“A Biblical History of Israel” by Iain Provan: An Extended Book Analysis–Part 12: In Praise of Critical Thought (…and the gloves come off)

At the end of the 2^nd edition of Provan, Long, and Longman’s book, A Biblical History of Israel (BHI), they have added an appendix entitled, “In Praise of Critical Thought: A Response to Our Critics,” in which (as the title suggests) they respond to the critics of their first edition. In particular, they respond to the critiques of Niels Peter Lemche, Lester Grabbe, John Collins, Keith Whitelam, Phillip Davies, Kenton Sparks, Megan Bishop Moore, and Brad Kelle.

If I were to characterize the appendix, I would have to say it is quite spicy and combative indeed—and necessarily so. To say that is it an example of “the gloves coming off” would be very apt. For as the appendix lays bare, these critics have failed in a number of ways: (1) They routinely ignore and fail to engage with the fundamental arguments laid out BHI; (2) When they do seem to address specifics in the book, they misrepresent what BHI says, and (3) More than anything else, seem more interested in trying to label and pigeonhole both BHI and the writers according to certain “tribal categories” in an attempt to justify their refusal to actually engage with the arguments in BHI. Consider this quote: “They have revealed themselves to be much more interested in defending a preconceived notion of what counts as ‘critical scholarship’ than in any critical engagement of their own—more interested in defending their own point of view who is ‘in’ and who is ‘outside’ the critical guild, as it may be discerned from the acceptance or denial of certain beliefs about the Bible and history that they themselves hold, than in exploring whether or not any of those beliefs should be adjusted” (413).

In simple terms, the critics essentially say, “Oh, BHI doesn’t line up with what we have already concluded, therefore, because it doesn’t agree with us, it isn’t critical scholarship, and therefore we don’t even need to consider their arguments at all.” In response to that, Provan, Long, and Longman argue that kind of stance isn’t really critical at all, but rather the worst kind of fundamentalist-thinking, for it refuses to even engage the argument because the conclusion doesn’t line up with their own pre-determined dogma.

With that said, let me provide a brief overview of how BHI addresses each of the above critics.

Niels Peter Lemeche
To get to the point, Lemeche says that Westminster John Knox Publishers shouldn’t have ever published BHI because the book was not “critical scholarship.” He accuses BHI of not respecting the biblical and archeological testimony and of placing archeological evidence “under the control of the biblical text.” In reality, BHI has simply argued that archeological evidence is fragmentary and has its limitations, and therefore shouldn’t be set up as the “high court” over and above the biblical text. All BHI has said is that the biblical text shouldn’t be placed under control of archeology, but rather both should be examined with a critical eye.

In another essay, Lemeche warns of the dangers of even engaging what he deems to be “uncritical scholars,” for fear of “diluting” one’s own position and, as BHI quotes, “…looks back nostalgically…on an earlier generation in biblical studies when ‘the historical-critical scholar would never have accepted the conservative as his equal and never have allowed him into his company’” (415).  That attitude explains why in his review of BHI, Lemeche never bothers to engage with anything in BHI. After all, BHI asks critical questions about certain aspects of modern critical theory. And, since those aspects amount to Lemeche’s own professed dogma of faith, they are not to be questioned at all. The only thing to do is burn the heretic.

Lester Grabbe
Lester Grabbe also seems more interested in labelling what kind of scholarship BHI is rather than taking the time to actually engage with the actual arguments of the book. Among other things, he says that BHI rejects basic historical principles, isn’t interested in general methods of writing history, and is really only interested in defending a special treatment of the Bible as a historical source. Therefore, BHI borders on fundamentalism and that it is a prime example of maximal conservatism. He claims that BHI argues that “even when the Bible is wrong—even when it is anachronistic, even when it is theological—it is still right, still historical” (418).

That is just nonsense. Of course, since no specific examples are given, it is hard to respond. But anyone who as actually read BHI knows these accusations are ludicrous. BHI doesn’t argue that the Bible be given “special treatment” as a historical source. It argues that it should be treated in the same way as any other source of ancient historical writing. In fact, it argues that all too often modern scholars are the ones guilty of giving the Bible “special treatment,” in that they subject it to a kind of hyper-skepticism that they never use with any other ancient text. As to Grabbe’s comments about “even when the Bible is wrong…it is still right,” BHI responds with the following: “No one who has read our book could reasonably attribute to us such a view, and it is indeed difficult to imagine how any thinking person could hold the Bible to be wrong and right at the same time” (419).

