Hi Arach,
and the POINT of this entire debate is that genesis is NOT presented as a historical account. it's presented as a collection of folk tales.
But the point I made was that we cannot dismiss everything in Genesis as being unhistorical as there are things mentioned that could be historical. However, even the recording of these texts has historical value, it provides evidence to the historian about the society in which these tales were constructed.
no, it does not. but i was attempting to describe what a history should be, or what a history usually tries to be.
But this is what YOU think history should be and it is not the same as what the ancients thought it should be. Huizinga says that every culture creates its own form of history, and the Hebrew Bible has more than one way of recording history.
The ancients recorded history in songs and sagas, poems and psalms, you cannot dismiss them as historically worthless because they do not fulfil our modern day criteria of history writing.
what i'm saying is that genesis is not saying "this stuff happened" but rather "these are the stories we've told for a thousand years." i don't care whether or not the stuff actually happened, and it has nothing to do with that. it's strictly the style and goals of the writing.
What they are saying is that these are stories that we’ve told for a thousand years about how God interacted throughout history with our ancestors. The Israelites believed that they were saved from Egypt by God, a God who interacts in history. They did not think that they were preserving fairytales.
no. AND THAT IS THE POINT.
The point is that many people do take these narratives a historically accurate and their authors did not present them as a historical novel, they presented them in the way that they saw fit, no ne critically analysed them.
no, and they could not have.
Okay, so how could the four authors not have believed that they were presenting a history of the past?
except for the books of kings and chronicles, which some believe pre-date genesis. see, this is the problem with your argument. genesis is not an archaic style of history written by a culture that was not familiar with history-writing. there are contemporary histories of the culture, and we have two variants on them. samuel, kings and chronicles appear to have been written based largely on a single historical document, and then slightly manipulated in favor of various political and religious ideas. this document the three books used as source seems to have contained purely historical records.
This is incorrect again. The Hebrew Bible has different ways of recording history, it depends on who the writer was. Every historian uses their own method of writing to suit their purpose. The author of Kings selected the material that he wanted to present, the material that suited his purpose. But the author (s) of kings also used figurative and symbolic language, (e.g. 2 Kings 14:9), which was an accepted way of writing history in ancient Israel.
Genesis HAD to use figurative/symbolic language, how else could they describe something events that they didn’t fully understand?
We have different approaches to history writing in modern history writing. Look at the range of history genres we have, positivist, humanist, capitalist, idealist etc. If we have different approaches to writing history, then why couldn’t the ancient Israelites?
the process by which kings and chronicles were copied indicates that redactor(s) were not interested specifically in recording history correctly, but putting a certain spin on things. so they are not fully considered to be "true" histories in the sense we use the word today.
Yes, they are not true historians in the modern sense, but they weren’t writing history in modern days, they were writing 2500 or so years ago! So their history was shaped by the society and context of their day, not ours. History writing has changed dramatically in 2000 years, we cannot dismiss their claims because they wrote in a different way from us.
But, just as you say, we have ‘true’ histories, and the thing you should realise is that we have ‘false’ histories too, but they are all still history.
they omit important facts contrary to their political positions. (ever wonder where the fundis got it?) what they also show is consistency. they were interested in one consistent story of the history of a people.
But even modern day historians do this. No history is free from bias, but it is still history. You just have to decide for yourself if it is credible history or not.
now bounce back over to genesis. inconsistencies all over the place. they very obviously used different sources, and copied them exactly. they didn't even make god have one consistent name. in some places, he's called "elohym" and in others "yahweh elohym" and in yet thers "el shaddai" or variants thereof. they are used in consistently the same in blocks of text. this means that the redactors of genesis were not interested in the slightest if the stories agreed and told a realistic and unified tale. rather, it shows that they were interested in preserving the stories themselves, independent of one another.
so the goal was not historical, it was the preservation of tradition.
But traditions invariably preserve history within their texts. There is the tradition that Joseph was sold into slavery in Egypt. Is there any reason to reject this as historical? Even if we prove it didn’t happen Joseph being sold into slavery is still history, it is just false history.
I know what you are getting at, and I am not saying that the Book of Genesis is historically accurate, I am saying that as a narrative of past events it qualifies as history. Now, if you want to say that Genesis is a history book that is full of myths, aetiologies, propaganda and impossibilities, then I wouldn’t disagree. It is still history though, even if it is nonsense.
and they are wrong. billions of children believe in santa claus. that doesn't make him real.
HISTORY HASN’T GOT TO BE REAL! How many times do I have to say this?
Genesis says there was a man called Noah who built a boat and saved all the animals. This is a historical narrative, it is history, but it is false history.
and that DOES NOT make it a history.
Yes it does. If a text is a narrative about the past it is history.
History IS NOT what happened in the past, it is the record written about that past. It is the piece of paper that the words are on, not the past event itself.
yes. see kings and chronicles.
And Joshua — Judges.
neither, both are strictly propaganda. history is not genre, and rarely records the lifes and deaths of homeless men.
Both are history because they both contain a narrative about a past event. They both cannot be right, but they are both valid histories, you just need to decide which one is the most plausible for you.
if you can't see how a gospel is not a history, i can't help you and we should end this debate now.
I don’t need any help LOL.
A gospel is a history of the good news.
The book of Luke even interviews eyewitnesses and contains details of background events. Whether we believe that any of these events happened is immaterial, the gospels are history, they may just be false history.
I gave you my definition of history, a conclusion reached after months of reading scores of books, so why don’t you give us your definition of history and we can perhaps see where the problem is?
see, i just thought it was common sense.
It is common sense, but you need to know what history is first.
Brian.
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