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First Person: The Meaning of Unhistory

Not everyone shows up in the written record

By Hershel Shanks

“The reader should be aware that we have no direct evidence of the existence of characters best known to readers of the Bible, including—but not limited to—Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Esau, Moses, Joshua, Deborah, Gideon, David, Goliath, and Solomon.” So writes Rabbi S. David Sperling, professor of Bible and chair of the faculty at Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, in his recent book The Original Torah.1 Sperling contends that the Pentateuch is, to use his term, “unhistorical.” By this he means that the text can tell us nothing about the period of which it speaks, […]

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Endnotes

1.

S. David Sperling, The Original Torah (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1998).

2.

Sperling drops a footnote to “David” in the list to tell the reader that in 1993 an inscription was found that mentions the “House of David”; this, however, he tells us, does not count: The inscription refers “to a king of Judah but not to King David himself.” I’ll bet dollars to donuts that Sperling learned of this extraordinary inscription only after he wrote the list including David and then added the footnote to make his sentence technically correct. The inclusion of David in the list only highlights the weakness of his point.

3.

See John P. Meier, “The Testimonium,” BR, June 1991.

4.

See Robert Deutsch, “Seal of Ba‘alis Surfaces,” BAR 25:02.

5.

See my revision of the chapter on the Exodus in the new edition of Ancient Israel (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1999).

6.

“Bronze Bull Found in Israelite ‘High Place’ from the Time of the Judges,” BAR 09:05.

7.

Frauke Gröndahl, Die Personennamen der Texte aus Ugarit (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1967), pp. 43 (not interpreted as Israel), 394 (the name of an elite Maryannu warrior).