A Good Tip for Biblical Scholars from an Aussie Communist Author

As I said in my previous post, I've been reading Frank Hardy's The Hard Way, his account of the writing of Power Without Glory and the trial that followed publication. It's likely some people haven't heard of Hardy or of his book which he self-published back in 1950. The book was a fictional account of political powerbroker and businessman, John Wren, who had considerable influence in Victorian state politics and especially the Labor Party. In the book, the character John West is based on Wren. Hardy, a member of the Communist Party of Australia, was charged with criminal libel by Ellen Wren, wife to John Wren. In the book her character, Nellie West, is portrayed as having an adulterous relationship from which she became pregnant and had a child. If found guilty of criminal libel not only would the book have been banned and suppressed but, as the author, Hardy faced a lengthy gaol term as well. As I said in my previous post, reading The Hard Way has sent me back in time through my memories of living in Melbourne back in the early 70s. Most of the time I lived in Fitzroy, part of a network of Catholic Worker inspired households in the area. In many respects the world that Hardy describes in the Melbourne of 1950 was still there in 1972. The Melbourne City Watchhouse was largely unchanged, the streets, the pubs, for the last two days I've even been reliving the smells of the Fitzroy I knew then. Oh the tantalising tricks of memory. Because, of course, that Melbourne, that Fitzroy no longer exists. When I was last there on 2004 the working class neighbourhood had become pretty gentrified and up-market. I found that quite sad, in fact. I think that all those memories flooding back now may prompt some reflective posts of my younger days in Melbourne but not tonight. Tonight I want to pick up on something that Hardy wrote that seems quite relevant to biblical studies today.

As I said, Hardy's book was an historical fiction. It was based on the Wrens, especially John Wren and was designed to expose the corrupt workings of power in Victoria, especially as it related to the Labor Party and working class struggles. Hardy aspired to be a realist writer and, as a Communist, wrote the book as a tool for politicising and consciousness-raising amongst working class Australians. The Hard Way is fascinating for its portrayal of the way Communist and union activists brought literature into the lives of working class people, even when on the job.

At the end of Power Without Glory Hardy included an Author's Note on fiction and history and the writing of characters. It's referred to a number of times during the trial and so is quoted a few times in The Hard Way. I'm going to share those quotes here because I thought Hardy's observations were quite pertinent to biblical studies.

Hardy points out that there are three types of characters in his book, fictional, 'real people' and composite characters. The composite characters are a blend of real and fictional elements. He then observes

Will the characters be real or invented ? Characters – that is, people - cannot be invented, they must be based on persons drawn from real life… But no single person, as he exists, is concentrated or typical enough for literature; something must be added, something taken away. In every person there are characteristics typical of many people… Sometimes actual historical events and people will be portrayed, often composite incidents and characters…

I'm struck by the thought then that no matter how 'real' a character may be they are still in some sense composite because even for real people "something must added". At the same time too, even fictional characters in some way are derived from real people. All narrative then, even or especially narrative about real people and real events is in some sense composite, a blend of fiction and actuality. Power Without Glory is an example of such a composite work, so too is The Hard Way. Frank Hardy himself used a nom de plume, Ross Franklyn, based on both his and his wife's given names. Ross Franklyn becomes a character in The Hard Way; it's Hardy's way of reconciling the two people he had become, the novelist and the activist. Ross Franklyn is a fictional character but he is also a composite character, too, based on Frank Hardy himself.

Hardy's insights can also be applied to the biblical narratives, both Old and New Testaments. Even when they are dealing with real people, among whom I would place Ahab, Hezekiah, Josiah, Judas Maccabeus, Jesus, Pontius Pilate, Herod, Mary the mother of Jesus, these are all to a greater or lesser extent composite characters. The events that surround them, that they perform are likewise composite events, blends of fiction and reality, reality fictionalised. As for the fictional characters and events, they too are drawn on real people and events in some way, we just don't know who these people and events are and we will likely never know.

Many people might be upset by this fictionalising, the composite nature of the people and events recounted, probably no more so for large numbers of people, that the Gospel portraits of Jesus might be composite, fictionalised. In response I want to quote another passage from The Hard Way. First I needed to point out that despite the fact that the criminal libel was brought by Ellen Wren due to Nellie West's adultery, it's a fact that Nellie West is portrayed sympathetically all the way through Power Without Glory. She is driven to adultery by her husband. Also in The Hard Way, Hardy alleges that information he and his defence team received, gave them to believe that Ellen Wren was pressured by her husband into the action because he didn't want to bring an action himself. If he did he'd be putting the spotlight on serious allegations of criminal behavior on the part of the book's character, John West, criminal behaviour that might actually have been composite in nature, much moreso than Nellie West's adultery.

After the trial when Hardy is found not guilty by the jury, he relates this account of the reactions of John and Ellen Wren to the result.

I put the pen aside and idly began to read press cuttings which lay on the table.

‘John Wren was reading a copy of Fortune, the American business magazine,’ I read the interview by Herald journalist, Noble. ‘He put it down. I said, “Mr Wren, have you heard the news? The Hardy jury has returned a verdict of Not Guilty!” Not an emotion showed on the face of the seventy-nine-year-old financier. There was a long silence, broken only by his occasional repetitions, “Not Guilty… extraordinary!”… With a pale blue shawl around her shoulders, grey-haired Mrs Wren opened the kitchen door herself. She was white-faced but composed. She said, “The verdict is nothing more than I expected, that’s all I can say.”’

Ross Franklyn seemed as if he had been reading over my shoulder: ‘Well, John and Nellie West acted in character,‘ he said.

‘Yes,’ I replied simply.

What really counts is not that a figure has been made a composite of fiction and real. That's how narrative works. What counts most is that they act in character, in the text and vice versa. It's up to us to work out whether or not they do.

Bible, History and Ancient Israel

I've just finished reading Megan Bishop Moore's Philosophy and Practice in Writing a History of Ancient Israel, well, rereading actually. I read it last year and was supposed to write a review but life got right away from me as '09 progressed. Re-reading it I'm ready to do the review but I thought I would first gather/research my thoughts here.

I have to say the book is pretty good in the way it surveys how "biblical" history or "Ancient Israel" history has been done from mid-last century to present. It provides a particularly good account of the challenge raised by the 'minimalists' in the late 80s and 90s to a whole suite of assumptions that had underpinned biblical/Ancient Israel history writing up until then. Two key assumptions, in particular, were questioned by the minimalists - the reliability of the biblical texts for providing any valid information about Ancient Israel and the very validity of the term Ancient Israel to understand Iron Age Palestine. Was the history of Ancient Israel/Iron Age Palestine nothing more than a scholarly construct based on biblical texts, themselves products of the later Persian/Hellenistic eras, that had but retrojected a constructed narrative onto the past, even displacing that Iron Age past?

The one thing that strikes me reading this book is just how much old testament biblical studies has been aligned with doing history, in many respects subsumed by doing a specific history, that of Iron Age Palestine. In terms of the texts, I'm pretty much a minimalist. I don't think any of them come from the Iron Age. They may draw on Iron Age resources, a few psalms and hymns and poems, a few laws and maybe some rituals. And clearly the author(s) of Kings had some kind of chronicle or king lists for Palestine in the Assyrian period and later because we can find references to these same monarchs in Assyrian records. But at the same time it's clear that Kings is written well and truly after the events it describes - it has to be to end, when it does, at the Babylonian conquest of Judah. Kings ends in an exile present so it has to be written some time later, later exile, Persian or beyond. And as Kings serves as final instalment of the saga, Joshua - Kings, known in Judaism as the Former Prophets, and known by scholars as the Deuteronomistic History due to recurring patterns of style and thought, ideology, then it seems fair enough to regard all those texts as roughly contemporaneous in composition. The alternative account of this history, Chronicles, definitely ends in a Persian present, as do, of course, Isaiah and the Book of the Twelve Minor Prophets. So their composition has to be in the Persian period or later.


