Before Russell Gmirkin there was Niels Peter Lemche. RG wrote of NPL's contribution:
Niels Peter Lemche inaugurated the modern study of the Pentateuch as a Hellenistic Era composition in his influential 1993 article, noting that external evidence for the biblical text in the form of preserved manuscript fragments or references in extra-biblical texts of known date appear only in the third century bce and later.In light of this, Lemche questioned whether common assumptions regarding the antiquity of the biblical text were correct and proposed that the Hebrew Bible might conceivably have been composed as late as the Hellenistic Era, after the conquests of Alexander the Great and the penetration of Greek culture into the east, when empirical evidence for biblical writings first appears.
A key contribution of Lemche 1993 was the deconstruction of historical criticism, by which biblical critics sought to date the Pentateuch and other texts by means of inner-biblical literary criticism. Lemche pointed out that this process was dependent on a credulous reading of biblical historiographical texts of unknown date or historical value, including the stories of the introduction or discovery of new Pentateuchal legal content under Josiah (1 Kings 22-23) and Ezra (Nehemiah 8-10). While earlier biblical critics had accepted these stories as written close in time to the purported events they recounted and substantially conveying historical fact, Lemche pointed out that biblical historiographies were of highly uncertain date and contained prominent theological content that undermined their value as historical sources. Consequently they were of no direct bearing to the dating of Pentateuchal writings to which they alluded. The major substantial contribution of the Copenhagen school of biblical criticism has been the deconstruction of historical criticism’s methodologically unsound approach to dating biblical texts, with its overreliance on an uncritical reading of the biblical historiographical narratives (Davies 1992; Thompson 1994, 1999; Lemche 1998, 2008). A major theme of the Copenhagen school is that historical facts regarding ancient Israel should be secured by demonstrably contemporary archaeological, inscriptional and epigraphical evidence rather than externally uncorroborated biblical accounts.
The second major contribution of Lemche 1993 was laying the groundwork for a new theoretical framework for biblical criticism.[ Lemche observed that biblical criticism had a historical tendency to date texts as early as possible, taking into account anachronisms, dating all but a few biblical texts to Iron II, Babylonian and Persian Era dates. But Lemche pointed out that the first extra-biblical evidence for biblical writings of any sort were the fragments of biblical texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls, for the most part dating to the second century bce or later. Nor did the LXX translation of the early Hellenistic Era significantly impact that observation, since “there is really no reason to believe that the Hebrew versions must perforce have been much older than their translations into Greek” (Lemche 1993: 189). There was thus no real evidentiary basis for assuming that the biblical writings predated the Hellenistic Era as commonly assumed by Lemche’s contemporaries. A reappraisal of the cumulative extra-biblical evidence thus led to the conclusion that a Hellenistic Era date for biblical writings could not be excluded on objective grounds. The removal of the assumed pre-Hellenistic context for the production of biblical literature changed the basic paradigm of biblical criticism. For comparative studies, this meant broadening the chronological horizons to include both Ancient Near Eastern and Hellenistic literature for potentially relevant comparanda. For source criticism, this meant including not only Ancient Near Eastern literature but other literature known in the east during the Hellenistic Era, including Greek literature known to the Jews and later Hellenistic texts. This broader approach to comparative and source critical studies is what is here termed the Hellenistic research paradigm, in contrast to the pre-Hellenistic research paradigm that excluded Hellenistic Era materials from consideration.
A side issue raised by the emergence of the Hellenistic research paradigm that caused controversy at the time was the relative weight to be assigned to the terminus a quo and terminus ad quern, the earliest and latest possible dates, in seeking out the likeliest date of composition for a biblical text. According to Lemche (1993), although a biblical text might draw on earlier sources (cf. Lemche 2011), the proper starting point for assigning a date to a biblical text was its latest possible date, when there was definite knowledge that the text in question existed, rather than seeking hypothetical contexts in biblical times, under a Solomon, a Josiah, or an Ezra, when our only source of information is that of biblical historiography. This approach led to the labeling of the Copenhagen school of biblical criticism as “Minimalist,” in contrast to the “Maximalist” approach that routinely assigned biblical texts significantly earlier dates. The relative merits of the arguments of the Minimalist versus Maximalist debate need not concern us here, since the methodology adopted in the present study gives preferential weight to neither the earliest nor latest possible date, collecting comparative and source critical evidence across the whole allowable date range before drawing inferences.
