Reading the Historical Books

A Student's Guide to Engaging the Biblical Text

Dutcher-Walls, Patricia

• Éditeur: Baker Academic
• Année: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441244789
• Sujet: Theology & Religion
• Sous-sujet: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Biblical history can be some of the most difficult material for beginning students to grasp. The conventions of contemporary history writing are quite different from those of ancient Israelite writers. Here a master teacher offers basic orientation to the genre and conventions of the Old Testament historical books, helping students become careful and attentive readers. Written in an accessible style with many ancient and contemporary examples, this book introduces students to some of the phenomena they will encounter in the historical books and provides strategies for understanding their significance. The goal is to make further reading and study of Scripture more informed and sensitive. Sidebars, discussion questions, and further reading suggestions are included.

1
Discovering the Context of the Text

Writing about the past includes conveying a sense of the background behind the events being recorded. There is always a context for events, and that context provides the setting for what transpired—everything from the physical environment and the political and economic conditions at the time to the personal and social relationships that affected the events. Any event interacts with its context, and different contexts may create very different outcomes for similar events. If you have ever lived through an earthquake, you know that a highway built on bedrock will likely survive better than one built on landfill—same event, very distinctive outcomes. Or if two nations hold elections, one nation a democracy and one a totalitarian state, the elections will likely have very different outcomes in terms of political participation. To understand what happened in order to write intelligently about the two elections, you would have to know something about the particular circumstances of each election, like the political systems and each nation’s history of electoral policies. Context makes a difference in the events of the past.

For example, if you received this text message from a friend whom you know pretty well, you would be able to decipher it easily:

ahh man it was weird lol. cover was 20 bucks but yolo i guess so we went for it. saw jess there too, though she said not to tell you. i hope you’re not mad, man. ended up dancing with robin hood and the wizard of oz people haha. so random. got home at like 2 i think? my mom and dad are choked, especially after last weekend

Since you know where your friend likes to hang out, you would not need an explanation about the locale to which he was referring. You would know that “Jess” was his former girlfriend, and that “Robin Hood” and the “Wizard of Oz” were costumed friends from a recent Halloween party. You would also know why it was so crucial that he be home on time for a curfew.1 Also, if you are used to text messaging, you do not need to have the language itself translated. But imagine if your grandparents saw the text message—they would not only need the language to be translated into something they would recognize as English but would also need the background to be explained. For someone who does not know these things, understanding the context of the message is crucial for understanding its meaning. Context makes a difference in the events of the past and in writing about the past.

But let’s go back to our opening statement: “Writing about the past includes conveying a sense of the background behind the events being recorded.” This statement indicates another important aspect of “context”: not only the background of the events themselves but the background of the writing about those events must be considered. People recording the past also have a context, an environment, a set of political, economic, and social circumstances that affect how they write about the past. If a historian is writing about contemporary and local events, then the contexts of the events and the writing are similar. However, historians may write about events in another part of the world or in a time period removed from their own. If so, then they have to be aware that their context is very different and their own awareness and assumptions about things may be distinct from the context they are writing about. The historians would need to take care to try to understand and re-create the context of the events in their own setting in order to give a good account.

Let’s go back to the opening statement one more time: “Writing about the past includes conveying a sense of the background behind the events being recorded.” There is actually a third context that eventually impacts a historical document—that of the reader of the account of the past. The reader may be in an environment or setting very different from that of either the original events or the written account. For example, you may have in your family’s records an account by your great-grandmother of the story of her grandmother emigrating from another part of the world over 150 years ago. The events of the original time took place in the mid-1800s, perhaps in a time of great famine and hardship in your family’s country of origin. The original characters in the story knew well the environment of the country of origin because they had lived there all their lives. But when your great-grandmother recounted the story maybe eighty years ago, she was living in the new country and did not know the old country at all. She had to rely on recounting the story as well as she could, trying to explain some of the traditions of the old country as they had been handed down for her new context. Now, when you read this account, you are living in still another context—one much different from either the original events of the emigration or the recounting of those events by your great-grandmother. You may need a family member to translate some of the words being used in the account or to explain some of the practices about century-old clothing or food or social expectations. Context makes a difference in the events of the past, in writing about the past, and in reading an account of the past.