The Torah, too, has long been regarded as post-exilic in its final form. The famous documentary hypothesis of historical critical scholarship, following Wellhausen postulated a post-exilic context to the P or priestly material that was understood as one of the four key assumed sources of the Pentateuch. This was the material added by the editors who redacted the materials into the Torah's final form. Historical critical scholars relied on the assumed age of the other assumed sources, most famously (the Book of) J, which was generally dated to the 10th or 9th centuries BCE. The dating of these various assumed sources relied on the historical veracity of the biblical narratives about Ancient Israel. But for a long time, what was crucial was to identify and date sources, it was a kind of an archeology of the text from which a history could be constructed and by which scholars could identify and locate specific voices, not least the 'original voices' of different prophets. A similar process has been employed in New Testament studies, especially in the quest for the historical Jesus but I wont go into that here.

By mid-20th century, methodological problems with such source criticism had led to the development of form criticism and redaction criticism. The latter analysed the way the sources had been edited together to create the final text. However if an editor is too skilful in their work, then they are starting to be more like an author, what became termed as the case of the disappearing editor (redactor).

Most of this historiography is not covered by Bishop who starts her account early/mid-20th century with the US based biblical archeology 'school' of Albright and Bright who weren't at all interested in digging in the text when they could be digging in the (Palestinian/Israeli) soil instead. Like the historical critics, these archeologists had great confidence in the overall historicity of the biblical accounts and theirs was a genuinely scholarly approach, unlike the ark hunters and other Christian fundamentalist so-called archeologists of today e.g. the late Ron Wyatt. She turns then from US biblical archeology of the soil to European archeology of the text as represented by Albrecht Alt and his 'school'. This is the good old historical critical project that I referred to above. Like Albright and his followers, Alt and his colleagues had as their goal the reconstruction and elucidation of the history of Ancient Israel. As with the US archeology school, Alt and his colleagues followed a genuinely scholarly approach to their work with texts. Both schools were positivist, empirical in their approach and committed to objectivity in the way they did history.

I think several factors undermined both these approaches. By the 70s archeology is starting to put in doubt some of the presumed historicity of the biblical narrative. At the same time, for both archeology and for history more broadly, the 20th century saw changes in philosophy and practice in both disciplines. Bishop outlines these shifts in her first two chapters. Inasmuch as biblical studies had been conflated with doing history, then the rise of minimalism was necessary and inevitable. The minimalists could be seen as calling people to more rigorous standards of doing history. Or even more importantly, asking just what was the point of all this history of Ancient Israel work in the first place. How much was the interest in the states/statelets of Iron Age Palestine due to theological rather than straightforward historical concerns? And, given their later provenance, how relevant are the biblical texts to reconstructing a history of Palestine in the Iron Age? Is placing reliance on the biblical version of events, evidence of theological bias, especially if artifacts and other data don't give support to that version?

Bishop gives a chapter to the minimalists and then turns to the 'opposition' which she terms non-mimimalist. It's a rather awkward term because it implies an opposing binary whereas I think the reality is more like a continuum at (or towards) one end of which sit the minimalists while the non-minimalists stretch along most of the rest of the continuum. Some such as Iain Provan (and his colleagues Long and Longman) would appear to sit right down towards the other end of the of the continuum, at least in accepting the reliablity of the biblical narrative, accepting everything from the Abraham/Sarah story onwards as a history (alas Bishop doesn't report why Provan, Long and Longman don't accord the primordial 'history' - Adam to Babel - the same sort of reliability). The problem with such an approach is that, especially with no other data, artifactual or textual, for verification, what's produced is not so much history as scholarly paraphrases of biblical narrative. So much of the older history of Ancient Israel really is nothing more than biblical paraphrase.

Bishop's final chapter assesses the state of the discipline i.e. history of Ancient Israel. It seems that for many if not most non-minimalists, there is a new consensus in approach, one in which results are understood to be more contingent and in which there can be a greater variety of reconstructions and consequent discussion and debate. As a biblical scholar, rather than ancient historian, I'm most interested in what we can learn about the religious world of Iron Age Palestine and how much continuity it had with the older 'Canaanite' world of the Bronze Age. I'm also interested in the religious interactions between Palestine and its neighbours e.g. Egypt. However what I would really like to know more about is Palestine in the Persian and Hellenistic periods and not just Palestine but the communities of YHWH worshippers within Palestine and beyond. We get a glimpse from the Elephantine papyri and can get some glimpses by reading some of the biblical texts such as Isaiah and The Twelve. Biblical history for me is, in part, the history of the religious ideas found in the Old Testament and related texts, how they fit in the broader religious world of the ancient Middle East and beyond. Whether or not there was a Samson or a Saul or a Solomon is nowhere near as important, at least from a biblical studies perspective.

Some more notes on Bible and History

There's generally not a lot of commentary in this blog. I do however post most entries on my Facebook page and often there's a bit of discussion there. People who know me will often email me comments as well. And so late last month I received this comment on my Bible and history posts. I responded then that it was something I should take up on my blog and tonight I'm finally giving it a go.

The other thing I'd briefly say is re that vexed question of truth and the OT, it could almost be summed up in the odd old proverb "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear". If the OT has no real truth historically while Jesus is about the fulfillment of a historical promise-cum-revelation and he sees himself as to some extent incarnate in that past history, one can't then easily maintain his truth is as good as the negation of that same history. Lies, falsehoods and distortions can't produce Truth-in Itself and although there is such a thing as mythic truth it's only because we understand truth to fact that we can even assume such a notion as a more elastic mythic truth exists. I realize you don't like, perhaps even detest, the book of Joshua and I won't deny it has its difficulties for us

There are a number of issues here but I think the key one revolves around Jesus and his relationship to the collections of texts known as Old Testament. Even with that statement I had to pause because there are a number of ways that it could be qualified, not least because there was no such thing as an Old Testament let alone Jewish Bible in Jesus' day. Both were constructed by Christians and Jews in the years centuries after Jesus' execution (there still is and never has been a definitive Christian Old Testament while the Jewish Bible was probably standardised by the 3rd or 4th centuries CE). Nevertheless we can say that in the first century there was a world of authoritative text and story that we can call biblical or scriptural. Probably the heart of this world was Torah, the 5 books of Moses, shared by Jew and Samaritan alike. Psalms and David were also important for Jews, as well as Isaiah and, for many, 1 Enoch (from the evidence at Qumran).

Part of the problem is that Jesus seems to accept the validity of most of these stories. He talks about Moses and Abraham and Noah as if they were real people. He talks about David and Solomon in the same way and even claims some kind of descent from David. But if David and Solomon weren't real people and neither were Moses and Abraham and Noah well then what do we say about Jesus? Because if Jesus is divine isn't he supposed to be omniscient? Why isn't he speaking like a modern historian or archeologist or even a modern biblical scholar? It's a bit like the creationists. Despite their claims, they aren't the least bit interested in the verbal inerrancy of Genesis 1 or Genesis 2. Nope it's the Gospel inerrancy that concerns them especially those passages where Jesus seems to talking about Adam and Eve, Noah etc as if all of that is real. In other words we don't have any texts in which Jesus speaks like a modern evolutionary biologist or a palaeontologist or a geologist.

But even more importantly is the fact that Jesus claims to be some kind of fulfilment of the stories and other literary materials that we term Old Testament. His claims are grounded in them so what do we make of that? Surely if these stories didn't actually happen but are instead fiction what does that make of Jesus' claims?