John Collins
John Collins characterizes BHI as “giving a nod” to critical thinking, but then lapsing into a rather uncritical, “maximalist” view. He takes particular issue with BHI’s discussion of epistemological openness. Now, anyone who has read the book knows that the concept of epistemological openness speaks to the pursuit of all knowledge and gets to the issue of how we learn and understanding anything. It requires that when we are trying to gain historical knowledge of anything, we need to be open to the possibility (indeed, probability) that we don’t know everything going into it, and that we need to critically consider any and all claims that purport to tell us something about history. It means not dismissing claims a priori based on nothing more than a bias that says, “Oh, well we already know such and such.”

Collins, though, interprets this as BHI is claiming that we should just “believe the Bible is true” unless it can be proven to be false. That is just astonishing. BHI asks how such a prominent scholar could “so grievously misread” what they wrote. The answer, BHI says, is that Collins is coming to the material with a predetermined lens in which he sees three positions. In the center, there is the “right” position, where he is, and then there are the two extremes of the maximalist and minimalist positions, which he deems uncritical. Therefore, the way he sees is, since BHI is obviously “nonminimalist,” since Collins doesn’t seem to ever bother to question whether or not there are any problems with modern critical theory, and since BHI does, in fact, raise questions about the underlying assumptions of modern critical theory, Collins concludes that BHI must be “maximalist.” Once again, instead of engaging the arguments and looking critically at them, he just slaps the book with a certain label to justify his ignoring of the argument.

BHI characterizes these three scholars—Lemeche, Grabbe, and Collins—with the following blistering statements. First there is this:“As for Lemeche and for Grabbe, so for Collins, ‘critical scholarship’ is not a vocation to which one commits oneself, but a guild bound together by predetermined postures and shared dogma. As he himself candidly states the matter in a later essay, ‘the academy is a community of interpretation, with its own presuppositions and traditions, just as are the synagogues and the church’” (424). If that is not an admission that many in the academy are more interested in “defending” their belief than pursuing the truth, I don’t know what is.

And then there is this: “The great advantage to this approach to ‘criticism’ for Collins is that he need never engage even with ‘sophisticated’ arguments that threaten to overturn his fundamental prejudices. By definition these sophisticated arguments can never be ‘critical’ arguments, since they do not adopt all the correct premises, and they certainly do not lead to the correct conclusions. Therefore he can simply label and ignore them—just as members of the tribe that he would no doubt wish to name ‘fundamentalist’ might do, albeit in defense of very different prejudices. …Collins reveals himself to be very much of like mind with them” (424).

Whitelam and the Rest
At this point, it would be just spinning a broken record to go through the details of the critiques of Whitelam, Davies, Grabbe (again), Moore, and Kelle. As BHI shows in an almost redundant fashion, their critiques prove to be the same old refrain: Not much actual engagement with any actual argument in BHI, but rather attempts to label the book as “other,” as “uncritical,” and as “fundamentalist” and “maximalist.” I’ve read many works by “minimalist” scholars and “fundamentalist/maximalist” scholars, and I have no reservation saying that while BHI certainly challenges (dare I say “attacks”) the typical minimalist position, it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a “fundamentalist” or “maximalist” position. A real Fundamentalist would probably find BHI to be a secular, biblically-compromising work that undermines Scripture and that bows its knee to the historical-critical method.

The core proposition of BHI is clarified once again in the last pages of the appendix: “That the surviving literature of ancient Israel that touches upon the history of that people in the period from about 2000 BC to about 400 BC should play a central role in current attempts to describe that history; the arguments [of Part 1 of the book] continue to make sense; and part II still offers an account of the history of Israel that seeks to give appropriate weight to differing kinds of carefully considered source material for this history, both biblical and extrabiblical” (440). In other words, real critical scholarship should not dismiss the biblical texts a priori as “not historical,” neither should it blindly automatically accept it as historical, just as it is written, all the way through. Critical scholarship reads and takes it seriously along with other evidence outside the Bible and tries to come to conclusions about biblical history that way. I find that they make this argument very convincingly throughout the book.

