Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Jonathan D. Safren" <yonsaf AT beitberl.beitberl.ac.il>]

Niels Peter Lemche wrote:

>         [Niels Peter Lemche]  Jonathan you are making my life too easy, what
> is left is not the story of the Bible but something you constructed that
> might or might not have anything to do with what happened, and it is only a
> parody of the biblical version, having lost the essence of that narrative.
> The same problem arises, when people ask the David of the Bible to be a
> historical person. This great king never was, but this does not say that
> there was never a David. One David belong to history and is the subject of
> historical investigations, the other to literature. You can only mix them
> together if you can verify that the David of history was the great king of
> the Bible or viceversa. This has to do with categories.
>
> [JSafren] What you call "a parody of the biblical version" I call tradition
> history. True, I make an a priori assumption, that historiographical
> traditions occurring repeatedly in the Bible in different forms and from
> different sources apparently have some basis in fact; and going on from 
> that a
> priori asssumption, I try to reconstruct the original tradition or the Sitz 
> im
> Leben.

You may or may not accept this method (I know you don't), but please don't 
call
it "a Parody of the biblical version". As I said, the biblical version is
theological literature. This theological literature is based on an event or
events that have been interpreted and reinterpreted depending on the author 
and
his social/religious milieu. This is no different from the work of any
historiographer. Suetonius and Gibbon each interpreted the events of the same
period in light of their own views on historiography and the periods in which
they lived. The same goes for JE, P, D, or any other biblical trafition about
the Exodus.
I accept the theological nature of the Exodus traditions. But trying to get
behinf them doesn't amount to a parody.
Yours,
--
Jonathan D. Safren
Dept. of Biblical Studies
Beit Berl College
44905 Beit Berl Post Office
Israel