The Biblical Past: From Continuity to Discontinuity

Among biblical scholars, studies of the pasts represented in the Hebrew Bible have been far more focused on literary considerations than epistemological ones. In an article published in the 1970s, Manfred Weippert, for example, could look back on previous decades of historical scholarship and comment that “in most cases” these studies had been dominated by a “literary perspective,” including methods of “literary criticism, transmission history [Überlieferungsgeschichte], stylistics, or theology (modern: kerygma).” ^{Footnote 8} Weippert’s own study notwithstanding, ^{Footnote 9} a strong preference for historical research into the literary development and features of biblical storytelling continued unabated after its publication, perhaps most prominently in John Van Seters’s incisive book-length investigation, In Search of History. ^{Footnote 10} Already in the second sentence of this volume we read that to “define the concept of history it is not necessary to discuss the philosophical question of how one can have knowledge of a past,” ^{Footnote 11} and throughout his work Van Seters takes great care to eschew epistemological interests in an effort to restrict his historical analysis to questions of genre alone. ^{Footnote 12} What knowledge about the past is communicated through the biblical historiography identified by Van Seters in this work, consequently, is not a concern pursued, as the writing of history is first and foremost a “literary tradition” that “is not primarily” concerned with “the accurate reporting of past events.” ^{Footnote 13}

More certain for Van Seters is that in ancient Israel a genre of historiography developed in fully realized form, produced “when the nation itself took precedence over the king” ^{Footnote 14} and written so as “to communicate through this story of the people’s past a sense of their identity—and that is the sine qua non of history writing.” ^{Footnote 15} For Van Seters, then, the birth of this genre was wed not to a kingdom or a culture but to the genius of an ancient individual who, much like Herodotus but somewhat before him, culled together various oral and written sources in order to compose a “literary work of superb accomplishment.” ^{Footnote 16} With its “uniform style and outlook,” ^{Footnote 17} the author of this history, named the “Deuteronomistic Historian” in conjunction with Martin Noth’s earlier work, was, Van Seters concludes, “the first Israelite historian, and the first known historian in Western civilization to truly deserve this designation.” ^{Footnote 18}

The boldness of Van Seters’s conclusions are somewhat less daring when set alongside previous works that came to similar conclusions. Significant among these is Eduard Meyer’s monumental Geschichte des Altertums, written in the early decades of the twentieth century, which also maintained that “a genuine historiography” (eine wirkliche Geschichtsschreibung) first arose in the region of ancient Israel. ^{Footnote 19} A type of history first arose in the region of ancient Israel with the new “orderly state” ^{Footnote 20} that had emerged with the Davidides. What contributed to the authenticity of these historical writings was a peculiar narrative style and perspective, one fixed, in Meyer’s estimation, on the profane dealings of leading individuals and the trajectory of their actions over time. Impressive to Meyer, then, was how the biblical past could be communicated in such a way as to be removed from both the “religious coloring” and the “political or apologetic bias” he found among other literary traditions in the ancient world. ^{Footnote 21} Instead, what Meyer apprehends in the Hebrew Bible is the historian’s voice, unmoved by any consideration other than the trappings of what had once actually taken place in former times: “with cool objectivity, indeed with superior irony, the narrator looks down on events which he is able to report with unmatched clarity … in full dispassion as they appear to the onlooker.” ^{Footnote 22} This “most surprising product” of the Israelite kingdom was a history that “no other culture of the ancient Orient bequeathed,” and was one matched by the Greeks, Meyer comments, “only at the height of their development in the 5th century BCE.” ^{Footnote 23}

A genuine historiography distinguished as such by its subject matter and literary style would also find expression within Erich Auerbach’s acclaimed study of representation in Western literature, published not long after Meyer’s contribution. ^{Footnote 24} In the famous essay on Odysseus’s scar that begins this work, Auerbach moves to dissociate the legendary material of Homer from those writings of the Hebrew Bible that “come closer and closer to history as the narrative proceeds.” ^{Footnote 25} How to separate the legendary from the historical is a matter of style, Auerbach argues, involving one’s capacity to discern a literary form that is “easily perceived by a reasonably experienced reader.” ^{Footnote 26} In contrast to how legend “runs far too smoothly,” ^{Footnote 27} for example, a historical account “runs much more variously, contradictorily, and confusedly … how often we ask ourselves if the data before us have not led us to a far too simple classification of the original events!” ^{Footnote 28} Thus, when Auerbach turns to the story of Absalom’s rebellion or to the images of David’s last days in the Books of Samuel and Kings (2 Sam 13–1 Kgs 2), it is precisely the style of its narration, its “contradictions and crossing of motives both in individuals and in the general action,” that makes it “impossible to doubt” the historical character of the information conveyed. ^{Footnote 29}