It further argues that it should no longer be acceptable in scholarship to fail to do the following:

1. Discuss the nature of historical knowledge and how testimony and story-telling plays a role in our understanding of, and access to, the past;
2. Consider the problematic way in which the “verification principle” is selectively used in modern study of the history of Israel;
3. Consider the very serious issues pertaining to what eyewitness accounts and other sources can and cannot/might and might not do for the historian;
4. Ponder the fact that all texts (not just biblical texts) are ideological in nature, and contemplate how that should affect the historian’s use of those texts;
5. Reflect on the limitations of the historian’s use of analogy in the attempt to understand the past;
6. Offer justifications for particular readings of the biblical texts, based on recent analysis of those texts by narrative critics.

Critical biblical scholarship must take all those points into consideration. If it doesn’t, then it can’t really be considered true critical scholarship. Rather, any proposed scholarship that purposely ignores and refuses to actually engage with the arguments, and instead chooses to be content with sweeping generalities, name-calling, and labels as an excuse for its refusal to critically engage with the material—that cannot be considered “critical scholarship.” As BHI states, “That is not critical scholarship, whatever the posturing that accompanies it. It is something else entirely—a kind of fundamentalism of the left that is the mirror image of the fundamentalism of the right that it so despises” (441).  

Conclusion
I have found BHI to be one of the best books out there that comprehensively tries to understand both the history of ancient Israel and the literary way the biblical texts tries to bear witness to that history and uses that history to try to show how the writers believed God had acted in that history. In order to try to explain how the Bible (both the OT and NT for that matter) presents history, I have often used the example of a movie like Hacksaw Ridge—one can use any movie about a historical event for that matter. The biblical texts, like that movie, is largely based on real historical events. At the same time the director and producer of that movie are constantly making decisions on how to present the material, and in doing so, they are shaping the material in a certain way, inventing dialogue, sometimes re-arranging events, and sometimes changing details here and there so that the history can fit into the storyline of the movie.

Those instances of shaping and artistic license do not negate the historicity of the movie as a whole. It just means that we know the movie doesn’t amount to just a camera being set up on Iwo Jima and giving us some kind of “unfiltered historical reality.” We understand that creativity is being employed in the telling of the story of that history, and we are smart enough not to dismiss the entire movie as “fiction” because that creativity was used in the telling of that story. The same should apply to the Bible.

In the end, that means we really do have to do away with any “absolute certainty” that the events in the Bible transpired in the exact way and detail that they are presented in the Bible. The Bible isn’t trying to provide some kind of “objective, non-biased, just the facts ma’am” account. We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking it does, for that kind of approach is foolish and uncritical. At the same time, we shouldn’t go in the entirely opposite direction, either, and conclude “it’s all fiction.” That kind of approach is equally foolish and uncritical.

And so, for example, yes, I believe Exodus and Joshua are telling us about a real event in which the real historical person of Moses was able to led a group of Hebrew slaves out from Egypt somehow, and that a generation later, that group made its way into Canaan, engage in battles with the people living there, and eventually gained a foothold in the land to where (as we see in II Samuel and I/II Kings) that people came to dominate that small strip of land for a short time during that time. The events like the crossing of the Red Sea, or Joshua’s commanding the sun to stand still, or an angel killing 185,000 Assyrian soldiers—all of those things obviously are told with a certain amount of literary creativity, but they are still testimony that something happened in those events. Somehow the Hebrews escaped; somehow the Israelites were able to keep going until they had defeated the Canaanites who had attacked Gibeon; somehow Jerusalem was saved and Sennacherib failed to take it.

We will never be able to go back in time to “know for certain what EXACTLY happened” and what parts of the stories are historically accurate and what part are what I call “creative brushstrokes.” I don’t obsess over that. I am convinced (as BHI has shown) that the biblical text is, in fact, historical testimony and that there is enough evidence (both biblical and extrabiblical) that points to the fact that the events in the Bible are, at bottom, real historical events. Their primary aim, though, isn’t to give sort of academic, objective history lesson. As II Timothy 3:16 says, the Scriptures are inspired by God and are “useful for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness.” And that is something that goes far beyond any academic exercise.