The Creation of History in Ancient Israel

Marc Zvi Brettler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134649846
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The Creation of History in Ancient Israel demonstrates how the historian can start to piece together the history of ancient Israel using the Hebrew Bible as a source.

1
DEFINING HISTORY, IDEOLOGY
AND LITERATURE

The ability of the ancients to invent and their capacity to believe are persistently underestimated.

M.I.Finley, Ancient History: Evidence and Models (New York: Viking, 1986), 9

ON DEFINITIONS

The three terms “history,” ‘ideology” and “literature” have played a central role in scholarly literature on biblical historical texts, yet there is no uniform understanding of these terms. For example, different volumes in the series The Forms of the Old Testament Literature¹ present different definitions of the genre history. One volume defines it as “Designed to record events of the past as they actually occurred. The structure is controlled by chronological stages or cause-effect sequences of events as the author(s) understood them.”² Another considers “history”:

An extensive, continuous, written composition made up of and based upon various materials, some originally traditional and oral, others written, and devoted to a particular subject or historical period. The author of history links together his materials and unifies the whole by imposing overarching structural and thematic connections. History is dominated by a concern with chronology and cause-effect relationships; it seeks to place events and how they occurred within a framework of interpretation and in relation to the author’s own time. For purposes of literary definition, it is not important whether, from our modern point of view, the events actually occurred as reported…. Writers of history intended to document, reflect on, and organize the past in order to understand, legitimate, or define in some way the institutional and social reality of their own time.³

The two different definitions would yield quite different lists of biblical texts that should be considered “history”; examination of additional definitions by other biblical scholars would yield more diversity.

This lack of consensus might suggest that it is pointless to propose definitions of history or of other central terms. Indeed, some eminent historians have suggested that definitions of history are counterproductive, and only act as a “prison.”⁴ I disagree, since I feel that a “definition… [i]f properly formulated…can become an efficient tool for clear thinking.”⁵ Furthermore, I believe that the process of evaluating various proposed definitions helps to clarify for the reader my stance on several central issues.⁶

A definition should be concise, and just broad enough to include what is typically considered essential.⁷ Thus, definitions of the type of Long’s second, “longer” definition, cited above, should be avoided. Additionally, although it is interesting to see the etymological meaning of central terms such as “history,” and the use of its cognate predecessors in Greek and Latin literature,⁸ definitions must reflect usage and not etymology.

This notion of “definition” as a heuristic instrument useful within a particular discipline rather than as an objective description of an absolute reality underscores the subjectivity and partial circularity of biblical studies. A definition is chosen with a corpus of texts in mind and a (pre-) understanding of those texts; that definition is then used to understand those texts. This process, which is central to scholarship, is described clearly by John Barton, in his study of the methodologies of biblical scholarship:

Biblical “methods” are theories rather than methods: theories which result from the formalizing of intelligent intuitions about the meaning of biblical texts. Texts are perceived as having certain sorts of meaning—or, just as interestingly, as failing to convey meaning—by reading them with certain vague expectations…which are either confirmed and clarified, or disappointed and frustrated. The reading begins again, this time with a sharper focus; and at the end of the process there emerges a distinct impression of what the text means, together with an explanatory theory as to how it comes to mean it. But the theory…is logically subsequent to the intuitions about meaning. It may lead to useful insights into other texts, when they are approached in a similar frame of mind, and so may greatly shorten the quest to understand them.⁹

My definitions, reached after many readings of the biblical historical corpus, attempt to reflect my crystallization of the “vague expectations” of how that corpus should be interpreted; their success will be judged by the extent to which they offer others a useful “frame of mind” for understanding biblical historical texts.

However, the subjectivity involved in biblical scholarship should not suggest a state of anarchy, where all definitions, theories and interpretations are equally valid.¹⁰ Instead, I would side with Jon Levenson, who believes that though “we all have biases,” theories may be evaluated by the extent to which they agree with the data, which we may evaluate because the idea that “all we have is biases” is false.⁷¹ Ultimately, the definitions proposed here must be judged by their usefulness in understanding the biblical texts, the data that we possess.

HISTORY

A century ago, the great American historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote, “The conceptions of history have been almost as numerous as the men who have written history.”¹² Conceptions of history have multiplied even further since Turner wrote, especially with the growth of social history and cliometrics.¹³ Rather than surveying all of the proposed conceptions of history that might be useful to biblical scholars,¹⁴ I will examine Collingwood’s influential understanding of history, as representative of the notion that biblical texts should not be considered history. I will then concentrate on two definitions of history used by biblical scholars. A discussion of the problems with these definitions offers the backdrop for my proposal concerning the definition of history within biblical studies.

