simply was no Israel at this time. The biblical accounts of premonarchic Israel are valueless for purposes of historical reconstruction. Take away the Bible, they say, and you wouldn’t know there was an Israel at this time. Nothing identifies the 250 to 300 new settlements in the central hill country of ancient Canaan as Israelite. We call them Israelite only because that’s where the Bible says the early Israelites settled (see Joshua 11:3, 21, 17:18, 20:7).

Besides, say the biblical minimalists, none of the archaeological markers that supposedly identify this new ethnic group holds up under careful scrutiny. For example, the so-called four-room house, common among sites thought to be Israelite, is also found outside of Israelite territory. The collared-rim jar, once thought to be a typically Israelite vessel, is also found elsewhere and might be concentrated in the hill country simply because it was especially suitable for carrying water; since the abundance of collared-rim jars in the hill country of Canaan could be accounted for on practical grounds, there is no need for ethnic arguments. Moreover, most of the hill-country pottery of this period, which archaeologists call Iron Age I (1200–1000 B.C.E.), resembles pottery in Canaan from the previous period (the Late Bronze Age [1550–1200 B.C.E.]). If the Late Bronze Age inhabitants were Canaanites, so were the Iron I settlers.

This position has a fatal flaw, however. Over a hundred years ago, quite by accident, British archaeologist William Flinders Petrie discovered a hieroglyphic stela in which Pharaoh Merneptah boasts about his military victories in Canaan. He says he defeated three cities and a people: Israel.^d Known as the Merneptah Stela, or the Israel Stela, it is the earliest extrabiblical reference to Israel. It can be securely dated to the late 13th century B.C.E. Moreover, there is no doubt about the reading. It plainly refers to Israel. Like many Egyptian words in hieroglyphics, the word “Israel” includes an additional sign that lacks any phonetic value. Scholars call such signs determinatives because they indicate the kind of word to which they are attached. There is a determinative for a city (attached to the three cities in Canaan that Merneptah claims to have defeated), a determinative for a nation and another determinative for a people. The determinative attached to “Israel” is the determinative for a people. This precisely describes the condition of the Israelites at the time, before the institution of the monarchy.

To discredit the Bible as a historical source is one thing; to discredit the Merneptah Stela is quite another. But for this accidental find, the biblical minimalists might well have won the day among mainstream scholars, who often feel defensive about maintaining the historicity of obviously tendentious biblical narratives. However, the biblical minimalists did not admit defeat in face of the Merneptah Stela. One of the leading biblical minimalists, Gösta Ahlström of the University of Chicago, wrote a book titled Who Were the Israelites?⁷ in which he dealt with the problem. Israel, he contended, was only a geographic term at this time, not an ethnic designation. It was, he says, the territorial designation for the central hill country of Palestine.

Another biblical minimalist, Robert Coote of the San Francisco Theological Seminary, gets around the Merneptah Stela by arguing that there was no relationship between the Israel of the stela and the entity we know as Israel. The Israel of the stela was simply “a Palestinian tribe or tribal confederation.”⁸ Coote bases his conclusion largely on anthropological studies of tribal societies.

All this provides the background for understanding the latest attack on the reliability of the biblical accounts—this time on the monarchy narratives, which recount the period of Israel’s greatest glory and most illustrious monarch, King David. In the words of one of the leading biblical minimalists, Philip R. Davies of the University of Sheffield, in 039England, “The figure of King David is about as real as King Arthur.”⁹

Again, take away the Bible, and what do you have? Archaeology provides no evidence of an Israelite empire led by the likes of King David or King Solomon, who, according to the biblical chronology, ruled the united nation of Israel from about 1000 B.C.E. to 920 B.C.E. Neither David nor Solomon is mentioned outside the Bible. Moreover, the archaeological evidence for the tenth century is painfully sparse—in contrast to archaeological periods before and after. If David and Solomon ruled vast empires, we would expect evidence of this in the archaeological record. So argue the biblical minimalists.

In 1993, however, Israeli archaeologist Avraham Biran uncovered an extraordinary inscription at Tel Dan, where he had been digging for 20 years.^e A 13-line fragment of a larger stela, the inscription is apparently part of a victory monument that, like the Merneptah Stela, recounts the defeat of the Israelites—this time by the Arameans in the ninth or eighth century B.C.E. This stela is similar to the Merneptah Stela in another respect: It presents the same kind of challenge to those biblical minimalists who deny the existence of the Davidic monarchy. For the Tell Dan Stela refers to the “House [or dynasty] of David,” Beth David in Hebrew. Also like the Merneptah Stela, it is a recognition by an outsider of Israel’s (the Davidic dynasty’s) importance.

