The Book of Samuel: Its Composition, Structure and Significance as ...

8 JOURNAL OF HEBREW SCRIPTURES
school responsible for the monumental work of editing the history
of Israel. This school was active from the time of King Josiah’s
reform, continued its work during the Babylonian exile, and completed
it in the Persian Period (though there are varying opinions
about the work’s nature and times). Another argument had already
been raised earlier by the Scandinavian school, which tended to
perceive Biblical literature as a product of continuous oral, rather
than written, transmissions, and thus its historical parts should be
regarded as unreliable. This argument was supported more recently
by archaeologists and historians who claimed that written findings
from Iron Age I and Iron Age IIa are scarce. The corpus of written
findings, they argued, began to grow gradually only from the
second half of the eight century BCE and onward. This implies that
literacy in the tenth and ninth centuries BCE was very limited and
developed gradually only later and in accord with the development
of urbanization and the established monarchy in Israel and Judah.
This hypothesis about the gradual development of literacy in Israel
brought about the hasty conclusion that the Biblical texts began to
be written down no earlier than the second half of the eighth century
BCE, and that the writing process continued even much later—into
the Second Temple period. Hence, the book of Samuel
would have been composed several hundred years after the events
that are portrayed in it. 22 According to radical views, the book of
Samuel consists at best of oral traditions that were handed down
from one generation to another. In the passage of time and the
multiplicity of transmitters the oral traditions underwent gradual
growth. Many traditions were altered, others were invented. Some
scholars jumped to the even hastier conclusion that the biblical
story about the rise of the monarchy as depicted in the book of
Samuel should be regarded as a complete myth, far from any historical
reality. 23 These undermining conclusions call for reinvestiga-
22 See, e.g., N. Na’aman, “In Search of Reality behind the Account of
David’s Wars with Israel’s Neighbors,” idem, Ancient Israel’s History and
Historiography: The First Temple Period (Collected Essays, Vol. 3; Winona
Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 38–61, esp. 38–39; I. Finkelstein and N.A.
Silberman, David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots
of the Western Tradition (New York: Free Press, 2006), 53, 86, 94, 123, 126–
128, 132–134.
23 This skeptical approach has especially found an anchor in Scandinavia
and the UK, and its followers were dubbed by their opponents: “minimalists”,
or even “nihilists”. For the former approach, see, for instance,
T.L. Thompson, The Early History of the Israelite People from the Written and
Archaeological Sources (Leiden/New York: Brill, 1992); P.R. Davies, In Search
of ‘Ancient Israel’ (JSOTSup, 48; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992); K.W. Whitelam,
The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (London/New
York: Routledge, 1996); N.P. Lemche, The Old Testament Between
Theology and History: A Critical Survey (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John
Knox Press, 2008). For the views of those who oppose this approach, see,