I'll attempt some kind of answer by responding to the allegation that I 'don't like' even 'detest' the book of Joshua. Now I wouldn't be the first person to be troubled by Joshua. It has sat like a fishbone in the throat of Christianity for centuries. And lets face it, if Joshua was a straightforward no holds barred historical account, then there is no alternative from a human, from a Christian perspective but to condemn it as a brutal and genocidal text. And tragically it is a text that has been used to give warrant to genocide, in the Americas, in Australia and now in Palestine.

But I don't detest Joshua, although there was a time when I might have done. However when I realised that reading it as history was the wrong way to read it that I came to appreciate that this text is so much richer than a simple catalogue of events. Reading it as history actually misses the point because one very striking pattern is the play between who is in this Israel and who isn't. What is this Israel is the central issue of the book. Because the other surprise that happens when reading Joshua as story not history is that all of a sudden you see that the text is constantly undermining any notion of a 'pure' Israel. At the beginning we meet a unified homogenous Israel. At the end, Israel is merged, blended with the people of the land while religiously it is indistinguishable from them. The Israelites are worshipping the Baals and Astoreths of their neighbours as Greek Joshua declares at its conclusion. It's almost as if Joshua knows that Israelites once were Canaanites and is determined to make sure that we the readers know that fact. Fro that perspective Joshua is forcing us to face up to the othering processes we humans engage in to create communities, to determine who is inside and who is outside. I still hope to write something on the Girardian processes in the book of Joshua.

The real history lies in the texts themselves not the stories they contain. The texts represent a process of cultural/religious transformation in the Levant/Palestine over the preceding centuries. It was that transformation that set the preconditions for Jesus. Without that transformation there could have been no Christ event, pure and simple. So Jesus does represent a fulfilment. He's not the only one, there's also the Mishnah and the Memar Markah. The processes of transformation these texts represent include a range of trajectories, some of which find in Jesus a major turning point at which they become Christian trajectories.

Philip Davies: Watch Your Language

Thanks to Jim West for this. As Jim says, Philip Davies is "a delightful and enjoyable scholar" and in this piece "writes a delightful and thoroughly enjoyable op-ed on scholars and the language they use."

It's from Bible and Interpretation and here's a sample:

Here is one of my original proposed dictionary entries (p. 333):

ISRAEL

(a) A probably fictitious entity supposedly composed of the elements of two nation-states formed in Palestine during the Iron II period under the kings David and Solomon

(b) The name given to a kingdom centered in the Ephraimite hill country of Palestine between the end of the 10th and the end of the 8th centuries BCE, possibly deriving its name from a group mentioned in the MERNEPTAH STELE.

This entry greatly oversimplified the issue: the Israels that the biblical writers offer us are more varied and variegated: the books of Deuteronomy, Kings, Ezekiel, Chronicles, and Ezra, for instance, all differ on what “Israel” includes (make up your selection from Samarians, Judeans, and Judeans claiming to be returned from exile, proselytes, gerim). It is now clearer, too, that Judah and Israel probably originated independently, developed independently and, though closely associated during their history (by temporary political union and vassalage), were at their demise antagonistic neighbors.

So go and read the rest.

More on Bible and History

In an earlier post, I effectively began a survey of Old Testament texts assessing their historical veracity and usefulness for cnstructing a history of ancient Israel. I pretty much covered the primary history of Genesis to Kings and touched on the Latter Prophets and 1 Enoch. As far as Genesis and the Torah are concerned, I think it's safe to say that most biblical scholars are minimalists as far as history is concerned. In other words no one is interested in a historical Moses, or dating the Exodus these days, let alone a historical Jacob or Abraham or Sarah. These are recognised as stories composed and written many centuries after the times in which they are set. It follows then that Joshua has likewise been minimalised, so to speak, as far as history is concerned. There are some who might try to find history in parts of Judges but the days when scholars debated the amphictyony as a critical institution of ancient Israelite society are long gone. In the biblical studies history wars, the line sits at Saul, David and Solomon. As yet, there is still no independent evidence to verify the stories in Samuel (Saul and David) or 1 Kings (Solomon). It's only in 2 Kings that we start to find a story world peopled by characters and relating events for which we can find other attestation. And even then, the other attestation does not necessarily agree with the bibical account. But at least we know that some of the kings in 2 Kings were real people.

There is, of course, another account of this history, the book of Chronicles, 1 & 2 Chronicles/Paralipomena - the Greek name means the things left out. however, the problem with Chronicles is that not only does it include material not found in Samuel or Kings but the portrait of David and Solomon found in Chronicles is markedly different to that in Samuel and Kings. Indeed, Chronicles is mostly concerned with the Temple cult and so David here appears in a very idealised almost priestly form and Solomon after him. It omits the story of Bathsheba, Absalom's rebellion and other less than flattering accounts of David. So Chronicles account of these stories is generally not regarded as having much historical merit at all.

Related to Chronicles is Ezra-Nehemiah, which in Jewish bibles is counted one book but in Christian bibles is counted as two. And just like Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah is very problematic for doing any history. Parts of both texts are related in first person, however neither Ezra nor Nehemiah seem to be aware of each other's existence, which is odd to say the least because they appear to be contemporaries in the text. Is one fiction and the other historical? The problem, which is which? And what then is the relationship of Ezra-Nehemiah to Haggai and Zechariah which appear to have another account of the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Temple. Is there history in any of these four texts? And then there is 1 Esdras which is another version of the material in Ezra-Nehemiah and some from Chronicles with some original content of its own. In other words, it's mostly derivative and not without problems at that.

Whatever one can say about Esther, one certainty is that this is a fiction designed to provide a scriptural warrant for Purim. Tobit, any history there, most unlikely. Judith? If that's history I'll eat it. Ruth is a lovely story but can it really serves as a history especially as it concerns the ancestors of David, who is likely to be a fictional character. Job? To read Job as history is a meaningless exercise. The text is not interested in providing historical details such as when or even where Job lived. The text, of course, is a script and Job is likely to be a sacred drama of some sort. Jubilees is a retelling of much of Torah.

When we turn to the rest of the biblical literature it gives little or no help in writing a history of events. Psalms, Proverbs, Qohelet, Wisdom and Sirach might be useful for writing a history of religion. Lamentations and Song of Songs are of little use to history work. Daniel is prophetic commentary on the events around Antiochus Epiphanes in the 2nd century BCE and so useful in that sense. 4 Ezra is prophetic commentary on the destruction of the Second Temple.

Only 1 and 2 Maccabees seem to be doing any real sort of history and even there we have to be careful. 2 Maccabees is more interested in a theological interpretation of events and does not cover the same breadth as 1 Maccabees. 3 and 4 Maccabees on the other hand are not interested in history, as we understand it, at all.

So if we're wanting to write an Israelite history, most of the Old Testament literature is of little use for getting details of key events and persons.

History, Story and the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible

Probably because I've been reading Megan Moore's book, Philosophy and Practice in Writing a History of Ancient Israel, in fact I've just finished it, but questions of history and text are really to the fore at the moment. But my last couple of posts are New Testament focused and I want to come back to my home turf, Old Testament/Hebrew Bible.

Over the last couple of decades there has been a bit of a history/culture war between what everyone terms minimalists and what Ed Conrad has called maximalists and Moore terms non-minimalists over how to do a history of Ancient Israel and the role the biblical texts should play in such an enterprise. I said in one of my earlier posts that for too long "biblical studies has been understood as a variant of history, digging around in the texts to ascertain what actually happened." Too often most of the so-called history has been little more than elaborate paraphrases of biblical narrative, but too often without any of the literary merit of the biblical text itself.

As part of the biblical history process, there has been the digging around in the texts, worse the dissolving of the texts to create new ones, hypothetical ones such as the Book of J or first Isaiah and so forth. These are then used in a kind of circular process to verify the historicity of the biblical narrative because these hypothetical source texts are seen as artefacts in that history even though they are really nothing more than scholarly constructions. I knew a colleague once who was very critical of the Documentary Hypothesis of the Pentateuch. He would always say that he was keen to get to heaven and see if he would meet the Yahwist - "Hi, I'm Sam Yahwist, the author of J" - we'd always chuckle over that line.

