Thomas L. Thompson wrote The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives as a careful and polemical reassessment of the evidence for treating the Genesis stories about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as history. He set out to test the long standing consensus among many biblical scholars and archaeologists that the patriarchal narratives preserve authentic memories or social realities from the second millennium BCE. Thompson shows step by step that the types of evidence commonly appealed to to place the patriarchs in the Bronze Age are neither decisive nor uniquely tied to that period, and he draws the forceful conclusion that the search for a historical Abraham is essentially without secure historical foundation.
Thompson begins by situating the debate. He reviews the dominant mid twentieth century position which argued that names, customs, and certain material references in Genesis match second millennium contexts, and that archaeology therefore at least indirectly confirmed the antiquity and historicity of the patriarchal traditions. Thompson scrutinizes the principal claims and the principal proponents of that view. He argues that much of the comparative material was misapplied, that parallels were often selective, and that similar names or customs recur over long spans and in varied regions so that matching a detail in Genesis to an archaeological datum rarely amounts to proof of historicity.
Methodologically Thompson insists on clear separation between literary criticism and archaeological interpretation. He refuses the common practice of dating or evaluating archaeological finds by assuming the historical truth of biblical texts. Instead he holds that texts and material culture must be compared critically, with the texts read as literary products whose form, language, and concerns may reflect the period in which they were composed or redacted rather than the distant era they purport to describe. That methodological stance undergirds much of his subsequent argument, and it leads him to treat the patriarchal narratives as literary traditions shaped in later periods.
In detailed chapters Thompson examines the main kinds of evidence that had been used to defend patriarchal historicity. He surveys personal names, place names, customs and legal materials, apparent social structures, and specific material cultural references. For each category he shows that the alleged parallels are ambiguous, often derived from nonexclusive cultural traits, or depend on reading the Bible as a straightforward historical record. He pays careful attention to the ways literary motives, theological aims, and anachronistic editorial settings could shape the narratives. On the basis of these chapters he asserts that archaeological data do not prove, and in many cases do not even make likely, that the patriarchal stories are rooted in second millennium family histories.
Thompson reaches two related conclusions. First, archaeology has not demonstrated the historicity of any single patriarchal event. Second, the patriarchal narratives themselves do not appear to have been composed as historical reportage about individuals living in the second millennium BCE. Rather, Thompson treats them as traditions and literary constructs that reflect the social and ideological concerns of later times, in particular the first millennium and the formative centuries of Israelite identity. His verdict is that the quest for a historical Abraham is, for historians and for students of the Bible, largely fruitless if pursued as an archaeological rescue project.
The book was initially published in 1974 and grew out of Thompson’s dissertation and early research. It arrived on the scholarly scene at roughly the same time as John Van Seters’s critique which argued that the narratives reflect Iron Age rather than Bronze Age social realities. Together these critiques helped shift the field away from the earlier near consensus and stimulated prolonged debate about how to read Genesis and how to relate text and archaeology. Thompson’s book has been widely cited and discussed because it raised foundational methodological questions, even by those who did not accept all of his conclusions.
Reception and influence have been contested. Some scholars praised Thompson for rigorously exposing weak argumentation and for urging methodological caution. Others criticized him for downplaying the possibility that oral or social memories could preserve older traditions in modified forms. The debate that Thompson helped to intensify led to more explicit attention to redaction, literary layers, and the social contexts in which biblical stories were shaped and transmitted. Over decades his work has come to be seen as an important pivot point in the study of biblical historicity and biblical archaeology.
In summary Thompson’s Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives offers a patient and detailed demolition of the claim that archaeology confirms the historical reality of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as second millennium figures. It champions a skeptical and textually informed method that treats the Genesis narratives as literary traditions whose provenance is complex and whose historical referent cannot be assumed. Whether one accepts every element of Thompson’s case, his book remains a crucial work because it reframes the questions scholars ask about the Bible and the past and because it insists that the evidence be examined without smuggling in the conclusions one hopes to prove.