Thor
Jedi Council Member
Last weekend I read an article in the news paper WeekendAvisen on a Danish theology professor, Niels Peter Lemche, who has spent his entire life within academia showing that there is no historical evidence for the claims made in the Old Testament about the Jews and therefore no basis for the claim on which Israel was given parts of the land of Palestine in 1948. To the members of the forum this is not news and anyone who has read Laura's books have been introduced to a much deeper analysis. However, it is not often that I see this pointed out in the main steam media and therefore I found it worth translating.
WeekendAvisen is considered to be Denmark's most well researched news paper. It's a weekly publication and the articles are often longer and deeper than what you'll find in other news papers. Consequently, it's also somewhat of an elitist or academically oriented reader base. The article was published in WeekendAvisen #7, 2014 on 02/14/2014.
He is the The Deluge.
The man sits behind a desk facing the packed auditorium. His hair and beard is grey, he’s wearing a suit and tie and his wife, children and grand children are sitting in the audience. It’s his last lecture. In 45 minutes he will stand up, have a glass of wine at his own retirement reception and walk out through the gate in Købmagergade. Fifty years have passed – or to put it more dramatically, half a century, since he started studying theology as a young man. He’s never been any other places than here (Theological Institute of the University of Copenhagen) and at the Theological Institute of the University of Aarhus (Denmark’s second largest city). During all this time he has demolished and torn down. As a result of his life’s work there’s no stone left unturned in the Old Testament. It has no historical truth value any more. In reality there was never any old Israel, no Jewish people made up by the migrating tribes, no almighty God and therefore nothing, on which the Western world could base the state of Israel in 1948.
Professor Niels Peter Lemche is talking at a break neck pace throughout his 22 page retirement lecture that he has named ”Après le déluge”, after the Deluge. He, himself, is the Deluge. Together with three other men in the socalled Group of Four or Copenhagen School he dismantled the Old Testament resulting in a heap of old myths populated by fantasy figures such as Abraham, Isaac and Jakob. According to Lemche the Old Testament are political texts that are written much later to create an imaginary common past to support the idea of One Israel. He’s been called anti-semitic and a threat to Western civilization. The latter he might enjoy. To the audience both here and internationally he has either contaminated theology or saved it.
When he started his university studies in 1964 with Latin as his strongest foreign language, the Department of Theology took up no more than 2,500 square feet close to Frue Plads. The professors hele everything in just as tight a grip as they had always done since 1479 when Theology started at the University of Copenhagen as one of four Departments. The twelve professors decided everything – at least for a short while yet. In the early sixties there were some women but not very many. Since only very few percent of a given age-group graduated from high school, getting into the University was even more elitist.
”We felt very chosen and talked with disdain about the new goals of having 25 percent of a given age group graduate from high school” says Niels Peter Lemche in his small office before his final lecture. ”It was apparent how many people were having a hard time in the first year of high school”.
For some time still, everything was peace and quiet. He quickly learnt Hebrew, Aramaeic, Akkadic and Ugaritic. His professor in the Old Testament was challenging and inspiring and just the opposite of those teaching the New Testament and , seeemingly due to chance, he drifted in that direction.
1968 – clear the table.
”In 1968 the revolt against everything we’d been told took place. We no longer took things at face value. We wanted to know why we needed to know something and science had to be relevant to people. Social issues were on our minds and wanted our own list what was important. Of course this shapes how you look at the world. The new field of research that I entered was actually part of the zeitgeist but it just hadn’t taken off yet. ”
In the wake of the student rising a small and specialised group of theology students formed. The group was interested in the Old Testament and was of the opinion that the existing research was incorrect and that it needed to be toppled and replaced by a new insights or to be more specific, a paradigm shift. And that’s what happened.
”We’ve all been brain washed by the Deuteronomists” said student and later Palestine archeologist John Strange and by this he meant that everbody blindly had accepted and followed the understanding of Israel according to the way the authors of the Old Testament wanted it. This includes the whole idea about the oldest Israel in Palestine was organised as a holy cooperation between twelve tribes that were ethnically distinct from everybody else and that only had one god, Jahve which was different from everybody remaining poplation in Canaan. The belief was that the twelve tribes had migrated from neighboring areas and were completely special. They were conquerors from outside that came and broke up the existing society.
