John Van Seters (born May 2, 1935 in Hamilton, Ontario) is a Canadian scholar of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the Ancient Near East.
Gray Professor of Biblical Literature in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1977–2000).
On the matter of their origins, they were not Hurrians from northern Syria and Anatolia, they did not invade Egypt with chariots and horses and their capital city of Avaris was not to be located in the vicinity of Tanis.
This book attempts to undermine both the Biblical archaeology school of William F. Albright, who had argued over the previous fifty years that the archaeological record confirmed the essential truth of the history contained in Genesis, and the "tradition history" school of Albrecht Alt and Martin Noth, which argued that Genesis contained a core of valid social pre-history of the Israelites passed down through oral tradition prior to the composition of the written book itself.
Along with similar revisionist works by Hans Heinrich Schmid of Zurich and Rolf Rendtorff of Heidelberg, published in 1976 and 1977, this led to a major reevaluation in Pentateuchal criticism.
[2][3] Van Seters next undertook a major comparative study of ancient historiography, In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History (1983), which was recognized by the awards of James H. Breasted Prize of the American Historical Association, (1985), and the American Academy of Religion Book Award in Historical Studies (1986).
Van Seters combined his strong interest in historiography with his revisionist work in Pentateuchal criticism in a detailed study of the Yahwist as an "antiquarian" historian writing about Israel’s origins under the influence of Babylonian civilization while in exile in Babylonia during the 6th century BCE.
Most student handbooks on Pentateuchal studies are committed to a particular methodological approach or school of thought and largely ignore alternative theories of the Bible’s compositional history.
Furthermore, this editorial process is thought to have continued until the whole biblical corpus reached a definitive "canonical" form in the early Roman period.