Provided that such foundational studies would find in the Hebrew Bible a type of historiography set apart by its narrative perspective and literary qualities, it is not surprising that similar assessments can be found among biblical scholars who were contemporaries of Meyer and Auerbach. Such a viewpoint received considerable support in the early, influential studies of Hermann Gunkel and Hugo Gressmann, ^{Footnote 30} for example, both of whom also accented the dispassionate style of biblical historiography and its attention to the political, ^{Footnote 31} finding in the narratives surrounding David and his successors some of the preeminent instances of history writing in the ancient world. ^{Footnote 32} The soil was thus prepared for Gerhard von Rad’s classic article a generation later on the “Beginnings of History Writing in Ancient Israel” ^{Footnote 33} that would come to a very similar assessment of biblical storytelling, including the manner in which its “portrayal of personalities and events breathes an atmosphere which must silence any doubts as to the reliability” of what it records. ^{Footnote 34} In accordance with Meyer’s earlier judgments, von Rad would also conclude that the origins of this historiography was “undoubtedly in the age of Solomon” ^{Footnote 35} and, following Meyer further, that “there are only two peoples in antiquity who really wrote history—the Greeks and, long before them, the Israelites.” ^{Footnote 36}

In stepping back from these important studies, it can be seen that what unites them is their almost exclusive preoccupation with the literary features that constitute the historiography they identify. Even the “reevaluation” proposed by Van Seters of Gunkel and von Rad’s earlier work is one directed at when and how biblical historiography came to be, but not the question of what knowledge about the past this material might convey. Throughout these works, what distinguishes the history writing embedded in the Hebrew Bible is fundamentally its literary “style and outlook,” its “objectivity” and the manner in which it “breathes an atmosphere” that can only be understood as historical “by the experienced reader.” Such matters of style and focus thus separate this “learned genre,” as Gunkel describes biblical historiography, ^{Footnote 37} from the more primitive forms of legend or folklore that preceded it and from which it emerged. That the biblical narrative, with its references to a particular people and the rise and fall of the kingdoms they are said to have established, could draw so near to some of the defining themes pursued among the great national histories of a Macaulay, Michelet, or even von Ranke, only furthered a connection between these ancient works and modern historical studies. ^{Footnote 38} History for these scholars was above all political history, and in the proliferation of histories devoted to the kingdoms of ancient Israel and Judah at this time, one can see how seamlessly, in fact, the ancient stories of the Hebrew Bible could be reframed as historical writings that provided historical information about specific kingdoms and peoples and the politics that embroiled them. ^{Footnote 39}

Significant works devoted to biblical historiography have continued to appear since Van Seters’s investigation, from Baruch Halpern and Marc Brettler’s monographs ^{Footnote 40} to the comparative efforts of David Damrosch ^{Footnote 41} to still more recent studies that connect parts or broad swaths of the Hebrew Bible with an understanding of history. ^{Footnote 42} The value of such research is without question, detailing how, as Van Seters’s work did before them, biblical storytelling was both connected to a broader ancient Near Eastern literary milieu and also set apart from it. What has been amassed from this line of research are a host of insights into the poetics of biblical narrative, including those conventions and devices of narration that were harnessed by the biblical writers in the service of what stories they tell. Why the biblical past, for example, is frequently recounted through lengthy works of narrative prose instead of being textualized through epic verse (i.e., the Odyssey, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Epic of Aqhat), ^{Footnote 43} how a preterite verbal form came to be developed apart from the perfect to recount a past, ^{Footnote 44} the penchant for the third-person voice in biblical narrative rather than first-person narration, ^{Footnote 45} or the distinct methods of characterization found within these texts are, ^{Footnote 46} among others, all questions worthy of the rigorous studies applied to them.

But for those who might turn to these writings for the histories they write of ancient Israel, the question raised by this stream of scholarship is the relationship between the literary form they highlight and the content of what these texts recount. The decision to entitle their pioneering studies as In Search of History, The First Historians, History and Historical Writing in Ancient Israel, or The Creation of History in Ancient Israel only gives further impetus to this question, ^{Footnote 47} a question centered on what differences, if any, separate the historical writings these scholars identify in the Hebrew Bible from the historical studies they themselves produce. ^{Footnote 48} Said differently, if we insist that ancient narratives in the Hebrew Bible are to be identified so decidedly as a form of history writing, then how are we to understand the claims they convey?

The difficulty with scholarship focused on the literary features of biblical storytelling is that it offers little by way of addressing such epistemological concerns. In part, this impasse stems from the fact that genres are themselves historical, incidental to the literary cultures that develop them and the specific circumstances that influence their development. ^{Footnote 49} What is conveyed through an ancient text that is situated within a particular generic classification by scholars today may therefore depart, and considerably so, from what is imparted through other instances of this genre that are written in different eras or cultural contexts. That the Context of Scripture, to cite only one example, groups together such varied writings as the Egyptian Turin Canon, the Hittite “Proclamation of Anitta of Kussar,” and the Babylonian Chronicles all under the rubric of historiography attests to how necessarily flexible such generic classifications can be, and this elasticity must then be stretched ever further if this designation is to somehow accommodate seminal modern works of historiography such as Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall or Theodor Mommsen’s Römische Geschichte. How we determine the classification of a literary form, in the end, offers few historical insights into what information its writings express. No one confuses the historiography of a Manetho with a Moses Finley.

