Excerpts

1 Ancient Israel: History and Language The Bible comes to us from the world of the eastern Mediterranean. Much of what Christians call the Old Testament was written in what is now Israel/Palestine, the majority probably in Jerusalem. Some may come from Mesopotamia (what is now Iraq), to which many Jews were exiled in the sixth century BCE, and some perhaps from Egypt, where a substantial Jewish community lived from the same period onwards. It is conceivable that there are passages in the Old Testament as old as the tenth or eleventh centuries BCE, but modern scholars tend to think that the eighth century - possibly the age also of Homer - is the earliest likely period; the latest Old Testament book (Daniel) comes from the second century BCE. There may already be some surprises here. It is widely believed that large parts of the Bible are much older than this implies, with the stories about characters such as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the book of Genesis going back into the second millennium BCE. The story the Bible tells does indeed span a very long period; but the books that describe it almost certainly do not date back in written form to such remote antiquity themselves. For the early stories in Genesis, and even the accounts of the activity of Moses in Exodus, we probably have a written version of tales that originally circulated by word of mouth in a mostly illiterate culture, though some biblical scholars think they are deliberate fiction. (It is noticeable that Moses and his predecessors are scarcely mentioned again until literature that we are sure derives from the sixth century BCE, notably Isaiah 40- 55.) The story of the origins of Israel, then, is at best folk-memory, which is unlikely to be accurate in any detail across more than a generation or so. This means that we have little access to the history of Israel in the times covered by the opening books of the Bible, the Pentateuch (Greek for 'five scrolls', and meaning Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy). At the other end of the chronology, it is also not generally known that there are Old Testament books more recent than Greek tragedies or the works of Plato and Aristotle. This is partly because later books tend to claim an older ancestry: Ecclesiastes (Qohelet in Hebrew) seems to claim to be by Solomon, who lived in the tenth century BCE, and Daniel claims to be a near- contemporary of Jeremiah, living in the time of the exile in the sixth century BCE. But the general consensus now is that both books are the product of a much later period, and in the case of Daniel a time as late as the age of the Maccabees, Jewish freedom fighters in the second century BCE who went on to found a dynasty. Thus the Old Testament does not derive from a single period in the history of Israel, but from a wide range of dates as well as a variety of places. It is the national literature of a small nation: Israel is about the same size as Wales, or the state of Maine. Before modern times, Israel had a genuinely independent existence for only a few centuries, from perhaps the tenth to the seventh century BCE, and was otherwise subject to the main regional powers - Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia or the Hellenistic kingdoms that controlled the Middle East after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE. Israel was itself a geopolitically unimportant state, but it lay at the heart of various trade routes in the Middle East and so was open to influences from its larger and more significant neighbours. If we are to understand the development of its national literature, it is necessary to have in mind an outline history of Israel within the wider ancient Near Eastern world. But the history as reconstructed by modern historians differs markedly from the story the Old Testament itself tells. We begin by sketching this story, and then proceed to the modern reconstructions. The Old Testament gives the impression that the origins of the people of Israel do indeed go back well into the second millennium BCE. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and Joseph and his eleven brothers, live well before the time of Moses, which in turn is long before the first Kings of Israel, Saul, David and Solomon. In Genesis, the ancestors migrate from Mesopotamia to the Promised Land but continue to have connections with their relatives to the east. They then move to Egypt in a time of famine, Joseph having gone ahead of them as a slave who becomes a major Egyptian official. Chronological notes in the Old Testament suggest that we are meant to think of this as happening in perhaps the fourteenth century BCE. The people return to the Land, this time from the west, from Egypt, under the leadership of Moses; after wandering in the desert for forty years and receiving the Ten Commandments and the other laws, they finally enter the Land with Joshua at their head. By the eleventh century or so they have settled down in the Land under the people the Old Testament calls the 'judges', tribal leaders who rose to rule the whole of Israel. They face opposition from other local peoples such as the Midianites. It is the Philistines, however, incomers who have settled in the west of the Land (where the Gaza Strip is now), who present the first major challenge; a local leader called Saul rises to the occasion, repels the Philistines and becomes the first king of all the tribes in the north of the Land, excluding the southern tribe of Judah. David, a Judahite from Bethlehem, takes over from Saul when Saul is killed in battle with the Philistines, and unites Judah and Israel to make a single kingdom with its capital at Jerusalem. The union is unstable, and always a source of tension. Under David and his son Solomon, Israel then expands to dominate the surrounding small