Van Seters on the Deuteronomist

I finished John Van Seters' In Search of History. In this post, I'd like to talk about the Deuteronomist.

I'll start with something that Van Seters says on pages 357-358:

"Even though Herodotus was a great storyteller in his day, and his history is replete with tales and legends, his work is not just a collection of folk traditions. It has a design, a combination of disparate forms, a way of creating continuity, and a sense of unity and purpose throughout the whole, and these features do not derive from the stories themselves. In the same way Dtr makes use of many stories and popular traditions in his work, but he makes each fit his design for the whole. This is so clearly the case for so much of the material that indisputably belongs to him that if a story or episode does not fit, it must be suspected of not belonging to the original Dtr work."

This is a good quote because it mentions three important issues regarding the Deuteronomist: his use of sources, his creativity as an author, and the addition of material to the Deuteronomistic History.

First, let's consider the Deuteronomist's use of sources. On pages 254-255 and 258, Van Seters discusses the Deuteronomist's interaction with a folktale about Saul before he became king. In I Samuel 9-10, there is a story that has the "stylistic marks of a folktale." (This is not true of all of the chapter, according to Van Seters, but of much of it.) Van Seters calls it a "wonder story, with 'signs' but with very little theological interest." In this story, Saul loses his father's donkeys and finds them again under the direction of a seer, Samuel. But Samuel tells Saul about three episodes that Saul will experience on the way home, and the third episode explains a saying, "Is Saul also among the prophets?". This saying, according to Van Seters, expresses "a somewhat derogatory view of the" prophets.

But Van Seters thinks that the Deuteronomist added elements to this story that "radically changed its character and intention." The Deuteronomist transformed the folktale into a story about the prophet Samuel's anointing of Saul to the kingship, which was to address the Philistine oppression of Israel. For the Deuteronomist, the prophet Samuel knew where the donkeys were "as the result of divine revelation, so that the prophet is primarily the medium of the word of God." In the Books of Kings, we see the Deuteronomistic notions that the prophet communicates God's word and plays a role in the appointment of Israelite kings, so, for Van Seters, when we encounter these concepts in I Samuel 9-10, we can identify them as the hand of the Deuteronomist. The folktale lacked theological interest and manifested a derogatory attitude regarding the prophets, but the Deuteronomist's contributions fashioned out of the folktale a story that highlighted the prophet's significant role in God's activity within history.

Second, my impression in reading this book has been that Van Seters attributes to the Deuteronomist things that could be ascribed to other authors, which perhaps highlights the Deuteronomist's creativity in fashioning material. For example, on pages 350-351, Van Seters says that the departure of the Ark of the Covenant from Israel in I Samuel 4:3-5 is from the hand of the Deuteronomist. He says that "It is widely recognized the Dtr often referred to the Ark as the 'Ark of the Covenant of Yahweh/God' because he regarded it as the repository of the covenant laws of Deuteronomy." I Samuel 4:4 refers to Yahweh as being enthroned on the cherubim, and "According to the Dtr's description of the Temple, great cherubim were constructed in the holy of holies in such a way that the ark could be placed under the outstretched wings; together they were regarded as the seat of the deity." Moreover, Van Seters states that the Deuteronomist associates the glory, or kavod, "with the Ark, both in 1 Sam. 4:21-22 and in the description of the placing of the Ark in the Temple in 1 Kings 8:11."

Van Seters holds that the Deuteronomist viewed the Ark of the Covenant as the repository for the commandments and the seat of the deity, whereas some may contend that the Deuteronomist viewed the ark solely as the repository for the commandments. Moshe Weinfeld argues, for example, that the Deuteronomistic School was against an anthropomorphic depiction of God, which explains why Deuteronomy 12, 14, and 16 call the sanctuary the place where God places his name, indicating that the sanctuary is for God's name, not a home for God himself. Under this perspective,the Deuteronomist probably would not say that the Ark was a throne for God. Van Seters apparently attributes elements of I Kings 8 to the Deuteronomist that others may ascribe to other authors.

Van Seters also believes that there was only one Deuteronomist, an exilic one. On page 310, he says that the Deuteronomist is describing an unseen temple, one that has been destroyed, indicating that he is writing during the exile. On page 352, Van Seters states that the story of the Ark's departure in I Samuel 4 is the Deuteronomist addressing the question of "whether the deity was now subject to foreign gods or still in control of the affairs of men", an exilic sort of question.

