Kingdom of Priests

A History of Old Testament Israel

Merrill, Eugene H.

• Editorial: Baker Academic
• Año: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781441217073
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Theologie & Religion
• Categoría: Bibelkritik & -auslegung

From the origins and exodus to the restoration and new hope, Kingdom of Priests offers a comprehensive introduction to the history of Old Testament Israel. Merrill explores the history of ancient Israel not only from Old Testament texts but also from the literary and archeological sources of the ancient Near East. After selling more than 30, 000 copies, the book has now been updated and revised. The second edition addresses and interacts with current debates in the history of ancient Israel, offering an up-to-date articulation of a conservative evangelical position on historical matters. The text is accented with nearly twenty maps and charts.

1 Recalling Israel’s Past

Issues and Strategies

Preliminary Considerations

The History of Israel and Historiography

Access to the Past

The Foundations of Biblical History: Assumptions and Methods

The Old Testament as History

The Old Testament and Critical Method

Sources for the Reconstruction of Israel’s History

Evaluation of Historical Sources

Development of a Sound Methodology

The Old Testament as Historiography

The Nature of the Literature

The Historical Eras

The Strategy of Old Testament History

Preliminary Considerations

Any scientific enterprise must take its point of departure from a set of assumptions, no matter how tentative, that provide it with rationale and justification. This is true of history writing more than most disciplines, since, although the events with which it is concerned transpired in the past, one must suppose that their facticity and meaning can be recovered (if only partially) and that they can be integrated and synthesized into some kind of construct credible and understandable to the modern reader.

When that history is the story of a people enshrined in holy literature, the nature of the task becomes much more complex and the assumptions much more predictive of the outcome. One’s view of the integrity and authority of that literature affects one’s very approach to the task, to say nothing of methodological procedure and conclusions.

A history of Israel must depend for its documentary sources almost entirely upon the Old Testament, a collection of writings confessed by both Judaism and Christianity to be Holy Scripture, the Word of God. The degree to which historians are willing to submit to this claim will inevitably affect the way they think about their task. Skeptics will view the sources as nothing more or less than a collection of myths, fables, legends, and other texts of relative reliability created and transmitted by an ancient people. Believers will be persuaded that they hold in their hands an absolutely unique literary creation, a book that professes to be divine revelation. As such it cannot be approached as one would approach any other ancient texts. It must be addressed as the Word of God, with all this implies concerning its worth and authority as historical source.

Regarding the Old Testament as the Word of God radically alters the task of writing the history of Israel by raising it to the level of a theological activity. If we grant that the writing of Israel’s history and the writing of the history of any other people are on entirely different planes precisely because, in the former case, history and theology cannot be separated, we must assert that the kind of negative skepticism that is a necessary part of conventional historiography has no place in our work. By virtue of our confession that we are under the authority of the very sources we are investigating, we have already surrendered our right to reject what we cannot understand or what we find difficult to believe.

This does not mean, however, that a modern-day history of ancient Israel should be nothing more than a retelling of the biblical story. The very fact that the Old Testament relates ancient events as sacred history, as primarily theological rather than social or political phenomena, is enough to justify repeated attempts to reconstruct the story according to the canons of normal historiography. This book represents such an effort. Our purpose is to understand the history of Israel as an integration of political, social, economic, and religious factors, and to do so not only on the basis of the Old Testament as Scripture but also with careful attention to the literary and archaeological sources of the ancient Near Eastern world, of which Israel was a part.

The History of Israel and Historiography

History, popularly and succinctly defined, is a record of the past, but such a reductionist understanding is both inadequate and misleading.[1] First, history properly is the past, no matter how it is recollected and understood. Second, any account of the past is unique to the particular historian, one shaped by the contours of his or her own experience, competency, research, and presuppositions. Third, history and historiography must be clearly distinguished, the one having to do with events of the past per se and the other with the interpretation of those events as preserved in either unwritten (artifactual) or written (inscriptional) sources. Moreover, sources of any kind are not facts but only provide access to facts; the factuality of the information they contain is itself to be determined by careful investigation of their settings, their claims, their testability, their internal self-consistency, and their compatibility with other data from the same times and places.