nations such as Moab, Ammon, Edom and even Aram (now Syria), and we can speak of an Israelite empire. Solomon also constructs a royal temple in Jerusalem as a centre for the worship of God. This is the high point of the history of Israel as the Old Testament sees it. After the death of Solomon the old north- south divide reasserts itself, and there are two kingdoms, Judah and the northern kingdom of Israel, sometimes referred to as Ephraim after the name of the main tribe that had settled in the area it covered. It is Judah that really interests the Old Testament writers, who (we may surmise) lived mostly in Jerusalem. Still there are stories of the north too, such as the tales of the prophets Elijah and Elisha, who work under various northern kings in the ninth century, including the notorious Ahab and his queen, Jezebel - regarded by the Old Testament's second book of Kings as apostates from the true Israelite religion and worshippers of the god Baal. Israel is continually at war with Aram, inconclusively so, throughout the century, but in the eighth century the rising power of Assyria, with its capital at Nineveh (near modern Mosul), snuffs out the northern kingdom. The king of Assyria invaded all the land and came to Samaria; for three years he besieged it. In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria; he carried the Israelites away to Assyria. (2 Kings 17: 5- 6) Judah survives, the Bible tells us, as a tiny independent state until the beginning of the sixth century when it in turn falls to the Babylonians, who have by now supplanted Assyria. The Temple is destroyed, and the land devastated. So begins the Jewish exile, with all the leadership either executed or transported to Babylonia, and only 'the poorest of the people of the land' (2 Kings 25:12) left behind. The Old Testament speaks of a number of important figures from the exilic age, notably Jeremiah and Ezekiel, but tells us little of what the exiles in general did or suffered. Later in the sixth century the conquest of Babylon under its last king, Nabonidus, by the Persian monarch Cyrus the Great leads to a different imperial policy, under which exiled peoples are allowed to return to their homelands. 'Thus says King Cyrus of Persia: The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem in Judah. Any of those among you who are of his people - may their God be with them! - are now permitted to go up to Jerusalem in Judah, and rebuild the house of the LORD, the God of Israel.' (Ezra 1: 2- 3) Accordingly a number of Jews return to Judah and begin to rebuild the Temple (known usually as the Second Temple, to distinguish it from the original built by Solomon). We read of some of their activities in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, who are presented as regulating Jewish life under the Torah - the great law book given by God, which we are probably meant to understand as the Pentateuch. After Nehemiah we learn little more of the Persian period, and the Old Testament gives the impression that the significant history of Israel, guided by its God, is more or less over. Only the book of Esther purports to tell of Jewish life under the Persians. Persia was conquered by Alexander the Great (at the end of the fourth century, in 333 BCE, at the Battle of Issus), and there is more information about Jewish life in the Land under his successors in the books of Maccabees.* From them we learn that one successor of Alexander, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, tried to stamp out Judaism in the early second century BCE, but was resisted by Judah Maccabee and his brothers. From the Jewish historian Josephus we gather that their descendants established a new royal dynasty in Jerusalem, the first time since the exile that the Jews had been ruled by a Jewish king. But this information does not come from the Old Testament itself, where the story of Israel peters out in the Persian age. There is probably not a single episode in the history of Israel as told by the Old Testament on which modern scholars are in agreement. Some take a conservative position, treating the Old Testament narrative as likely to be accurate unless there is proof to the contrary, and tend to regard even the stories of early Israel (before the monarchy) as broadly true. Others, commonly referred to as minimalists, think that the story is mostly fiction; some even believe that little of it was written before the age of Alexander and his successors, in the fourth or early third century.  Most Old Testament scholars fall between these two extremes. Dating biblical material is extraordinarily difficult, and we have no manuscripts that go back into biblical times: the earliest are the Dead Sea Scrolls, from the second century BCE at the earliest, so dating can only be based on the contents of the biblical books, their style and their vocabulary - not on hard evidence such as the date of actual scrolls. So it is impossible to establish a complete consensus, and hard to avoid the impression that much reconstruction of the history of Israel depends on the temperaments of the scholars involved, whether sceptical or credulous, and often also on their religious stance - committed, indifferent, or hostile to the Bible as Scripture, that is, as a sacred text with the characteristics summarized above. We might despair of knowing anything worthwhile about the history, and hence (which is what concerns us here) of having a solid historical framework within which to decide when the various books of the Bible are likely to have been written. If there is no agreed history of the nation, then the history of its national literature cannot be written either. This is unduly pessimistic. In fact the history of Israel can be reconstructed in some periods, and we can often tell when the biblical narrative approaches fiction and