What Was the Minimalist versus Maximalist Debate?

Abstract

The minimalist-maximalist debate(s) appeared as a prominent feature of discussions about the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament in Europe and the United States during the 1990s. The conceptual matter, however, can be traced back to the changes in the field during the 1960s, but especially during the 1970s. In the middle of this decade, two studies were published independently of each other, initiating a deconstructive mode of biblical historicity whose full impact emerged in the 1990s. Thomas L. Thompson (1974) and John Van Seters (1975) separately indicated that Abraham and the biblical patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) were not historical figures, since no archaeological or epigraphic traces of them were available in the ancient Near Eastern record of the Bronze Age (ca. 3000–1200 BCE), and that the patriarchal traditions were posterior to that age, in effect belonging either to the period of the united monarchy in Israel (ca. tenth century BCE) or to the exilic period (ca. sixth century BCE). In any case, it was clear to these scholars that a history of Israel could not start with the patriarchs. Further developments in the late 1970s and the 1980s were also critical of the historicity of an Israelite exodus from Egypt, of the conquest of the promised land, and of the existence of a period of the judges in Israel—namely, of a considerable portion of the narratives in Genesis–Joshua. By the late 1980s, the then available critical histories of Israel would deem the united monarchy of David and Solomon as a safe historical period in which to start writing the history of the ancient Israelites. This consensus, however, was once again challenged in the early 1990s, consolidating the historiographical perspective we now know as “biblical minimalism"...