What Did the Biblical Writers Know & When Did They Know It?  By William G. Dever. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001. xiii and 313 pages. Cloth. $25.

Dever, a leading Syro-Palestinian archaeologist, answers the question in his title by stating "They knew a lot, and they knew it early." The book is a sustained attack on a small group of scholars known variously as "minimalists" or "revisionists," who deny most of the history related in the Bible, also in the monarchical period, and date the Bible almost exclusively to the Persian and Hellenistic periods. The revisionists include Philip R. Davies, Thomas L. Thompson, Keith W. Whitelam, Niels Peter Lemche, and, at least partially, the Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein.

Dever is a convert to Judaism from Congregational Christianity, but describes himself now as a non theist and a secular humanist. Dever himself would find almost no historical memory in the stories of the matriarchs and patriarchs, in the Exodus and wilderness wandering, or in the conquest. He, however, offers a very spirited defense of the ethnic identity of a people called Israel in the era of the judges and a historical convergence of texts and artifacts in the accounts of the reign of Solomon (e. g. the building of the temple and the fortification gates at Hazor, Gezer, and Megiddo) and throughout the period of the Divided Monarchy. He documents the wide use of writing and literacy in Iron Age Israel (inscriptions, seals) and outlines the archaeological evidence for "popular" religion (incense stands, fertility figurines, the goddess Asherah, solar and astral worship, libations for the dead, and planting and harvest festivals). Many of these practices, now documented archaeologically, are explicitly condemned in the biblical text. The objective throughout the book is to use the external data provided by archaeology as a tool for isolating a reliable core of events in the Bible, despite its theocratic nature (many biblical texts are labeled "propaganda" by Dever).

Despite this helpful and successful defense of the core history of monarchical Israel and of an identifiable proto-Israel in the period of the judges, the book is marred by its polemical character, sometimes stooping to ad hominem attack. Almond Press, where some of the revisionists have published their materials, has been dubbed the "nut press" by some according to Dever, and Thompson's alleged jaundiced view of Judaism--which Thompson would surely violently protest!--is attributed to the fact that his degree is from the University of Tübingen. We are told that few biblical scholars make any effort to keep up with the burgeoning archaeological literature. I protest.

The second flaw in the book is its critique of postmodernism. This "ism" has its problems, of course, and its attention to the subjectivity and the indeterminate character of knowledge do pose dangers. But postmodernism has shown the role of gender, class, and race in all investigations and surely does not deserve to be demonized or caricatured. Dever pillories the following statement as "too absurd to be taken seriously": "A text is an 'interpretable entity independent of its author.' I too try to identify the social or historical contexts of authors, but I recognize that those contexts are often unknown or at least uncertain and that the anonymity of many biblical authors is probably quite intentional. In addition, new literary criticism has pointed out that texts mean what texts mean, which is not always the same thing as what an author might have intended.

So this book gets a mixed review. On the positive side, it offers a refreshing new synthesis of the convergence of biblical text and archaeological artifact in pre-exilic Israel. But on the negative side, it is far too polemical and far too sweeping in its indictment of postmodernism. Dever squirms at times in distancing himself from fundamentalists on the one hand, who believe too much, and the revisionists, on the other hand, who believe much too little.

Ralph W. Klein

Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago