Après le déluge: Københavnerskolen eller kaos?

The article is based on the author’s farewell address at the Universityof Copenhagen and includes a review of recent scholarship in thelight of the achievements of the Copenhagen School. The changes ofparadigm from classical historical-critical scholarship to contemporaryOld Testament scholarship after le déluge which was the CopenhagenSchool are considerable. First of all the link previously assumed betweena text in the Old Testament and what really happened in Palestine inancient times has been broken when we realized that there is actually inthe case of the Old Testament so little that unites history with narrativethat it is misleading to understand biblical historiography as “history”.It is a story about the past, a kind of cultural memory, and to those whowrote these stories about the past, the real past was not very important.Another result of the contribution of the Copenhagen School relatesto the dating of biblical literature that was hardly collected before theHellenistic Period, and probably not in Jerusalem or in Palestine. Therefore,with the retirement of the last original member of the CopenhagenSchool it is a totally different scene in Old Testament studies whichremains, not because everyone accepts the theses of the school but because it has set the agenda for present and future discussion

Historie og kulturel erindring i Det Gamle Testamente

It is an established fact that biblical historiography is fundamentallydifferent from modern historical reconstructions. It was neverthe aim to describe the past as it really was. The purpose of historiographywas didactic, and the means had little to do with modern historicalreconstructions. In this way it is preferable to consider biblicalhistoriography to be cultural memory, and it is sharing with memorythe right not to be dependent on historical facts. Rather it represents a“memory” of the past as constructed by an elite group – the few whowere able to write and read. It is possible to reconstruct the “profi le” ofthese intellectuals and their aim: to write a national history, and clearlyfor propagandistic reasons, to support the primacy of Jerusalem over Samaria.Most likely this historiography dates to the Hasmonean period

Ancient Israel: A Way of Organizing Our Ignorance

En mi disertación de 1985, Early Israel, ofrecí la siguiente máxima: nuestra más importante tarea es reconocer nuestra ignorancia. El concepto de “antiguo Israel” fue inventado por la historiografía moderna como una manera de organizar todo lo que los investigadores creían conocer sobre la sociedad de la Palestina antigua y su historia. Más de veinte años atrás, Philip R. Davies definió al “antiguo Israel” como la manera en que la información histórica del antiguo Levante era mezclada con relatos bíblicos sobre Israel en algo que solamente existía en la mente de los biblistas. Ello nos remite al discurso de Platón sobre la memoria humana como una tablilla de arcilla fresca sobre la cual se escribe. Podríamos sustituir hoy esta tablilla de arcilla con un disco blando. Pero, lo esencial es que una vez construido, el concepto de “antiguo Israel” ha servido como el disco blando/tablilla de arcilla sobre el/la cual se ha escrito toda la información –mítica, histórica– del mundo antiguo para luego ser integrada con la información bíblica. En una discusión más precisa sobre la memoria, podría decirse que el antiguo Israel es algo “memorizado”. Se indica en ocasiones que el antiguo Israel recordaba algo. De este modo, en efecto, una memoria creada por la moderna investigación se transforma en el sujeto que recuerda, y así los investigadores simplemente asumen que ellos conocen mucho más de lo que en realidad pueden conocer. In my dissertation from 1985, Early Israel, I presented the following maxim: Our most important duty is to acknowledge our ignorance. The concept of “ancient Israel” was invented in modern scholarship as a way to organize everything these scholars believed to know about ancient Palestinian society and its history. More than twenty years ago, Philip R. Davies defined “ancient Israel” as the way historical information from the ancient Levant was blended with biblical stories about Israel into something that only existed in the mind of biblical scholars. This reminds us of Plato’s discourse about human memory as a soft tablet of clay to be inscribed. We might substitute his clay tablet with a “soft disc.” But the essential is that once constructed, the concept of “ancient Israel” has served as the soft disc / tablet of clay on which to inscribe all information –mythical, historical– from the ancient world after which it was blended with biblical information. In a more narrow memory discussion, it may be said that ancient Israel is something “memorized.” It is sometimes said that ancient Israel remembered something. As a matter of fact, in this way a memory created by modern scholarship becomes the subject that remembers, and in this way the scholars simply assume that they know far more than they are indeed able to know.