Thompson, Mythic Past

Historicity of the Bible Notes from Thomas L. Thompson “On Reading the Bible for History: A Response” Excerpts and Notes from Thomas L. Thompson, (Journ Bib St [date missing from my copy]): The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the ‘I have argued for some years now that we need to Myth of Israel (Basic Books, London and New discuss the literary, the theological and the York, 1999). exegetical issues in our independent history writing.’ [summary of whole bible]: ‘an epic narrative creates Thomas L. Thompson, The Messiah Myth: The the mythic period of the United Monarchy in Israel Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David (Basic and delivers it as the “golden age” of the Davidic Books, 2005). From the Preface: dynasty’s forty kings, and as the product of Hellenistic literature.’ 4 ‘That the Bible alone offers no direct evidence about Israel’s past before the Hellenistic period is not ‘The Bible’s own story of the past, centred on the because it is late and secondary—though surely that rise and fall of old Israel, still dominates historical should give pause to the most conservative of reconstructions within biblical studies, yet the art historians—but because the Bible is doing and delight of these stories is little appreciated. something other than history with its stories about They are seen only… as accounts of events: they the past.’ have become history. The study of all the texts from the ancient Near East and of all the excavations in ‘In discussions about both monumental inscriptions Israel and Palestine has been infected by a rather and biblical narratives, historians tend to place singular aspiration of biblical scholarship: to events in a demythologized space, which they understand the Bible as an account of the historical themselves create. The intention is to displace the past…. Such thinking, posing as an historical and mythic space to which biblical and ancient texts critical scholarly discipline, | has been a great have given voice. Whether one is dealing with an embarrassment to modern research. Rather than army led by God and meeting no resistance, a being historical, it broke the first rule of history by heroic king marching through the night to attack at failing to distinguish it from myth. Rather than being sunrise or—in victory—returning the people to critical, it used a logic entirely circular. Rather than faithful worship and the abandoned temple to its being a self-correcting, self-critical science, it took god, absence of attention to the story’s world for granted its own assumptions and contented ignores the function of ancient texts. The further itself merely to “correcting” the Bible where failure to weigh our texts against comparable plausibility required it. The miracles, it seems, had to literature cripples reading by neglecting the go, but the rest could remain as unchanged as stereotypical quality of biblical tropes. Rhetorical possible. While such a need to read our sacred texts strategies such as the logic of retribution, reiterative as history begs explanation, biblical archaeology has echoes of legends past and ever illusive irony are resolutely failed to provide the Bible with an lost in the historian’s search for a past that shifts the historical context in which it might reasonably be reader’s attention from the story to an imagined understood…. Why is an understanding of the Bible past. The assumption that the narratives of the Bible as fictive considered to undermine its truth and are accounts of the past asserts a function for our integrity? How does historicizing this literature give texts that needs to be demonstrated as it competes it greater legitimacy? Why, in fact, does a literary with other more apparent functions.’ work as influential as the Bible need further legitimation?’ 4-5 ‘Traditions such as the Bible’s, which provided ancient society with a common past, are very different from the critical histories that play a central role in contemporary intellectual life. The differences what they thought, and what they understood to between two perspectives, ancient and modern, brlong to the genre of literature they were writing. reflect different perceptions of reality… | “There is These texts are historically useful for what they nothing new under the sun.” This ahistorical axiom imply about the author’s present, and about the of ancient Hellenistic thought gives voice to the knowledge available to him and his contemporaries, structures of the traditions about the past which not for their author’s claim about any projected were created in the ancient world. It puts these past. One of the most striking and wonderful things traditions at odds with the goals of modern about an “historian” like Josephus is that he knows historical methods which are rather centred in almost nothing about “the past” that we ourselves defining events of the past as unique.’ 5-6 do not already know from other sources. When an ‘How the Bible is related to history has been badly account he gives of a supposed event of two misunderstood. As we have been reading the Bible centures earlier “confirms” something we can read within a context that is certainly wrong, and as we in other words, it is only because he has copied or have misunderstood the Bible because of this, we paraphrased it.” 10 need to seek a context more appropriate.’ On the Mesha Stele: ‘What is established by this There has been an explosive upheaval in our remarkable parallel is not the existence of a knowledge of the AME and of Palestine since even historical Balaam, but an ancient way of telling the mid-80’s. Even stuff written and taken for stories about prophets or holy men who bless and granted then has been overturned and is hardly curse nations and their kings.’ 11 useful any more. 7 ‘The Mesha Inscription gives us evidence that the ‘Without an independently established history of Bible collects and re-uses very old tales from Palestine and Ancient Israel, the question of Palestine’s past. Even evidence from extra-Biblical historicity— whether or not the Bible describes texts which proves that some of the biblical events that occurred in the past— remains a riddle.’ narratives do derive from early sources does not 9 confirm the historicity of these stories. Quite the contrary, it confirms the Bible’s own presentation of A large body of Persian, Hellenistic, and Greco- them as fictive tales of the past.’ 14 Roman texts ‘give us detailed accounts of what writers represented as the past…. These texts, ‘While it is a hard-won principle of biblical however, are not very easy to use. Not only are they archaeology that the historicity of ancient biblical filled with all kinds of legends and stories, but their narratives about old Israel cannot be affirmed unless authors did not much care to distinguish between we have extra-biblical evidence, it is just as stories which were interesting, humorous or important to be aware that even when we do have entertaining, and stoires which actually related such extra-biblical | confirmation, it is more likely to something that had occurred in the past. They did confirm the Bible’s literary and metaphysical tropes not hesitate to change their sources and reconstruct than to establish it as historical record-keeping.’ 14- the past whenever there were gaps in their 15 knowledge, or indeed in any manner that they saw ‘The biblical stories must be understood as using the fit. As we have grown more aware of such typical names of [some] historical kings of Israel [such as characteristics of traditrional historiographies about Ahab and Jehu]. These extra-biblical confirmations Palestine’s past, the way that scholarship once used also support the approximate dates the Bible gives them for reconstructing the history of Israel has for these kings, within a modest range of error. grown less acceptable. Historical scholarship’s Nevertheless, we cannot conclude that the Bible’s indolent habit of offering paraphrases of ancient use of such real names of kings of the past was historians and correcting them only when evidence based on hypothetical but otherwise unknown proves them wrong will no longer do. Nor will it do dynastic lists, which might give us the hope of using any longer to view such traditional historians as in the other, unconfirmed names as if they were some degree “dependable”. What they conceived as historical. Our historical knowledge comes, rather, “historiography” were historical fictions about the not from the Bible’s references but, independently, past, using whatever materials came to hand. What from their occurrence in Assyrian texts. The evidence we learn when we read them is not data about any suggests that the Bible, like Shakespeare, often earlier period of the past, but rather an account of invokes fictional kings in confecting its stories.’ 15 ‘When we ask whether the events of biblical Solomon's proverb above, is not our own, but narrative have actually happened, we raise a evades our grasp. What is spirit, however, free from question that can hardly be satisfactorily answered. the change of the world of matter, lasting and The question itself guarantees that the Bible will be therefore real as it may be, is beyond our misunderstood. One of the central contrasts that experience. Like Job's knowledge of Yahweh, we divide the understanding of the past that we find know of it only from hearing. Form and matter, the implied in biblical texts from a modern spiritual and the physical, reality and appearance understanding of history lies in the way we think develop a cosmic irony, frustrating the human ideals about reality.’ 15 of understanding.

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