The biblical minimalists’ attack on the Tel Dan Stela has been led by Professor Davies. His questioning of the plain meaning of Beth David is so broad based as to make one wonder whether he himself has any real confidence in his arguments. Words in the inscription are separated by dots called word dividers. Because a word divider does not appear between Beth and David, Davies argues, Beth David is a toponym, like Bethlehem. Another argument he makes is that because ancient Semitic languages are written largely without vowels and the v (vov) in David can also be read as a long o, the letters could be read Beth Dod. Davies suggests that the last letters, which supposedly mean “David,” could as likely mean “beloved” or “uncle” or “kettle.”

Leading Semitic linguists such as Anson Rainey of Tel Aviv University and David Noel Freedman of the University of California have ridiculed Davies’s suggestions. Freedman points out that “House of David” (using these same Hebrew letters) appears over 20 times in the Hebrew Bible. Rainey called Davies an amateur (although Davies has an undergraduate degree from Oxford and a doctorate from the University of Scotland, he is not generally regarded as an expert in ancient Semitic languages) and then opined that the biblical minimalists’ suggestions regarding the inscription can “safely be ignored.” “Disinformative abuse,” replied Davies, “though typical of Rainey.”^f

050

There is something else in Davies’s attack on the Beth David inscription, a harbinger of things to come. Biran originally published the inscription with a colleague, Israel’s leading epigrapher, Joseph Naveh of Hebrew University. The editio princeps appeared under the names of both scholars, and it is they whom Davies initially attacked—not simply their conclusions, but their motives: “I am surprised that Biran and Naveh have not even bothered to consider these more plausible alternative readings—though I can guess why! They seem anxious to find a Biblical relvance to the inscription, regardless of whether it is there or not.”¹⁰

This raised the debate to a different, more personal level.

At the 1995 meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, in Philadelphia, Keith Whitelam of the University of Stirling, in Scotland, read a paper in which he contended that ancient Israel was a fiction; it had been “invented” for “political reasons.” What lies behind the effort to invent ancient Israel is the need to “exclude…Palestinian history.” For Whitelam, the ancient inhabitants of the land, usually called Canaanites, are Palestinians.

Israeli biblical historian Avraham Malamat, in a letter read to the audience after Whitelam’s paper, called the paper “outrageous…anti-Bible and anti-Israel.”

Since then Whitelam has published a book expanding on his ideas, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History. As the title indicates, the book is half political tract and half scholarly discussion, both at the same time. The phrases in the title are repeated over and over as a kind of mantra. I counted the “silencing” of Palestinian history no less than 30 times, often more than once on a single page. If Palestinian history isn’t silenced, it is “excluded” from consideration. The “invented” history of ancient Israel is referred to at least 15 times. If it isn’t an invented past, it is “imagined” (at least as often). “Palestine and Palestinian history” are “denied any right to [a] past.” This is because of the “stranglehold” of biblical studies. If it isn’t a stranglehold, it’s the “tyranny of the discourse of biblical studies.” If it isn’t tyranny, it’s a “straightjacket.”

For Whitelam, the biblical minimizers are “not radical enough,” even though in his—and their—view, they have thoroughly destroyed the Bible as a historical source. Ahlström, for example, is still guilty “of excavating the [biblical] texts for historical information.” Better, but still not extreme enough, are the biblical minimalists who, like Thomas Thompson, question “whether a history of Israel can be written at all.”

Even these biblical minimalists are at fault because they are still looking for the history of ancient Israel. Whitelam’s response is that “we know nothing of Israel’s origins” and apparently cannot since, apart from the Bible, we have almost nothing to go on. And the ancient Israel depicted in the Bible is nothing more than “a literary construct,” a “fiction, a fabrication.”

In Whitelam’s view, the very search for ancient Israel is illegitimate. We should instead be looking for Palestinian history.

Whitelam’s use of the term “Palestinian” is not only interesting but clever. Because no geographical term covers the land presently occupied by the modern states of Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, what to call the region is a problem. “The land of the Bible” is too long and too parochial when speaking of nonbiblical time periods. “Eretz Israel” (the land of Israel) is not considered neutral enough. Ancient Israel had vastly different borders at different times. “Canaan” applies only before the emergence of Israel.

“Palestine” also has its problems, not the least of which is that it is also a term with modern political implications. (Whitelam acknowledges the “often bitter debate” that followed the effort of a leading American archaeologist, William Dever, to replace the term “biblical archaeology” with “Syro-Palestinian archaeology.”) Moreover, the land was not called Palestine until the fifth century B.C.E., and its borders, too, changed from time to time. So it is no more satisfactory than the other terms. Nevertheless, for want of a better term, many scholars do use the term “Palestine” to designate this geographical area, even for periods before the term existed.

