Hi Joshua,
For the benefit of readers, I’d just like to clarify what a Gish gallop is. RationalWiki defines it as follows:
The Gish Gallop (also known as proof by verbosity [1]) is the fallacious debate tactic of drowning your opponent in a flood of individually-weak arguments in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument collection without great effort. The Gish Gallop is a belt-fed version of the on the spot fallacy, as it’s unreasonable for anyone to have a well-composed answer immediately available to every argument present in the Gallop. The Gish Gallop is named after creationist Duane Gish, who often abused it.
Wikipedia defines it more succinctly:
The Gish gallop is a technique used during debating that focuses on overwhelming an opponent with as many arguments as possible, without regard for accuracy or strength of the arguments. The term was coined by Eugenie C. Scott and named after the creationist Duane T. Gish, who used the technique frequently against proponents of evolution.
Wikipedia continues:
During a Gish gallop, a debater confronts an opponent with a rapid series of many specious arguments, half-truths, and misrepresentations in a short space of time, which makes it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of a formal debate.[3][4] In practice, each point raised by the “Gish galloper” takes considerably more time to refute or fact-check than it did to state in the first place.[5] The technique wastes an opponent’s time and may cast doubt on the opponent’s debating ability for an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved[6] or if the audience has limited knowledge of the topics.
Here’s an example of what a “Gish gallop” looks like.
Readers will note that the Gish gallop is a debating tactic, which is deliberately designed to score as many points as possible over a short space of time. To speak of a book as employing a “Gish gallop” makes little sense - especially when the book in question is a lengthy tome, of some 912 pages, which takes months to adequately digest. (I know, because it took me months to condense the arguments I liked best into an online format that readers could peruse at their leisure.) And even my condensed version took up some 50,000 words. That’s hardly a gallop - especially when I explicitly stated at the beginning of my review:
WARNING: This will be a very lengthy review, which few people will have time to read in its entirety. For readers whose time is very limited, here’s a brief, 5,000-word executive summary, which will be followed by a main menu that allows readers to navigate their way around the review, as they please, although I would ask serious readers to at least peruse Section A. There is no need to rush: I don’t mind waiting a few days for people’s comments.
In his book, Michael Alter identifies some 120 contradictions and engages in 217 speculations (which he freely acknowledges are “nothing more than speculations” [2015, p. xlvi] over the space of 746 pages, excluding the extensive Bibliography). He quotes mostly from mainstream Biblical scholars, and his discussion is thorough. Personally, I don’t think it’s fair to call it a “Gish gallop.”