Biblical Historiography

The names of Saul’s descendants appear in a different form in the books of Chronicles (1 Chr 8:33-34; 9:39-40) as compared to those in the books of Samuel (2 Sam 2-4; 9; 19; 21). In Chronicles the name Eshbaal is used instead of Ishbosheth, and Meribaal instead of Mephibosheth. This article describes the differences between these names in the context of early Hebrew epigraphy. The recalling of the original names of the first Judaean royal dynasty in the books of Chronicles could be explained not only with reference to the original version of the books of Samuel, but also from the oral tradition of Judea or from some documents of the royal archives that survived the Babylonian conquest.

The question of the historical reliability of the Biblical stories stands in the center of a long debate among biblical scholars, and many have adopted decisive positions on this issue, to one side or the other. This article comes to undermine the decisiveness and replace it with a question mark. For this purpose, we shall deal with one of the least historical stories in the book of Judges, "The Outrage in Gibeah" (Judges 19-21). Due to the structure and style of the narrative, which have been analyzed extensively, most researchers believe it to be completely fictional and with no basis in historical reality. In this article we shall reexamine various clues in the book Samuel that seem to indicate that this story has a certain historical basis. And if a story of such "literary" character has an historical core, then the exaggerated decisiveness of the positions on this issue seem to become undermined, also with regard to other stories in the Bible.

In this article I deal with the geographical pattern of the North Israelite
temples during the first half of the 8th century BCE. The Israelite temples can be divided into two groups: 1) Those located in the heartland of the kingdom, at least some of which celebrated important traditions of the North. 2) Those located on the borders of the kingdom according to its ideology, that the two Hebrew kingdoms should be ruled by a (North) Israelite king. I then review two themes in which the system of Northern temples could have influenced the cult of late-monarchic Judah.

In this article we deal with the historical realities behind what we consider to belong to the old part of the Ark Narrative (1 Sam 4,1 – 7,1). Based on the finds of excavations at Kiriath-jearim, Shiloh and other places mentioned in the story as well as text exegesis and understanding of the geopolitical situation, we suggest that the story reflects the ideology and aspirations of Israel in the first half of the 8th century BCE, the time of Jeroboam II. We propose that the main theme of the narrative is the transfer of the Ark of Yhwh from Shiloh to Kiriath-jearim on the border of Israel and Judah. This narrative is apparently connected to a United Israel ideology in the days of Jeroboam II, according to which the territory and people of the two Hebrew kingdoms should be ruled by a Northern king from Samaria; this was the de-facto situation following the victory of Joash over Amaziah at Beth-shemesh (2 Kings 14,11-13). Choosing Kiriath-jearim as the location for the temple of the Ark was related to this concept.

This essay deals with the archaeological and extrabiblical clues that are relevant for identifying the historical realities that may lay behind pentateuchal texts. It will concentrate on the most thoroughly discussed pentateuchal narrative complexes, namely, the patri archs and the Exodus and desert wandering.

Herodotus was born in a city with mixed Hellenic and Carian population, and grew up in a region (south-west Asia Minor) which was in constant and close contact with the great states of the Near East, such as Lydia and Achaemenid Persia. He was thus in a privileged position in terms of communication and exchange with the cultures of the ancient Orient. In this paper I propose to explore Herodotus’ authorial debt to the narrative and intellectual traditions of the East with regard to major, macroscopic compositional tendencies of his historical oeuvre. Two fundamental narrative structures, which condition the organization of Herodotus’ material and the layout of his work, seem to have been inspired by characteristic techniques and thematic patterns of Near-Eastern texts or lore.

Firstly, Herodotus conceives and recounts world history according to the typical structure of West-Asiatic and Egyptian king lists and chronicles: these latter works enumerate a series of successive rulers and record basic biographical data, key historical incidents, and occasionally picturesque anecdotes about the reign of each one of them. Herodotus assimilates this pattern and uses it both on a small and on a grand scale in his narrative. The individual historical sections (logoi) concerning particular peoples (Lydians, Egyptians, Medians) are constructed in the manner of a chronicle; the narrator lists a sequence of kings and offers briefer or longer reports of historical events and anecdotal tales for every name of the list. The Herodotean oeuvre as a whole is built on the same chronographic principle; a succession of Achaemenid monarchs (Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius, Xerxes) forms the framework, which is filled in with extensive accounts of each king’s exploits, wars, and other ventures.

