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The Earliest Treatments of Israelite and Judean History

The writing of history as a narrative about past events is a very ancient undertaking. Its roots, so far as Western historiography is concerned, are anchored in the cultures of Israel and Greece.

History, as a genre or literary type, is found in much of the Hebrew Scriptures where events are understood in a theological or, to use Collingwood’s terminology,1 “theocratic” perspective. In spite of this perspective, much of the narrative material in these Scriptures is historiographical in intent in so far as it attempts a narrative account of past events. To suggest, as is frequently done, that Israel was the creator of historical writing2 probably goes beyond the evidence. Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Hittite inscriptions, annals, chronicles, narratives, and art in many ways approach genuine historical thought and writing3 and tend to moderate extravagant claims about the originality and priority of Israelite historical writing. In addition, the origins and character of historical writing in Israel, especially with regard to the materials in the Pentateuch remain a much debated and unsettled issue.4 Since the Hebrew Scriptures have been and remain the primary sources for reconstructing the history of Israel and Judah, questions regarding the nature, character, and antiquity of these traditions will be discussed in various places in the following chapters.5

The first discussions of Israelite and Judean history, apart from the biblical traditions, stem from the Hellenistic Age and were the products of both Jewish and non-Jewish authors. In the early Greco-Roman period, Jewish–Roman relations and Jewish apologetic concerns engendered several treatments of Jewish history and life. From the second to the fifth century CE, with the emergence and dominance of rabbinic Judaism and the growth and state recognition of Christianity, concern with and interpretation of earlier Israelite and Judean history passed into the hands of Christian historians and theologians whose assumptions and descriptions set a pattern that remained basically unchallenged throughout the Middle Ages. These three phases of the discussion are the concern of this section.

Much of the literature dealing with Israelite and Judean history from the Hellenistic Age either did not discuss the subject in any great detail or, more probably, has been irretrievably lost. Except for the biblical book of Daniel and the apocryphal books of 1 and 2 Maccabees, only the fragments of this Hellenistic literature preserved in the works of Josephus, in Eusebius’s Praeparatio Euangelica, and in a few other Greco-Roman writers survive.6 Nonetheless, it is highly probable that most Hellenistic universal historians included a section on the history of the Jews in their works.

Among pagan authors, discussions of the origin of the Jews and the figures of Abraham and Moses dominate. Both favorable and slanderous treatments appear. Hecataeus of Abdera (about 300 BCE), in his work on the culture, history, politics, and religion of ancient Egypt, discussed the origins of the Jews in terms of their expulsion from Egypt at divine urging and their subsequent colonization of Judea. Josephus (Contra Apionem 1.183–204) quotes from a work by Hecataeus which was wholly concerned with the Jews, although Josephus’s passage only contains miscellaneous material about Jewish matters during the early Hellenistic Age. Hecataeus’s treatment of the Jews and their history was generally favorable and, while praising Moses as a cult founder and lawgiver, he shows little, if any, direct knowledge of the Jews and their sacred writings. Hecataeus’s description of Moses and subsequent Jewish history that tended to telescope everything around Moses was highly influential upon practically all Hellenistic and even Greco-Jewish writers.7

Over against the material in Hecataeus (and Theophrastus, Megas-thenes, and Clearchus), which took a favorable attitude towards the Jews, one finds widespread use of a version of the exodus and the career of Moses that heaps calumny upon the Jews. Utilizing an old story form that told of a foreign invasion of Egypt,8 a reign of terror by outsiders, and a triumph over this dominance by a hero-king,9 these descriptions of Jewish history depicted the Hebrews as an impure people, Moses as a polluted Egyptian priest, and portrayed Jewish life and practices as hostile to everything non-Jewish.10 This hostile propaganda was basicaly centered in Alexandria and reflects the tension between Jews of the Egyptian diaspora and the native, especially priestly, Egyptian population. The roots of this anti-Jewish polemic were no doubt multiple,11 and the tension is already reflected in Aramaic papyri of the fifth century BCE from Egypt. Variations on this theme of Jewish origins are reflected in Egyptian literature for over six centuries12 and no doubt formed a vital part of the arsenal of anti-Jewish propaganda offering a supportive rationale for repressive measures.

Perhaps the most significant example of this anti-Jewish version of Moses and the origins of the Jews is that attributed to Manetho (third century BCE) by Josephus (Contra Apionem 1.73–91, 93–105, 228–52), who claims to be quoting from Manetho’s Aegyptiaca, although Josephus seems to retell Manetho’s treatment in two different versions.13 Manetho’s phil-Egyptian version or Josephus’s interpretation of it identified or associated the expulsion of the Hyksos with the biblical account of the Hebrew departure from Egypt, an interpretation sometimes found in modern histories of ancient Israel.

Among the materials preserved by Eusebius from the collective work of Alexander Polyhistor (Concerning the Jews) are fragments of a historical work by the so-called Pseudo-Eupolemus (Praeparatio Evangelica 9.17–39). This writer was apparently a Samaritan and one of the first to present biblical history under the form of Hellenistic historical writing.14 Some time near the beginning of the second century BCE, he combined biblical materials with traditions from non-Jewish writers such as Berossus and Hesiod in order to show Abraham as the source of the culture of the Phoenicians and Egyptians, and thus indirectly the source of Greek culture, since Herodotus, Plato, and Hecataeus had argued that the Greeks had acquired much wisdom from the Egyptians. Such a position carried the assertion that the biblical tradition represented the oldest wisdom of humanity. Abraham was the teacher of a multitude of nations (see Gen 17:5)! Pseudo-Eupolemus utilized various elements of Babylonian and Greek mythology, perhaps the pseudepigraphical Enoch tradition, and haggadic traditions about Abraham. His work depicts Abraham in universalistic categories and is clearly concerned with apologetic interests.

Shortly after Pseudo-Eupolemus, and perhaps partially dependent upon him, the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Aristobulus (see 2 Macc 1:10) expounded Judaism as a philosophy and sought to show that the Mosaic law was a true philosophy and in no way contradictory to philosophical wisdom.15 His work was apparently addressed to the young King Ptolemy VI Philometor (181–145 BCE) but may have been intended for a larger, even predominantly Jewish audience. Such apologetic works—both historical and philosophical—must have been addressed, at least in a limited way, to non-Jewish pagans16 and not just to renegade Jews who had forsaken Judaism or were strongly tempted by the option of apostasy.17 The work of Pseudo-Eupolemus suggests that historical writing as an apologetic concern addressed to non-Jews developed in Palestine in Hellenistic circles before the Maccabean Revolt and probably not just in Samaria.18

The Maccabean struggles against the Seleucids triggered extensive Jewish historical writing. Eupolemus,19 probably shortly after the Maccabean Revolt (see 1 Macc 8:17; 2 Macc 4:11), wrote a work on Jewish history that discussed, among other matters, the date of the exodus and the figure of Moses (dated chronologically much earlier than in the MT), the Solomonic temple, and the Davidic–Solomonic state where the discussion reflects the influence of the expansion of the Hasmoneans and their international political relations. Eupolemus, as a Hellenized, priestly supporter of the Maccabees, demonstrates a strong patriotic and nationalistic interpretation of Jewish history and less of the universalistic spirit that characterized Pseudo-Eupolemus. According to Clement of Alexandria (Stromata 1.141), Eupolemus calculated the time between Adam and the fifth year of Demetrius I Soter (162–150 BCE) as 5,149 years. In his chronological concerns, Eupolemus expressed the widespread interest in world chronology that was characteristic of many Hellenistic writers.20 Jason of Cyrene, about whom nothing is certainly known, produced a five-volume history of the early Maccabean struggles (see 2 Macc 2:23), probably covering the years 176–160 BCE. His work has been summarized as 2 Maccabees21 by an unknown epitomizer who probably not only condensed the massive work but added some popular haggadic legends (2 Macc 1:11–18), supernaturalistic touches, and martyrological stories (2 Maccabees 6–7). Second Maccabees is more akin to Hellenistic than biblical historiography—in its direct address to the reader, its edifying quality, its conscious literary strivings, and its concern to entertain and enhance the reader’s enjoyment (see especially 2 Macc 1:1–6; 15:38–39).

First Maccabees, like 2 Maccabees, may be classified as contemporary history since its focus of concern is the Maccabean struggles down to 134 BCE, probably near the book’s date of composition. This work is more similar to the narrative style of Kings and Chronicles, that is to biblical historiography, than 2 Maccabees, although the work is in some regards more pro-Hasmonean than the latter.

One further work engendered by the Maccabean struggles should be noted, namely the book of Daniel. While apocalyptic rather than purely historical in form, the book of Daniel does, however, reflect a concern widespread in Hellenistic historiography—the concern with universal history which has already been noted in the work of the Samaritan Pseudo-Eupolemus. Daniel utilized the concept of four world monarchies in discussing universal history, a concept widely and earlier employed by Greek and Hellenistic writers as well as later Roman authors.22 In Daniel one can discern a tripartite division in the author’s treatment of world history: (1) the time before the capture of Jerusalem, known from the biblical historical works (more assumed than discussed by the author); (2) the era of the four world empires manifesting a great decline in civilization; and (3) the futuristic eternal kingdom about to dawn.23 This understanding and schema of history, later adopted and adapted by Christian historians, were to dominate historical treatments of Israelite and Judean history until the post-Reformation period.

Four writers of Jewish history from the Greco-Roman period deserve attention: Alexander Polyhistor (first century BCE), Nicolaus of Damascus (born about 64 BCE), Justus of Tiberias (first century CE), and Flavius Josephus (about 37–100 CE). Alexander was from Miletus, although he wrote in Rome where he had been taken by Lentulus during Sulla’s eastern campaign. The latter manumitted and appointed him a pedagogue. Among Alexander’s more than twenty-five works, one was titled Concerning the Jews, fragments of which have been preserved in Eusebius’s Praeparatio Evangelica. Much of his writings apparently consisted of compilations. His writing on the Jews probably belongs to the period shortly after Pompey’s conquest of the Seleucid empire and reflects the Roman fascination with and curiosity about things Eastern. In the preserved fragments, Alexander, who was not Jewish, quotes Jewish and pro-Jewish as well as non-Jewish and anti-Jewish authors, seemingly adhering faithfully and undiscriminatingly to his sources. His account of Jewish history began with the pre-patriarchal ancestors and may have extended down to his own day. The order of the events narrated follows the sequence of the biblical books, beginning with Genesis and extending through Kings and Chronicles, which might suggest that he was familiar with the biblical books in translation. His quotations from some rather obscure writers would indicate his utilization of a significant Roman library. An important feature of Alexander’s work is its reflection of the extensive chronological synchronization of Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, and biblical history and data. For example, Alexander associated the biblical flood and Noah with Berossus’s Babylonian flood story and Xisuthrus. Already in the second and first centuries BCE, numerous attempts had been made to produce a world chronology and an Alexandrian biblical chronological ‘school’ can perhaps be traced hack to the Hellenistic Jewish writer Demetrius, who wrote during the reign of Ptolemy IV Philopator (221–204 BCE).24 The Greek version of the Pentateuch certainly reflects the activity of such a chronological school.

Nicolaus of Damascus, who had served as tutor to Cleopatra’s children and written a biography of Augustus, became a court official and counsellor to Herod the Great some time before 14 BCE probably as part of the latter’s desire to turn Jerusalem into a major literary center. Among his works were an autobiography and a world history composed in 144 books. Nicolaus’s history, written in Jerusalem and under the patronage of Herod, to whose reign about one-fifth of the work was devoted, was a true universal history that integrated Jewish history into the larger context of world history, which was traced back to the times of mythical origins. With the exception of Josephus, Jewish and Christian historians seem to have made little use of Nicolaus’s work, although extensive portions were available to Photius, the ninth-century anthologist and patriarch of Constantinople.

Justus of Tiberias, a contemporary and antagonist of Josephus and like him apparently an unenthusiastic supporter of the revolt against Rome, produced not only a history of the Jewish War but also a chronicle of the Jewish kings extending from Moses to the time of Agrippa II. Justus seems to have made extensive use of Hellenistic universal chronicles, synchronizing the date of the exodus with the assumed contemporary Attic and Egyptian rulers. Justus’s extensive chronological synchronization, through the work of Julius Africanus, exercised a significant influence upon Christian biblical chronography.

Pride of place among Greco-Roman Jewish historians must be assigned to Flavius Josephus, although this may be as much due to the accident of historical preservation as to the excellence of historical presentation in his works. In the last quarter of the first century BCE, Josephus produced four major writings: Bellum judaicum, a history of the Jewish War in seven books; Antiquitates Judaicae, a history of the Jewish people from earliest times down to the outbreak of the Jewish–Roman War in 66 BCE in twenty books; Vita, an autobiographical work primarily describing Josephus’s role in the war; and Contra Apionem, a treatise on the antiquity of the Jewish people in two books. All of Josephus’s works were written for apologetic or polemical purposes, a factor that exercised significant influence and perhaps frequently produced distortions in his presentations. Whether Josephus was a traitor to his own people or a nationalist with loyalties that transcended the passion of Zealotism has been much debated, but that he was a sagacious opportunist has seldom been doubted.

In spite of Josephus’s argument that “the industrious writer is not one who merely remodels the scheme and arrangement of another’s work, but one who uses fresh materials and makes the framework of the history his own” (War 1.15), much of his historical work relied heavily upon previous authors, a factor sometimes acknowledged,sometimes not.25 Josephus was consciously aware of his interest, apologetic concerns, and the need to justify his presentations, and he commented briefly on his historiographic method. The account of the Jewish war, his finest work, was written to demonstrate that the Jewish revolutionary party was the dominant factor in the Jewish–Roman strife and the cause of the destruction of the temple and to correct previously published non-Jewish versions of the conflict (War 1.1–18). As to the first purpose, Josephus informed his Greek and Roman readers that, in spite of his desire to “recount faithfully the actions of both combatants” (War 1.9), his own reflections and private sentiments held that his country “owed its ruin to civil strife, and that it was the Jewish tyrants who drew down upon the holy temple the unwilling hands of the Romans” (War 1.10). As to the second purpose, Josephus felt that he had to correct the view that the Romans were “the conquerors of a puny people” (War 1.8) and to combat ill-informed historians: “As for the native Greeks, where personal profit or a lawsuit is concerned, their mouths are at once agape and their tongues loosed; but in the matter of history, where veracity and laborious collection of the facts are essential, they are mute, leaving to inferior and ill-informed writers the task of describing the exploits of their rulers.Let us at least hold historical truth in honour, since by the Greeks it is disregarded” (War 1.16).

