ReViews

The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel

Thomas L. Thompson (New York: Basic Books, 1999) xix+412 pp., $30.00 (hardback)

“A powder keg of a book”: That’s how the publisher is touting Thomas Thompson’s latest book. Explosive or not, it is an unusual approach to literary, historical and archaeological data. Which is why we have taken the unusual step of asking two scholars—an archaeologist and a Bible scholar, from two very different schools of thought—to review it separately. We leave it to them to measure its bang.—Ed.

“Biblical” Israel never existed. The “stories” found in the Hebrew Bible are simply myths, written in the Hellenistic era to bolster the self-identity of Jews living then.

So writes Thomas Thompson, long a disaffected anti-establishment figure in America, who has finally found a position at the University of Copenhagen, where he is one of the principal spokesmen of the “revisionist” school of Biblical historians. This small but vocal minority of scholars, basing its work on “post-modern” epistemology and deconstructionist approaches to ancient texts, essentially denies that Israel existed in the Iron Age (1200–600 B.C.). For the revisionists, the Bible is nothing more than a “pious hoax.”