How and Why – the Means and the Meaning
Part 2 – The Archeology
To Be or Not to Be – That is the Question
To rephrase the famous quote: Was he or was he not? In other words, was there a real Abraham or was he a fictitious character dreamed up to embody and justify Israel’s faith? Van Seters In Search of History, pp4-5 lists five criteria by which you know that you are dealing with “written history”:
- History writing is a specific form of tradition in its own right. Any explanation of the genre as merely the accidental accumulation of traditional material is inadequate.
- History writing is not primarily the accurate reporting of past events. It also considers the reason for recalling the past and the significance given to past events.
- History writing examines the causes of present conditions and circumstances. In antiquity these causes are primarily moral–who is responsible for a certain state of affairs? (It goes without saying, of course, that modern scientific theories about causation or laws of evidence cannot be applied to the ancient writer.)
- History writing is national or corporate in character. Therefore, merely reporting the deeds of a king may only be biographical unless these are viewed as part of the national history.
- History writing is part of the literary tradition and plays a significant role in the corporate tradition of a people.
This summation seems to be well regarded and a valid list of criteria. Abraham’s Biblical records is acceptable as historical by Van Seters’ criteria.
However, his criteria is not accepted by all scholars. A competing criteria that is not acceptable to the majority of scholars is the claim that “for … a text to be considered historically reliable, it must be corroborated by an external source.” (The author will go unnamed as I do not wish to be disparaging to any particular scholar. The quote is from History and Ideology, p23) This camp will not accept any document not supported by an independent source of that time period. In other words, no person’s deeds are historical unless they were important enough to affect another country to the extent that the country recorded the events in that country’s annals. To accept this theory means that Abraham, and anyone like him, never existed. They are myth, not reality.
I accept Van Seters’ analysis–with one caveat. Recall the comparison of the man John Chapman to the myth Johnnie Appleseed. There were five comparisons, four of which were spot on identical between the two. The only one which was different had inadequate information from the real John Chapman to determine how much of a likeness or disparity there was. If there was any disparity, it was by making Johnnie Appleseed a more admirable person.
I suspect that, if there is any difference between the historical Abraham and the Abraham of the Bible, the same type of idealization might be occurring. However, we lack any method of verification one way or the other.
Lacking evidence to the contrary, I accept the Biblical record.
One of the “proofs” often offered as confirmation that the Abraham accounts are real is that Abraham claims his wide Sarai was his sister to the Egyptian Border Official. That will be the subject of the next blog–and the facts are sure to surprise you.