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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > December 1989

The Hebrew Bible Contains the Oldest Surviving History

By Jacob Licht

The extraordinary achievement of the Hebrew Bible as history is rarely remarked on, but it is worth considering. For the Hebrew Bible contains the oldest surviving historical work as such and perhaps the earliest history ever written.

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Footnotes

1.

Jainism is a dualistic religion that flourished in the Indian subcontinent in the sixth century B.C.E. (Before the Common Era, the religiously neutral term corresponding to B.C.)

2.

The notion of the Tablets of the Law being finally deposited in the Ark is clearly spelled out only in Deuteronomy.

Endnotes

1.

H. G. Rawlinson, India, a Short Cultural History (New York: Praeger, 1952).

2.

See J. Nunes Careira, “Formen des Geschichtdenkens in altorientalischer und altestamentlicher Geschichtschreibung,” Biblische Zeitschrift 31 (1987), pp. 38–57. The article is instructive because the author assumes the existence of a Mesopotamian historiography and points out its poverty instance by instance.

3.

Julius Wellhausen, Die Composition des Hexateuchs und der historischen Buecher des Alten Testaments, (Berlin: de Grueter, 1963), pp. 240–243.

4.

This has been done by apocalyptic. See Jacob Licht, “Time and Eschatology in Apocalyptic Literature and in Qumran,” Journal of Jewish Studies 16 (1965), pp. 177–182; esp. p. 181.