Patriarchs and Pentateuch

After his undergraduate studies at Duquesne University, Thomas Thompson spent a year in Oxford, before going to Tübingen, where he lived and studied with Kurt Galling and Herbert Haag from 1963 to 1975, and was a research associate on the Tübinger Atlas des vorderen Orients, publishing a book on the Bronze Age in Sinai and the Negev (1975) and on the Bronze Age in Palestine (1979). His PhD (Temple University) on the historicity of the patriarchs was published in 1974. After teaching part-time at the University of North Carolina from 1976 to 1978, he spent ten years as a private scholar before taking a post at Lawrence University, then at Marquette University in Milwaukee, where he remained until 1993. Denied tenure in that Jesuit school, he accepted a chair in Copenhagen, where he remains, having retired in 2009.

In understanding and appreciating the work of Thomas Thompson it is important to realize how much his formation owes to Europe and how far his published views isolated him from mainstream American academic life. It is equally important to recognize that from the beginning he was as much, if not more, interested in literature, especially folk literature, than in history and archaeology. It was his Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives, which, together with John Van Seters's Abraham in History and Tradition, may be said to have buried the notion of a ‘patriarchal age,’ but Thompson's interests were, as his subsequent work has shown clearly, less concerned with ‘historicity’ as an issue in itself, than with how we should read and understand such narratives.