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I'm still in Thomas Thompson's Mythic Past. Today, I'll touch on Thompson's view on whether the biblical authors believed that they were writing history.
On page 222, Thompson talks about the contradiction between Nehemiah's presentation of an empty Jerusalem long after she was conquered by the Babylonians, and Lamentations' portrayal of Jerusalem as a city "filled with violence." Was Jerusalem occupied after she was conquered, or not? Thompson states the following:
"It is only our own historical expectations that see the image of Jerusalem as an empty and abandoned wilderness and Jerusalem as filled with violence as contradictions. For both Nehemiah and Lamentations...it is because of sin that the desert is found. This is how Mount Zion is a wasteland...Exile is Jerusalem as a wasteland; it is the emptiness of the soul; it is to be without God. This is not historiography at all, but a metaphor of pietism...[T]he dark night of the soul (expressed biblically in the metaphor of exilic wilderness) as a time of testing and rebirth is both a central and an essential aspect of piety's self-understanding."
On pages 223-224, Thompson discusses Jeremiah 4:23-26, which describes Jerusalem during the exile using language from Genesis 1:
"In these powerful, terrible verses, the poet portrays exilic Jerusalem---this land of an ignorant people who do not know God---as an empty earth: as the world before creation...So too Jerusalem of the exile has returned in Jeremiah's vision of the desert's formlessness before God's creative and life-giving breath moved over the surface of the waters. Jerusalem is without God. It had no light; the mountains were no longer firmly held on their pillars; there was no humanity; no birds of the air. Instead of Genesis 1's divine spirit moving with its creative force, God's fierce anger governs Jeremiah's poem. It is in the face of such a wilderness Jerusalem that the poet in chapter 5 desperately searches Jerusalem's streets for a just man, that God might pardon the city."
In my reading of Thompson's book so far, I've been confused by his view on biblical historiography. Does he believe that the biblical authors thought that they were narrating events that occurred in the past? At some points, he seems to assume that the biblical stories are metaphors for a pious life. The wilderness is about the journey through life, and, in one of the quotes above, Thompson says that the exile is a metaphor for the "dark night of the soul." Thompson portrays some of the biblical authors as philosophers and theologians---who were making general points about the pious life. At other points, however, Thompson does relate the stories to a historical context, usually a Hellenistic one, as when he interprets Ahab to be a metaphor for Antiochus IV. But I do not know if Thompson thinks that the biblical authors in such cases expected their audience to take their stories as historical, conveying the message that there were similar events in Israel's past that could instruct the Jews in their current situation, or rather that the biblical writers assumed that their audience would catch on to the metaphor.
Moreover, Thompson holds that there really was a deportation of Israelites. In the quotes above, Thompson indicates that biblical writers were seeking to promote an event within history, namely, the rebirth of Israel, and so there is an attempt by biblical authors to impact their historical contexts, meaning that they weren't entirely moving within the realm of spiritual allegory. And yet, Thompson's quotes above are about how biblical authors can use spiritual allegory to comment on Israel's situation in space and time: Israel is in a spiritual desert and needs a new beginning, initiated by the creative power of God.
And then there are times when Thompson says that the biblical writers created a past for Israel, and that they wrote etiologies, stories that purport to describe the origins of certain things.
But if they were composing etiologies saying how certain things originated, does not that imply that they believed that those things originated in the manner that they narrate? Probably the closest that Thompson comes to addressing this question (in my reading of the book so far, that is) is on page 44. In Joshua 10, God rains down hailstones on Israel's enemies. Joshua captures some kings, executes them, puts them in a cave, and orders Israelites to lay five large stones at the cave's entrance. Thompson says that these are from the hailstones that God rained on Israel's enemies (but I don't see that in the text). And Joshua 10 says that the stones are at that cave "unto this day." Thompson states:
"The memorial set up at the cave, five of Yahweh's stones, is an obvious argument for the story's historicity. Such an argument is a common folktale motif, quite like the closure of Hans Christian Andersen's story of 'the princess and the pea' with its historicizing details that the pea is still in the museum...'that is, if someone hasn't stolen it'."
But Thompson then says that the author of Joshua 10 is subverting his own story: there really is no monument of hailstones unto this day, for hailstones melt! So is Thompson saying that the author expects his audience to pick up on that point and to conclude that the story really is not historical?