Secondly, Herodotus appears to have taken over from Near-Eastern storytelling the concept of the frame narrative, i.e. the tales emboxed inside other tales like “Russian dolls”. This technique first appears in ancient Egyptian novellas and story collections of the second and first millennium BCE, and subsequently spread all over the eastern world up to Iran and India, conditioning the layout of the great oriental narrative compilations, from the Book of Sindbad to the Pañcatantra and the Thousand and One Nights. Herodotus exploits this pattern already in the first and paradigmatic long novella of his work (the story of Solon and Croesus, 1.29-33) and then in various subsequent narrative sections (e.g. the account of the Spartans’ conference and Socles’ speech, 5.91-93). In all these cases one of the characters of the main narrative tells a series of didactic stories in close sequence, in the manner familiar from ancient Egyptian story collections (Papyrus Westcar, Tales of Petese) and from the Book of Sindbad.

Why the Creation Week reflection of Psalm 104? Is this reflection merely general? If it merely is general, then why is this psalm's form entirely, and exuberantly, autobiographical? It’s three companion psalm’s, Psalm 103, 105, and 106, are largely biographical and communal in orientation, and seem originally to have been exhortative rather than expressive. In fact, the first-personal form of Psalm 104 is one of the most deep and intense of that of any text in the Bible. Some deny that any of Psalm 104 was authored in mind of the Flood, and this denial is based on an effectively pedestrian approach to this psalm. Reinforcing this denial is that this psalm’s only conceivable *explicit* reference to the Flood is comprised of a geo-physical description, rather than that either to the Flood by name or to the *fact* of a memory of the Flood by those persons who survived the Flood on the ark. Even the pro-Flood rebuttals to this denial have tended to frame the entire idea of the Flood as merely the Flood's geophysical dimension, leaving this psalm’s clear human element out of this psalm’s own equation. Therefore, the attempts on both sides of this Flood-reference controversy over Psalm 104 has tended to answer the other side by focusing almost exclusively on some combination of 1) that geophysical description of vs.6-9; (2) plausible Biblical and extra-Biblical sources to confirm or disconfirm a Flood view of that description; and 3) the original Hebrew of that description. This combination fails to account for the total issue: (A) whether any or all of Psalm 104 was authored in mind of the Flood, and (B) why any or all of Psalm 104 might or might not be authored in mind of the Flood. Therefore, it conceivably is erroneous to view this psalm’s author therein as psalming from anything less than a most extraordinary frame of mind and reference. In order to establish, for all sides, as to whether this psalm likely does, or likely does not, in any way reference the Flood, the entire psalm, not just its first several verses, must be ascertained thereto. The present paper attempts to forward that issue.

Giosuè figlio di Nun è la figura centrale della narrazione relativa alla conquista di Canaan e alla spartizione del paese riportata nel libro biblico che porta il suo nome; come pure è una personalità di rilievo nei racconti della rivelazione sul Sinai e delle peregrinazioni nel deserto, in cui appare in qualità di comandante nella guerra contro Amalek, 1 tra gli esploratori del paese, 2 come aiutante di Mosè 3 e predestinato a succedergli alla guida di Israele. 4 La ricerca recente lo ha perciò valutato in base alle opinioni o alle conclusioni su questi avvenimenti. A chi consideri attendibile il nocciolo della descrizione biblica sugli inizi della fede in Yhwh e sulla conquista della terra appare ovviamente plausibile anche il disegno che ne tratteggia la fonte deuteronomistica, predominante nel libro di Giosuè attuale. 5 Per contro, chi non ne ammette il valore storico preferisce un'interpretazione più riduttiva. Sono così spuntate le varie teorie per cui egli sarebbe un personaggio mitico, 6 un eroe eponimo, 7 il campione (fondatore?) di un culto, 8 il condottiero della tribù di Efraim 9 o 1 specialmente 64-65. Pure, con più moderazione, a proposito delle qualità di Giosuè come comandante: YADIN Y., (ebr.) «Aspetti militari ed archeologici nella descrizione della conquista del paese», in RABIN H. et al. (ed.), 'iyyunim b ə seper y ə hošua', Jerusalem 1960, rist. 1971, 71-100; EPH'AL I., «The Battle of Gibeon and the Problem of Joshua's Southern Campaign», in LIVER J., (ebr.) The Military

This study is a structural and thematic analysis of 1 Chron. 21.1–22.1, and conveys some general observations about its likely communicative intent for the post-exilic community that wrote and received the book of Chronicles. The central argument is that the disunity and conflicts in the core relationships between Yahweh–king, Yahweh–Israel, king–Israel, and king–army in the opening verses of the census narrative, while in tension with the Chronicler’s general tendency to idealize the Urzeit, are actually a key part of the message and purpose of this narrative in Chronicles and for the community of the text. It is argued that the narrative highlights the centrality of Jerusalem, the temple, the cult, and the absolute sovereignty of Yahweh; it circumscribes and nuances the role of David and the monarchy in the ‘history’ of the cult; and it advances particular relational principles for the post-exilic leaders and their community.