when it has roots in historical reality. The early history - that is, the period before the rise of the monarchy - is genuinely sketchy. The Bible presents the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and his twelve sons) and the generation led by Moses as successive: Abraham comes to the Land, his descendants go to Egypt, then they return again under Moses. But we might detect here underlying, alternative traditions. Some of Israel's ancestors came from the east, from Mesopotamia or Syria, while others came from the west, from Egypt. Some scholars suggest that the Bible has arranged the traditions so as to give an impression that a single people had both experiences, but behind the unified story there lie two different stories belonging to two different groups. Common to both groups is the belief that the Israelites were not native to Palestine, but were incomers from elsewhere, and this seems to be firmly fixed in the traditions behind the Pentateuch. But the stories reflect the experiences and folk memories of people settling in the Land in the period we associate with the judges, the time just before the monarchy, rather than telling us much about the second millennium BCE. There is one reference to 'Israel' on a stele (victory inscription) found in Thebes in Egypt in 1896, belonging to the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah and probably dated to about 1215 BCE, which indicates that a people calling itself by that name was already in Palestine in the thirteenth century, at that time under Egyptian rule. But we are told nothing more about them, and Israel is never mentioned again in any ancient Egyptian texts. In the twentieth century some biblical archaeologists developed the theory that the stories of the patriarchs reflected customs known from second- millennium BCE texts - Mesopotamian documents, from the cities of Mari and Nuzu - rather than those current in later times in Israel. Hence, they argued, the stories must be genuine, or at least rest on traditions from that period. For example, there are three stories in Genesis where one of the patriarchs passes his wife off as his sister, which results in her being taken into the harem of a foreign ruler, to avoid his being killed (Genesis 12, 20, and 26): When he [Abram] was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, 'I know well that you are a woman beautiful in appearance, and when the Egyptians see you they will say, "This is his wife"; then they will kill me, but let you live. Say that you are my sister, so that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared on your account.' (Genesis 12: 11- 13) It was argued that in Mari marriage between brother and sister did in fact occur, whereas in later times in Israel it was regarded as incestuous. Thus these stories would have to be 'pre-historic', and that would mean that we do have some information about the earliest ancestors of the Israelites. More recently, however, this line of reasoning has been generally abandoned. In this particular case, the whole point of the story is that the woman in question is not the patriarch's sister: describing her as such is a ruse to protect him rather than a statement of fact, and hence presupposes that sisters could not also be wives - just as in historical times. We may still think that the patriarchal stories preserve some kind of folk-memory of earlier times, and indeed their names are notably not of a kind found later in Israel, suggesting that they are genuinely pre- monarchic. But exactly how old they are we cannot tell.6 Similarly, the names associated with the exodus from Egypt are in several cases unmistakably Egyptian. Moses occurs as an element in well-known Egyptian names such as Tut-mosis, and Aaron and Phinehas, other characters in the story, also bear Egyptian names. The exodus tradition must also preserve some kind of folk-memory that the Israelite ancestors spent time in Egypt; but these were not necessarily descendants of the patriarchal group that had originally come from the east, from Mesopotamia. Thus, as suggested above, we might be dealing with two parallel memories. It is not even clear which story is older than the other: if Merneptah's stele refers to a group that had settled under Moses' successor Joshua, while the patriarchal stories concern people settling under the leaders we call the judges, then the traditions in Exodus could actually be older than those in Genesis. The tribes ruled over by the judges bear the names of the twelve sons of Jacob, so the Genesis stories about these characters could easily reflect folk tradition from the judges period. This is, however, speculative; it is possible that the narrative sequence the Bible offers us is correct. All this may be felt to leave the biblical story of early Israel in tatters: what remains is the sense that the ancestors of the Israelites were not native to Palestine, but came in from elsewhere - much as did the Philistines in about the same period, probably from Crete. Recent archaeological work, however, has called even this in question. Whereas the book of Joshua gives the impression that the Israelites conquered the Promised Land through a series of battles against the native Canaanites, excavations of early Israelite settlements reveal no break in population in the relevant periods: the population expanded, but there is no evidence of widespread destruction, and the crucial markers of identity such as pottery types continue uninterrupted. From this it seems that any incomers were probably few and far between. Unless some Israelites genuinely did owe their ancestry to people outside the Land, it is hard to see why such traditions should have developed, for it is hardly advantageous in most societies to present oneself as the child of immigrants. But the archaeological evidence, combined