I have started reading NP Lemche's The Israelites in Myth and Tradition. Lemche is said to be one of the leading 'minimalists' in OT studies and also one of those William Dever is squarely aiming his fire at. Dever paints a picture of minimalists as being extreme post-modern deconstructionists but Lemche is nothing of the sort. In fact, I would describe him as almost pre-modern as he seems to take his method from the great nineteenth century German historian, Leopold von Ranke. The first chapter of the book is called Playing the von Ranke Game and I assumed that this would show why von Ranke's once vaunted methodology is a complete failure. But no. Rather surprisingly, it seems that Lemche is seriously suggesting using von Ranke's methods to write a history of ancient Israel, or rather to demonstrate that you can't write one like that. Now if Lemche was an extreme decontructionist all this would be explicable as a prolonged practical joke, but he gives no indication that this is the case and I really have no idea what he is up to.

Von Ranke's method splits sources between primary and secondary and insisted we only use the former. For OT history, that means ancient inscriptions are the only primary evidence and the Bible is secondary almost regardless of how conservative you are. Thus all twentieth century developments like source criticism, redaction criticism and textual criticism go straight out the window. Lemche is willing to admit that the Bible does contain some historical nuggets but the only way to demonstrate them is to use a genuine primary source as the proof text. So, at present, Lemche's work looks to me like the amusing undergraduate exercise "What can be say about history if we assume our main source [the Bible] doesn't exist". This is similar to asking the question "What can we know about Jesus without using Christian sources?" and just as wrong headed.

But Lemche goes further and deals with the primary evidence with a quite unwarranted level of scepticism. Let's ignore his well poisoning when he mentions that everything has been considered a fake, even when those accusations are a century old. Rather, the problem is that he refuses to draw any connections between sources at all. Let's take the word 'Israel' as an example. This appears in the 13th century BC Merneptah Stele as a place that pharaoh had laid waste in Palestine. Lemche shows that the stele is best interpreted as meaning that this Israel is in the central Highlands - exactly where the remains identified by Dever as proto-Israelites were found. These remains are distinguished (according to Dever) by a paucity of pig bones but Lemche doesn't mention this at all. And we have the Bible placing Israel in central Palestine at that point in time. Three sources of evidence - two primary - and Lemche still refuses to call these people even proto-Israel. Worse is to come. The 9th century BC Tel Dan inscriptions also refer to Israel but Lemche won't accept that this must be the same entity that is on the Merneptah Stele! Does Lemche really think that the 13th century Israel disappeared and was simply resurrected by another group of people four hundred years later? Well, that is what he suggests.

All this explains why historians ditched the von Ranke method a century ago. It remains to be seen where Lemche is taking all this in the remains of his book, but he appears so far to be going nowhere in a hurry...

The Larry Summers affair rumbles on. I won't say a man has never been so persecuted for speaking some common sense, but he certainly looks like he regrets saying anything now. I think his big mistake was to apologise as this was an admission of guilt. Ken Livingstone, London's mayor, wisely told his persecutors to take a running jump at the moon and has come out of it better.

Luckily, some brave voices are speaking out in Summers' defence. One of these is Steven Pinker, with whom I have plenty of disagreements but I have to admire him for being both clear and candid. This makes his mistakes transparent as well as his good points. Sadly, Summers' opponents won't take much notice of him as he is already branded as a mouthpiece of the right (which must be upsetting for a Democrat voting libertarian). The UK Guardian also ran a good article today by a woman scientist who is not afraid of her science.

The key question here is whether we should be aiming for equality of opportunity or equality of outcome. Almost everyone except the most diehard leftie would now say the former, but when push comes to shove, it turns out that many people have a problem with choice. It is a brute fact that more boys want to be mathematicians and scientists than girls. All the evidence points to this being part of human nature and not socialising. It is universal. It is found in the most progressive of environments. Boys actually brought up as girls display the same desires as other boys. Pretending it is not true helps no one and simply leads to unhappy people who are forced to do want they don't want to. And all this business of choice is quite apart from the fact that boys are, at the extremes, better at maths than girls anyway.

I do hope the Summers' affair will be the last stand of the diehard fascist wing of feminism who no longer have a leg to stand on. And hopefully, Harvard will continue to appoint the best people to the top jobs and ignore fatuous quotas that have no meaning in reality.

For those who don't always look at the comments, let me point out again the response to my thoughts on Dever made by Celsus. I am very grateful to him for such rapid and useful feedback. I will be leaving any adjudication between the minimalists and Dever until I have at least read Lemche's The Israelites in History and Tradition that sits on my desk. I intend to blog comments on that and then attempt some sort of synthesis. As I have said before, I come to this question as a historian rather than an ANE specialist, so expect to be corrected with alarming frequency when I get things wrong.

From a historical point of view, I might suggest that mythmaking is a fairly similar process whenever one is doing it. Looking at a great and influential work of nineteenth century mythology, John William Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, we can note a number of things.

• The mythmaking is largely in the editoralising and selection of material;
• Few things presented as facts have no basis at all in history;
• Minority positions are presented as the majority and vice versa;
• The author has no doubt that his myth is true;
• Paraphrase can be very effective in subverting meaning but invented quotations are rare;
• The overall effect is to leave the reader believing the myth is even more clear cut than it actually is.

All of this, it seems to me, can be applied to the Dtr history. Most obviously, the minority Yahwist position is presented as the majority and in retrospect most readers assign it a completely dominating position that even the text as we have it cannot support. The authors cannot be accused of lying, they are pretty good at getting isolated facts right and quotations have to be read against themselves. So, perhaps the way to extract history from myth is to look at how myths are constructed in cases we can get behind them and use the same techniques to unwind where we cannot. Further good examples of where we can get behind the myths to a great extent include Charlemagne's reign, the English Reformation and most pseudo-history. While I hesitate to suggest Graham Hancock is the perfect model for the Deuteronomist, I would be interested to see how my method deals with his sort of schlock.

But all that is for later. For the moment, let's see what Lemche says for himself and how he works in practice.

Here are some further thoughts on William Dever's What Did the Bible Writers Know and When Did they Know It?

The bulk of the book is in the fifth chapter that deals with the period from the death of Solomon until the fall of Judah to the Babylonians in 586BC. For this period, Dever can point to loads of archaeological information that have convergences in the Bible. Most famously, there are events like the raid of the Egyptian Pharaoh Shishank around 925BC, the mention of Israel’s kings in Assyrian records and the unsuccessful siege of Jerusalem in 701AD. Shishank’s raid is commemorated in an inscription in Egypt which match destruction layers in Palestine and the Biblical record. Likewise, evidence of Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem in 701BC is found in the famous inscription by Hezekiah in his water tunnel, Assyrian inscriptions and the biblical record, not to mention royal storage urns dating to exactly that campaign. As far as Dever is concerned, it is simply bad scholarship to ignore all this evidence coming together. Another point he is keen to make is that there are countless Hebrew inscriptions dating from before the Exile that show the Hebrew language existed long before the Persian period when the Bible reached its final form. Here, through no fault of his own, Dever comes a bit unstuck. Some of the inscriptions that he mentions form part of the present forgery indictments in Jerusalem and Dever does make light of the idea that they might be fakes. Some of his opponents have claimed that the Baruch bulla, for instance, is forged, which Dever declares a ridiculous idea. Sadly it is no such thing and archaeologists are probably now unable to trust anything not found in situ. This leaves a great deal of trustworthy archaeological evidence but not as much as Dever thought at the time of writing this book. Certainly declaring anything that destroys your theories is a forgery, as Dever hints some have been doing, is bad methodology.

The final chapter is a bit if a rehash of the rest of the book but contains one more killer point against the Bible being written very late in its entirety. Dever points out that the reason that most scholars now date the Book of Daniel to the Hellenistic period is precisely because it contains many references to the political situation at that time. This kind of anachronism, Dever rightly says, is a good reason to date a text late. Contrasting the position of the Deuteronomincal History, Dever explains how the fact that it contains none of the anachronisms you would expect if it had been originally written in the post-exilic period is a good reason to date it early. If you add to this how it is uncannily accurate about matters of detail about life in the united and divided monarchy period, now confirmed by archaeology, we have little choice but to accept it contains genuine history which can be extracted using critical methods.