The question of the relationship between form and content becomes more acute, further, with the recognition that considerations of literary style are also ill-equipped to respond to these epistemological concerns. The most well-known critique of this view may stem from Roland Barthes’s famous essay on the “discourse of history” and the resemblance discerned between the historian’s writings and “imaginary narration as we find it in the epic, the novel, the drama.” ^{Footnote 50} Much of Barthes’s analysis is spent fleshing out this resemblance, underscoring throughout how the reconstruction of a past within the historian’s work is as imaginative as any other form of textual representation. ^{Footnote 51} The historian’s discourse, Barthes writes, appears to refer to some past reality (its “reality effect”), but does so only by way of the clever literary strategies it employs (its supposed impartiality, a narrative that apparently tells itself)—strategies that nevertheless collapse, as all textual references must, the past reality it claims with its means of signification. ^{Footnote 52} What results is an illusion, a “‘shame-faced’ signifier,” ^{Footnote 53} as Barthes describes it, by which the historian’s imaginative, literary representation is mistakenly presumed to be a “copy” of an actual past reality to which the historian has access, but does not. ^{Footnote 54}

Barthes’s study, which reaches towards the realm of polemics, is nevertheless of value for our purposes here because of how it problematizes a connection between the literary style of a text and the type(s) of knowledge this literature might convey. What results is an undercutting of those arguments that would assert that how a past is recounted, its supposed realism or objectivity or themes or narrative structure, tells us anything about the epistemic character of what is portrayed. Paul Ricoeur, in his own reading of Barthes, comments on how the “literary modes” used by the historian “to persuade the reader of the reality, conjunctures, structures, and events become suspect of abusing the reader’s confidence by abolishing the boundary between persuasion and making believe.” ^{Footnote 55} The epistemic challenges posed by the unavoidable literary features found in any past set down in writing, a “slap in the face” as Ricoeur puts it, stirs questions that can only be addressed by engaging the history of knowledge more directly. ^{Footnote 56} Why the Book of Samuel is so often viewed as a form of historiography while the Book of Ruth is not, though both works draw on a host of common narrative traits to represent an era that is nearly coeval, strikes at the heart of the problem.

The Hebrew Bible in all its “Otherness”: Von Rad and Yerushalmi

Some scholars have recognized the challenge. Even von Rad himself, decades after his study of the origins of historical writing in ancient Israel and toward the end of his career, would observe a “crisis” in biblical scholarship with regard to how “the Old Testament’s own historical understanding … confronts our modern way of thinking about history with a different one.” ^{Footnote 57} What is significant about von Rad’s discussion for our study, detailed at length in a postscript to his volumes on Old Testament theology, is that the divide identified is not one of genre or a particular literary style, but instead centers on how the past is conceptualized by the biblical writers—what von Rad describes as ancient Israel’s “own intellectual schema” ^{Footnote 58} that employs a “different frame of reference” ^{Footnote 59} for how it orders and communicates past knowledge.

This “way of looking at history,” ^{Footnote 60} von Rad argues, is not determined by the rational, critical standpoint of modern historicism. Instead, biblical storytelling is intensely focused on moments of divine intervention and the meaning of this activity for the present and future, a mode of retrospection that is communal and curatorial, generational and residual. So von Rad draws attention to “the tremendous difference between their [biblical] view of history and the modern scientific one,” ^{Footnote 61} a biblical perspective not “dominated, as we are, by the standpoint of authenticity,” or at least one which values “authenticity in a different way from the way we do.” ^{Footnote 62} A warning is thereby announced: “We must consider whether we have not too naively combined the Old Testament’s way of thinking about history with our own, either by making it endorse ours, or, what is even more serious, by interpreting it in the light of our present-day theories.” ^{Footnote 63} In a separate article written not long after this admonition, von Rad challenges future scholarship to better “appreciate Old Testament historical thought [alttestamentliche Geschichtsdenken] in all of its otherness [Andersartigkeit].” ^{Footnote 64}

Von Rad’s discussion follows a line of German scholars, both prior and subsequent to him, who have long questioned the relationship between the past represented in the Hebrew Bible and a form of history on the grounds that the former employs distinct and different conceptual presuppositions about past reality from what one associates today with historical knowledge. ^{Footnote 65} But perhaps the most penetrating study of the divide accented by von Rad comes not from the sphere of biblical studies, but from the work of the historian of Jewish history and culture, Yosef Yerushalmi. In a series of lectures eventually published in a volume entitled Zakhor, ^{Footnote 66} Yerushalmi writes of a paradox that had occasioned these studies, an anomaly hinted at in an article that had appeared previously ^{Footnote 67} but which was now examined more directly through the theme of the “relation of Jews to their own past, and the place of the historian within that relationship.” ^{Footnote 68} The paradox named here was located specifically in the “place” of the historian, a role that held only a very muted significance in Jewish tradition, and often no significance at all, Yerushalmi argues, despite profound Jewish interest in the past throughout the ages. ^{Footnote 69}