And as with the New Testament, there was also a role for oral tradition but whereas in NT it was only a matter of a number of generations with the OT and primarily the Genesis stories of patriarchs and matriarchs it was an oral history handed down over many centuries. However in the 70s the historicity of those narratives really began to be questioned and nowadays we are all pretty much minimalists when it comes to Genesis. To try and read Genesis as history really misses the point of the stories which, when treated as sacred stories, are found to be rich in a plethora of meanings, that are obscured by, lost through trying to treat them as history.

The same applies to the Exodus stories and it was brought home to me the other day at Mass most strikingly. Currently in the daily lectionary, the Old Testament readings are from Exodus. Monday's reading concerned Moses confrontation with the golden calf and the ensuing events in Exodus 32. My attention was particularly caught by this

²¹ He said to Aaron, "What did these people do to you, that you led them into such great sin?" ²² "Do not be angry, my lord," Aaron answered. "You know how prone these people are to evil."

What we have here is an example of a recurring pattern throughout these texts of putting down, abjecting the past, the ancestors. It's found in Genesis, most dramatically in the account of Joseph and his brothers. It runs all the way through the exodus accounts from Exodus to Deuteronomy, in a setting where the Israelites are almost in constant, dare I say, intimate contact with the LORD. In Joshua the triumphant (and genocidal) entry into the land sputters out towards the end into an almost civil war and ominous warnings from Joshua. Judges is a carnivalesque world were everything is topsy turvy finally spinning out of control with the parodically sociopathic Samson to culminate in the outrage at Gibeah and civil war followed by pack rape to close laconically saying "In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes." Judges is pretty much an anti-heroic narrative, at times employing a fairly morbid sense of humour as in the accounts of Jephthah and his daughter and Abimelech. The Samson story, too, is sociopathic comedy. But history? No more than the Iliad or the Odyssey or the Epic of Gilgamesh, in other words not much at all.

In Christian Bibles Judges is followed by Ruth but in Jewish Bibles the narrative moves straight into Samuel. While Judges closes seeming to say, "if only we had a king we'd be fine" Samuel and then Kings basically reply "be careful what you ask for" These Israelites are pretty bad left to their own devices but under kings they screw up even more, so much more that first the Assyrians and then the Babylonians are sent by God to put an end to the whole Israelite experiment itself.

This same pattern of abjecting the ancestors is maintained in the (latter) prophetic books (as it is also in 1 Enoch) which serve really as a commentary on the whole primary 'history' Again oral tradition used to be invoked in using these texts as history. Now it's possible to imagine a community dedicated to the memory of a Jeremiah or maybe an Isaiah but what about an Obadiah or a Joel (if we can actually ascertain in what time period Joel is actually set) or a Nahum? And is it a coincidence that the names of these prophets have something to do with the themes of the texts which bear their names. I'm most familiar with Isaiah and the Twelve Minor Prophets and the one thing that strikes me most about these two texts is how much they read as scripts for perfomance pieces. More than anything else Isaiah reminds me of a liturgical performance; is it really a libretto?

Many of the Psalms, too, read as commentary. Again that was brought home to me most strikingly on Monday by the Responsorial Psalm which was from Psalm 105/106, a long piece proclaiming the wickedness of the Israel including the incident of the Golden Calf

¹⁹They made a calf in Horeb
and worshiped a metal image.
²⁰They exchanged the glory of God
for the image of an ox that eats grass.
²¹They forgot God, their Savior,
who had done great things in Egypt,
²²wondrous works in the land of Ham,
and awesome deeds by the Red Sea.
²³Therefore he said he would destroy them—
had not Moses, his chosen one,
stood in the breach before him,
to turn away his wrath from destroying them.

In his In Search of 'Ancient Israel', Philip Davies speculates that the greater part of the Hebrew scriptures were composed pretty much contemporaneously. I remember at the time being quite excited by this idea. It made more sense to me than the notion of the rolling book(s) that moves through the centuries accumulating and absorbing additional text in a quite passive way. It always passes through the hands of generations of editors and there is no author to be seen almost anywhere. Something about that struck me as wrong - again it seemed too disturbingly linear and oddly passive. So the idea of them being composed deliberately as part of a broader project has a strong appeal. After all, these texts are remaking a religious tradition or several, I think, in response to the shock of Empire. In parts they incorporate older sources, in parts they rewrite and revise older sources and in other parts they compose wholly new material and most of the time it's not really clear which is which.

The most important history in these texts pertains to religious ideas and imagery. A good example is again in Monday's reading Exodus 32. After the destroying the Golden Calf Moses goes before the LORD and says

³⁰The next day Moses said to the people, "You have sinned a great sin. And now I will go up to the LORD; perhaps I can make atonement for your sin." ³¹So Moses returned to the LORD and said, "Alas, this people has sinned a great sin. They have made for themselves gods of gold. ³²But now, if you will forgive their sin—but if not, please blot me out of^"> your book that you have written."

This whole scene is strongly evocative of the High Priest's role on the Day of Atonement. Perhaps the words in Moses mouth are from the very ritual itself. Perhaps. We can't know for sure and that's where the need for humility, of recognising the contingency of all readings, enters in.

History, Mythology, Theology and sacred texts - a response to Audrey

I do all my blogging on my laptop, I do all my computer stuff on my laptop. I have an old desktop but it sits on a very cluttered desk in my very cluttered bedroom. The lack of space and the convenience of the laptop means that I do pretty much all my blogging and all my computer stuff in bed. Bed is about the only clear space in my bedroom and even it has a pile of books sitting on one side of it (books, books, books, my bedroom is crammed with books).

Blogging in bed is a very comfortable way of putting down your thoughts but it can also have its drawbacks. I'm the sort of person who often falls asleep over a book at night. I find I can also fall asleep over the laptop at night too. My last post, Dating the Scriptures, is one in which I fell asleep several times while writing it on Saturday night. I'm quite disappointed with it because I'd wanted to do a bit more, a lot more with the topic than I actually did, in particular getting into Old Testament texts and dating/history questions. But I kept falling asleep, finally in quite a final way. I woke up quite late on Saturday night not certain how long I'd been asleep and realising that I still had the blog page in front of me. I skimmed it through and gave it a bit of a wrap and then published it but not without misgivings. I'd planned to revisit the topic tonight and maybe explore some more the areas that I didn't really get into the other night. But then I checked the blog this evening and I found a couple of comments there including this one from Audrey to which I made a short reply. However there are a number of issues in Audrey's comment which actually relate to some of what I wanted to say on Saturday night so I'm going to respond to Audrey's observations in more detail. In my response I'll quote from the reply I made on the thread as well - except it doesn't appear to be there so my response might be even more detailed than I expected. Ok here goes

Audrey begins by picking up on the destruction of the Temple in 70 and the dating of gospels and other texts:

I thought the post 70 date, has to do with the destruction 0f the temple, as there are references to that event in some of the gosples (could be wrong about this

Audrey is right here but in my post I pointed out how the late J A T Robinson had questioned that assumption in his Redating the New Testament. In my (apparently lost) reply on the thread I remarked that I thought Robinson had done a pretty good job of putting the cat among the pigeons on this question and made a good case for the apparently clear references to be not so clear at all especially when compared to references to the 70 events in texts that are clearly post 70 and clearly referring to those events e.g. 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, Epistle of Barnabas. I don't feel confident that one can date the NT texts on the basis of any presumed references to 70, except say Revelation which I'm inclined to think is written around 70 as I read it as a reflection on the events of the 1st Jewish war and its significance for Christians

As to the early christians rearanging facts to suit early myth and theology, of course they did! Herod killing the new born in Mathew is clearly meant to put Jesus in the same league as Moses - Its not a statement of fact, it's a literary allusion.

