First Person: The Meaning of Unhistory

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“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, only about the time hundreds of years later when the text was composed—and the stories made up. The stories in the Torah, he contends, are “politically charged texts [that] provide historical evidence [only] for the period in which they were composed.” Therefore, he concludes, “I am compelled to read the Torah allegorically because it cannot be read historically.”

That these Biblical figures have not shown up in extra-Biblical records is part of Sperling’s demonstration that the Biblical accounts are “unhistorical.” Whether or not these Biblical figures ever existed is a complicated question that I will not address here. The case differs for, say, Abraham, on the one hand, and David on the other, as Sperling recognizes.² My point is simply that the absence of specific reference to these figures in contemporaneous extra-Biblical sources is next to irrelevant. For a simple reason: We would not expect them to be mentioned in the sparse written records that we have. There may be good reasons to argue that certain figures in Professor Sperling’s list never existed, but one of these reasons is not the fact that they are not mentioned in the scant contemporaneous sources that have survived. (If this were the standard, we would doubt that Jesus existed, since in that comparatively recent period, for which we have tons of material, he is unmentioned except for one questionable passage in Josephus.)³

Or take another example. We know from the Bible about an Ammonite king named Ba‘alis who lived in the sixth century B.C. If we were writing a few years ago we could correctly state that there was no extra-Biblical reference to Ba‘alis—even a king went unmentioned. Now he has turned up twice in the extra-Biblical record.⁴ There are numerous instances like this.

Sperling makes the same kind of mistake more broadly when he inaccurately states that “the archaeology of the past three decades demonstrates that … Israel was never enslaved in Egypt, so consequently there was no exodus and no trek through the desert.” Archaeology demonstrates no such thing! On the contrary, based on the archaeological record, most scholars recognize that some of the people who became Israel indeed came from Egypt. Why would they make up a fictional account of an ancestry as slaves? What archaeology is Sperling referring to? He never gets specific on this point. Evidently he is referring to the absence of direct archaeological evidence in Egyptian records for an Israelite presence in Egypt or of their escape or of their trek through the desert. The absence of such evidence is hardly surprising since these events were little more than a blip on the screen of Egyptian history at the time and nothing to brag about anyway. Moreover, there is enough archaeological evidence of an Asiatic slave population in the eastern Delta to make the account of an early Israelite population there quite plausible. Again, I am not arguing that the Biblical account is entirely historical. I don’t believe it is. I don’t even want to argue here for a historical core, although I believe there is a historical core.⁵ My narrow point is that the absence of direct archaeological evidence of Israelite enslavement is next to irrelevant. It is surely not sufficient to assert that “Israel was never enslaved in Egypt” or that “there 059was no exodus.” We would have expected a more nuanced treatment of these questions from an authority like Sperling.

This is not the only occasion when Sperling plays fast and loose with archaeological materials. Consider how he uses the famous bronze bull figurine found in the hills of Samaria:⁶ Sperling contends that the golden calf episode at Mount Sinai is unhistorical and is in fact an allegory in which Aaron, who made the Mount Sinai calf, “is an allegory of Jeroboam [I],” who, as described in 1 Kings 12, set up golden calves at Bethel and Dan. In support of this contention, Sperling cites “archaeological” evidence, the bull figurine from the Samarian hills; Sperling writes, “The archaeological find from northern Israel [i.e., the bull figurine] fits perfectly with the realistic setting of 1 Kings 12.” But the bull figurine dates to Iron I (1200–1000 B.C.), the time of the Judges, not the time of the Divided Monarchy. If this bronze bull has any relevance to Sperling’s allegorical argument, it entirely escapes me; if anything, it works against it. The only thing that the citation of the bull figurine does for Sperling’s argument is add an irrelevant archaeological veneer to it.

Another kind of example: Sperling tells the reader that “the personal name Israel was found in thirteenth-century B.C.E. texts from Ugarit.” I had never heard this, so I called two experts. Neither had they. But a little research revealed that one possible, but quite unlikely, reading of a name was indeed Israel.⁷ Sperling makes the statement, however, without citation and without qualification. This is not only poor scholarship, it is dangerous: How many term papers will make the same unqualified, positive assertion that Sperling makes based on his supposed authority?

Sperling is what has recently come to be called a Biblical minimalist. For him, the accounts in the Torah are nothing more than the “the allegorical setting of a completely fictional past.” In his view, “The biblical traditions are allegories invented deliberately to obscure the fact that the people of Israel were native to their country.” Thus, “The stories of servitude in Egypt are allegories of servitude to Egypt” (italics in original). It is unfortunate that Sperling thinks that an allegorical reading necessarily eliminates other readings, including historical readings. He has some interesting insights in his book, but it is badly flawed not simply by his extreme Biblical minimalism but—and this is my main point here—by the misuse of archaeology.

“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, […]