In the War, Josephus’s interpretation of the events of his day is presented, in Thucydidean fashion, in three speeches attributed to Agrippa (2.345–401), Josephus himself (5.362–419), and Eleazar, the leader of the Masada rebels (7.323–36, 341–88).26 The central elements in Josephus’s interpretations were twofold. (1) As in Polybius, Roman dominance was understood as the work of providence or God. Josephus has Agrippa declare: “Divine assistance . . . is ranged on the side of the Romans, for, without God’s aid, so vast an empire could never have been built up” (2.391). Josephus reports that in his speech to the defenders of Jerusalem, he, after surveying the history of Israel’s suffering, sought to convince the Jews that “the Deity has fled from the holy places and taken His stand on the side of those with whom you are now at war” (5.412). Thus, like the prophets of old, Josephus applied a theological rationalization to explain the conditions of history. (2) The decimation of the nation and the trauma of the temple’s destruction were interpreted by Josephus as divine recompense (5.413–19). Josephus has Eleazar declare: “We have been deprived, manifestly by God Himself, of all hope of deliverance,” for God was expressing his “wrath at the many wrongs which we madly dared to inflict upon our countrymen.” He even has Eleazar interpret the rebels’ suicidal death as a form of payment to God: “The penalty for those crimes let us pay not to our bitterest foes, the Romans, but to God through the act of our own hands” (7.331–33). With good Deuteronomistic theology, Josephus explained the calamity that befell the Jews as divine punishment for the sins of the people, though as the sins of a minor element in the population.

Josephus’s other major historical work, his magnum opus, was titled Jewish Antiquities (or, literally translated, Jewish Archaeologies). Involved in Josephus’s presentation of the “ancient history and political constitution” of the Jews to the Greek-speaking world (Ant. 1.5) were two subsidiary influences, one clearly expressed and the second clearly deducible. In the first place, the translation of the Pentateuch into Greek in Alexandria, as reported in the Letter of Aristeas, and the assumed Greco-Roman interest in this work on Jewish history led Josephus to hope that a widespread interest in Jewish history in its entirety existed among non-Jews (1.10–14). The curiosity and encouragement of his patron, Epaphroditus, reinforced his hope. Josephus’s model led him to approach the topic in terms of translating the Hebrew records (1.5), although his work can in no way be classified as a translation and even to designate it a paraphrase is misleading.

Secondly, in 7 BCE, Dionysius of Halicarnassus had published in twenty books a work on Roman archaeologies (Antiquitates Romanae), written in Greek, in which he utilized various types of source material in order to demonstrate the great antiquity of Rome in line with the general interest in antiquity reflected in Hellenistic writers who, however, stressed Babylonian, Greek, Egyptian, or Jewish antiquity rather than Roman. Josephus seems to have adopted consciously the pattern and interest of Dionysius in the general structure of his work in order to demonstrate that Jewish history was able to stand on an equal footing with that of any other culture in terms of both antiquity and intrinsic interest.

In the present discussions, only a few general characteristics of Josephus’s history can be noted:

1. Although Josephus declares that his aim is to set forth “the precise details of our Scripture records neither adding nor omitting anything” (Ant. 1.17), he did deliberately omit some traditions as well as supplement the biblical materials. Some of his conscious omissions were clearly calculated to avoid providing anti-Jewish protagonists with any material that might be used to support the scurrilous claims that the Jews worshipped God in animal form, specifically the ass. One of the prominent concerns in his Contra Apionem is the refutation of this accusation. Noteworthy in this regard is his omission of any reference to the story of the Israelite worship of the golden calf (Exodus 32) in his history. Numerous non-biblical legends, many with parallels in rabbinic and Hellenistic haggadah, were added to his presentation. Among these are the stories of Moses’s command of the Egyptian army in expelling the Ethiopians (Ant. 2.238–53; a similar but not identical version appears in the second-century BCE writings of the Alexandrian Artapanus), the worship of Alexander the Great in the Jerusalem temple and his special favors to the Jews (Ant. 11.329–45; a very popular theme in later rabbinic tradition), and numerous less significant stories. Josephus does not explicitly differentiate between the biblical and the haggadic non-biblical traditions; the two seem to stand on an equal footing in his work.

2. In his discussion of Abraham and Moses, Josephus glorifies both characters, but at the same time he stops short of portraying them as immortals. Abraham is depicted as the first monotheist whose monotheism was derived from his speculation on the irregularity of natural and astronomical phenomena and was responsible for his persecution in Mesopotamia and subsequent settlement in Canaan (Ant. 1.154–57). In Egypt, Abraham taught astronomy (already discovered by the antediluvian ancients; Ant. 1.69–71) and arithmetic to the ignorant Egyptians, who subsequently passed along this learning to the Greeks (Ant. 1.166–68; somewhat similarly Artapanus, see Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 9.18). Josephus presents Moses, whose birth and significance were revealed to Pharaoh and Amram (Ant. 2.205–16), as a philosopher, lawgiver, statesman, and military hero (see especially Ant. 1.18–26; 2.238–53; 3.179–87; 4.176–95). Josephus stresses not only Moses’s death but Moses’s authorship of the account of his death so that none could claim that, like Enoch (Ant. 1.84), “by reason of his surpassing virtue he had gone back to the Deity” (Ant. 4.326; see 396; and compare Philo, De Vita Mosis 2.288–91) and thus been granted special immortality, as seems to have been claimed in certain circles (see Origen, Contra Celsum 1.21).

3. Although Josephus declares that “some things the lawgiver Moses shrewdly veils in enigmas, others he sets forth in solemn allegory” (Ant. 1.24), his work is surprisingly free of allegorical interpretation, in strong contrast to the work of Philo (see, for example, Philo’s De Migratione Abrahami). Josephus, however, sought to show the correlation between Moses’s writing and natural philosophy, for example, in the depiction of the tabernacle and priestly garments as “an imitation of universal nature” (Ant. 3.123, 179–87).

4. A further noteworthy characteristic in Josephus’s history is his recognition of many of the critical problems and difficulties in the biblical text, a characteristic shared by many of his Jewish contemporary and later rabbinic interpreters of the Scriptures. His work demonstrates that the ancients perceived many of the issues that were to occupy scholarly investigations centuries later. Working within a framework that accepted the inspiration and veracity of the Scriptures and gave no thought to the possibility of diversity and development in the literary text, Josephus handled these problems through supplementation and harmonization. A few examples will suffice as illustrations. In discussing Cain, for example, Josephus is careful to point out that Adam and Eve had not only sons but daughters as well (Ant. 1.52; cf. Jubilees 4.1–8) and that Cain feared that he would be a prey to wild beasts in his wanderings and thus needed a protective marking (Ant. 1.59). In the discussion of the tribal allotments in the book of Joshua, one should logically conclude that since the distribution was an ad hoc operation by lot, then equality in tribal territories should be expected. Josephus knew that this had not been the case and this he explained in terms of land valuation and tribal population (Ant. 5.76–80). In discussing the capture of Jerusalem, Josephus was aware of the contradictions in Josh 15:63; Judg 1:8, 21; and 2 Sam 5:1–10 and the need to harmonize such contradictions. Josephus accomplished this task by having two Jerusalems—a lower city captured as noted in Judg 1:8 and an upper city not taken until the time of David (Ant. 5.124; 7.61–64). In the stories of David’s first association with Saul, the biblical text has David entering Saul’s service as a musician and armor-bearer (1 Samuel 16) whereas the subsequent story of David’s combat with Goliath depicts Saul as unaware of David’s identity. Josephus harmonizes the traditions by playing down the identity problem, omitting any reference to 1 Sam 17:55–58 (perhaps due to his dependence upon the Greek text where these verses do not appear), and by suggesting that David had previously been placed on furlough by Saul (Ant. 6.175). Second Samuel 21:19, where Elhanan is said to have killed Goliath, is harmonized with 1 Samuel 17 by Josephus’s omission of the name of Goliath in the former.

5. Another notable feature of Josephus’s historical treatment is his rationalization of miraculous and extraordinary events. Josephus was somewhat troubled by Old Testament miracles (as was apparently the author of Wisdom of Solomon 19:6–21), or at least wondered about the incredulity of Gentile readers. Josephus dealt with the miraculous by carefully guarding himself and his own opinion and/or by explaining the miraculous through rationalization. When speaking of accounts in which miracle played a significant role, Josephus frequently pointed out that he was merely recounting the story as he “found it in the sacred books” (see Ant. 2.347). At other times, he used a rather set formula suggesting that on these matters “everyone should decide according to his fancy” or “everyone is welcome to his own opinion” (see Ant. 1.108; 2.348 and frequently elsewhere). This tendency to point the reader to his own opinion was already used by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Roman Antiquities 1.48), from whom Josephus may have borrowed it, and was later stated as a rule for historians by Lucian in his third-century CE work, How to Write History: “Should any myth come into question, it should be related but not wholly credited: rather it should be left open for readers to conjecture about it as they will, but do you take no risks and incline neither to one opinion nor to the other” (60).

On several occasions, Josephus offers a rationalistic or naturalistic explanation for the unusual. The great longevity of the antediluvians was due not only to their being “beloved of God” but also to their use of astronomy and geometry and a diet “conducive to longevity” (Ant. 1.104–8). The Hebrew passage through the sea is paralleled by the retirement of the Pamphylian Sea before Alexander (Ant. 2.347–48).The purification of the bitter waters of Marah was due to the draining off of the contaminated part (Ant. 3.8). Josephus pointed out that quail were abundant around the Arabian Gulf and that manna was still a phenomenon in that region (Ant. 3.25, 31). Even natural causes are offered as one solution to the plagues that beset the Philistines after their capture of the ark (Ant. 6.9). In explaining the rescue of Jerusalem and the slaughter of 185,000 Assyrians in a single night, Josephus drew upon the story of Herodotus, which told of an invasion by mice of the Assyrian military camps (Ant. 10.18–22). Josephus, however, was no thoroughgoing rationalist who shied away from references to the miraculous. In his description of the fall of Jerusalem (War 6.288–300), he refers to numerous miraculous portents that heralded the fall of the holy city. Whether he believed these to be actual occurrences or was merely seeking to emphasize for his audience the gravity of the occasion with rhetorical exaggeration is, of course, beyond the realm of solution.

6. A final characteristic of Josephus’s account of Israelite and Judean history is his lack of any sense of development in the people’s institutions and religion. The orthodox practices, beliefs, and institutions of his day were assumed to have existed from the time of Moses (see the book of Jubilees where the patriarchs are depicted as exemplary practitioners of the Mosaic law). That the whole of Jewish law and the institutional structure of Judaism had been given on Mount Sinai was a firmly anchored concept in later rabbinic Judaism. Josephus certainly operated with a very similar assumption.

After Josephus, ancient Judaism produced no historian in any way comparable. Very few Jewish writings from the rabbinic and Talmudic periods can be called historical works. Three perhaps should be noted. The Megillat Taanit (“The Scroll of Fasts”) is an Aramaic document probably written near the beginning of the second century CE. Containing a list of thirty-six days on which Jews were not to fast because of the joyous events that occurred on those days, the work provides some narrative material on events during the period of the second temple. However, in no way can it really be designated a real history. The Seder Olam Rabbah (“The Order of the World”), probably from the second century CE, is a chronological work generally ascribed to Rabbi Yose ben Halafta.27 The work established a chronology based on the calculation of dates from the creation of the world (libriath ha‘olam or anno mundi). While it is primarily concerned with the dating of biblical events, a final chapter surveys the period from Alexander the Great to the revolt of Bar Kokhba in 132–135 CE. Meyer has summarized the value of this work in the following terms: The author’s

endeavour to establish a single consistent chronology, reconciling apparent variations in the biblical text, would place his work very much in the rabbinic tradition of seeking to resolve scriptural contradictions which might otherwise create some doubt about the accuracy of the text. Though he confined himself almost entirely to biblical history, mixed chronicle with midrash, and sometimes departed from chronological sequence, the author of Seder Olam did evince a desire to establish a sequential framework for Jewish history. His concern was unusual for that time.28

Pseudo-Philo’s Liber antiquitatum biblicarum was apparently produced in the first century CE as a Jewish handbook on biblical history.29 The work is primarily a midrashic chronicle of biblical history from Adam to David characterized by extensive omissions, modifications, and additions to the biblical texts. Its exact purpose is unknown. Many of its additions have parallels in other Jewish haggadah. The work was translated into Greek and subsequently into Latin, perhaps in the process being turned into a Christian handbook.

The sudden cessation of the writing of historical works by the Jews has been explained in various ways. The causes of this phenomenon were probably multiple; among them were the Jewish loss of a national and cultic center, the sense of a demise of sacred history with the destruction of the temple, the further scattering of the Jews in the diaspora that intensified the dissipation of any concept of continuing political history, the canonization of Scripture that presented the Jews with a closed sacred past, the general disillusionment with historical processes attendant upon the failure of two major Jewish revolts against Rome, and the rabbinical orientation towards the law and its application and the rabbinical demands for total purity of life and separation from the world. Jewish historians in the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman world had borrowed the forms and interests of Hellenistic historiography and ethnography and utilized these for apologetic, propaganda, and polemical purposes. Josephus was a primary example. After the Bar Kokhba Revolt, these purposes seem to have lost their appeal. Jewish apocalyptic, with its special historical concerns, was reduced to only a glowing ember in the Hadrianic fires.