I agree that early Christians rearranged and enhanced and augmented facts. The diffferent narrative order of John to that of the Synoptics is a clear example of that and one that has exercised the minds of many scripture scholars over the generations trying to resolve the differences so as to create a coherent single narrative. The events were also framed in specific theological and mythological perspectives designed to highlight their deeper significance. The problem is, of course, trying to identify clearly which is which. I'm not certain that it's possible and so that's why I couldn't say for sure that Herod's slaughter of the male infants of Bethlehem didn't happen. Yes, the story has allusions to Moses but it has other allusions as well. Are they designed to provide an interpretive to understand the significance of real events or are they fiction designed to highlight a specific relationship Jesus has to Old Testament figures and models, or both (I never dismiss both/and)? Certainly by all accounts the event is in keeping with the character of Herod so something like that could have happened. We just don't have any other evidence to say one way or another. One thing for sure is that a dispassionate reading of both Matthew's and Luke's infancy narratives sees a birth associated with some sort of messianic fervour. Something like that would have made a king like Herod act. The only thing is we can't know for sure and we can't tell what might be real and what might be fiction.

As to the resurection - to an atheist like me, it's simple, if he got up - he was'nt dead. If he was dead - he did'nt get up. This is another example of the early christians using myth (and imagination) to make a theological point, to take it literaly is a little silly.

Is it really that simple? And this is a crucial point that I wanted to get into the other night but didn't. In our culture when people die that's it. But not so in other cultures. Many years ago I knew an aboriginal woman, an activist, still is in fact. Back then she was regularly visited by her grandmother who was always telling her off about stuff and so forth. The only problem was that her grandmother had been dead for quite a few years. According to freinds of mine she lived with, the grandmother had a bad habit of appearing at the top of the stairs (they lived in a big old semi-detached house in North Fitzroy) and deliberately startling this woman. They never saw the grandmother but they certainly knew from this woman's agitation and anger when her grandmother was around. Hers is not the only case of visitations from the dead in aboriginal cultures that I know of and I'm sure these cases can be multiplied n times just for Australian indigenous cultures alone. I'm told that in Central Australia aboriginal people don't like going to hospitals because of all the dead people - spirits - they see hanging around there. Similar stories abound in other indigenous cultures from the Pacific, the Americas and so forth. People have told me stories of all sorts of things they've experienced in such cultural settings and how disturnig it was for them as Westerners to suddenly have all their cultural rational certainties challnged through exposure to a totally different cultural perspective. And in that cultural setting things do happen that aren't supposed to from a modern rationalist let alone atheist perspective. In terms of the Resurrection I want to cite South African New Testament scholar, Pieter Craffert who adopts a social scientific anthropological approach to such questions

From a social-scientific perspective two answers can be given as to whether Jesus rose bodily from the dead: yes and no, but they do not mean the same as in the above scholarly answers. As already argued, yes, the sources do report about real cultural events and realities; yes, Jesus's resurrection was a genuine cultural experience for his first followers; yes, he was resurrected, as the texts indicate, in a first-century material body, because in their world, visionary experiences indeed provided sufficient evidence for such cultural claims. These visions were neither delusions nor objectively real events but culturally real experiences that are reported in the New Testament sources. As indicated above, such a cultural-sensitive understanding of the experiences of Jesus's immediate circle of followers is an inevitable insight provided by this perspective.

....once the myth of realism is replaced by the idea of multiple cultural realities, it becomes possible to also re-evaluate the empty tomb accounts. While they function as one ofthe building blocks in the mod-ern rationalist debate about Jesus's resurrection, the New Testament sources already realised that an empty tomb is no secure evidence to claim a bodily resurrection because the body could have been moved or removed. That is, on the assumption that Jesus was indeed laid to rest in a known tomb — which is not an obvious assumption. But it is the cultural logic about the belief in the possibility that deceased ancestors can intervene in human affairs which should be considered here. A different cultural logic about death and the human self is at work in cultures entertaining the notion that deceased ancestors occupy a continued social position and function in society. If Jesus was resurrected as experienced by his first followers, his tomb must have been empty because he (the person/body Jesus of Nazareth) has then assumed a different mode of being — a mode of being consistent with their afterlife beliefs ["Did Jesus Rise Bodily from the Dead? Yes and no!" Religion and Theology 15 2008]

All the early Christian texts affirm these resurrection experiences as key to the whole Christian project getting off the ground after Jesus was executed. From a historical perspective it should not be matter of saying such things can't happen and so they didn't and therefore the stories must be later inventions retrojected back in time - and consequently the texts must be late because they contain these events. And that's pretty much how the 'realist' rationalists have approached these texts for the last couple of centuries. Religious rationalists have in turn argued that not only did these events happen but they can prove from the texts that Jesus physically rose from the dead. Craffert details all manner of arguments as to whether Jesus rose from the dead and whetehr it was a spiritual resurrection or a physical resurrection. Thing is these are all questions of theology and metaphysics not history. From a historical perspective, Christianity got under way because Jesus followers believed that not only was he no longer dead but that they had seen him alive. It doesn't matter whether the historian beleives what they saw was real or, worse, saying it couldn't happen so the story was made up later.

I personally believe in the bodily resurrection, not least for its sheer poetry, but I'm not going to go over and under and around the texts to try and objectively prove it happened because we can't. All we have are those texts, nothing else, and the very nature of life and death means that we cannot access those events in any way outside the texts. All we can say objectively is that Jesus followers believed they saw him alive and leave it at that.

I supose the ten year gap is just to give time for Mark to be written, then considered worthy of being copied, then physicaly caried to other early Christin communitys, by donkey (eh haw) or on foot. Then read, then thought about, discussed, preached about, argued about. then some one has to be inspired enough by something in the original story, or missing in the original story,(this does assume that mark was first, as there is enough evidence to make that a reasonable view) that they felt another version was needed. Ten years under that context is pretty fast, it could just as easily been 20 or 30, as you say the dating are guestimates, one or two years is pushing it, though possible

I personally think that communication was much quicker in the Roman empire. It was a very sophisticated society. The fact is that early Christians were very much creators of texts. They were pioneers in the use of the codex the precursor of our book. I not only think the timelines are guesstimates but very highly constructed to put as much time between the text and the original events. Consequently John is always dated latest of all, I think because John is so richly imbued with theology and mythology. Under the rationalist approach this could only have happened after a long period of time because early Christians certainly weren't into complex theology and mythology and Jesus least of all.

This rationalist approach is actually based on 19th century romantic notions about true religion and rationality drawn from Hegel and Kant and myths of progress and reformation. It's found in the standard models of Old Testament history - history becomes central to the way scripture is read. History is a rational enterprise and furthermore the historical approach to go back in time and actually get to the spirit behind the text. In good liberal Protetant fashion they valued a simple rational relgion and presumed that the religion of ancient Israel was an ancient instance of such. However over time this religion was corrupted with hierarchy, magic, ritual and mythology. The prophets true to the spirit of Israelite religion struggled against this coruption of real religion but in the end to no avail. Finally the priests triumphed and the simple pure religion of Israel was replaced by priestly ritualistic and legalistic Judaism, a moribund and corrupt entity. And then along came Jesus who represented a renewal of the old purity of spirit. He as executed but his followers continued on his name, although only Paul really grasped the radical/rational/ethical teaching of the Master. However over time, corruption set in with mythology, ritual and priests eventually giving rise to Catholicism. But the spirit of true religion welled up again in the Reformation and then in the Enlightenment.

