Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>]

On 15/11/2005 01:45, Yigal Levin wrote:

> Not only Exodus. The entire Bible, in all its versions (not just the MT), is 
> primarily a book about God's relationship with Israel. Some parts of it use 
> "historiography" as a tool to get that message across. Others use poetry. 
> Others use wisdom. Whatever the authors thought was irrelevant to their 
> objective - they left out. Their objective was NOT to teach us what WE think 
> of as history. We should always keep that in mind.
>
>  
You and Jack can assert such things as many times as you like, but 
unless you provide evidence you are not going to convince people like 
Karl, or even myself who is already in partial agreement.

Anyway, what do "WE think of as history"? If by this you mean an 
exhaustive record of all events, of course the Bible is not that, but 
nor are modern history books. If a modern author were to write a history 
of the people of Israel from earliest times, even if they had far better 
data than are actually available, that history would pass over the time 
in Israel, between Joseph and Moses, very briefly, as does the 
Genesis-Exodus narrative - for the focus of the book is on Israel, not 
Egypt. The modern author would probably want to relate this to specific 
Egyptian dynasties and dates, but then those are modern concerns, not 
the concerns of ancient Israelite historians. For historians they were, 
although like modern historians not without their specific purposes and 
biases. Why can't people accept this? Is it because someone once 
declared that Herodotus was the first historian and so no one earlier 
can be called a historian?

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/