The early Christian church inherited from Judaism a collection of Scriptures strongly oriented to history. This combined with the belief that God had finally and fully revealed himself in the historical person, Jesus of Nazareth, meant that Christians could not ignore past history; in fact it had to claim the history of the old covenant as its own. The apologetic desire to present Christianity as the true heir of Old Testament faith and the evangelistic-confessional proclamation of the church as the special object of God’s providence led to the attempt to view “theocratic” history in systematic form. This systematization of history took both chronological and philosophical forms, although even the chronological perspectives were undergirded with major theological claims. The earliest specimens of Christian interpretation and systematic treatments of history were more chronological than historiographic in form.

The Christian chronographers had to summarize the history that the converts were now supposed to consider their own; they had also to show the antiquity of the Jewish–Christian doctrine, and they had to present a model of providential history. The result was that, unlike pagan chronology, Christian chronology was also a philosophy of history. Unlike pagan elementary teaching, Christian elementary teaching of history could not avoid touching upon the essentials of the destiny of man.30

Little is known of the Christian chronographers and their works prior to the establishment of Christianity as the state religion in the fourth century CE. Among the most important of these pre-Constantinian Christian ‘historians’ were Clement of Alexandria, Julius Africanus, and Hippolytus of Rome. Their concerns were primarily apologetic—to counter the contempt of Christianity as a novelty; and their methods were primarily those of their precursors, the Greco-Jewish historians and Hellenistic chronographers.

The work of Julius Africanus (about 170–245 CE), of which only fragments have survived, will illustrate the approach of these Christian chronographers.31 Africanus’s work, which was still available to Jerome (De viris illustribus, 63), consisted of five volumes. He treated the history of the world from creation until his own day and like practically all patristic writers saw chronology in eschatological perspectives. He allotted 6,000 years for the world’s duration and dated the birth of Jesus to 5500 anno mundi. Such time schemes or world ages were common in Jewish apocalyptic writings and are even found in rabbinic sources.32 Africanus did not share the view of his North African contemporary Tertullian, who claimed that “to be ignorant of everything outside the rule of faith is to possess all knowledge.” He worked out an elaborate synopsis of sacred and profane history, using as a fixed point the accession of Cyrus, and sought to collaborate his synchronisms with quotations from secular sources. He dated the flood to 2,262 after creation and apparently placed the exodus in the year 3,707. The first of these reckonings differs from the LXX, which places the flood 2,242 years after creation, and the date of the exodus was correlated with a Greek version of the flood assigned to the time of Ogygos, the legendary first king of Thebes. The date of Cyrus’s accession was derived from Diodorus of Sicily, who had stated that Cyrus became king of the Persians in the opening year of the fifty-fifth Olympiad. The Olympiad system was based on the quadrennial celebration of the Olympic games, with the first of these supposedly held in what would be our 776/775 BCE.33

In Africanus, one sees a flicker of textual criticism, so essential to scientific historiography. In a letter to Origen, he outlined seven reasons for considering the story of Susanna as late and fictitious and thus as no original part of the book of Daniel. He also noted and discussed the differences in the Matthean and Lukan genealogies of Jesus. Africanus’s textual criticism and skepticism of sources, however, nowhere approached that of the non-Christians Celsus and Porphyry. In their attacks on Christianity, the former criticized the miraculous and absurd in the Bible and the latter denied the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, pointed out inconsistencies in Genesis, understood the book of Daniel against the times of Antiochus Epiphanes, and called attention to major disagreements in the Gospels.

Eusebius of Caesarea, who died about 340 CE, utilized the works of his Christian and pagan predecessors in the study of chronography and produced an extensive chronology of world history. Although especially indebted to the work of Africanus, Eusebius frequently deviated from him and developed a new system for synchronistic tabulation. Unfortunately, Eusebius’s chronographic work has survived only in Jerome’s Latin translation and adaptation and in an anonymous Armenian translation. In his so-called Chronographia, he produced an outline of the history of five major nations: the Assyrians, Hebrews, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. In calculating the reigns of these nations’ rulers, he engaged in some critical discussions of the systems used for dating. The chronological differences among the Greek, Hebrew, and Samaritan texts were discussed with Eusebius generally opting for the LXX calculations. In his so-called Chronicon, Eusebius utilized a series of parallel columns for presenting the synchronism of the various empires. He took the birth of Abraham as his fixed point for reckoning and placed this in 3,184 anno mundi. The flood was dated to 2,242 and the exodus 505 years after the birth of Abraham. By choosing Abraham as the beginning point in his calculations, Eusebius thus partially sidestepped the LXX/Hebrew chronological problems, since the major differences are found in the early chapters of Genesis.34

Eusebius did not produce his chronology in any hope of detailing the coming of the eschatological end-time, nor did he, like Africanus, work with any world-age scheme. Uncertainty about the times and seasons, he wrote, applies “not merely to the final cataclysm but to all times.” For him, “chronology was something between an exact science and an instrument of propaganda.”35 Eusebius’s career spanned the time that saw the church move from a persecuted sect to a state institution. His days were times of triumph for Christianity and Eusebius’s writings affirm this as the providential purpose of God whose action in human affairs was the real nucleus of the historical process.

Eusebius was not only the ablest of the ancient Christian chronographers, he was also the father of ecclesiastical history. Eusebius was the first to produce a history of the church—which for him extended from the incarnation until his own day, in which the savior had wrought a great and final deliverance and destroyed the enemies of true religion. In approaching his subject, Eusebius confessed, in the first chapter of his Ecclesiastical History, that “as the first of those that have entered upon the subject, we are attempting a kind of trackless and unbeaten path.” In executing his narration of church history, Eusebius spoke of the fragmentary knowledge of the past and the evidence available.

We are totally unable to find even the bare vestiges of those who may have travelled the way before us; unless, perhaps, what is only presented in the slight intimations, which some in different ways have transmitted to us in certain partial narratives of the times in which they lived; who, raising their voices before us, like torches at a distance, and as looking down from some commanding height, call out and exhort us where we should walk, and whither direct our course with certainty and safety. Whatsoever, therefore, we deem likely to be advantageous to the proposed subject, we shall endeavour to reduce to a compact body by historical narration. For this purpose we have collected the materials that have been scattered by our predecessors, and culled, as from some intellectual meadows, the appropriate extracts from ancient authors. (1.1)

In carrying out this procedure, Eusebius made a lasting contribution to Western historiography.

A new chapter of historiography begins with Eusebius not only because he invented ecclesiastical history, but because he wrote it with a documentation that is utterly different from that of pagan historians.36

Over one hundred works are cited directly or referred to as read by Eusebius. It is true, as Eusebius’s critics have frequently noted, that his intellectual qualifications were somewhat defective, that he sometimes suppressed that which might disgrace religion, that he occasionally misquoted sources, and that he sometimes failed to note that his quoted documents were contradictory. Nonetheless, Eusebius realized that the writing of history is dependent upon the reading and discriminating study of the documents of the past. Considering the number of spurious documents he chose not to utilize, one must judge Eusebius an outstanding source critic for his age.

Eusebius wrote his works in the glow of Christianity’s newly acquired status. In the glare of the conflagration kindled by the barbarian invasion of the Roman empire, Augustine (354–430 CE), the converted ex-teacher of rhetoric, sought to gather the whole of human history into a theological-eschatological framework. Christianity, like the empire, found itself on the defensive in the days of Augustine, and he launched a counter-offensive against paganism’s attempts to lay the blame for the empire’s troubles on the steps of the church. For the later Augustine, any attempt to present the Roman empire in messianic terms would have constituted a heresy of the first order.

Augustine took the six-day scheme of creation and transposed these into a sixfold periodization of sacred history, the history of De civitate dei versus De civitate terrena: Just as there were six days of creation, so there were six ages of history: the first from Adam to the flood, the second from the flood to Abraham, the next three (as outlined in St Matthew’s gospel) from Abraham to David, from David to the Babylonian captivity, and from the Babylonian captivity to the birth of Christ. Then came the sixth age, in which the human mind was recreated in the image of God, just as on the sixth day of creation humandkind was created in the image of God. In this age men now lived (De civitate dei 22.30). The time from Adam to Noah constituted the first day and saw the light of a promised redeemer given to the fallen parents of the human race. The second day—the period of childhood—extended from Noah to Abraham with the ark as the symbol of the promise of salvation. From Abraham to David was the third day of youthful adolescence, and, as God has separated the waters on the third day, so he in this age separated the chosen people from the heathen masses. From David to the exile was the day of early manhood. The period of full manhood—the fifth day—extended from the scattering of the chosen people until the coming of the Messiah. The period of old age—the sixth day—was the age of Christian salvation with its new Adam (Jesus) and its new Eve (the church). The seventh day, corresponding to the divine sabbath, would dawn with the return of Christ in glory to establish a peace that would know no end. Augustine thus placed his own time within the waning period of the sixth day. That day had dawned with John the Baptist, with Christ’s incarnation the sun had risen, and with the spread of Christianity noonday had arrived. The sun had now begun its descent and senility set in but Augustine warned against precise speculation on the arrival of sunset.

In Augustine’s schematization, a number of factors are of significance. (1) He is not so much concerned with history as with the philosophy of history. (2) It is sacred history, the history of De civitate dei, that is important, not the outer events or occurrences nor human actions and causality. (3) The past of humankind and of Israel and Judah are of importance only as the prelude to the age of redemption, which itself is only a prelude to that final timeless period of total salvation and damnation. (4) Augustine’s vision embodies a penultimate pessimism about his own day, which was the age of senility, the time before the end. (5) Augustine sought “to direct man’s gaze from the contemplation of himself and the achievements of his reason upwards to the majesty of God.”37

In The City of God, Augustine had attempted to prove that the calamities that had befallen the Romans were not limited to the period of the church and, whenever they had occurred, were the result of the corruption of manners and the vices of the soul. The expansion of this thesis he bequeathed to his contemporary and admirer, Orosius. The latter’s Historiarum adversus paganos libri septem, completed in 418 CE, was an attempt “to trace the beginning and man’s wretchedness from the beginning of man’s sin” (1.1). Orosius prefaced his main discussion with a description of Asia, Europe, and Africa, thus manifesting a recognition of the importance of geography for history (as had Caesar, Cicero, and Sallust). Orosius’s work is important for subsequent historiography not because he “set forth . . . the desires and punishments of sinful men, the struggles of the world and the judgments of God, from the beginning of the world down to the present day, that is, during five thousand six hundred and eighteen years” (7.43), but because of his particular periodization of world history. According to Orosius, there had existed four world empires: Babylon, Macedon, Carthage, and Rome. His thesis is no doubt based on a particular interpretation of the four empires in Daniel (Babylonian, Persian, Median, and Greek), which identified the fourth empire with Rome. However, Orosius took a far more favorable attitude towards the Roman empire than his idol Augustine. For him, the iron teeth and claws of the fourth beast were a deterrent to the barbarians and the antichrist.

Before summarizing the early church’s historiographic legacy to the Middle Ages, three additional factors should be noted. In the first place, the theory of the plenary inspiration of Scripture had become widespread by the fifth century CE. Such a view of the origin and nature of the Bible stifles any drastic critical approach to the biblical materials. Since the Bible was and remains the basic source material for the history of Israel and Judah, such a position almost by necessity means that the historian retells, expands, elucidates, and harmonizes the biblical source material but does not deal with it critically. Secondly, the hermeneutical principles widely employed in the church allowed the interpreter to find several meanings in any given text: the historical and various mystical, analogical, figurative, and allegorical senses. This multiple layer method of interpretation was indebted not only to Greek allegorical treatments of epic and mythical materials and to rabbinic exegesis but also to the philosophical–allegorical interpretation of Aristobulus and Philo of Alexandria.38 The allegorical approach to biblical interpretation meant that interpreters did not have to confront directly the problems and difficulties within the biblical text. When in doubt, appeal could be made to the rule of faith and the established tradition: Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est.

Thirdly, hagiography (the writing of accounts of the lives and sufferings of saints) had become widespread in the fourth and fifth centuries, perhaps influenced to a degree by the Hellenistic conception of the divine man. Athanasius’s Life of St. Anthony and Sulpicius Severus’s Life of St. Martin of Tours are good examples. These hagiographies were eulogistic and rhetorical biographies that offered a sort of dateless and timeless semi-historical work. They actually functioned to draw people away from the matter-of-fact world and pointed to that transcendental realm that impinged upon historical reality. Eusebeius, in his life of Constantine, demonstrated how difficult it was to write a Christian biography of a person involved in affairs military, political, and economic. Hagiography was concerned with different matters. Yet hagiography was to be standard fare in medieval times and in its own way an impediment to the development of serious historiography.

What the early church transmitted to the Middle Ages did not encourage the development of serious historiography. No developed Christian historiography comparable to the work of Herodotus, Thucydides, or even Livy, Tacitus, and Josephus, was passed on unless Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History be the exception. Augustine, Orosius, and their contemporaries had not dialogued with the secular historians of the pagan revival in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, such as Ammianus Marcellinus. These were left “to die from natural causes.”39 The works of the Greek and Hellenistic historians belonged to the pagan past and in the West could quickly sink into a long dormant eclipse. Source and textual criticism were suffocated by the weight of a totally inspired collection of Scriptures, and allegorical interpretation was at hand to provide any needed escape valve. Concern with the transcendental, with the sacred side of the historical process, with the philosophical-eschatological dimensions oriented people towards the other world and away from the questions of human causality and action.

The Medieval Period

Three major types of historical tradition during the medieval period have been distinguished by Southern: classical, early scientific, and prophetic.