Many have argued that there were two Deuteronomists: one writing during the reign of Josiah, and the other during the exile. A piece of evidence that they cite is I Kings 22-23, in which the prophetess Huldah says that Josiah will die in peace, and yet he perishes in battle. Their idea is that an earlier Deuteronomist wrote about Huldah's prophecy because he did not know that Josiah would die violently, since he was writing during the time of Josiah, but the part about Josiah's death was written later by an exilic Deuteronomist. But Van Seters thinks that both parts are by the exilic Deuteronomist. He states on pages 318-319:

"...the reference to being gathered to one's grave in peace does not preclude a violent death. It means only that the king would be buried in his own tomb (23:30), which in fact was the fulfillment of the Huldah prophecy. There are no grounds here for conjecturing more than one Dtr historian."

For Van Seters, the Deuteronomist was a creative historian writing during the exile, and his historiography is similar to that of the Greeks, who were developing histories at that time.

Third, Van Seters maintains that later authors added to the Deuteronomistic History. We have seen in my earlier post that he argues that the Court History of II Samuel was a post-exilic anti-Messianic piece that was added to DtrH. But there are other examples. For example, Van Seters contends that the Yahwist added the story of Rahab to Joshua, for it conflicts with its literary context. According to Van Seters, "The episode was contrived and added in order to articulate a more universalistic perspective on Israel's religion" (page 325). Van Seters also contends that the dividing of the land in Joshua is from P, for "The manner in which the assembly is convened at Shiloh and the procedures laid down for the land division are characteristic of the P style" (page 335).

Van Seters mediates between the positions of Gerhard Von Rad and Martin Noth. For Gerhard Von Rad, Genesis-Joshua constituted a Hexateuch, and J and P made contributions to the Book of Joshua. Martin Noth, however, considered Genesis-Numbers to be a Tetrateuch, and he associated the Book of Joshua more with Deuteronomy than the authors in the Tetrateuch, which included J and P. Van Seters agrees with Noth that there is a strong Deuteronomistic element in the Book of Joshua, but he also, like believers in the Hexateuch, acknowledges that J and P have contributed to Joshua. Van Seters holds that J and P supplemented the Deuteronomistic material in Joshua.

I'll stop here, but I'll probably revisit Van Seters' In Search of History in future posts. Stay tuned!

Not Arbitrary Ascriptions

On pages 100-103 of volume 2 of The Psalms in Israel's Worship, Sigmund Mowinckel speculates as to how certain Psalms got to be attributed to particular events in David's life, or to Moses, or Solomon. Mowinckel does not think that le-David necessarily means that a Psalm was composed by David, but rather that it was composed for the use of David's house. After all, Mowinckel argues, Psalm 18:50 refers to David's descendants, which indicates that the Psalm here applies to one of David's descendants! But, at some point, le-David was understood to mean that a Psalm was composed by David. And, through a process of darash, Psalms were related to specific events in the life of David, Moses, or Solomon.

For example, Psalm 18 appears to pertain to the deliverance of the Psalmist from foreign enemies in battles, and David was someone who fought many battles with foreign enemies. Consequently, the Psalm was related to David after he had been delivered from his enemies, and from Saul. (Many say that the "Saul" part was inserted later, on account of its awkwardness.)

In Psalm 63:3, the Psalmist says that his "flesh longeth for God in a dry and thirsty land", and the scribes took this literally and applied the Psalm to David's experience in the wilderness of Judah.

Psalm 52 was related to Doeg telling Saul that David had come to Abimelech, even though it's not a perfect fit: the Psalm says that the enemy lied and hurt the Psalmist, when Doeg did not lie, and his deed hurt the priests, not David himself. But the Psalm mentions a gibbor, and I Samuel 21:8 and 22:17ff. appear to class Doeg with the king's gibborim, and so the scribes said that the Psalm was about Doeg.

Psalm 90 is ascribed to Moses, which Mowinckel says does not work, for the Psalm is individualistic, which indicates its lateness, plus it doesn't appear to be the work of a young nation in the wilderness, but rather concerns a settled people suffering at the hands of greedy people and armies. But scribes saw things in the Psalm that reminded them of the generation that died in the wilderness, in the time of Moses. The Psalmist lamented that people die at age seventy, which was applied to the wilderness generation---since the age of adulthood is thirty, and the wanderers were in the wilderness for forty years. Forty years were about to be up, and they'd be dead, unable to enjoy the Promised Land. And the Psalm also asks that the worshipers of the LORD see God's work, while their sons see God's glory. For the scribes, the implication here is that only the sons---of the wilderness generation---would see God's glory, by entering the Promised Land.

