both "the 'substantial historicity' of the patriarchs" and "the unified conquest of the land" were widely accepted in the United States until about the 1970s. Contrarily, Grabbe says that those in his field now "are all minimalistsat least, when it comes to the patriarchal period and the settlement. ... [V]ery few are willing to operate [as maximalists]."

In 2022, archaeologist Avraham Faust summarized recent scholarship arguing that while early histories of Israel were heavily based on biblical