The aim of the classical imitators was to exemplify virtues and vices, for moral instruction, and to extract from the confusion of the past a clear picture of the destinies of peoples. The aim of the scientific students of universal history was to exhibit the divine plan for humanity throughout history, and to demonstrate the congruity between the facts of history revealed in the Bible and the facts provided by secular sources. As for the prophetic historians, their aim was first to identify the historical landmarks referred to in prophetic utterances, then to discover the point at which history had arrived, and finally to predict the future from the still unfulfilled portions of prophecy.40

Much of medieval historiography can be analysed in these categories.

A characteristic of practically all historical works during the Middle Ages is what has been called “history without historical perspective.”41

The student of medieval historiography must learn to do without perspective in historical presentation. A medieval writer could distinguish stages in the history of salvation, but they were religious stages. He did not discern change or development in temporal history. He saw continuity in customs and institutions . . . Roman emperors are made to talk and behave like medieval rulers. Alternatively, a writer learned in the Latin classics tended to make medieval rulers talk and behave like the Caesars. The historian did not only look back to the Old and New Testaments for parallels and precedents; he lived in an expanding Bible. The writer of a saint’s Life felt that he was adding a new page to the Gospel story; the recorder of a warrior’s deeds was continuing the tale of ancient and Old Testament heroes. Past and present interlock: ancient precedents imposed themselves on the present; the past resembled the present as the historian saw it. He had no sense of anachronism.42

This lack of any sense of the past as past is vividly reflected in medieval art, which portrayed ancient kings, prophets, and saints in the dress, armament, and physical setting of medieval times.

Before examining some of the historical works of this period related to the history of the study of Israelite and Judean history and to historiography in general, some particular comments should be made. First of all, distinction must be made between the European West and the Byzantine East. In the West, Greek literature fell into temporary oblivion; in addition to the basic patristic literature, the primary classical sources used and imitated were Roman. The most widely used of Roman writers were Suetonius, Sallust, Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, and Livy. This meant, of course, a strong emphasis on rhetoric to which history was a sub-genre. In the East, the Byzantine scholars were heirs to the classical Greek traditions, Hellenistic historiography, and early Christian historical writings due to the survival of the Greek language. In the East, however, the writings of Polybius and Plutarch had a significant impact that influenced historical writing towards contemporary history and biography. In the West, the lower level of literacy prejudiced much historiography towards the miraculous and mythical. The rise of territorial states in the West produced a desire to relate national and contemporary history to the general sweep of sacred history.

Secondly, medieval historical works as a rule dealt with pedestrian matters such as city and monastic records and annals, with propagandistic concerns as in the case of royal biographies, or with pietistic orientations exemplified in the lives of saints and other writings of a hagiographic character, as well as in the devotional use made of the biblical traditions. Most of these works contribute little or nothing to either the development of historiographic methodology or to the study of Israelite and Judean history.

Thirdly, the medieval period was no cultural and educational monolith. The concept of the Middle Ages as a barbarian period of constant decline is a legacy from Renaissance historiography. Two periods, the Carolingian in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, and the twelfth century have rightly been described as periods of true renaissance.

In the early medieval period, four historians are pre-eminent: Gregory of Tours (about 540–94), Isidore of Seville (about 560–636), the Venerable Bede (about 673–735), and Paul the Deacon (about 720–800). Each of these produced histories that, to a lesser or greater degree, filled out the shadowy past of their people by drawing up a historical pedigree that traced its origins to some great but misty figure or people of the past. (Virgil had done this for the Romans in his account of Aeneas and the Trojans who settled in Latium; and Jordanes, who died about 554, had traced the Goths back to the biblical Magog and the Scythians in his rewriting of Cassiodorius’s De Origine Actibusque Getarum.) Of these, Isidore and Bede are of interest for the history of the biblical period.

In his Chronica Majora, Isidore borrowed from several earlier Christian chronographers and produced a chronology extending from creation to 615 CE. In his universal scheme, Isidore devised the practice of dating everything backward and forward from the birth of Jesus. In his Etymologiae, an encyclopedia summarizing the known information on topics as diverse as grammar, mathematics, and medicine, Isidore discussed the topic of history writing.

Predictably, history is seen as a subsection of grammar, which itself is part of rhetoric. Grammar Isidore defines as “the art of writing,” and history as “a written narrative of a certain kind.” He distinguishes history from fable and myth: fable expresses truth by means of fiction . . . while poetic myth expresses truth by means of fictions about the gods . . . History differs from these kinds of narrative in being true in itself. It is “the narration of deeds done, by means of which the past is made known.”43

Isidore went on to argue that history must depend upon the account of eyewitnesses. He writes: “None of the ancients would write history unless he had been present and had seen what he narrated; we grasp what we see better than what we gather from hearsay. Things seen are not represented falsely.”44 A historian writing about the past is thus basically forced to be a compiler dependent upon his sources, which hopefully are or rely upon eyewitness accounts.

By all standards, Bede was the most outstanding historian of the early Middle Ages. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum), he adopted a Eusebian approach to church history, listing and quoting from his sources “in order to remove all occasions of doubt about those things I have written, either in your mind or in the minds of any others who listen to or read this history,” as he wrote in his dedication to King Ceolwulf of Northumbria. In his treatment of the biblical period, Bede stood within what Southern has called the scientific tradition of medieval historiography.45 Bede adopted the six-age scheme of Augustine46 and popularized Isidore’s BC/AD dating. Within the six-age pattern, Bede incorporated a genuine concept of autonomous development in history. Southern has described Bede’s originality in the following manner:

Just as the first Day began with the separation of light from darkness, and ended with the fall of Night, so the first Age began with the creation of man, continued with the separation of the good from the bad, and ended with the destruction of the universal Flood. Bede applied this form of exegesis to each of the six ages. As a result, each age acquired a distinct momentum, similar in pattern but distinct in its results: at the beginning of each there was an act of restoration, succeeded by a period of divergent development, leading to a general disaster which set the scene for a new act of restoration. I think that Bede is quite original in giving to each Age this rhythm of dawn, growth, and destruction, containing the promise of a new dawn. It is a rhythm which has some faint similarity to the Hegelian dialectic of history, and this similarity is strengthened by the way in which Bede ties his ages of history together in a movement analogous to the seven ages in the life of man. The first age, Infancy, is the time beyond the reach of memory before the Flood; the second, Childhood, is the time before Abraham when human language was first formed; the third, Adolescence, is the time of potency, when the generation of the Patriarchs began; the fourth, Maturity, is the time when mankind became capable of kingly rule; the fifth, Old Age, is the time of growing afflictions; the sixth, Senility, is the time in which the human race moves into the decrepitude which precedes the age of eternal rest . . . Bede brought history to the point at which it could be looked on not only as a succession of distinct ages with development of their own, but also as a kind of biological process preceding from age to age.47

Although Southern has here probably overstated the originality of Bede,48 this medieval historian certainly grasped something of the developmental process in human affairs and pondered deeply over the shape of universal history. In most of his works, however, Bede manifests the medieval fascination with the miraculous and the visionary, but it must be remembered that he, especially in the ecclesiastical history, was writing for the edification of his audience and was stressing the role of divine providence in Anglo-Saxon conversion to Christianity.

In the Carolingian period, under the Frankish rulers Charlemagne (768–814) and his son Louis the Pious (814–40), significant intellectual and educational developments occurred. Royal prescription decreed that monasteries and bishops’ houses should be centers of education. At Charlemagne’s palace school, the seven liberal arts—the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic) and the Quadrivium (music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy)—were cultivated. Latin was restored to the position of a literary language, and there was a revival of interest in classical texts, both Christian and pagan. The works of Sallust and Suetonius were especially influential. Einhard drew upon Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars for his life of Charlemagne and thus chose to imitate a style that differed radically from general medieval hagiography and biography and allowed for a rather secular and critical interpretation. Einhard’s treatment of Charlemagne gave impetus to numerous royal biographies; but biography as a form became an instrument of the church, and rulers tended to be treated from clerical perspectives. Thus they hardly advanced the general cause of historiography. The classical eulogy and the Christian tradition of saints’ Lives combined to reduce the amount of factual information required in biography.

The Suetonian model permitted more precision, but it proved to be too bare for medieval taste. The rhetorical tradition defeated it. We cannot expect to find objectivity either; biographers wanted to praise or excuse. Their saving grace is that they remember the traditional advice to the historian to tell the truth and to report events as an eyewitness wherever possible . . . Sudden flashes of realism light up their most conventional stories. If we judge them as propagandists, we have to admire their ingenuity. All do their best for rulers who fell short of what was expected of a Christian hero.49

Historians who quoted and imitated Sallust’s Catiline Conspiracy and Jugurthan War failed to make use of a significant factor in his works: ‘there is no sign of any interest in Sallust’s theory of historical causation . . . none of them so much as noticed that he had an overall theory of the development and decline of political societies.”50

The Carolingian revival of learning was oriented towards preparation for Bible study. During the reign of Charlemagne, several attempts were made to revise the Latin text of the Bible.51 The most important was that of Alcuin, presented to the king at his coronation as emperor on Christmas Day 800. Alcuin was certainly familiar with the Greek text and used this occasionally to correct the Latin. Some evidence exists to suggest that at least some Christian scholars were acquainted with Jewish interpretations of the Old Testament—with their emphasis on a literal reading of the text—if not with Hebrew itself.52 During this period “there begins a veneration for the Fathers that invests their views on the meaning of Scripture with dogmatic authority.”53 Commentaries produced by piecing together excerpts from the fathers were common in the ninth century. Such commentaries not only served the devotion of the faithful but also brought to attention “the inconsistencies and gaps in the patristic tradition.”54 Differences among the patristic authorities meant that attempts had to be made at reconciliation or harmonization or, as in the case of Paschasius and John the Scot—who was familiar with Greek theology—one might be led to compare, criticize, and even discuss the differences and the meaning of the text.

The primary concern of historians during the Carolingian period was contemporary history. Royal historiography possessed a commanding subject in Charlemagne and his family. During the period, “a new form of historical writing is evolved in the Annales, which develop gradually from entries in a liturgical calendar to an increasingly fuller narration”;55 but this too was oriented towards contemporary events. Nothing comparable to the works of Augustine, Orosius, or Bede were produced during this time.

What might be called national history continued as a major concern of the post-Carolingian period as it had been in the early medieval period. “The lesson that destiny of nations is the noblest of all historical themes” was not lost.56 Most of these works were similar in intent to the earlier histories of Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon. “A whole series of attempts was made to apply to other races the theme in Virgil’s Aeneid of a noble group of people guided by the gods towards a splendid destiny.”57 Widukind produced his work on Saxon history, Dudo wrote about the Normans, and Richer about the Franks. This form of writing reached its apogee in the romantic and fantastic Historia regum Britanniae by Geoffrey of Monmouth (about 1100–1154). He attempted to establish for the Celts a more illustrious and detailed past and a more glorious and consequential destiny than was the case of any other national historian. Trojan origins, visions and heavenly visitations, and Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table are described in imaginary and graphic contours. “Although some, even contemporary, readers were not deceived by the work, and William of Newburgh, one of the best English historians of the 12th century, denounced it as a tissue of absurdities, many seriously accepted it as history.”58

Scholars are accustomed to speak of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries as a proto-Renaissance, as a time of great progress in learning and culture. Knowles has summarized the humanism of this period by outlining its three dominant characteristics: “first, a wide literary culture,” which demonstrated itself in a “capability of self-expression based on a sound training in grammar and a long and often loving study of the foremost Latin authors”; “next, a great and what in the realm of religious sentiment could be called a personal devotion to certain figures of the ancient world; and, finally, a high value set upon the individual, personal emotions, and upon the sharing of experiences and opinions within a small circle of friends.”59 During this period, the universities at Paris, Bologna, and Oxford were founded. The Crusades to recover the holy land from the Seljukian Turks reached their culmination in the establishment of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. Contacts between the East and West, in spite of the church split in 1054, produced cross-fertilization between Byzantium and Latin Europe. Aristotelian logic and philosophy, partially through the mediation of the Arabs, began to dominate Western thought through translations and the greater availability of his works.

The introduction of the whole canon of Aristotle to the West was a process continuing over a hundred years. The first wave, that of the logical works, was absorbed easily and avidly . . . The second wave, that of the difficult and profound philosophical works, gave more trouble and was less easily absorbed, though its effects were epoch-making. Finally, the ethical and political and literary treatises presented Europe with a philosopher who regarded human life from a purely naturalistic, this-world point of view . . . the atmosphere, the presuppositions of this great body of thought were not medieval and Christian, but ancient Greek, not to say rationalistic in character.60

Aristotelian thought made possible the birth of ‘theology’ in the systematic and scholastic sense that was to dominate religious studies in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries.61

Aristotle’s thought, it should be recalled, did not encourage historiographic studies. For Aristotle, history was too chaotic: “The historian has to expound not one action, but one period of time and all that happens within this period to one or more persons however disconnected the several events may be” (Poetics 1459a). History also lacked the element of universality: “The historian describes the thing that has been; the poet the kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is more important and philosophic than history, for its statements have universal validity, while those of the historian are valid only for one time and one place” (Poetics 1451b). The urge to systematization is basically anti-historical in perspective.

This period of the proto-Renaissance, in its earliest phase, also witnessed some significant developments in historiography. In England, after the Norman Conquest of 1066, radical changes characterized society and the old cultural systems were challenged. In response to the threat of change, English monastics saw themselves as the custodians of the past and to preserve that past monasteries became the centers of antiquarian concerns.62 Monastic charters were collected, documents transcribed, historical and annalistic texts assembled, buildings and inscriptions studied, and the remains of saints gathered. “The post-Conquest monks were sure that they had a great past, but they were uncertain of their present and future . . . The monastic antiquaries searched the records to give detail and lucidity to their inherited conviction of greatness . . .”63

William of Malmesbury (about 1080–1143), in his ecclesiastical and secular histories of England, demonstrated how such antiquarian material could be used to reconstruct a realistic view of the past. No parallel to such antiquarianism exists before the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the latter was to lack both the passion and purpose of the former.