A key contribution of Lemche 1993 was the deconstruction of historical criticism, by which biblical critics sought to date the Pentateuch and other texts by means of inner-biblical literary criticism. Lemche pointed out that this process was dependent on a credulous reading of biblical historiographical texts of unknown date or historical value, including the stories of the introduction or discovery of new Pentateuchal legal content under Josiah (1 Kings 22-23) and Ezra (Nehemiah 8-10). While earlier biblical critics had accepted these stories as written close in time to the purported events they recounted and substantially conveying historical fact, Lemche pointed out that biblical historiographies were of highly uncertain date and contained prominent theological content that undermined their value as historical sources. Consequently they were of no direct bearing to the dating of Pentateuchal writings to which they alluded. The major substantial contribution of the Copenhagen school of biblical criticism has been the deconstruction of historical criticism’s methodologically unsound approach to dating biblical texts, with its overreliance on an uncritical reading of the biblical historiographical narratives (Davies 1992; Thompson 1994, 1999; Lemche 1998, 2008). A major theme of the Copenhagen school is that historical facts regarding ancient Israel should be secured by demonstrably contemporary archaeological, inscriptional and epigraphical evidence rather than externally uncorroborated biblical accounts.
The second major contribution of Lemche 1993 was laying the groundwork for a new theoretical framework for biblical criticism.[ Lemche observed that biblical criticism had a historical tendency to date texts as early as possible, taking into account anachronisms, dating all but a few biblical texts to Iron II, Babylonian and Persian Era dates. But Lemche pointed out that the first extra-biblical evidence for biblical writings of any sort were the fragments of biblical texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls, for the most part dating to the second century bce or later. Nor did the LXX translation of the early Hellenistic Era significantly impact that observation, since “there is really no reason to believe that the Hebrew versions must perforce have been much older than their translations into Greek” (Lemche 1993: 189). There was thus no real evidentiary basis for assuming that the biblical writings predated the Hellenistic Era as commonly assumed by Lemche’s contemporaries. A reappraisal of the cumulative extra-biblical evidence thus led to the conclusion that a Hellenistic Era date for biblical writings could not be excluded on objective grounds. The removal of the assumed pre-Hellenistic context for the production of biblical literature changed the basic paradigm of biblical criticism. For comparative studies, this meant broadening the chronological horizons to include both Ancient Near Eastern and Hellenistic literature for potentially relevant comparanda. For source criticism, this meant including not only Ancient Near Eastern literature but other literature known in the east during the Hellenistic Era, including Greek literature known to the Jews and later Hellenistic texts. This broader approach to comparative and source critical studies is what is here termed the Hellenistic research paradigm, in contrast to the pre-Hellenistic research paradigm that excluded Hellenistic Era materials from consideration.
A side issue raised by the emergence of the Hellenistic research paradigm that caused controversy at the time was the relative weight to be assigned to the terminus a quo and terminus ad quern, the earliest and latest possible dates, in seeking out the likeliest date of composition for a biblical text. According to Lemche (1993), although a biblical text might draw on earlier sources (cf. Lemche 2011), the proper starting point for assigning a date to a biblical text was its latest possible date, when there was definite knowledge that the text in question existed, rather than seeking hypothetical contexts in biblical times, under a Solomon, a Josiah, or an Ezra, when our only source of information is that of biblical historiography. This approach led to the labeling of the Copenhagen school of biblical criticism as “Minimalist,” in contrast to the “Maximalist” approach that routinely assigned biblical texts significantly earlier dates. The relative merits of the arguments of the Minimalist versus Maximalist debate need not concern us here, since the methodology adopted in the present study gives preferential weight to neither the earliest nor latest possible date, collecting comparative and source critical evidence across the whole allowable date range before drawing inferences.
Gmirkin, Russell E. Plato’s Timaeus and the Biblical Creation Accounts: Cosmic Monotheism and Terrestrial Polytheism in the Primordial History. Abingdon, Oxon New York, NY: Routledge, 2022. p. 14ff
Here is an excerpt from that 1993 article by Lemche that Gmirkin is discussing above:
The following points may speak in favour of a Hellenistic date of the Old Testament:
1. It is a fact that the history of Israel as told by the Old Testament has little if anything to do with the real historical developments in Palestine until at least the later part of the Hebrew monarchy. It cannot be excluded (and there is, as a matter of fact, no reason to exclude) that we here and there may possess genuine historical recollections, but it should at the same time be argued that from a historian’s point of view we have to consider the historical literature in the Old Testament a poor source of historical information.