Psalm 72 is applied to Solomon, for it talks about a glorious king, who is also a king's son (and thus not David), and whom shall be given the gold of Sheba.

According to Mowinckel, the scribes did not arbitrarily apply Psalms to certain events in David's life, or to Moses, or to Solomon. Rather, they based their ascriptions on what they thought were clues within the Psalms themselves.

Inadequate Explanations; Debates on Messianism

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."

Lightstone on Mekhilta; Which Babies?

I have two items for this post:

1. I read an article by Jack Lightstone, "Form As Meaning in Halakic Midrash", which appeared in the January 1, 1983 Semeia. Lightstone discusses the contribution of Rene Bloch, which he considers to be problematic. Bloch had a diachronic approach to midrash, which meant that she'd look at different interpretations of a particular verse throughout history. I can't say that I completely understand Lightstone's problem with that, but I think that one of his issues is that he doesn't like all of those interpretations throughout history being classified as midrash; rather, he wants to look at rabbinic literature itself to determine what midrash is. And he seeks to look at each piece of rabbinic literature in its particularity---to see its methods of interacting with the Scripture---rather than lumping it under the name of "midrash" with other interpretations in history, as if they're all the same thing (when they're not), or their main ingredient is the interpretation they arrive at, rather than the methodology of getting there (that may be what Lightstone considers to be midrash---when it comes to the rabbis, that is).

What Lightstone highlights in this article is a method in the Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael. The method goes as follows:

"Scripture A means x. Does it mean x or might it not mean y? But Scripture B undermines y and/or supports x."

This method does two things. First of all, it says that Scripture is a holistic document, which is why Scripture b can be used to interpret Scripture a, even if they're from different places in the Hebrew Bible. Second, it says that we should not rely on logic alone, but on Scripture. One may logically think that Scripture A means something, but, if another Scripture shows that it means something else, then Scripture takes precedence over logic. According to Lightstone, the Mekhilta wasn't as hard on logic as the Sifra, but it still tried to show that Scripture had priority.

2. In History and Ideology in Ancient Israel, Giovanni Garbini says a few times that the Hebrew Bible's reference to a nation is allegorical. He interprets Isaiah 14 to be about the fall of Xerxes of Persia, even though the text claims to concern the fall of the king of Babylon. On page 191, he states, "we must ask whether the difficult passage Gen. 15.13-16 was not originally an allusion to the Babylonian exile (rather than to that of Egypt) made in such a way as to give a long duration to the Chaldean dynasty." Garbini may believe that the Hebrew writers used allegory because they did not want to appear as subversive to their captors.

I wondered, though, about Psalm 137. Doesn't that express hope that Babylonian babies will be dashed into rocks, while the Jews are at the waters of Babylon? In my reading of Sigmund Mowinkel's The Psalms in Israel's Worship, Volume 2, however, I encountered another interpretation: that Psalm 137 is hoping that Edomite babies will be dashed into rocks. In the Hebrew Bible, there is animus against Edom, for it is said to have profited off of Judah's defeat at the hands of the Babylonians. But the Babylonians probably wouldn't have cared what the Jews thought about Edom---just as long as they weren't subversive against the Babylonians.

At the same time, there are prophecies that discuss the fall of Babylon. Are these allegorical---referring to a later captor?

Idrimi, Epic and Historiography

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.

Neusner's "Synoptic Problem in Rabbinic Literature"

I read Jacob Neusner's "The Synoptic Problem in Rabbinic Literature", which appeared in the September 1, 1986 Journal of Biblical Literature.

What is the synoptic problem? In New Testament studies, there is a prominent view that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source. But there are sayings that Matthew and Luke have in common, which are not in Mark. According to a number of scholars, Matthew and Luke drew these sayings from a Q source. Some believe that there was a Q community. And then there are scholars who think that there were various levels of Q: Q1, Q2, etc. One level was supposedly apocalyptic, but another level was not.

