For the past half-century, running alongside the bloody conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has been a less widely known, but closely related scholarly dispute, no less bitter or seemingly any less intractable. This second dispute concerns the so-called “historicity” of the Hebrew Bible. What is meant by this expression is the extent to which the events and characters depicted in the Bible are historically genuine or mere fabrications of the religious imagination. A new book by Jacob L. Wright, professor of Hebrew Bible at Emory University, entitled Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins, certainly helps its readers separate the Bible’s historic wheat from its fictive chaff.

Until comparatively recently, the Bible’s account of the early history of the Jews was widely accepted as true, albeit with ever-diminishing credence given to the numerous miracles and acts of divine revelation it reports. Since the 1970s, however, for a variety of reasons, of which the most important has been the absence of any extra-biblical evidence for them, the historical authenticity of such events as the Exodus and subsequent conquest of Canaan has started to become doubted by increasing numbers of biblical scholars to the point where belief in their historicity is very much a minority opinion in scholarly circles today. Much the same holds true of the supposed existence of such characters as the Hebrew patriarchs and of such institutions as Israel’s supposed twelve tribal structure and the united monarchy of kings David and Solomon.

Scholars who deny the Bible’s historicity have come to be called “minimalists,” with many of them claiming that its lack of historicity undermines any historic claim that Jews might have to the territory of present-day Israel/Palestine. As Ilan Troen, professor of Israel Studies at Brandeis University, has remarked: “[An] anti-Israel approach is endemic in the minimalist school of biblical criticism. … [It considers] that the Old Testament is an intricate and complex deception invented by Hebrew scribes some two and half millennia ago.”

Biblical minimalism is by no means without critics and these fall broadly into two camps, sometimes called “maximalists” and “centralists.” Largely on the basis of their religious commitments, biblical maximalists are unwilling to renounce belief in the Bible’s historicity unless given compelling reason for doing so. While stopping well short of accepting the historicity of almost everything that the Bible relates, biblical centralists maintain the disciplines of archaeology and epigraphy provide sufficient evidence to accept as historical fact far more of what the Bible relates than biblical minimalists do.

Arising from Defeat

Jacob Wright very much belongs to the centralist camp. An avowed practising Jew and member of a modern orthodox synagogue, Wright is, however, unprepared to go along with the supposed defining dogma of Jewish orthodoxy, namely, belief in the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch or even, for that matter with the historic existence of a real Moses. Yet, on the basis of what he considers adequate archaeological and epigraphic evidence, he affirms the historicity of the Davidic dynasty of Judah and the Omride dynasty of its northern neighbour, Israel. Nor is Wright willing to dismiss as fable, as are some extreme minimalists, the Assyrian conquest of Israel in 722 BCE and the Babylonian conquest of Judah a century and a half later, along with the destruction then of the Jerusalem Temple. Nor is Wright prepared to disavow the Temple’s resurgence after the more accommodating Persians replaced the Babylonians as regional hegemon towards the end of the sixth century BCE, and who allowed Judahites to rebuild it and Jerusalem’s city wall, now, however, as mere subjects in a province of the Persian empire than denizens of a sovereign state.

Indeed, it is precisely from those very experiences of defeat of Israel and Judah, as well as their long-running mutual rivalry and division, that Wright sees the Hebrew Bible as having arisen. For during their existence as rivalrous kingdoms, for whose respective historicity Wright contends there to be unassailable extra-biblical evidence, their respective scribes and priests produced the early narrative histories of each that over time, he claims, were subject to repeated elaboration, re-editing, and combination, until from them eventually emerged the Bible as we have it today. As Wright puts it: “[T]he biblical writings consolidate rival populations and regions by connecting their heroes and traditions in a single narrative.”

Wright considers the northern kingdom to be the original source of the biblical stories about the Hebrew Patriarchs as well as those about the enslavement of their descendants in Egypt and the eventual Exodus from it and conquest of Canaan. Judah is considered by Wright the original source of the biblical stories about Israel’s subsequent transition to monarchy. These latter include the stories about the centralisation of worship at the Jerusalem temple which Wright claims became an especially prominent theme following the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom. This invasion brought an influx of northerners into Jerusalem, including scribes and priests with their native legends.

The Babylonian conquest of Judah might have resulted in the break-up and disappearance of its inhabitants as a distinct people. Instead, argues Wright, the common experience of defeat led eventually to a rapprochement between its scribes and those of Israel who melded their respective narrative histories, and thereby forged from them the Hebrew Bible as we know it. The respective conquest of these two kingdoms by foreign empires became reinterpreted as divine punishment for having defied the will of God, which was delivered in divine law codes and then woven into the story of the Exodus.

In Wright’s view, therefore, the Hebrew Bible was written not, as Christianity would have it, as the story of the decline and fall of a people whom God had originally commissioned to disseminate to humankind acknowledgment of His existence and moral teachings, but whom God later renounced after their persistent relapses into various forms of idolatry and immorality. Rather, contends Wright, the Hebrew Bible was written to weld the defeated inhabitants of Judah and Samaria together into a unified people (Samaria being the province of the Assyrian empire formerly at the geographic centre of the northern kingdom of Israel before its conquest). On Wright’s account, the Hebrew Bible was written to provide these defeated peoples with hope by depicting them as having in the past been able to stand together as a unified people and even flourish, despite lacking a king and even political independence. For them to do so again, was its message, they only had need of the sovereignty of God who would restore their fortunes should they only repent of their former aberrations and return to His rule and worship.