At least two major theologians and canonists of the twelfth century worked with a concept of development and change in history.64 These were Hugh of St. Victor (about 1096—1141), and Otto of Freising (about 1115–58). Hugh was not strictly a historian, although he wrote a chronicle of world history for use as a student’s handbook in which he stressed the importance of time, place, people, and events for the understanding of history. In his theological works, a dynamic view of history pervades his discussions. His arguments rest on the presupposition that humandkind moved in history from the primitive and simple to the more sophisticated and developed. He sought to outline the various stages, for example, in the history of the sacrament of penance showing that its final form was the product of the needs of the early church. Thus doctrine goes through developmental stages and the needs of human institutions play a role. In his description of the world ages, Hugh’s thought has a certain evolutionary ring. The first age of man, from the fall to Abraham, was “the age of natural law when men groped around for remedies for their ills by the light of reason and experience.” Primitive humandkind developed various sacraments, sacrifices, and offerings to present to their gods. The second age, which began embryonically with Abraham and fully with Moses, was “the age of written law when God intervened actively in human history” and provided humanity with the means of education and sacramental union. In the third age, which began with Christ, grace replaced law and the inspirations of the spirit supplanted the commandments.65 In these ages, humans cooperated with God in a forward movement towards higher forms of human existence. Hugh, in his writings on the liberal arts, argued again for stages in human development from the primitive to the advanced. He declared: “Men wrote and talked before there was grammar; they distinguished truth from falsehood before there was dialectic; they had laws before there was rhetoric; they had numbers before there was arithmetic; they sang before there was music; they measured fields before there was geometry; they observed the stars and seasons before there was astronomy.”66

In technology, it was the operation of human reason that functioned to meet the needs of humans. Physical necessity prompted humanity towards achievement. “There arose the theoretical sciences to illuminate ignorance, ethics to strengthen virtue, and the mechanical arts to temper man’s infirmity.”67 Hugh’s sense of historical development in all categories of life presented a rather optimistic view of the historical process, a view in which novelty was not only accepted but also declared good.

Otto, the bishop of Freising in Bavaria and a member of the imperial family, produced a universal history from creation to his own day relying on the schemes of six ages and four world monarchies. The work is basically Orosian in orientation. In a number of ways, Otto differed from or extended the thought of Augustine and Orosius. He identified the city of God with the church and in Henry IV’s submission to Pope Gregory VII at Canossa in 1077 he saw the triumph of the ‘heavenly’ over the ‘earthly’ city. Although Otto shared the Orosian view of the decline of human rule, he was nonetheless able to affirm, especially in his work on Frederick I, that history was not a tragedy and that empire could be an instrument of peace. Otto gave detailed treatment to the so-called ‘transfer thesis,’ the idea that civilization and empire moved from East to West. The idea was implicit already in Eusebius and perhaps already used at the Frankish court before Otto. He, however, worked out analogies between the ancient empires and those in Europe. The empire of his day was understood as the continuation of the fourth empire—the Roman—which had simply moved westward. Otto applied the transfer theory not only to political power but to religion and education as well: “Note well that all human power and knowledge began in the East and end in the West, so that in this way the variability and weaknesses of all things may be made clear.”68

The Middle Ages witnessed the blossoming of what might be called ‘prophetic’ or ‘apocalyptic’ historiography. The six-age scheme and the four monarchies theory of world history were, of course, derived from biblical texts that were either taken as prefigurations or as predictions. Biblical commentators had solved to their own and their contemporaries’ satisfaction most of the assumed predictions in the biblical texts. Numerous attempts were made, however, to define more closely some of the loose ends, especially the interpretation of Daniel 7, Revelation 6, and the appearance of the antichrist. The general ambiguity of apocalyptic texts tends to allow for their constant reinterpretation by those disposed to see themselves living in the last days and to see their enemies as the antichrists. The ambiguity of the biblical texts had even been heightened in some cases by patristic exegesis. Jerome, for example, had suggested that the ten horns in Daniel 7 might refer to the ten kings who would be the instruments of the Roman empire’s destruction and would be followed by the antichrist. If the Bible were the inspired truth, then these prophecies must have some concrete historical referent, or so reasoned medieval lovers of prophecy.

In addition to biblical prophecies, various other elements contributed to medieval prophetical historiographic interests: numerous Sibylline documents, developing astrological investigations stimulated by Islamic science and the introduction of the astrolabe and the improved ability to calculate astronomical phenomena, and the prophecies of such figures as Merlin and Hildegard of Bingen.69 The most famous apocalyptic historian of the time was Joachim of Fiore (about 1132–1202), whose fame and thought endured long after his passing. Joachim advanced a trinitarian conception of history. The time of ancient Israel and Judah was the age of God the Father, the second age of God the Son began with Jesus, and the age of the Holy Spirit was soon to dawn. The world of the new age was to be the time of the monks and was to be inaugurated by the appearance of a new Elijah and twelve holy men. (Many saw in the mendicant friars of the following decades a fulfilment of his prophecies.) The antichrist was to appear for the first time before the dawn of the final age and the reign of the Spirit. Needless to say, many were later seen as the embodiment of the antichrist; the most frequent candidate being the Muslims, a view already expounded by ninth-century Spanish theologians. The views of Joachimism and prophetic historiography scarcely advanced the cause of Israelite and Judean historiography. They did, however, tend to dispose people towards the future and hope and for several generations occupied the thoughts of many, not the least of whom was Sir Isaac Newton.

Before leaving this section, a few comments should be made about Jewish historiography in the Middle Ages. The surprising factor is that nothing comparable to Christian and Muslim historiography existed in Judaism during this period.70 The primary concerns of medieval Judaism centered upon either halakhic or philosophical-ethical matters. When they appear, historical matters in the Talmud are anecdotal. When the Jewish authorities “discussed the past, particular incidents, rather than its totality, caught their attention.”71 It is possible to take the various writings of a Jewish scholar like Maimonides (1135–1204) and distill from these his comments on and interpretations of various historical events reported in the Bible.72 These are basically retelling, with commentary, of the biblical narratives supplemented by haggadah and chronological notations. From these it is possible to reconstruct Maimonides’s historical worldview, but this is hardly historiography.

One special work deserves mention. This is the Hebrew writing called Josippon, so named because of its association with Josephus. Written in southern Italy in the mid-tenth century, Josippon begins with the table of nations in Genesis 10, contains a discussion of the founding of Rome, and provides a history of the Jews, primarily of the second temple period down to the fall of Masada. The unknown author made use of the Latin version of most of the books in Josephus’s Antiquities and a Latin adaptation of Josephus’s War. The book was widely used in the Middle Ages, was even translated into Arabic in the eleventh, and apparently was supplemented in the twelfth century.73

From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

The foundations of modern historiography were laid in the Renaissance, which began in Italy in the fourteenth century and spread northward. The militant humanism of this period certainly had its roots in medievalism, in spite of its scorn for the Middle Ages; but its intellectual and technological accomplishments were revolutionary both in themselves and in their implications. One of the products of the Renaissance was history as an independent discipline. A second result was a critical approach to many of the problems and issues of life. The radical consequences of these two developments for the study of Israelite and Judean history, however, were not to be developed fully until the nineteenth century.

During the Renaissance, four elements that pervaded much of the intellectual activity were generative of momentous consequences for future historiography. These were a true sense of anachronism, a renewed interest in antiquarianism, a critical stance towards the literary evidence from the past, and the attempt to understand the causation of historical events through reason.74 One must not, of course, assume that a majority of the educated and scholarly figures of the Renaissance period shared these perspectives, any more than one should assume that after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species everyone gave up the idea that God created humankind in a paradise state.

As was noted earlier, medieval writers as a rule lacked a historical perspective on the past as past, as different in space and time from the contemporary. In the fourteenth century, a historical sensibility began to develop. This appears, for example, in Giotto’s fresco painting in the Arena Chapel at Padua (about 1305), which depicts Pontius Pilate clean-shaven, with garlanded head, and wearing a Roman robe embossed with a golden, imperial eagle. He appears as a figure from the past, not as a contemporary. Petrarch (1304–74) was well aware of the differences between his own day and those of his beloved Rome before the conversion of Constantine. So much so that he described his own times as barbarian and wrote ‘nostalgic’ letters to the classical authors expressing his longing to escape from the present and to find solace in those happier bygone days of old. Renaissance authors slowly recognized that everything had changed over time—laws, words, clothes, customs, arts, and buildings.75 There was, in other words, a historical relativity to all things.

Antiquarianism was a natural accompaniment to the revived interest in the past.76 In the Renaissance, men like Petrarch were not only interested in ancient literary works but in what would be called archaeological remains. Coins, inscriptions, and ancient ruins were of interest not just as relics from the past but as means to reconstruct the past. Petrarch used coins to discover what Roman emperors looked like and in his epic poem Africa drew upon the ruins of Rome, which he had visited, in describing the city at the time of the Carthaginians’ visit. In 1446, Flavio Biondo produced a topographical description of Rome dependent upon both the literary sources and his personal visits to the ruined sites. The fact that Renaissance scholars frequently misinterpreted antiquities or distorted their antiquarian knowledge is beside the point, for the issue is not their correctness in detail but their methodological procedure.

The discipline of documentary criticism was a speciality of many Renaissance scholars, The most outstanding and influential early Renaissance literary critic was Lorenzo Valla (about 1406–57). Petrarch, however, had already (in 1355) used internal and external evidence to prove that a document exempting Austria from the jurisdiction of the Emperor Charles IV was a forgery.77 In 1439, Valla disproved the authenticity of the Donation of Constantine in which Constantine had supposedly assigned temporal power over Italy to Pope Sylvester I and his successors. (Otto of Freising and other medieval authors had suspected that the document was a forgery, as did Valla’s contemporaries Nicholas of Cusa and Reginald Pecock, independently.) “The significance of Valla’s declamation was neither in applying philological criteria, for Petrarch and others, including canonists, had taken this step, nor in denying the authenticity of the document, which had already been placed in doubt; rather it was in exhibiting the whole array of humanist weapons—polemic and personal vituperation as well as criticism stemming from grammar, logic, geography, chronology, history, and law.”78 Valla and others applied their literary criticism to numerous documents, both classical and Christian, to prove their inauthenticity or to elucidate their origin and history. “In 1460, Nicholas of Cusa wrote the Sieving of the Koran (Cribratio Alcoran) which treated the Koran as Nicholas had already treated the Donation. He identified three elements in its composition: Nestorian Christianity, a Jewish adviser of Muhammad, and the corruptions introduced by Jewish ‘correctors’ after Muhammad’s death. This was to treat the Koran as a historical document, and to write the history of its leading ideas.”79 The status of the Bible as the word of God exempted it from such treatment for the moment.

The literary legends about national origins and hagiographic legends about the saints were open to criticism by the humanists. Two examples will suffice. The Italian historian, Polydore Vergil, published a history of England in 1534 in which he took up the older attack on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s depiction of the Trojan Brutus as the founder of Britain. His basic argument rested on an appeal to the ancient sources: none of the ancient Roman authors and sources make any reference to this Brutus.80 In a short biography prefaced to his edition of Jerome’s works, Erasmus (in 1516) argued that many of the legendary traditions “contaminate the saints with their old wives’ tales, which are childish, ignorant, and absurd” and that the best source for knowledge about Jerome was the humandkind himself.

For who knew Jerome better than Jerome himself? Who expressed his ideas more faithfully? If Julius Caesar is the most reliable source for the events of his own career, is it not all the more reasonable to trust Jerome on his? And so, having gone through all his works, we made a few annotations and presented the results in the form of a narrative, not concealing the fact that we consider it a great enough miracle to have Jerome himself explaining his life to us in all his famous books. If there is anyone who must have miracles and omens, let him read the books about Jerome which contain almost as many miracles as they do sentences.81

The literary study of the early Renaissance humanists was not oriented merely to the detection of forgery and the exposure of many venerated traditions as nonhistorical legends. There was a very positive side to the focus on documentary evidence. “The mere problem of gaining access to the past began to supersede the problem of how to make use of it.”82 The humanists stressed that the recovery of the past through documentary sources had to depend upon philology and grammar. This meant a literal and realistic reading of the sources and at times textual criticism to restore the sources. Valla, in his Annotations on the New Testament published by Erasmus in 1505, came close to placing the biblical sources on the same footing with other ancient documents. Valla had also concluded that “none of the words of Christ have come to us, for Christ spoke in Hebrew and never wrote down anything.”83 Erasmus, who argued for a “return to the sources” (versetur in fontibus), defended Valla’s position on the need for textual criticism to restore the sources of theology.84 This meant that the reliability of the Old Testament versions must be established on the basis of Hebrew and the New Testament on the basis of Greek. (Pope Clement V and the Council of Vienne in 1311–12 had called for the training of teachers in three languages—Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic or Chaldee.) In interpreting the Bible, Erasmus argued that the role of the grammarian was more important than that of theologian.

Nor do I assume that theology, the very queen of all disciplines, will think it beneath her dignity if her handmaiden, grammar, offers her help and the required service. For even if grammar is somewhat lower in dignity than other disciplines, there is no other more necessary. She busies herself with very small questions, without which no one progresses to the large. She argues about trifles which lead to serious matters. If they answer that theology is too important to be limited by grammatical rules and that this whole affair of exegeting depends on the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, then this is indeed a new honor for the theologian that he alone is allowed to speak like a barbarian.85

In spite of Erasmus’s emphasis on grammar in the understanding of the biblical text, he refused to disavow allegorical interpretation, although he warned that it should not be overdone, should apply everything to Christ, and requires a pious mind.86 Here he shows himself closer kin to Augustine than to Valla.

