Can You Understand This?

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We try to expose our readers to various scholarly viewpoints, even though we do not always agree with them. We have confidence in our readers’ ability to make up their own minds. It is in that spirit that we have tried to present the case of the Biblical revisionists, or Biblical minimalists, or as they are sometimes derogatorily called, Biblical nihilists. Whatever their name, they agree that there is little, if any, history to be found in the Bible—say, for example, the story of the Exodus. At most, we can learn something about the period, hundreds of years later, when the text—a fictional composition, they contend—was composed.

Sometimes it is difficult to understand the language of the minimalists. That presents us with a difficult situation: How do we present something to our readers that we ourselves do not understand? How do we fulfill our function as editors?

Recently, we found a solution. Religious Studies News (RSN), a quarterly newspaper published jointly by the venerable Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion, often includes excerpts from books of significant scholarship that the editors feel their scholarly readers should be aware of in order to stay abreast of developments in the profession. In the November 1999 issue, RSN published an excerpt from a new book by a leading Biblical minimalist, Thomas Thompson of the University of Copenhagen. (Thompson is discussed in the two preceding articles.) The excerpt, presumably chosen in consultation with the author, was doubtless intended to present a choice nugget that would both provide insight into the basic argument and entice the reader to want to read more—an excerpt, one would think, representative of the book at its best. Why not provide BAR readers with this excerpt? Why not, indeed.

Many readers may come away, as we did, wondering, “What did the man say?” After reading the excerpt, we could not repeat the gist of the argument. Our more insightful readers, however, may well find meaning beyond our fathoming.

The book was published by Jonathan Cape in England under the title The Bible as History: How Writers Create a Past. In the United States, Basic Books published the book under the title The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel. To our mind, these titles pretty much say it all and are more understandable than the text of the book. But that is for our readers to decide. Here is the excerpt, reprinted in full from RSN.—Ed.

Book Excerpt: The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel

Gods are created, but the true God is unknown. This important maxim lies at the center of the Bible’s theology.

The historicism implicit in the biblical theology movement of half a century ago is more modern than it is biblical. What is often referred to as the Bible’s history has, in fact, nothing to do with writing history in any modern sense. The biblical basis for the theological language of salvation history is not a history, but a tradition. It is interested neither in the past nor indeed in the future. Both are but reflections for reality, and, as such, other than reality. The most disorienting difficulty with such readings of the Bible, is that they attempt to transpose a perspective of reality underlying biblical traditions into peculiarly modern terms. They permit reflection on our reality, but not reflection on what was real for the writers of the Bible. It was once fashionable for theologians to demythologize the Bible’s story world—as if there were available modern equivalencies immediately at hand, with which we might translate the Bible’s mythos into our own way of thinking. This was closely linked to the Protestant ideal of making the Bible’s faith our faith. Strong was the confidence that the God of the Bible—or indeed Jesus—could somehow be translated and become our God, without substantial loss or distortion. This fundamental assumption (and I would say arrogance) of biblical theology had at its core a belief in the inadequacy of the world-view of the ancients. At the same time, it maintained a blind faith that this same primitive world’s religious perception could become a saving perception in our world. History—an intellectual construct about events of the past and their meaning—has been, until very recently, an inescapable and fundamental part of our thinking and of our understanding of reality. It forms the crux of the distortions of neo-orthodox exegesis. Such a perception of reality, however, is far from the intellectual matrix of biblical tradition. Unlike events of history, events of tradition do not share in reality because of the uniqueness or singularity of their meaning. “Reality” for the Bible lies quite far from both this world and its events. “History,” like all of the events of human affairs, is, for the ancient traditionist, illusory. It is like the whole of this material, accidental and refracted world in which we live. Events in time are seen as through a distorting glass. True reality is unknowable, transcending experience.

Tradition is important heuristically. It brings understanding. Its recitation evokes truth. 037It does not recount it. Reality is not part of this traditional world, which is rather a world of human creation. Not even the gods of the tradition are real in themselves. They are only manifestations of God. Yahweh is God for Israel. He is Immanuel: God with us, only significant because of his referent.

Rather than as history, the Bible’s tradition might better be expressed as reiterative and typological aetiology. I use the world aetiology with purpose. It is a story of the past that seeks to echo—through metaphor—the truth of what is known. The biblical stories about the faithless and shattered Israel, about its relationship to and its betrayal of its forgotten God, are hardly history, as we understand the word. The word history does not even exist in Hebrew. In the Bible’s many stories and collected songs, written to create a self-understanding among its readers as the saved remnant of Israel, the Bible does not address or try to understand an historical past. The so-called “deuteronomistic history,” for example, from Joshua to the end of Kings, is not driven by any effort to explain either Samaria’s or Jerusalem’s destruction by its story of a god protecting the nation whenever it is faithful to him and punishing it in turn whenever Israel or Judah abandoned Yahweh’s worship for that of his competitor Ba’al, as has been commonly claimed. This is not even the purpose of Kings. Such an interpretation confuses narrative plot and motif with theme and function. It mixes up occasion with purpose and significance. However black and white the evil and good of Judges and Kings might be, the simple-mindedness implied by this caricature should never be confused with authorial intent.

