No relevant variances exist for any world populations. So (1)–(4) is false vis-a-vis China, India, Mesoamerica, etc. There are no relevant genetic differences in cognition or any other relevant mental ability or capacity. And across time. There is no such thing as “polygenic educational attainment scores” for ancient Greece and Rome, much less any evidence they’d have been different (some of the most sophisticated thought occurred under the Romans), even less that they’d have been different because of genetics rather than economics or culture.

Most importantly, there is nothing about the scientific and industrial revolutions that would have even been odd for the Romans to develop—they only got stopped by happenstance decisions regarding economic and political structures, which took a thousand years to get back out of. In fact the Middle Ages evince some of the stupidest people making the stupidest decisions and failing to comprehend even basic things. Their brains or genetics were not different. Their economics and culture were. And it was those that had to be returned to previous pagan models to recover science and industrialization.

I cover this in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire.

1) Ancient pagan times including Bronze Age, through Ancient Grece up to Roman Republic had population with high cognitive abilities. Eg. as tested by polygenic educational attainment scores.
2) Roman Empire = population with low cognitive abilities. (Christianity becomes popular then!)
3) Within the city Rome itself – during the times of empire theres a popultion replacement, with conventional South Europeans loosing majority to Middle Easterners. (The need to change religion because of different population?)
4) During middle ages cognitive abilities in Norther Europe grow slowly up until the before Industrial Evolution. (thus Industrial Revolution can happen, as well as earlier movements)

Your bugbears are indeed apt though. And your comment important, for any readers not aware of the things you and I are talking about.

Thanks for the reply – and I agree with your observations, and I did find the book valuable. I may have been too harsh, hasting, or misunderstanding.

On Solomon in particular, Grabbe does acknowledge that the Bible is the only source, and that it is clearly fantastic, yet states he believes Solomon is historical. So you are correct, he qualifies it as a belief.

On the C14, yes, his book was not intended as an exploration of any issue, but a road map. I guess it may be a pet bugbear of mine; the constant questioning of radiometrics in general irks me.

Thanks

Indeed, Ancient Israel (like The Bible Unearthed) is just a “where they claim to be now” book, an intro 101 to “current consensus” to get you up to speed on the field if you weren’t already there. And like his predecessors, Grabbe states clearly when a conclusion he reaches is his own opinion, and often acknowledges competing opinions, and gives some brief on why he takes his opinion and thinks it matches the majority. So, it’s not an oracle. It’s just a textbook.

I came to a screeching halt at 3.2.4.5 “The Early Monarchy: Saul, Samuel, David, and Solomon Traditions”. Here Grabbe ignores various positions he espouses in Chapter 1.

Does he “ignore” them or overcome them? Those are different things. The set-up is the baseline (the background). That does not commit anyone to a conclusion. If Grabbe deviates from expectation it is usually because he thinks the evidence warrants doing that, and is describing why a majority of his peers agree. And when that happens, he usually makes clear what he is doing and why, and even cites competing conclusions. I think this is a fair way to do this. The reader is not misled (as long as they didn’t skip anything) but informed. What they are informed of is what a majority of mainstream OT experts think—not when the mainstream OT consensus is wrong. That’s 201, not 101; but requires knowing the 101 before collapsing it with a re-look.

The Bible Unearthed worked the same way. And so does Ehrman’s Jesus Interrupted, which is my matching recommendation for NT studies. I recommend these not because I 100% agree with them, but because they do accurately reflect where each field generally is on the subject, regardless of whether it’s there for a good reason or not.

Hence my point in my review: Grabbe is trying to “preserve the phenomena” a bit too much and “I’m more skeptical than Grabbe on many things.” Saul is a good example. But to be fair, Grabbe is honest about this: he outright states the sum of his reasoning and admits it can be questioned; and this allows us to question it. That’s a virtue of the book.

The case for David is stronger (we actually have hard evidence there was such a dynast; we just don’t have confirmation they were a hegemon). But again Grabbe gives you all there is and explains that he is concluding on that and not some hidden evidence he assures us of, nor does he try chesthumping and browbeating. He also cites other scholars for a further dive if anyone wants to pursue it. But we don’t even need to because he is so transparent as to his premises and reasoning that we can critique it right on the page. That’s good writing. He’s not trying to con you. He’s trying to explain his own thinking and not hiding disagreement. That’s what books like this need to do.

Certainly if one were to take a single sample, from a single stratum, from a single site, then a single test following a single regime; that would be discard-able in the face of an otherwise sound model.

That isn’t quite what he says. As you note, to explain away a C14 result you need an alternative explanation of the result that is likely enough to intrude on the certainty of the result, and that usually requires presenting evidence supporting that alternative theory (not claims; evidence). Which can only be done meticulously case-by-case. Otherwise, you are left with the probabilities entailed by the result. You can’t just gainsay them with a “maybe, therefore probably” argument.