The trivial concerns of the grammarian or the “very small questions” grammar asks—to use Erasmus’s terminology—were part of a major revolution in thought. The difference between the medieval interpretative gloss on a text and the grammatical analysis of a text is enormous; they belong to two different worlds of thought. The humanists of the Renaissance openly broke with the scholastic method, caustically opposed it, and asserted the superiority of their new methods. Valla declared: “The discourse of historians exhibits more substance, more practical knowledge, more political wisdom . . . , more customs, and more learning of every sort than the precepts of any philosophers. Thus we show that historians have been superior to philosophers.”87 The difference between scholasticism and humanism in the Renaissance period has been described in the following terms: “By proliferating abstractions and superfluous distinctions, scholastic philosophy had lost contact with concrete reality. It had cut men off from meaning, hence from their own humanity. Valla’s philosophy, on the other hand, emphasized precisely these standards—concreteness, utility, and humanity . . . Indeed, a return to reality may be taken as the slogan of Valla’s entire philosophy.”88

The quest or return to reality was not only the source of the humanistic or historical revolution of the Renaissance but also the basis for the scientific revolution that has its roots in the same period.89 Science had to overcome the legacy of Aristotelian scholasticism. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the scientific revolution, which reached a climax in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for all aspects of life including biblical studies, although Butterfield seems to have been successful in this regard: “Since that revolution overturned the authority in science not only of the middle ages but of the ancient world—since it ended not only in the eclipse of scholastic philosophy but in the destruction of Aristotelian physics—it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom.”90 Mechanics and astronomy were the first scientific disciplines to develop.

These new approaches to reality were concerned with questions of explanation and causation in both natural and human orders. The way was opened for a view of the world that operated according to ‘natural law’ even if that law be understood as the will of God. The historical implication of such a view is enormous: humans can understand past events as analogous to present events. Human, climatic, geographical, and other factors could be viewed as causal elements in historical events both past and present. This rise of explanation in historical studies marked a significant development in historiography.

“In medieval historical writing there are explanations of an extremely specific kind, in terms of the motives of individuals; there are also explanations of an extremely general kind, in terms of the hand of God in history, or the decay of the world; but middle-range explanations are lacking.”91 These “middle-range explanations”—what today we would call sociological, economic, geographical, and climatic considerations—have their beginnings in the Renaissance.92

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, which in many ways represents merely a radical and religious application of Renaissance principles and aims, made at least four significant contributions that were ultimately of great importance in the history of Hebrew historiography.

First of all, the reformers placed the Bible at the center of the theological enterprise. Sola scriptura was the keynote of the Reformation.93 In emphasizing the Bible as the rule and norm of faith, the reformers stressed a literal interpretation of the Scriptures. Luther wrote:

The Holy Spirit is the plainest writer and speaker in heaven and earth, and therefore His words cannot have more than one, and that the very simplest, sense, which we call the literal, ordinary, natural sense.

All heresies and error in Scripture have not arisen out of the simple words of Scripture . . . All error arises out of paying no regard to the plain words and, by fabricated inferences and figures of speech, concocting arbitrary interpretations in one’s own brain.

In the literal sense there is life, comfort, strength, learning, and art. Other interpretations, however appealing, are the work of fools.

In addition to an emphasis on the literal reading of Scripture, the reformers argued that Scripture is its own interpreter. Luther declared: “Scripture itself by itself is the most unequivocal, the most accessible, the most comprehensible authority, itself its own interpreter, attesting, judging, illuminating all things.”94

This emphasis upon a literal reading of the Scriptures, which had earlier been stressed in Judaism over against a christocentric reading of the Old Testament, did not immediately produce any critical-historical approach to the Bible. Even Luther retained a prophetic-christocentric attitude towards the Old Testament. The idea of the divine inspiration of Scripture or the Bible as the word of God halted the reformers short of any really critical approach, although Luther relegated Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation to an appendix in his New Testament translation primarily because of theological reasons, which he buttressed with an appeal to the dispute over these documents in the early church.95 Matthias Flacius Illyricus’s Claris scripturae sacrae (1567), one of the first handbooks on biblical hermeneutics, is representative of Protestantism’s stress on the importance of the literal or grammatical sense, but warns that there are no contradictions in Scripture and that exegesis must be in agreement with faith.96 This emphasis on the literal reading of the biblical materials was ultimately to make literary-critical analysis not only possible but also necessary.

A second contribution of the reformers was an iconoclastic attitude towards tradition. This phenomenon was widely current in many circles during the times as previous examples have shown. The reformers sought to restore the purity of the church and return to the origins; components and traditions that appeared to have intervened extraneously could be repudiated. Such attitudes, however, fostered a sense of criticism although it was much easier to be critical of post-biblical than biblical traditions. An example of a significant critique of an ancient and venerated tradition is represented by Carolus Sigonius who challenged the traditional Jewish view of the origin of the synagogue. An expert on Greek and Roman institutions, Sigonius, in his De republica Hebraeorum libri VII (1583), argued as follows regarding the antiquity of the synagogue:

The origin of the synagogue is by no means an old one. We find, indeed, no mention of it [in Scripture] either in the history of the Judges or in the history of the Kings. If it is at all admissible to venture a conjecture in this kind of antiquity, I would surmise that synagogues were first erected in the Babylonian exile for the purpose that those who have been deprived of the temple of Jerusalem, where they used to pray and teach, would have a certain place similar to the temple, in which they could assemble and perform the same kind of service.97

Many concepts, positions, and traditions, however, were taken over uncritically by the reformers. Both Luther and Melanchthon accepted the four monarchies approach to world history. The Frenchman Jean Bodin, in his Method for the Easy Understanding of Histories (1566), thus sensed he was breaking new ground when he included an essay on the “refutation of those who postulate four monarchies and the golden age.”

A third contribution of the Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation can be seen in the fact that the history of the church became a dominant issue in the struggles within the church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Historiography was a major weapon in both arsenals. Protestants argued that the teachings of Jesus and the faith of the primitive church had become distorted by the hierarchy of the church. (They differed among themselves as to the precise date at which the apostasy began.) Catholics sought to prove that the church at the time was the true successor of primitive Christianity and that the church was basically the same as it had always been. Luther and Calvin’s writings reflect the general Protestant view of church history,98 although Luther wrote in the introduction to Robert Barnes’s Vitae Romanorurn pontificum (1535) that it was a wonderful delight and the greatest joy to see that history, as well as Scripture, could be used to attack the papacy. In Eusebian fashion, historians on both sides turned again to the extensive study and employment of documents, to even a greater extent than many humanist historians, who, especially in Italy, were more interested in literary form than documentation, being strongly influenced by the rhetorical tradition.99 The greatest monuments to this historical controversy are the thirteen-volume Historia ecclesiae Christi (1559–74) produced by the Magdeburg Centuriators, under the leadership of Matthias Flacius, and the twelve-volume rejoinder, Annales ecclesiastici, by Caesar Baronius.100 As a result of this use of historiography as a battlefield, ecclesiastical history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries displayed a greater erudition, a more minute analysis of sources, and a more historiographic sophistication than secular history. Unfortunately none of this energy and insight was applied to the study of Israelite and Judean history, although the issue established history as an important element in religious controversy.

The fourth significant development that grew out of the Reformation was religious freedom that allowed for enormous theological diversity. The rejection of authoritarianism in tradition, priesthood, and religious practice permitted an increased appeal to private judgment, often, of course, uncompromisingly certain that it reflected the true biblical and Christian point of view. Thus theological positions were capable of absorbing modernity while claiming to be founded upon true antiquity. This permitted significant shifts on the questions of authority and revelation, which made biblical criticism not only possible but sometimes desirable. “The exercise of private judgment permitted the Protestant not so much to avoid as to conclude compromises: he could come to terms with the new ideas around him.”101 Protestantism thus had a built-in flexibility that made accommodation possible. “It is to Calvin’s great credit that he recognized the discrepancy between the scientific world system of his days and the biblical text, and secondly, that he did not repudiate the results of scientific research on that account.”102

The Italians Lelio (1525–62) and Faustus Socinus (1539–1604), with their moderate unitarian theology and their assumption that the veracity of Scripture should be subjected to rational judgment, were among the first to formulate a view of religion whose modernity even antagonized the reformers.103

Following the Council of Trent (1545–63), which reaffirmed the Vulgate canon and text of the Bible but recommended the latter’s revision, a long debate ensued between Catholics and Protestants and among Protestants themselves over which Old Testament text—Latin, Greek, or Hebrew—was authoritative. Even the inspiration of the Hebrew vowel points became involved.104 The attempts to decide such issues led to heated controversy and, though perhaps not widely recognized, to humans sitting in judgment over the text.

The reformers had argued that a person could interpret the Scriptures aided by divine light or fides divina. Luther, at the Diet of Worms (1521), had spoken of being “convinced by the testimony of the scriptures or by clear reason.”105 Gradually the fides divina had to give more and more to ‘clear reason’ and the divine or inward light tended to become “really the Lumen naturale under a mask.”106 The seventeenth century witnessed the dethronement of the Bible as the authoritative source of knowledge and understanding and saw biblical interpreters and historians utilizing the products of the lumen naturale.107

The heliocentric theory in astronomy, expounded in Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium and opposed by Luther and Melanchthon, was undergirded by Kepler’s mathematical work and Galileo’s theory of dynamics and his invention of the telescope. Kepler suggested that science should be used in understanding the Bible and proposed (in 1606) that the Bethlehem star was due to the unusual conjunction of Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter in the sign of Taurus in 6 BCE. The discovery and exploration of new lands brought to attention the existence of peoples beyond the purview of the biblical texts. Travel accounts reported on the life and customs of distant lands. For the first time—in the writings of figures like Pietro della Valle and Michael Nau—reports on monuments, sites, and life in Palestine became known. The scientific revolution possessed its philosophical counterpart in the thought of Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes. Based on an empirical and critical approach to all knowledge, the new philosophy sought, as Bacon stated, “a total reconstruction of sciences, arts, and all human knowledge, raised upon proper foundations.” The establishment of history as an independent discipline in the major universities necessitated the self-consciousness of the field as a ‘science’: the earliest professors of history were primarily commentators on the writings of ancient historians. The first professor of history at Cambridge University was dismissed in 1627 because his comments on Tacitus were considered politically dangerous.108 Historians produced manuals on the art of history writing and the use and criticism of documents. The most important of the latter was Jean Mabillon’s De re diplomatica (1680). Generally, in the seventeenth century, antiquarian or archaeological and historical concerns were pursued separately. The former was undertaken, with some exceptions, by dilettantes possessed by an abundance of leisure and some interest in the arts and travel. Much energy and money were expended to secure artifacts for the adornment of museums and livingrooms. Near the end of the century efforts were made to combine historical and antiquarian interests; some scholars went so far as to claim the superiority of archaeological over literary evidence in reconstructing history.109 The seventeenth century was also a time of general questioning of authority, both political and religious, as the Puritan movement and the Cromwellian revolution in England demonstrate.

The impact of the intellectual climate of the seventeenth century upon the study of biblical history can be illustrated through the selection of three examples: the desire to produce a definitive biblical chronology, the attempt to defend a literal interpretation of biblical events through the use of the new sciences, and the growing literary-critical approach to Old Testament documents.

In 1583, Scaliger (1540–1609), the most outstanding philologist of his day, published his De emendatione temporum, which provided a synchronized world chronology incorporating Greek, Roman, and Jewish calculations and utilizing recent astronomical discoveries. In 1606, he published his Thesaurus temporum, a collection of every chronological relic extant in Greek and Latin. The most influential biblical chronology in the English-speaking world was published in 1650–54 by the Irish bishop James Ussher (1581–1656). In the preface to his Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti, Ussher confidently assured the reader: “If anyone well seen in the knowledge not only of sacred and exotic history, but of astronomical calculation, and the old Hebrew calendar, should apply himself to these studies, I judge it indeed difficult, but not impossible, for such a one to attain, not only the number of years, but even of days from the creation of the world.” Of the date of creation, he wrote: “In the beginning, God created Heaven and Earth, Genesis 1, verse 1, which beginning of time, according to our chronologers, fell upon the entrance of the night preceding the 23rd day of October in the year of the Julian Calendar, 710 . . . Marginal note: the year before Christ, 4004.”110 Subsequently, Ussher’s chronological calculations were placed in the margin of the King James Version of the Scriptures. Chronographers, of course, differed in their calculations, but many of the scientific minds of the seventeenth century sought to establish scientifically the biblical chronological data. Even so great a mathematical mind as that of Isaac Newton, in a work published posthumously in 1733, sought to demonstrate the accuracy of the predictions in Daniel when applied to papal power. He also sought to make biblical chronology agree with the course of nature, astronomy, sacred history, and the classical histories, especially Herodotus.

One of the most debated topics in the seventeenth century was Noah’s flood—its historicity, nature, and extent. In a classical study, Allen has shown how all the sciences of the time were drawn upon to expound the flood in a literal sense and to explain it in rational terms. Scholars discussed the chronology of the flood, the size of the ark, the number and names of the animals, the amount of food needed to feed the ark’s passengers, and so on. The most vexing problem was, of course, the question of the origin of sufficient water to flood the entire earth to a depth of fifteen cubits. With the discovery of new lands and new animals, living quarters on the ark became more crowded. Even astronomical phenomena, such as comets, were brought into the picture as explanations. A local flood theory developed when reasonable arguments for a universal flood wore thin. Such an enormous superstructure of arguments was developed to support a literal flood until the whole thing was doomed to topple from its own weight. What resulted from such attempts to support the literal historicity of biblical narratives was a “rational exegesis, a form of pious explanation that innocently damned the text that it expounded.” “Theologians now required the Bible to conform to the reason of men.”111

A third seventeenth-century development was the application of literary and documentary criticism to the Old Testament, especially the Pentateuch. Documentary criticism meant that questions about the origin, nature, and historical reliability were to be asked of the biblical materials. Earlier scholars, such as Isaac ben Suleiman in the tenth century, Ibn Ezra in the twelfth century, Carlstadt and others in the sixteenth century, had raised questions about the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. The significant biblical critics of the seventeenth century were Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), an English philosopher; Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77), a Dutch-Jewish philosopher; Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), a Dutch jurist and theologian; and Richard Simon (1638–1712), a French Catholic priest.112

Spinoza outlined the program of biblical criticism.