with an analysis of the biblical narratives and what is known of how folk memories are created, suggests that most later 'Israelites' were in fact Canaanites, that is, descendants of native inhabitants of the Land. The theological or ideological belief that all derived from those who had once come out of Egypt with Moses was the belief of a few, but was internalized by the nation at large in later times. So all Israel later celebrated the Passover and rejoiced in the deliverance from Egypt that Passover commemorates, even though many were the offspring of people who had never actually been there. Nation- building often involves the extension to all of folk memories that originally affected only a few - much as Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, even though the majority are not the descendants of those who first did so, and indeed the historical background of most Americans follows a different trajectory. Even when we come into the eleventh and tenth centuries BCE, the age of the first kings, it is not easy to be sure we have firm ground under our feet. Excavations in Jerusalem suggest that it was not a major city in this period, even though it had been important as an administrative centre when Egypt ruled Canaan in the late second millennium BCE, the age of Merneptah's monument. The Bible's presentation of David and Solomon as emperors, subjugating all the surrounding nations and building on a lavish scale, therefore seems almost certain to be an exaggeration. The Old Testament contains copious stories about these two kings, as also about their predecessor Saul, but modern historians tend to think that the stories are quite novelistic in character, even though probably resting on some genuine historical information. It is really only for the ninth and eighth centuries that we have information in the Bible that can be substantiated from external records. Here the evidence shows the biblical account to be biased, but probably in touch with historical reality. The Assyrians record their relations with the northern kingdom of Israel, which they refer to as the 'house of Omri'. According to 1 Kings 16, Omri was a relatively unimportant king whose reign of twelve years was characterized chiefly by his disobedience to the God of Israel and his worship of foreign gods - a standard accusation against the kings of the north. But the Assyrian annals show that Omri was an important and powerful ruler: even into the eighth century the title 'house of Omri' continues as the name for Israel, and Jehu, a king who according to 2 Kings 9 actually overthrew Omri's dynasty, is identified as 'son of Omri' on the monument called the Black Obelisk (now in the British Museum in London), where he is shown doing homage to the Assyrian King Shalmaneser III. The northern kingdom under Omri and his dynasty was prosperous and independent, and probably considerably more powerful than Judah, its poorer southern neighbour. The eighth century BCE is the moment when we have clear historical evidence for both kingdoms, and a majority of biblical specialists think that it is in this period that there were first significant writings. The stories of the earlier kings, as well as the folk memories from the premonarchic age, were probably collected and edited around this time. From the eighth century too we have the words of prophets such as Amos, Isaiah, Hosea and Micah, however much their words have been overlaid with later additions, as we shall see in Chapter 4. It was a time when both kingdoms enjoyed a short respite from inervention by other powers. The Aramaeans, who had been so troublesome in the previous century, provided little opposition, while the Assyrians were preoccupied for some years with battles on other fronts, especially to their north where the state of Urartu was giving trouble. For a few decades, from about 760 to the 730s, Israel and Judah were free to enjoy peace and relative prosperity. The prophets, more far- sighted than others, already sensed that this prosperity would be short- lived; and so it proved. In 745 the Assyrian throne came to be occupied by Tiglath-pileser III, who had expansionist plans and began to push westwards; and by the end of the century the northern kingdom, always harder to rule than Judah and with no well- established dynasty, had been extinguished and turned into an Assyrian province. Judah (the size of an English county) remained as the only viable part of the 'people of Israel', as the Judaeans continued to call themselves. In the seventh century we learn about the fortunes of Judah from the later chapters of 2 Kings, and also from extensive narrative sections of the book of Jeremiah, if these are reliable sources, as many Old Testament scholars think they are; certainly they tally well with Assyrian and Babylonian records. Assyria was conquered by Babylonia in 612 BCE (a victory reflected on in the biblical book of Nahum), but from the Judaean perspective this only made things worse. The last kings of Judah, before the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar finally annihilated it in the early years of the sixth century, seem to have believed they could avoid coming under the Babylonian yoke. Jeremiah, who prophesied during the last years of Judah, persistently told the leadership to accept Babylonian hegemony and not attempt foolhardy schemes to reassert their independence, but this was to no avail. In 598 BCE the Babylonians invaded and took away the king, Jehoiachin, from Jerusalem, with many of his courtiers and officials. At that time the servants of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came up to Jerusalem, and the city was besieged. King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came to the city, while his servants were besieging it. King Jehoiachin of Judah gave himself up to the