In the opening lecture Yerushalmi gives teeth to this claim by turning to the writings of the Hebrew Bible. Remarkable about these ancient texts, Yerushalmi asserts, is their manifest preoccupation with a tangible past of human affairs, rooted in historical time and centered on the interactions and fate of a specific people. Nevertheless, this particular sense of the past, so “saturated” with the historical, is found to be cultivated and maintained “not by historians, but by priests and prophets.” ^{Footnote 70} The breach identified here between how the biblical past was constituted and how the historian approaches it (“Israel is told only that it must be a kingdom of priests and a holy people; nowhere is it suggested that it become a nation of historians”) ^{Footnote 71} —is one that ripples across the various studies that comprise this book. It reaches full expression by the work’s end, where Yerushalmi, in a remarkable final lecture, comments on his “ironic awareness that the very mode in which I delve into the Jewish past represents a decisive break with that past.” ^{Footnote 72}

A central concern that appears across Yerushalmi’s lectures is this “very mode” by which the historian “delves into the past,” something Yerushalmi contends is distinctly modern and removed from how more ancient communities reflected on times that preceded their own. What Yerushalmi points out in these remarks is a technique or discipline of historical inquiry that is rather late in its emergence, a “mode” of thinking about the past that is informed by distinct presuppositions as to what constitutes authentic historical knowledge: the refusal to appeal to divine causation to explain historical events; an awareness of a global, shared history within which all pasts are relativized and none are unique; the willingness to contest any testimony, no matter how authoritative it may seem; the necessity to make explicit why one draws on certain sources over others; the requirement to doubt every claim until it can be corroborated by further evidence. ^{Footnote 73} Such epistemic assumptions depart “not on this or that detail,” Yerushalmi remarks, but concern the “vital core” ^{Footnote 74} of how the ancient communities that Yerushalmi studies related to and produced knowledge of former times. “To the degree that this historiography is indeed ‘modern’ and demands to be taken seriously,” Yerushalmi observes, “it must functionally repudiate premises that were basic to all Jewish conceptions of history in the past.” ^{Footnote 75}

The break identified by Yerushalmi in these closing comments, much like von Rad before him, is focalized on “premises” and “conceptions,” on the “mode” by which current historians produce historical knowledge and how this knowledge production departs from writers in antiquity. The contemporary historian, far removed from the ancient communities in which the biblical writings took form, “must understand the degree to which he [sic] is a product of rupture.” ^{Footnote 76} This sense of rupture is one quite at odds, then, with the studies of biblical historiography above that would suggest a strong sense of continuity between these writings and how we understand works of history today. “For better or worse,” Yerushalmi comments in his concluding remarks, “an unprecedented experience of time and history is ours, to be reflected upon, perhaps to be channeled in new directions.” ^{Footnote 77}

Foucault and the Archaeology of Knowledge

The language of rupture and otherness found in the works of Yerushalmi and von Rad draws us near to Michel Foucault’s celebrated study, The Order of Things, which was written just after von Rad had come to reassess his understanding of the biblical past and a decade before Yerushalmi’s initial probing into the history of Jewish historiography. What is of interest in Foucault’s investigation for our purposes here are two insights that did not originate with him but which were given particular vitality within his study: ^{Footnote 78} first, that the knowledge claims we make are made possible by the conditions of knowing that are particular to the era we inhabit, or what Foucault terms variously as the “historical a priori” or “episteme” that guide, implicitly and often unaware, the questions we ask and the answers we provide; ^{Footnote 79} and second, that the history of these “configurations” ^{Footnote 80} of knowledge is not one of incremental progress that builds on former ways of knowing, but is one marked by cleavages that inaugurate new modes of how knowledge is conceived. ^{Footnote 81}

“But what if,” Foucault writes, “errors (and truths), the practice of old beliefs, including not only genuine discoveries, but also the most naïve notions, obeyed, at a given moment, the laws of a certain code of knowledge?” ^{Footnote 82} This question, posed near the outset of The Order of Things, is directed at a collection of thinkers who occupied the “Classical” and “Modern” periods, as Foucault terms them, or a period stretching roughly from the seventeenth century CE forward in Europe, wherein Foucault argues that a transformation occurred with regard to how scholars from different fields approached their disciplines. Foucault comments: ^{Footnote 83}

