Desta vez foi Yosef Garfinkel, arqueólogo da Universidade Hebraica de Jerusalém, na BAR de maio/junho de 2011. Confira aqui e leia o artigo em pdf aqui.
Ele aponta como minimalistas Niels Peter Lemche, Thomas L. Thompson, Philip R. Davies e Keith Whitelam, mas põe na roda também Israel Finkelstein, arqueólogo da Universidade de Tel Aviv, pois seu artigo gira em torno do reino de Davi no século X a.C. e sua pièce de résistance é, claro, Khirbet Qeiyafa.
Não seria uma boa hora para se ler sobre arqueologia e geopolítica em Israel?
O artigo de Garfinkel suscitou, além de outros debates, uma recente réplica de Philip Davies, em The Bible and Interpretation: “The End of Biblical Minimalism?”
Que começa dizendo:
Seeing this epitaph on the cover of BAR (37:03, May/Jun 2011) immediately brought to mind one of Mark Twain’s celebrated sayings: “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”
In this case, not only exaggerated but also so often repeated over the last 30 years that my “minimalist” colleagues and I (all pictured in our youth) are feeling like Lazarus.
So why is so brave as to cry “wolf” yet again, when the basic principles of what its opponents call “minimalism” have become so widely adopted in biblical scholarship (it would be just as weary to cite the references let alone keep up with the reading). Well, it obviously demands some misrepresentation of what “minimalism” is (like most previous epitaphs). Its opponents regularly choose to define it in the way they think they can most easily attack it. No wonder so many people are confused about what it is. In this case, “minimalism” is defined, apparently, as the belief that David and Solomon and their “United Monarchy” did not exist. Well, “minimalists” have come to that conclusion, it is true, though there is a great deal of historical methodology, archaeological data, and textual exegesis lying behind that conclusion, and no minimalist that I know would regard the existence of David et al. as an essential tenet of minimalism. Without indulging in a detailed exposition, the issue is about how, why, and when the biblical books were written—a rather larger and more complex thesis than Garfinkel seems to appreciate, and a problem of which the historicity of otherwise any individual person or event forms only a rather small part.
Leia o artigo.