before we begin to approach the earliest period of jewish history we have to address
the question of how shall we approach the bible as a historical source the bible is of course
regarded by tens of thousands of generations millions upon millions of people as the word
of god and has a tremendous amount of authenticity simply because of that status but if we're trying
to approach it looking for historical data is that an appropriate way to understand this text
i'm going to set that question aside for now but i would like to give you a thought experiment that
hopefully will clarify some of the questions that arise as we look at it from the point of
view of a historian one last caveat i know when people look at me especially for the first time
they think i'm a rabbi i think it's the keeper and the beard that give it away and it's true
on a personal level i have proclivities towards observant judaism and i i do my best as much as
i can to be as observant as possible but let's just set that aside as well and look again at
this question from a historical perspective because i am not a rabbi i'm just a regular
guy who happens to work as a historian here's the thought experiment the year is 1985 and you
are in middle school you're 12 years old and your teacher gives you an assignment she gave
it to you a few weeks ago but you ignored it it's only due tomorrow you have a few hours
left to write it the assignment is please write 500 words on the life of julius caesar
middle schoolers today would say no problem but it's 1985 and no one has invented the internet yet
so you're stuck you have a few hours left the library is closed what do you do
you scramble around the house looking for some kind of book that says something about julius
caesar and in your older sister's bedroom you find some of her college textbooks including a ratty
old paperback it was probably published sometime around 1972 that has on the spine julius caesar
by william shakespeare great this is fantastic this is exactly the book you look at it's kind
of hard to read it's not written in modern english but you know you sort of skim through
it and you figure out a few key things and you scrap together a paper for your teacher now the
question is how reliable is william shakespeare's account of the life and death of julius caesar as
a historical account can we say that the things that shakespeare described actually happened not
terribly likely first of all shakespeare's account was written about 1600 years after the events
described oh my gosh now shakespeare probably had some other data you know read other histories to
be able to put together the story of julius caesar but he clearly was not even writing a history book
he was writing something for popular entertainment and what kind of poetic license did he take
in producing that particular work can we actually say anything real about william shakespeare's
account of julius caesar and just to take it to a meta level which is going to be very relevant for
looking at the bible as well the copy that you're holding in your hand was published in the 1970s
who says that it doesn't actually date from the 1970s who says it even dates from the 1600s
maybe it really was published for the first time in the era of elizabeth ii as opposed to elizabeth
the first how do you know that this is an accurate copy of something that was actually written
400 odd years earlier all these questions abound and just to make it a little bit
more fun notice the iconic presentation of shakespeare's shame upon him his uh his visage
uh that's based on something called the chandras portrait which is named after its owner not after
the subject or the painter neither of which are known for certain but it's generally believed
to be a depiction of william shakespeare himself when you look a little closely at it you see that
shakespeare himself apparently wore an earring but that has been removed from his ear in the
version that you hold in your hand so there's just so many possibilities for inaccuracies
and understanding the life of julius caesar shouldn't we say that as well about the bible
even according to the word of god approach whatever that means exactly many of the events
described in the bible are written down explicitly as as having occurred in the distant past so
what do we do with this as a uh as a historical account one more word about the word of god
approach can we possibly penetrate the inscrutable mind of the almighty to determine that the purpose
of the biblical text before us is to give us historical data perhaps it's to give us
religious instruction moral instruction it's for our edification without necessarily giving
us a blow by bull chronicle of events it's a big complex sprawling document we will be exploring
it in greater depth in the following lectures as it relates specifically to history but it's like a
real you know tangled mess of complications to try to understand this text as a historical source but
by the time we get to the 19th century there are a lot of questions about how to approach the bible
as a historical text we see people like william albright who say well okay without denying the
higher criticism approach that is advocated by people like belhausen you know we can still go
back to the land of israel and discover the facts as they occurred using this relatively new science