Access to the Past

Recovery of the past is possible only through the acquisition of records of the past, either literary or nonliterary. Preliterate or nonliterate cultures yield their history through the archaeological excavation of material objects that eventually become available to the historian in museums and other repositories. Though lacking textual interpretation, such artifacts can yield significant information provided certain methodological controls are in place.[2] For example, an object found in a datable stratum can be dated at least to that stratum and then compared with similar or different objects from comparable strata. These can then be assigned a place in typological stemmata established by the determination of stratigraphical sequences. Pottery, because of its clearly discernible morphology, is an especially useful diagnostic tool for providing dating and other information not only about ceramic objects themselves but also about other finds in situ with them, in some cases even inscriptions.[3]

Modern archaeology has moved beyond the discovery of mere artifacts and their interpretation to broader fields of inquiry including the application of the methods of the physical and social sciences to the nonliterary past.[4] It is now possible to examine traces of the natural environment of ancient cultures and to determine with some precision features such as climate, soils, and water systems and how they made human life possible in its various social and cultural expressions. The study of the density and distribution of occupation sites sheds a great deal of light on matters of agriculture, trade, security, economics, statecraft, and general social and civic interaction.[5] When used with great care and discipline, later—even modern—structures of labor, trade, migratory patterns, and the like can serve as a basis for extrapolating information from ancient settings, particularly where the ancient and modern share similar geographical and cultural environments. Even more reliable results are attainable by painstaking analysis of material objects and drawing conclusions as to their provenance and nature and the skills employed in their production. This may lead to information about their likely places of origin, the trade they presuppose, the level of technological expertise they exhibit, and the division of labor that made them possible in the first place, particularly if they are objets d’art.

The subjectivity of this kind of “historiography” is immediately apparent, since, even if the information just suggested can be gleaned, questions of who, how, and especially why remain unanswered. In other words, cold artifacts are “brute facts,” objects that have no voice and thus no self-interpretation. Historians must therefore turn to texts to advance their understanding beyond this very basic level.

As is true of any artifact, an inscription’s value as a witness to history lies largely in the determination of its original setting. This leads to the consideration of at least two factors—its stratigraphical location and its palaeographical features. Where was it found, and at what stage of the development of its script did it leave the hand of the scribe? The one question has to do with archaeological method, and the other with an epigraphical technique that enables scholars to locate a text within a continuum of graphic evolution.

Since most historians are neither archaeologists nor epigraphers, they must rely on scholars adept at deciphering, dating, editing, publishing, and translating the texts from which they draw the information necessary to their historical reconstruction.[6] The better these things are done, the more useful is the text to the task of the historian. But texts, again like other artifacts, require interpretation. Though they have words and sentences, by themselves they have little to say at best and may even be misleading at worst. The following four guidelines assist the interpretation of texts in general. The next section will then consider principles important to historiographical texts in particular.

