Bill T. Arnold
The first book of the Bible presents several challenges when approached from the perspective of history and historiograph). First and foremost among those problems is that the opening chapters describe characters and events in a world dramatically different from our own: a world with talking serpents, with life before cities, before agriculture, before music or metallurgy; a world in which humans were unified with one language; and more. We cannot begin to locate these characters and events in a particular time or place, which is, of course, one of the tasks of any study of history These chapters are, in fact, presented from a perspective before history, if we assume that history is properly understood as a time when humans began to write accounts of the past (a definition that itself is difficult to refine). And so we will need to start by asking how these materials in the early chapters of Genesis may be examined, or even if they may be examined at all, from the perspective of history and historiography.
Second, and closely related to this first challenge, is the realization that the genre or type of literature that we find in the book of Genesis is unlike others, with its own subset of characteristics raising numerous questions when examined, again, from the perspective of history and historiography We will need to explore the specific characteristics and qualities of these literary types and how exactly they speak to issues of history, or whether they in fact speak
To issues of history at all. And as we will see, these distinctive literary features relate to the ancestral accounts of Genesis 12-50 as much as they do to the so-called Primeval History of Genesis 1-11.
Third, in the case of Genesis we are left with even less evidence from the ancient Near East than usual when studying the Old Testament and its parallels with the surrounding environment. We famously have literary parallels in creation accounts (especially from Mesopotamia), comparative materials in creation concepts (including from Egypt), and cultural features from the ancient world that are suggestive as parallels to certain elements in the ancestral narratives. But in terms of archaeological context, or extrabiblical confirmation of the characters and events of Genesis, we are left completely without trace. As a result, this chapter on the materials in the book of Genesis is especially challenging for a volume devoted to, as stated in the introduction, exploring “the major sources relevant to ancient Israel’s history” and evaluating “key issues of interpretation required of a critical study of that history”
Methodology and the Refinement of Our Task
We have set as our purpose in this volume the exploration of the sources, those within the Bible and all other sources beyond it, in order to see what may be said about the historical realities treated in the Bible itself. Before getting far in this endeavor, however, we must admit certain obvious limitations on how much we can say, due to a lack of details in those sources. The challenges already introduced here make the task especially difficult in a chapter devoted to the book of Genesis. In such a setting our task is necessarily attenuated; we are left with searching for what one scholar has called “a critically assured minimum.”39 On the one hand, it is naive to think that we are capable of reconstructing what actually happened in the history of early Israel, especially in the period of Israel’s ancestors, or even more especially the beginnings of world history. On the other hand, historians of all periods operate with degrees of probability and are tasked with discerning the likelihood of this or that event regardless of the time period or even the amount of relevant material available for investigation.40
Because of these challenges and limitations, we are like scholars of all traditions and “schools” of investigation, using the best of our critical acumen and methods to draw conclusions about the historical realities of the biblical world.41 In this process we must be willing to discern between (1) those conclusions that we consider essentially established, or “proven” and sometimes regarded as “factual”; (2) conclusions that seem most likely, although the evidence is less than sufficient to settle the matter once and for all; (3) conclusions that have sufficient evidence to establish their reasonable credibility, and for which we may use the term “plausible”; and (4) conclusions that are only possible, but for which we have no real evidence and about which we cannot make definitive statements. The latter are only possibilities in the sense that we can imagine them in the realm of human intellectual investigation; it is possible for rational, thinking humans to believe them. But to go beyond these conclusions is to assert mere fantasy or, in some cases, to explore the nature of faith itself, which is, of course, beyond the boundaries and capabilities of historical research.42
Our task of exploring the possible historical realia in Genesis is complicated still further by developments in the study of Israel’s Scriptures in recent decades. Among many scholars it has become a common methodological datum to assume that the biblical text cannot be trusted when it comes to historical specifics (see the three methodological approaches discussed under “1990 to the Present” in the introduction). The basis for such an assertion, it is alleged, is that the textual evidence contained in the Bible has been “transmitted” or preserved through centuries by scribes, which, in the minds of some researchers, essentially disqualifies the biblical text as a primary historical source. In such an approach, archaeology and contemporary epigraphic data become “primary,” and the biblical witness to ancient events is relegated to a “secondary” status.43 An extreme version of this approach contends that we must attempt to reconstruct Iron Age history in the Levant as though the Bible does not exist at all.44
The problem, of course, is that archaeology and epigraphy themselves need interpretation, and sometimes scholars are as inclined to privilege or overinterpret these data as severely as they accuse others of overreading the biblical text. Whatever status one attributes to the biblical text, primary or secondary, it is methodologically problematic to exclude the possibility of any historical realia being preserved in the written testimony simply because it is transmitted over long periods of time.45 The possibility must always be left open that late sources, which typically are assumed to be secondary or tertiary, may contain more accurate historical information than sources taken as primary only because those sources are older or perceived as more tangibly related to the events such as archaeology or epigraphy46 More care is needed with all sources on a case-by-case basis when exploring these earliest periods of Israel’s history. In the case of the book of Genesis, we are left with no specific evidence from archaeology or extrabiblical sources, as we have already noted. This leaves us only with the text of Genesis, and the methodology employed in this chapter does not assume an essentially skeptical stance relative to that textual witness. But I will also endeavor to avoid overreading or overinterpreting the text of Genesis as if it were a historical document, since this biblical book, perhaps above all others, requires particular attention to its genre or literary type. Our task requires that we ask in what sense the terms “history” and “historiography” may be applied to a book such as Genesis.
World History
