Posts
I'm continuing my way through John Van Seters' In Search of History. Here are two issues:
1. Van Seters looks at scholarly attempts to explain how ancient Israel developed a historiography in her pre-exilic period, whereas other ancient Near Eastern nations at that time had mere annals rather than national histories. Solutions that have been proposed include: that ancient Israel believed that God was working in history and directing it towards an end, whereas other ancient Near Eastern nations had "a mythical and cyclical...view of nature and history" (page 240); that ancient Israel had a "freedom of spirit", whereas Mesopotamia and Egypt had an absolutist political system and rule of the priesthood, which suppressed the freedom that was necessary to create a history (page 237); that Israel in the hill country was separate from her Canaanite neighbors in the cities, but, when she absorbed Canaanite customs, J and E felt compelled to argue through a national history that "Israel received the land from Yahweh and not from Baal" (page 244); that the emergence of the United Monarchy fostered history writing, presumably because it consolidated national consciousness and created structures that could write and propagate a national history.
Van Seters doesn't think much of these explanations. He believes that the concept of God directing history towards an end is not a prominent concept in the Hebrew Bible, much of which lacks an eschatology. He notes that other ancient Near Eastern nations believed that gods intervened in history. And he wonders why J and E do not mention Baal if their agenda is to show that Yahweh and not Baal gave Israel the land.
But what is Van Seters' point in discussing the views of scholars on the origins of Israelite historiography? I think one reason is that he wants to show that their attempts to ground the origins of Israelite historiography in Israel's pre-exilic period are problematic. Van Seters believes that Israel's historiography originated in the sixth century B.C.E., the time of Judah's exile, and that she was influenced by Greek historiography. Consequently, Van Seters often mentions that biblical scholars have tried to explain how Israel developed historiography five hundred years before the other people who had a historiography---the Greeks---and did so out of the clear blue sky, without precedents.
And yet, Van Seters has referred to historiography in Mesopotamia, Hittite regions, Egypt, and the Levant, and, on page 247, he appears to criticize scholars' ambivalence to comparing Israelite historiography with that of other nations. But did other ancient Near Eastern nations have national histories? From what I could see, much of what they had consisted of propaganda for the king or the cult, and, in some cases, the recording of knowledge for its own sake. But does that count as a national history? I suppose that the nations are characters in these stories, and that it's only natural that histories would focus on rulers. But the Hebrew Bible proposes that each and every Israelite has a special role---to keep God's laws, as members of God's covenant people---and so it appears to focus more on the people of the nation than other ancient Near Eastern nations' historiographies. And perhaps Greek histories, too, exalt the "Greeks", maintaining an ethnic focus.
I'll stop here on this point, for I can easily write myself into a hole.
2. For this item, I'll start with something that Van Seters says on pages 290-291:
"We may conclude from these observations that the Court History is a post-Dtr addition to the history of David from the postexilic period. In this period the theme of the divine promise to David in 2 Sam. 7 tended to develop into an 'eternal covenant' with strong messianic overtones. The Court History must be seen, therefore, as the product of an antimessianic tendencies in certain Jewish circles at this time. This would mean, of course, that by itself the Court History was not a piece of history writing, although it involved a close scrutiny of the pre-existing Dtr history as a source. There is no reason to believe that any other sources, traditional or archival, were at the author's disposal when he composed the various scenes and episodes of his work. They may all be contrived. The notion of an eyewitness account of events has to be abandoned and with it the standard reconstruction of the rise of history writing in Israel. There is no such historiography in Samuel-Kings prior to the work of the Dtr Historian."
There are different reasons that Van Seters holds that the Court History was added to Dtr: the unlikelihood that the Deuteronomistic Historian, who is pro-David, would include an anti-David source (which the Court History is) in his history; that the Deuteronomistic History makes sense without the Court History, whereas the Court History only makes sense with the Deuteronomistic History, showing that the Court History was "built around" Dtr (page 279); that the Court History presumes details that are in the pro-David History of David's Rise, which "depends heavily...upon those thematic elements introduced by the redactor-author, Dtr" (pages 270, 284). My impression is that Van Seters dates Dtr at least to the exile, and one reason is that he says that the language of II Samuel 7 "sounds as if it were borrowed from the salvation oracles of the prose of Jeremiah" (page 273). And Van Seters dates the Court History to Israel's post-exilic period, a time when there were debates about whether or not there should be a Davidic Messiah.
I want to make one more point, before I close this post. From what I have written so far---based on what I have read---one might think that Van Seters is a minimalist, who does not accept the historicity of David and Solomon. Yet, on page 301, Van Seters suggests that I Kings uses "a collection of the records of Solomon's reign, especially inscriptions, that were extant in the time of the compiler."