In The Idea of History, R.G.Collingwood claims that “history is a kind of research or inquiry” whose object is “res gestae: actions of human beings that have been done in the past”; it “proceeds by the interpretation of evidence” and has as its object “human self-knowledge.”¹⁵ The scientific nature of history is crucial for Collingwood, who sees Herodotus as the first historian and entitles one of his chapters: “The Creation of Scientific History by Herodotus.”¹⁶ He explicitly rejects the possibility that Mesopotamian or biblical texts might be categorized as history.¹⁷

Collingwood’s definition is unnecessarily restrictive. It reflects a modern bias toward scientific history, a bias which reflects the relatively recent growth of history as a university academic discipline.¹⁸ Few, if any, premodern works would be characterized as history if we rigidly followed Collingwood; as M.I.Finley has noted, “The ability of the ancients to invent and their capacity to believe are persistently underestimated.”¹⁹ A recent article focussing on Herodotus notes that many ancient historians believed that truth is not essential for history.²⁰ Indeed, many classical scholars deny that Herodotus was a scientific historian in Collingwood’s sense.²¹ Even the reputation of Thucydides, who is often seen as the first objective historian by those skeptical of Herodotus, has begun to wane.²² For example, Virginia J.Hunter has noted: “Factual accuracy and objectivity have long been considered the major qualities of Thucydides” History. This is a onesided, if not totally distorted view of the historian and his method of composition.”²³ At times, she notes, Thucydides fits events into patterns, “generat[ing] facts for which he had no evidence.”²⁴ To the extent that Thucydides might have been interested in objectivity, he was very atypical of classical historians.²⁵ In sum, Collingwood misrepresents Herodotus and other pre-modern historians, and his understanding of history is not useful in examining the conception of history in antiquity.²⁶

John van Seters’ In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History²⁷ is the most significant recent synthetic work on ancient Near Eastern history writing. It offers both a survey of Israelite history within its ancient Near Eastern background and an exploration of the historiographical nature of the books Joshua-Kings. He begins with a precise definition of history,²⁸ that of the Dutch historian, Johan Huizinga, “History is the intellectual form in which a civilization renders account to itself of its past.”²⁹ Rather than evaluating the secondary use of Huizinga’s definition by van Seters, I will turn to Huizinga’s original article, where the implications of the definition are adumbrated.³⁰ Huizinga sees a “sharp distinction between history and literature,” and claims that history “is almost entirely lacking in that element of play which underlies literature from beginning to end.”³¹ As we shall see later in this chapter, this sharp dichotomy between literature and history is rightly rejected by most scholars of ancient texts, and by many who study modern historical writing as well. An additional problem of applying Huizinga’s definition to the Hebrew Bible is that we often know so little of the event which stands behind the biblical historical narrative, that we cannot discern the extent of the “element of play.” Any understanding of history which depends on historicity cannot be profitably applied to the biblical corpus.³² In sum, to the extent that Huizinga’s definition of history implicitly emphasizes a correct self-understanding by the civilization, it is unsuitable for the Bible, which typically cannot be evaluated in these terms.³³

A more recent attempt at understanding biblical history, published in 1988, is Baruch Halpern’s The First Historians: The Hebrew Bible and History.³⁴ Halpern sidesteps the issue of historicity, and defines history on the basis of the intention of the text’s author: “Whether a text is history, then, depends on what its author meant to do.”³⁵ More specifically, a text’s classification as history depends on its “author’s relationship to the evidence.”³⁶ True history is typified by its “antiquarian interest,”³⁷ and should be contrasted with “romance,” which contains elaborations “unnecessary to the presentation of a reconstruction from the evidence.”³⁸ Phrased differently, the central issue for us to consider in determining whether to label a biblical text “history” is whether “the narrator ha[d] reason to believe what he or she wrote.”³⁹

This type of definition is highly problematic. How do we know if an elaboration goes beyond the evidence the author had, especially...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION THE NEW BIBLICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY
• 1 DEFINING HISTORY, IDEOLOGY AND LITERATURE
• 2 CHRONICLES AS A MODEL FOR BIBLICAL HISTORY
• 3 THE TYPOLOGIES OF GENESIS
• 4 DEUTERONOMY AS INTERPRETATION
• 5 THE EHUD STORY AS SATIRE
• 6 IDEOLOGY IN THE BOOK OF SAMUEL
• 7 TEXT IN A TEL 2 KINGS 17 AS HISTORY
• CONCLUSION THE CREATION OF BIBLICAL HISTORY
• NOTES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY