A Critique of Minimalism: Walter Dietrich reviews John Van Seters

Dietrich reviews Van Seters’ The Biblical Saga of King David in the latest number of the Review of Biblical Literature. It is a thorough nine-page discussion. Dietrich is a top-tier researcher of the biblical narratives featuring Saul and David. His carefully considered conclusions: Van Seters proposed slicing-and-dicing of the relevant texts in 1-2 Samuel and 1 Kings is arbitrary (willkürlich), and his dating of same inadequate to the content of the texts (unzutreffend). More below the jump.

The most persuasive critiques of minimalism do not issue from maximalists. They come from hard-boiled middle-of-the-roaders like Dietrich. Truth be told, maximalists and minimalists think a lot alike. The extremes of the spectrum pursue mirror-opposite but otherwise identical pre-emptive strategies.

Minimalists milk the evidence at hand, and especially the lack thereof, in order to cast reasonable doubt on any and all reconstructions that depend on a degree of credence of extant tradition that is not required by the evidence. Maximalists milk the evidence at hand, and especially the lack thereof, in order to cast reasonable doubt on any and all reconstructions that depend on a degree of skepticism of extant tradition that is not required by the evidence. Neither class sifts the evidence in search of the truth. They are the equivalent of prosecutors or defense attorneys who use evidence on behalf of a client.

Minimalists have a penchant for suggesting that extant traditions are “pure inventions.” This provides cover for their own proposals, inventions in their own right.

Maximalists have a penchant for treating traditions as something other than traditions. As if the literature in hand consisted of eyewitness accounts which, if we possessed them in the originals, would agree on all details. Wherever traditions are not in perfect agreement, the default situation, maximalists feel obliged to set the traditions aside and offer a version of events and realities behind the traditions in accord with a preconceived sense of propriety in terms of the means God would use to reveal truth. Ultimately, this is an expression of a covert lack of agreement with the fact that in the Bible, God reveals himself, if he reveals himself at all, not through events and realities without remainder, but through an inspired account of them.

How does a hard-boiled middle-of-the-roader navigate to conclusions? Mark Hamilton puts it nicely in his recent JHS review of a monograph by Dietrich, The Early Monarchy in Israel: The Tenth Century B.C.E. (trans. Joachim Vette; Biblical Encyclopedia 3; Leiden: Brill, 2007) online here:

Rather than making sweeping deductions based on general principles, [Dietrich] works through the evidence in a sophisticated case-by-case way, exercising measured skepticism toward both the biblical text and his own assumptions.

In the case at hand, this works itself out as follows. Van Seters, a minimalist, thinks that a largely fictional pro-Davidic narrative was composed by the Deuteronomistic historian in the late 7^th or early 6^th centuries bce. In the late Persian period, an anti-Davidic saga was composed and combined with the above. According to Van Seters, the many elements in the traditions about David which, on the basis of the criterion of embarrassment, are almost universally considered to reflect 10^th century events, are in fact rank inventions.

Dietrich, a middle-of-the-roader, attributes a great deal of the material about Saul and David to sources in existence prior to the seventh century. That is in accord with his perception, which he shares with a long tradition of scholarship stretching back to the classical age of Wellhausen and Driver, that, in Dietrich’s words, “Samuel and Kings confront us not with novels but with literature containing many traditions” (p. 228 in the book already cited).

Minimalists and maximalists ignore the classical tradition of biblical scholarship at their peril. That tradition will remain standing no matter how often M & M theories make the pages of newspapers looking for the newest sensation. 

Comments

[Alan Lenzi]

This is something about which we can agree! M & M both err. You've explained why so very well (which is, as usual, not surprising).

[Ranger]

Alan,
M&M! That's funny.

John,
I've often wondered what the minimalists do with the obvious use of older sources in Samuel/Kings. Do they hold these sources to be mythic constructions of a brilliant writer?

I admit that I've only read "Memories of Ancient Israel" by Davies and selections from Thompson's "The Mythic Past." The former outshined the latter both in quality and realization of the radical nature of the claims it was making.

Honestly to an evangelical worldview like my own who had read Dever/Finklestein, etc. in grad school and Millard/Hoffmeier, etc. in seminary, such claims seemed not merely radical but ludicrous. Still, I pressed on and actually enjoyed Davies despite disagreeing in many, many places...I can't say the same about Thompson.

[JohnFH]

Davies seems to have a better handle on what is at stake - the foundations, not just of Judaism and Christianity, but of the Western project.

He seems to sense that you can't just gut the West of its traditional metaphysic and expect everything to just to go on as if nothing happened.

Yes, Van Seters would have us believe that what look like traditions are actually short stories, more or less in the sense that term has in the world of modern fiction.