Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 3/24/07, Harold Holmyard wrote:

> Conservative Old
> Testament scholars, "biblical maximalists,"
> generally accept the historicity of most Old
> Testament narratives (save the accounts in Gen
> 1–11) on confessional grounds, and noted
> Egyptologists (e.g., Kenneth Kitchen) argue that
> such a belief is not incompatible with the
> external evidence. Other scholars (e.g., William
> Dever) are somewhere in between:

This is a misrepresentation of Biblical maximalists.
Biblical maximalists generally refers to scholars
who hold to the accuracy of the Bible in terms of
events during the United Monarchy, if such a
period indeed existed.  Dever is considered a
maximalist.  But thanks for giving a good live
example of how discussions that somehow
touch on issues of biblical historicity inevitably
end up having to defend the positions on biblical
historicity that scholarship has adopted for some
time now.

Yitzhak Sapir