Biblical Minimalism - Background: Academic Study of The Bible in The 20th Century

Background: Academic Study of The Bible in The 20th Century

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 ceased to be taken literally 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 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 equally non-historical. At the same time, archaeology and comparative sociology convinced most scholars in the field that there was equally little historical basis to the biblical stories of the Exodus and the Israelite conquest of Canaan.

By the 1980s, the Bible's stories of the Patriarchs and Exodus and Conquest 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 Palestine, 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.