Whitelam seeks to build on this. If the place is called Palestine, why shouldn’t its history be called Palestinian history and its people Palestinians? “The fact that [historians] refer to the geographical region as Palestine but never refer to its inhabitants as Palestinians is a denial and silencing of Palestinian history. We are continually presented with images of a land in which its inhabitants are anonymous.”¹¹

Thus when Whitelam speaks of Palestinians and Palestinian history, he means what other scholars mean by Canaanites and Canaanite history—the people in the land and their history before the emergence of Israel. Obviously, Whitelam is drawing a connection between these ancients he calls Palestinians and their modern counterparts of the same name.

For Whitelam, “the construction of history…is a political act,” and he takes full advantage of the latitude this position allows him. Of course, when he says this, he is being critical of biblical historians, but he himself is far worse. The best biblical scholars make a conscious effort to examine their biases and to suppress them in their scholarly work. Whitelam makes no such effort. His biases are exposed for all to see. No bifocals needed.^g

Whitelam charges biblical scholars with “collaborating” in the wider effort to dispossess the Palestinians of their land. “The discourse of biblical studies has been shaped by contemporary political struggles over the question and future of Palestine…Biblical studies has been and continues to be, despite the many protestations of innocence, involved in the contemporary struggle for Palestine…The Zionist struggle for the realization of a sovereign and independent state has dominated the history of the region throughout this century.”¹²

Biblical scholars know what they are doing, according to Whitelam; their “motives…have been masked in the public writings of the discipline…Biblical studies is…implicated in an act of dispossession which has its modern political counterpart in the Zionist possession of the land and dispossession of its Palestinian inhabitants.”¹³

Until recently, Israel has “control[led] the past,” but it is now losing its grip. “The reappraisal of biblical narratives, which has continued with increasing vitality and self-confidence, has continued to contribute to the fracturing of the consensus. The major implication for historical research has been to signal the death of ‘biblical history,’ which is gradually being replaced by the growing recognition of Palestinian history as a subject 051in its own right.”¹⁴ Incidentally, one factor that has contributed to this fracturing of the consensus, in Whitelam’s view, is the Palestinian intifada.

As we have seen, Whitelam constructs his argument on the work of the biblical minimalists. It is they who end up almost totally rejecting the Bible as a source for reconstructing the history of ancient Israel. They start with some telling considerations. The Bible is certainly not history. It is a book of theology, of God’s actions in history. It is full of miracles and supernatural events that fall outside the historian’s ken. Moreover, the Bible has frequently been misused to support a view of history that could not be sustained in light of archaeological finds and modern historiographical standards. In short, from the historian’s viewpoint, the Bible is often inaccurate.

Having conceded all this, are we then left with the conclusion that the Bible is valueless as a historical source?

In a court of law, a witness whose testimony proves inaccurate with respect to one fact becomes suspect as to all facts. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. The cross-examining attorney is justified in arguing that that witness’s testimony should be totally ignored.

The historian does not have that luxury, however. In a legal case, the kinds of evidence the court will allow are limited. It will not, for example, permit hearsay. Not so the historian. The paucity of evidence available to reconstruct ancient history means that nothing that may conceivably be relevant should be overlooked or ignored.

The biblical minimalists very shrewdly build on some sound scholarship to reach unsound conclusions. Much of what they say is correct—until the “therefore.” The infirmities in the biblical testimony mean not that the Bible should be entirely ignored but that it must be used with caution as a historical resource.

Indeed, this is true of all sources for reconstructing the history of ancient Israel. Are the boastful claims on ancient monuments, in hieroglyphics or cuneiform, any more reliable than the Bible? To answer this, we need look no further than the Merneptah Stela, which, with typical royal braggadocio, claims that Israel has been exterminated: “Its seed is not!” A slight exaggeration.

And what of the ancient historians, such as Josephus and Herodotus and Manetho? They too have been shown to be unreliable in some respects and tendentious in others. Are we simply to disregard them?

We must be no less cautious of the results of archaeology. The evidence of archaeology is notoriously difficult to interpret. Little that is said wins universal agreement. In a typical modern dig, only two to five percent of the site is excavated. No one knows whether the next spadeful of dirt will expose the error of an earlier archaeological conclusion.

The biblical evidence, too, requires interpretation. The Bible must, in a sense, be excavated, to uncover its history and compositional layers before making any judgment about what might be said about the history embedded in the text. Not an easy task, but one for which there is no alternative.

