Minimalists in Biblical Studies: From Rebels to Unsuspected Contributors

The seven contributions in this issue look back on the storm that stirred Hebrew Bible scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s over the use of biblical texts to reconstruct the history of ancient Israel. A session was organized at the joint SBL/EABS conference in Berlin in August 2017 on “What have we learned from the Minimalists?” Lester L. Grabbe, Ehud Ben Zvi and Thomas L. Thompson, core members of the European Seminar of Historical Methodology, offer here personal accounts on the origins and development of what was deemed “minimalism” by their opponents. Yigal Levin, Baruch Halpern, Athalya Brenner-Idan and Ernst Axel Knauf respond with highly relevant alternatives now that the debate is over. Whether or not the debate was a mere storm in a tea pot, in many ways everyone in biblical scholarship is now a minimalist.