THis account is a very simple portrait, almost caricature, of the biblical studies project of the last two centuries but those dynamics I would suggest still characterise much of New Testament studies although thankfully it's been pretty much dispelled from Old Testament studies (except perhaps in seminaries and theological colleges) . The model of a decline from ancient Israel into ancient Judaism is false. We don't know much about ancient Israel but I'm pretty sure that the reality of ancient Israel is very different from the portrait of biblical Israel. As for the Old Testament texts they are, for the main, products of the Temple and of priests. Furthermore the old idea of Israelite religion as a simple ethical unitarian monotheism is little more than a romantic fantasy. The religion of ancient Temple Israel was a complex form of monotheism or more probably a complex of monotheisms derived from an older polytheist base and with an elaborate cosmology which included astrology, numerology, and sacred geometries together with angelologies.

Christianity emerges from this complex Jewish matrix. Rather than marking some return to some kind of pure and primitive religion I think early Christianity as a Jewish religious movement subscribed to a suite of theologies that were every bit Jewish and every bit complex. Daniel Boyarin argues that the famous Logos text of John 1 is pretty standard 1st century Jewish Logos theology given a Christological twist. You don't need to put John in the last decade of the first century to account for the theology.

Early Christianity was not a species of evangelical Protestantism as found in Baptist chapels and Gospel halls and certainly not Pentecostal superchurches. It was a Jewish religion practicing rituals derived from older Jewish Temple and synagogue models. I'm inclined to think that just as in the rest of Judaism, Christians created texts for use in rituals/worship. Sometimes they adapted older Jewish texts such as the Ascension of Isaiah but soon created their own Gospels, apocalypses, Psalmic texts such as the Odes of Solomon. I don't accept the necessity of long tunnel periods of oral tradition. Oral tradition is all very well in pre-literate societies but neither the Roman Empire nor the ancient Jewish world can be called pre-literate societies. And indeed religiously what else is 'oral tradition' but the regular rituals of worship and sacrament.

So hence I don't see the need for long time frames for the creation of Christian literature, especially literature with strong theological and mythological motifs. I'm suspicious of such models particularly if they are neatly linear and most especially if they are constructed on the basis of romantic rationalist agendas.

Dating the Scriptures

A couple of months ago, I saw a really interesting post over at Source Theory, that I've been wanting to write about for a while, on the conjectural date of the Gospels. He says

Recent discussion over at the Synoptic List has again got me wondering at how Matthew, Mark and Luke are presumed to have been written decades apart. That any of them were written even a decade apart is really only a conjecture, based on a hypothesis of literary dependence which does not really require such a conjecture. Actually the two notions are a bit circular since literary dependence is also based on the notion that the Gospels are written decades apart!

The three synoptics may all have been composed within one year of the other two. It is strange that scholars often give dates for Matthew and/or Luke that are a decade or two after Mark, when what they really want to say is merely that, say, Matthew evidences some knowledge of Mark.

I'm quite taken by the idea of Matthew, Mark and Luke being within a year or two of each other. I must admit that I found the standard dating of all four Gospels is too suspiciously neat and tidy. Below is a fairly standard scholarly dating of the four gospels taken from the Wikipedia entry on Gospel:

• Mark: c. 68–73, c 65-70
• Matthew: c. 70–100, c 80-85. Some conservative scholars argue for a pre-70 date, particularly those that do not accept Mark as the first gospel written.
• Luke: c. 80–100, with most arguing for somewhere around 85, c 80-85
• John: c 90-100, c. 90–110, The majority view is that it was written in stages, so there was no one date of composition.

In most of the standard New Testament Intros the gospel dates worked out something like above, Mark in the 60s, Matthew either in the 70s or 80s, Luke in the late 80s or even 90s and then John last of all in the 90s or early 2nd century. The only major difference was in one of Helmut Koester's books where he seemed to date John to c. 70 but without going into why. (I remember asking my then New Testament lecturer about it but he shrugged it off saying not to worry but ignore it).

As I said such a scenario had been nagging at me because it just seemed too neat and tidy. The big question for me was why always a 10 year gap. It just seemed too arbitrary, having little relation to the messiness of ordinary life. I admit doubts were really sewn by J A T Robinson's Redating the New Testament in which he had a go at dating all of the New Testament texts to before 70. He argued that all four Gospels were roughly contemporaneous. Coming into existence over a roughly 10 year period in the 50s and 60s, a notion that to me always had merit. The standard approach smacked of some sort of 'monology' - there always has to be one gospel, one prime text but maybe for early Christians such monology was an alien concept. Later Christians on the other hand would always be troubled by having not one gospel but four.

Another issue is the question of history. For too long biblical studies has been understood as a variant of history, digging around in the texts to ascertain what actually happened. And so in gospel studies there has been the quest for the historical Jesus all based on the assumption that te textual account must bear some correspondence to reality. And yet the obvious fact of the gospels is that they are constructed not according to the dictates of historical verisimilitude but instead by other concerns altogether. Perhaps that is why John is always dated last of all, its storyline is quite radically different to the other three and therefore, it's assumed, can't bear any connection to the real history. That plus the notion that it is the most theological of the gospels places it in the 90s as far away as possible from the lifetime of Jesus. After all people living close to Jesus' time would not re-arrange the facts and embed them in myth and theology would they? (My answer is yes they would) The other convenient result of such thinking is that the magical and mythical are undertood as later accretions to the gospel events. The more there are the later the text goes the thinking.

Thus we have the phenomenon of the debate over whether Jesus actually rose from the dead. N T wright for one has written extensively on it in an atttempt to represent the final word on the topic. But is there any new data on which to base all these extensive arguments. None whatsoever. At the heart of the debates are the same texts and narratives. It doesn't matter whether one wants to uphold the tradition or 'get back to the facts', neither side is working with any novum. Of course, historical Jesus questers nowadays are working with a plethora of newly discovered texts but most of them do not add any substantial new data. The arguments thus keep chasing their tales, the reconstructions become more and more elaborate.

History and Biblical Ancient Israel

Right now I'm reading Megan Moore's Philosophy and Practice in Writing a History of Ancient Israel, in which she examines the debates between so-called minimalists and maximalists when it comes to Ancient Israel and how to use the Old Testament for purposes of history. I guess I'd fit mostly in the minimalist camp, especially if I understood myself to be primarily a historian, which I don't. Certainly I don't regard the Old Testament as having a lot to tell us about the historical Iron Age kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and certainly nothing that came before. We can also glean little or no information of what happened in the Babylonian or Persian periods (there's no history in Esther). Well, at least not if you want a history that contains events and personalities. You can, of course, do a history, or maybe better do a study of the religious ideas in the Old Testament how they reconstruct a variety of religious motifs and stories and how they construct a past in that process. You can also examine how those ideas and story worlds fit within the broader context of ancient Middle Eastern religions and you can look at how those ideas are taken up in subsequent texts too.

The reason I'm writing on this is because I discovered today that Michael Heiser's Two Powers in Heaven blog is, if not shutting down, then discontinuing. Thankfully it doesn't mean the blog is being closed because there's lots of good stuff there including a most fascinating essay that Michael Heiser has put up from the Journal of Biblical Literature in 1961. Titled 'The "Son of Man" of Daniel 7:13 f.: A New Interpretation' it's by Julian Morgenstern. In it he argued, that the Son of Man/Ancient of Days Daniel 7:13 f. is derived from the old solarised YHWH cult instituted by Solomon and derived from the solar cult of neighbouring Tyre. Morgenstern argues that just as the Tyrians worshipped the sun in two aspects, Baal Shamem and , so too in Solomon's Jerusalem God was worshipped, an elder Ancient of Days who went down to Sheol at the time of the autumnal equinox and a younger Yahweh, Son of Man, who rose from Sheol at the time of the vernal equinox and was embodied in the king.

