The Notion of History in the Hebrew Bible

Abstract

The term “notion” in the title is applied not so much to the history of Israel’s development in its religious, moral, social, juridical and political institutions traced in the texts of the Hebrew Bible as to the interpretation that these texts make of such institutions and the characters connected to them. The intention here is to understand the historiography of the Bible: the way Israelites understood themselves at different points in their history. For the modern West, historiography is one of the natural activities concerned with the understanding of its own existence. In this aspect, westerners are heirs and disciples of both Greek and Biblical historiography. The majority of ancient cultures did not feel the need to adopt this form of understanding their existence. The fact of living a history did not pose any problem for them. Therefore they never produced a true historiography. Certainly, these cultures created a great diversity of historical documents: court diaries, annals of kingdoms, lists of kings and marvellous inscriptions of every kind. Nevertheless, this is not a true historiography. Ancient Israel, profoundly influenced by the radiating culture of Mesopotamia and Egypt, and in possession, after being installed in Canaan, of a poorly defined heritage, succeeded to produce, even in the field of historiography, a markedly personal literature. Perhaps for a classical reading of the problem, it would be acceptable to contemplate an Assyrian stone slab. The King of Assyria Assaraddon, on his return from a victorious expedition in the year 671 BC, in which he crushed the revolt which broke out after the death of Sennacherib, had a stone slab sculptured depicting the conquered Abdi-Milkutti, King of Sidon, and Ushanahoru son of the Ethiopian pharaoh Taharqa1, tethered on a leash. The profane language on the triumphal stone of Zengirli would have us believe that either Assaraddon was a giant, or the King of Sidon and the Ethiopian prince were pygmies. But this is not true. The artist, following the canons of Mesopotamian art, has minimized the conquered ones simply to express the idea of the superiority, even the transcendency of the Assyrian monarch. Not so many years ago, this kind of argument would have been faced with certain requirements of “objectivity” in order to present the facts as they really happened, but now the problem is not so simple2.