Foucault’s well-known thesis, developed at length over the course of his study, is that this “reorganization” of knowledge was the result of the Classical era’s episteme giving way to another that replaced it. Rather than knowledge elicited according to ideas of representation and resemblance between phenomena, perhaps best exemplified in Linnaeus’s detailed classificatory system of nature, ^{Footnote 84} suddenly a “profound historicity penetrates into the heart of things” at the turn of the nineteenth century. ^{Footnote 85} Now, everything from language to economics to biology had to be understood in terms of historical origins and historical development, a shift in thinking so pronounced that Foucault perceives a “mutation” ^{Footnote 86} by which “History” replaces “Order” as the governing intellectual premise that guided scholarly work. Though “unknown to themselves,” the basis on which knowledge was pursued in various disciplines assumed “the same rules to define the objects proper to their own study, to form their concepts, to build their theories.” ^{Footnote 87} Even a radical thinker such as Marx, Foucault comments, was “like a fish in water” in the nineteenth century, a thinker bound to his age like any other, “unable to breathe anywhere else.” ^{Footnote 88}

The perception of the embeddedness of Marx’s thought in the nineteenth century offers some insight into the historical approach advanced by Foucault in this study, one termed, as the subtitle describes it, an “archaeology.” This archaeological method was directed specifically at the history of knowledge, or a manner of analysis whereby the historian “excavates” distinct configurations of knowledge in an effort to view their stratifications across distinct periods in time. ^{Footnote 89} What we find in Foucault’s study is not a history of ideas or cultural mentalités, accordingly, but a history of how certain ideas and mentalités became possible during a specific historical moment and then, in time, gave way to the sedimentation of new assumptions and commitments, ^{Footnote 90} an approach developed by Foucault himself in his early histories of madness and the clinic. ^{Footnote 91}

What is meaningful about this approach for our purposes is Foucault’s contention that how we conceptualize some object of knowledge is enabled by a complex “network” or “field” of shared inferences, values, and convictions that support and give intelligibility to these conceptions during the period in which they are achieved. ^{Footnote 92} Far from being transcendental or innate, Foucault maintains that the knowledge claims we make are subject to the normative assumptions and practices that pertain to how knowledge is realized within one’s time. Consequently, what is of historical interest for Foucault are the epistemological conditions of an era, or the “conditions of possibility” ^{Footnote 93} that allow certain forms of knowledge to emerge, regardless of whether we engage the spheres of economics, biology, or, for the purposes of this investigation, history. As Foucault describes it, his work is “an inquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory became possible; within what space of order knowledge was constituted.” ^{Footnote 94}

Foucault’s approach is not without its critics. As Michel de Certeau observes in his penetrating essay on Foucault, the historical method Foucault pursues “is often imprecise exactly where it is most incisive.” ^{Footnote 95} But one need not accept Foucault’s sweeping conclusions, or even readings of specific thinkers, to see how his historical approach could have ramifications for historians who investigate ancient texts and their claims about the past. For what Foucault provides is a historically sensitive theory of how forms of knowledge are reflective of the eras in which they appear, being bound in such a way to the reigning assumptions of their day that, as Foucault writes, “one cannot speak of anything at any time.” ^{Footnote 96} What Foucault’s work foregrounds, then, are the conditions, emphatically historical, that enable knowledge to emerge in a given era, drawing our attention to the question of how the pasts conveyed in the Hebrew Bible came to be. ^{Footnote 97}

An Archaeology of Ancient Thought: The Case of Shiloh

How do we appreciate the biblical past “in all its otherness”? Foucault’s work gives further impetus to von Rad’s question, pressing historians, as he does, to examine “the categories of discontinuity and difference, the notions of threshold, rupture and transformation, the description of series and limits.” ^{Footnote 98} A substantial contribution Foucault’s study affords our readings of the Hebrew Bible, with these considerations in view, is how it advances the scholarship of those historians who would take care not to approximate a biblical sense of the past to our own. What is resisted through an approach attentive to the categories of “discontinuity and difference,” that is, is an impulse to locate within the Hebrew Bible forms of past knowledge consistent with any modern category, historical or otherwise. ^{Footnote 99} Though we are heirs to how the biblical authors conceived of the past, we are not their counterparts, and what Foucault’s work demonstrates is that systems of thought are always dynamic, always historical, prone to transformations that separate more ancient ways of knowing from more recent ones. As Foucault’s colleague Paul Veyne puts it, “what conforms to the program of truth in one society will be perceived as an imposture or elucubration in another. A forger is a man working in the wrong century.” ^{Footnote 100}