Now late last week I was memed; I had to identify the five worst biblical studies books I've ever read. Now it was difficult because, as I said, I had to read a bit of crappy stuff in my undergrad days and then again during my PhD. Most of the crappy stuff was crappy because it attempted to present a history of Ancient Israel. But all it really ever achieved was a retelling of the Old Testament account. Refreshingly, despite its age, Morgenstern writes something interesting and something which anticipates where some of the discussion would be 50 years later. But back then he must have felt that he was out on the edge. Thing is there are still some worthwhile insights in his essay.

And I hope that Two Powers in Heaven will resume again one day.

Orality and Textuality

Over at LP today, Mercurius has an interesting article on Prequels. In the article, Mercurius makes this observation re biblical literature:

I suggest that the Bible, especially the five books of Moses, fulfills many of the functional attributes of a prequel, at least in an ancient-world context. Certainly it was committed to paper (ok, papyrus) centuries after the events it purports to describe, and seeks to exposit the origins of those stories. It was in all probability written by multiple authors, attempting to weave their voices together with post-explanations of an epic story arc.

This first Prequel provided a group of semi-nomadic herders with a context for their lives and the situations in which they found themselves. It offered a narrative analysis of the fault-lines of the societies in which they lived. In Genesis and Exodus, a people told themselves stories of how they came to be

To which I replied

I love the idea of the Torah as a prequel and certainly for Christian bibles the Old Testament is meant as a sort of prequel to the JC stuff. The only quibble I have is the notion of the ’semi-nomadic’ herders. None of the biblical texts were written by or for semi-nomadic herders. They were writen by scribes, most likely in temples, for the agrarian and small urban populations of Persian and Hellenistic Palestine.

Mercurius then responded:

Quite so of the texts themselves, Michael. But those texts, we have good reason to believe, were written versions of oral tales that the Hebrews had already been telling themselves for centuries, and during their semi-nomadic phase as well. I guess that’s what I was getting at by the “ancient world context” of a prequel…

I then replied pointing out that while Genesis etc present this idyllic nomadic vision of the past it's not based on any historical reality. Hebrews were Canaanites and never were a separate nomadic people.

However Mercurius' article is a good example of what I referred to as the power of biblical narratives. Let's face it the stories are quite gripping - ripping yarns even - and they are thoroughly embedded in our culture and have remained so through the various paradigm shifts in our culture over the centuries.

This notion of ancient tales handed down orally from generation to generation is a striking example of how the power of these biblical narratives is sustained through the paradigm shifts behind modernity. Clearly non-literate societies have very powerful oral cultures but that the biblical narratives, especially those of the Torah and Joshua were handed down orally over generations is a product of 19th century Romanticism. It's part and parcel of 19th century European nationalism with its fascination for folk cultures as representatives of some sort of ethno-national spirit. No doubt, too, aspects of Enlightenment ideas of the Noble Savage are part and parcel of the package. Orality and notions of oral traditions represented a sort of purity of ethno-national spirit not yet contaminated by urbanity with its literacy, hierarchies and cosmopolitanism. Historically based biblical studies began in the 19th century under the influence of such romantic historiography. And so developed notions not only of oral traditions of Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Samson, handed down through the generations but also of oral traditions associated with prophecy and prophets that were likewise handed down orally through generations of prophetic disciples before being written down. Such ideas also flowed into New Testament studies with notions of simple communities of Jesus followers who hand down oral traditions over several generations before they are written down. This process of writing down was also understood more as a process of corruption of the pure spirit of the origins. 'Mythology', hierarchy, sacerdotalism were seen as signs of this corruption and part and parcel of the historical critical biblical studies project was to get behind these corrupting accretions to reach the pure origins that had become submerged.

One of the problems with this whole approach was the naive acceptance of the overall historicity of the narratives in the Old Testament. That was okay in the 19th century when there had been little or no archeology done but nowadays archeology has undermined the facticity of the Old Testament historical narrative and as I've said before the archeological evidence shows that the Hebrews were not a nomadic people who invaded the Palestine and conquered/displaced the native inhabitants of the land. Hebrews/Israelites were Canaanites and the transformation of Palestine was not one of outsiders removing insiders but a transformation of insiders themselves, a transformation that took place in the Persian/Hellenistic period and not in the Bronze or Iron Ages.

This perspective puts at question any possiblity of longstanding oral traditions of an Abraham, let alone a Moses or Joshua. The notion of the oral stories depends on the notion of Hebrews as a semi-nomadic people as per Mercurius own observations. But if that is a fiction not based on history so too is the notion of the oral traditions handed down over generations.

The stories of the Patriarchs etc are not oral folk narratives but narratives composed by scribes, probably temple based scribes. These are not simple tales either but sophisticated theological and philosophical works using narrative. They retell and rework ancient stories but these storeis are more likely to be 'official' stories such as the Baal narrative and other sacred stories that were part and parcel of temple religions. I have an essay coming out in the Bible and Critical Theoey e-journal looking at how the story of Absalom's revolt against David is a story shaped by ritual forms, in this instance, the rituals around the Day of Atonement. These rituals have shaped or underpin a range of other Old Testament narratives such as Cain and Abel, the Binding of Isaac, the story of Jacob, and of Joseph, even the story of David, Jonathan and Saul itself.

If there are oral traditions behind the biblical narratives, the traditions are those of temple and ritual, not those of nomadic pastoralists. But the ubiquity of the notion of the biblical stories oral tales handed down by a simple nomadic people shows the success of the historical -critical biblical scholars in embedding the 'Bible' in 19th century European Romantic ethnicism and nationalism.

Bible and History 1

I want to resume my discussion of bible and history as it pertains to the texts of the Old Testaments, ‘ancient Israel’ and biblical religion. To start off, I have to state that, with a handful of exceptions, we have no idea of when, where, or by whom any of the Old Testament texts were written. Only one text, the Wisdom of ben Sirach tells us who its author was, and that only because his grandson who translated it into Greek tells us in a prologue to the Greek version. From that prologue we know ben Sirach wrote early in the 2^nd century BCE while his grandson translated the text some fifty years later. The author of 2 Maccabees tells that the text is a précis of a (now lost) 5 volume work by a Jason of Cyrene. But the author remains anonymous although it appears they wrote in the late 2nd century BCE. The Greek version of Esther also seems to indicate that it was translated in late 2nd century BCE. Daniel and 1 Maccabees likewise can be dated to the 2nd century BCE. Daniel is about the crisis caused by Antiochus Epiphanes’ suppression of traditional religious practices in Judah and ‘paganisation’ of the Jerusalem Temple. 1 Maccabees recounts the Maccabean revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes that gave birth to the Jewish Hasmonean kingdom in Palestine. However in the case of Daniel, Greek Daniel has got more stories about the prophet than Hebrew Daniel and at Qumran we have remnants of other Daniel stories that were never included in either books of Daniel.

In contrast to these few texts, all the rest of the Old Testamental literature is anonymous. Authorship has been attributed to various biblical figures, most famously Moses traditionally understood as the author of the Pentateuch (with the exception of the account of his death at the end of Deuteronomy, attributed to Joshua). Samuel was often understood to have written Judges and part of Samuel while Psalms are attributed to David (for the most part) and other wisdom texts to Solomon but the texts themselves remain anonymous. It’s anyone’s guess who wrote Job or Song of Songs. As for the Prophets, Baruch is traditionally believed to have compiled Jeremiah, but the book itself never says so. Jubilees never names its author and as for the Enoch literature, there are great quantities both canonical (1 Enoch in the Ethiopian bible) and non-canonical (as well as texts of 1 Enoch there was a lot of other Enoch associated material at Qumran and there is the 2 Enoch Slavonic corpus and a much later Rabbinic 3 Enoch). Who wrote any of this we don’t know. Interestingly 4 Ezra/2 Esdras reckons that Ezra and five other men wrote most of the Old testament literature following the return from Babylonian captivity. The Babylonians had destroyed all the old sacred texts so under divine inspiration Ezra and his companions rewrote it all ... ‘ninety four books were written ... the Most High spoke...saying “Make public the twenty four books you wrote first and let the worthy and the unworthy read them... but keep the seventy ... (and) give them to the wise among your people”’ (14:44-46). In Jewish tradition it was Ezra who at least gave the final form to the Law following the return from Babylon.