The problem is that there are no remnants in the real world that show that they were ever there. As Lemche explains ”People were digging and digging to find those Isralelites. Not even a pottery shard! Nothing pointed to the fact that a conquering people had come. Nothing of significance took place during those years when the migration supposedly took place”.
There had been no attempts at placing the Old Testament in a socio-cultural context (very ’68) and no anthropological analysis of the societies that were already existing and were made up by nomads and villages. Lemche delivered these in his doctoral thesis, Early Israel (1985). His idea was that Israel developed out of the people who were living in the area all along. Later on he discovered that not even the local canaanians existed despite the fact that the jews were raging against them in the Old Testament. They only existed in a litterary world as an anti-people in opposition to the real people, the Israelites. Who also did not exist at the time.
In addition to this Lemche moved the dating of most of the text from the Old Testament several hundred years forward in time. They became much younger and as a result they lost some of the authority that is gained by antiquity. Another result was that the gap in time between the two parts of the Bible became much shorter.
In other words, the Bible can’t be used as an archaeological reference book. It can contain morals and a story that is worth telling and worth listening to but that does not make it true. Lemche was one of the first researchers to question the historical authenticity of the Old Testament.
Wasn’t this known before 1964?
”Both yes and no. Some people took out the religious messages from the text and treated the rest as historically accurate. What we’re saying is that what is told never took place because it simply does not correspond to what has been found” replies Niels Peter Lemche. ”David was supposed to be there around year 1000 and rule but that is pure legend. The city of Jerusalem where he was supposed to be king did not exist in that place at that time. It leaves him with the same historical value as Rolf Krake (a mythical Danish king)”.
A thorough shake-up
It was obvious that this would cause strong reactions. It was ”a very thorough shake-up” as professor Mogens Müller writes about Lemche. The Copenhagen School is under attack, in particular from American fundamentalists and others that read the Bible litterally. The state of Israel felt that it had been let down; it’s distant past has been removed and Lemche comes to the pretty brutal conclusion: ”If it hadn’t been for texts such as these there might not have been a state by the name of Israel in Palestine today and there would be no claim that a particular group of people – even after thousands of years – are the rightful owners of the land.”
Mogens Müller believes that the most important consequence of Lemche is that the attention has been removed from the story that is being told in the Old Testament and its possible ”historical” authenticity and onto the authors of the story in the old days. They created the texts and edited the past. They were ideologists.
Lemche’s best bet on the purpose of it all is that it is not so much about the past as it was but more about the past as a story that could explain who the authors and their readers in the antique Jewish society wanted to see themselves as and where they originated from.
During the lecture he tells that there’s not a lot of what was taken as commonly accepted science when he was a student that has survived. He also says that a lot of the things that we find in the Old Testament did take place in the real world – but just not in the way that they are being told. And it’s very often difficult to distinguish between what happened, what people believe happend and what is pure fantasy.
After the lecture people are standing in the hall way and discussing how strange is was to be taken an oral exam with Niels Peter Lemche and deceased professor Arne Munk. Munk was the son of Kaj Munk who was associate professor in the Old Testament and definitely of the old school. The two professors could discuss at length whether the student should be graded A+ or F based upon which professor the student agreed with. In Arne Munk’s classes the students were still drawing time lines of the Old Testament and plotting in events as if they had actually taken place. In Lemche’s classes the students were told to forget everything about it. He represented what was hot, fresh and new.
God is still here
”Old Testament is a pretty nerdy class that students want to move through as quickly as possible in order to get to the New Testament which is the reason why you are there in the first place. But back then the Old Testament suddenly became the hottest topic” says priset af editor of the magazine Folk og Kirke (People and Church), Rebecca Rudd. She has come to the lecture because ”my entire theological identity is here”. When she began her theology studies in 1991 she was immediately introduced to ways of thinking that radically differed from everything including her own expectations.
