CHAPTER 3
How the Bible talks about the past


1 Stories and their references to an historical world

In the last chapter, a number of biblical narratives were discussed that were obviously not accounts of an historical past, though they were central stories in books that scholars often speak of as historical. These tales were both written and passed on as tradition for quite other reasons. Even as the collectors of biblical tradition were putting together a tradition of origins, establishing a self-understanding as the ‘new Israel’ interest lay more in transcendent meaning than in developing either a real or an imagined past. Our questions about this tradition cannot be limited to whether it is an ‘accurate’or an ‘exaggerated’ account of the past. What the narratives and the tradition are talking about has to be our point of departure.

Asking whether biblical narratives have other motives and purpose than historical ones is useful, but it only takes us so far, and only helps us with those narratives that are most clearly fictive. The issue is more complicated than asking questions about whether the story’s iron floats on water. Not all of the Bible’s stories are obviously fictional. This can best be seen by comparing two variants of a single story. It is a story about the Nephilim, who appear as a race of giants in a tale recounted in Numbers 13, and as more normal human beings in a paraphrasing reference to the same tale in Deuteronomy 1.

The first time that the Nephilim appear in the Bible is in a brief episode in Genesis 6: 1–4, just before the flood story. Although short, the episode has an important theological role to play in Genesis, which we will discuss later. Here, we need to limit ourselves to the legend of the Nephilim, Gods, or ‘sons of God’, Genesis tells us, came down to earth, where they learned that women are beautiful. They marry those they want. The children of these marriages the writer identifies as Nephilim. In closing this scene, we read an added gloss, seemingly of a passing scholar: ‘These were the heroes of old; men of renown.’

Stories about children born of gods and humans are also found outside the Bible. The peat early Mesopotamian epic is of Gilgamesh, a man whose mother is a goddess. He is described as two-thirds god and one-third man. He is a giant of a man, a great warrior and brawler: a ‘Superman’ without a childhood in Nebraska to teach him humility. Like the Bible’s Samson, Gilgamesh is heroic: perfect for an adventure story except for a fatal law, creating tragedy. The central plot takes up the theme that arises from Gilgamesh’s relationship to the divine world: Gilgamesh’s mortality. The same plot element is encountered by Homer’s half-god/half-man hero, Achilles, who was immortal except for the vulnerability of his heel. It is not merely that these heroes were part gods. Ironically, that defined the heroic qualities of their ‘manliness’. They were men of great violence. They did heroic deeds. They had unsurpassable strength. That is what the stories that created them are most interested in. Such ‘big bow-wow’motifs have formed a tradition of entertaining tales that is now more than 4,000 years in the telling and still growing. In the Bible – perhaps in tribute to their story competitors of Greek literature the tales of the wars against the Philistines centre on three such figures: Samson, with the tragic story of his love for Delilah, Saul, who has killed his thousands and whose life struggles with fate, and David, who has killed tens of thousands – not a giant himself, but a giant-killer – who, in competition with Saul, plays out the messianic role of obedient ‘servant of Yahweh’

The brief reference to the Nephilim in Genesis 6 hardly gives us a story. It is little more than an explanatory clarification and comment: an aetiology for the heroes and giants of old. It explains where these extraordinary figures of folklore originally came from: how the Nephilim and heroes of the past first had their beginning. While heroes in the Bible are individuals, the Nephilim are a quite specific people or race of giants, whose story is found in Numbers. This story is excellent, with rich possibilities of wonder and fantasy.

In Numbers 13, Moses has brought the Israelites through the wilderness to the edge of the ‘land of Canaan’. Following Yah web’s instructions, he sends a leader from each of the twelve tribes of Israel to spy out the land and to report back to him. The spies go out as ordered. They are stunned by what they find. The account they bring back strikes horror in the hearts of the Israelites. ‘The land we passed through and spied out is a land that would eat its own people. Everyone we saw there was huge. We saw the Nephilim. . . We felt like grasshoppers. In fact, we looked like grasshoppers to them’ (Num. 13: 32–33). Both the land and the people were giants. The first, variant account the spies bring of the Neshtol Valley (the ‘Valley of the Cluster’ makes this abundantly clear. Having been instructed to bring back samples of the fruit in the land, the spies cut a cluster of grapes in the valley and return to camp with it, a scene one can still see today in the logo of the Israel Department of Tourism. It takes two soldiers to carry the cluster of grapes. So too, the cows and bees must have been giants; for the rivers of the valley flowed with milk and honey (Num. 13; 23–24)!

The giant motif dominates the story to introduce the leitmotif of Yahweh’s power to do whatever he wishes, Yahweh brags to Moses: ‘I can make you into a people greater and mightier than this’ (Num. 14: 12), However, the people are terrified of the giants. Suffering Yahweh’s anger and scorn at their cowardice, all of Israel except Joshua and Caleb refuse to enter the land. The story has a double function. On one hand, it illustrates the recurrent moral of the wilderness chain of stories: that Israel must do God’s will, not merely what is humanly reasonable. On the other hand, it helps structure the larger chain of tradition from Genesis to II Kings around the thematic cluster of faithlessness, punishment and exile. Yahweh punishes Israel for its disobedience. The whole generation will die in the desert. They are the lost generation, laying the foundations for stories of deportations yet to come. Joshua and Caleb are spared to serve as ‘the remnant’ who lead a ‘new Israel’into the promised land.

When Moses offers us a paraphrase of this story in Deuteronomy 1, both the refusal to follow Yahweh and the lost generation motif are maintained. The whole of the story’s fantastic picture of a land of giants, however, has been translated and transformed into something quite prosaic. The people of the valley are large and numerous, their cities are huge. Fruit was gathered, but nothing is either extraordinary or interesting about it. Giants and ‘sons of God’, the fear-inspiring description of a ‘land that would devour its own people’, all are invisible in Deuteronomy’s demythologizing version of the story. In Deuteronomy’s account, we have commentary. We do not have story, but a description of Israel in its betrayal, and we have divine judgement. What has been lost is the adventure, that insight into transcendent reality. Deuteronomy’s interpretation is not so very far from many modern readings: moralistic rather than theological. It portrays a righteous God and a feckless Israel, but nothing of the fateful centre of the tale.

Yet Deuteronomy’s own story hardly survives the implicit commentary of the text. We momentarily lose sight of Moses and his farewell speech to the Israelites, who are poised to begin their journey into the promised land. The moralist’s voice that we hear speaks in a different time than Moses’, and has a different audience than ancient Israel. The original story of Numbers was intended to strike vicarious terror. How else evoke a responsive and courageous ‘Nevertheless!’ or ‘Even so!’ from this adventure’s audience? How else, in fact, convince them that only God can save them in their history? The ethical demand of such a story is not bravery of any ordinary sort, such as that demanded of soldiers to fight against superior forces. That belongs to Deuteronomy’s realism. Rather, God’s command in the Numbers story is absolute: to do his will and not their own. He will have Israel fight against giants! Deuteronomy’s rationalistic paraphrase replaces the tale’s passionate demands with the reasonable one of the moralist. The implicit disagreement in such competitive interpretations of the tradition is characteristic of the discourse that recurs throughout the Bible. It reaches its most dramatic height in the great debates of the Book of Job, which pit the Hellenistic revolt of Job’s rationalism, against the traditional pietism of his friends. Like the collection of sermons in Deuteronomy, the great opera of Job’s book uses a story of the past to create a stage for moral discourse.


2 Don’t go Back to Egypt for horses

Similar to Deuteronomy’s revision of the story of the giants in Numbers is the discussion in Deuteronomy 17: 16 of Solomon’s horses. Here in the reiteration of Deuteronomy’s Moses and II Kings’ Solomon, the difference between a past created and a present referenced becomes clear, Moses’ speech in Deuteronomy takes its setting as part of his second farewell speech to the Israelites from on top of Mount Nebo, as the Israelites are preparing to enter the promised land, having crossed the wilderness. Moses summarizes the larger narrative’s attitude towards Kings, commenting pointedly on the coming story of I Samuel 8, where Israel’s elders ask Samuel to give them a king ‘just like all the other nations’ (I Sam. 8: 5). In Deuteronomy, Moses tells the people that they can have such a king, but adds to this a threefold warning which is on its surface most baffling:

Only he [the king] must not multiply horses for himself, or cause the people to return to Egypt in order to multiply horses, since Yahweh has said to you, ‘You shall never return that way again.’ And he shall not multiply wives for himself, lest his heart turn away; nor shall he greatly multiply for himself silver and gold. (Deut 17: 16–17)

The narrator does not remain inside the role of Moses of the farewell speeches. Nor does he address anything that is meaningful to Moses’audience on Mount Nebo. The author addresses his own audience and refers implicitly to a narrative his readers know. He is commenting on and interpreting a story yet in the future. The reference is to the narrative of I Kings 10–11, the story of Solomon and his legendary wealth. The whole earth sought the king’s presence and brought him gifts of silver and gold. Solomon made silver as common as Jerusalem’s stones. He brought horses from Egypt, having in all 1,400 chariots and 12,000 horse: fabulous numbers for an ancient army. Solomon’s wealth is also measured in women, 700 in number from foreign nations, who the story’s sectarian and xenophobic voice tells us ‘turned his heart away’ from his God.

Yet the narrator’s Moses-voice of Deuteronomy is not interpreting the story he refers to in Kings after all. Solomon’s betrayal of his God, which causes his ultimate rejection by Yahweh, is already quite explicit in that story. Deuteronomy merely recalls it to his audience’s attention. Why he does so, becomes clear in the close of Moses’ second sermon on the mount at the end of Deuteronomy 28: 66. Here, Moses is referring to the time in the future when Israel will lose the land and be scattered ‘from one end of the world to another’. He marks his rhetoric starkly, with threats of degradation and humiliation: ‘Yahweh will bring you back in ships to Egypt, a journey which I promised that you should never make; and there you shall offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but no man will buy you.’ The closing phrase is important to mark well, as it strikes a note of scornful sarcasm. This is not a reference to an enslavement in Egypt from which Yahweh had once saved Israel – the motif with which Moses’ second sermon begins (Deut. 5: 6) – but to far worse. The scorn and ironic diatribe lift this closure of Moses’ sermon out of its narrative context. Departing from the specific literary references of old Israel and tradition, the text engages a subtext of political commentary involving the real world of the author. Who are these people who go back to Egypt by ship? Are they, like Solomon before them, buying horses, marrying foreign women and preferring to gain wealth at the expense of their religion? Are they known to the narrator’s implied audience? Do we here have a thinly veiled, Taliban-like polemic against the substantial number of diaspora Jews living in Egypt at the time that Deuteronomy was written? There is abundant evidence of Jews living in Egypt. In his Antiquities, the first-century author Josephus refers to many Jews who moved ‘back’to Egypt, and especially to Alexandria, during the course of the third century BCE. Does the story talk about a present, which is projected into the past it creates?


3 A story’s access to reality

One of the issues we need to address in order to distinguish the different voices and ideologies that are implicit in the Bible’s texts is the reality to which some of the early stories refer. What kind of reality did they grow out of? Scholars have had different opinions about this. Some have argued that the stories began in folktales. Over time, they gradually became more and more historical. Such arguments are used to explain what is described as a baffling mixture of legend and history. Others have argued the opposite: that first there were events, and the accounts of these events became increasingly fictionalized. This explanation is often used to justify the nearly universal tendency in biblical archaeology to ignore elements of a story that are obviously fictional in a search for a story’s ‘roots’ in historical events.

