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The Israelites in History and Tradition (Library of Ancient Israel)

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Niels Peter Lemche (b. 1945) is a biblical scholar at the University of Copenhagen, and is one of the leaders (along with Philip Davies, Israel Finkelstein, Thomas Thompson, and Keith Whitelam) of the so-called "Minimalism" (sometimes also known as the "Copenhagen School") movement in biblical archaeology and Israelite history.

In this 1998 book (his more recent books include The Old Testament between Theology and History: A Critical Survey, Prelude to Israel's Past: Background and Beginnings of Israelite History and Identity, and Historical Dictionary of Ancient Israel (Historical Dictionaries of Ancient Civilizations and Historical Eras)), he states in the Preface, "After having published a study on the Canaanites back in 1991, and having claimed the biblical Canaanites to be the invention of ancient biblical historians, I soon found another volume missing, devoted to the image of Israel as found on the pages of the Old Testament.... It is my hope that this book will provoke a healthy discussion about the subject of ancient Israel. What was Israel really? A people? Or a state in ancient Palestine? Or something which only exists in the biblical narrative?"

Concerning the "victory stele" found at Merneptah, he writes, "(it) does not confirm the date of the Hebrew conquest of Palestine; in fact, it has no bearing on that topic. It testifies only to the presence in western Asia at the end of the thirteenth century B.C.E. of something that constituted some sort of ethnic unity, which was identifable as far as it had its own name, Israel. What this entity pecisely was is, on the other hand, not as easy to ascertain as people may be inclined to believe."

Here are some of his opinions:

"The system of the twelve tribes is absolutely artificial, and the individual steps in its development can be seen as literary responses to problems presented by the main course of the narrative."
"Although the case of the Jebusites is left undecided because of lack of evidence, this 'people' might be just as mysterious (or ephemeral) as any other people in the lists of pre-Israelite inhabitants of Canaan."
"Scholars will have to realize that they have a choice to make. They can decide to keep David as a historical figure, however reduced into something quite different from the biblical towering figure of the almighty king. They can also keep the biblical figure that is a literary and not a historical figure. They cannot have it both ways."
"It is one of the theses of this book that the Israel found on the pages of the Old Testament is an artificial creation which has little more than one thing in common with the Israel that existed once upon a time in Palestine, that is, the name."

Obviously controversial, Lemche's book is a very challenging interpretation of the historical evidence for ancient Israel, and will be of considerable interest to those interested in such things.

This is a significant addition to recent literature on Ancient Israel by Davies, Dever, Finkelstein, Thomas Thompson, Whitlam, and others, whom Lemche discusses. Recommended for those interested in understanding the Bible and the foundations of "Judeo-Christian" civilization.

Lemche surveys/critiques two centuries of Old Testament scholarship. This series (Library of Ancient Israel) aims to bring modern scholarly disciplines -- archaeology, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, literary analysis -- to bear on the subject. Corrections must be made to biblical scholarship of the past two centuries, as well as to older literalistic, allegorical, typological readings of the Bible. Lemche denies the charge that scholarship has a "negative attitude" toward biblical texts: it is necessary to determine whether texts are primary evidence for actual history. He illustrates the tendency of Bible scholars to go beyond evidence to link artifacts to the biblical narrative. He discusses the difficulty of writing a history of ancient Israel free of presuppositions of the biblical ideology. "... the loyalty that most Old Testament historians feel toward Israel's history as told by the biblical authors is a psychological rather than a scientific fact" (149).

The biblical story of Israel may have been composed to forecast the "new Israel" -- an ideal society to be established in the future. Modern reconstructions of this story may be shaped by modern ideas of nationality. Modern European ideologies of nationalism and ethnicity have shaped study of the OT as a source of Christian civilization. The ancient Near East as source of Arab civilization was ignored. The idea of ethnicity as basis for nationhood is a modern idea. Current research raises a doubt that a total isolated community (ethnos) existed anywhere in the ancient Near East.

The fierce debate currently raging between "minimalists" and "maximalists" as to how much actual history is recorded in the OT is advanced by Lemche's well-informed, succinct (218 pages)discussion.