of archaeology and construct the past and see how it conforms to the bible as essentially the
uh the template for historical events the in other words the way albright looked at
biblical history as he said you know we have essentially got in the bible
the cover of the puzzle box inside are a thousand pieces but we see what it's supposed to look
like so all we've got to do is go to israel find the places mentioned on the biblical
narrative dig up the ground there and we'll find evidence of things that happen we'll go to jericho
we'll find the walls of jericho that were destroyed by joshua and things like that
the thing is once you get to israel you're confronted with a massive amount of data and
who says that it's going to conform to the picture box maybe we should instead look at the pieces
put it together without knowing how it's going to look and then we'll look at the picture afterwards
that's the approach that many later archaeologists began to take especially when they began to
find pieces like this that looked like they didn't belong anywhere in the original picture box cover
so by the time we get to the middle of the 20th century there is a lot of confusion about how are
we supposed to look at the bible as a historical text things came to a head in the 1990s with
the development of the so-called copenhagen school of biblical study this is an outgrowth
of a philosophical cultural movement called postmodernism that essentially questioned the
narrative reliability of text and the copenhagen school advocated essentially a minimalist approach
to the use of the bible as a historical document it's sometimes characterized as like a rejection
of the bible as a historical document that's not a scholarly approach at all and it's hard to really
stick that label on any of the major proponents of the copenhagen school but definitely they wanted
to downplay the reliance on the biblical text as a you know a road map for what happened in ancient
history the reaction to the minimalist school was the so-called maximalist school and uh the
maximalist again it's a caricature as a of a term but essentially maximalists are scholars who say
hey you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater there's a tremendous amount of
reliability in the old testament uh and perhaps the the greatest proponent of this school is
none other than the great kenneth kitchen who wrote this phenomenal work which i
happen to have my copy of it right here what a monstrous brick of a tome this is you can see
i've taken a lot of notes because it is absolutely fascinating and over the course of a lifetime of
a study of egypt and assyria babylonia yugaritic and acadian and you name it this is definitely
one of the most accomplished scholars of the period he says that you know fundamentally the
historical descriptions that are contained in the hebrew scriptures are pretty reliable now he's not
advocating the word of god approach there are certain passages in the in this particular book
that would cross a roshiva's eyes it's definitely not what we would say in jewish terms a from book
but from a historical perspective it really cements the idea that the hebrew scriptures has
a phenomenal amount of valid historical data that is it's we're going to be spending a lot of time
in this work as we go through the series because it is impossible to understand anything about the
history of ancient israel without looking at dr kitchen's magisterial work we'll also be looking
at contemporary scholars like rabbi dr joshua berman who wrote a series of books most recently
this very powerful book called anima it's the hebrew term means i believe and is clearly an uh
an allusion to maimonides 13 principles of belief i'd like to mention now uh just a couple of things
about kitchen's approach to biblical history that will be relevant for us going forward first of all
in the introductory section to his major work dr kitchen basically says we can divide
the history as portrayed in the bible into seven basic periods pretty straightforward the first
period is something we talked about in the last lecture uh primeval proto-history which basically
goes from the creation of the world is described in genesis up to about the second millennium
before the common era let's say 2250 or 2000 bce and that's essentially what's described in the
very beginning of the book of genesis the second period is that of the patriarchs abraham isaac and
jacob and their wives uh sarah rebecca rachel and leia and that goes from the early to mid second
millennium that is from about the year let's say 1750 till you know maybe but go up to joseph
another couple hundred years and that's described for the rest of the book of genesis uh the third
period is the egyptian sojourn and exodus and that would be the mid to the late uh second millennium
that means around let's say 1500 to 1200 more or less and it's described in the book of exodus
and then we get to the fourth period which is settlement in canaan and notice that he uses
the term settlement rather than conquest that will become very important when we get to that
period later and that would be the late second millennium says approaching the year 1000 bce
and it is described in the book of deuteronomy and then in judges and in joshua the fifth period is