If we recognize that the stories of the Hebrew Bible were not underpinned by our own historical commitments, ^{Footnote 101} then the ancient frameworks that once supported their claims warrant further historical scrutiny. The divergences in thought theorized in the work of von Rad and Yerushalmi are not subsidiary historical considerations from this vantage point, but vital ones, encouraging further historical study into how the pasts portrayed in the Hebrew Bible were enabled by their own distinct modes of knowing, devised according to the “epistemological space specific to a particular period,” as Foucault describes it in the foreword to the English edition of his work. ^{Footnote 102} What an appreciation of the discontinuities in the history of thought enjoins is a historical investigation of these differences, ^{Footnote 103} in other words, or an “archaeology” that delves into how more ancient configurations of knowledge, now distanced from our own, may have once crystallized and taken hold. The prevailing concern of whether a particular biblical reference is historically authentic or reliable is held in abeyance on this approach, left latent in order to pursue a more fundamental historical question: how did the biblical writers come to tell these particular stories about the past, and not others? ^{Footnote 104}

A response to such a question would be necessarily multifaceted, drawing on research related to the craft of Hebrew scribalism and the techniques of textualization that can be discerned within the written evidence that is available to us. ^{Footnote 105} Such investigations would also need to inquire more broadly into how such texts arose and functioned in a society that was dominantly oral/aural in its dissemination of knowledge, the biblical narratives being developed in conjunction with oral storytelling and the embodied, performative features attached to it. ^{Footnote 106} And if the scribes who wrote these texts remain nameless and the specific contexts in which their documents came to light somewhat obscure, the awareness these writings evince of an Iron Age landscape and lifeways suggests that these ancient writers were intimately familiar with the terrain of the southern Levant, compelling us to examine how their stories were developed amid the natural and built environments to which they often refer. ^{Footnote 107}

But for a study attentive to the ancient “configurations” of thought that would have enabled the claims made in biblical storytelling, it is the stories themselves that are of the most consequence. For within the biblical writings we encounter an assortment of references to past phenomena, whether of individuals, events, practices, places, or objects, that can be situated within a wider constellation of evidence from antiquity that coincides with the eras in which these stories are set. The aim of such arrangements is not to determine the historicity of these textual allusions according to the tenets of our contemporary epistemological commitments. Rather, the intent is to embed their claims among an assemblage of traces from antiquity so as to gain deeper insights into the ancient mechanisms and limits of knowing that informed them. ^{Footnote 108}

As an example of how this approach might unfold, we turn to the biblical references to Shiloh. What is significant about this location for our purposes are the diverse biblical writings that refer to it, including material in Joshua (Josh 18:1, 8–10; 19:51; 21:2; 22:9), allusions to its standing in Judges (Judg 18:31; 21:12–21), its prominence in the early narratives of Samuel (1 Sam 1–4), and mention of it in the later texts of Jeremiah (Jer 7:12; 26:6, 9). ^{Footnote 109} Perhaps the most common way of reflecting on the biblical claims made about this site is to pursue them by way of literary critical means, a method that looks to separate the different textual strands of these composite works into distinct sources in an effort to locate them historically. In terms of passages in which Shiloh is named, there is even some (modest) agreement on the redactional layers discerned: within Joshua, stories connected to Shiloh are commonly linked to the influence of the Priestly tradition, ^{Footnote 110} and a similar Priestly influence is also found in the brief allusions to the location in Judges; ^{Footnote 111} in the Book of Samuel, references to Shiloh are generally considered to be among texts that developed independently, whether those concerning Samuel’s origins (1 Sam 1–3) or the loss of the ark (1 Sam 4–6), and which were eventually woven into the larger narrative structure of the book; ^{Footnote 112} and among the writings of Jeremiah the passages on the ruins of Shiloh are located among the “prose speeches” of this book, likely composed and further developed in the period after Jeremiah’s life. ^{Footnote 113}

Such insights are of lasting value for how we understand the compositional history of these works, detailing how a collection of scribal hands with distinct interests wrote and revised these texts over the course of a number of generations. But from an epistemological vantage point, such redactional and source-critical methods can only be pressed so far. In the end, even if we were to somehow retrace these stories to an original form or date certain passages with precision, a sense of the underlying modes of knowing that informs these references would still be out of reach. The history of a text’s formation offers few historical insights into what information was drawn on for its claims.

Rather than the compositional history of this literature, then, what we are after instead is a deeper historical appreciation of the knowledge that enabled these stories to be told. This pursuit cannot be decided by attending to the biblical texts alone but necessitates that we frame their claims with other material that pertains to the periods in which they are set, examining what features of these stories are refracted or obscured when set alongside additional evidence from antiquity. For Shiloh, the most important of these traces are the archaeological remains that have been recovered from the site. ^{Footnote 114} What excavations carried out at Shiloh (Khirbet Seilun) have revealed is that the location flourished during the Middle Bronze Age IIC period (ca. 1650–1550 BCE) when an impressive wall was constructed around it. This settlement was then destroyed, being mostly abandoned throughout the centuries of the Late Bronze Age except, perhaps, for a small cultic site that received some visitors in the LBA I period. ^{Footnote 115} Shiloh was then rebuilt sometime in the late twelfth/early eleventh century BCE. ^{Footnote 116} Most of the buildings unearthed, however, were not private dwellings, according to the excavators, but were more likely auxiliary structures that housed goods for what appears to have been a larger complex located near the summit of the site, possibly a sanctuary of some type. ^{Footnote 117} This Iron I location and its public buildings were nevertheless also short-lived, coming to a violent end around 1050–1000 BCE when the location was set ablaze. ^{Footnote 118} In the period after, Shiloh was abandoned once more, with some building activity developing at the site three centuries later (ca. late eighth–seventh centuries BCE), though these remains suggest only a “tiny, insignificant settlement” at the time. ^{Footnote 119} The location will not be fully reoccupied until the late Hellenistic period some five centuries later, nearly a millennium after the Iron I site had been destroyed. ^{Footnote 120}

