What Did the Biblical Writers Know, and When Did They Know It?

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Chapter One

The Bible as History, Literature, and Theology

The Mysterious Bible

The Bible, including the Old Testament, or as we prefer here, the Hebrew Bible,is so familiar to those of us still steeped in the Western cultural tradition that itwould seem to need little explanation, much less defense. For centuries the Biblehas been the Classic ? although that really means (1) that we take it forgranted; and (2) that we revere it, but don't bother to read it any more.

    Yet for all the lip service still paid to the Bible in our society, it remainslargely a mystery to lay people. A recent, long-running television series in whichI became involved was entitled "Mysteries of the Bible." Obviously it capitalized(so to speak) on the public's continuing fascination with the unresolved riddlesof the Bible: Where was the Garden of Eden? Did Jericho's walls really cometumbling down? Why did the biblical writers think Jezebel such a wickedwoman? Such examples could go on and on.

    Even though I was somewhat surprised, and indeed gratified, to see thepublic's enthusiasm for the series (I now am recognized when I go to the localbarber shop), I became skeptical in the end. The commercial and somewhatcynical exploitation of biblical topics is clearly designed to titillate more than toeducate the public. Any gratuitous educational benefits aside, the Bible remainsa mysterious book to most people.

The Nature of the Hebrew Bible

The above is true partly because we forget that the Bible is not a book at all, buta whole shelf of books. That means that you cannot simply pick up the Bibleand read it from beginning to end, as a connected story with a structured plotand believable characters. One of my friends was required to do that for a"book report" in a college class on "The Bible as Literature" (he confessed laterthat he could never bring himself to pick up the Bible again). What is the Bible's"story" really about? Who wrote it, and why? And can we moderns really believeany of it?

    The many "books" that make up our Hebrew Bible (39 in English versions,but 24 in Hebrew) have many stories to tell, written almost entirely byanonymous authors. These stories were set down over a period of a thousandyears, the whole finally woven into a composite, highly complex literary fabricsometime in the Hellenistic era (ca. 2nd century B.C.). This vast "library"?forthat is what the Bible really is ? contains such diverse and indeed contradictoryliterary forms as myths, legends and folktales, sagas, heroic epics, oraltraditions, annals, biographies, narrative histories, novellae, belles lettres, proverbsand wisdom-sayings, poetry (including erotic poems ? read the Song ofSongs without your spiritual blinders on), prophecy, apocalyptic, and muchmore.

    All of this vast compilation of literature comes down to us from a long-lostOriental world almost entirely foreign to our modern consciousness andworldview. Furthermore, the Bible is written in a dead language. (Hebrew hasbeen revived as a spoken language only recently, as in Israel, but in any case itdiffers considerably from Biblical Hebrew.) Finally, the librarians in charge ofthe biblical corpus seem to be mostly clerics of one sort or another, intent uponforcing their "orthodox" interpretations upon the rest of us, although no two ofthem agree. Or else they are academics, who seem to delight in making the Bibleeven more mysterious and therefore accessible only through them, althoughI suspect that many professional biblical scholars are closet agnostics.

The Biblical Tradition under Attack

Where does all this leave the intelligent layperson, whether formally religious ornot, who wishes simply to understand the Bible better? And is the effort worthit any longer, at a time when the biblical literature ? indeed the entire biblicaltradition ? is being dismissed by so many as "irrelevant" even by those in Synagogue,Church, and Seminary? My colleagues tell me that many priests andclergy no longer know Hebrew and Greek and thus cannot read the Bible in theoriginal. The study of the history of ancient Israel, long fundamental to our understandingof biblical Israel and her faith, is scarcely taught in many Protestantseminaries. History and historical exegesis have been replaced by more stylishcourses in liberation theology; feminist approaches to the Bible; new literarycriticism, including structuralism, semiotics, rhetorical criticism, and evenmore esoteric "schools" that we shall discuss in more detail later.

