The Primary History as Museum Exhibit: Rethinking the Recovery of the Hebrew Bible’s Artifacts

Abstract

The “Primary History” is the scholarly term for the biblical narrative spanning Genesis through Kings, created largely through the combination of pre-existing texts and traditions. This narrative has played a central role in scholarly reconstructions of the history of Israelite and Judahite traditions more generally because it is often possible to recover these pre-biblical traditions apparently intact. However, the recovery of pre-biblical traditions is a more complicated problem than typical approaches—which focus on the reconstruction of original texts—allow. Scholars also need to consider how the combination and arrangement of traditions has altered our perception of them, even when we can recover their original form. This article employs contemporary theoretical approaches to museum exhibits in order to explore how the combination and presentation of artifacts reshapes what they seem to mean, without physically altering them, and applies those lessons to the study of reconstructed pre-biblical texts.