Hence I suspect Grabbe is bracketing: when digressing on a massively complicated subject will double the length of what is supposed to be an introductory text, you bracket it as unresolved and move on. This is SOP in all fields of history. I did this with the dates of the NT documents in Ch. 7 of On the Historicity of Jesus: I worked from standard consensus date ranges because that doesn’t burden my results with the weight of additional epicycles of controversy, and doesn’t add another hundred pages of wheel-spinning. I explain, though, that I am doing this (and that different dates are plausible), and chuck the principle when I have a strong case to make against the consensus that I can cover in just a few pages (e.g. on Hebrews and 1 Clement). By ensuring my dates are near 100% certain on any objective analysis, there is no burden weighing down my other results, and by being so clear-cut it can be covered in two pages, inclusion becomes physically possible again. With thousands of individual C14 results, Grabbe is not in that position.

Another way to bracket is to punt to another study, and thus offload most of the argument elsewhere. I do this in OHJ, with all my previous peer reviewed articles, allowing me to offload dozens of pages of argument to another venue and just fill that in with “see here.” But to do that the studies have to exist. I don’t know if Grabbe has other publications on the C14 question but I assume not, or else he’d reference them. It’s thus “haven’t been there, can’t do that.”

So what you are seeing is Grabbe not having wordcount to digress on a thousand different examples and just saying “disputes exist” and working from there. You can then check the disputes; he breadcrumbs through citing the scholars who raise the disputes. If some of them commit the fallacy you identify (e.g. they cite no disputing study or have no good reason to dispute a result), then you’ll find out. Grabbe is avoiding the problem of getting into the weeds by picking fights he has no wordcount to win, and just asking you to go watch reruns of the fights on CNN and make your call.

But all that said, as I noted in my review, I do think he tries harder to be charitable to the religious-Zionist nexus than it deserves. But he is transparent enough that this bias is trackable in every case. And that’s the best you could hope for from any summarizer of an entire field. There is, in fact, no better example to turn to. So like voting for President in the United States, you have to choose the least worst one. And right now, that’s Grabbe.

That’s the thing — I can fully cop to being a poor student of rhetoric (and much else during my “normal school time”) and quite gullible for most of my life, but qualifiers loom large in my toolkit, tower of memories, et al.

I just should have asked someone about it 10+ years ago instead of letting it bother me without responding until now. But glad our host was willing to oblige, as I most definitely fancy myself a good-faith (if sporadic and slow) reader!

I must stress that these are just my readings of the book, as not a scholar, or extensive student, of the field. If I am in error in any way, I welcome correction!

The chapters (other than 1) are all in three parts, “Sources”, “Analysis”, and “Synthesis”. From an (fairly) informed layperson’s point of view, the Sources form an invaluable reference as a sort of annotated bibliography. This alone makes the book a must have for anyone beginning (or nearly so) the pursuit of ancient Israel.

Now onto the reservations.

Chapter 1 seemed sound enough, noting the importance of several factors, including archaeological evidence, and the wider cultural context of texts. Some of which he seems to ignore later in the book.

I was happy with the “Analysis” of Chapter 2; but I came to a screeching halt at 3.2.4.5 “The Early Monarchy: Saul, Samuel, David, and Solomon Traditions”. Here Grabbe ignores various positions he espouses in Chapter 1.

His principal argument for a historical Saul seems to be the Criterion from Embarrassment. “He was a problem for the narrator of 1-2 Samuel, which is an excellent reason for believing he was a historical character.” He then goes on to cite several good reasons for the existence of the Saul tradition, but none for the existence of Saul the person.

His principal arguments for David don’t seem much more sound. For the historical plausibility of the Saul-Samuel-David triad, he cites to the history of the Archbishops of Canterbury anet the English kings. Not sure about that. Then he supports the historical David by seeming to say the there are elements of the David story that are incoherent with mythography, but indicative of historicity, such as documenting regrettable shortcomings of David.

Then Solomon: here the principal arguments seem to be “David should be the builder of the temple, but he wasn’t, somebody built the temple, the tradition of Solomon is strong, ergo Solomon”. This despite acknowledging that the biblical stories of Solomon are not plausible, and that there is no archaeological evidence in support, rather the contrary.

One other final note that may (if my reading is correct) shed some light on the positions taken by Grabbe: he carefully notes when other scholars discount C14 dating, as conflicting with that scholars model, but he does not really take a position on this, but seems on the whole to accept it as a stance as valid as that of opposing scholars. Certainly if one were to take a single sample, from a single stratum, from a single site, then a single test following a single regime; that would be discard-able in the face of an otherwise sound model.

However, this is not how C14 dating is properly done. To discard C14 dates for a particular stratum/site, you must offer scientific (only) rebuttals to the date.

In sum, I cannot doubt that Grabbe is a serious, honest, and open scholar. I wonder if he perhaps has a bit of the shading so persistent in Bible related scholarship, where the Bible is given an (unconscious) certain heavier weight that other texts of the time and place.

Could you give me some examples of that information? (So I know what readers need that’s not in Grabbe; I’m evidently taking that for granted myself)