The Bible from Epic to History

...At times, their idea of a literal interpretation seems a bit strained...

...The highpoint of the Bible's historical style is the account of King David, a living, breathing man in a way that earlier figures are not, despite his story's many stereotypical features, possibly drawn from epic sources...

...Although they agree that the first five books are based on older documents, they think "the enterprise of uncovering these earlier sources is a misguided one...

...They do call specific facts into question but can be identified easily and do not undermine confidence in the Bible as a whole...

...They also show that the books influenced by these Canaanite poems come to us authentically from very early times...

...Instead, they urge what they call a "literal meaning of the text as against a scholarly and traditional" one...

...The story, it now dawned on me for the first time, was my own: All of it—including, I eventually discovered, the Greek Testament—was mostly about Jews...

...They believe, for instance, that the "tree of knowledge of good and evil" (Genesis 2:9), whose fruit made Adam and Eve "as gods" (Genesis 3:5), was not a metaphor pertaining to a specifically moral kind of wisdom but rather a merism —a figure of speech, common in Western Semitic poetry, that pairs antonyms to suggest inclusiveness...

...My interest in Scripture was awakened not by ancestral memories but by the two years I spent in Britain, where written English is even today saturated with the rhetoric of the King James Bible, or Authorized Version...

...Whatever their source, the similarities between the Bible, the epic cycles of the Ugaritans and other Semitic peoples, and the works of Homer are very striking...

...Samuel and Kings, whose sources may be half a millennium older, were not of course anything like the earliest accounts of political events...

...But as Cyrus H. Gordon and Gary A. Rendsburg maintain in The Bible and the Ancient Near East (Norton, 345 pp., $32.50), the Hebrew Testament, for all its importance in later Jewish history, has much stronger links to the larger Near Eastern civilization in which it emerged than to current ideas of Jewishness...

...The whole of history "is presented in one continuum," so that the process of change—no longer conceived on the recurring model of the seasons—has a direction...

...Samuel and Kings transfer "human values from the epic to current events," and this, the authors contend, is the essence of real historical writing...

...Notwithstanding the failure to find any contemporary extra-Biblical evidence for the historicity of the founder of the royal line, historians have always assumed it...

...As I progressed into Genesis, I found my attitudes changing...

...Still, there is no clear evidence to justify the claim that they came from Caphtor, nor do Gordon and Rendsburg establish that the "close connections between the literature of Ugarit and Homer are due in large measure to the Caphtorian element that spans them...

...Gordon and Rendsburg, professors, respectively, of Mediterranean studies (Brandeis) and of Near Eastern studies (Cornell), devote little attention to the process of composition...

...In fact, though, 15th-14th century BCE documents from the city of Nuzu, in northeast Mesopotamia, show that inheritances were subject to bargaining among siblings...

...In one recorded case "a man in need of food sold his inheritance portion to his own brother in exchange for livestock...

...human richness...

...They eluded understanding until the mid-1950s, when Michael Ventris deciphered the so-called Minoan Linear ? tablets, establishing that they recorded an archaic form of Greek...

...As works of high tragedy, they are more powerful than anything in Herodotus, but the authors should have noted that he is a great deal more sophisticated as a historian...

...A century and a half ago, the first archeologists on Crete (Caphtor) uncovered tablets in two languages, written with the same script...

...With his son and successor the Bible's level of historical writing falls: "The exact specifications of Solomon's buildings are small compensation for the lack of...

...It produced the body of literature closest to the Hebrew canon: epic verse in Canaanite—a language resembling that of the Jews—celebrating the very gods execrated by Scripture, notably Baal and Asherah...

...His command of a band of rough men, his impetuousness, his winning of a princess by slaying Philistines instead of paying a bride price, his amours, his intimate love of Jonathan (2 Samuel 1:26)—all of these and other features fit rather into the milieu of Homer's heroic age than into the framework of synagogue and church...

...The authors argue persuasively that in comparison with the later parts of Scripture, the early books are full of characters, like King David, who have "more in common with the heroes of the Iliad than with Ezra and Nehemiah...

...never do they distinguish among the "Yahwistic," "Elohistic" and priestly strands of the Torah...

...One of the Sea Peoples, the Danuna, became in the authors' view the Israelite tribe of Dan...

...For the Bible's literary associations, the most important body of comparative documents are those of Ugarit, a Canaanite town on the Mediterranean, in what is now northern Syria and was then called Aram...

...Such turns of plot figure prominently in this literature because they are unusual and thus "worthy of epic...

...Since inscriptions in it considerably outnumbered those in Linear B, it seems to have been dominant...

...Clearly, too, the script common to both had strong Egyptian borrowings...

...All quotes have been taken from the AV and checked against an ecumenical roster of its contemporary Jewish, Catholic and Protestant rivals...

...Since my interests were literary, I started out reading the AV, disdaining other translations—particularly those that, like the New English Bible, had entirely dispensed with its magnificent phrases...

...It is they whom Gordon and Rendsburg identify with the Sea Peoples of Egyptian records and the Philistines of the Bible...

...Finally, the authors note, the Bible presents the origins of the Jewish people and its settlement in the land of Canaan in the context of an "account [that] begins with the creation of the world...

...But Herodotus is a lot more curious about foreigners on their own terms: His account of Persia, perhaps less stirring as narrative than the Book of Esther, tells us a great deal more about the country, for one thing because it doesn't focus on the Jewish minority...

...The authors stress what might be called a Caphtorian theory of Near Eastern history...

...After the phonetic values had been determined, Gordon himself soon demonstrated that the language of Minoan Linear A was a northwest Semitic tongue similar to Hebrew and Canaanite...

...At this point, I not only claimed a special Jewish relationship to these ancient writings but also wondered how Gentiles could see anything for themselves in a work that on the whole treats them with suspicion...

...Yet their predecessors—the annals of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Sumer, Akkad and other Near Eastern societies—were "not real history in which personal character and motivation were delineated...

...The Bible still does seem to me a Jewish contribution to human culture...

...What attracted me was mainly its importance in shaping the English language and literature: I wanted to know the associations conjured up, for example, by Captain Ahab and such phrases as "how are the mighty fallen" (2 Samuel 1:19...

...The authors hypothesize that about 1800 BCE a Semitic people, originally from Canaan or Aram, left the delta of Egypt for Crete...

...If the epic tradition casts doubt on certain details, the authors argue that in another way it makes the books of Samuel and Kings, rather than the works of the Greek writer Herodotus (fifth century BCE), the first true history...

...This might conceivably be read into several texts they cite, particularly Genesis 49:16—"Dan shall judge [govern] his people as one of the tribes of Israel") In all likelihood the Scriptural Philistines had been among the Sea Peoples, one of whom is identified in Egyptian records as the Peleset...

...Gordon and Rendsburg cite the large number of tales recalling motifs repeated frequently in Genesis too: difficulties in finding suitable wives, the annunciation by gods of future progeny, longbarren women miraculously giving birth in old age, the triumph of younger over older sons—even of eighth sons, like King David and the Ugaritic epic hero Kret...

...it anticipates true historical evaluations of rulers whether or not it achieves this in itself...

...Moreover, the Samuel-Kings cycle views even the greatest and most pious Kings of Judah critically...

...In those societies, paradoxically, only gods and other legendary figures could be described in a realistic manner...

...There still is no such evidence, but in 1993 an inscription was discovered at Dan referring to the House of David about 150 years after his death—by far the earliest known reference outside the Bible...

...In this case, insist the authors, it simply means the sum of useful knowledge...

...Other parts of the Samuel-Kings cycle do stand out as works of history, particularly the accounts of the reigns of King Ahab of Israel and of Judah's King Hezekiah...

...Later, in the 12th century BCE, as the Children of Israel were fleeing that very delta and establishing themselves in Canaan, the Semitic culture of Crete and other east Mediterranean islands was attacked by the Mycenaean Greeks, who absorbed it and then transmitted it to Greece...

...Meanwhile, contend the authors, many Semitic Cretans moved under Mycenaean pressure to the mainland of the Near East, including the land of Canaan...

...I myself had difficulty exorcising the old-fashioned way from my mind, but this literal approach does wonderfully explain many of the Bible's most seemingly improbable details, particularly the institutions as opposed to events: Before I read Gordon and Rendsburg I had never taken seriously Esau's selling his birthright to his brother Jacob for "a pottage of lentils" (Genesis 25:34...

...From Genesis and Exodus to Esther, the Bible is full of accurate information about the other cultures of the Near East...