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THOMAS L. THOMPSON, The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Pp. xix + 412. $30.
This volume is broken into three parts. In the first, Thompson asks why and how scholars mistook the Bible for historiography. The second is a reconstruction of the real history of ancient Palestine, which is then compared with the Bible. In the final part, T. discusses the historical context from which the biblical texts emerged. The book contains no references to secondary sources and very few to primary ones. It is also plagued with typographical errors, some serious and hard to catch, such as the reference to "2666 B.C.E." as the date of the exodus on p. 73, which must from context be a misprint for A.ra. (anno mundi) 2666, which is 1498 B.C.E. T.'s flair for rhetoric seems a little out of hand at times, as in his use of adjectives such as "Taliban-like" (pp. 66, 296), his descriptions of David as "a pezzonovante" (p. 47) and of Abraham as a "bunco artist" (p. 304), and the occasional appearance of an expression like "hippy-motif" (p. 344) or "big bow-wow literature" (p. 390).
Thompson's treatment of the question why the Bible was taken for history is mainly in chap. 2. His answer is traditional: "this fiction" was constructed with "traditions, stories and legendary lore from Palestine's past," some of which are "very old" sources (p. 78). Among them are not only literary traditions but also "unknown sources" like those "implied in the synchronic listing of royal successions of the houses of Omri and David" (p. 60). In part 1 there is no discrete section in which T. deals with the use of the Bible for history by modern scholars, but his remarks on this are cogent. He notes that modern histories of Israel are essentially paraphrases of "selected biblical accounts," such paraphrases-rather than the biblical accounts-being presented as "the Bible's view of the past" (p. 4). The miracles are edited out, and the rest is left as plausible. He discusses the true literary genre of the Bible in chaps. I and 2. The Bible, he concludes, was never meant to...