An anonymous feedback suggested that I should be criticizing JP Holding of Tektonics.org as well as Joe. I can't really see how Joe's profanity compare to JP's satire and assume that Anonymous was just looking to score some points.

That said, JP Holding does get a lot of people's goat and I am fairly regularly criticised for linking to him and praising him. The first conclusion to draw from this is that he is effective in what he is trying to do and his detractors are just looking for another angle of attack. The material which JP refutes are websites from internet scribblers who simply do not deserve to be treated with respect. Anyone who still seriously believes that Jesus is based on pagan myth is clearly beyond the reach of reasoned argument and should be satirised mercilessly. The sheer self righteousness of the delusions of sites like this and this stick in the craw and we should all be grateful to JP for taking them down a peg or three.

Also, I find his site extremely useful. Every so often I get an email from a distressed Christian who has read some rubbish and isn't sure how to react. 99 times out of 100, JP has already trashed the material in question and his apologetics encyclopedia makes it easy to find out where. I suppose you could describe JP as the Michael Moore of Christian Apologists. Both are heroes to much of their own constituencies (they gave Moore an Oscar, after all) but can cause some unease for their lack of subtlety. And they both drive their opponents up the wall. As a fan of movies such as The Life of Brian and Dogma, I fall into the category of Christians who have no problem with satire and certainly can't fault JP for indulging in it.

So, I make no apologies for supporting JP Holding's apologetics. That atheists can't stand him is to be expected but he is only reacting against the drudgery they are producing. After all, JP only got into this business to counter the Secular Web's The Jury is In.

Intelligent atheist of the month is an otherwise anonymous 'Joe' who felt his communication was so important he had to send it three times. His pearls of wisdom: "jesus never existed you dumb m***** f*****"

Joe used the feedback form so I have no idea who he is. He didn't use asterisks, or any other punctuation for that matter. Nice to see that reasoned argument is still the exclusive purview of the non-believing community.

In other news, my wife and I are well and truly snowed in. We got the car to the end of the drive but then got stuck. It took a spade and kindly neighbour just to get our car back to our spot so we weren't blocking the road. This is the only occasion ever that I have pondered the virtues of a 4x4....

William Dever wrote his book, What Did the Biblical Writers Know?, primarily to combat scholars who believe that the Hebrew Bible has no value as a historical document. Admittedly, the only part of it that he believes might have such value is the Deuteronomical History of Joshua through to Kings and some of the prophets. The book is arranged into six chapters of which the meat is to be found in the fourth and fifth. The sixth chapter is largely a repeat of the second and third which gets slightly tedious in its repetition. It should be pointed that although this book is intended as a polemic against particular scholars, there is plenty of value for those less interested in academic squabbles.

The first two chapters are aimed squarely at Dever’s opponents who he labels as ‘post modernist’ and ‘deconstructionist’, intending both terms to be derogatory. We are treated to a hostile summation of the basics of post modern literary theory and then given a run through of the ideas of several individuals whom Dever considers particular offenders, including NP Lemche. There are three charges laid by Dever. Firstly, he does not think that literary criticism, especially when using the methods of deconstruction, are appropriate to the study of the Bible as a historical document. Whether they are appropriate to the study of anything at all, Dever leaves open to serious doubt, but he clearly feels that historians should avoid them. In this, he is correct up to a point. While historians have had to learn lessons from postmodernism, what is left that makes it distinctive is much less useful. I think that you can precisely identify when someone has gone to far. If they say “history contains fictive elements”, “complete objectivity is impossible” or “writers have an agenda” then you are dealing with sensible mainstream historians who have taken on board the important lessons of postmodernism. But when someone says “all history is fiction”, “objectively is completely impossible” or “texts have no meaning beyond what they are given” then you have found yourself a bona fide literary critic who should not be let loose in a history department. Whether or not Lemche falls into this category, I shall deal with when I come to review his work.

The second item of Dever’s charge sheet is to do with alleged personal agendas, politics and motivations. It seems to stem from a long running dispute and rather than intrude on private grief, I will leave the matter to one side. Anyone interested in the thrust and counter thrust of this row will find plenty to whet their appetite’s on the web, especially at Bible and Interpretation.