However much Josiah’s explicitly tragic opposition to Yahweh and his servant Pharaoh Neco might be associated with the sympathetic portrayal of the people mourning him in II Chronicles 35, neither Josiah’s death nor the portrayal of his goodness in Kings are refractions of any saving grace. Nor is the loss of Josiah in Kings a tragic loss in any classical sense of the word. However much the Book of Lamentations over Jerusalem’s destruction might be associated with Jeremiah’s passionate story,¹ and with the people’s exile from Jerusalem, the history does not have mourning for its closure. Yahweh once destroyed Israel. Now he has destroyed Judah and Jerusalem with its temple and its king. He has not destroyed these that he might bring good out of destruction. Nor has he acted even because Israel and Judah were evil, but rather, more simply, he has done this by his choice and by his anger. This is not “salvation history.”

The “biblical view” of this narrative does not understand Yahweh’s providence in terms of good rewarded and evil punished. That is a caricature attributed to one or other of Job’s friends. For Kings, Josiah was good King Josiah. All other kings were unfaithful to Yahweh. But Josiah was good. For him, one might expect divine grace. “Before him there was no king like him, who had turned to Yahweh with all his heart, soul and strength, following the whole of Moses’ Torah; nor did his like ever come again” (II Kings 23:25). Josiah’s goodness, however, nowhere determines the story’s outcome. Even more important, this is not a problem in the story. The narrative is not unresolved with Josiah’s death. Indeed, the Josiah story epitomizes II Kings’ perspective of Yahweh’s role in human history. It is in the form of a prophetic oracle that the death of Josiah acquires its context: “I will take Judah away from my sight as I did Israel; and I will also throw off this city that I have chosen: Jerusalem; and also this temple in which I had said my name would live” (II Kings 23:27)! The stated reason for this? Yahweh’s choice and anger. This also is not “salvation history.”

Unlike its tradition variant in Chronicles, the Book of II Kings does not present Josiah in any way as opposing God by attacking the Egyptian forces. The account is lapidary: “Pharaoh Neco, king of Egypt, went up to the King of Assyria to the River Euphrates. King Josiah went to meet him; and Pharaoh Neco killed him at Megiddo when he saw him” (II Kings 23:29). This is neither “salvation history” nor any ideologically directed meaningful history. It does, however, reflect a perspective that bears looking into.

Neither promise and fulfillment nor reward and punishment are the root metaphors driving these narrative variants. Unlike the Josiah of Chronicles, the great ruler of Kings is not a Greek hero such as Oedipus, caught between the realities of his own greatness and divine purpose, however much his life, and the loss thereof, has been determined by fate. Josiah’s death in II Kings is not the death of classic tragedy. It reflects a uniquely biblical perspective: of human goodness destroyed, unmourned. Yahweh of Kings is not the God of Jeremiah’s restoration whom we meet in Jeremiah 33:1–26. Nor is this God Chronicles’ transcendent deity, which has so much in common with the more positive, indeed polyannic, theology of Jeremiah. This God is not terribly far from Job’s Yahweh—that awful God of the whirlwind, in contrast with whom even the most innocent of men is but a worm. This is the same God whom those great agnostics, the implied authors of Ecclesiastes and Jonah, could not and would not understand. This is the God of the Saul stories and the God of the flood stories of Genesis: one who decreed both salvation and destruction for Israel. This was done not through justice nor for justice’s sake. In this author’s world, the fate of a man is insignificant in the face of divine will.

The closure of Kings, with its reassertion of the divinely arbitrary, disrupts any sense of the morally ordered world of justice of the sort that we find in Jeremiah and Chronicles. Yahweh’s moral disorder receives faint mockery in the narrative’s comparison with the human Evilmerodach’s contrasting mercy to the captive Jehoiachin.

—From Thomas L. Thompson, The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel. © 1999 Thomas L. Thompson. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a member of Perseus Books, L.L.C.

We try to expose our readers to various scholarly viewpoints, even though we do not always agree with them. We have confidence in our readers’ ability to make up their own minds. It is in that spirit that we have tried to present the case of the Biblical revisionists, or Biblical minimalists, or as they are sometimes derogatorily called, Biblical nihilists. Whatever their name, they agree that there is little, if any, history to be found in the Bible—say, for example, the story of the Exodus. At most, we can learn something about the period, hundreds of years later, […]