Kivipi boss wakati historia inajieleza bayana
Digging to find out, or to bury, the truth!
Very few Bible scholars believe nowin the historicity of the book of
Genesis, especially the narrative of Abraham and Sarah’s life. In the early and
middle 20thcentury, leading archaeologists such as William F. Albright, and
biblical scholars such as Albrecht Alt, believed that the patriarchs were either
real individuals or believable composites of people who lived in the “patriarchal
age”, the 2ndmillennium BCE. But, in the 1970s, new arguments concerning
Israel's past as well as the biblical texts challenged these views. These arguments
can be found in Thomas L. Thompson's The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives
(1974), and John Van Seters' Abraham in History and Tradition(1975).
Thompson, a literary scholar, based his argument on archaeology and
ancient texts. His PhD dissertationcentred on the lack of compelling evidence
that the patriarchs lived in the 2ndmillennium BCE, and noted how certain
biblical texts reflected 1
stmillennium conditions and concerns. Van Seters
examined the patriarchal stories and argued that their names, social milieu, and
messages strongly suggested that they were Iron Age creations. In his book, he
argues that there is no unambiguous evidence pointing to an origin for the
stories in the 2ndmillennium BC:Arguments based on reconstructing the patriarch's
nomadic way of life, the personal names in Genesis, the social customs reflected in the stories,
and correlation of the traditions of Genesis with the archaeological data of the Middle Bronze
Age have all been found, in Part One above, to be quite defective in demonstrating an origin
for the Abraham tradition in the second millennium B.C. (...) Consequently, without any such
effective historical controls on the tradition one cannot use any part of it in an attempt to
reconstruct the primitive period of Israelite history. Furthermore, a vague presupposition about
the antiquity of the tradition based upon a consensus approval of such arguments should no
longer be used as a warrant for proposing a history of the tradition related to early
premonarchic times(Van Seters: 1975, 309).Consequently William G. Dever1
has
stated that by the beginning of the 21stcentury, archaeologists had given up hope of
recovering any context that would make Abraham, Isaac or Jacob credible ‘historical figures’
(Dever: 2002, 98n.2).The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the
Historical Abrahamis a book by biblical scholar Thomas L. Thompson, Professor
of Old Testament Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Together with John
Van Seters's Abraham in History and Tradition. This book marked the culmination
of a growing current of dissatisfaction in scholarly circles with the then-current
consensus (or near-consensus) on the Patriarchal narratives.