For those unfamiliar with the “minimalist” vs. “maximalist” debate over biblical archaeology, the former basically believed the OT has little or no historical value, as it was entirely written during or after the exile. Maximalists, on the other hand, disagree, but on what I’d call a continuum of optimism about the biblical text as a historical source. Anyone who thinks the OT is not entirely late and contains actual history is a maximalist of some kind. Maximalists range from those who would take every jot and tittle of the biblical text as conveying real-time history to those who embrace portions. The term ought *not* be equated with any notion of inerrancy. They aren’t synonyms.
The latest brouhaha in the field of biblical archaeology is still Khirbet Qeiyafa. Maximalists have hailed it as the death of minimalism. This recent BAR article by Y. Garfinkel explains why. For an up-to-date summary on the fight, you could also try this post by Todd Bolen.
So where are you on the scale, Mike?
I’m not a minimalist for sure. I’d be somewhere right-of-center on the maximalist scale. I tend to give any ancient source (biblical or not) the benefit of the doubt AFTER (or in concert with) consideration of genre. In the case of the OT, I would be as open to the fact that the OT narrative can be “theologized history” (a historical event is written about theologically, and so the details may go beyond the real-time event) as I am to a “straight” real-time reading. It seems quite inconsistent to me to say on one hand that the biblical writers saw God acting in history and then deny that they were theologizing an event in what they wrote. I also think it very inconsistent to rule out biblical historicity because it has supernatural characters — I guess we should also just toss out most of what we have in Assyrian or Egyptian “history” then, since outcomes were credited to divine intervention.
Good thoughts. I think the biggest challenge for me is that I grew up presuming that the whole OT had to be historically ‘factual’ or it wasn’t true. Comfortability with genre-identification is something the evangelical church desperately needs to gain if it’s not to produce loss of faith or fundamentalists.
In that “Keys to the Kingdom” article, there was a portion about a potsherd having writing on it where they were trying to determine if it was Hebrew or Canaanite in origin. Would you ever be consulted? Or were you?
nope – the Israelis have that covered pretty well.
The BAR article was pretty entertaining I was rolling at the paradigm-collapse trauma, line.
We often read or hear that some researchers doubt the historicity of events mentioned in the Bible. This is especially true about tales of the Fall, the Flood, the tower of Babel, and miracles that were described in the Gospels. These are accounts that researchers regard as unreliable. They may think them to be legends or myths, and think them unworthy of serious consideration.
We are going to study this difficult subject by considering many examples. This study is especially designed for people who sincerely want to study the historic accuracy of Biblical accounts.
In the text we will introduce many archaeological discoveries that support Biblical accounts. They have many times confirmed information originally found in the Bible.
The source: http://www.jariiivanainen.net/Bible_and_the_history.html