Old Testament Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! === Recent scholarship === In 2007, a historian of ancient Judaism [[Lester L. Grabbe]] explained that earlier biblical scholars such as [[Julius Wellhausen]] (1844β1918) could be described as 'maximalist', accepting biblical text unless it has been disproven. Continuing in this tradition, both "the 'substantial historicity' of the patriarchs" and "the unified conquest of the land" were widely accepted in the United States until about the 1970s. Contrarily, Grabbe says that those in his field now "are all minimalists{{snd}}at least, when it comes to the patriarchal period and the settlement. ... [V]ery few are willing to operate [as maximalists]."<ref name="GRABBE p.">{{cite book|last=Grabbe|first=Lester L.|title=Understanding the History of Ancient Israel|date=2007-10-25|publisher=British Academy|isbn=978-0-19-726401-0|pages=57β58|chapter=Some Recent Issues in the Study of the History of Israel|doi=10.5871/bacad/9780197264010.003.0005}}</ref> In 2022, archaeologist [[Avraham Faust]] wrote that in the 1990s a school known as [[biblical minimalism]] rejected the historical value of the Bible for the study of ancient Israel during the Iron Age, "but this extreme approach was rejected by mainstream scholarship."<ref>{{Cite book |title=The Ancient Israelite World |last=Faust |first=Avraham |publisher=Taylor & Francis |year=2022 |isbn=978-1-000-77324-8 |page=79 |editor-last=Keimer |editor-first=Kyle H. |chapter=Between the Biblical Story and History: Writing an Archaeological History of Ancient Israel |editor-last2=Pierce |editor-first2=George A. |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=4beREAAAQBAJ&pg=PA79}}</ref> Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! Cancel Editing help (opens in new window) Discuss this page