Is there any historiography in the Hebrew bible? A Hebrew - Greek comparison

Abstract

E W Nicholson has challenged the view that there is any historiography in the Hebrew Bible and disputed the published comparisons of the author between the Hebrew "histories" of Genesis to 2 Kings and the histories of Herodotus and other early Greek historians. In particular, he understands Greek historiography to be a form of narrative about the recent past that is based only on direct observation and the critical appraisal of historical evidence and rational causes without any consideration of divine causation of historical events. By contrast the biblical writings are only "story". The following essay attempts to show that this understanding of Greek historiography is quite misleading and that there is indeed much that is similar in the Hebrew Bible and the Greek histories such that the biblical writings deserve to be called histories every bit as much as those of ancient Greece.