When we return to the biblical references to Shiloh, certain associations emerge between these ancient accounts and the settlement’s archaeological remains. For the stories of Shiloh’s past in the Book of Joshua, the claims made about its status as an early site for the tabernacle and seat of some authority for the Israelite tribes in Canaan (Josh 18–22) rest uneasily with the material culture recovered from the location. During the era in which a putative Joshua would have been active (ca. fourteenth–thirteenth centuries BCE), that is, Shiloh appears to have been largely abandoned. ^{Footnote 121} But within the Book of Samuel, different relationships emerge between these writings and the site’s material culture. References to Shiloh’s significance during the career of Samuel and its subsequent eclipse after battles with Philistine forces (1 Sam 4) point to a past that has some affinities, in other words, with what can be discerned about the rise and fall of the Iron I settlement at this time. The references to the ruins of Shiloh four centuries later in the writings of Jeremiah, furthermore, and allusions to it abandonment in Ps 78, each attest, in turn, to the fate of the location after its demise in the Iron I era.

How to account for these assorted claims about Shiloh is the question that strikes at the heart of this approach. What is required is a framework supple enough to accommodate references that find some semblance with the past attested through the location’s archaeological remains and others that exhibit greater discord, a storytelling whose pasts both draw near to and resist what we can ascertain about the location’s Late Bronze and early Iron Age history from other traces left behind from antiquity. The challenge in determining what conditions enabled these stories to be told, consequently, is that they appear affixed to modes of retrospection that are akin to but still distinct from how we conceive of a historical past today.

Of the possibilities by which to respond, it is considerations wed to memory that prove most promising. ^{Footnote 122} If we are to pursue the more fundamental basis on which past knowledge was made possible for the biblical writers, the “episteme” that enabled and circumscribed what could be known of former times, it is an epistemology rooted in remembrance that helps clarify and explain how such biblical references were once constituted. To be sure, fatigue with studies oriented toward memory is a concern in light of the recent proliferation of publications devoted to this topic by biblical scholars. The pitfall of such a propagation, as others have observed, ^{Footnote 123} is that memory can become a catchword of sorts, garbing older methods in more fashionable terminology whose results are, nevertheless, much the same.

But for a study that is resolutely epistemological in its historical interests, the advantage of anchoring these biblical stories within the domain of memory is that doing so anticipates the polysemous and multiplex accounts we find of particular referents such as Shiloh in these writings. When situating the biblical allusions to Shiloh within an assemblage of remains from Khirbet Seilun, this is to say, we come across claims that can exhibit some resonance with the past intimated through these archaeological traces and, in other instances, considerable dissonance. Albright’s dating of Shiloh’s Iron I destruction was unusually precise, for example, because the biblical allusions to the eclipse of Shiloh’s importance (1 Sam 4) that Albright relied on happened to be consistent with the archaeological evidence of the settlement’s downfall. ^{Footnote 124} But such associations are lacking for those allusions to Shiloh’s standing in Joshua and Judges, or the brief references to it in Kings (1 Kgs 11:29; 14:2–4), where there is greater variance between these references and the material record. However we understand the knowledge that informs these biblical accounts, then, we have to countenance its dynamics, its drifts and oscillations and rootedness that elicited a spectrum of affiliations with other forms of evidence from the eras in which these stories are set.

But a past represented through the exercise of memory is reflective of these dynamics. ^{Footnote 125} The knowledge recalled through the frameworks of memory, that is, is often found to be malleable, susceptible to the influences and interests of the periods in which a past is recalled. ^{Footnote 126} That stories about Shiloh could be infused with Priestly concerns that arose later in time would conform to a commonplace feature of what is remembered, where every present introduces new alterations, supplements, and erasures to what is recalled, creating a past that is alloyed to the perspectives of the present generation that remembers it. ^{Footnote 127} A remembered past often becomes entangled with more recent landscapes, figures, and events, blurring what lines may separate past and contemporary experiences. ^{Footnote 128}

Nevertheless, memory is not altogether mutable. The stubborn persistence of certain recollections to endure over time, particularly those connected to tangible features of the landscape, is also a significant feature of the dynamics of remembering. ^{Footnote 129} If the memories of Joshua at Shiloh, for example, draw nearer to the revisionary character of remembrance, the memories of Shiloh’s import in Samuel and Jeremiah—references that would have made little sense after the eleventh century BCE when the location lay in ruins—likely draw closer, in certain instances, to memory’s resilience. One of the more promising ways to account for Shiloh’s prominence within texts written well after its downfall is that certain memories of the location endured within Iron Age highland communities. Theorists of memory have often argued, in fact, that our memories are contingent on the places we find meaningful, being localized and affixed to their material remains because of how places persist over long stretches of time. ^{Footnote 130} That Shiloh was in ruins for centuries, its great wall and buildings in a state of disrepair over the course of many generations, was likely a key factor, consequently, for why it was remembered as it was in such a variety of biblical texts.

