• DOI:10.2104/BC070044
• Corpus ID: 59131405

Review of Jens Bruun Kofoed,Text and History: Historiography and the Study of the Biblical Text: (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2005)

@article{Burt2007ReviewOJ,
  title={Review of Jens Bruun Kofoed,Text and History: Historiography and the Study of the Biblical Text: (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2005)},
  author={Sean Burt},
  journal={The Bible and Critical Theory},
  year={2007},
  volume={3}
}

• Sean Burt
• Published 1 October 2007
• History, Art
• The Bible and Critical Theory

Few topics in Hebrew Bible scholarship in the past twenty years have engendered more fevered polemic than the question of the Bible’s value for reconstructing ancient history. One can hope that the excesses of this debate are now finally behind us. With this book, a revision of a dissertation submitted to the University of Aarhus in 2002, Jens Bruun Kofoed offers a study that, though argumentative, proceeds with refreshing restraint. Kofoed frames his argument as a critique of scepticism towards the Bible’s historical statements. Yet, he differentiates his book as a Danish response to the Copenhagen School and, having studied with so-called minimalists, even calls their work ‘both inevitable and necessary’ (x). In his introductory first chapter, Kofoed asserts a wide-ranging thesis, ‘that the texts of the Hebrew Bible contain reliable information for a reconstruction of the period it purports to describe’ (30). Throughout the study, however, Kofoed steps back from this ambitious claim about the entirety of the Bible. He restricts his investigation to the books of Kings, focusing on the question of ‘whether the picture that the texts paint of, for example, the United Monarchy is (a) no more real than the world of Narnia or (b) is... a reliable witness to the events that the texts purport to describe’ (32). Notably, Kofoed explicitly sets aside any consideration of ideological shaping or emplotment of the narrative and how those processes may affect the question of historicity (31). Chapter 2, ‘The Lateness of the Text’, addresses the chronological distance between the composition of Kings and events described therein. He states, ‘[i]f, for example, the text in its present form and content can be shown to be a ‘creatio ex nihilo’... its referents must be sought in the Yehud of Hellenistic Period Palestine. Consequently, the text will have very little historically reliable to say about an Iron Age Israel’ (33). Kofoed accordingly proceeds to make a case for continuity of tradition, whether oral or written, from the events up until the composition of Kings. Here, especially with his substantial discussion of oral transmission (58–82), which is not BOOK REVIEWS