king of Babylon, himself, his mother, his servants, his officers, and his palace officials. The king of Babylon took him prisoner in the eighth year of his reign. (2 Kings 24: 10- 12) Eleven years later the king they set up in Jehoiachin's stead, his uncle Zedekiah, rebelled openly, egged on by unrealistic advisers, and this time the Babylonian army laid waste to Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, and took Zedekiah away, blinding him after he had seen his sons executed. Judah ceased to exist as a state, though many people naturally remained in the Land, with a civil servant, Gedaliah, ruling over them from the city of Mizpah, north of the devastated Jerusalem. After only a few years Gedaliah was assassinated by a claimant to the throne, and after that we know no more of events in the homeland. The exile in Babylonia probably involved only a fraction of the preexilic population of Judah, so there may be works in the Bible that derive from those who remained behind, such as the book of Lamentations (which is probably not by Jeremiah, as traditionally believed, but not far from his spirit). A leader of the exiled community seems to have been the prophet Ezekiel, and (as we shall see) significant literary work probably went on among the exiles. They were not imprisoned or punished, but were able to establish settlements: from then on there was always a Jewish presence in Babylonia. Jehoiachin was apparently still regarded as the legitimate king, and a cuneiform tablet (the Weidner Chronicle) records that provisions were allocated to him, confirming the account in 2 Kings 25: 27- 30: In the thirty- seventh year of the exile of King Jehoiachin of Judah, in the twelfth month, on the twenty- seventh day of the month, King Evilmerodach of Babylon, in the year that he began to reign, released King Jehoiachin of Judah from prison; he spoke kindly to him, and gave him a seat above the other seats of the kings who were with him in Babylon. So Jehoiachin put aside his prison clothes. Every day of his life he dined regularly in the king's presence. For his allowance, a regular allowance was given him by the king, a portion every day, as long as he lived. From the next century we learn from the Murashu tablets (found in what is now southern Iraq) that the Jewish community had established businesses and even a bank, following Jeremiah's advice to settle down and acclimatize to the Babylonian environment (see Jeremiah 29). How far there was communication with those left in Judah is unclear, though Ezekiel (exiled in 598) speaks of a messenger coming to him from Jerusalem when it fell in 587 (Ezekiel 33: 21- 2). But what is certain is that when Cyrus, king of Persia, defeated the last Babylonian king, Nabonidus, in 539, some Judaean exiles returned to the Land to re- establish national life there and even rebuild the Temple. The book of Ezra preserves what purport to be versions of a decree by Cyrus authorizing this, though many historians are sceptical about their authenticity. At any rate, the Persian authorities evidently did not obstruct the initiative, and we learn from the prophets Haggai and Zechariah that by about 520 BCE the foundations of the new Temple were laid, and that the people were governed by a descendant of Jehoiachin called Zerubbabel and by a high priest called Joshua or Jeshua. From then on Jewish life had two foci: one in the diaspora - in Babylonia and other places, such as Egypt, to which Judaeans had fled after the fall of Jerusalem - and the other back in the homeland. Of what happened during the long years of Persian rule over Israel we are badly informed. Various books of the Bible probably come from that time, including Job, Chronicles, probably indeed the whole Pentateuch in its finished form (many parts of it, as we shall see, are earlier in origin). But none reflects on the historical events of the period. Even the cataclysmic shift in power in the ancient Near East brought about by the rise of Alexander the Great is not commented on in the Bible, and it is only under his successors that we discover a palpable effect on the Jewish community. After Alexander died in 323 BCE, his empire was divided up among his generals. Palestine initially fell under the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt, who appear to have governed the Jewish community benignly for all we can judge from the biblical evidence, scant as it is. But in the early second century BCE they were dislodged from their hegemony over the area by the Seleucid dynasty ruling in Syria. In the 160s a ruler called Antiochus IV, who surnamed himself Epiphanes ('God made manifest'), decided that the hellenization of the Jews - that is, their assimilation to Greek customs and ways of living - had not developed far enough, and began to enforce observance of practices that many Jews abhorred. Parents were forcibly prevented from circumcising their sons, the consumption of pork became mandatory as a test of loyalty to the empire, and Sabbath observance was forbidden. By now many Jews had assimilated and did not oppose these moves, but a group of zealots, led by a family known as the Maccabees or 'hammers', took up arms against Antiochus. They rededicated the Temple, in which he had installed an image of Zeus, and for a time ruled over the Jewish state, which was thus independent for the first time in many centuries. Their dynasty was soon entangled in political wrangles, with the high- priesthood up for sale, and in any case Jewish independence did not outlast the advent of the Romans in the Levant. Palestine became part of the Roman Empire, divided up under various local rulers all more or less vassals of the Roman power, until in 70 CE Jerusalem was sacked by the Roman army under Pompey and the Jews no longer had a national state at all - just as had happened in the sixth