constituted as a canonical claim with immense normative authority or that it is an ideological claim with a self-serving agenda barely concealed in the formation and transmission of the tradition. If we were to agree, as the minimalists now claim, that the formative work on the tradition was to serve the community that emerged from the deportation in the sixth and fifth centuries, this makes historical critical work no less urgent. Only now that critical work is not to hypothesize about the long development