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Last October, an academic conference was held at Northwestern University, outside of Chicago, on fthe Origins of the Jewish People and Contemporary Biblical Scholarship. The event, a Philip M. and Ethel Klutznik symposium and lecture, was supported by the United Jewish Federation of Chicago and Northwesterns Jewish studies program, Among the invited speakers were such mainstream academic superstars as Peter Machinist of Harvard University, who holds the third oldest academic chair in the United States; Baruch Levine of New York University, who has written distinguished commentaries on Leviticus and Numbers; Marc Brettler, a leading young scholar at Brandeis University and author, most recently, of The Creation of History in Ancient Israel, and William Dever, former director of the William E Albright School of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem and one of America's premier archaeologists of ancient Israel.
The conference was structured to address a "crisis" in the study of history as described in the Bible; "crisis" was the word used in the title of the principal address delivered by Machinist: "The Crisis of History in the Study of Jewish Origins." This crisis, as the various papers made dear, was caused by a group of scholars variously called the Copenhagen School, Biblical revisionists, Biblical minimalists and even Biblical nihilists. The reference is to a number of scholars, a few of whom teach at the University of Copenhagen, while others teach at universities in England, Scotland and even the United States. These scholars are in no way organized into a group and, indeed, have important differences, but they do share a certain skepticism regarding the value of the Bible in reconstructing the history of the period that the Biblical author is describing (as opposed to the value of the Biblical text for reconstructing the period when the text was composed, hundreds of years later).
As an alleged member of this school, I was invited to storm, if I could, the Biblical fortress manned by this formidable group of defenders. I was listed in the printed program as giving a "Response" to the speakers in the sections on "Historiography" and "Archaeology and Philology."
Unfortunately, for the first time in my life I became seriously ill, ending up in the hospital just before the conference. I was unable to...