century. When in this complicated history were the books of the Old Testament written? A rough consensus has arisen among specialists that biblical books are unlikely to go back much before the ninth or eighth century, the age of Omri, Elijah, Amos and Isaiah. As we have seen, before then 'Israel' was a vague entity with little centralized power: David and Solomon, who are said to have established a huge empire, have left almost no traces that archaeologists can examine, and receive no mention in the records of other nations in the region. Only in the ninth century do the Assyrians begin to speak of the 'house of Omri'. It seems improbable that Israel or Judah before then had the kind of royal administration that needed, and could train, scribes adept enough to write the biblical books.13 Writing had indeed begun in Sumeria (southern Iraq) in the third millennium BC, and around the same time in Egypt, so there is no reason in principle why even very early peoples should not have included those who could write. But writing in such societies was always the preserve of a specialized class of scribes: both cuneiform and hieroglyphic writing are too complex for widespread literacy to be plausible. The early Hebrew alphabet, by contrast, is quite simple, consisting of just twenty- two letters; yet still there is little evidence that literacy was widespread in ancient Israel before the seventh century BCE. (Almost our only earlier evidence is provided by the Gezer calendar, a brief text mentioning the seasons for various farming activities, discovered some twenty miles west of Jerusalem and generally dated to the tenth century BCE; but this does not demonstrate widespread literacy in this period.) There is a lively scholarly debate about the importance of writing in ancient Israel, and of the possibility that scribal schools existed, as they certainly did in Mesopotamia and Egypt.14 The books of the Old Testament are almost certainly the product of an urban elite, based in Jerusalem and perhaps other major cities such as Samaria, rather than folk literature. They may well rest on earlier legends preserved orally and not only on earlier written documents such as state archives of the kind referred to in the books of Kings ('the book of the deeds of the kings of Israel/Judah'). Teasing out the development from oral tradition to written text is one of the most difficult tasks in biblical scholarship, and the results are at best tentative. As with any study of the classical world, we have no independent access to any oral traditions that may underlie the texts. Though it is fascinating to speculate on these, so far as the Bible as a book is concerned it is improbable that anything was written before the ninth century. The books of what is now the Old Testament thus probably came into existence between the ninth and the second centuries BCE. This does not necessarily mean that the records of earlier ages are pure fiction, but it makes it hard to press their details as solid historical evidence. Many readers of the Bible would recognize that the stories of the early history of the world - Noah's Ark, the Tower of Babel - are mythical or legendary, but it may be more challenging to think that the stories of Abraham or Jacob or Moses are also essentially legends, even though people bearing those names may well have existed. No one is in a position to say they are definitely untrue, but there is no reasonable evidence that would substantiate them. This is also the case with the early kings, Saul, David and Solomon, though the stories about them do make sense within a period (the eleventh and tenth centuries BCE) about which we know something, from the archaeological record. With the later, eighthand seventh- century kings (for example, Hezekiah and Jehoiachin) there is definite corroboration from Assyrian and Babylonian records, and we are less in the dark. But even some of the stories of life after the exile, in the Persian period, may be fictional: most biblical scholars think that the book of Esther, for example, is a kind of novella rather than a piece of historical writing. A later date does not of itself mean that a given book is more likely to be accurate: much depends on its genre, as we shall see in the next chapter. The biblical books thus probably span a period of about eight centuries, though they may incorporate older written material - ancient poems, for example - and may in some cases rest on older, orally transmitted folk memories. But the bulk of written records in ancient Israel seem to come from a core period of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, with heavy concentrations in some particular ages: most think, for example, that the period of the exile was particularly rich in generating written texts, as was perhaps the early Persian age, even though we know so little about the political events of the time. The flowering of Israelite literature thus came a couple of centuries earlier than the classical age in Greece. The Old Testament, taken by and large, is thus older than much Greek literature, but not enormously so. Compared with the literature of ancient Mesopotamia or Egypt, however, Israelite texts are a late arrival. I have been referring to the body of texts in question here as 'the Old Testament', but the term is problematic. This is how Christians refer to it, by contrast with the New Testament (a term that goes back as far as Bishop Melito of Sardis [d. c .180 CE]). For Jews the New Testament is of course not part of their Scriptures at all, and so they tend to refer to the Old Testament as simply 'the Bible', or sometimes 'the Tanakh' (or Tenakh or Tanak), which is an acronym taken from the initial letters of the three sections into which the Bible is divided according to Jewish tradition: the Law ( torah ), Prophets ( nevi'im ), and