    The Atlantic Monthly ran an article in December 1996 entitled "TheSearch for a No-frills Jesus" by Charlotte Allen. Here Burton L. Mack, longtimeProfessor of New Testament at the School of Theology of Claremont inCalifornia, is quoted as saying of the latest studies in the "quest for the historicalJesus" that the forthcoming publication of Documenta Q by the InternationalQ Project "should bring to an end the myth, the history, the mentality, ofthe Gospels." Says Mack, who spent his entire professional life training Christianministers: "It's over. We've had enough apocalypses. We've had enoughmartyrs. Christianity has had a two-thousand-year run, and it's over." I see herea hypocrisy whereby one so long "professes" a history that he thinks did not exist.As I shall note in Chapter 6, the malaise in the scholarly pursuit of "the historicalJesus" parallels almost exactly the current crisis in the search for "thehistorical Israel." The same methodological issues are involved.

    The irony is that the most deadly attack on the Bible and its veracity, in eitherthe historical or the theological meaning, has come recently not from itstraditional enemies ? atheists, skeptics, or even those "Godless Communists"feared by Bible-believing people until recently ? but from the Bible's well-meaningfriends.

    If its professional custodians no longer take the Bible seriously, at least asthe foundation of our Western cultural tradition, much less a basis for privateand public morality, where does that leave us? If we simply jettison the Bible asso much excess baggage in the brave new postmodern world, what shall we putin its place?

Is the Bible "Historical" at All?

For the purposes of the present discussion, I would argue that the most seriouschallenge to the Hebrew Bible in its long history of interpretation and controversycomes from a small but vocal group of scholars, mostly European, whohave recently undertaken what they sometimes allude to as "revisionist" historiesof ancient Israel. Of course, every generation in the history of Judaism andChristianity has assayed to write its own, "new" histories of ancient Israel ? andrightly so, because the spirit of the biblical tradition is dynamic, ever-changing.Even within the biblical period itself, as Michael Fishbane, JeffreyTigay, and other rather conservative scholars have shown, the biblical writersare constantly in a kind of "inner dialogue" with themselves. These writersdare to rework the literary tradition, even though it was regarded from early onas Scripture, "sacred writings." And now, after centuries of such "recycling theBible," the effort has been made even more necessary ? and rewarding. That isbecause of the gradual development of basic tools of modern scholarship sincethe Enlightenment that no scholars, even Fundamentalists, can ignore: literarycriticism, historical exegesis, comparative religion, and especially, as we shallsee, archaeology in its broadest sense.

    Given these considerations, what is menacing about the revisionists andtheir program? Simply this: if we look carefully at their agenda, the revisionistsdo not intend merely to rewrite the history of ancient or biblical Israel; theypropose rather to abolish it altogether. As Philip R. Davies puts it in his littlebook that started much of the fuss, In Search of "Ancient Israel" (1992), therewas no "ancient" or "biblical" Israel. These are all late "intellectual constructs,"forced back upon an imagined past by centuries of Jewish and Christian believers.The notion of "ancient Israel" stems ultimately from the Bible itself; but theBible is "pious fiction," not historical fact. The Bible, too, is a late literary construct,written in and reflecting the realities of the Persian-Hellenistic era (ca.5th-1st centuries), not the Iron Age of Palestine (ca. 12th-6th centuries) thatpurports to be its setting.

    In Chapter 2 I shall expose the dangers of the revisionist challenge inmuch more detail. Here I wish only to acknowledge the thrust of their majorquestions. Is there any real "history," at least in the modern sense, in the HebrewBible? And if not, how can we any longer write a history of ancient Israel or itsreligion(s) at all? These questions deserve to be taken seriously, even though therevisionists are hardly the first to have posed them. (As happens so often, self-styledrevisionists are not nearly as radical as they suppose.)

    The urgency here is simply that (1) not even the most extreme "modernists"in critical biblical scholarship of the late 19th-20th century ever went so faras to deny any historicity to the Hebrew Bible; (2) the current visibility of therevisionists in the professional journals, at national and international symposia,and increasingly on the Internet has scarcely come to the attention of laypeople and may seem frivolous to scholars, but it reveals a disturbing trend towardwhat I would call nihilism. In adopting the term "nihilism" (Lat. nihil,"nothing"), I have in mind its common and current usage in philosophy tomean "the denial of the existence of any basis for knowledge or truth." The revisionistswill reject this term; but their own declared methodology and resultsbetray them, as we shall see presently. "No history" means no history. Here,however, I wish only to sound a preliminary alarm, while at the same time takingthe revisionist challenge seriously.