”It was super provocative that someone was standing there saying the Jewish body of texts is relatively recent and not necessarily a representation of historical truth but rather a political point of view from a given point in time. It was break with the entire way of looking the texts. A break with their historical truth value. In 1948 the Western World based the Jews claim to the land on the old texts. Niels Peter Lemche says that there never was such a united people. They are made up by a small group of intellectuals at a much later time.”.
How do you survive as someone who has faith and as a priest when someone shows up and says that what is written in the Old Testament is not true?
”The texts are philosophical, linguistic and spiritual and they are true in a different sense of the word. Niels Peter Lemche thinks as a historian and doesn’t have the same veneration as others who read the text through theological or religious lenses. He says that they are myths, created by the people who want to tell who has the right to the land of Israel. He was blunt where others may be more gentle. The entire Old Testament class is made up of people who love Israel and who have an emotional attachment to the country”
How can you use such an insight?
”You can react in one of two ways. Either you can say, as the atheists do, that when what is written in the Bible is not true it is of no use. But it’s also possible to read the texts in another manner – as another type of truth. Lemche open the door for us and we have ventured further. The critical view can also be applied to the New Testament and you can know that the texts are far more ideological than historical. Without him and the movement to which he belongs I don’t think that we had started to read the texts with a focus on their litterary value. It’s obvsious that the first step is to break away from the historical reading.”
A young baptist priest who is still a student at the Theological Institute is listening in one of the rows of chairs. He says that ”he really can’t be bothered all that much” by Lemche’s scientific results because the Bible tells story that will always be true. About God and man. ”Faith is not scientific and we can’t prove anything at all. We believe in what we chose to believe in. A God that wants the best for us and calls to us” says Kasper Klarskov.
”I’ve met people that are mad at me because I don’t believe in everything that is written in the Bible represents a 100 percent scientific truth. The Bible hasn’t attempted to be a book about science or physics or biology or anything else that is measurable. But in some cirlces it has been turned into such a book and Niels Peter Lemche has helped to dismantle that. It’s a big and important work. He doesn’t destroy anything in my faith. You can say that there are two truths: something is true in the scientific sense. And something else is true because we believe that it is true. ”
WeekendAvisen is considered to be Denmark's most well researched news paper. It's a weekly publication and the articles are often longer and deeper than what you'll find in other news papers. Consequently, it's also somewhat of an elitist or academically oriented reader base. The article was published in WeekendAvisen #7, 2014 on 02/14/2014.
He is the The Deluge.
The man sits behind a desk facing the packed auditorium. His hair and beard is grey, he’s wearing a suit and tie and his wife, children and grand children are sitting in the audience. It’s his last lecture. In 45 minutes he will stand up, have a glass of wine at his own retirement reception and walk out through the gate in Købmagergade. Fifty years have passed – or to put it more dramatically, half a century, since he started studying theology as a young man. He’s never been any other places than here (Theological Institute of the University of Copenhagen) and at the Theological Institute of the University of Aarhus (Denmark’s second largest city). During all this time he has demolished and torn down. As a result of his life’s work there’s no stone left unturned in the Old Testament. It has no historical truth value any more. In reality there was never any old Israel, no Jewish people made up by the migrating tribes, no almighty God and therefore nothing, on which the Western world could base the state of Israel in 1948.
Professor Niels Peter Lemche is talking at a break neck pace throughout his 22 page retirement lecture that he has named ”Après le déluge”, after the Deluge. He, himself, is the Deluge. Together with three other men in the socalled Group of Four or Copenhagen School he dismantled the Old Testament resulting in a heap of old myths populated by fantasy figures such as Abraham, Isaac and Jakob. According to Lemche the Old Testament are political texts that are written much later to create an imaginary common past to support the idea of One Israel. He’s been called anti-semitic and a threat to Western civilization. The latter he might enjoy. To the audience both here and internationally he has either contaminated theology or saved it.
