Interpreting Ancient Israelite History, Prophecy, and Law. John H. Hayes

by the tamarisk tree.159

      The pentateuchal legislation—“the Hebrew constitution”160—is attributed to Moses, “the legislator constantly, yet discreetly, mitigating the savage usages of a barbarous people.”161

      The laws of a settled and civilized community were enacted among a wandering and homeless horde who were traversing the wilderness, and more likely, under their existing circumstances, to sink below the pastoral life of their forefathers, than advance to the rank of an industrious agricultural community. Yet, at this time, judging solely from its internal evidence, the law must have been enacted. Who but Moses ever possessed such authority as to enforce submission to statutes so severe and uncompromising? Yet, as Moses incontestably died before the conquest of Canaan, his legislature must have taken place in the desert. To what other period can the Hebrew constitution be assigned? To that of the judges? a time of anarchy, warfare, or servitude! To that of the kings? when the republic had undergone a total change! To any time after Jerusalem became the metropolis? when the holy city, the pride and glory of the nation, is not even alluded to in the whole law! After the building of the temple? when it is equally silent as to any settled or durable edifice! After the separation of the kingdoms? when the close bond of brotherhood had given place to implacable hostility! Under Hilkiah? under Ezra? when a great number of the statutes had become a dead letter! The law depended on a strict and equitable partition of the land. At a later period it could not have been put into practice without the forcible resumption of every individual property by the state; the difficulty, or rather impossibility, of such a measure, may be estimated by any reader who is not entirely unacquainted with the history of the ancient republics. In other respects the law breathes the air of the desert. Enactments intended for a people with settled habitations, and dwelling in walled cities, are mingled up with temporary regulations, only suited to the Bedouin encampment of a nomad tribe.162

      Milman certainly realized that the dating of the law was the central issue in Old Testament interpretation and that when one dates the law is highly determinative for how one writes the history. Also, he raised practically all the possible options for dating the law.

      Milman follows the basic biblical account of the conquest and division of the land. The judges of early Israel, whose title is associated with “the Suffetes of the Carthaginians,” are described as “military dictators” operating in emergencies within the “boundaries of their own tribe.” Their qualifications were their “personal activity, daring, and craft,” and they appear “as gallant insurgents or guerilla leaders.” In the case of Deborah, several tribes came together in “an organized warlike confederacy.” The tribes were disunited because of their disobedience to the Mosaic law and were compelled to arms in furthering the incomplete conquest in “war of the separate tribes against immediate enemies.”163 Although the Bible speaks of the judges being raised up by the Lord, “their particular actions are nowhere attributed to divine action.”164 The absence of Judah and Simeon from the song of Deborah (Judges 5) suggests that perhaps they “had seceded from the confederacy, or were occupied by enemies of their own.”165

      Enough has been said of Milman’s work to suggest his approach since many of the basic issues arise in treating the period prior to David. Although Milman was probably the first to treat Israelite and Judean history from a secular orientation and in the same terms one would write a history of Greece or Rome, his name and an exposition of his position are seldom mentioned in surveys of Old Testament studies.

      A second innovative work was the lengthy, multi-volume history by Heinrich Georg August Ewald (1803–75),166 one of the most outstanding Oriental and Semitic scholars of the nineteenth century.167 He was a student and successor of Eichhorn at Gottingen. Ewald’s history is as verbose and dull as Milman’s is crisp and entertaining.

      Almost one half of the first volume of Ewald’s history is devoted to the problem of the sources for Israelite history.168 Ewald says his “ultimate aim is the knowledge of what really happened—not what was only related and handed down by tradition, but what was actual fact.”169 Tradition thus preserves an image of what happened, but it is also formed by imagination, which may blur the details or form of the event it remembers, and is shaped by the memory, which tends to obliterate details and contract the overall content.170 Chronological distance from the events reduces the extent and trustworthiness of the tradition:

      The Hebrew tradition about the earliest times—the main features of which, as we have it, were fixed in the interval from the fourth to the sixth century after Moses—still has a great deal to tell about Moses and his contemporaries; much less about the long sojourn in Egypt, and the three Patriarchs; and almost nothing special about the primitive times which preceded these Patriarchs, when neither the nation, nor even its ‘fathers,’ were yet in Canaan. So, too, the Books of Samuel relate many particulars of David’s later life passed in the splendour of royalty, but less about his youth before he was king.171

      Tradition has supports in songs, proverbs, and personal names, and in visible monuments such as altars, temples, and memorials.172 The strongest support of tradition, however, is the institution, such as annually recurring festivals that recall the incidents.173 Foreign elements also enter traditions: names are added, numbers lose exactness, events shift their chronological moorings, and similar traditions become associated.174 Tradition rests in imagination and feeling more than understanding and thus is closely associated with nationalistic sentiments.175 Different events are remembered in different styles of traditions and since tradition is very plastic it may be moulded by religious interests, aetiological concerns, and mythological perspectives.176

      The earliest Israelite historians found the tradition that they used as “a fluctuating and plastic material, but also a mass of unlimited extent.”177 At the writing-down stage, tradition went through further change. The modern historian must “distinguish between the story and its foundation, and exclusively seek the latter with all diligence.”178 “Tradition has its roots in actual facts; yet it is not absolutely history, but has a peculiar character and a value of its own . . . It is our duty to take the tradition just as it expects to be taken—to use it only as a means for discovering what the real facts once were.”179

      Thus, Ewald has a high regard for tradition’s relationship to historical facts and for the historian’s ability to use the tradition to discover the facts. By the Mosaic era, writing was known in Israel and a historiography possible.180

      Ewald divides the historical books into three groups: the Great Book of Origins (the Hexateuch), the Great Book of Kings (Judges–Kings + Ruth), and the Great Book of Universal History down to the Greek Times (Chronicles–Ezra–Nehemiah + Esther). Ewald then analyzes these great books as to their sources. The basic source of the Hexateuch was what Ewald called the “Book of Origins” (what is today called P), which he dated to the period of the early monarchy.181 This book incorporated older fragments and materials and was subjected to various modifications, prophetic and Deuteronomistic, before it attained its final form at the end of the seventh or the beginning of the sixth century.182 In similar manner, Ewald proceeds to analyze the other two historical complexes, their origin, components, modifications, and history.

      Before beginning his reconstruction of the history, Ewald discussed some problems of chronology183 and general geographical matters.184 Ewald follows the four-age theory of P and speaks of the three ages of the preliminary history of Israel: creation to Noah, Noah to Abraham, and Abraham to Moses. In discussing the first two ages, Ewald compares the traditions with those of other peoples, discusses the ages of the characters, and avoids any real straightforward statements about the factuality of the materials. Behind the patriarchal figures are to be seen tribal groups. The oldest extant tradition about Abraham is Genesis 14.185 The patriarchal ancestors spoke and thought monotheistically but not quite in the Mosaic form.186 The Hebrews are pictured entering Egypt at different times in various migrations, beginning in the Hyksos period, but the exodus is not to be associated with the expulsion of the Hyksos.187