Issues concerning Israelite Historiography

1. Issues concerning Israelite Historiography Dr Southwood

2. Various questions concerningthe nature of “history” • to answer questions that people ask about their relationship – relationships to the land on which they live, to the ethnic group with which they identify, and to their religious myths and rituals that undergird their sense of identity (Frank Frick 2002).

3. Histories of Israel? Or Midrashic Paraphrases? (Davies) • B Bright, J. (1981), A History of Israel (3rd edn., London: SCM Press). • Noth, M. (1983), The History of Israel (London: SCM Press. Reprint of Second English Edition, A. & C. Black, 1960). • SogginA History of Israel: from the beginnings to the Bar Kochba Revolt, AD 135 (London: SCM Press). 

4. Maximalists / Minimalists Maximalists (Kenneth Kitchen, William Dever 2001, Ian Provan and his colleagues), argue for the historicity of the many of the biblical accounts. Minimalists (Philip Davies of Sheffield University, Thomas Thompson Copenhagen, Keith Whitelam Sheffield again, Nils Peter LemcheCopenhagen), emphasize the ideological characteristics of the accounts

5. Whybray If none of these methods can provide an adequate basis for the writing of a history of Israel, it would seem that if such a history is to be written the biblical text, however liable to correction, must be taken as a foundation’.   Whybray, R. N. (1996), ‘What Do We Know about Ancient Israel’

6. Philip Davies • To assign non‐biblical data the role of ‘elucidating’, ‘confirming’, (or equally, of ‘denying’) the biblical narrative (or ‘biblical record’) will mean that the many remaining gaps in our knowledge are occupied by biblical data. …If the fate of the non‐biblical data is to be made to fit into the remnants of a framework which they themselves have not sponsored, then they are not being properly utilized.

7. Nils Peter Lemche • The traditional materials about David cannot be regarded as an attempt to write history, as such. Rather, they represent an ideological programmatic composition which defends the assumption of power by the Davidic dynasty

8. Ian Provan • Positivism is intellectually incoherent—incoherent, among other reasons, because if its level of scepticism with regard to some favourite things were applied consistently to everything, there could be no knowledge of anything… the biblical text is treated with a scepticism quite out of proportion to that which is evident when any of the other data relating to Israel's history are being considered

9. Vehemence of the debate • deliberate distortion • ubiquitous distortion • ignoring the context • fundamentalism • outright falsification • Davies: Method and Madness

10. William Dever • Biblical text as an ideological construct. • But, of the minimalists, Dever accuses them of being ‘misinformed, ill‐tempered’ and having ‘increasingly ideological monologues’

11. Self-awareness? Historians… do not just listen to the evidence, they engage in a dialogue with it, actively interrogating it and bringing to bear on it theories and ideas formulated in the present. … if we abandon our self-consciousness and fail to develop the art of self-criticism to the extent that we imagine we are bringing none, then our prejudices and preconceptions will slip in unnoticed and skew our reading of theevidence.