The consensus around the historicity of the United Monarchy is long gone, as already noted in the previous chapter’s conclusion. This chapter first expands on the old consensus, describing its decline and even “death” as it unfolded in the 1990s. It then describes the concomitant rise and development of the minimalist school, which, while failing to make many converts, had a major impact on scholarship. The chapter then looks at changes in the way the archaeology of the period is perceived by many biblical scholars, many of whom have become skeptical or even dismissive of the possibility of a large Israelite polity in the tenth century, and the word “empire” has all but disappeared from the discourse. The chapter pushes back against this excess of caution, examining how the supposed archaeological and historical reasons for it have not stood the test of time. Indeed, discoveries made over the past twenty years or so challenge this new skepticism and instead reinforce a more sophisticated version of the older views, which worked with the idea of a United Monarchy in this period.

Is the biblical story about Israel’s “United Monarchy” history, fiction, or somewhere in between? This chapter reviews the scholarly discourse about the texts and introduces critical Bible study. Since the inception of critical scholarship, Bible scholars have noted that the narrative contains tensions and even contradictions that demonstrate the impossibility of accepting the details of the biblical narrative as an accurate reporting of events. Nevertheless, researchers long distinguished between the core narrative arc of the Saul and David stories, which was relatively consistent between the sources, and the many contradictions, alternative details, and smaller points, which were understood as attempts at polemic and apologetics, pushing one agenda or another, or simply rhetorical flourish. This meant that while many of the details in these accounts cannot be taken at face value as historical, the same critical reading of the text led biblical scholars to believe – until recently – in the historicity of the bigger picture. The reasons why this consensus has changed are primarily due to broader, “archaeological” considerations that are discussed in Chapter 3.

The book draws to a close by assessing how far, by the end of the seventeenth century, the ‘limits of erudition’ were on the verge of being transcended. This chapter focuses in particular on the ways in which Louis Cappel and Richard Simon attempted to alter how their contemporaries construed the relationship between Scripture, scholarship, and given confessional positions. The book concludes by presenting a new interpretation of the significance of Simon’s work.

The book opens by setting out the vital import of erudition in early modern Europe, when it was believed historical knowledge would confirm and illuminate religious truth. It explains how, in this context, the Bible came to be a subject of particularly fraught investigation owing to the way in which different versions of the text in different languages became associated with different confessional groups. The Introduction presents the work’s novel conceptual framework that draws on techniques and approaches associated with the history of knowledge and the social history of ideas to reconstruct the processes involved in creating knowledge about the Old Testament in post-Reformation Europe.

By no means has it always been the case that European readers have always believed, as did Voltaire, that the main purpose of Herodotus’ Histories was to tell the story of the clash of eastern and western ‘civilizations’.Indeed, from at least the later seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth century, the first four books of the Histories were widely used by Christian scholars to verify sacred history with profane data.For this very large scholarly faction, Herodotus offered the earliest, and most checkable, ‘oriental’ facts, useful in combatting rationalist and pyrrhonist arguments about the untrustworthiness of ancient histories that could not be otherwise verified.Only in the later nineteenth century, when decipherments and excavations began to provide more direct and concrete testimony of the probable historical accuracy of the Hebrew Bible did Herodotus begin to lose his function as, in the words of one eighteenth-century Jesuit advocate, ‘historian of the Hebrew people, without knowing it’.

The purpose of this introductory sketch is to offer a biographical frame that helps the reader to place the articles in this companion in their historical context. The overview of Grotius’ life contains the most important chronological facts, publications and professional occupations that gave shape to his personal, political and scholarly career. Special attention is paid to his research in the fields of law, philology, ecclesiastical politics and exegesis. Much of the information gathered here is to be found in Henk Nellen, Hugo Grotius (1583-1645). A lifelong struggle for peace in Church and State (Leiden: Brill, 2014), but in order to avoid falling back into a downright summary of this biography some new material has been included. The story of Grotius’ eventful life is told along lines offered by a triptych of friendships that determined his scholarly efforts to a large extent: he successively kept close relations with Daniel Heinsius, who rivalled with him in many literary activities, Gerardus Joannes Vossius who assisted him in realizing his political-theological objectives, and Denis Pétau who advised him on his exegetical works. A succinct description of Grotius’ Nachleben serves to show that long after his death his theological works attracted an international readership and enjoyed an acclaim that is comparable to the one he attained in the fields of natural law and international law.

The Conclusion takes up the afterlife of the understandings of the Bible’s relationship to history consolidated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It does this by exploring the writings of modern biblical scholar David C. Parker, arguing that they reveal how these contingent understandings and their political implications have become naturalized, and how theological integrations of the Bible’s divine and historical dimensions have become obscured. The Conclusion proceeds to consider how this evacuation of theological depth is at the heart of the story this book has sought to tell. Rather than see the history of the Bible simply as the battleground between transcendent and immanent accounts, the Conclusion underscores the need to address the larger theological and metaphysical frameworks in which forms of biblical transcendence and immanence are articulated. The Conclusion ends by highlighting how the book has shown that theologically and metaphysically thin conceptions of Scripture have been mobilized in the service of newly atomized ways of thinking about and ordering human life.