The third item on Dever’s charge sheet is ignoring, distorting or abusing modern archaeology. Lemche, he says, “cites only minimal data” in his recent works and other scholars are said to be even worse. Dever, who is a field archaeologist, is not happy that scholars with no archaeological experience are misusing his subject for what he claims are their own agendas. Is it true that they are? At least the accusation is made from Dever’s own area expertise and can be assessed from the evidence. When an esteemed archaeologist explains how non-archaeologists have misunderstood data from outside their own area of expertise, then we have a proper case to answer. On the other hand, all the stuff on motivation and postmodernism that Dever also alleges is unhelpful even if it is explicable in terms of previous accusations of bad faith made by his opponents.

I'll deal with the chapters that actually set out the evidence from archaeology next.

As promised before Christmas, I have written a review of Roger Steer's Letter to an Influential Atheist which you can read here. I'm afraid it isn't a very flattering review. A good illustration of the books faults is that even or resident troll, Stephen Carr, has been able to put together a convincing rebuttal.

Related to the archaeology debate is this story about Edom which a friend pointed out. One of the problems with relying on silence is that there is always the risk that someone will find what you said was not there. This is always a test for anyone - do you admit you got it wrong or stick to your guns? Somehow, I can't see the minimalists going away any time soon.

Thanks to Layman for his comments on organ sale. I think that the problem of people wanting to get their hands on organs early is dealt with by using the life assurance system. The insurance company has no incentive to let anyone die early as they are the ones who have to pay out on that event (the sale of organs is not going to offset the entire cost of the pay out). Meanwhile, the organ donor has already got their benefit from lower premiums. So I do not think any new pressure towards euthanasia (which I oppose completely, of course) is brought to bear here.

I am reading a rather good book by William Dever called What did the Biblical Writers Know and When did they Know It?. Not much of a title, I grant, and neither is Dever much of a stylist but the content is fascinating and highly informative.

Most recent books about biblical archaeology (like The Bible Unearthed and It Ain't Necessarily So) have been aimed at debunking traditional religious claims about the historical accuracy of the bible. I am going to hold off on that topic until I have seen some evidence from the traditionalists' side, but Dever really takes it for granted. He wastes no time in saying that we can know nothing about the Patriarchs and the Exodus, as we read about it in the bible, did not happen. His guns are aimed squarely at the so-called minimalists who claim the whole Old Testament was written too late to contain any history at all. Thus, as far as the minimalists are concerned, neither King David nor Solomon existed, and neither did many of the kings listed as rulers of Judah down to the eighth century. Their main evidence for this is that archaeology is silent on the events depicted in the bible.

Dever's reply appears devastating. Whereas the minimalists are not archaeologists and do not appear to be familiar with much of the field, Dever is an experienced field archaeologist of great repute. When he says the evidence is there, you have to sit up and listen. And his book is full of fact after fact after fact. He marshals huge amounts of archaeological data to find convergences with the biblical record and declares we can get at the history. Yes, the bible is biased and has a theological agenda, but we can get past that by using external evidence and factoring out the bias. Nor is Dever a naive positivist as he also has a great deal to say about schools of archaeological theory.

Much has been said about how bad tempered the debate between Dever and the minimalists has been. I actually found the book quite restrained most of the time. However, Dever is certainly pissed off that non-archaeologists are presuming to write books about what the subject does and doesn't say when they do not appear to have the necessary expertise. Also, Dever claims that Thomas Thompson, a leading minimalist, has accused him of unethical practices and falsifying results. If this is true, then Dever's anger is justified. Another criticism leveled at Dever is his dismissal of post-modernism. In fact, the entire third chapter of the book is given over to theory and Dever's complaints are not against post modernism per se, but against using literary criticism to try and do history. In this, he is absolutely right as I have repeatedly been saying about new wave studies of the New Testament.

Celsus, of Ebla Forums, is a supporter of the minimalists and has recommended Niels Peter Lemche as their most credible spokesman. So, I also have got his The Israelites in History and Tradition out the library and will report back on whether it really is as baseless as Dever alleges.