Après le déluge: Københavnerskolen eller kaos?

The article is based on the author’s farewell address at the Universityof Copenhagen and includes a review of recent scholarship in thelight of the achievements of the Copenhagen School. The changes ofparadigm from classical historical-critical scholarship to contemporaryOld Testament scholarship after le déluge which was the CopenhagenSchool are considerable. First of all the link previously assumed betweena text in the Old Testament and what really happened in Palestine inancient times has been broken when we realized that there is actually inthe case of the Old Testament so little that unites history with narrativethat it is misleading to understand biblical historiography as “history”.It is a story about the past, a kind of cultural memory, and to those whowrote these stories about the past, the real past was not very important.Another result of the contribution of the Copenhagen School relatesto the dating of biblical literature that was hardly collected before theHellenistic Period, and probably not in Jerusalem or in Palestine. Therefore,with the retirement of the last original member of the CopenhagenSchool it is a totally different scene in Old Testament studies whichremains, not because everyone accepts the theses of the school but because it has set the agenda for present and future discussion.