For a PDF copy of the article please contact me ONLY VIA EMAIL. Thanks.
Full citation:
Sergi, O. 2019. On Scribal Tradition in Israel and Judah and the Antiquity of the Historiographical Narratives in the Hebrew Bible. In: Krause, J., Oswald, W. and Weingart K. eds. Eigensinn und Entstehung der Hebräischen Bibel: Erhard Blum zum siebzigsten Geburtstag. Tübingen (Mohr Siebeck): 275–299.

Theoretical considerations about law and narrative and their combination in biblical literature lead to a brief overview of biblical texts, prophetic and historiographical, advancing law (broadly construed), then to an analysis of four Priestly stories about the generation of new law, Lev 24:10-23 (about cursing the deity), Num 9:1-14 (about the secondary date for performing the Pesah), Num 15:32-36 (about Sabbath observance), and Num 27:1-11 (about inheritance by women), with implications for understanding the Priestly history.

investigates what “crime” the Chronicler understood David to have committed in his census of 1 Chronicles 21 that deserved the subsequent “punishment” of a devastating plague. Evans suggests that the Chronicler read his Vorlage, 2 Samuel 24, through the lens of Exod 30:11–16, which requires a kōper payment be col- lected during a census lest a plague come upon the people. The hermeneutical key to understanding the Chronicler’s use of this legislation is found in 2 Chron- icles 24, where the Chronicler explicitly appeals to the kōper legislation in the context of the repair of the temple. Evans suggests that the Chronicler viewed the kōper law as only relevant in contexts of sanctuary construction, thereby explaining why other censuses in Chronicles are not viewed negatively. Fur- thermore, the Chronicler inferred the relevance of this legislation to David’s census by intentionally creating a new literary context of imminent temple construction. The Chronicler thereby associated this kōper legislation, which mentions an improper “census” followed by a “plague,” with David’s failed census in order to clarify the sin of the census.

Οι άμεσοι πρόδρομοι του Ηρόδοτου είναι οι λεγόμενοι Ίωνες λογογράφοι. Ο όρος λογογράφος χρησιμοποιήθηκε από τον Θουκυδίδη για να χαρακτηρίσει συλλήβδην όλους τους Ίωνες ιστοριογράφους, μαζί και τον Ηρόδοτο. Στην ουσία, ο όρος σημαίνει απλώς «πεζογράφος», κάποιος που γράφει σε πεζό λόγο (σε αντίθεση με τους ποιητές, που γράφουν σε στίχο, ιδίως τους επικούς ποιητές, που κυριαρχούσαν ως τότε στην λογοτεχνική ζωή της Ελλάδας). Ο Ηρόδοτος φαίνεται ότι χρησιμοποιούσε παρόμοιους όρους για τους προδρόμους του: τον πιο επιφανή από αυτούς, τον Εκαταίο τον Μιλήσιο, τον ονομάζει λογοποιόν.

The language of “genocide” as applied to the conquest of Canaan puts pastors, scholars, and apologists in a bind. I advocate for careful avoidance of the term, starting with considering the specific hermeneutical, historiographical, theological, or ethical concern of a questioner or critic, rather than starting with questions of accuracy or precision.

Viewable online at: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/helpful-distinction-or-quarrel-over-words-the-conquest-as-genocide-in-evangelical-apologetics/

In this paper, the literary tradition describing a military coalition united
against an enemy is explored in three contemporary sources, belonging to different literary genres: Shalmaneser III’s Kurkh Monolith, Zakkur’s victory and thanksgiving stele and the biblical stories of the conquest of the land (Josh 10–11). A common underlying literary tradition shaped the motifs utilized in these disparate descriptions – the assembling of the forces, their depiction and enumeration, and the subsequent victory
of the one against the many by means of divine assistance. Moreover, in this tradition, the coalitions are always assembled by the enemy force. Even within this common literary tradition, distinctive motifs characterize the local viewpoint vs. the imperial one.
The common motifs and their unique utilization will help to shed light on biblical historiography, placing the situation of a conflict against a military coalition not in its correct historical frame, but at the beginning of the people’s history: in the description of the divinely assisted conquest of the land, when God fought for Israel (Josh 10:14).

The names of Saul’s sons appear in a different form in Chronicles (1 Chr. 8:33–34; 9:39–40). In Chronicles the name Eshbaal 1 is used instead of Ishbosheth, and Meribaal or Merib-ba’al instead of Mephibosheth. In this article I will attempt to clarify the significance of the differences in the names in the books of Samuel and Chronicles. Did the author of Samuel want to avoid attributing worship of Baal to the House of Saul by changing his sons’ names? Do these alterations reflect the different orientations of the authors of Samuel and Chronicles, or are they the result of the way in which the text was transmitted and copied? We will see that these questions touch on much broader questions: What was the relationship between the religion of Israel and the religion of Canaan? When did the religion of Israel begin to be monotheistic? Is there a relationship between name-giving and religious beliefs?

The redactional history of the Book of Kings is a complex and very disputed issue. Many recent studies offer interesting comparisons between the introductory and concluding summaries of 1-2 Kings and the Mesopotamian Chronicles, but their results are divergent. With no claim at solving the many issues of the redactional history of the Book of Kings, this article suggests the existence of two clues — i.e. the attribution of the fall of Samaria to Shalmaneser V and the use of the hypocoristic form Pûl for Tiglat-pileser III — that allow us to connect some historical information given in Kings with a late Babylonian tradition rather than with an earlier Neo-Assyrian one.

Henry Morris III reads into Genesis 2 only the minimum necessary to make a complete sense of the account. It therefore fails to abide the whole of Genesis 1, and renders the portion about humans' divine image-bearing as little more than that of the study of animal life in a rigid college course. Morris therefore finds no indication in the pair of accounts that any actual conversation took place between Adam and God, much less between God and Eve. Therefore, in, turn, despite his having to admit some point of the obvious in Genesis  2, Morris notices no suggestion in either account that God made Adam and Eve as fully operating prototypical adult humans in terms of initiative in the faculties of conversation and language development. In sum, Morris, renders the pair of accounts (Genesis 1-2) far more micro-managingly 'authoritative' in mere verbatim than richly normal regarding the human being.

Psalm 104 centrally and largely is a reflection on the normal condition of the natural world. But, given the kinds of events and authorship allowed by the Bible, it would be premature, at best, to conclude that the essence of this psalm originally appeared in human history from an everyday frame of mind upon that normal condition. Therefore, the historically first instance of the essence of this psalm may well far surpass the level of 'the extraordinary' even of which John Glenn experienced in his first orbit of the Earth. Yet modern scholarship sees this psalm as consisting in little more than what it spells out. The present article addresses some of the reasons why modern scholarship fails to see beyond this psalm's explicit form to its most likely origination: the state of mind of Noah in the days and decades after the Flood.

"The book examines biblical narratives describing the origins of holy places other than Jerusalem. The accounts are examined with three main questions in mind: 1. are there any common features in biblical accounts about the foundations of places of worship; 2. are there any particular elements in the aetiological stories that can show anything about the 'real' mythology and/or rituals of the sanctuary; and 3. what were the circumstances of the creation of such narratives?

The answer for the first question is positive, i.e., the stories of the origins of holy places contain the elements relevant to local cult and rituals, e.g.: the grave, altar, sacrifice practice, tree, etc. Answering the second question revealed possible reconstructions of a few cult practices (e.g.: in Beer-Sheba, Hebron and Shechem). The third question, about the possible dates of the narratives, provided some new insights. The assumption was made that the stories of the origins of holy places could have been created only when the sanctuary existed. If so, the archaeological data point to the 10th - 9th century BCE and the 3rd -2nd century BCE as possible points of origin. Such possibilities incline the author to advance the hypothesis of Hellenistic origins or redaction of most of the examined aetiological narratives."

Most of the essays in this volume stem from the special sessions of the Historiography Seminar of the Canadian Society for Biblical Studies, held in the late spring of 2007 (University of Saskatchewan). The papers in these focused sessions dealt with issues of self-identification, community identity, and ethnicity in Judahite and Yehudite historiography. The scholars present addressed a range of issues, such as the understanding, presentation, and delimitation of “Israel” in various biblical texts, the relationship of Israelites to Judahites in Judean historical writings, the definition of Israel over against other peoples, and the possible reasons why the ethnoreligious community (“Israel”) was the focus of Judahite/Yehudite historiography. Papers approached these matters from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary vantage points. For example, some pursued an inner-biblical perspective (pentateuchal sources/writings, Former Prophets, Latter Prophets, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah), while others pursued a cross-cultural comparative perspective (ancient Near Eastern, ancient Greek and Hellenistic historiographies, Western and non-Western historiographic traditions). Still others attempted to relate the material remains to the question of community identity in northern Israel, monarchic Judah, and postmonarchic Yehud. https://www.eisenbrauns.org/books/titles/978-1-57506-165-8.html