The well-known nineteenth-century critical dictum that a biblical narrative reflects the historical context of its writing rather than the more distant past of its referent is one that has hardly been answered by the archaeological research of the past century. The essential thrust of this axiom continues to haunt our reading. Even when we are dealing with texts that do refer to an historical past, the reference is always to a knowledge that is part of the world and understanding of the composition. It reflects an understanding of the past. Our interpretation and reconstruction must begin with this later period of the text, and not with any earlier period, which we might prefer to think of as a story’s reference.

To understand how stories talk about any possible real world of history, we have to look at their context and at whatever the text might refer to. We also have to recognize that most of our Bible stories are neither whole nor original compositions. They were not put together as narrative accounts of the past, but as collections of fragmented traditions that survived the past. Recognizing their presentation as collections of stories, songs, poems, lists, records and wisdom sayings means that we need to distinguish between the collectors and what they collected. We should pay attention to how and why the traditions were collected and recognize the heuristic function of collection as a literary form. We need to speak of both the traditions and the literary ‘baskets’ that have held them and have allowed them to be transmitted as a coherent tradition about ancient Israel. In fact, we can hardly speak about an ancient biblical Israel as existing apart from, the stories and literary constructs that first pve expression to such a people. In creating a tradition through which they could find their religious self-identity as the new generation, children and remnant of Israel, the writers of these texts presented the torah and the tradition as the religious centre of the people of God, in which all peoples – both in Palestine and the diaspora – attained a synthetic identity. The literature reflects what Israel came to mean as a result of this tradition’s accumulation, rather than anything about the political state that existed during Palestine’s earlier Iron Age. The relationship between these two historical realities, the social and political reality of the distant past and the later reality of literary traditions, is not obvious. We need to examine it further. That the traditions collected were used as paradigms for a philosophical discussion of morality cautions us that we are not always dealing with simple historical questions about whether something happened or could have happened.

When we start with Israel as we understand the term, the Israel we know from the Bible, we need to recognize that our understanding of Israel as a people and as a nation is unrelated to any known historical Israel. The Israel we know was created by this literature: any examination of its origins is forced to move in lock step with an examination of the development of the Bible’s tradition. Nor is this Israel open to independent historical research and judgement. The Bible is our starting-point Within the context of the Persian or Hellenistic renaissance, the authors of the tradition created the understanding of the population of Palestine as Israel. They created this ‘Israel’ not as it once existed in an earlier period, but in a way that was meaningful for themselves.

History is by definition anachronistic. It is not objective – something that exists in the past, waiting to be uncovered – for the past is in rains and exists no longer. If, when we write our history of ancient Israel, we write a history that is reasonable and makes sense, it is t history that makes sense to ourselves. This is also true of those who originally put together traditions from the past. They ‘understood’ their sources and presented them as traditions of ‘old Israel’. The coherence and meaning that they gave to these traditions did not reflect the past, that is, the actual relations of events among groups and individuals of the early Iron Age. It reflected and answered rather the needs of the writers and their audiences, who, centuries later, developed a world-view in which commitments to a moral and philosophical life dominated. In this view, old Israel and its traditions of the past represented human failure. It was an example of error and sin. The tradition was important as warning, and it defined the listeners’ hopes in the commitment to a ‘new Israel’ of their own lives and of their own future. That is how the tradition made sense for them.

In talking about the anachronisms of biblical stories, I am dealing with how the narratives made sense to those who told and wrote them, and especially to those who understood them as their own traditions. It might be useful to consider how typical scenes or events are reiterated in biblical narrative, much in the way we saw the theme of the crossing of the waters reiterated in the stories of Jacob, Moses and Joshua. All shared the common metaphorical goal of leaving the past behind and creating a new beginning. It is this anachronistic core of our narratives, reflecting the values and interests of the much later society of early Judaism, that creates ‘history’ for us. It is built not on the basis of linear time, but of reiterated flashbacks. It recasts metaphorical memories of the present as images of the past, defining them as origin story. An interesting integration of this motif with ‘historical’ events, meaningful to the audience’s contemporary audience, is the variant to the crossing of the waters motif which is found in Josephus’ History of the Jews. Josephus refers to a story about the Macedonian conqueror of Persia, Alexander the Great, who crossed through the sea, dry-shod to carry out God’s work by marching his army against the Persians. Josephus uses this tale to mark what he viewed as the new beginnings of Hellenism. The crossing stories in the Bible are variants of Josephus’ Alexander story. But even in Josephus the reference is made merely to give context to a fictive claim of historicity. The audience knows the ‘event’ and recognizes its reference to the transcendent ‘baptism’metaphor, of crossing over the waters to salvation.

The exodus miracle of crossing through the sea is not dependent on the story in Joshua – or vice-versa – any more than the episode of Aaron and the golden calf of the wilderness story-chain is drawn from the story of Jeroboam’s golden calves that were set up at shrines in Bethel and Dan, Both hold story metaphors in common about a false understanding of religion based on sacrifice rather than obedience. They are both variants of the much more explicit tale of Saul’s fall from grace in I Samuel 15. The philosophical theme is addressed directly: ’Does Yahweh prefer burnt offerings and stcrilce to obedience to his voice? No, obedience is better than sacrifice; listening is preferable to a ram’s fat’ (I Sam. 15: 22)!

Such a theme, so central to the intellectual currents of Hellenism, is echoed repeatedly in the pages of the Bible. Yahweh complains centuries later through the prophet Isaiah that he is ‘tired of the burnt offering of rahis and with the fat of calves. What is he to do with all these sacrifices?’ (Isa. 1: 11) More philosophically, Yahweh presents us with a teacher’s view of this critique of temple cult in Hosea 6: 6: ‘I want loyalty, not sacrifices; the knowledge of God, not burnt offerings.’ He refuses to accept such sacrifices at all in Amos 5: 22, and the prophet Micah lends summary finality to the discussion; ‘Man [that is, Adam], you know well what is good, what Yahweh demands of you. Deal with understanding. Show steadfast love. Keep awake and walk with your God’ (Micah 6: 8). Hardly departing from this discussion, the gospels draw on Micah’s metaphor of this Adam’s knowledge, as Matthew has Jesus echo Micah’s philosophy: ‘Had you understood what it means; “I will have mercy and not sacrifice,” you wouldn’t have condemned the innocent The son of man is master of the Sabbath’ (Matt. 12 :7–8). Such histories as we find in I–II Samuel, reiterating the moral and philosophical discussions of tradition as they do, do not reflect events, but beliefs that were current when the collections were made.

Yet another example of story-writing by creating echoes through history is the practice of interpretive retelling of a story. This is a quite common technique in writing the stories of Jesus. One well-known story echo is in Acts 7. The story of the death by stoning of Stephen has but a thin veil separating it from Luke’s story of Jesus’crucifixion. Stephen’s last words before he dies (Acts 7: 59–60), ’Lord Jesus, receive my spirit,’and ‘Do not charge them with this sin,’ evoke Jesus’own ‘Father forgive them, for they do not understand what they do’ (Luke 23: 34), and ‘Father, into your hands I entrust my spirit’ (Luke 23: 46). Such techniques support and are supported by a reiterative understanding of history. Stephen plays the same role in his story as Jesus did in his, just as Jesus plays story roles comparable to the roles of David, Moses or Elijah. The technique can also be used to make very specific theological statements. Following a motif established in Exodus 7: 1, where Moses plays the role of God for Pharaoh and Aaron takes up the role of his prophet, the story in Acts presents Jesus in the role of God for Stephen, while Stephen is his prophet. The implied commentary of this rather bold, but none the less orthodox, reiteration of the Moses tradition is very similar to Matthew 1: 23’s echo of the Moses story of Exodus 3: 12’s interpretation of the name of Yahweh as the God who ‘is with Israel’, by citing Isaiah 7–8’s Immanuel story. The story of the naming of Jesus for Matthew, as with the story of Yahweh’s name reflects how God is present in the world.

One of the most striking examples of historical echoing is in the structuring of Matthew’s story of Jesus on the Mount of Olives the night he is arrested (Matt. 26: 30–46). While Jesus is walking to the Mount of Olives he talks to his friends of their coming betrayal and rejection of him. When they arrive, he asks Peter and John to pray with him, but they fall asleep. He is full of anxiety, abandoned by his friends, and prays that he might avoid his coming fate. Yet, in the end, he submits to the divine will: ‘Not as I will, but as you will.’The story is told in a threefold repetition of this prayer, alternating with the motif of his disciples’ carefree slumber. When the scene closes, Jesus announces that the ‘son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners’.

Our model for Matthew’s account is found in the story of David in II Samuel 15: 13–37. In that story, David’s son Absalom has just been declared king in Hebron, causing civil war. The people go over to Absalom and David is isolated and has to flee Jerusalem. Only Ittai and the Gittites remain faithful to him, as David crosses the Kidron and goes out into the wilderness in preparation for new beginnings. David then goes to the Mount of Olives, crying the whole way, and everyone who goes with him bows their head and weeps, ‘the whole country and all the people’ (II Sam. 15: 23). It is here that we find the wellspring of the gospel story’s pathos, in this first story of the Messiah’s rejection. In mortal danger, David decides to entrust himself to what God wants and accepts his fate: ‘so shall God do with me as he sees it’ (I Sam. 15: 26), David then goes up to the top of the Mount of Olives, ‘where it is the custom to pray to God’, Luke’s gospel picks this motif up in the line that opens his story: ‘So he rose and went out to the Mount of Olives, as was the custom’ (Luke 22: 39).

Although both Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels centre their scenes on Jesus’prayer and build them on David’s commitment, confided to Zadok, whose cue-name marks the ‘righteousness’ of David’s prayer that he will follow God’s will rather than his own, the David story does not present this as David’s prayer. In fact, though David goes up the mountain to pray, the prayer itself is not given. This is provided by the interpretive setting given in the title of Psalm 3: ‘This is the psalm that David sang when he led from his son Absalom.’ The song is remarkably appropriate to its dramatic task: ‘My enemies are many; many rise against me; many say: “God will not save him” ‘ (Psalm 3: 2–3). The psalmist’s David commits himself totally to Yahweh, who ‘answers him from his holy mountain’ (Psalm 3: 4). David prays to be saved from his enemies and Yahweh answers him from his holy mountain. With Yahweh’s support, David will not fear, for he knows that Yahweh destroys his enemies and crushes the ungodly. All salvation and all blessing come from Yahweh.

The interpretive technique that Matthew uses shares the perspective of the Psalter. Matthew 26: 30 introduces the story of Jesus’ prayer in the garden of Getfasemane: ‘After they had sung a psalm, they went out to the Mount of Olives.’ The reference to singing a psalm at first appears inconsequential, until one realizes that Matthew knows his Psalter well. Not only does he use the David story of II Samuel 15 for Jesus’ prayer, but he introduces his reiteration of this story with a cryptic reference to the singing of Psalm 3, the very same song that the titles in the Book of Psalms had placed in David’s mouth. Psalm 3; 6–7 makes this argument certain. ‘I lay down to sleep; I awake because the Lord has supported me,’ Matthew reiterates this verse as his audience’s voice of a new Israel, in a subtle contrast to the threefold episode of the faithless disciples who sleep but do not wake (Matt. 26: 38–46).

In II Samuel 16: 1–2, David passes the summit of the Mount of Olives and is given an ass to ride as a symbol of his royalty. He is given food and wine for his return from the wilderness. This scene finds its echo in Matthew 21, when Jesus first goes from the Mount of Olives to be hailed by the people as king, like David. The scene offers a humble foreshadowing of the celebration of Jesus entering his kingdom on that other mountain Golgotha at the gospel’s close (Matt. 28). The theme of the David story stresses David’s acceptance of the fate that God wills him: ‘perhaps, God willing, Yahweh will hear his plea and give him happiness instead of this curse’ (II Sam. 16: 12). The Mount of Olives scene closes, but the story continues until chapter 18: 9 when the threat to David and to his kingdom is finally resolved, David’s son Absalom, who has also been anointed as king and God’s messiah, is killed, ‘hung fast on a tree’, a scene that will be echoed in the story of Jesus’ crucifixion. When David hears of Absalom’s fate, pierced through the heart by Joab with three arrows (II Sam, 18: 14), the king weeps over his son’s death, and in chapter 19 David is brought home to Jerusalem to rule his kingdom. The shared interpretation of the David story by both Psalm 3 and Matthew’s story is glimpsed once again in the personal emotion both the Jesus story and the original David story captures. The use of Psalm 3’s first-person voice supports an identification between the reader and each text’s messiah (David or Jesus). This transference has pedagogical purpose. So, too, should the reader accept his fate. The story has positive implications, God brings all things to good. Even despair, betrayal and loneliness presage salvation. It becomes quite clear that the characters who play such roles have their primary purpose in dramatically illustrating virtue.

These narratives, in their mythic reiteration of transcendent realities, not only present themselves as collecting a tradition that belonged to the past, they collect and represent old traditions. Implicit, and often explicit, comments and interpretations give abundant evidence of this. Many of the traditions have survived successive dislocations in different literary contexts primarily because they found echo and meaning in the lives of the people that preserved them. These collectors of the biblical tradition were those who used books for education, leisure and reflection. They formed the Bible as we know it: some few teachers, philosophers and scholarly bibliophiles.

That the individual stories, songs and poems collected in the Bible were ‘from the past’ and were about the past was among the primary reasons they were included in the tradition. How past they were is another question that needs to be taken up with each different tradition in the collection. What we can know in answer to such questions is restricted to our understanding of the world, and of the traditions, that existed at the time our texts were written. Even as more ancient sources are claimed by the text, our judgement regarding the accuracy of such claims is limited by what we understand to have been the knowledge of the past that was available to the original writer. Traditional stories reflect both real and literary worlds. Without a detailed and independent understanding of the historical contexts in, which a story once had its relevance, our ability to distinguish historical writing from fiction is fragile at best. Nowhere do the narratives directly reflect the world of old Israel that they tried to revive and preserve. The biblical traditions reflect but incoherent, part fictive, remnants of a past that those who came to see themselves as the survivors of the destruction were able to put together and give meaning to in the radically new worlds in which they lived. It was these stories’ meaningful expressions of the old order – expressions that gave hope and direction to the new – that affected their preservation. Dependability in reflecting the past had nothing to do with the selection. It is the meaning that the stories could bear that brought about their preservation and transmission. One rarely finds original stories in the Bible. What are found are stories that are interpreted. And it is most often the interpretation, not the story, that matters to the writer of our text.

A very simple example of such stories that have been preserved for the sake of interpretation occurs in chapter 6 of John’s gospel. Jesus is up on a mountain in Galilee. The story pivots on the need to feed a great crowd of people. However, there are only five barley loaves and two fish. John, like Matthew 15 before him, reiterates the old Elisha story of II Kings, where the prophet plays the role of a holy man feeding large crowds with just a few pieces of bread and some fish. How wonderful it was. There were even leftovers! Furthermore, John’s five loaves of barley bread which become twelve baskets of crumbs add a riddle to the story; the five loaves of the torah’s five books are more than enough to feed the twelve tribes of Israel. It is the cryptic message that underlies the story that is responsible for John’s interest. John sets up a contrast. On one hand, there are ‘those men’ (John 6: 14) who interpret the miracle as a sign that Jesus is ‘the prophet that should come’. This is seen as a threat to Jesus, who, like Moses before him, goes back up the mountain alone. In a paired scene on the next day, John, echoing the author of Psalm 78:12–31, presents his interpretation of this basic story of Moses and Elisha in order to illustrate a fundamental principle of early Jewish piety and to offer a polemic against ‘those men’s’interest in signs and wonders: ‘God, himself has set his seal on the son of man, who gives food for eternal life, not food that perishes’ (John 6: 27). John goes on to refer to the ‘bread of heaven’, which Moses gave old Israel to eat, when they were in the desert. Exodus 16’s manna of the wilderness story John now interprets as a foreshadowing of the ‘true bread which gives life to the world’ John 6: 31ff). This is the bread of true teaching; namely the torah. People live not through magic, but by doing what God wants. This is exactly the kind of interpretation to which the Pentateuch’s other variant of the story directs the miracle of the manna and the quails (Num. 11)! Moses’ Israelites, like Jesus’ crowds, are the opponents, misunderstanding a teaching about the spiritual values of loyalty and truth. John’s story is nothing other than a faithful transmission of the tradition before him.


4 Techniques in writing Genesis

Genesis is a very good text to use when talking about how biblical narratives construct their pictures of the past. For example, three kinds of technical structures can be observed here. These three interrelated techniques are used to create coherence and unity in Genesis’ ‘history’, in fact they offer the essence of Genesis’ role as an account of the past. All are very important for the larger discussion. A naive or excessively realistic reading of Genesis can easily cause confusion about what is understood as historical by the tradition.

a) Chronologies The chronology that we find used in the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible is based on a very simple system, yet it has little to do with what we would normally understand as either chronology or history, and much more to do with highlighting and emphasizing the importance of events. The system is a construction based on a chronological scheme using the Hellenistic motif of a ‘great year’ of 4,000 years’duration. The history consists of a chain of traditions reaching back into the past, to a central event that is celebrated as the focus of the tradition’s chronology. The projected completion of a ‘peat year’ in the tradition’s future allows the whole to be read as an implied prophecy. The identification of the great year’s closure provides the hidden key to interpretation. The Hebrew Bible’s great year finds its focal point in the year 2666 BCE, the date of the Exodus and of the creation of old Israel. The great year of this tradition’s future, the equivalent of the year 4,000, which marks the goal of this tradition, is timed to fall in 164 BCE, the year in which the temple of Jerusalem was rededicated to Yahweh in the course of the Maccabean revolt. This is the year of the birth of the new Israel that gives meaning to the tradition. The key to this chronological revision of the stories is found in the implicit warning for the new departures that the temple’s rededication inaugurates. The pivotal events on which the dating system is based, counting back from the Hellenistic period’s Maccabean rededication of the temple, are: the edict of the Persian king Cyrus, who ordered the building of the second temple; the destruction of the first temple and the beginning of exile; the original construction of the temple by Solomon; the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt under Moses (marked with special emphasis); Yahweh’s call of Abraham; and finally Abraham’s birth. The whole begins with the creation of Adam in anno mundi (AM) 1. The known historical information on the basis of which the system begins – that is from the viewpoint of the system’s creators – was knowledge of the temple’s rededication under the Maccabees (164 BCE) and the length of time between that event and the date of the legendary edict of Cyrus (538 BCE). This was 374 years, the exact length of time necessary to complete the needed total of a ‘great year’ of 4,000 years’ duration since the beginning of the world. The pivotal date of the structure is the dating of the Exodus to the year 2666 am, representing both two-thirds of a ‘peat year’ and 26 2/3 of the Bible’s forty generations, an average of 100 years’duration since the time of Adam. It is for this reason that the antediluvian patriarchs are given such great ages, up to Methuselah’s 969 years. We find only a remnant of what appears to be a 100-year generation scheme in Genesis 15: 12–16, where the period of enslavement in Egypt is measured both as 400 years and as four generations long. A similar calculation is found in the frequent forty-year generation scheme in both the wilderness story, the Book of judges and in the lives of some of Genesis’ heroes. For example, Abraham lives for 100 years in Canaan. Isaac is born when Abraham is 100 years old. Isaac marries at the age of forty, and, at the age of sixty, has his first-born son Esau, who in his turn marries at the age of forty when Isaac is 100 years old. From the birth of Abraham in 1946 AM to Solomon’s temple in 3146 AM, we have twelve generations totalling 1,200 years. Similarly we also have twelve generations, but of forty years each, totalling 480 years, from the Exodus to the building of the temple. From that time to the exile we have 430 years + 50 years for the exile itself, to find once again a paired time-span of 480 years. The 430-year period, from the building of the temple to its destruction, occurs again as the length of time from the entrance into Egypt to the exodus, of the patriarchs is exactly half of this total; i.e., 215 years long.

All the data dependent on the 480–430–215 year scheme, as well as the date of the Exodus in the year 2666 and Abraham’s birth in 1946, are explained within this Hellenistic ontology of time.

b) Toledoth Unlike the close variant of Genesis found in the book of Jubilees, and also unlike the rather loose accumulation of genealogies that can be found in the First Book of Chronicles, Genesis’ narrative forms a continuous and quite complicated chain from the creation of the world to the origin of Israel as a people. The chain used is genealogical: a list of ancestors, following a pattern of father and son, without gap or break. I would describe this as the toledoth or ‘genealogy’ framework – see figure 1 on p.76

The system is a relatively simple one. It has its starting-point in the original title of Genesis, found in Genesis 5:1: ‘This is the Book of the Toledoth of Adam’. Genesis is the Book of Adam’s Tradition: what comes after and from his existence. It is ‘the story of humanity’. The toledoth structure binds together the distinct parts of Genesis into a continuous narrative. So we find the phrase: ‘this is the toledoth of the sky and the earth’ used to link the creation story of Genesis 1 with the quite different doublet-story of the garden of Eden in Genesis 2–3 and of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4. First the world is created. The text then presents what follows from that creation; that is toledoth. These narratives are used as an introduction to the book, which begins with the genealogy of Adam in Genesis 5 and leads up to the flood story of Genesis 11. The flood story is followed by four major movements, structured consecutively: the threefold list of Noah’s sons down to Terah, Abraham’s father, is used to introduce the Abraham and Isaac stories. These lead us to the tales of Jacob and his sons, which, in turn, are used to open the Joseph story. Each of these long chain-narratives is introduced by a genealogical preface. Just as the genealogy of Genesis 5 leads to the toledoth of Noah, so Genesis 11’s toledoth of Sbem introduces Terah, Similarly, the genealogy of Ishmael introduces the story of Isaac, and those of Esau lead us to the stories of Jacob and his sons. The toledoth does not introduce the character named, but the history that follows him. For example, Jacob’s toledoth does not begin the story of Jacob but that of his sons. It even includes Genesis 38’s tale of Judah, which is unrelated to the tale of Joseph and his brothers that closes Genesis.

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c) Eponymy The third technique used in creating Genesis’ history writing is the fiction of eponymy. Eponyms are forms of ‘cue-names’» names in stories that tell the audience something about the role the character plays in the narrative. The most frequent forms of eponym in Genesis reflect geographical and political toponomy. Quite commonly, these names appear listed in the genealogies. They are often interpreted as ancestors of the groups represented by their names. Sometimes small stories and legends are attached to such names. The use of eponymous ancestors in tradition creation is also well known in early Arabic, Greek and Latin literature. These eponymous characters often travel, and become associated with origin stories of peoples and nations. Such characters can also have story lives simply as heroes, quite apart from the nations or historical realities they represent.

The most elaborate use of this fictive technique is in classical sources. A good parallel to Israel and his twelve sons, representing the nation and its tribes, is mentioned by Diodorus Siculus. The hero Aeolus had twelve sons who were the ancestral founders of the twelve legendary towns of earliest Aeolia. In Pindar, we have a story about a man Opus who, having been adopted by Lokrus, went on to found the city of Opus in the region of Lokris. Travel in these stories usually has a purely fictional function, with no known association with historical events. Aetolus fled the Peloponnesus because of a murder. He then settled on the northern shore of the Gulf of Corinth, a region that was called Aetolia, which had two major towns: the names of Aetolus’two sons, Pleuron and Kalydon. Sometimes the heroes have adventures. Such is the story of Danaos and his son Aegyptos. Aegyptos (ancestor of the Egyptians) had fifty sons who wanted to marry the fifty daughters of Danaos, the father of the Danoi, an ancient people of the Aegean. To prevent this, Danaos sent his daughters on a ship with fifty oars bound for Argos. The sons followed and all but one were murdered. He is not only named Argos, but became the king of Argos.

A variation on the eponymous ancestor was that of a founding father. In the Latin traditions, the wandering of Aeneas, like the wandering of Abraham, was well suited to the building of genealogies and the creating of small geographical legends. Like Abraham, the father of many nations, yet not himself an eponym of any, Aeneas was the legendary founder of settlements in Thrace, Delos, Arcadia, the islands of Kythera and Zakynthus, areas in southern Italy, Sicily, Carthage, Misenum and Latium. The motive of most of these genealogies and wandering stories was to account for the origin of the various groups referred to. The persons connected by the genealogies are personiled districts, nations, towns, patronages, lineages, trades, guilds, mountains, springs, lakes and rivers. This type of fictive ancestor is quite at home within lineage and patronage systems, because of their frequent use of family metaphors to describe themselves. This might well explain the abundance of such material in the Bible, as the patronage system was established throughout Palestine and throughout the Mediterranean world. The names are connected as fathers, mothers, sons or daughters. Stories and legends filled out the genealogy. Certainly, the vast majority of the names in Genesis follow one or other type of this pattern, from the great table of nations, Ham, Shem and Japheth representing the geography of Africa, Asia and Europe, in Genesis 10 to each of the central characters of most of the book’s collected tales.


5 The biblical Israel as fiction

Biblical Israel, as an element of tradition and story, such as the Israel of the murmuring stories in the wilderness, or the people of the stories of II Kings who are faithless as their kings are faithless, or the lost Israel, which is the object of prophetic diatribe in Isaiah and Amos, is a theological and literary creation. This Israel is what I have called ‘old Israel’. It is presented as the polar opposite of an equally theological and literary ‘new Israel’, which is the implicit voice, for example, of II Chronicles, the Book of Psalms, the Damascus Covenant and the gospels.

The discussion about the fictional quality of biblical narratives, and especially this chapter’s discussion about how such stories refer to an historical world is central to the issue of the Bible and its relationship to the past. We can best understand this if we consider briefly the fictional qualities of Israel in the Bible. This Israel stands in sharp contrast to the Israel that we know from ancient texts and from archaeological field work. Of course, the Israel of the Jacob story who wrestled with God and who was the father of twelve children, all of whom became in their turn fathers of Israel’s twelve tribes, is a character of fiction, based on the assumed existence of Israel in its twelve tribes. Few biblical scholars would doubt this today. Such ‘eponymous’ figures of story have a life of their own, quite apart from any real or assumed past. Odysseus’ struggle with the Cyclops need not have anything to do with a known past and hardly gives us cause to believe in historical Cyclopses in the Aegean’s past. Similarly, Israel’s tribes need not have been either twelve or tribes in reality. More than that, names in both history and tradition have a very long life. They change over time and can have a variety of real references. This section’s title, emphasizing the fictive quality of the Bible’s Israel, refers not merely to the Bible’s use of eponymy but to the way the Bible created an entire past for its ‘old Israel’. It built this fiction out of traditions, stories and legendary lore from Palestine’s past. Some of the sources for such ‘knowledge’ are very old, and it is useful to take a look at how such knowledge changes over time.

The name ‘Israel’ goes back in history to at least the thirteenth century BCE. It was once the name of the people of Canaan (western Palestine) who are said to have been destroyed by the Egyptian army under Pharaoh Merenptah. However, the reference to an ‘Israel’ as the spouse of Canaan in an early Egyptian inscription is hardly the same as evidence for the historical existence of the Israel of the Bible. This text renders only the earliest known usage of a name. It does not refer to the ‘Israel’we know from the Assyrian period and which is mentioned in both Assyrian and Palestinian texts. That Israel was a small regional state that controlled the highlands north of Jerusalem, and which first developed some centuries after Merenptah. Apart from the obvious difficulty that the Egyptian stele reports that ‘Israel’s seed’ had been destroyed and ‘was no more’ it does not correspond with the highland Israel or any biblical Israel. If the Merenptah stele expresses any ‘real’ history, we know nothing of that from the Bible. When the Israelites leave Egypt in the Exodus story, they are a great nation threatening Egypt itself. This is hardly the Israel whose children Merenptah has ‘annihilated’. In Joshua this people is opposed to Canaanites and conquer the entire ‘land of Canaan’, and in the stories of Judges and I Samuel, they come to dominate the coastal plain’s Philistines. In the Books of II Samuel and I Kings, biblical Israel controls the whole of the South Levant between Egypt and the Euphrates, a region that, with the help of Judah, Israel holds until the story of its destruction in II Kings 17. Outside of this narrative in Genesis-II Kings and the related books named after prophets, the name Israel is a constant of biblical literature especially in the form the ‘children of Israel’, with reference either to the patronage states of Jerusalem and Samaria, or to later groups of Jews, Samaritans, Galileans, Idumeans, Christians and still other religious groups who understood themselves with the theological metaphor of a ‘new Israel’

That it is hard to identify any of these biblical and biblically related Israels with specific historical peoples or nations should not be surprising. There are a number of names of ‘peoples’ that first appear in texts of the Bronze Age. These names also take a variety of meanings over the course of centuries. For example, although the name ‘Hebrew’, used for the language of the Bible, belongs to the period of the Bible’s formation, the name ‘Hebrew’ used as a gentilic – that is, as a term referring to a people goes much further back to refer to a class or a type of person. Related terms show up in Sumerian, Assyro-Babylonian and Egyptian texts in the forms SA.GAZ, Hapiru and ‘Apiru. These terms refer to individuals and groups who were not accepted within the accepted political structures of patronage alliances and loyalties that governed society. These ‘Hebrews’ were both literally and figuratively ‘outlaws’, not terribly unlike such legendary characters in story as the David of I–II Samuel or the Abraham of Genesis 12 and 14, where they are called ‘Hebrews’.

The word ‘Amorite’ first appears in cuneiform texts in the form amurru. Already in the late Early Bronze Age, it is used to signify geographic direction, as in the amurru, that is, ‘western’, regions. As a name, it refers rather generically to the people of and from this region. By the Late Bronze Age, it appears as the name of a region of Syria. A similar-sounding but unrelated name, ‘Amw – a word originally referring to the ‘boomerang’ throwing-stick used as a weapon by these people – is used in early Egyptian texts to refer generally to the people of Asia, and especially to Semites and culturally related groups who inhabited the desert regions and the Egyptian Delta. In the Bible, the name ‘Amorite’ is used as a variant of the term ‘Canaanite’, as a name used for the indigenous population of Palestine.

The term ‘Philistine’ has had perhaps the richest variety of usage; now over more than 3,000 years. It first appears in the form peleset in thirteenth-century BCE Egyptian texts, where it is used as a gentilic, and refers to one of several groups of immigrants from the Aegean, or perhaps from coastal Anatolia, who have settled along the southern coast of Palestine and who attack the Delta. They are finally settled and accommodated within Egyptian territories, including Palestine’s coast. By the Assyrian period, the name, in the form Palashtu, occurs in cuneiform texts. It refers to a geographic region covering most of southern Palestine. In the writing of the sixth-century BCE Greek author, Herodotus, ‘Palestine’ is a geographic name for the whole of Southern Syria.

This also seems to have been the sense in which the Romans used it centuries later. The term Palestine was used by European scholars since at least the sixteenth century much in the Roman manner. After the First World War, it was used by the British mandate government, as well as by Jews, Muslims and Christians living in the region. Increasingly, it has come to refer to the territory to the west of the Jordan River. Since 1948, and especially since the war of 1967, the term Palestine has been used for the territories that were not part of the state of Israel. Historical and biblical scholarship, however, has generally continued the use of the term as in the period of the British mandate, to refer to the entire region south of the Litani River and the Lebanese mountains to Gaza and the Sinai in the south and from the Mediterranean to the Transjordanian opening to the Arabian desert in the east. The gentilic, ‘Palestinian’ has come into use increasingly to refer to the indigenous, non-Jewish population of this greater area, and is beginning to take on exclusively ethnic connotations. According to biblical lore, the Philistines were the pre-Abraham inhabitants of the southern coast and the Shefelah – where they appear frequently in stories from Genesis to II Samuel. They are said originally to have come from Caphtor (Crete), and to have built cities and kingdoms at such places as Gerar, Gaza, Ashqelon and Ekron.

The term ‘Canaanite’ is badly used by most everyone in archaeology and ancient Near Eastern studies today, thanks to the Israeli archaeological practice of identifying the Bronze Age as a ‘Canaanite period’. Biblical archaeologists use it as if it referred to an ethnic and culturally coherent fact. Unfortunately, this does not correspond with any known historical reality. Not only is the term ‘Canaan’ originally a geographic name, without a specific, historically defined identification; it is unknown as a name of a people at this early date. It has more to do with coastal Syria and Phoenicia than Palestine’s lowlands, and does not correspond with the larger towns of Palestine even in the Bible. The sharp boundaries that the use of the terms ‘Canaanite’ and ‘Israelite’makes possible are wholly unwarranted, ‘Canaan’ appears on the Merenptah stele and has been shown to be paired with ‘Israel’ as his spouse. They are the metaphorical parents of three towns destroyed by the Egyptian army. The only historical group known to refer to themselves as Canaanites were Jewish merchants of North Africa in the fourth century CE. It has also been well argued that the name ‘Canaanite’ is used in the Bible as a literary and fictive term to contrast with the biblical Israel. It is a negative term for those who worship foreign gods, and especially Ba’ai. In the stories of Genesis to Joshua, Canaanites play much the role that Philistines play in Judges and I–II Samuel, and the role that Israel itself often plays in II Kings; namely as a universal term for the enemies of Yahweh.

The development of the biblical tradition reflects the formative process by which names such as ‘Israel’ and its counterparts in the Bible’s stories were created out of the fragments of Palestinian folk traditions and literature that had survived the political and historical disruptions of the Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods. The formation of biblical narrative was a process that created the Israel we know. It had its earliest roots in the period of Assyria’s domination of Palestine, but the understanding of Israel we know from the tradition first arose during the late Persian or early Hellenistic period, and was not fully developed before the time of the Maccabees. Long after the destructions of Samaria and Jerusalem, in the course of the gradual restructuring of Persia’s conquered territories by both the Persians and their Hellenistic successors, the Israel of tradition presented itself to history, like the phoenix, specifically in the form of an Israel redivivus. The true essence and significance of Israel – and implicitly its future glory – was traced in the tales of the patriarchs, the stories of the wilderness and of the judges, and the great legends about the golden age of the united monarchy. Idealistic sentiments of futuristic incipient messianism ring throughout this tradition with the recurrent affirmation of one people and one God. It is this God, the only true king of a finally new Israel, who is projected to some day come to rule his chosen remnant from his throne in Jerusalem’s temple. This idyllic reality of piety is the Israel of tradition.