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William G. Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? - Book Review
Biblical Theology Bulletin, Summer, 2002 by John Barclay Burns
Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001. Pp. xiii + 313. Cloth, $25.00.
The subtitle of this book, "What Can Archaeology Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel?" asks whether the writings of the First Testament can be located in a real historical setting. In this work, the harvest of some thirty-five years' fieldwork in Syro-Palestinian archaeology, Dever asserts unequivocally that they can. He also launches a sustained, vigorous, and informed offensive against those who would tear the First Testament from any historical moorings and present it as a piece of theological invention from the Persian or Hellenistic period. Such scholars are variously described as revisionists or minimalists.
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The book divides naturally into three sections. The first (chapters 1 and 2) presents a clear definition of the issues involved in the current scholarly quest to remove the Bible from the realm of history and place it in the realm of literature.
In his opening chapter, Dever effectively summarizes both extremes of the debate and rejects them; but he obviously regards the minimalists as more of a threat than any conservative scholars who maintain the essential historicity of the biblical tradition. He typifies as absurd the post-modern, deconstructionist school of literary criticism, which dismisses the importance of authorship or authorial intention, thus allowing a text to be read and interpreted in any way (p. 14). He also admits, however, that traditional biblical archaeology and its goal of finding tangible proof of the central events of the First Testament failed.
In chapter 2 he sharpens his criticism of the minimalist school and depicts its adherents as a small but highly organized and influential group bent on the abolition of a historical Israel and any historical exegesis of the biblical text. He selects five scholars with whom he has profound disagreements, summarizes and criticizes their views, and chides their lack of professional historical training and archaeological experience.
The second section (chapters 3-5) introduces biblical, more recently designated Syro-Palestinian archaeology as a discipline and assesses its ability to contribute to the understanding of the Bible and of ancient Israel as an historical entity. The author presents a lively and concise history of archaeology in Syria-Palestine from its inception in the nineteenth century to the present. He comments on the growth and decline of biblical archaeology, paralleling the biblical theology movement in the decades after the Second World War. Then he chronicles the rise, since the 1970s, of the "specialized, professional and secular" Syro-Palestinian archaeology (p. 62). He argues that this archaeology can make the Bible more tangible and real and that artifacts and texts can both be "read" (p. 67).
Chapters 4 and 5, the core of the book, offer a detailed discussion of the major archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century and relate them to the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua-2 Kings). Dever's method is to correlate text and artifact to demonstrate that significant material in the narrative plausibly derives from Iron Age II (ca. 1000-600 BCE) and not from later periods. His table on p. 125 associating the textual, Judges and 1 Samuel, and arachaeological evidence concerning the 12th century BCE village settlements in the central hill country exemplifies this. Another good example of his methodology is his careful situation of the description of Solomon's temple in Kings and Chronicles securely within the parameters of Syro-Palestinian temple building and decoration from the Middle Bronze to the Iron Age.
In the third section, a final chapter (6) attests once more to an historical core, evidence of a real Israel, that lay behind the later theological accretions and is essential to the Bible's existence and continued relevance in the western cultural tradition. He provides a succinct summation of this "historical core" (pp. 267-74) and concludes that there was an ancient Israel, that archaeology can identify and prevent from being "written out of history" (p. 298).
Written by a veteran archaeologist and passionate scholar, this book raises critical issues. Dever agrees with the revisionists that much of the Israel presented by the First Testament never existed. He argues for a real Israel, however, whose presence is revealed by archaeology and in the biblical text, for without that real Israel there is nothing. The anarchy of uncontrolled deconstructioin of artifact and text is exposed as ultimately pointless and destructive. The author highlights the revisionists' almost wilful ignoring of long-established archaeological and textual data, such as Assyrian inscriptions and the extensive body of ostraca, inscriptions and seals that present biblical Hebrew as a living language.
More disquieting is his disclosure that his opponents dismiss as forgeries or redate inscriptions that question their conclusions, for example the 9th-century Tel Dan inscription that most scholars agree mentions a "king of Israel" and the "House of David." In this rich, vivid, and "no holds barred" book scholars and general readers alike are given a compelling and thought-provoking read.
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