Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Ian Hutchesson <mc2499 AT mclink.it>]

At 09.21 23/02/99 +1300, Bill Rea wrote:
>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.

Dear Bill,

What would all those points of contact be, Bill? That some cities existed
or that some foreign kings did? Perhaps that a few of the populations
mentioned were real? Hezekiah? Omri? Sanballat? While I don't know about
the second century -- some texts seem fairly sure to me --, I think you'd
need something a bitmore tangible than what I've mentioned in this
paragraph to be taken seriously in the last sentence you wrote above.

>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. 

That's your interpretation of their essentiality. Was Daniel a case of
looking back into the past or creating a past in order to comment on the
present?

>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.

That's nice psychological security. Why did you engage in this conversation
in the first place?

>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.

My postings have been about history and the efforts to reconstruct the
past. This leads me to say that there is no way we can admit the OT/HB has
a witness for the past, as there are almost no points of corroboration for
the information they provide, and at times there are clear contradictions
with data collected in other circumstances and which have been
corroborated. Being in a form that cannot be dated earlier than the second
century BCE, they can't be placed in the era.

That there may be some real events at their core cannot help us very much.


Ian