The historical narratives of the Old Testament came under fire as comparative and background studies identified problems in chronology and factual details. Literary studies found similarities between the biblical narratives and literary-historical compositions from the ancient Near East. These studies led critical scholars to question whether the biblical narratives could be used at all in the historical-critical process of reconstructing events of the Bronze and Iron ages. A group labeled “minimalists” contended that the biblical narratives were almost entirely unusable, while “maximalists”
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