When he started his university studies in 1964 with Latin as his strongest foreign language, the Department of Theology took up no more than 2,500 square feet close to Frue Plads. The professors hele everything in just as tight a grip as they had always done since 1479 when Theology started at the University of Copenhagen as one of four Departments. The twelve professors decided everything – at least for a short while yet. In the early sixties there were some women but not very many. Since only very few percent of a given age-group graduated from high school, getting into the University was even more elitist.
”We felt very chosen and talked with disdain about the new goals of having 25 percent of a given age group graduate from high school” says Niels Peter Lemche in his small office before his final lecture. ”It was apparent how many people were having a hard time in the first year of high school”.
For some time still, everything was peace and quiet. He quickly learnt Hebrew, Aramaeic, Akkadic and Ugaritic. His professor in the Old Testament was challenging and inspiring and just the opposite of those teaching the New Testament and , seeemingly due to chance, he drifted in that direction.
1968 – clear the table.
”In 1968 the revolt against everything we’d been told took place. We no longer took things at face value. We wanted to know why we needed to know something and science had to be relevant to people. Social issues were on our minds and wanted our own list what was important. Of course this shapes how you look at the world. The new field of research that I entered was actually part of the zeitgeist but it just hadn’t taken off yet. ”
In the wake of the student rising a small and specialised group of theology students formed. The group was interested in the Old Testament and was of the opinion that the existing research was incorrect and that it needed to be toppled and replaced by a new insights or to be more specific, a paradigm shift. And that’s what happened.
”We’ve all been brain washed by the Deuteronomists” said student and later Palestine archeologist John Strange and by this he meant that everbody blindly had accepted and followed the understanding of Israel according to the way the authors of the Old Testament wanted it. This includes the whole idea about the oldest Israel in Palestine was organised as a holy cooperation between twelve tribes that were ethnically distinct from everybody else and that only had one god, Jahve which was different from everybody remaining poplation in Canaan. The belief was that the twelve tribes had migrated from neighboring areas and were completely special. They were conquerors from outside that came and broke up the existing society.
The problem is that there are no remnants in the real world that show that they were ever there. As Lemche explains ”People were digging and digging to find those Isralelites. Not even a pottery shard! Nothing pointed to the fact that a conquering people had come. Nothing of significance took place during those years when the migration supposedly took place”.
There had been no attempts at placing the Old Testament in a socio-cultural context (very ’68) and no anthropological analysis of the societies that were already existing and were made up by nomads and villages. Lemche delivered these in his doctoral thesis, Early Israel (1985). His idea was that Israel developed out of the people who were living in the area all along. Later on he discovered that not even the local canaanians existed despite the fact that the jews were raging against them in the Old Testament. They only existed in a litterary world as an anti-people in opposition to the real people, the Israelites. Who also did not exist at the time.
In addition to this Lemche moved the dating of most of the text from the Old Testament several hundred years forward in time. They became much younger and as a result they lost some of the authority that is gained by antiquity. Another result was that the gap in time between the two parts of the Bible became much shorter.
In other words, the Bible can’t be used as an archaeological reference book. It can contain morals and a story that is worth telling and worth listening to but that does not make it true. Lemche was one of the first researchers to question the historical authenticity of the Old Testament.
Wasn’t this known before 1964?
”Both yes and no. Some people took out the religious messages from the text and treated the rest as historically accurate. What we’re saying is that what is told never took place because it simply does not correspond to what has been found” replies Niels Peter Lemche. ”David was supposed to be there around year 1000 and rule but that is pure legend. The city of Jerusalem where he was supposed to be king did not exist in that place at that time. It leaves him with the same historical value as Rolf Krake (a mythical Danish king)”.
A thorough shake-up
It was obvious that this would cause strong reactions. It was ”a very thorough shake-up” as professor Mogens Müller writes about Lemche. The Copenhagen School is under attack, in particular from American fundamentalists and others that read the Bible litterally. The state of Israel felt that it had been let down; it’s distant past has been removed and Lemche comes to the pretty brutal conclusion: ”If it hadn’t been for texts such as these there might not have been a state by the name of Israel in Palestine today and there would be no claim that a particular group of people – even after thousands of years – are the rightful owners of the land.”