What is most fascinating about these Ezra stories is that they recognise one definite fact about the bulk of the Old Testament literature. All of these texts know in some way of the destruction of the ‘Israelite’ states in Palestine by the Assyrians and Babylonians in 723 BCE and 600-586BCE respectively. In my previous post on this topic I linked to an article on Israeli archeologist, Israel Finkelstein. In that article, Finkelstien was presented as a radical for arguing that the stories of David and Solomon were fictions written in the reign of Josiah to justify a Jerusalemite claim to suzerainty over central or northern Palestine following the eclipse of Assyrian power. The only problem for Finkelstien’s theory is that the story of Solomon is part of the scroll of Kings (3 & 4 Reigns in the Greek bible) which goes on to recount the story of Josiah’s reign and the destruction of the Jerusalem kingdom itself by Babylon. In other words, Kings dates itself as a text to a post-monarchical present. It was also common to place the writing of Deuteronomy in the reign of Josiah because of the account in 2 Kings/4 Reigns 22 about the finding of a scroll of the law in the Temple and Josiah’s move to reform Judahite religion. The only problem is that we know little or nothing about the reign of Josiah apart from what’s in Kings and Chronicles. Furthermore the book of Deuteronomy itself knows that that the Israelite ‘experiment’ will end in tears. Indeed, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings can be read as a saga in which the Israelites are set up to fail over and over again culminating in the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and the end, once and for all, of the old monarchies in Palestine and the deportation of their priestly and aristocratic elites. The same can be said for the prophetic texts. Isaiah looks back to an Assyrian past from a Persian present, likewise the book of the 12 Minor Prophets. And while I can imagine an aristocrat from Jerusalem lugging a scroll of Psalms or a royal chronicle into exile, I can’t imagine that same aristocrat carting off a miscellany of rabble rousing texts from a ragtag of prophets. Jeremiah and Ezekiel recount the fall of Jerusalem and beyond while 1 Enoch has a panoramic vision stretching from the pre-diluvian world right through the Babylonian crisis to the (eagerly anticipated) fall of the second Temple.

I hold the view that the Old testament scriptures were composed and collated in the Persian and Hellenistic periods, and are a product of the Imperial age in the eastern Mediterranean. This period was marked by the rise and fall of empires and the resulting intermingling of cultures and religions. The Persian Empire was the first to bring together under one rule the eastern Mediterranean world. Established under Cyrus the Great in 559 BCE, at its peak the empire would stretch from Egypt and the Balkans in the west to Afghanistan and Central Asia in the east. Before Cyrus, the Fertile Crescent had been subject to the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires through most of the first half of the first millennium. Canaan and the broader Levant had been caught up in these imperial progressions from the 9th and 8^th centuries BCE onwards. I would argue that the Hebrew scriptures and the associated Greek and Samaritan scriptures, Pseudepigrapha and Qumran literature then are better understood as representing a religious project(s) of engaging with and transforming that older Canaanite-Levantine religio-cultural matrix. This project was part of major religious movements then occurring in the ancient eastern Mediterranean world in the first millennium BCE in response to the upheavals and transformations brought about by the imperial progressions. In this biblical project elements of older mythology, imagery, ritual, history were taken up and deployed to experiment with, explore and debate questions of universalism and diversity, the One and the Many, together with the allied questions of justice, good and evil, suffering and death. Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Persian and Greek religious ideas are also deployed as befitted the multi-cultural imperial background. This project was open-ended, pluralistic. There was no single monotheistic vision but several and I would argue the project continued even after the construction of biblical canons and the rise of Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity (For a very good analysis and overview of questions of Bible and history see Thomas Thompson The Bible In History: How Writers Create A Past, 2000).

Rene Girard argues that the biblical literature displays a deliberate anti-sacrificial movement, one that stands for the victim against the oppressor and scapegoater. He would argue that it is intentional on the part of the biblical authors. I think he is partially correct here. This literature is rewriting a religious world, a religious legacy. One can even say it is demythologizing the old religious order, but only because, in part, it is remythologizing a new religious order. But the demythologizing and mythic experimentation gives these texts an unanticipatad power. Furthermore the biblical project is not a coordinated process. There are a variety of projects unfolding here and a number of utopian visions. And beleive me these texts, including (especially?) such legal texts as Leviticus are utopian texts. but they all have one thing in common, the Temple. Old Palestine was a land of small monarchies and royal cults. But following the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions and the rise of the Persian rule over all of the Middle East,what happens to the Temples and their royal cults when here are no longer local kings?

The Continuing Power of Biblical Narratives

In the last couple of weeks I've had a number of opportunities to talk Bible with people in social situations. Every occasion I've come away with a renewed appreciation of just how influential the various biblical narratives are in the collective memory and also frustrated that people are not equipped to engage with this biblical power but have learnt to accept the narratives as real history.

So I'm regularly pointing out to people that there is no evidence that there ever was a David or Solomon, not to mention a Moses or an exodus. I even once had to tackle a religious affairs journalist on the ABC who described ancient Judaism as a tribalistic religion in contrast to the sophisticated Hellenistic culture around it. And people still carry the idea that ancient Jews were something like Bedouins, tribes that rode into Palestine and settled down there and that all the stange food laws and so forth come from their supposedly primitive tribal background.

Well, of course, none of that is true or, at least, verified by archeology. Indeed, the results of many years of Israeli archeology have shown that the 'history' recorded in Old Testament narratives is really creative fiction or maybe a form of historical midrash given that some apsects of the later 'history' can be verified by other means. And I have to be careful about using the word 'verified'. Such verification is simply that we have records that certain monarchs in the books of Kings and Chronicles did exist but we don't know much about them and we can't say that the biblical accounts of them give details of actual events (and the accounts in Chronicles and Kings are often in conflict, the wicked king, Manasseh, is a very good example). We also have no evidence for the existence for any of the biblical prophets. Certainly the biblical Jeremiah and Ezekiel are colourful characters. Isaiah is less so but subsequent texts about him, e.g. the Ascension of Isaiah, flesh him out more as a character. But what about Obadiah or Joel or Malachi? Indeed, we have much more information about the figure of (the prophet) Enoch than any of the Twelve Minor Prophets.

In part the power of the text is exercised through the sheer mass of cultural after effects in art, film, literature and music. Leonard Cohen is in town and his song Hallelujah riffs off the stories of David and Saul and Bathsheba in Samuel. It's a superb song and has been covered by a number of artists including the late Jeff Buckley, not to mention John Cale, k.d.laing, Rufus Wainwright and many others. I also remember an epsiode of the kids cartoon series, Rugrats, which gave a Rugrats version of the Exodus story, obviously as a seasonal contribution for Passover. These are just two examples from popular culture. Furthermore most histories of the ancient Middle East simply give a paraphrase of the Old Testament narratives when dealing with ancient Palestine. When I was tutoring for the Introduction to World Religions course at University of Qld many years ago, I'd always have to tell the class every year to ignore the accounts in the text book of ancient Israelite/Jewish religion. All that stufff about David Solomon, kings, prophets, wandering tribes, the Yahwist, 1st & 2nd Isaiah, Ezra, Nehemiah was all so much fiction or biblical paraphrase.

Ironically, I think the Book of Joshua, the one that no one likes, with its images of invasion, genocide and holy war, is the text that more than any other exposes the constructed nature of this history and in fact says that there really wasn't an invasion, that Israelites were really all the time Canaanites.

So in subsequent posts I'll have more to say about the history of Israel and the origins of biblical religion and its texts. I'll also post more on Joshua and the strange deconstructions encountered there.