How are Thomas Thompson and Biblical minimalism seen in modern historiography? Is The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives still considered generally true 40 years later?

by Penisdenapoleon
Flubb

Well, if you read their own words, they think they're the only people doing anything correctly and everyone else is a idiot... (see Davies' comment).

It's probably important to frame Thompson's book in that it was written largely as a rebuttal to what was over-confident and over-enthusiastic interpretations of biblical archaeology. The Albright school of archaeology had been attempting to find things to corroborate what they had found in the bible. They found things and then related them back to the Middle Bronze Age period, what was considered to be the Patriarchal point. From the 60s onwards, this was challenged on a number of fronts, mostly from within the Albright/Wright school at first, and then broadened out once we hit the mid 70s (Thompson in 74 and 78, Seters in 75, and Dever 70, 77, and 80). They argued that Albright had distorted the archaeological record to fit his model of the Patriarchs, which was true, he had. Subsequent redating of the MBIIA kept pushing back Albright's model further into the 3rd millennium, and both Dever and Thompson pointed out archaeologically that his dating system was incorrect (due to subsequent work on the Byblos tombs from which he derived his 18th century date).

So far, so good, this was a needed corrective to a methodological and realia problem. So, yes the arguments in the book are still true insofar that they take down the then current paradigm of biblical archaeology. But then Seters and Thompson drew the conclusion that the narratives contain no historical value at all, and that trying to put them into a 2nd millennium cannot work, and the texts must be concocted in the 1st millennium. Exactly where they both disagree (and other minimalists disagree with each other's dating). Regardless, everything must be a myth (Thompson) or saga (Seters), whereas Dever said it wasn't an archaeological problem, but a biblical one.

The two groups have diverged ever since, with Thompson and Seters both arguing for a late composition of the biblical text (a range of dates anywhere between the 2nd-7th centuries) and Dever staying more in the middle (7th century with redaction). During the 90s onwards, the split has evolved into the 'minimalist' vs 'maximalist' controversy which has turned incredibly bitter and personal on both sides. The minimalist school coalesced around the Copenhagen school and continues to pump out minimalist literature, ranging from the measured (Seters) to the hysterical (Davies and Whitelam). I'm not sure where maximalists congregate - nobody argues in the Albright/Wright school anymore and nobody really was during the late 70s. What is argued is that the text best fits a 2nd millennium date and that the Patriarch's fit a MBA, perhaps an EBA time period, with later inclusions and anachronisms inserted during the redaction period (cf Kitchen).

Drawing a line down the middle is Finkelstein and to an extent, Dever, who said that the textual arguments (it was mostly literary arguments until the mid 90s) were not really important, let's look at the archaeological data, and that's where they and a number of other archaeologists now sit.

The arguments are moving away from 'proving' anything, to a 'supporting' argument, if only because trying to prove anything in the first few hundred years before Israel comes into existence (another maxi-mini-centri argument brewing there) is going to be nigh impossible, as your likelihood of finding a specific family of people some 3500 years ago, is going to be small, so nobody expects to find Abraham or his descendants until there are enough of them. Now the argument has shifted towards the land of Israel and whether biblical Israel can be substantiated via biblical text at all. I can think of exactly one archaeologist who still argues for a literal reading of the text, everybody else will talk about telescoping of historical events (so for example, multiple Exodus' are compacted into one major Exodus) or variations along those lines.

How they are seen in modern historiography really depends on where you sit on the spectrum. For some time, the maximalists hated the minimalists, and the minimalists hated the maximalists, and I'll stop before I turn into a Lehrer song, but it's an awful lot of heat and not a lot of light. I tend to find the minimalists (ok, mostly Davies) a little precious (with Thompson not far behind) as they complain about being maligned and misinterpreted, but are very happy to dish it out as well (see the first link, but there are other examples). They do seem to hold the idea that everybody is doing it wrong (Lemche seems good on this on the ANE-2 list). The most virulent maximalist is Kitchen, who spends a good portion of the last few chapters in his On the Reliability of the OT ripping into Lemche, Thompson, Davies, Whitelam and Finkelstein, sometimes for good reason (I suspect Kitchen thinks that anyone not involved in digging should shut up, which takes out most of the minimalist school). Dever does something of the same in some of his books, but has mellowed slightly over time. The overall theme seems to be "I'm right, everybody else is wrong". There are a couple of mid-rangers -I know Lester Grabbe is counted as a minimalist, but I find him really measured and so have a lot of time for him. There is some overlap - you'll find some minimalists conversing with the other side and vice versa, but they tend to entrench.

We do have some minimalists floating around, so hopefully they'll drop in with their perspective.