What Kind of "History"?

When we are challenged as to whether there is any "history" in the Hebrew Bible,we ought to reply first by asking: "What kind of history?" It should be obviousthat everything in the quest for history depends upon qualifications that must bedemanded at this point. The fundamental point is that there are many kinds ofhistory, and thus many differing but appropriate methods, aims, and materialsfor history-writing. English has only one basic word, "history." But German, forinstance, has (1) Geschichte, or the academic discipline of history-writing;(2) Historie, or less formal narrative history; and (3) Storie, which may containmany mythical and folkloric elements, but nevertheless aims at a connected accountof the past. To put matters another way, we may distinguish: (1) politicalhistory, the history of great public figures and institutions; (2) intellectual historythe history of formative ideas; (3) socio-economic history, the history of socialand economic structures; (4) technological history, the history of things and theiruse; (5) art history, the history of aesthetics; (6) ideological history, the history ofhow certain concepts, specifically ethnic and religious, have shaped culture(7) natural history, the history of the environment and the natural world (such asPliny's Historia naturalis); and (8) perhaps a culture history, or total history.

    Yet even most professional biblical scholars (and, I fear, nearly all archaeologists)have scarcely given serious, critical thought to historiography ? theaims and methods of history-writing ? even though they must presume themselvesto be historians. This may seem like a harsh criticism of my colleagues,but consider the scholarly literature. As late as 1988, Giovanni Garbini complainedin his History and Ideology in Ancient Israel that "all those who havebeen occupied with and have written about the story of the ancient Hebrew Bibleare not historians by profession, though for the sake of brevity I have calledthem `historians'; almost without exception they are all professors of theology."

    The first full-scale critical study of historiographic issues in dealing withancient Israel in English-speaking biblical studies was John Van Seters' 1983work, In Search of History: History and Historiography in the Ancient World andthe Origins of Biblical History, followed in 1988 by Baruch Halpern's provocativeThe First Historians: The Hebrew Bible and History. The first publications,by a biblical or Syro-Palestinian archaeologist (for the terms, see below), thatdealt extensively with historiography and ancient Israel, were by myself, beginningin 1987. The literature since these early publications should have burgeoned,but it has not. Why? Is it because we historians have lost confidence inour ability to deal with a seemingly intractable past? Surely the current skepticismabout history-writing cannot be due to inadequate data, since both textualand archaeological sources have mushroomed in the past century, and new archaeologicaldiscoveries are now coming at a dizzying pace.

The Bankruptcy of "Mere Philology"

If one examines the malaise further, it soon becomes apparent that a"historiographical crisis" is perceived only among those scholars who deal specificallywith the texts of the Hebrew Bible. I would argue that these scholars ? sometrained originally as philologians, others secondarily as theologians,many now attempting to recycle themselves as "new literary critics" ? are undergoingan identity crisis that they are projecting upon the rest of us. We archaeologistshave no such hesitation about writing histories, however provisional,of Israel and the ancient Near East; we have been doing this for morethan a century now, with ever more promising results.

    Here it may be instructive to compare two recent books, announced inthe same issue of the catalogue of the trendy Sheffield Academic Press. One is acollection of essays from the 1994 Dublin meetings of the European Seminaron Methodology in Israel's History, entitled Can a "History of Israel" BeWritten? The other volume results from an international seminar held by archaeologistsin America the same year; it carries the upbeat title, The Archaeologyof Israel: Constructing the Past/Interpreting the Present. My own chapter inthe latter volume is entitled "Philology, Theology, and Archaeology: What Kindof History Do We Want, and What Is Possible? My Israeli archaeological colleagues,who now dominate the field and who were at the symposium in force,were incredulous; I was attacking a straw man. They all said: "Of course we canwrite histories of ancient Israel; let's get on with it!"

