Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] how scholars debate controversial issues

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Harold Holmyard <hholmyard3 AT earthlink.net>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] how scholars debate controversial issues
  • Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2007 19:41:05 -0500

Yitzhak Sapir 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.s

HH: Not really.

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.

HH: Look, maximalists are opposed to minimalists, who deny biblical historicity. A prime focus of the debate may be the United Monarchy, but the terms are used more broadly than that. Here is another source to support Wikipedia's definition, Mario Seiglie:
http://www.ucgstp.org/lit/gn/gn039/exodus.html

Uphill battle for believers

When it comes to the Bible, archaeologists and biblical scholars categorize themselves into two groups: minimalists and maximalists. The minimalists (also called deconstructionists of the Bible) generally hold the view that the Bible is full of myths and is therefore unreliable. So they vigorously try to refute any evidence that supports the biblical account.

Professor and archaeologist Anson Rainey says of the minimalists: "Their view that nothing in biblical tradition is earlier than the Persian period (538-332 B.C.), especially their denial of the existence of a United Monarchy (under Saul, David and Solomon), is a figment of their vain imagination . . . Biblical scholarship and instruction should completely ignore the ‘deconstructionist school.’ They have nothing to teach us" (Biblical Archaeology Review, November-December 1994, p. 47).

The maximalists, on the other hand, believe the biblical accounts have solid historical and archaeological backing. Long a minority among archaeologists, their numbers are growing, since it seems that every year discoveries are found that support, rather than refute, the biblical narrative.

Archaeologist Bryant Wood is an example of a biblical maximalist who is slowly turning the tide in favor of the biblical evidence. He argues that the archaeological data for the Exodus fall into place if the event is dated back to 1450 B.C., the approximate date the Bible indicates for the Exodus. He mentions that the documented evidence of foreign slaves at that time in Egypt could well include the Israelites. He also adds that archaeological indications of the destruction of Canaanite cities some 40 years afterward support the account of Joshua’s conquests (an interview with Dr. Wood begins on page 12 of this issue).

HH: Seiglie is certainly not using maximalist in your sense because Bryant Wood discusses the Exodus as in 1450 B.C.; Wood is not talking about the United Monarchy, yet Seiglie gives him as an example of a maximalist.

HH: Here is a quote by someone reviewing Kitchen's book On the Reliability of the Old Testament:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A13536JM05RBU2?ie=UTF8&sort_by=MostRecentReview

The title speaks for the subject of the book. Dr. Kitchen has once again produced an incredible work. Regardless of whether you are a Biblical Maximalist, Minimalist, or something in between, this book sets the bar for future scholarship on the subject. Kitchen takes a conservative approach to the material using a vast array of primary texts and originial sources. He is a paragon in the fields of Egyptology and the Ancient Near East--the material shows it.

HH: Since the book is speaking about the reliability of the whole OT, the reviewer is certainly not referring only to the United Monarchy when he uses the term maximalist.

HH: Here is a comment by Christopher O'Brien, Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at California State University, who seems to use maximalist in a broad sense:
http://northstatescience.blogspot.com/2006/11/is-there-biblical-archaeology-some.html

Two observations struck me while reading Hoffmeier’s letter and returning to the original articles that he cites. The first is that I question whether the whole minimalist/maximalist debate in biblical archaeology is really a construct of biblical fundamentalism more than it is a theoretical debate in archaeology. Supposedly “minimalists” see the Bible as offering little or no history verifiable through archaeological research. At the other end of the spectrum, “maximalists” see the Bible as mostly historical, documenting people, places and events frequently verified by archaeology.

HH: Here's another one, by Angela Roskop Erisman, a Bible scholar:
http://imaginarygrace.blogspot.com/2007/02/discourse-in-biblical-studies.html

The terms "maximalism" and "minimalism" are used with great regularity in biblical studies, as those of us in the scholarly world and regular readers of Biblical Archaeology Review are aware. To the best of my knowledge, these terms were coined by William W. Hallo in his 1989 Presidential Address to the American Oriental Society, published as "The Limits of Skepticism" in the Journal of the American Oriental Society 110 (1990): 187-199. Hallo took up the problem of how Assyriologists use cuneiform texts to understand ancient history, religion, and society, and the terms have made it over into biblical studies to label how the Bible is used for these same purposes. . . .

In a certain sense, these terms are labels for two different reading strategies. Put very simply, a "maximalist" reading tends to trust that the details about history, religion, and society that we find in a cuneiform or biblical text are accurate. A "minimalist" reading, on the other hand, tends to approach such details with skepticism—not the neutral and healthy "questioning" kind of skepticism that ought to characterize scholarship, but doubt. I think these terms are really a problem, and that using them does us more harm than good.

HH: Here's another one:
http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2006/11/not_a_trivial_e.html

The truth of the matter is (as any educated person knows) that there are two schools of thought among academics -- Biblical maximalists and Biblical minimalists. The Biblical maximalist believes the Bible to be accurate on most accounts unless proven otherwise, while the Biblical minimalist believes the Bible to only be accurate on things that have already been proven to line up.

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.

HH: It does not seem that you are defending anything. I am defending something. You were denying that there are many Biblical scholars who reject the documentary hypothesis and uphold the historicity of the patriarchal narratives. I was correcting that misrepresentation of reality.

Yours,
Harold Holmyard





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page