1. Any text, ancient or modern, must be identified by genre. Is it poetry or prose? Is it propaganda, apology, or polemic? Is it fiction, biography, or narrative? Is it law, business, or politics? Is it annal, history, or chronicle? These and many other genres and subgenres demand interpretive methods unique to each before they can properly be pressed into the historian’s service.[7]
2. Once genre has been established, it is imperative to connect the texts under consideration to others of the same genre both within the language and culture under review and outside them, especially, in the latter case, texts representative of comparative languages and literatures.[8] This is helpful not only in terms of literary style and form but frequently in terms of subject matter as well. What can be known well from another, related context can shed light on the obscurity of a solitary text originating in a similar milieu.
3. When texts are located within a literary field that includes comparative languages and literatures, they can be better understood as part of a broader cultural horizon and can, in turn, be useful in informing these more remote texts to which they are related.[9] The more pieces are available for the puzzle of historical reconstruction, the more likely an accurate picture of the whole can emerge.
4. All texts of a historiographical nature should be presumed, at the outset, to have at least a modicum of tendentious nuancing of historical reality.[10] This is the case with modern history writing, and where ancient texts can be found that record the same events from competing perspectives, proof of this principle is immediately apparent. One should assume at the same time, however, that historical bias is not necessarily the result of a dark plot designed to mislead but rather reveals a natural, almost intuitive desire to place one’s own people and their character and contributions in the best light possible. Notwithstanding—and to repeat—this admirable motive must not lead the interpreter of texts to the naive assumption that the texts consistently reflect objective and unvarnished truth in portraying the lives and times they cover. That is, there must in general always be room for healthy skepticism in the evaluation of ancient (and modern) literary sources.[11]

The Foundations of Biblical History: Assumptions and Methods

Closer to the subject of this work is a consideration of the principles and practices of historiography as they apply to the writing of biblical history, specifically the history of Israel as recorded in the Old Testament.[12] At the outset a major methodological concern comes to the fore in that the Old Testament is first and foremost a body of texts sacred to both Judaism and the church and only secondarily a work of history. Does its character as Scripture cancel out its value as a historical source, or conversely, does its attention to history lessen its authority as the Word of God? We will presently address these and related questions, but for now we must attend to the matter of the nature of the Old Testament as it presents itself and as the various faith communities have perceived it over the millennia. It is precisely at this point that the historian’s labors reach an inescapable conundrum. If the historian confesses the Bible to be a supernatural product of divine revelation, he or she must necessarily read and make use of it from this perspective. Moreover, the historian will attribute to it an authority and preeminence that he or she would never accord to other sources because of a (proper) commitment to the general historiographical principle of blind objectivity. On the other hand, the historian who comes to the Bible with no such confessional stance is likely to come, at best, with no foregone conclusions as to its reliability or, worse still, with a jaundiced eye, since he or she is likely to view it as a collection of religious texts that may or may not possess valid and verifiable historical information.

That the Old Testament presents itself as revelation is evident whether or not the reader is willing to accept that testimony, and normative Judaism and Christianity embraced this truth claim almost universally until the dawning of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century rationalism.[13] The present work, admittedly informed by this ancient tradition, proceeds from the premise that the Old Testament is the Word of God and that it is therefore reliable and authoritative not only when it teaches doctrine and theology but also when it professes to convey historical information.

This said, even a confessional stance must recognize that the Bible is also human literature and so must be understood in terms of literary categories and with due attention to accepted and proper methods of literary, rhetorical, and canonical criticism.[14] The Old Testament indeed contains historical data, but these data must be sifted and interpreted through the grid of appropriate literary analysis and with appreciation for the literary and rhetorical conventions at work in the historical and ideological environment in which the texts themselves originated. Two examples will suffice. The poetic descriptions of the exodus (Exod. 15) and of Deborah and Barak’s exploits (Judg. 5), though reflecting historical realities, must not be read as literal accounts but poetically embellished narrati...

Índice

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Abbreviations
• 1. Recalling Israel’s Past: Issues and Strategies
• 2. Origins
• 3. The Exodus: Birth of a Nation
• 4. The Conquest and Occupation of Canaan
• 5. The Era of the Judges: Covenant Violation, Anarchy, and Human Authority
• 6. Saul: Covenant Misunderstanding
• 7. David: Covenant Kingship
• 8. David: The Years of Struggle
• 9. Solomon: From Pinnacle to Peril
• 10. The Divided Monarchy
• 11. The Dynasty of Jehu and Contemporary Judah
• 12. The Rod of Yahweh: Assyria and Divine Wrath
• 13. Fading Hope: The Disintegration of Judah
• 14. The Exile and the First Return
• 15. Restoration and New Hope
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• Notes