2. An extensive part of this literature should be considered the creation of the Jewish Diaspora, first and foremost the patriarchal narratives, the story in Exodus about the Israelites in Egypt and their escape from Egypt, but also the conquest narratives in Joshua. All of these aim at one and the same issue, at the more or less utopian idea that a major Jewish kingdom—even empire—should be (re-)established in Palestine, an idea that emerged in spite of the fact that it had no background in an ancient Israelite empire.
3. The writers who invented the ‘history of Israel’ seem to have modeled their history on a Greek pattern. The first in modern times to stress this point is presumably John Van Seters, although his reference to Hecataeus of Miletus may seem gratuitous, as we no longer possess Hecataeus’s history, except in the form of rather diminutive fragments. It would be preferable to propose the history of Herodotus as the earliest point of comparison and to indicate that there are a number of similarities between the histories of Herodotus and the Old Testament. Both histories have as their beginning a perspective that encompasses the world as such, and this perspective narrows down to single nations only at a later point, respectively the Greek and the Hebrew. I should like to stress this point without ignoring the many significant differences between Herodotus’ history and the Old Testament historical literature. It is only my intention to indicate that the biblical historians display a knowledge of the Greek tradition, and that this could hardly have been the case before Greek historians were to become known and read in the Near East.
4. The Persian period does not seem to meet the requirements of being the time when the historical books of the Old Testament were written down. First of all it would have to be proved that Greek authors were known and extensively read in the Persian empire, and I very much doubt that this was the case. Furthermore, we have to look for a suitable place where the biblical historical narratives may have been written down.
1. It is a fact that the history of Israel as told by the Old Testament has little if anything to do with the real historical developments in Palestine until at least the later part of the Hebrew monarchy. It cannot be excluded (and there is, as a matter of fact, no reason to exclude) that we here and there may possess genuine historical recollections, but it should at the same time be argued that from a historian’s point of view we have to consider the historical literature in the Old Testament a poor source of historical information.
2. An extensive part of this literature should be considered the creation of the Jewish Diaspora, first and foremost the patriarchal narratives, the story in Exodus about the Israelites in Egypt and their escape from Egypt, but also the conquest narratives in Joshua. All of these aim at one and the same issue, at the more or less utopian idea that a major Jewish kingdom—even empire—should be (re-)established in Palestine, an idea that emerged in spite of the fact that it had no background in an ancient Israelite empire.
3. The writers who invented the ‘history of Israel’ seem to have modeled their history on a Greek pattern. The first in modern times to stress this point is presumably John Van Seters, although his reference to Hecataeus of Miletus may seem gratuitous, as we no longer possess Hecataeus’s history, except in the form of rather diminutive fragments. It would be preferable to propose the history of Herodotus as the earliest point of comparison and to indicate that there are a number of similarities between the histories of Herodotus and the Old Testament. Both histories have as their beginning a perspective that encompasses the world as such, and this perspective narrows down to single nations only at a later point, respectively the Greek and the Hebrew. I should like to stress this point without ignoring the many significant differences between Herodotus’ history and the Old Testament historical literature. It is only my intention to indicate that the biblical historians display a knowledge of the Greek tradition, and that this could hardly have been the case before Greek historians were to become known and read in the Near East.
4. The Persian period does not seem to meet the requirements of being the time when the historical books of the Old Testament were written down. First of all it would have to be proved that Greek authors were known and extensively read in the Persian empire, and I very much doubt that this was the case. Furthermore, we have to look for a suitable place where the biblical historical narratives may have been written down.
From Niels Peter Lemche's thirty year old article, Lemche, Niels. “The Old Testament ‐a Hellenistic Book?∗.” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 7 (January 1, 1993): 163–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/09018329308585016. pp 188f
And, of course, we have other studies, most recently that of Adler, demonstrating the archaeological evidence that underscores the view that our earliest evidence for anything like a religion of the Bible is no earlier than the Hellenistic period.