12 - Historiography in the Pentateuch: twenty-five years after Historicity

Summary

1999

It is hardly an exaggeration to claim that a modernist perception of history and history-writing as a distinct geme from narrative fiction has been the singularly most tenacious distortion in the past generations' scholarly reading of the Bible. In the recent Danish lexicon for biblical studies, Gads Bibel Leksikon, for example, Hans Jørgen Lundager Jensen's quite intelligent article on ‘historie’ recognized modern scholarship's intense self-identification with this concept. Accordingly, he found it necessary to concentrate his article entirely on distinguishing biblical narrative perceptions from a modern perception of history or of the Bible as useful for our historical reconstructions. With Lundager Jensen, I find myself much at odds with what seems implicit in the title of my essay. Given modern perceptions of historiography, one seems condemned to write about what the Bible is not. If, however, one chooses to write about biblical perceptions and what is implicit in the Bible's use of the past, and of time in its narration instead of history and history writing, one straggles against the very language one uses. One hardly escapes the anachronistic distortion one is so aware of. Is it possible that biblical writers simply did without a concept of history in their historiography, and didn't do anything in particular ‘instead of’? The Dantesque destiny that condemns historical-critical research to inescapable anachronism also cripples our efforts to discuss the ideology of narration implicit in biblical traditions.