Down-to-Earth Biblical History

William Dever, the senior American archaeologist working in the Holy Land, has written a significant critique of the current minimalist or deconstructionist trend in Old Testament scholarship. He has cut to the heart of the problem, namely that the practitioners of the minimalist approach do not really deal with the realities of the archaeological or textual evidence. Dever places the minimalist school in the context of post-modernism and delivers a scathing attack on their methods (or lack of them) and their nihilistic attitude to truth, especially their assertion that the entire Hebrew Bible is the product of the Hellenistic age. To counter the inferences of the minimalists Dever adduces a series of archaeological discoveries that can be related directly to various references in the Hebrew Bible. They pertain mainly to realia and other details that would hardly have been known to Hellenistic writers. This review supports Dever in all of his criticisms of the minimalists but takes issue with him in regard to some of the archaeological materials. I do not argue that they are irrelevant to Dever's case, but rather that it is possible to interpret some of them in a different manner. The lack of a historical-geographical perspective in Dever's work is duly noted

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• Lachish “Letter” 2 (BM 125702)

  Alice Mandell•Bulletin of the American Society…•2022

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