Reading an Ancient Account of the Past

When we as twenty-first-century readers in the developed world approach the historical books of the Old Testament, we are reading a series of documents that were written over two thousand years ago in a time and place very different from our own. The context of the Bible is different in many ways from our context. Most of us do not live in settings where travel is by donkey, where kings rule exclusively by their own power, where communication is limited to hand-carried messages, or where the planting of crops is done by hand. However, the differences are not so drastic between the context of the events recounted in the historical books and the context of the writers of those books. The writers were living largely in the same type of social structures and environmental, geographical, and political settings as the account of the past they were writing, even if some centuries had elapsed between certain of the events and the writing and later editing of the accounts. The issue for us as readers is to learn about the contexts of the biblical accounts of the past, which for the ancient writers did not need explanation or definition.

A very general approach locates the context of the events and the writing of the biblical historical books to a time period of roughly one thousand years, from about 1300 BCE to about 300 BCE. The location is what we call the ancient Near East, which runs from Egypt in northern Africa through the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean Sea, eastward through the vast valley of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Iran), and westward through modern Turkey and Greece. Most of the political states of that time were monarchies, each tightly controlled by a dynastic family, or by competing dynastic families. Sometimes a particularly powerful state acquired enough territory by conquest or treaty to become an empire, reaping extra economic surplus but needing military and economic controls over the larger territory.

Ancient economies were largely based on agriculture, with other economic resources located in trade, mining, herding, and fisheries, as well as limited skilled labor in jobs like metal and stone crafting. Much of a state’s economic structure was controlled by the monarchy. Relationships among states involved both trade by treaty and outright conflict in wars of aggression that could bring additional resources and income. Roads were key structures within and especially among states. A road functioned as a pathway for trade and communication and for armies bent on conquest. Social structures were generally highly stratified, so that there was a large gap between a small number in the richest classes, usually the royal house and its officials, and the majority of the population in the poorest classes, usually peasant farmers. Political and religious realities and institutions were highly integrated—politics involved religion, and religion undergirded politics.

In what follows, we will look at some of the most important aspects of the context of the historical books of the Old Testament. To create this picture of the ancient world, fields of knowledge such as sociology, anthropology, geography, economics, archaeology, and history are combined. Such a social-world approach tries to understand patterns and relationships among social actors—from the macrolevel, like states and empires, to the microlevel, like families and towns. Rather than concentrating on individual events and actions of a particular person, such as a king, social-world studies look at how kings as a type of social actor characteristically behave, or how agrarian states usually order their national institutions. What emerges in such a social-world portrait is a description of typical relationships among social structures and social actors, which can give a good sense of the context for particular events and actions.2

An example of how social-world studies work to describe patterns rather than individual data comes from a college textbook that you may have read. For the tenth edition of Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology, the cover illustration is a picture of Europe and Africa from space at night, showing the lights of cities. The blurb about the cover illustration in the book states, “The Cover, ‘Global City Lights,’ is an image created by Craig Mayhew and Robert Simmon of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Space Flight Center, from Defense Meteorological Satellite Program data. The relative brightness and clustering of the lights indicate the degree of urbanization.”3 The life going on for individuals within the many cities pictured is probably quite fascinating, but one main interest of the sociologist is the degree of urbanization.

In doing our study of the context of the Old Testament we will start from the texts themselves. What do the texts reveal as the background of their writing? What realities, knowledge, and environments were parts of the unspoken background that the writers could take for granted because this setting was so similar to the one they also knew? What does the social world context of the historical books look like from a viewpoint inside these accounts of the past? As we do this text-based survey of the contexts of the historical books, we will also provide an overview of the flow of the biblical story as the texts themselves portray it, without making any particular commitments to whether events actually happened exactly as they are described. As we noted in the introduction, our job is not to write a history of ancient Israel but to explore how the biblical historical books work as history writing. So this overview is designed to give you a summary of the Old Testament’s own account of its past. Also, as you go through this overview, note that we will explore many of the characteristics of the texts in the chapters that follow. In those chapters, we will examine how these texts convey an account of the past that works as a story, how they portray interests through how that story is shaped, and how they function as historical writing. For now, we focus on the background that is inherent in the texts and the story that is related against that background.

Geographical and Political Context and the Story in Summary: Part 1

When we start looking at the context for the biblical accounts of the past, it is clear that the biblical historical books were aware of and referred to the land and environment in which events took place.4 As with most adults today, who might read a newspaper or scan a news website to find out what is happening, there was an awareness of the place where they lived and of the larger world that had an impact on their lives an...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Discovering the Context of the Text
• 2. Listening to the Story in the Text
• 3. Discerning the Interests of the Text
• 4. Examining History in the Text
• 5. Examining the Shape of History in the Text
• Conclusion
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover