Historiography in Ancient Israel

Abstract

The nature and scope of the history in Genesis to 2 Kings has been obscured by the traditional division between the Pentateuch (Genesis to Deuteronomy) and the historical books (Joshua to 2 Kings). This division has led to a quite different approach to the compositional history of the Pentateuch from that of the historical books, and to a lively debate about the literary limits of each historian's work, and when and by whom the sections of the Old Testament were actually written. The view that has won broad acceptance is that Deuteronomy belongs to the following historical books (Joshua to 2 Kings) as a kind of ideological introduction to what is called ‘the Deuteronomistic History’ (DtrH), and its author is known as the Deuteronomist (Dtr). This leaves a Tetrateuch (Genesis to Numbers) which is a combination of two basic ‘documents’: one lay or non-priestly (the so-called Yahwist or J) and one priestly (P). This chapter proposes that DtrH is the earliest of these histories; it was supplemented by J in Genesis to Numbers, and this was further augmented by P. It also notes the historical tradition of the biblical books of Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah which challenges and revises the earlier historical tradition of the Hebrew Bible.