Some biblical minimalists may reply that they have engaged in the exercise I have just suggested but have found that there is very little reliable history embedded in the text. All right then, but scholars 052must examine everything case by case. The biblical minimalists, on the other hand, often give the impression that once they have undermined one fact asserted in the Bible the whole structure falls. Take the empire of David and Solomon, which, according to the Bible, extended from Kadesh-Barnea in the south to beyond Damascus in the northeast.^h Whether this is an exaggeration, and whether the control asserted by the Israelite united monarchy over much of this territory was perhaps less than absolute, are certainly reasonable questions. But the minimalists, pointing to the legitimate skepticism on these points, end up asserting that King David has as much historicity as King Arthur. Again, the jump is too big: A false conclusion is built on reasonable scholarship.

Another basis for the minimalists’ rejection of the biblical evidence is the admitted fact that the text was written down hundreds of years after the events described. As might be expected, the biblical minimalists generally date the written composition very late, though within the range of scholarly consensus. Whitelam, Thompson, Niels Peter Lemche and Davies, for example, all opt for the Persian and Hellenistic periods (fifth to second century B.C.E.), long after the purported emergence of Israel in the 12th century B.C.E., the purported rule of David in about 1000 B.C.E. and the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E., which ended ancient Israel’s purported national existence.

The written texts tell us more, say the biblical minimalists, about the period in which they were set down than about the period they supposedly describe. As Whitelam puts it, “[The Bible’s] value as a source for the historian is not so much in terms of the past it purports to describe but as an insight into the perception or self-perception of the literate stratum of society, mainly in the Persian and Hellenistic periods.”¹⁵

Again, a skewed conclusion is based on sound scholarship. It is true that much can be learned from the biblical text about the period in which the text was composed, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing to be learned from the text about the period described. One thing is certain: The biblical authors had an extraordinary historical memory. This has been demonstrated with respect to the patriarchal narratives, the Egyptian sojourn, the Exodus, the settlement in Canaan, the period of the Judges and the monarchical period. We now have extrabiblical evidence not only for the dynasty of King David but also for the existence of such biblical figures as Omri, Ahab, Jehu, Ahaz, Hezekiah and Manasseh, among others.ⁱ

Despite all this, Whitelam claims that the biblical minimalists have successfully “undermined the fundamental assumption within biblical studies that such traditions, despite a significant temporal separation from the events they describe, necessarily preserve some kind of historical kernel or historical memory which can be extracted from the narrative to provide raw data for the modern historian.”¹⁶ He concludes that the Bible must largely be ignored as a source for reconstructing the history of the period the Bible describes.

Having rejected the Bible’s historicity, the minimalists keep to their logic and take the next step. Once the Bible is toppled, ancient Israel itself can fall: “The issue of whether a history of Israel can be written at all,” Thomas Thompson writes, “must take central stage in all future discussions.”¹⁷

Thus enters Whitelam, who says we are asking the wrong questions. We should not be looking for ancient Israel. It never existed. Ancient Israel has only been “imagined,” “invented” for the purpose of suppressing Palestinian history. We have been misled all this time because “ancient Israel has been conceived and presented as the taproot of Western civilization.” What we should in fact be looking for, insists Whitelam, is Palestinian history. We must not be “distracted [as he confesses he himself has been] by the search for ancient Israel.”

The minimalists’ rejection of the Bible’s historicity, and their denial that ancient Israel even existed, would seem extremely naïve or extremely disingenuous. Scholars will disagree over the historical reliability of certain facts in the Bible. But the demonstrated historical memories embedded in the Bible—that is, historical data verified by independent sources—strongly indicate that it must be treated seriously as a historical source.

This is especially true because of the dearth of other reliable sources. As historians, we must deal with the information that we have. It ill behooves us to reject a major source when we have so little else. These issues should not be decided by politically driven scholarship. Whether or not debates over Israel’s ancient history have any effect on Israeli-Palestinian relations, the biblical minimalists are guilty precisely of what they accuse mainstream biblical historians of doing: using scholarship as the handmaiden of politics.

An increasingly modish—virulent?—strain of biblical scholarship concludes that the Bible is useless for reconstructing the history of ancient Israel. If this history can be reconstructed at all, it must be based solely on archaeological evidence as interpreted by anthropological models. A recent extension—criticism, really—of this thinking argues that the attempt to locate ancient Israel even in this way fails, inevitably, because the concept of ancient Israel is simply an “invention.” The search for ancient Israel is therefore irretrievably doomed ab initio. It must be abandoned; it is, in effect, an illegitimate inquiry, nothing more than an effort by biblicists […]