Since the 1990s, while some of the minimalist arguments (i.e. the Bible should not be used in archaeology) have been challenged or rejected, others have been refined and adopted into the mainstream of biblical scholarship (i.e. claims about Exodus, Israelite Conquest, United Monarchy).
At the same time, archaeology and comparative sociology convinced most scholars in the field that there was little historical basis to the biblical stories of the Exodus and the Israelite conquest of Canaan.
[5] By the 1980s, the Hebrew Bible's stories of the Patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt and Conquest of Canaan were no longer considered historical, but biblical histories continued to use the Bible as a primary source and to take the form of narrative records of political events arranged in chronological order, with the major role played by (largely Judean) kings and other high-status individuals.
At the same time, new tools and approaches were being brought to bear on scholars' knowledge of the past of ancient Canaan, notably new archaeological methods and approaches (for example, this was the age of surface surveys, used to map population changes which are invisible in the biblical narrative), and the social sciences (an important work in this vein was Robert Coote and Keith Whitlam's The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective, which used sociological data to argue, in contradiction to the biblical picture, that it was kingship that formed Israel, and not the other way round).
Similarly, while Lemche holds that the Tel Dan stele (an inscription from the mid-9th century BCE which seems to mention the name of David) is probably a forgery, Davies and Whitelam do not.
[8] The minimalists cautioned that the literary form of the biblical history books is so apparent and the authors' intentions so obvious that scholars should be extremely cautious in taking them at face value.
Linked with this was the observation that modern biblical scholars had concentrated their attentions exclusively on Israel, Judah, and their religious history, while ignoring the fact that these had been only a fairly insignificant part of a wider whole.
[13] Subtitled "The Silencing of Palestinian History", Whitelam criticised his peers for their concentration on Israel and Judah to the exclusion of the many other peoples and kingdoms that had existed in Iron Age Palestine.
This, he argued, supported the contemporary claim to the land of Palestine by the descendants of Israel, while keeping biblical studies in the realm of religion rather than history.
Some conservative scholars reacted defensively, attempting to show that the details of the Bible were in fact consistent with having been written by contemporaries (against the minimalist claim that they were largely the work of the Persian or Hellenistic periods).
[19] In the scholarly mainstream, historians of ancient Israel have partially adapted their methodologies by relying less on the Bible and more on sociological models and archaeological evidence.