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Politics, History and Culture

The historical veracity of the Hebrew Bible has increasingly been called into question over the past two centuries. The locus of most critiques has fallen on the patriarchal, exodus and conquest narratives, because these portions of the Bible are the least well supported by extra-biblical textual and archaeological data. During the past two decades, however, a much more radical brand of criticism has arisen in the field of biblical studies, one that seeks to deny the Hebrew Bible any significant role as an historical record. This school of ‘Biblical Minimalism’ argues that the Bible is primarily nationalist propaganda concocted by scribes many centuries after the events that it purports to describe in order to buttress the political and religious agendas of post-exilic Jewish elites. This ‘revisionist’ movement, made up mainly of European (as opposed to American and Israeli) scholars, is not very large; nevertheless, like revisionist movements within other academic disciplines, it has acquired a voice in its field that is wholly disproportionate to its size, based mainly on its sensational claims rather than on its innovative research. Indeed, when the claims of the minimalists are measured against the methodological and evidentiary standards that they themselves profess to uphold, their ‘findings’ largely fall apart. The fundamentally flawed nature of biblical minimalism is unmasked in this challenging and rewarding volume. The authors, though, are not simply motivated by a desire to dismantle the intellectual pretensions of minimalism; they are also out to defend the Hebrew Bible as a work that contains much genuine history. To achieve both of these objectives, the authors divide their tome into two distinct sections. The first is a rigorous methodological inquiry into the right and wrong ways of writing biblical history, while the second offers a well-constructed, albeit episodic, history of ancient Israel rooted in the Bible. Methodologically speaking, the authors start with the perfectly sensible proposition that the Hebrew Bible ought to be taken seriously as an historical document, even if its compilers did not self-consciously intend to produce a chronicle of ancient Israel. In contrast to the minimalists, who