Mogens Müller believes that the most important consequence of Lemche is that the attention has been removed from the story that is being told in the Old Testament and its possible ”historical” authenticity and onto the authors of the story in the old days. They created the texts and edited the past. They were ideologists.
Lemche’s best bet on the purpose of it all is that it is not so much about the past as it was but more about the past as a story that could explain who the authors and their readers in the antique Jewish society wanted to see themselves as and where they originated from.
During the lecture he tells that there’s not a lot of what was taken as commonly accepted science when he was a student that has survived. He also says that a lot of the things that we find in the Old Testament did take place in the real world – but just not in the way that they are being told. And it’s very often difficult to distinguish between what happened, what people believe happend and what is pure fantasy.
After the lecture people are standing in the hall way and discussing how strange is was to be taken an oral exam with Niels Peter Lemche and deceased professor Arne Munk. Munk was the son of Kaj Munk who was associate professor in the Old Testament and definitely of the old school. The two professors could discuss at length whether the student should be graded A+ or F based upon which professor the student agreed with. In Arne Munk’s classes the students were still drawing time lines of the Old Testament and plotting in events as if they had actually taken place. In Lemche’s classes the students were told to forget everything about it. He represented what was hot, fresh and new.
God is still here
”Old Testament is a pretty nerdy class that students want to move through as quickly as possible in order to get to the New Testament which is the reason why you are there in the first place. But back then the Old Testament suddenly became the hottest topic” says priset af editor of the magazine Folk og Kirke (People and Church), Rebecca Rudd. She has come to the lecture because ”my entire theological identity is here”. When she began her theology studies in 1991 she was immediately introduced to ways of thinking that radically differed from everything including her own expectations.
”It was super provocative that someone was standing there saying the Jewish body of texts is relatively recent and not necessarily a representation of historical truth but rather a political point of view from a given point in time. It was break with the entire way of looking the texts. A break with their historical truth value. In 1948 the Western World based the Jews claim to the land on the old texts. Niels Peter Lemche says that there never was such a united people. They are made up by a small group of intellectuals at a much later time.”.
How do you survive as someone who has faith and as a priest when someone shows up and says that what is written in the Old Testament is not true?
”The texts are philosophical, linguistic and spiritual and they are true in a different sense of the word. Niels Peter Lemche thinks as a historian and doesn’t have the same veneration as others who read the text through theological or religious lenses. He says that they are myths, created by the people who want to tell who has the right to the land of Israel. He was blunt where others may be more gentle. The entire Old Testament class is made up of people who love Israel and who have an emotional attachment to the country”
How can you use such an insight?
”You can react in one of two ways. Either you can say, as the atheists do, that when what is written in the Bible is not true it is of no use. But it’s also possible to read the texts in another manner – as another type of truth. Lemche open the door for us and we have ventured further. The critical view can also be applied to the New Testament and you can know that the texts are far more ideological than historical. Without him and the movement to which he belongs I don’t think that we had started to read the texts with a focus on their litterary value. It’s obvsious that the first step is to break away from the historical reading.”
A young baptist priest who is still a student at the Theological Institute is listening in one of the rows of chairs. He says that ”he really can’t be bothered all that much” by Lemche’s scientific results because the Bible tells story that will always be true. About God and man. ”Faith is not scientific and we can’t prove anything at all. We believe in what we chose to believe in. A God that wants the best for us and calls to us” says Kasper Klarskov.
”I’ve met people that are mad at me because I don’t believe in everything that is written in the Bible represents a 100 percent scientific truth. The Bible hasn’t attempted to be a book about science or physics or biology or anything else that is measurable. But in some cirlces it has been turned into such a book and Niels Peter Lemche has helped to dismantle that. It’s a big and important work. He doesn’t destroy anything in my faith. You can say that there are two truths: something is true in the scientific sense. And something else is true because we believe that it is true. ”