Counter-acculturation

While entirely wedded to purely secular categories in investigating and explaining the sources of the Bible, Wright’s account of them offers a very sympathetic and novel reconstruction of the thought processes of the various sets of anonymous authors who contributed to its formation. Having said that, his explanation of why the Hebrew Bible was written is not without several difficulties of which two are briefly rehearsed below.

First, Wright contends that the constituent narratives of the Hebrew Bible were composed by the scribes of Israel and Judah to enable their respective inhabitants to survive as distinct peoples and later to unite after both lost their kings and political independence. Nowhere, however, does Wright explain just why these scribes should have responded to their kingdom’s defeat by seeking to preserve the distinctiveness of its inhabitants rather than simply resigning themselves to their eventual disappearance through assimilating with either their conquerors or neighbours.

There is a possible explanation of why Hebrew scribes might have chosen to produce the Bible as a way of resisting their people’s extinction through assimilation, but one for which Wright’s proffered explanation leaves little room. Suppose, which seems not implausible, the highest values of the Hebrew scribes had been their religious cult which they had come to perceive as endangered from the cultural assimilation being undergone by their former kingdoms following their conquest. In such circumstances, these scribes would have had every incentive to resist such cultural assimilation by producing exactly the kind of biblical literature that they did. Now, Alexander’s conquest of Judah and Samaria towards the end of the fourth century BCE did instigate in each a profound cultural revolution that unquestionably threatened their indigenous religious cults through the adoption of Greek culture by their elites. As Moses Hadas pointed out in his 1959 book Hellenistic Culture: Fusion and Diffusion:

Alexander was so to change the world that … the traditional distinctions between Greek and barbarian [would] be obliterated. … [W]hole populations which had been insulated by obscurity were … stripped of the shelter of the miniscule political organisms which had enveloped them and were compelled to devise a new spiritual shelter in an overwhelmingly large universe.

For the Judean and Samarian priests and scribes who remained faithful to their indigenous Yahwist cults, resistance to the complete Hellenization of their respective peoples was needed to safeguard them. What better way was there for them to resist such Hellenization than by employing elements of the very culture their conquerors had brought, most notably Plato’s philosophy? The omission by Wright of consideration of the enormous role that it played in the creation of the Hebrew Bible constitutes a second major flaw in his explanation of why it came to be written.

There is no extra-biblical evidence for the existence of the Pentateuch before the third century BCE. Even the Letter of Aristeas, the sole extra-biblical evidence there is for dating it as early as that, is of dubious historicity. Even so, this was well after Judea and Samaria had begun to undergo acculturation by their Hellenic conquerors. Among the ways colonised peoples can resist acculturation is “counter-acculturation.” In his 2011 book, Argonauts of the Desert: Structural Analysis of the Hebrew Bible, Phillipe Wajdenbaum has explained this notion:

“Counter-acculturation” is not simply a rejection of the dominant culture in favour of the indigenous culture, but it often consists of using some aspect of the master’s culture against them as a weapon of liberation.

Wajdenbaum’s central thesis is that: “[In] the writing of the Bible … Greek culture was used in order to make both a national history and a religion, as well as to resist Hellenisation.” In support of it, Wajdenbaum cites numerous parallels between Greek myths and biblical stories, as well as between Pentateuchal laws and the laws recommended for the imaginary ideal Cretan colony whose proposed constitution is outlined in Plato’s last dialogue, The Laws. While these parallels have been noted since antiquity, they were traditionally attributed to Greek dependence on biblical sources for them.

Wajdenbaum, together with a growing number of other recent biblical scholars, including, most notably, Russell Gmirkin, Bruce Louden, and Robert Gnuse, have jointly provided often very compelling reasons for supposing that the dependency runs in the other direction. For Wright not to have mentioned the Bible’s likely partial Greek provenance is a serious flaw in what is otherwise an extremely interesting and insightful journey he takes the reader on through the constituent books of the Hebrew Bible. 

As to the idea that such a degree of minimalism as Wright espouses undermines the historic claim Jews have to the land of Israel, there is no better riposte than that given by Wright’s fellow biblical centralist, the Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein. He disposes of that notion by observing that, if there was no Israelite Exodus or conquest of Canaan, then most present-day Jews would be the remote descendants of its original inhabitants. This would strengthen, rather than weaken, the case for a Jewish state there today. The degree of minimalism that Finkelstein and Wright espouse does not even weaken the case for practicing Judaism since such mythical events as the Exodus can be celebrated religiously for their symbolic not literal significance.

Wright concludes his book by remarking on the Hebrew Bible that, although “it cannot be taken as normative[,] … it can be mined for wisdom… that bears directly on questions of corporate life, and collective survival. … Even as agnostics and atheists, we can appreciate the political truths preserved on its pages.” Wright’s book certainly helps its readers comprehend the political wisdom that lay behind the composition of the Bible and found its way into it, and as such, makes it a very worthwhile read despite the two shortcomings identified earlier in this review. Lest any readers of Law and Liberty doubt that any nuggets of political wisdom can still be found in the Bible, I can do no better than conclude this review by quoting the brief description of one such nugget given by the nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine whose relevance to current goings-on in the Middle East I leave it to readers to infer:

At a time when, in the temples of Babylon, Nineveh, Sidon and Tyre, bloody and unchaste rites were celebrated … we cannot sufficiently admire the early greatness of Israel… [and] Israel’s love of liberty. … [B]y instituting the jubilee… Moses did not seek to abolish the right of property; on the contrary, it was his wish that everyone should possess property. … Liberty was always the great emancipator’s leading thought, and it breathes and glows in all his statutes concerning pauperism.