In rabbinic literature, common sayings or variations of a saying show up in different writings, and the question is this: Did all of these documents draw from a common source, a Q, if you will? And Neusner's answer is that they did not. Here are examples that he discusses:

The Tosefta expands upon the Mishnah, so that is why the Mishnah and the Tosefta have material in common---it's not because they're both drawing from a common source. The Sifra tries to establish the authority of Scripture by showing that the Mishnah's rules are based on Scripture, or by demonstrating that Scripture contradicts logic and so we should go with Scripture rather than relying on logical argumentation (which is significant because the Mishnah often doesn't rely on Scripture). But Sifra uses the Mishnah, and so their commonalities are not due to a Q source. According to Neusner, Leviticus Rabbah doesn't even share much material with other sources, so it wasn't intent on drawing from a Q document.

Finally, Neusner argues that, when we look at the sayings that different documents have in common, we do not see a pattern, or salient characteristics that mark them as part of a common source. They are various. Some of them look indigenous to particular sources, such as Genesis Rabbah or Leviticus Rabbah. For Neusner, there was no rabbinic Q source. All we really know is that sayings appear in different places.

Beginning Van Seters' In Search of History

I started John Van Seters' In Search of History.

I'll start this post with Van Seters' "criteria by which to identify history writing in ancient Israel", which he enumerates on pages 4-5.

The first one is as follows: "History writing is a specific form of tradition in its own right. Any explanation of the genre as merely the accidental accumulation of traditional material is inadequate." This criterion is significant because it forms the backdrop for Van Seters' critique of the traditio-historical method, which (in some tellings) focused on individual units of tradition, as if they were oral at some point and accumulated elements before they were finally written down by a passive redactor. Van Seters does not view Herodotus or the historians of the Hebrew Bible as mere compilers or redactors of fairly coherent stories, but rather as active authors, who drew from sources to write their history.

The second-third criteria deal with the purposes of history: it gives "significance for past events" and tries to account for the state of the present, often by looking for moral causes---"who is responsible for a certain state of affairs?" The fourth criterion is that history is "national or corporate in character", meaning that it deals with a nation, not just a king. And the fifth criterion is that history "is part of a literary tradition and plays a significant role in the corporate tradition of the people."

Some of these criteria pop up in Van Seters' comparison of the Hebrew Bible's historiography with that of Herodotus, or other Greeks. On pages 39-40, Van Seters states:

"Like Herodotus, the Old Testament exhibits a dominant concern with the issue of divine retribution for unlawful acts as a fundamental principle of historical causality. [W]hat is significant is that historiography, whether in its various forms in the Old Testament or in Herodotus, deals extensively with law as an important element in understanding the actions of men and nations and the consequences of those actions...While the so-called Deuteronomistic historian and the Chronicler are concerned with this issue only on the national level, and so are more restrictive in scope than Herodotus, the Yahwist and the Priestly Writer do indicate the universal dimensions of the problem."

This overlaps with Van Seters' criterion of moral causation. I'm not sure how the "national or corporate in character" criterion comes into play here, though. To be a history, does a work have to deal with one nation primarily---the nation in which it is produced---or can it have a more universal focus?

On page 51, Van Seters states:

"...in terms of the scope of subject matter and the themes treated, nothing in the literature of the Near East before the fourth century so closely resembles the biblical histories as the Greek prose histories. Both deal with recent events, such as the Persian Wars or the Exile, and their causes through successive periods of the past. Both reconstruct the distant past through the technique of genealogy development with anecdotal or folkloristic digressions. The combination of 'official' sources, such as chronicles, with oral tradition, and of poetic fragments with prose narration in a multigenre product, is not evident in any other body of preserved literature in the Near East in this period."

This overlaps with the criterion that history tries to account for the state of the present. But Van Seters also highlights here a significant point of his book: that the Hebrew Bible can be compared with Greek historiography, for the "earliest Israelite histories" date to the sixth century B.C.E. (page 8). Van Seters does not believe that the earliest Israelite history was composed in the tenth century and "anticipated the emergence of the Greek historians by five hundred years" (page 8). Rather, Van Seters holds that Hebrew historiography occurred during the time of Greek histories, which included the sixth century B.C.E.

Van Seters dismisses the likelihood that "there was much direct cultural contact between the Greeks and the Hebrews before the fourth century B.C." (pages 53-54), so how does he explain the similarities between Greek and Hebrew historiography? Van Seters' solution is that Phoenicia served "as a bridge between Israel and the Aegean as well as a center for the dissemination of culture in both directions" (page 54).