The Bible

A Beginner's Guide

Paula Gooder

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780742397
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblische Studien

From the language of Shakespeare to the US presidential campaign trail, the Bible's influence is all around us. It is the most-printed book of all time, yet, upon reading it, we are met not by one work but by many: a complex mix of history and parable, law and prophecy.In this authoritative and impartial introduction, Paula Gooder ably guides the reader in how to approach this multifaceted text, and explores its enduring influence on Western culture, from Renaissance art to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Featuring textboxes focussing on key details, Gooder provides an illuminating framework for understanding the Bible and shares her infectious enthusiasm for the topic. Covering its origins, content and interpretation, this wide-ranging primer will be of invaluable benefit to those of any and no faith alike.

1

History

Introduction

One of the great challenges that faces anyone who wants to read even a bit of the Bible is that the biblical writers assume that their readers know the major historical events that lie behind the text. If you don’t you can be confused about what is really going on. To make it even more complicated the Bible isn’t even in chronological order. So although parts of it seem to follow on one from the other, other parts dot around all over the place. Take the Minor Prophets, for example. The first four Minor Prophets are Hosea, Joel, Amos and Obadiah. Hosea is thought to have written into the eighth century BC, whereas Joel is thought to be addressing an audience maybe 200 years later in the sixth century BC. Amos is back in the eighth century and Obadiah could fall either in the ninth century BC or the seventh century. Unless you have some kind of framework that helps you to understand what happened when, you can very quickly become hopelessly lost in the maze of kings of Israel and Judah; the difference between Syria and Assyria; the connection between the Babylonians and the Persians and so on.

In order to keep up with when and where things happened, it helps to have a rough sketch in your mind of the history of Israel until 70 AD. This chapter seeks to take a swift journey through the history of the Bible in order to give a framework onto which you can hang some of the key events of the Bible and see how they all fit together. It is far from exhaustive and seeks just to give an outline, nothing more.

It is also worth noting at this point that when a book is set is not necessarily when it is written. Then as now, people wrote history in which they describe events that took place sometimes hundreds of years before.

The beginning

Reading the Bible may be one of those occasions where the very beginning is not a good place to start, or at least not when you are interested in the question of history. In fact, the question of when history begins in the Bible may well have caused more conflict than any other subject. The obvious answer to the question of when history begins is when time begins, and yet giving this answer throws up all sorts of questions which are not easy to answer. Creationism – the belief that the world was created as reported in Genesis – is most often discussed these days in terms of science and its relationship to evolution, but it is also a belief about history. Many Creationists believe that chapters 1–2 of Genesis are historical accounts about the origin of the world. For them, history begins with Adam and Eve.

Of course, not everyone holds this view. Indeed there are a good number of scholars today who might be placed at the other end of the spectrum from Creationists on this issue. These scholars argue that the majority of the Bible originates a long, long time after it is set and that much of it comes from the time of the Persian and Hellenistic empires (i.e. the sixth century BC onwards). For them the vast majority of the history of the Bible is unreliable, written later by people who were attempting to reinvent their history once they came to the land from Babylon. As a result they don’t just doubt the historicity of Adam and Eve but of Moses, Joshua, David and Isaiah too.

There are of course many positions about the history of the Bible that people can hold between these two extremes. Some argue that while Adam and Eve may not be historical, Abraham was. Others think that the accounts about Abraham are too vague and personal to be history and so trace history from King David onwards, or from the time of the eighth century when prophets like Amos and Hosea are said to have lived. The question of history in the Bible is complex and controversial and there are no easy answers as to how to proceed. The debate about the historicity of the Bible rages on between scholars and each reader will need to form their own view about when they think the Bible moves from being ‘story’ to ‘history’. Some will think history begins with Genesis 1; others with Abraham or Moses; others with David and Solomon; and others still with Ezra and Nehemiah.

One of the real problems we face is that we simply do not have the kind of evidence we might need in order to be confident about what happened when. For that we would need a wide variety of texts (not just biblical ones) which all tallied in terms of dates and which also tallied with ample archaeological findings. Instead what we have is a majority of evidence from just one source, the Bible, a few scattered external sources which sometime tally with the Bible and sometimes don’t and archaeological findings which are hard to tie up with the biblical narrative. None of this means that the Bible is necessarily historically inaccurate; simply that it is hard to demonstrate the history to the extent that we might want to.

The debate about historicity is really irresolvable. The kind of evidence that we would need to demonstrate the historicity of these texts beyond a shadow of a doubt almost certainly doesn’t exist. It might be possible to prove parts of the narrative to the satisfaction of some people but it is impossible to prove all of the narrative to the satisfaction of everyone. The swift re-telling of history in the pages that follow has no time to stop and explore the controversial questions about what might or might not have happened. Instead it is just trying to put the key events in order with some possible dates alongside to give a rough map of how the different events relate to each other.

The account of history that follows begins with the call of Abraham in Genesis 12, because with him the story of a people chosen by God for a special relationship with God begins. Chapters 1–11 of Genesis are different kinds of account, with talking snakes, angels with fiery swords, sons of God who have sexual relationships with human women, and towers that their builders believe will reach to heaven. Although there are sporadic references to these events throughout the rest of the Old Testament (and indeed the New Testament too), the concentration of them here (together with the subject matter of creation and the fall) suggests that Genesis 1–11 is a different kind of narrative. Indeed many scholars call these chapters primeval history to indicate that they have a different kind of content and message to what follows them. The story of Abraham is where the ‘story’ of God’s people begins – it is up to you to decide whether you think this is the story of God’s people or the history of God’s people.

In each section of the history below, I have provided a rough date for the characters that feature in the relevant part of the Bible. This is meant to give you a very approximate idea of when these events might have taken place. The aim of the telling of the history below is to give an outline of the key events: more of a bird’s eye view than a detailed blow-by-blow examination of the stories, their authorship, and any historical problem that you might encounter while reading them.

God’s promise to Abraham

ROUGH POSSIBLE HISTORICAL DATE: c.1800 BC (middle to late Bronze Age)

RECORDED IN Genesis 12–50

KEY CHARACTERS: Abraham and Sarah, Jacob, Leah and Rachel, Joseph’s twelve sons

OUTLINE OF EVENTS: God promised Abraham that he would give him descendants and a land to live in. At first he had no children; then once he had many descendants, his family left the land of Canaan and moved to Egypt.

The story of the people of God starts with Abram (who was later renamed Abraham by God) since with him begins the story of a particular relationship between God and a specific family. The stories in this part of Genesis are often called the Patriarchal Narratives, and refer to the key figures of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (and their wives) who ruled over the clan which descended from Abraham.

The narratives told are uneven in terms of detail. There are times, like the time when Abraham and Sarah are waiting for a child, when quite precise detail is given; whereas at other times, like much of Isaac’s life, vast tracts of time are skipped over in a very cursory manner. The account gives the impression of being a little like a family photo album which misses out the less important moments in the family’s life and spends much longer on key moments which are important to the family’s story of who they are and what has made them who they are. So there are years where there is little entered in the ‘album’ and then pages and pages of one or two key events.

The key focus of this part of the story is God’s promise to Abraham which is summarized in Genesis 12.1–2:

Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.’

There are three key parts to the promise:

• that God will provide Abraham with descendants (‘I will make of you a great nation’);

• that God will give Abraham’s descendants land in which to live (‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you’);

• that God will maintain a special relationship with Abraham and his descendants (‘I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing’).

Figure 1 Abraham’s journey from Ur to Canaan

Genesis 12–50 is, roughly speaking, centred around this promise and the various crises that emerge when it looks as though one or another of these promises might not be fulfilled.

The first half of this story about the Patriarchs focuses on the question of whether Abraham will ever become the father of a great nation. For most of the story about Abraham, Abraham and Sarah have no children of their own which makes the promise of being the father of a great nation unlikely in the extreme. Even once Sarah gave birth to a much-longed-for son (Genesis 21.3), the question about whether Abraham will be the father of a great nation does not resolve for a long time, not least because Abraham is then commanded by God to kill Isaac (Genesis 22.2).

The second half of the story switches attention to the land (Genesis 25–50). Soon Abraham had many descendants, through his grandson Jacob who had twelve sons, but these descendants moved away from Canaan to Egypt. This then threw up the question of whether the great nation whose father was Abraham would in fact ever live in the land that God had promised them. The book of Genesis ends on a knife edge, with God’s promise to Abraham still in crisis. Abraham now had many, many descendants but these now numerous descendants lived far away from Canaan in Egypt where they had gone to stay with Joseph, Jacob’s son, to avoid a famine in Canaan.

THE HISTORICAL ABRAHAM?

The complexities and problems of demonstrating the historicity of the Bible are well illustrated with the character of Abraham. Over the years many people have argued vociferously for Abraham’s historicity, while others with the same evidence have argued just as vehemently against it.

The problem is that the kind of evidence we would need to prove Abraham’s existence beyond any shadow of a doubt almost certainly could not exist. Abraham was semi-nomadic and is said to have travelled over hundreds of miles during his lifetime. For much of this time he did not live in cities, but in a small tented community. The chance of digging up evidence of his existence is slim in the extreme, and even if archaeological evidence could be discovered it would be very hard to tie it to the Abraham of the Bible.

The best we can hope for is to argue that someone like Abraham could have existed in the relevant timeframe. Here we can find evidence but none of it very strong. One of the odd features of the Abraham narrative is that twice Abraham passed his wife off as his sister (and following that Isaac did it once too). There is evidence that this was a Hurrian custom (the Hurrians were an ancient people who lived in the region of Ur around the time that Abraham might also have lived there). Some scholars have also argued that names like Abraham or Jacob were in use in this region in the second millennium BC (i.e. the possible date for Abraham). Other pieces of evidence can be put forward but all are equally flimsy.

What this illustrates is that the existence of Abraham can neither be proved nor disproved. As a result we must treat these stories for they are – ancient tales of family events – more important for what they tell us about the people than for historical evidence.

Leaving Egypt and settling in the land

ROUGH POSSIBLE HISTORICAL DATE: c.1300 BC (late Bronze Age to Iron Age 1)

RECORDED IN Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1 Samuel 1–8

KEY CHARACTERS: Moses, Joshua, Deborah, Gideon, Samson, Samuel

OUTLINE OF EVENTS: Abraham’s descendants were numerous but enslaved in Egypt. Moses led them out of slavery, through the desert and eventually, under Joshua, they settled in Canaan. At this point they were twelve warring tribes in need of a leader.

The next phase of the history opens in Egypt many years after the death of Joseph in what is probably the late Bronze Age. Here the nature of the story has changed. The narrative is no longer concerned with a particular family but with a whole, now numerous, group of people wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• List of maps and illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 History
• 2 Genre
• 3 Canon
• 4 Translation
• 5 Interpretation
• 6 Legacy
• Further reading
• Biblical index
• General index