    I wish I could be as sanguine as they. But the fact is that mainstream Europeanbiblical scholarship, which for two centuries has led the internationalfield in new directions, has virtually given up on writing a satisfactory historyof ancient Israel. In America, the revisionist discourse has not yet createdmuch stir, certainly not among the public. But at national professional meetings,European scholars attend and make sweeping, doctrinaire pronouncementsthat would have been regarded as arrant nonsense only a decade ago,but are now applauded by audiences of hundreds. At the 1996 national meetingsof the Society of Biblical Literature, Thomas L. Thompson of Copenhagentriumphantly announced to a standing-room-only crowd that not onlywas there no "ancient Israel," but there was "no Judaism until the 2nd centuryA.D." His remarks were greeted with applause. Mine was the only voice raisedin protest; but I was drowned out, and the chairman closed the session. Afterward,I found many of my colleagues dismayed, but only a few of us had seenthe handwriting on the wall (a biblical allusion ? Belshazzar's feast ? forthose who still respond to such images). What is going on here? Should we bealarmed?

    The sad state of our art is perhaps best seen in several recent developments.One is an international seminar convened by European scholars in Jerusalemin 1995, published in 1996 as The Origins of the Ancient Israelite States.The opening address was a scathing, personal attack on me by Thompson, whoasserted among many other things that I had deliberately dismantled stones ofthe "Solomonic" city gate at Gezer and had thrown out all the pottery thatmight disagree with my preconceived notions of a 10th-century B.C. date. AlthoughI was unable to attend, having just returned from Jerusalem, "our" sidewas ably defended by one of America's most brilliant young biblical scholars,Baruch Halpern.

    The latest "exchange" of views was at the 1996 Dublin methodologyseminar, to which apparently we dissidents were not invited. The papers havenow been published, and again Thompson's contribution, "Defining Historyand Ethnicity in the South Levant," is largely a mean-spirited caricature of myviews and those of my North American and Israeli colleagues. As Thompsonhad already put it, we are guilty of "an interpretation of Palestine's archaeology[i.e., all of it] in the context of an anachronistically projected biblical Israel."I, in particular, have been throughout my long career "dependent on (a)commitment to find a harmony between archaeologically derived socioculturalscenarios and (a) reading of the bible (sic)." As for Thompson's ownconclusion, he declares: "I cannot imagine what a biblical text would look likethat was judged to be `historically wholly reliable'." In much of what follows,I shall supply many such materials, to be "read historically," both textual andarchaeological.

    Another deplorable development, one hailed by Thompson, was the1996 publication by Keith W. Whitelam of The Invention of Ancient Israel: TheSilencing of Palestinian History. Whitelam claims that biblical scholars, andespecially archaeologists like the Israelis and myself, have "usurped" the historyof the Palestinians, the real occupants of the land from the Bronze Ageonward. In the name of a fraudulently conceived "biblical Israel," we have conspiredto deprive the Palestinians of their cultural heritage and dispossessthem of their rightful homeland. In Whitelam's reading of history, the chargeof "inventing ancient Israel" comes perilously close to anti-Semitism, as somereviewers have pointed out.

    Before moving on, we need to be aware of the "shorthand" that is developingto categorize the protagonists in the growing debate, much of the terminologyin the "electronic gossip" on the Internet. Apparently the terms"maximalists" and "minimalists" stem from my own writings a decade ago.Now, however, we encounter "positivists" vs. "nihilists," "crypto-Fundamentalists"vs. "scientific historians," "triumphalists" vs. "supercessionists." Next, Isuppose, we will see "Zionists" vs. "Anti-Semites." Such name-calling is perhapsinevitable in the heat of the battle; but it certainly seems silly to lay people,and by oversimplifying, it serves only to obscure the substantial and serious differencesbetween two emergent "schools" of biblical interpretation that arelikely to dominate biblical scholarship for some time. In any case, the increasingrancor of the discussion is the clearest indication of the desperation among exclusivelytext-based historians that Halpern, quoting Jacob Burckhardt, hascharacterized as the "spiritual bankruptcy of philology" in itself. The revisionistsare right about one thing: the impasse is such that neither they nor wecan write a history of ancient Israel based entirely on the biblical texts. That istheir despair, however, not ours.

    In the remainder of this book, I hope to clarify these issues and to focusupon what I consider to be the crux of the matter: How and whether we canwrite a history of ancient Israel, and how biblical texts and archaeological evidencecan interact as legitimate sources for history-writing. Before proceeding,however, we need to set the stage by noting what the revisionists substitutefor the now-rejected notion of "the Bible as history": "the Bible asliterature."

History, Literature, and Faith

It has always been apparent that the Hebrew Bible is, among other things, literature? and immortal literature at that. Thus the modern, critical study ofthe Bible began properly in the mid-19th century as "literary criticism"(sometimes called "Higher Criticism"). This approach was, and still is, despitemany detractors today, a fundamental starting-point. From the beginning,however, literary criticism ? the detailed analysis of the historical settingof texts; their sources, authorship, and date; and the complex history oftheir transmission ? had as its ultimate goals (1) the recovery from the textsof a real history of events; and (2) the exegesis of these texts so as to reevaluatethe theological interpretations to be derived from or attached to these events,both ancient and modern. In short, the classical literary approach to the HebrewBible incorporated a tacit recognition of the Bible's fundamentally "historical"character. To be sure, over time literary-critical study has seemed tomany to undermine that very history, perhaps irretrievably. Again, the revisionistshave a point: it is no longer possible simply to read the Hebrew Bibleat face value as "history." The Bible is, rather, a series of theological reflectionsby later Israel on its past experience, not a "history of Israel." Yet that factdoes not mean that there is no history to be gleaned from the literature, as Ishall show presently.

    For the "revisionists," however, one must make a choice: we are constrainedto regard the Bible either as "history" or as "literature." Given theirhistoriographical nihilism, the choice is a foregone conclusion: the Hebrew Bibleis only literature. As Niels Peter Lemche and Thompson put it recently: "theBible is not history, and only very recently has anyone ever wanted it to be."Never mind that the statement is patently false (the Bible's millions of readersover two millennia have almost always thought it to be "history"). What is atwork here? What is the ideological motivation behind the revisionists' determinationto view the Hebrew Bible merely as literature? And what do they meanby "literature"?

The "Bible as Literature" Movement

Once again, the revisionists are scarcely innovators, for the beginnings of theso-called "new literary critical" approach to the Hebrew Bible can be tracedback nearly 30 years. What distinguishes the "new" literary approach from thetraditional? According to J. Cheryl Exum and D. J. A. Clines (of the "Sheffieldschool" of Davies and others) in their edited collection of essays, The New LiteraryCriticism and the Hebrew Bible, the "new" literary approach "is not a historicaldiscipline, but a strictly literary one, foregrounding the textuality (italicsmine) of the biblical literature." According to these leading proponents ofthe method, who are among the first to set it forth explicitly, it is rather eclectic,embracing for instance newer (i.e., nonhistorical) literary-critical approaches,poststructuralist methods, feminist criticism, political and materialist(but not classically Marxist) criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, and aboveall deconstruction.

    If one pursues the essays in this provocative volume, along with other recentliterature on new literary criticism, the following composite portraitemerges. It should be no surprise that the resulting portrait resembles quiteclosely the movement of the past decade or so known in wider literary circles as"deconstruction," which in my judgment is the parent of this particular radicalschool of biblical criticism. My categorization here may be somewhat cryptic inthe interest of brevity, but browsing a bit in recent literature will show that it isvalid.

What Are "Texts"?

1. A text is an individual "work of art in its own right" not something to be pursued as a :means to an end.

2. There is no single, authoritative "meaning" for a text.

3. How a text "signifies" is as important as what it "signifies."

4. "Structure" is more important than content.

5. There are multiple, almost limitless, approaches to a text that may be legitimate and productive.

6. All texts, because of the "unbounded" nature of language, are incomplete, often contradictory; most even lack any "conscious intentionality" on the writer's part.

7. Texts have no intrinsic "meaning"; any meaning must be supplied, and it depends largely on the reader's response, as well as the "social context of knowledge" the author's and ours.

8. "Meaning" is best "produced" by reading the text imaginatively and symbolically, on many levels at once, as well as in conjunction with other texts ("intertextuality").

9. Readings far beyond the text's original boundaries are not only possible but desirable.

10. The only "test" of a reading's "authenticity" (if any) is acceptance by the reader's particular community.

    Such new literary critical manifestations may not necessarily be subscribedto by all practitioners of the method, but they are typical. The theory,however, is best understood in practice, particularly if we look at how texts aretreated specifically. Again, my point of departure is standard, recent literaturein mainstream biblical studies.

Continues...
Excerpted from What Did the Biblical Writers Know, and When Did They Know It?by William G. Dever Copyright © 2002 by William G. Dever. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.