Since the very earliest times, we humans have dreamed of overcoming the limits imposed by our bodies, and of using technology to surpass the intellectual, physical or psychological boundaries of our existence. The development of writing in the ancient world is usually ranked as one of the most important of human cultural achievements, as significant as the domestication of fire, the invention of agriculture, and even the development of the wheel. With the invention of the alphabet, writing technology has given us a means to record our words and therefore allows our thoughts to outlive us; the dead can speak to the living. The use of the alphabet permits us to build on the knowledge of others, over generations. It is at the core of our civilization — and some would go so far as to say it is at the essence of our humanness . The technology of writing, it could be said, is a sort of ‘brain storage’ device. Ernst Cassirer, the 20 th century Jewish-German philosophe
As it relates to the academic study of the Bible in the 20 th century, there are primarily two opposing poles that have emerged among scholars — with biblical minimalists on the one end, and biblical maximalists on the other. To oversimplify, minimalists tend to not consider the Bible as a valid historical document due to the contradictions that can be found between the biblical narrative and all that has been dug up by archaeologists over the past century in the Near East. Maximalists, on the other hand, usually assume that the Bible texts are more or less correct, unless archaeological evidence can incontrovertibly prove otherwise. To exacerbate matters, some radical minimalists in the field have not only raised the question of historical reliability of the Bible, but they have altogether dismissed it as being purely fictional — only to be read as (religious) literature. Most scholars hate these labels because, after all, a label is just a label, and nothing is ever so clear