116 - The First Historians: The Hebrew Bible and History

The First Historians: The Hebrew Bible and History
By Baruch Halpern
San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1988. 285 pp. $22.95.

This is an important book by an erudite and witty author. In contrast to much modern scholarship, Halpern asserts that the historians of the Hebrew Bible, particularly the Deuteronomistic historian, had a genuine historical consciousness and historiographic intent. Though naive and imbued with a pre-modern theory of causation, the biblical historian treated available sources in a trustworthy way and honestly intended to interpret the past without invention or manipulation of the facts.

Halpern defends this credible thesis with his own solution to the "locked room mystery" of Ehud, a look at the utilization of the Song of Deborah by the prose writer of Judges 4, and an extensive investigation into the themes and working techniques of the Deuteronomistic historian. The historian did not bend source data in order to fit deuteronomistic dogma. Miracles found in oral and written sources were simply taken at face value. The strategies of historiographic presentation resemble those of Thucydides in dramatic freedom and those of modern historians in the advocacy of a certain causational explanation for what happened. One need not agree with every detail of Halpern's analysis to be convinced by the general truth of his observation: the Deuteronomistic historian was no liar and the subsequent redactor of that history was neither obtuse nor dishonest.

Richard D. Nelson
Lutheran Theological Seminary
Gettysburg, Pa.