The Old Testament Hebrew Scriptures in Five Minutes - Philippe Guillaume
23. What Was the Minimalist versus Maximalist Debate?
The Old Testament Hebrew Scriptures in Five Minutes - Philippe Guillaume
Emanuel Pfoh [+]
CONICET & University of Helsinki
Emanuel Pfoh, Ph.D., is a researcher at the National Research Council (CONICET), Argentina, and at the Centre of Excellence "Ancient Near Eastern Empires", University of Helsinki, Finland. His publications include The Emergence of Israel in Ancient Palestine: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Equinox, 2009), Anthropology and the Bible: Critical Perspectives (edited for Gorgias Press, 2010), The Politics of Israel’s Past: The Bible, Archaeology and Nation-Building (co-edited with Keith W. Whitelam for Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013), and T&T Clark Handbook of Anthropology and the Hebrew Bible (edited for Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2022). His research interests are the historical and political anthropology of Syria–Palestine in the Late Bronze Age, the history of Israel and Palestine in the first millennium BCE and the politics of biblical scholarship.
Description
Biblical scholarship in the 1990s pitted those who held on to the historicity of the Genesis patriarchs against those they derogatorily dubbed “minimalists.” The latter argued on the basis of solid evidence that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were invented to craft biblical Israel, an almost undisputed point today.