The history of the Scriptures should . . . teach us to understand the various vicissitudes that may have befallen the books of the prophets whose tradition has been handed down to us; the life, character and aim of the author of each book; the part which he played; at what period, on what occasion, for whom and in what language he composed his writings. Nor is that enough; we must know the fortune of each book in particular, the circumstances in which it was originally composed, into what hands it subsequently fell, the various lessons it has been held to convey, by whom it was included in the sacred canon, and, finally, how all these books came to be embodied in a single collection.113

Several assumptions can be discerned in this newly budding biblical criticism. (1) The Bible is to be subjected to critical study just as any other book. (2) The biblical material has a history of transmission that can be elucidated by determining the various circumstances through which it passed. (3) Internal statements, styles, and repetitions make it possible to deny single and Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. It should be noted that Grotius, Hobbes, and Spinoza had moved away from the typical Jewish and Protestant view of religious authority and revelation and that their criticism was probably the result rather than the cause of such a move.

The most important and influential seventeenth-century biblical critic was Simon.114 As a Catholic, Simon sought to show that Protestantism’s reliance upon the Bible was not as sound a principle as the Catholic reliance upon Bible, tradition, and the church. He stressed the importance of a thorough knowledge of Hebrew for Old Testament study as well as textual criticism and philology. Simon emphasized the process by which the biblical materials were transmitted, pointing to their supplementation and alteration. Claiming inspiration for the revisers of the materials, on the analogy of church tradition, Simon argued that those who had the power to write the sacred books also had the power to revise them. Simon deliberately stressed the words ‘critic’ and ‘criticism’ in his writing, using them in the title of practically all his works. He explained the usage this way:

My readers must not be surprised if I have sometimes availed myself of expressions that may sound a little strangely in their ears. Every art has its own peculiar terminology, which is regarded more or less as its inviolable property. It is in this specialized sense that I have employed the words critic and criticism . . . together with some others of the same nature, to which I was obliged to have recourse in order to express myself in the terms proper to the art of which I was treating. These terms will come as no novelty to scholars, who have for some time been accustomed to their use in our language.115

Simon addressed his writings to the general educated audience, and wrote in French, not Latin, and his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, published in 1678, had, by 1700, gone through four Latin, two English, and seven French editions. The object of multiple attacks for its questioning of venerated traditions and positions, the book was condemned by the Congregation of the Index in 1683.

The humanists’ and reformers’ insistence on a ‘return to the sources’ and a literal reading of the text had been based on the conviction that there one could find the pristine faith, piety, and history. This confidence was to be shattered on the rocks of biblical criticism. What literary criticism found in the Bible was to produce a quagmire that was increasingly to absorb scholarly attention.

In the eighteenth century, and for the first time in Western history, a diversity of philosophical-theological systems with scholarly respectability competed in the intellectual marketplace. These included a variety of approaches to Christian theism ranging from scholasticism to experiential pietism, Pyrrhonic agnosticism, atheism, and pragmatic rationalism.116 The sanctity of tradition, the customs of culture, and the regulations of the marketplace all favored the theistic option; however, Christianity and the Bible were subjected to an unprecedented and trenchant examination and critique. The agent of this activity was deism.

Deism’s roots can be traced to various earlier influences and anticipatory figures. McKee has done this in the case of Isaac de la Peyrere, who in 1655 published a work advancing such hypotheses as the existence of men before the creation of Adam and the non-Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Gay provides a good description of the exponents of the movement:

All deists were . . . both critical and constructive . . . All sought to destroy in order to build, and reasoned either from the absurdity of Christianity to the need for a new philosophy or from their desire for a new philosophy to the absurdity of Christianity . . . Deism . . . is the product of the confluence of three strong emotions: hate, love, and hope. The deists hated priests and priestcraft, mystery-mongering, and assaults on commonsense. They loved the ethical teachings of the classical philosophers, the grand unalterable regularity of nature, the sense of freedom granted the man liberated from superstition. They hoped that the problems of life—of private conduct and public policy—could be solved by the application of unaided human reason, and that the mysteries of the universe could be, if not solved, at least defined and circumscribed by man’s scientific inquiry.117

Various stances towards the Bible were taken by the deists, but as a rule, they sought to distill the biblical traditions; to siphon off the supernatural, the miraculous, and the unbelievable; and to leave behind the pure essence of a reasonable faith.118

During the height of the deistic controversy in England (1700–1750), two major studies of Israelite and Judean history were published. Prideaux’s work, which covers the period from the reign of Tiglath-pileser III to the lifetime of Jesus, comprises three volumes that totaled almost 1,400 pages.119 The work went through over a score of editions and was translated into German and French. Prideaux relied primarily upon the biblical traditions and Josephus, but made use of practically every known literary document from antiquity. Only occasionally did Prideaux take a critical attitude towards his sources. He challenged the authenticity of the letter of Aristeas and its account of the origin of the LXX and provided the reader with a history and description of the study of the LXX.120 Prideaux disagreed with Josephus on Alexander’s route to Jerusalem,121 and argued that the synagogue had its origin in the days of Ezra.122

Shuckford wrote his volumes to present the history from creation to the point where Prideaux had begun. Like his predecessors, from the fourth century on, Shuckford presented universal history in a biblical perspective, beginning with Adam and Eve. This was still the classical model. Sir Walter Raleigh had started at this point in his widely used History of the World, published in 1614, and although unfinished it covered history down to the Roman period. Basically the same model was employed in the multi-volume An Universal History from the Earliest Time to the Present, written by a consortium of scholars, mostly from Oxford and Cambridge, and published in 1736–50.123 Shuckford, like Prideaux, was thoroughly familiar with all the ancient sources as well as the historyof research. Both, for example, used, quoted, and opposed Spinoza and Simon. Shuckford’s work, which was never completed beyond the time of Joshua, was, perhaps because of the biblical material covered, more influenced by the deistic controversy than that of Prideaux. In describing the magicians at the court of Pharaoh, Shuckford presents them as deistic philosophers:

In Moses’s time, the rulers of the Egyptian nation . . . were then the most learned body in the world, beguiled by the deceit of vain philosophy . . . The Pagan divinations, arts of prophecy, and all their sorceries and enchantments, as well as their idolatry and worship of false gods, were founded, not upon superstition, but upon learning and philosophical study; not upon too great a belief of, and adherence to revelation, but upon a pretended knowledge of the powers of nature. Their great and learned men erred in these points, not for want of freethinking, such as they called so; but their opinions upon these subjects were in direct opposition to the true revelations which had been made to the world, and might be called the deism of these ages; for such certainly was the religion of the governing and learned part of the Heathen world in these times.124

Like his predecessors, Shuckford stretched his intellectual powers in defence of the biblical chronology, arguing that the antediluvians enjoyed longevity because before the flood the earth was situated so as to have a perpetual equinox, thus sparing its inhabitants the rigors of seasonal change.125 He argued that “at the flood, the heavens underwent some change: the motion of the sun was altered, and a year, or annual revolution of it, became, as it now is, five daysand almost six hours longer than it was before.”126 However, Shuckford, who was thoroughly familiar with the problems of textual criticism, was occasionally willing to amend the Hebrew text on the basis of the Greek (for example, Deut 34:6 should read “they buried him”;127 thus Moses did not write the account of his death). He sensed the problem of the divine names in Genesis and Exodus, and devoted an extended discussion to the use of the names Jehovah, El Shaddai, and Elohim.128 His solution tothe problem was not to postulate a multiplicity of documents but to theorize about the diversity of persons in the godhead.

Outside England, the deist impulse led to some very scathing attacks on Christianity and the Bible. The Frenchman Voltaire (1694–1778) never tired of pointing out what he called the absurdities, inconsistencies, and low morality found in the Bible. To claim that God was its author was to make “of God a bad geographer, a bad chronologist, a bad physicist; it makes him no better a naturalist.”129 To claim that Moses wrote the Pentateuch was to claim Moses to be a fool. Voltaire suggested that much of the Old Testament was borrowed by the Jews from other peoples, and proposed that Moses may have never lived: “If there only were some honest and natural deeds in the myth of Moses, one could believe fully that such a personage did exist.”130 The significance of Voltaire was his popularization, in caustic language, of many of the issues that had previously been the concerns of erudite scholars. Voltaire, however, approached the Bible and its historical materials not so much as a critic but as an assassin.

In Germany, the impact of deism can be seen in the work of H. S. Reimarus (1694–1768), who, at his death, left behind what the philosopher Lessing published as the Wolfenbüttel Fragments. One of these fragments was an essay on “the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea.”131 Reimarus sought to show the impossibilities in a literal interpretation of the biblical description of the crossing of the sea. According to Exod 12:37–38, about six hundred thousand Hebrew men left Egypt, not counting the women, children, and mixed multitude and animals that accompanied them. Reimarus says this would give a figure of about three million people, three hundred thousand oxen and cows, and six hundred thousand sheep and goats. Approximately five thousand wagons would have been needed to carry provisions and three hundred thousand tents would have been required to house the people at ten per tent. Had the multitude marched ten abreast, the three million would have formed a column one hundred and eighty miles long. It would have required nine days as a minimum for such a group to march through the parted sea. Reimarus’s arguments, and there were others who made similar points, hit at the very heart of those who took the Bible as literally inspired and as factually infallible.

Among the founding fathers of the United States were many with deistic leanings. Jefferson edited a version of the New Testament devoid of any miracles and concluding with the death of Jesus. Thomas Paine, an Englishman who spent several years in the U.S. supporting the Revolutionary War and some time in France in exile, was a brutal controversialist in his attack upon the Bible. Paine’s peculiarity consists in the “freshness with which he comes upon very old discoveries, and the vehemence with which he announces them.”132 In his book The Age of Reason, Paine wrote:

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel. Speaking for myself, if I had no other evidence that the Bible is fabulous than the sacrifice I must make to believe it to be true, that alone would be sufficient to determine my choice.133

The significance of the deistic movement and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was not in the area of historiography per se.The deists, in their discussions of the Bible and the history portrayed in the Bible, presented the issues of biblical criticism to the general public. In addition, their scathing attacks on the defences supporting a factual, literal reading of the text were devastating. It would never again be easy to present Israelite and Judean history by simply retelling and amplifying the biblical narratives.

Several developments, in addition to the deistic controversy, occurred in the eighteenth century, which should be noted since they were greatly to affect the study of Israelite and Judean history. The use of ancient literature in comparative studies of the Old Testament became more common and less apologetic. In 1685, John Spencer, of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, published his De legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus et earum rationibus in which he compared the ritual laws of the Old Testament with relevant material from Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Comparative study, as the deists demonstrated,could cut in two directions; it could be used to support either the uniqueness or the dependency of the biblical materials. The study of Palestinian geography was advanced by Hadrian Reland’s Palaestina ex monumentis veteribus illustrata (1714) and the pioneer work in Palestinian antiquities, Compendium antiquitatum Hebraeorum, by Johann David Michaelis, appeared in 1753.

The basic elements in the documentary criticism of the Old Testament were established during this time. The German pastor Henning Bernhard Witter (1683–1715) and the French physician Jean Astruc (1684–1766) laid down some of the criteria for source criticism of the Pentateuch. The classic four-source theory of the Pentateuch was to be worked out in the nineteenth century but the five pillars of documentary criticism were established in the eighteenth. These pillars are: (1) the use of different names for the deity, (2) varieties of language and style, (3) contradictions and divergences, (4) repetitions and duplications, and (5) indications of composite structure.

A third phenomenon to be noted is the maturation of the science of Old Testament introduction. Pioneers in this area were Michaelis and Johann Salomo Semler.134 Both of these men were influenced by English deism.135 With Johann Gottfried Eichhorn’s Einleitung in das Alte Testament (1780–83), the basic problems of Old Testament introduction—growth of the canon, history of the text, and origin and nature of the individual books—were discussed in handbook form. With Eichhorn, the humanistic argument that the literature of the Old Testament should be investigated like any other literature was integrated into the mainstream of Protestant biblical study.

A fourth factor in the eighteenth century was the poetic or ‘romantic’ reaction to the classicism and rationalism of the Enlightenment. In Old Testament studies, this movement is most closely associated with the work and thought of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) who was influenced by such figures as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88), and Robert Lowth (1710–87). The latter’s De sacra poesi Hebraeorum (1753) studied Hebrew poetry along the lines of research applied to Greek and Latin poetry, arguing that poetry represented humandkind’s earliest form of speech and was as expressive of truth as philosophy. The pietist Hamann had also expressed an emphasis on poetry as the mother-tongue of the human race and, like most pietists, stressed the reader’s immediacy to the biblical materials. Rousseau glorified primitive humandkind as a free and happy being living in accordance with nature and instinct, and for whom language was his basic expression of the natural and communal spirit.136 Herder emphasized the necessity of entering empathically into the human world out of which the Bible had come, rather than seeking understanding merely through critical and technical analysis. He was more interested in the group than the individual and in the manner in which the group gave expression to its distinctive culture, not necessarily according to any universal laws. Cultures are like plants that grow in unique ways dependent upon the situation of the place, the circumstances of the times and the generative character of the people. Whatever can take place among humankind does take place; life does not operate along rationalistic lines. Herder’s approach to the human past stressed an appreciative and imaginative relationship to the ‘spirit’ and not a rational, judgmental relationship.137

A final development in eighteenth-century Old Testament research was the introduction of mythological study. The systematic study of classical mythology originated with the German classicist Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812) who argued that myth was one of primitive humandkind’s basic modes of expressing the experiences and understanding of life and nature. The first application of mythological studies to the Old Testament was made by Eichhorn, a student of Heyne at Göttingen, who published a work on Genesis 1–3 titled Die Urgeschichte (1779). Eichhorn’s work, which was greatly influenced by Lowth, was taken up by Johann Philipp Gabler (1753–1826). The concept of myth, when applied to parts of the Old Testament, greatly affected the manner in which scholars examined these materials and naturally led directly to the question of the historical factuality of their content. Later, what could be labeled as mythical was removed from the arena of the historical.138

The Nineteenth Century

Major developments in the nineteenth century that form the background for Israelite historiography may simply be noted since they have been so frequently discussed. In the first place, more liberal stances in theology came to characterize many segments of the religious communities. This liberalism was less dogmatic in its theological orientation, more progressive in its relationship to contemporary culture and thought, and more humanistic in its perspectives than previous generations. This gradual shift can be seen, for example, in the rise of the so-called Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, which sought “to see in Jewish history the gradual progression of Jewish religious or national spirit in its various vicissitudes and adjustments to the changing environments.”139 This liberal spirit, which was now located within the life of the religious communities themselves, was willing to break with traditional beliefs and approaches and to take a more critical attitude towards the biblical materials.