the period of the united monarchy this is a golden period under the king saul and david and solomon
and that's described in the first book of samuel first book of chronicles and then the sixth period
the divided monarchy which is uh moving through the first millennium let's say we're getting
into the 800s and the 700s and that's in uh two samuel kings and the book of chronicles and then
finally the exile in return talking here about the babylonian exile the sixth and fifth centuries
before the common era described in a host of biblical works now two quick things the first
is notice that i have not included all the books in the hebrew scriptures because a lot
of them are really difficult to you know provide clear historical data although they have pieces
of it the book of psalms for example it clearly you know heartfelt prayers to god but there is
occasionally historical data embedded in psalms as we shall see as we go through this course
but secondly more significantly in kitchen's work he doesn't start at the beginning the first period
and move through all seven periods rather what he does is he starts in the sixth period
the divided monarchy quite late now in jewish history well over a thousand a hundred years
into jewish history and then he moves later in time to the exile and return
and only then does he go back to start at the first period again
why does he do that why does he start at period six go to seven and then all the way
back to one two three four the reason is actually pretty obvious if you're familiar with the data
there's a lot more really cool evidence for the historicity in period six and seven
than there is in one two three four five he still has a lot to say about peers one two three four
five that is incredibly valuable but he says you know what i want to give you the really powerful
uh you know incontrovertible stuff first and then once you're with me with two good chapters of this
decent archaeological data then i'll take you back to some of the more you know intuitive and
some of the more deductive type of material that is in the earlier period it's really complicated
i know but we'll go through it starting from period one and i hope you'll bear with me
let us give you an example of what is like some of the really cool data in both of those sections
so dr kitchen argues that there's basically two types of data points that prove the bible has
reliability as a historical source the first would be external evidence of historical reliability and
what he means by that is data taken from outside the text of the bible that conforms exactly to
the text as we have it and a great example of this is archaeological finds so for example
this black obelisk of shamans iii which dates from the ninth century before the common era
clearly has king yehu who is described in the hebrew bible as uh you know owing obeisance to
king chamonix iii and this monumental architecture clearly describes this from the perspective of
the occupying power of israel and it seems to lock into place the account that we have
of the historical relationship between these two powers so this is the kind of evidence that we
love as historians because it kind of like you know confirms everything from an independent
vantage point and most of that really dates from the 9th century onward meaning from the
800s onward and since we're going to be going back to the year 2000 before the common era
you know it's it gets harder and harder the earlier you go back in time to find
this kind of hard external material evidence for the historicity of the biblical narrative
but that doesn't mean that we're without resources and a good 350 pages of dr kitchen's work is based
on looking at internal evidence of biblical reliability just giving you one little example
here and we're going to go through many more of them as we go through the next few lectures
look at the price of slaves in the ancient world so dr kitchen was able to comb through
a tremendous variety of data points in dozens of ancient dead languages to find how much it cost
in shekels to buy a slave in the ancient world and then he compared it to the few data points of how
much slaves cost as described in the bible so if you look at this graph the red line describes how
much slaves cost in various parts of the ancient world from the nile delta through the mesopotamian
region and we see that it follows that essential red curve from the year 2250 to about the year
500. and then when you take the few passages in the biblical texts that refer to the price
of slaves we see that you know what it conforms pretty much to the price of slaves that was the
going rate in the ancient world that's like hmm very interesting now it does not have the same
kind of hard proof it's not going to fall on your foot like a big piece of monumental architecture
will make you say ouch but nevertheless it's really quite persuasive to say hey you know if it
costs 20 shekels for a slave in the old babylonian period and joseph was sold for 20 shekels around
that time that sounds like a reasonable piece of historical data that we could rely on we're
going to see a lot more of this in the next few lectures but for the time being i want to thank
you for sticking with me through this difficult historiographic introduction we're going to get
back to the history itself god willing in the very next lecture thank you for watching