Once again, thanks for your thorough response here. As I mentioned in one discussion about this (might have been MM, might have been elsewhere), I have developed a pretty strong initial heuristic of "when ancient stuff says something happened, we should take that as our starting point and depart from there only as much as very convincing evidence moves us." I've developed that heuristic from stuff like Schleimann's finding of Troy and later archaeological verification of various previously questioned textual traditions. It's only a heuristic, and sometimes the real "what happened" is pretty darn different from what the ancient sources say happened.
As for this particular theory, one thing I've noticed is that I haven't yet seen a discussion of what I was taught was the default theory, that most of the Old Testament as we know it was put together and written down during the Babylonian exile. But then, I haven't read Gmirkin myself, so maybe he goes into that.
On your topic about the "political correctness" of questioning the sourcing of the Bible, I'd be inclined to see it less as a universal thing, and more a discipline-by-discipline thing. For a long time, even as academia moved atheistic, materialistic, and leftward, Classics and Biblical scholarship lagged behind. These days, that lag may be gone, and as you say, that may mean the introduction of some plausible theories that deserved more attention than they got for questioning orthodoxy, but might also mean theories get more attention for going in the direction everyone else wants to go these days.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2023-10-13 04:43 am (UTC)As for this particular theory, one thing I've noticed is that I haven't yet seen a discussion of what I was taught was the default theory, that most of the Old Testament as we know it was put together and written down during the Babylonian exile. But then, I haven't read Gmirkin myself, so maybe he goes into that.
On your topic about the "political correctness" of questioning the sourcing of the Bible, I'd be inclined to see it less as a universal thing, and more a discipline-by-discipline thing. For a long time, even as academia moved atheistic, materialistic, and leftward, Classics and Biblical scholarship lagged behind. These days, that lag may be gone, and as you say, that may mean the introduction of some plausible theories that deserved more attention than they got for questioning orthodoxy, but might also mean theories get more attention for going in the direction everyone else wants to go these days.
Cheers,
Jeff