Writings ( ketuvim ), including Psalms, Proverbs, Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles-. In the world of academic biblical study there is much debate as to which term it is best to use. The problem with 'Old Testament' is that the word 'old' can be construed as negative or pejorative - 'these are the old scriptures, but in the New Testament we now have some better ones'. This fits in with a long Christian tradition of what is known as supersessionism, the belief that Christianity has improved on and so supplanted Judaism, a view that is arguably implied in the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews, which describes Jesus as the 'mediator of a new covenant' (Hebrews 9:15) - testamentum is simply the Latin for covenant. The solution in recent academic writing has tended to be to use the expression 'the Hebrew Bible' or 'the Hebrew Scriptures'. This has the advantage of not being a religious usage at all - it was coined, and is used, almost entirely within the academic world. It does leave the expression 'New Testament' somewhat stranded, since there is then nothing with which the word 'new' contrasts, but this is generally felt to be a price worth paying for a term that does not imply an adverse judgement on Judaism. As we shall see, it is inexact, because not everything in the Hebrew Bible is in fact in Hebrew. But it is a fair approximation to the truth. 'Old Testament', however, remains the normal term in popular usage, and within most Christian churches, and is the norm in printed Christian Bibles. This means that there is merit in continuing to use it, provided it is taken neutrally and without any implication of supersessionism; and there are Jewish scholars who are content to use it in that way. In this book 'Old Testament' and 'Hebrew Bible' are used more or less interchangeably, the former somewhat more in contexts in which these books are being seen as part of a larger Christian Bible, and the latter more when Jewish, or purely academic, perspectives are to the fore. But my own conviction is that 'Old Testament' is not tainted to the extent that it is unusable, and sometimes I treat it as the default term, given that this is what the majority of people in western culture have usually called these books. The word 'Hebrew', however, reminds us that most of these books were originally written in what is often called Biblical (sometimes Classical) Hebrew. Hebrew belongs to the Semitic language family, unrelated to European languages.* Semitic languages were spoken all over the ancient Near East, and this continues to be the case. The most important modern example is Arabic, which has developed into a major world language and, in its classical form, is known by many non- Semitic speakers because it is the language of the Qur'an. Hebrew belongs to the north- west branch of Semitic, along with other local languages of the southern Levant such as the now- defunct Ugaritic, Phoenician and Moabite. There are other branches: among East Semitic languages is Akkadian, the language of Assyria and the lingua franca of the whole Middle East until well into the first millennium BCE - Egyptians and Assyrians corresponded in Akkadian. (Sumerian, an earlier language in what is now Iraq, is not Semitic, and is not related to any other known language.) The ancient and modern languages of Ethiopia belong, like Arabic, to the South Semitic branch. Another North-West Semitic language is Aramaic. There is sometimes a misapprehension that Aramaic derives from, or even is a late version of, Hebrew. In fact the languages are quite distinct though closely related, about as close as German and Dutch, or Spanish and Portuguese: clearly similar though not mutually comprehensible. But Aramaic is by far the more important in historical terms. It may have arisen in Syria (ancient Aram), but it too became a lingua franca across the Middle East, and in the first millennium even the Persians (whose own language was Indo- European) used it in correspondence and administration: this version is accordingly sometimes referred to as Imperial Aramaic. By the time of the New Testament it had replaced Hebrew as the language of everyday speech, and Jewish communities had begun to develop translations of the Hebrew Bible into Aramaic - these are known as targums (see Chapter 18). It is clear that Jesus and his followers would have spoken Aramaic, though they also knew the Bible in Hebrew. Aramaic survives as the liturgical language of the Assyrian Church of the East and the Syriac Orthodox Church, and in the form called Syriac16 it is represented by a wide Christian literature, little known in the west but including much poetry and hymnology of high quality. Knowledge of Hebrew never died out. It morphed into a form known as Mishnaic Hebrew, the language of the Mishnah, a collection of discussions of finer points of the Jewish Law or Torah that was codified in the second century CE. There continued to be people able to speak and write Hebrew down to the twentieth century, when it was revived and developed in the form of Modern Hebrew, with many new words and constructions, as the national language of the state of Israel after 1947. In ancient times Hebrew was simply the local language of Israel and Judah, with no wider significance: it was the Bible that propelled it onto a larger stage. The ability of many Jews in the first millennium to read both Hebrew and Aramaic is strikingly illustrated in the Bible itself, because there are two biblical books that in their earliest extant states have passages in both languages: Ezra and Daniel (both among the later books of the Hebrew Bible). In Daniel 2:4, the shift from Hebrew to Aramaic actually occurs in the middle of the verse, and the book then continues in Aramaic to the end of Chapter 7. There are various theories about