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I'm continuing my way through John Van Seters' In Search of History. Here are two items:
1. On pages 190-191, Van Seters compares the historiography about Idrimi with that concerning David and Solomon. Idrimi in the fifteenth century was the king of Alalakh, a city-state in what is now Turkey. The story about Idrimi, however, was composed a couple of centuries after Idrimi's time, Jack Sasson argues. According to Sasson, Sarruwa the scribe created this "simulated autobiography" about Idrimi. For Sasson, Sarruwa did not know much about Idrimi, and he invented most of his story, glorifying the "king as hero and founder of the dynasty...through the mediums of folklore and legend" (Van Seters' words). Sasson bases his argument on such things as the similarity of the inscription and the statue it is on to items in the Late Bronze Age, as well as the incompatibility between the text and Idrimi's historical context.
Van Seters states: "The story of Idrimi suggests that it was possible for a scribe in a high place to invent a lifelike portrayal of a dynastic founder in a historical text and to do this in the interests of nationalism and political propaganda. The story was certainly intended to be taken as fact by the populace, and no doubt the king was greatly venerated because of the exploits recounted in it."
I found this interesting because it addresses an important question regarding historiography: Did the ancients think that their stories really happened? According to Van Seters, the scribe who wrote the story about Idrimi expected his audience to regard the story as a factual description of the past.
Van Seters says that scholars have tried to support the historicity of the David and Solomon stories by appealing to their parallels with the story about Idrimi. But Van Seters states that "the comparison may more correctly point in the opposite direction", for the similarities "suggest that heroic and folkloristic elements could quite easily be applied to such founding monarchs and become part of the historiographic tradition."
2. On page 136, Van Seters states:
"The construction of a temporal continuity from theogony and the time of heroes and first heroes to later history by means of genealogical connections is also part of early Greek historiography. Whether Egypt had some influence upon this Greek development, along with the Mesopotamian antediluvian tradition, is hard to say."
According to Van Seters, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and early Greek historiography bridged recent history with theogony and a legendary time of heroes. What set Herodotus apart from the Greek prose writers before him, however, was that he shied away from "mythological and legendary explanation" in his history (page 24). According to Van Seters, Herodotus "dismisses rather briefly (1.1-5) the whole matter of causes from the heroic age and raises the question of responsibility within the time and scope of the historical period itself" (page 24). Moreover, Van Seters associates Herodotus with the Ionian enlightenment, which "encouraged a critical approach to [Homer and Hesiod] that rationalized their miraculous elements and also corrected them by new information" (page 22). As a rule, Herodotus was a rationalistic historian, although there may be some exceptions to this rule in his history.
On page 21, Van Seters quotes a dictionary's definition of an epic: "a long, formal, narrative form in elevated style, typically having as its subject heroic exploits and achievements or grandiose events." Examples of epics include the Iliad and the Odyssey. Van Seters does not regard the Hebrew Bible's stories as epics. The Yahwist in Genesis portrays the age of heroes and the origin of civilization in a negative light (think the Cain, the Nephilim, and Nimrod). Abraham's travels are "not adventures like those of the Odyssey" (page 29). And, on pages 29-30, Van Seters states regarding the story of Moses:
"The story of Moses is hardly any closer to a heroic model or an epic presentation. His rescue as a foundling is a folktale that could be used of a hero, but it could also be told of a historic person of recent history, as it was of Cyrus by Herodotus. Moses' youthful attempt at delivering his people by force of arms is a failure, and he flees out of fear of the king's threat. When his call as a deliverer does come he tries very hard to excuse himself from the challenge. His contest with the king of Egypt is by the prophetic words and succeeds when the Israelites flee or are driven from the land. The rebellions of the people in the wilderness and the other trials are hardly akin to the labors of Heracles. And the long digression on the laws hardly fits the epic pattern. Even the battles with Sihon and Og are treated as reports in a manner similar to Israel's own historiographic tradition in Samuel and Kings."
Van Seters' agenda in distinguishing the Pentateuch's historiography from epic appears to be to undermine the view that there is "an original poetic epic behind the sources of the Pentateuch [which argues] for the great antiquity of its 'history' through a long stage of oral tradition" (page 30). Van Seters' wonders why poetic epics survived in Greece and Mesopotamia, but not in ancient Israel---if there indeed was an epic poem behind the Pentateuch. So Van Seters is critiquing traditio-criticism.
What confuses me is this: Does Van Seters distinguish epics from historiography? On page 29, Van Seters denies that Genesis is an epic, and then states: "For the most part we have a genealogical succession in which the patriarchs' lives are filled out with folktales, etiological motifs, anecdotes, and novellas. There are stories dealing with the origins of neighboring peoples and some supplementary genealogical digressions. All this belongs to the stuff of the historiographic tradition." Here, Van Seters appears to distinguish historiography from epic.
Yet, on pages 200-201, Van Seters seems to cite the Iliad as an example of historiography. And, in the quote from page 136, Van Seters says that Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and early Greek histories had theogonies and a legendary time of heroes.
