The Old Testament between Theology and History: A Critical Survey.

• Author: Smoak, Jeremy D.
• Position: Book review

The Old Testament between Theology and History: A Critical Survey. By NIELS PETER LEMCHE. Louisville: WESTMINSTER JOHN KNOX PRESS, 2008. Pp. xx + 476. $49.95.

The main purpose of this book is to situate the Copenhagen school's contribution to the study of ancient Israelite history within the past two centuries of scholarship on the theology of the Old Testament. For the past three decades the Copenhagen school, scholars from the University of Copenhagen and Sheffield University, have argued that the Old Testament texts were composed at a very late date in the first millennium B.C.E., somewhere during the fourth-second centuries (p. 380). In the present hook. Lemche argues that the school's deconstruction of the idea that the biblical narratives reflect the real history of the Iron Age southern Levant has played a part in liberating Old Testament theology from the flawed presuppositions of the historical-critical method and paved the way for newer post-modern approaches (p. 384). The book's title betrays that its contents are largely aimed at students of theology and religion and more specifically those who work in Old Testament theology.

The book is divided into four parts, each consisting of smaller chapters. The book's structure, which reviews the rise and fall of the historical-critical paradigm, intends to place the Copenhagen school's work as the culmination of scholarship on the study of ancient Israelite history in the twentieth century. The book ends with an appendix dial presents a history of the ancient southern Levant without reliance upon the biblical texts.

Part I, entitled "From Theology to History," charts the history of the historical-critical paradigm in European and North American study of the Old Testament over the past two centuries. The author argues that most histories of Israel written during this period were flawed because they represented little more than a paraphrase of the biblical texts (p. 87).

Part II, "The Crisis for History," gives an overview of what the author sees as the "'collapse" of the historical-critical paradigm in the latter half of the twentieth century. Lemche argues that the seeds for such a collapse emerged from the larger revolutions in the fields of psychology and sociology, which increasingly focused upon the role of the reader, observer, or informer in the determination of meaning (p. 104). The author argues that the failure of archaeology to confirm the history of the biblical texts also...