why this should have happened, but it seems to indicate that the writer and readers could switch effortlessly from one language to the other, perhaps scarcely noticing the change, as multilingual people are known sometimes to begin a sentence in one language and finish it in another. Strictly speaking this means that the term 'Hebrew Bible' is a misnomer because the Bible is not exclusively in Hebrew, but it is an acceptable approximation to the truth. As already mentioned, written Hebrew has only twenty- two letters, and these all principally indicate consonants. In ancient times, as also in modern Israeli Hebrew, vowels were not indicated. This might seem to make the language hard to read, but the vowels of Hebrew words are predictable more often than those in English ones, and in many sentences there is no more difficulty in reading a purely consonantal text than there would be in understanding an English sentence such as 'Hbrw wrtng ds nt hv vwls', especially when (as here) the context helps us to decipher it. Even so, from quite ancient times a custom arose of using a few of the letters to indicate vowels as well as consonants. Thus, for example, the letter yodh, which normally indicates the consonant y, could also stand for the vowels e or i, much as in English y can be either a consonant (as in yellow ) or a vowel (as in easy ). This practice became more common in later texts, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, originating in many cases from the first century BCE or so, make more use of these fuller spellings than does the Hebrew Bible in its now traditional form. Modern Hebrew continues this custom. Well into the Christian era, Hebrew scribes began to develop a sophisticated system of marking vowels through dots and dashes over and under the letters ('vowel points'), which also happens in Arabic. This means that the Bible as we have it now does contain a full phonetic transcription of all the words. The fact that the system is much later than the texts it is used to write does not mean that it is unreliable: the pronunciation of the words was transmitted in the tradition of reading the Bible aloud, and what the Masoretes - the scribes who devised the system of vowel points - recorded was not invented by them. Modern biblical scholars tend to think that the vocalization, as it is known, is sometimes wrong, but overwhelmingly more often it is almost certainly right. The Masoretes, working in the sixth to tenth centuries CE in both Tiberias and Jerusalem in Palestine, and in Babylonia, developed techniques for making sure that their vocalization would be accurately transmitted by subsequent generations, with many marginal notes calling attention to anything surprising that scribes might be tempted to change. These notes are known as the Masorah. Modern printed Bibles usually depend on a particular Masoretic manuscript, the Leningrad or St Petersburg Codex (referred to in biblical studies as L), from about 1008 CE. This is the oldest complete manuscript we possess, but much older fragments of many biblical books have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls - in the case of the book of Isaiah, more or less the entire book was found there, and in more than one manuscript. These manuscripts, a good thousand years earlier than L, often differ in important ways from the texts familiar to us, though taken by and large they confirm that the transmission is remarkably accurate - we are clearly dealing with the same books, even if the wording is different in places or some passages are longer or shorter than in L. In two cases, Jeremiah and Psalms, there are really significant differences in the order and sometimes even the content of chapters, but this is the exception rather than the rule. Even the Dead Sea material is several centuries later than the original texts; as with writings from the world of Greece and Rome, so with the Hebrew Bible we do not have 'autographs', that is, texts from the hand of the original writers, but only later manuscripts. That is why there can be such controversy over the date of the original texts: they must be older than the Dead Sea Scrolls, but by how much is a matter for debate in each case. Very little of what is set out in this chapter is controversial among biblical specialists. Some are much more optimistic about the reliability of the stories of early Israel in the Bible, but the general trend is towards scepticism about the accuracy of the narrative books of the Old Testament before the age of Amos and Isaiah, the eighth century BCE. What I have said about the Hebrew language, and the manuscript tradition, is not controversial at all. But the overall implications for the theme of this book are far-reaching, because the origins of the Bible, and particularly the Hebrew Bible, are thus rather obscure. Like any other collection of books from the ancient world, the Bible derives from many different periods and circumstances. Where it tells a historical story, it is not always accurate - partly because it contains legends, and partly because its account of history is governed by a commitment to various interests. The idea that the kingdom of Judah was more important than the kingdom of Israel, for example, is a theological or ideological rather than a historical judgement. The Hebrew Bible is not a book produced at one time, but an anthology of books, and, as we shall see, some of those books are themselves anthologies. Religious believers tend to think that it does have an overall coherence, as we saw in the Introduction, but this is hard to show empirically. When we dig back into the history of the Bible, what strikes us first is diversity and complexity. Excerpted from A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book by John Barton All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.