Speer und Pfeil sind zentrale Symbole in den Geschichten von Saul und David. Ursprunglich ein Attribut koniglicher Macht und Kuhnheit (Zimrilim; 1Sam 13,22), wird der Speer in der Saulgeschichte zu einem negativen Symbol und mit Sauls Untaten, seiner Ohnmacht (1Sam 26,7) und letztlich seinem Tod (2Sam l ,6) assoziiert. In der Episode von der Schlacht auf dem Berg Gilboa flieht Saul vor den Pfeilen der philistaischen Bogenschutzen. Beide Symbole werden in der Davidgeschichte wieder aufgenommen. Abner zeigt seine heroische Starke, wenn er Asael mit einem Schlag seines Speeres totet (2Sam 2,23), eine Kraftprobe die ihm letztlich das Leben kostet. Diese Episode verkettet die unheimliche Speersymbolik der Saulgeschichte mit der Daviderzahlung, in welcher der Pfeil eine vergleichbare Rolle spielt. So wie Urija wird Abschalom von Pfeilen (LXX) getotet; die Urija-Abschalom Parallele wird unterstutzt von einer Reihe mikrotextueller sprachlicher Figuren und Motive (Fokkelman 1981; Polak 1994)...

I libri di Samuele si aprono con un’appendice sulla fine del periodo dei giudici, con Samuele stesso, e descrivono poi, a partire dalla instaurazione della monarchia, le vicende del primo re, Saul, l’ascesa di David e la sua elezione fino ai suoi ultimi atti, ma non alla sua morte. Si tratta pertanto di un’opera all’interno della quale il ruolo centrale è svolto da tre grandi personaggi: Samuele, Saul e David; essa tuttavia è al contempo storia dell’intero popolo di Israele e dei suoi rapporti con Dio e le altre nazioni. Si hanno quindi anche notizie sull’organizzazione dello stato monarchico nascente e le sue guerre, i racconti sull’arca dell’alleanza e sulle lotte di successione, vicende romanzesche, episodi di seduzione, profezie, inni e salmi.

Adam initially and mainly would have taken to the physically expansive, terrestrial, meteorological, and celestial features of his world. But DeRemer et al propose that Genesis 1 begins and proceeds upon the most reductive end of the physical spectrum of space, matter, and energy, and, by progressive introduction of various physically secular items, only finally arriving at a sacred planet Earth within a humanly familiar cosmos. In terms of physics and text, their model begins quite simply. But it constitutes a suspension of the conservatively Biblical paradigm according to which God communicates mainly to humans’ normatively everyday sensibilities. Moreover, given the clear terrestrial subject of the Creation account, their model does not abide the narrative simplicity of their model’s axiom, but instead poses complications for their axiom in face of the text, comparable to that posed for orbital terra-centrism in face of astronomical observations. Their model’s main problem is that it is based on a hyper-exegetical attempt to preserve the hypo-exegetical Light before Luminaries model in face of the problems inhering in the ignorant hypo-exegesis of the entire account. The Light before Luminaries model does not abide the conservatively Biblical paradigm, but merely, by hypo-exegesis, allows it due to the clear terrestrial subject of the account. It is proposed that only by interpreting the text according to the sensibilities of the terrestrially and celestially normalized human might a conservatively Biblical solution be found.

En este artículo se presentará una perspectiva de la historiografía bíblica a la luz de la historiografía del antiguo Cercano Oriente en el marco de la discusión actual entre ambas. Se tendrá en cuenta la naturaleza de la Biblia considerándola como la revelación sobrenatural de Dios a su pueblo. A lo largo de la investigación se intentará corroborar la independencia del texto bíblico de cualquier fuente externa que pueda alterar su macro-estructura teológica o mensaje en conjunto de la palabra de Dios para su pueblo a lo largo de la historia. Por el contrario, la microestructura del texto bíblico indica el área superficial donde pueden incidir conceptualmente las evidencias externas provistas por la historiografía antigua.

מחקר זב בודקהן את מאפייני הסגנון המליצי בנאומים שבספר דברי הימים והן את אופיה של הלשון הדבורה בפסקאות דו-דיח, שבולטות במקומות שונים. כן נבחנים מספר ניבים בקטעי השיחשמעידים על אופיה של הלשון הדבורה בתקופה שבה פעל הכרוניסט. יסודות הלשון הדבורה אמנם נדירים אך הם מעידים שאזנו של בעל דברי הימים היתה כרויה ללשון שבפי הקהילה שבה פעל ואשר לביסוסה הדתי והרעיוני עשה.