Secondly, major advances were made in general historiography. The nineteenth was the century of history. Of special importance was the development of what has been called a positivistic approach to history, which not only attempted but also believed it possible to reconstruct past history “as it had actually happened” (wie es eigentlich gewesen). The most prominent of these outstanding positivistic historians were Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831), Leopold Ranke (1795–1885), and Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903). Practically every aspect of human life was subjected to historical exploration in the nineteenth century.140

Thirdly, the decipherment of ancient Near Eastern languages—opened the long-closed literary remains of Israel’s neighbors to study and interpretation.141 The full impact of these new fields of learning was not to be felt fully until the last years of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, for the first time scholars could examine the literary products of these cultures at first hand and thus were no longer dependent upon the ancient, secondary sources.

Fourthly, the exploration of the Near East and Palestine raised historical geography to a level of real competence. Explorers like the Swiss Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (1784–1817) and the American Edward Robinson (1794–1863) whose three-volume work, Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea (1841), based on his travels in 1838, reported on sites, place-names, and customs and used modern names to identify many places mentioned in the Bible. In 1865, the Palestine Exploration Fund was established and, in 1872–78, it sponsored a geographical survey of western Palestine (the Conder–Kitchener expedition). Other national societies were begun to encourage and finance exploration. Archaeological excavations at several sites in Palestine were undertaken.142

Fifthly, the isolation and dating of the ‘documents’ that went to make up the Pentateuch continued apace. The so-called four-source hypothesis that argued that four major documents (J, E, P, D) were redactionally combined to produce the Pentateuch gradually came to dominate discussions after mid-century. The character, content, and date of the individual documents were considered of great significance in understanding the religious development of Israelite and Judean life and in evaluating the historical reliability of the documentary materials.143

A survey of Israelite and Judean history in the nineteenth century can best be made by examining some innovative works from the period. The first work to be noted, and perhaps the first really critical history of Israel ever written, is that by Henry Hart Milman (1791–1868). Milman, a graduate of Oxford University, was ordained in 1816. During his early days, he wrote poetry and plays and from 1821 to 1831 held a professorship of poetry at Oxford. In 1849, he was appointed dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Most of Milman’s rather extensive literary output were works in church history. His History of the Jews was first published in 1829 and met with significant opposition. The work, however, was issued in a number of editions by various publishers until the first decade of the present century. Of the twenty-eight books in his three-volume history, the final ten are concerned with the history of the Jews following the Bar Kochba Revolt.

Milman’s history was addressed to the general reading public and tends to be rather sketchy and to avoid any detailed discussion of controversial points or of methodology. The extent of his familiarity with Old Testament studies cannot be really determined. Only a few isolated references are made to significant figures, although Milman was acquainted with travel reports on the Near East and Palestine and makes rather frequent reference to these. Milman adopted a developmental approach to Jewish history: “Nothing is more curious, or more calculated to confirm the veracity of the Old Testament history, than the remarkable picture which it presents of the gradual development of human society: the ancestors of the Jews, and the Jews themselves, pass through every stage of comparative civilization.”144 Excepting only their knowledge of God and their custodianship of the promises, “the chosen people appear to have been left to themselves to pass through the ordinary stages of the social state.”145 Milman approached the Bible with a very limited view of inspiration and noted that “much allowance must . . . be made for the essentially poetic spirit, and for the Oriental forms of speech, which pervade so large a portion of the Old Testament”146 and that God “addressed a more carnal and superstitious people chiefly through their imagination and senses.”147 He warned his readers that miracle would play little role in his interpretation of history, noting that those who have criticized the belief in revelation are “embarrassing to those who take up a narrow system of interpreting the Hebrew writings; to those who adopt a more rational latitude of exposition, none.”148 Whereas Prideaux and Shuckford were unwilling to accommodate their historical discussions to the views of the biblical critics, for Milman, there was no other option.

Milman began his history with the patriarchs and made no reference to the materials in Genesis 1–10. Abraham is described as an “independent Sheik or Emir”149 or “the stranger sheik” who is allowed “to pitch his tent, and pasture his flocks and herds” in Canaan.150 Milman considered the different stories of the endangering of the wife to be “traditional variations of the same transaction”;151 “Abraham is the Emir of a pastoral tribe, migrating from place to place . . . He is in no respect superior to his age or country, excepting in the sublime purity of his religion.”152 In describing patriarchal society, Milman wrote:

Mankind appears in its infancy, gradually extending its occupancy over regions, either entirely unappropriated, or as yet so recently and thinly peopled, as to admit, without resistance, the new swarms of settlers which seem to spread from the birthplace of the human race, the plains of central Asia. They are peaceful pastoral nomads, travelling on their camels, the ass the only other beast of burden . . . The unenterprising shepherds, from whom the Hebrews descended, move onward as their convenience or necessity requires, or as richer pastures attract their notice.153

The description of the patriarchs as “the hunter, the migratory herdsman, and the incipient husbandman,” suggests that the record draws upon “contemporary traditions.”154 The Israelite ancestors are thus a Volk who differ from their contemporaries only in their theological view of God.

In discussing the stay in Egypt, Milman argued against identifying the period with the Hyksos era but dated it later, refusing however to hypothesize a specific time.155 He noted that biblical tradition assigns either 430 (MT) or 215 (LXX) years to the stay, but that both of these are irreconcilable with the mere two generations that separated Moses from Levi, a factor that also raised uncertainty about the number of Israelites leaving Egypt.156 Milman described the plagues and the crossing of the Red Sea, but spoke of the “plain leading facts of the Mosaic narrative, the residence of the Hebrews in Egypt, their departure under the guidance of Moses, and the connexion of that departure with some signal calamity, at least for a time, fatal to the power and humiliating to the pride of Egypt.”157 In describing the crossing of the sea, he refers to a report by Diodorus Siculus concerning the erratic behavior of the water in the area.158 The quails and manna in the desert are explained in naturalistic terms and the changing of bitter water to sweet is explained chemically. In footnotes in the second edition, Milman reports on the chemical analysis of water especially secured from a Palestinian spring called Marah that suggested high concentrations of “selenite or sulphate of lime,” which could be precipitated by “any vegetable substance containing oxalic acid . . . and rendered agreeable and wholesome.” He also reports that a traveler had brought him a sample of manna produced by the tamarisk tree.159

The pentateuchal legislation—“the Hebrew constitution”160—is attributed to Moses, “the legislator constantly, yet discreetly, mitigating the savage usages of a barbarous people.”161

The laws of a settled and civilized community were enacted among a wandering and homeless horde who were traversing the wilderness, and more likely, under their existing circumstances, to sink below the pastoral life of their forefathers, than advance to the rank of an industrious agricultural community. Yet, at this time, judging solely from its internal evidence, the law must have been enacted. Who but Moses ever possessed such authority as to enforce submission to statutes so severe and uncompromising? Yet, as Moses incontestably died before the conquest of Canaan, his legislature must have taken place in the desert. To what other period can the Hebrew constitution be assigned? To that of the judges? a time of anarchy, warfare, or servitude! To that of the kings? when the republic had undergone a total change! To any time after Jerusalem became the metropolis? when the holy city, the pride and glory of the nation, is not even alluded to in the whole law! After the building of the temple? when it is equally silent as to any settled or durable edifice! After the separation of the kingdoms? when the close bond of brotherhood had given place to implacable hostility! Under Hilkiah? under Ezra? when a great number of the statutes had become a dead letter! The law depended on a strict and equitable partition of the land. At a later period it could not have been put into practice without the forcible resumption of every individual property by the state; the difficulty, or rather impossibility, of such a measure, may be estimated by any reader who is not entirely unacquainted with the history of the ancient republics. In other respects the law breathes the air of the desert. Enactments intended for a people with settled habitations, and dwelling in walled cities, are mingled up with temporary regulations, only suited to the Bedouin encampment of a nomad tribe.162

Milman certainly realized that the dating of the law was the central issue in Old Testament interpretation and that when one dates the law is highly determinative for how one writes the history. Also, he raised practically all the possible options for dating the law.

Milman follows the basic biblical account of the conquest and division of the land. The judges of early Israel, whose title is associated with “the Suffetes of the Carthaginians,” are described as “military dictators” operating in emergencies within the “boundaries of their own tribe.” Their qualifications were their “personal activity, daring, and craft,” and they appear “as gallant insurgents or guerilla leaders.” In the case of Deborah, several tribes came together in “an organized warlike confederacy.” The tribes were disunited because of their disobedience to the Mosaic law and were compelled to arms in furthering the incomplete conquest in “war of the separate tribes against immediate enemies.”163 Although the Bible speaks of the judges being raised up by the Lord, “their particular actions are nowhere attributed to divine action.”164 The absence of Judah and Simeon from the song of Deborah (Judges 5) suggests that perhaps they “had seceded from the confederacy, or were occupied by enemies of their own.”165

Enough has been said of Milman’s work to suggest his approach since many of the basic issues arise in treating the period prior to David. Although Milman was probably the first to treat Israelite and Judean history from a secular orientation and in the same terms one would write a history of Greece or Rome, his name and an exposition of his position are seldom mentioned in surveys of Old Testament studies.

A second innovative work was the lengthy, multi-volume history by Heinrich Georg August Ewald (1803–75),166 one of the most outstanding Oriental and Semitic scholars of the nineteenth century.167 He was a student and successor of Eichhorn at Gottingen. Ewald’s history is as verbose and dull as Milman’s is crisp and entertaining.

Almost one half of the first volume of Ewald’s history is devoted to the problem of the sources for Israelite history.168 Ewald says his “ultimate aim is the knowledge of what really happened—not what was only related and handed down by tradition, but what was actual fact.”169 Tradition thus preserves an image of what happened, but it is also formed by imagination, which may blur the details or form of the event it remembers, and is shaped by the memory, which tends to obliterate details and contract the overall content.170 Chronological distance from the events reduces the extent and trustworthiness of the tradition:

The Hebrew tradition about the earliest times—the main features of which, as we have it, were fixed in the interval from the fourth to the sixth century after Moses—still has a great deal to tell about Moses and his contemporaries; much less about the long sojourn in Egypt, and the three Patriarchs; and almost nothing special about the primitive times which preceded these Patriarchs, when neither the nation, nor even its ‘fathers,’ were yet in Canaan. So, too, the Books of Samuel relate many particulars of David’s later life passed in the splendour of royalty, but less about his youth before he was king.171

Tradition has supports in songs, proverbs, and personal names, and in visible monuments such as altars, temples, and memorials.172 The strongest support of tradition, however, is the institution, such as annually recurring festivals that recall the incidents.173 Foreign elements also enter traditions: names are added, numbers lose exactness, events shift their chronological moorings, and similar traditions become associated.174 Tradition rests in imagination and feeling more than understanding and thus is closely associated with nationalistic sentiments.175 Different events are remembered in different styles of traditions and since tradition is very plastic it may be moulded by religious interests, aetiological concerns, and mythological perspectives.176

The earliest Israelite historians found the tradition that they used as “a fluctuating and plastic material, but also a mass of unlimited extent.”177 At the writing-down stage, tradition went through further change. The modern historian must “distinguish between the story and its foundation, and exclusively seek the latter with all diligence.”178 “Tradition has its roots in actual facts; yet it is not absolutely history, but has a peculiar character and a value of its own . . . It is our duty to take the tradition just as it expects to be taken—to use it only as a means for discovering what the real facts once were.”179

Thus, Ewald has a high regard for tradition’s relationship to historical facts and for the historian’s ability to use the tradition to discover the facts. By the Mosaic era, writing was known in Israel and a historiography possible.180

Ewald divides the historical books into three groups: the Great Book of Origins (the Hexateuch), the Great Book of Kings (Judges–Kings + Ruth), and the Great Book of Universal History down to the Greek Times (Chronicles–Ezra–Nehemiah + Esther). Ewald then analyzes these great books as to their sources. The basic source of the Hexateuch was what Ewald called the “Book of Origins” (what is today called P), which he dated to the period of the early monarchy.181 This book incorporated older fragments and materials and was subjected to various modifications, prophetic and Deuteronomistic, before it attained its final form at the end of the seventh or the beginning of the sixth century.182 In similar manner, Ewald proceeds to analyze the other two historical complexes, their origin, components, modifications, and history.

Before beginning his reconstruction of the history, Ewald discussed some problems of chronology183 and general geographical matters.184 Ewald follows the four-age theory of P and speaks of the three ages of the preliminary history of Israel: creation to Noah, Noah to Abraham, and Abraham to Moses. In discussing the first two ages, Ewald compares the traditions with those of other peoples, discusses the ages of the characters, and avoids any real straightforward statements about the factuality of the materials. Behind the patriarchal figures are to be seen tribal groups. The oldest extant tradition about Abraham is Genesis 14.185 The patriarchal ancestors spoke and thought monotheistically but not quite in the Mosaic form.186 The Hebrews are pictured entering Egypt at different times in various migrations, beginning in the Hyksos period, but the exodus is not to be associated with the expulsion of the Hyksos.187