This new series spawned out of my recent several-part series analysis of the biblical exodus (see Part 1). Here I argue that along with the objectively historical, legend and myth constitute significant portions of Old Testament texts, especially ones describing Moses, the Hebrew exodus, the conquests under Joshua, the reign of King David, among others. Commentary is made on the methodological approaches used by historians to learn about the ancient past while we also explore recent research on the reliability of memory and oral traditions.

Despite what will give some readers the impression of a harsh, even ideological treatment of the biblical texts, I am not offering a theological critique of the Bible as Scripture. Instead, this series limits itself to a historical critique intended to be fair to the biblical texts themselves. My recommendation is that should these historical critiques convince readers and conflict with their preconceived, personal theological interpretations of Scripture, those readers search for a more appropriate hermeneutic that will enhance their faith rather than diminish it.

The Methodological Work of Historians

“The task of the Old Testament scholar is to use a methodology and remain faithful to the Hebrew Bible text” (Gwizo 2019, 68). These are true words that, in Biblical Studies, have motivated historians to conceptualize methodologies for learning about the spatio-temporally situated flesh-and-blood human beings comprising what they call “ancient Israel,” “the Jews,” “Israelites,” “Hebrews,” and so on. 

It is agreed among secular, professional historians that it is best to avoid letting personal biases infiltrate one’s work. Although I am not a biblical historian, in the Study of Religions we operate by the same standard, taking seriously phenomenologist Edmund Husserl’s notion of the epoché, which simply entails the bracketing of personal convictions and beliefs, religious, political, or any other, when engaging in research and data analysis. The concept of the epoché is therefore an appropriate principle and rule of thumb; a failure to embrace it will have scholars conducting their work in ways that are parochial, agenda-driven, and unnameable to sound scholarship.

Applying this principle to Biblical Studies, the questions of theology and biblical inspiration are separate matters entirely. Historical methodologies are both incapable and disinterested in proving or disproving the Bible as Sacred Scripture. In the context of professional scholarship, if the historian’s objective is to arrive at the “theologically important” (Gerard von Rad cited by Gwizo 2019, 70), it is not to be the theologically significant for the historian but that which was of great importance for the ancient Hebrews and Jews, according to the late and limited traditions in which their memories are preserved. The historian must “listen as carefully and objectively as possible” to the voices of ancient traditions and avoid distortion (Martin 2008, 30).

To produce accounts and hypotheses about ancient history, contemporary historians need to ask a range of questions that comprise what is called source criticism: Who wrote or produced a particular source? When and where was it produced? What other materials does the ancient author draw upon? These questions are underscored by the view that the biblical corpus is a collection of historical writings open to critical investigation that should be approached using independent rational judgment rather than dogmatic authority (Fryer 1974, 17). All historians agree that texts from ancient history were written by human authors over long periods of time in “cultural matrix(es) very different from our own” (Collins 2016). The historian must attempt to understand the text in the context of that ancient setting.

Historical methods provide a toolkit for historians to apply to the ancient source materials for answering these source-critical questions. A few criteria are commonly utilized, such as the number of textual sources attesting to an event or personage of ancient history, independent cross-corroboration between sources (i.e., two independent sources are better than just one), internal coherence or consistency, archaeological attestation (i.e., do the text’s details of described events, locales, settlements, cultures, and so on cohere or conflict with established archaeology?), early attestation (i.e., a particular source’s earliness in terms of composition in relation to the described events), and other criteria (e.g., embarrassment, dissimilarity) that are applied by historians to ancient texts.

In this sense, the term “critical” does not necessarily have a negative connotation: “Not all biblical criticism is negative or destructive. In fact, the basic idea of criticism is rather positive, namely that of carefully examining the relevant data and passing judgement on them” (Fryer 1974, 44). But one might also argue that no “critical” historical method is positive or negative since, as I mentioned earlier, they are incapable of answering questions of theological significance that interest theologians, such as those of biblical inspiration. Instead, by using these methods, the historian is interested in drawing conclusions about a particular source’s value and reliability for historical reconstruction.

Yet, from a historical objectivist approach, answering these source-critical questions for many of the biblical sources proves difficult for several reasons. Often it is challenging to just determine who the author was, the time period during which a source was written, the location where the author was situated in which he composed it, and the external circumstances of composition when extra-biblical materials are considered, many of which do not cohere with the much later biblical stories described in the Pentateuch, the conquests in the Book of Joshua, among others. The result can be an exercise in speculation and scholarly dispute.

For our biblical sources, the texts are generally significantly removed chronologically from the events their authors describe (e.g., assuming Abraham lived around 2000 BCE, it took an eye-watering 1,400 years for the traditions in which he was embedded to be later crystallized in the Book of Genesis; for Moses this was about six centuries; for King David about four, and so on), show signs of going through numerous hands and redactions, introducing tensions into the sources themselves, and drew from earlier non-biblical sources, many of which have their share of source-critical challenges.

On the other hand, the biblical sources are also histories, showing some confirmation in extra-biblical sources. Historians, for example, are confident that “Israel” was in existence around the year 1209 BCE, that there really was a King David, and an exile was caused by a Babylonian invasion in c. 589–587 BCE. Many biblical descriptions also situate the biblical events historically and contextually, refer to real figures and locations in ancient Middle Near Eastern locales, and can therefore be used as sources for historians in different fields; for example, an Assyriologist (a historian specializing in the histories of ancient Assyria and Babylonia) can use a biblical source in correspondence with an Assyrian one (e.g., despite the legendary depictions in these sources, historians can know from them that Nebuchadnezzar II at least reigned as a powerful king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, given his attestation in scant Babylonian sources (e.g., Nebuchadnezzar Chronicle), as well as biblical sources, such as Daniel, Jeremiah, and II Kings, and archaeology supportive of biblical descriptions of him besieging Jerusalem and destroying the Kingdom of Judah c. 589–587 BCE).

Having outlined these fundamental principles of historical investigation, I now focus on oral tradition, the means by which the ancient legends, histories, and myths were passed along by the Hebrews and later the Jews. We will also draw on insights offered by recent research in memory studies too, since memory and oral tradition are inextricably entangled.

References

Collins, John J. 2016. “Historical-critical methods from Part III – Methods and approaches.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, edited by Stephen B. Chapman and Marvin A. Sweeney, 129-146. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Gwizo, Innocent. 2019. “Old Testament Methodologies: An Evaluation.” E-Journal of Religious and Theological Studies 5(3):68-83.

Martin, Dale B. 2008. Pedagogy of the Bible: An Analysis and Proposal. Louisville, Kentucky, United States: Westminster John Knox Press.

Fryer, N. S. L. 1987. “The Historical-Critical Method – Yes or No?” Scripture 20:41–70.