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I started Thomas Thompson's Mythic Past. In this post, I will talk about two issues: Thompson's treatment of the Mesha Stele, and his placement of the origins of certain biblical narratives within a Hellenistic context.
1. On page 10, Thompson states: "Ancient inscriptions have often been found, which refer to one or other character or narrative which we otherwise know only from the Bible. Yet, even here, a confirmation of the biblical narrative, which would allow us to read it as if it were history, is still elusive."
On pages 12-14, Thompson discusses the Mesha Stele as an example of this point. The Mesha Stele "has been dated by historians to some time between 849 and 820 BCE", and it is Moabite. It talks about how Omri, the king of Israel, afflicted Moab for many days, which was an indication to Mesha that the Moabite god Chemosh was upset with Moab. When Omri's son later tried to humble Moab, Mesha defeated him. Many scholars have compared the account of the Mesha Stele to the events narrated in II Kings 3, in which Moab rebels against Israel, and Joram, the son of Ahab, tries to defeat the country. But Joram and his allies retreat when Mesha of Moab offers his own son as a sacrifice.
So is the Bible story of II Kings 3 confirmed, or at least shown to be getting at some historical event that actually happened? Thompson does not think so. I'll start with what Thompson says on page 14 and work backwards from that:
"...in the biblical variant of the Moabite story in II Kings 3:4-8, the two kings of Israel that are involved are not Omri and his son (namely Ahab), but rather Ahab and his son Jehoram. The motif of a king of Israel and his son attacking Moab remains constant; only the names of the characters vary. This is a pattern of variation that occurs often in stories, but in history only by mistake. It would be an error to pit the Bible against the Mesha stele in a contest of historicity. It is also wrong to date the stele by using the biblical tradition as if it were an account of an event. Nor do the roles the characters play in either version of the story allow us to understand the narratives as reflecting historical events or persons. The similarity of the Mesha narrative to the posthumous tale of Idrimi forces us to see the inscription as a monument celebrating Mesha's completed reign, and to date it somewhat later or at the very close of this historical king's reign. What we have in the Mesha stele is an early variant of the same tale that we find in the Bible. [T]he Mesha inscription gives us evidence that the Bible collects and re-uses very old tales from Palestine's past."
For Thompson, the Mesha Stele and II Kings 3 are not historical accounts of an event, but rather they're different versions of a story that was floating around. One version landed in the Mesha Stele, and another version ended up in II Kings 3.
For Thompson, the Mesha Stele itself is literary. Thompson notes that the "monument on which this inscription was written was originally erected at a sanctuary", and it resembles biblical tales about God controlling the fate of Israel and Judah and sending "enemies against them when he is angry." Moreover, the Mesha Stele appears to belong to "a substantial literary tradition" that inscribed stories about past kings---kings who had died--- and narrated the stories in the first person. These works were tributes to past kings, and some of them contained clearly legendary elements. The birth story of Sargon the Great of Akkad, for example, presents him as a baby being cast into the river in a basket, a situation from which he was rescued. We find this sort of motif "throughout ancient literature", including Exodus 2 and the story Oedipus. Other literary elements of the Mesha Stele that Thompson notes include the time-frame of forty years (which occurs also in the Bible in numerous stories, albeit not the one about Mesha), "a god becoming drunk on the blood of his enemies" (which is present also in Late Bronze Ugaritic poetry and Egyptian creation mythology), and slaughtering enemies in sacrifice to a god (which is in the Hebrew Bible). Regarding Omri in the Mesha Stele, Thompson regards him as the legendary founder of Samaria, and so he too belongs to the realm of story-telling, one "built on eponymous ancestors", the sort of thing that we encounter in the Hebrew Bible and Greek stories.
(And, on a side note, Niels Peter Lemche on page 45 of The Israelites in History and Tradition suggests that the presence of Omri in the Mesha Stele does not mean that the Stele dates to the ninth century B.C.E. Perhaps "Omri" was used as a dynastic name, the way that "David" is used for descendants of David in such passages as Jeremiah 30-33. And, even after the Omride dynasty fell, the author of the Mesha Stele could have regarded the king of Samaria as an Omride, for the Assyrians considered Jehu to be a son of Omri. Consequently, for Lemche, the Mesha Stele could be narrating events involving "any king of Israel right down to the destruction of Samaria".)
So Thompson believes that the Mesha Stele contains a version of a story that was composed after the reign of Mesha (or near the end of his reign). For him, it is literary, not historical.
2. Thompson dates a lot of the Hebrew Bible to the Hellenistic Period. I can cite many examples of this, but I will refer to only one, since I have other things to do, and I want to draw this post to an end. On page 97, he states that the pattern for the biblical story of the separation between Northern Israel and Judah was "the break-up of the Hellenistic empire, which had separated into two integral parts: the southern Ptolemies of Egypt ruling from Alexandria, and the Seleucids of the north ruling from Antioch and Babylon." When II Kings criticizes Northern Israel, Thompson argues, it is really going after "the hated religious syncretism of Antiochus IV".
