Grabbe, Are Historians of Ancient Palestine Fellow Creatures or Different Animals?
Lester L. Grabbe circulated a copy of his paper Are Historians of Ancient Palestine Fellow Creatures or Different Animals? pp. 19-36 to members of the Seminar to stimulate the debate. He thinks of himself as a historian, for he has written a study about Israels history, Judaism from Cyrus to Hadrian I-II, Minneapolis, Augsburg Fortress, 1992 (British edition in one-volume paperback, London, SCM Press, 1994). He concluded the following: 1) We can write a history of ancient Syria-Palestine-Israel. 2) In writing such a history, the biblical text can and must be used. 3) There are great difficulties of using the biblical text, so the use of the text needs to be argued for in each case. 4) The use of the archaeological and biblical sources need to be evaluated each in its own right, and we should avoid to mix promiscuously textual and other data. 5) Imaginative and speculative reconstructions should be admitted and we must indicate the probabilities of any hypothesis. He argued that the goa
