Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Bill Rea <cctr114 AT its.canterbury.ac.nz>]

Ian wrote:-

>Then you might refrain from trying to use the texts as surrogates for
>historically verified sources.

Again, if you read what I wrote, you would see I wasn't doing this.

One of the stranger aspects of this thread, at least to me, is why you
are driving this historical verification so hard. Let us be honest -
in dealing with the Hebrew Scriptures we dealing with religious
texts. The writers were looking into the past of their people in
an attempt to see something which is impossible for the historian
to perceive, namely the working of God. 

You have proclaimed to us often enough that you are doing history.
No problem there. But I don't understand why you are poking around
religious texts at all let alone constantly denying their usefulness 
in historical research to those whose primary interest in them is
because of the texts religious significance.

My personal belief lies somewhere in the middle between the literalists
who see everything  in these texts as totally accurate in all respects
and the "minimalists" (if you will excuse me for using that label) 
who seem to want to place the writing of them in the 2nd century
BC. There are just too many points of contact with events much
earlier than the 2nd century BC for me to swallow this.

Ian also wrote:-

>I have been arguing that noone seems to have any way to know what in the
>texts, if anything, relates to the period they purport to. 

I don't disagree, but to say this misses the intent of the writers.
They were essentially looking into the past and drawing from it an
*interpretation* of the ways in which God worked, to guide their people
into the future. But the historical core on which this interpretation
was built appears to me to actually exist. I do not claim we can
recover this core to the satisifaction of the historian. To you that
might be a horendous problem, to me it's inherant in the nature of the
texts. In fact, after many years of thinking about this, I'm glad we
cannot satisfy the historian.

I lived in the US long enough to know that the Americans endow their
history with an almost mythological significance. Just because they
do this we do not deny that at their core there were some real events.


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