Israel’s Texts Created Her History? by slaveofone
When ancient Israel used the genre of a national history in order to provide the country with a national identity (Mullen 1993), rather than to recreate a past reality out of an interest in ‘history’, this is in accordance with a long tradition. It was only in ancient Israel, however, that this practice developed into a fully fledged national history-writing.
The History of Ancient Israel: What Directions Should We Take?, Barstad
I appreciate that this quotation tries to sever Israel’s history-writing from a positivistic historiography (as if anyone at any time in any place merely wrote the facts of history without being framed and guided by some kind of personal or cultural narrative, world-view, and sociological perspective). However, I find it problematic in a great many respects.
Firstly, writing, reading, and reception of Israel’s history-writings
would only matter to an elite and closed social group (the scribes) that couldn’t account for more than five percent of total population. While the scribes could influence the general populace in terms of religious devotion and such, the texts themselves could in no way redefine and substitute an ideal national vision for the realities of tribal identities, traditional blood ties, and folkloric culture.
Secondly, even if there was political motivation by the scribes to reconstruct Israelite history in order to give it a national identity it didn’t have, the idea that even a powerful political entity could cause an entire people to accept a history they never knew and which contradicted their own knowledge, experiences, stories, traditions, and cultural identities is absolutely ridiculous—especially among a people which was defined by its social structures and did not resemble our Modern and Post-Modern self-defining individualism.
Thirdly, this method of history-making which is claimed of ancient Israel is anachronistic, arising only in present times, and cannot therefore be applied to the ancient world.
Fourth and finally, any argument that seeks to say a nation-state or people operated and thought in such a way radically disassociated from the entire culture and world in which they exist so that they stand unique and alone not only betrays a complete lack of historical understanding, but smacks of Modern evolutionary triumphalism.