I took your comment out of context in my previous reply, I see. ....austendw wrote: ↑Wed May 03, 2023 8:26 amI think you are mistaken to dis Davies in this way. As far as I remember, he was not so rash as to jettison all diachronic analysis of biblical texts. Unlike Lemche who penned these words:neilgodfrey wrote: ↑Tue May 02, 2023 10:39 pmIt is built on the same methodological flaw as is study of gospel origins: the presumption that the narrative contains some historical core. That is, as Philip Davies pointed out, circularity.
But an idea can become so entrenched that not even Philip Davies could bring himself to place it later than the Persian period. We had to wait for Lemche to come out and say what no-one had dared till then to say.Junking 200 years of scholarship because you believe the scholars came at the problem from the wrong angle is not only pretty arrogant, but an expression what I can't help but think of as a sort of scholarly Stalinism. This has encouraged scholarship in which serious examination of the language, form and context of biblical writings, is rarely employed to any significant degree, which I think is regressive and really a bit sad.The conclusion that historical-critical scholarship is based on a false methodology and leads to false conclusions simply means that we can disregard 200 years of bible scholarship and commit it to the dustbin. It is hardly worth the paper on which it is printed. (N.P. Lemche, “On the Problems of Reconstructing Pre-Hellenistic Israelite (Palestinian) History”, Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 3 (2000) 1–12).
(Forgive the hyperbole, but this is the internet, after all... though I've edited it to tone it down a smidgin.)
Neither Davies nor Gmirkin nor Lemche discounts the textual inconsistencies and breaks and oddities that are noticed in the biblical writings. It is not as though the questions raised by the Documentary Hypothesis are thrown out. But the interpretations, explanations for those textual questions are different when approached through different models. If those models are not based on circular reasoning then they have to be more valid than those that are.
It also cannot be ignored that the dominant ideas in biblical studies really are the preserve of ideologically committed scholars. Biblical studies really is not as "pure" as, say, physics or genetics. The responses to Davies' book In Search of Ancient Israel in which he exposed the circularity of the orthodox paradigms is evidence enough of that.