Rating: 
Summary: Tortuous and ill-conceived
Review: Thompson's book is rather poorly organised, yet it is possible to detect certain recurrent themes.The Hebrew bible, in his view, has no historicity worth speaking of: it is, in fact, a largely Hellenistic creation, composed or redacted after the 3rd century BCE. Thompson often applies Classical epithets to biblical material: David's assault on Jerusalem is 'Homeric' i.e. is actually modelled on the Iliad of Homer and the schism of Israel and Judah is, we are told, modelled on the break up the Seleucid empire. I must say, I find much of this tortuous and unconvincing. His biblical exegesis is also haphazard and ill informed: he tells us for instance, that, since in Hebrew, the term penis is also rendered euphemistically by the term for the hem of a garment, the author intends a ribald laugh when David cuts off the hem of Saul's garment, instead of killing him, as though he were emasculating him. I find this unconvincing: euphemism is not double entendre, and David's act was one of mercy, conveying to Saul that he could have killed him, but did not. The tenor of the story is tragic, not comic, with David trying desperately to maintain the love of his former king, despite betrayal. Most of Thompson's exegesis is devoted to revealing textual inconsistencies, some very ill researched, with the aim of debunking the tradition as a historical source. In so doing, he asserts that the Bible does not report an 'historical' Babylonian deportation of the Jews, although 'deportations happened -often'. What is one to make of such a thesis? Thompson's central thesis is that the Hebrew bible is a collection of traditions, whose historicity, if any, is irrecoverable -as though traditions cannot themselves be historical. We are treated to a meandering study (the book has no index and no notes -a la Foucault, the poetry of Thompson's prose is his argument) of Thompson's personal reflections on these traditions, with very little reference to history, philology or archaeology. Indeed, Thompson honours us, inter alia, with how the trope of the death of Absolom, caught by his hair in a thicket, reappears in Paul's trope of Jesus, 'hung on a tree'. Fascinating stuff, but rather divorced from normative Hebrew biblical or Syro-Palestinian studies or history. In the '70s, Thompson wrote a book 'proving' the non-historicity of the Patriarchal narratives. When, surprisingly, the field of biblical studies did not pop out of existence, Thompson spent the next 20 years brooding over the injustice of his not being able to find work in the field he had so zealously tried to destroy. Now from his European fastness in Copenhagen, he has excelled himself with a work that attempts the impossible: it both tries both to demonstrate the intrinsic absurdities and contradictions of the Hebrew tradition, and how its portrait of the divine evolves (presumably into a Christian), and, at the same time, professes to do its authors justice. There are good literary critics of the Hebrew tradition, who pay close attention to the flow, style and needs of its narrative -Robert Alter springs to mind. But, unlike Thompson, Alter has an a priori respect and love for the tradition he analyses. Thompson seems concerned with a debunking, revealing thinly disguised contempt.
Rating:
Summary: Poor Scholarship dependent on polemics
Review: Thompson, at the forefront of the "revisionist" school of biblical criticism, stands as a stellar example of why archeology is best left to archeologists. Moreover, he demonstrates that ad absurdum arguments and straw man debating may sell books, but is hardly scholarship. Thompson claims that he is breaking paradigms in 'biblical archeology' by dismissing the Garden of Eden and the patriarchal period. The problem is that these are straw men arguments; no serious archeologist working in the Middle East claims that these stories are determinable historic facts. In fact, it has been decades since anyone made such a claim. Having 'decimated' a position that no one holds, the author than launches into a claim that since these stories of the bible are a historical, than logic dictates that NONE of the bible can be historic. An analogy would be to read a biography of George Washington that speaks of cutting down the cherry tree, and assuming that if there was no tree, there could have been no Washington. For Thompson, this is accomplished by denying any historical ancient Israel. To do this he does mental gymnastics that are often self contradictory. The references to Israel in ancient Egyptian and Assyrian writings are dismissed as forgeries. He ignores the fact that many of the bible's stories track archeological provable facts like the rise and fall of cities. The goal here is not scholarship, rather it is a political axe he wants to grind. The entire revisionist school in fact stands on a string of logical fallacies. They talk about being archeologists, but have never done field work. They talk about being biblical scholars, but they do not take the text seriously. The text consistently makes arguments from silence, presenting no evidence or supportive data. Instead, we have a string of opinions. What scholar writes a book of this length without even a single footnote? The land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean speaks volumes of the existence of historic Israel. Only someone wearing blinders would be unable to see it. If Thompson wants to make an argument, he should present evidence. Without it, he can offer only polemics and propaganda. Though written by a non-academic (no one is perfect) "Is the Bible True?" by Jeffrey Sheler presents this material in a far more interesting fashion. You may also want to look at William Dever's "What did the bible writers know and when did they know it?" It's a poor title, but he is an exceptional scholar.
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