I was taught the Table of Nations (Genesis 10) was probably at least an attempt to be historical. Sort of like a map of the known world, but dictated from an oral tradition.
~Max
Who taught you? What authority did they give for this?
As I said before, different people will draw different lines.
We have a continuum here. We start with single celled organisms and end with (currently) modern humans.
ISTM somewhere along that line is a modern human. You may place the line somewhere I do not and that is the gray area. But, you have to place that line. Do we really have a category of kinda-sorta-mostly-but-not-quite homo sapiens but are still homo sapiens?
Sure we do. Hominins. (Us included; but also the direct ancestors and extinct sideshoots.)
Well, the whole Bible is an attempt to be historical, in that it presents itself as an account of historical events. But it’s only for the later books that we have reasonable evidence to believe that there is broad-stroke historical accuracy on the level of “these tribes fought a war, and this one won”. Obviously the detailed accounts of the battles and diplomatic exchanges written from the POV of an omniscient narrator aren’t at all reliable.
What else could it possibly be? It’s a list that purports to include every tribe in the known world and trace their ancestries back to the sons of Noah. It’s just a list – it doesn’t include any narrative or anything remotely morally uplifting. Of course it’s not factually accurate, but I don’t see how you could argue it doesn’t clear the bar of attempting to be historical.
Are they distinct from homo sapiens?
Otherwise you can say we have similarities with chimps. No distinction worth making.
I don’t think we are forced to draw a line at all. I know that is how human minds work, we love certainty and categorisation. However, no matter where you or I choose to place a line on such a continuum, it’ll be wrong.
Aside from the fact that parts of the Bible are non-narrative and thus don’t present themselves as accounts of events, historical or otherwise, it’s my understanding that this statement is controversial, because there are some parts of the Bible (e.g. Job, Jonah) that are disputed: while some people think that they are, indeed, intended as accounts of historical events, others think they are fictional, in the sense that their authors and original audience never thought of them as intended to convey what actually happened.
Yes, I stand corrected, there are some books of the Bible (Esther is another one) that even the most Orthodox agree are short stories rather than factual accounts. And obviously books like Psalms and Proverbs aren’t narrative.
That’s where we differ. Historical is a modern term. Whether it can be applied to the early oral traditions is more than controversial, as Thudlow notes, the problem of how to think about them is the deepest, most critical question that needs to be answered before interpretation starts.
The Bible isn’t well-served by modern terms like fiction or history. If you take away the veneration and look at it as a text to be unraveled, a better modern term is propaganda. If you set aside the pejorative usage, you can see propaganda as a created reality imposed by governments or other elites. Anything put forth by a set of religious leaders is intended to be a set of truths that followers must believe.
Sometimes the propaganda contains easily recognizable - although often exaggerated - facts that give it credibility. The evil acts of the Hun enemy in WWI were mostly lies in the British propaganda that gives the word its modern negative connotation, but they built on a layer of the horrific acts all wars include.
Religions and cults (synonymous in their early stages) contrarily often use what seems to outsiders outlandish tales, as did the LDS, Scientology, and Heaven’s Gate. Doing so made their followers stand out from all the non-believers, but also pushed them ever deeper into the group for community, and made them willing subjects for a new set of laws. Propaganda has the purpose of sharpening lines between belief sets. The U.S. was founded on propaganda: the Declaration of Independence is a powerful example.
The Old Testament lies somewhere in between, with a collection of outlandish tales bolstered by recognizable historic and contemporary references. That served a purpose, too. Genesis and Exodus gave the writings authority in the way that their society recognized, leading the way to Leviticus, which laid out the laws that the followers had to obey, laws which separated them from other religions.
You can go through and glean historic references that have outside confirmation, but why? To maintain that the Bible has truth in it? That’s backward thinking that serves only to privilege the words to impose them on others. The passages were collected not to record the truth of history but a “Higher Truth” that trumped all else. All religious documents proclaim they are the sole bearer of this “Higher Truth.” That should be given exactly the respect it deserves.
Do they?
I don’t think the Baháʼí do, for instance.
I think the assumption that every religion must say that all the others are wrong is, itself, a back-of-the-head religiously based assumption; quite a common one in people whose backgrounds are in religions whose documents do say such things.
You’re quite right. There have been probably millions of what could call religions over human history and they do vary in all the ways humans do.
However, the Old Testament does indeed insist that other religions are wrong, often in the strongest terms, and followers have spent two millennia insisting that the New Testament does the same. So let’s please stick to the topic at hand.
I think you’re using an excessively narrow definition of “history”. I would define it as “any text which purports to offer a factual account of previous events”. If you define it according to the scientific and ethical principles of modern academic historians, then you say that humans have only developed a concept of “history” during the last couple centuries, which seems like an absurd assertion.
No question “propaganda” is an appropriate term to use here; the primary purpose of the Bible is to push a particular worldview, not to impart factual information. But as you noted about the British in WWI, propagandists put their own spin on things, but they can’t flatly deny facts that are widely known to be true and hope to convince anyone. The Germans didn’t really eat Belgian babies, but they did in fact invade Belgium.
Why is it important to assert that the Bible contains some elements of objective historical truth? It’s not particularly important IMO, but when someone makes the false assertion that it doesn’t contain such elements, why not fight the ignorance? I argue about things all the time on this board that aren’t actually super important to me.
You may think the accuracy, i.e “truth,” of the Bible is not particularly important, but two thousand years of history reveal how critical that is for others.
Just on the very small scale, the emphasis on proving the Bible true all but destroyed Middle Eastern archaeological studies until very recently.
I think I’ve already said that. I also said somewhere that “fiction” and “history” are modern genres that have deep roots but didn’t develop into what we today recognize until relatively modern times.
Yes, people who take the Bible literally have caused a great deal of harm over the centuries and should be roundly mocked and ridiculed.
But, although I could be misinterpreting you, your attitude seems to be that the Bible contains nothing that any reasonable person would be interested in or consider important, and studying it for any reason whatsoever should be viewed as an intrinsically suspect endeavor. There’s a pretty vast excluded middle there.
You’re misinterpreting me, and rather insultingly. Do I sound like someone who has never paid attention to the contents of the Bible? How and why am I writing these detailed interpretations of the way they’re written in that case?
Actually, that’s a good question. I’m putting in all this effort and none of it gets a direct response. I understand that most people are not used to thinking of the Bible in this way. I would have hoped that here at the Dope people could past ingrained habits.
Sorry, don’t mean to be insulting, and you’re right that you have displayed some knowledge of the subject. But I must confess to being sincerely confused about what exactly what your position is and what point you are trying to make. It just feels like you’re arguing against Biblical literalism, but nobody in this thread is taking the other side of that argument.
I am a bit curious about this. One book I read claimed that the account in Exodus had approximately the entire Mobile Alabama CSA (metro area) fording the Gulf of Suez and then wandering the Sinai peninsula for (albeit in declining numbers) quite some time (40 years?) before alighting on Canaan (and treating the locals poorly), yet there appears to be zero evidence of this. Is archaeology discouraged there?
Yes, Exodus says that there were 600,000 adult men leaving Egypt; it doesn’t number the women and children, but a reasonable extrapolation would be a total population of 2 million, which is obviously completely unrealistic for many reasons, the lack of any archeological support being one of them. Also, as Cecil has pointed out, the events depicted in Exodus are dramatic enough that one would expect to find some mention of them in contemporaneous Egyptian records, which we don’t.
Some argue, though, that we’ve been mistranslating as “thousand” a word that should really mean “about ten”, which would make the total population a more reasonable 20,000.