The example of Shiloh thus offers a brief window into the dynamics of what can be termed an episteme of memory. When we situate these biblical references within a wider assemblage of archaeological evidence from the Iron Age period, what comes to light, that is, is a past informed by conditions of thought that have strong affiliations with remembering, where certain claims about Shiloh’s past appear to have persisted over time, others revamped, and still others that were likely lost to us as certain memories of the location were forgotten after its early destruction. But what is also significant about this turn to memory is that it draws us near to how the biblical writers themselves describe the knowledge that is drawn on for their stories about the past. The discourse of biblical storytelling is suffused with references to memory (), in fact, from divine commands (Ex 20:8; Deut 5:15; Is 44:21), to descriptions of commemorative practices (Num 15:39; Deut 6:6–9; Josh 4:7), to other, more indirect indications of memory’s import for how information about the past was solicited and conserved in the societies in which the biblical scribes were active (Deut 5:3; 25:17–19; 26:5–10; Josh 24).

Following Yerushalmi, ^{Footnote 131} it is of some consequence, then, that when Moses addresses the Israelites about their collective past he does not tell them to historicize it but to remember it (Exod 13:3; Deut 8:2; 24:9), and that when the psalmist is summoned to sing about an earlier age it is not some notion of historical accuracy that is sought but a performance that details the “riddles of old … that our ancestors recounted to us” (Ps 78:2–3). Rather than Thucydides’s quest for “exactness” (άκριβεία) in his method (Thuc. 1.22) or Spinoza’s plea for a more “thorough historical study” (sinceram historiam) of the biblical past, ^{Footnote 132} what is often foregrounded instead in the biblical writings is a concern with remembrance (cf. Josh 1:13; Judg 8:34; Ps 77). This concern is exemplified, for example, in the story of Absalom’s monument (2 Sam 18:18), though Absalom’s desire to be remembered came not to be fulfilled by a putative building project now lost to us, but was rather realized, as recognized elsewhere in the biblical corpus (Exod 17:14; Job 19:23–24), through the writing down of stories connected to him, texts that functioned as an essential aide-mémoire by which to remember a past that spanned many centuries in time. What biblical storytelling often participates in, therefore, both implicitly and, at moments, self-consciously, is a discourse animated by a remembered past: ^{Footnote 133} “Remember the days of old, consider the years long past; ask your father, and he will inform you; your elders, and they will tell you” (Deut 32:7).

For scribes working in a society in which older narrative texts were limited and oral storytelling more familiar, ^{Footnote 134} such allusions to memory are suggestive. ^{Footnote 135} What these references to remembrance provide are further indications, in other words, of the indigenous frameworks that would have once undergirded the stories told about the past in ancient Israel, including those of Shiloh, where, in Ps 78, the “riddles of old … that our ancestors told us” (Ps 78:2–3) are connected explicitly to Shiloh’s downfall (Ps 78:60). An approach that draws on extra-biblical and archaeological evidence to inquire into the conditions of thought that made possible the stories the biblical scribes told finds additional support, then, in an ancient discourse that also emphasizes modes of remembrance for the pasts it represents.

What is afforded through this manner of study, to conclude, is a different vantage point by which to consider the Hebrew Bible as a source for the histories we compose, one pitched between the positions of those who hold to the fundamental historical character of these writings and those who impugn it. Instead, a framework attentive to the history of knowledge resists either of these standards, standards that have more to do with our assumptions about what constitutes past knowledge than those premises once operative in antiquity. Situating the biblical claims within an episteme of remembrance is therefore one attempt, among other possibilities, to be sensitive to ancient configurations of knowledge beyond or other than our sense of the historical. ^{Footnote 136}

If we are to draw on these biblical stories for the histories we write today, a method that historicizes the epistemic conditions that made them possible would thus underscore the risks involved. Our historical representations, on this view, would be complicated by claims informed by ancient modes of retrospection that depart from the motivations and techniques of modern historical inquiries, conveying knowledge from antiquity that cannot be seamlessly woven into the historical narratives we tell. “But it is no longer the season of the miracles of the Nekuia,” Marc Bloch observes of the ancient authors he reads and the manifest differences that distance their understanding of the past from his own. ^{Footnote 137} Nor is the biblical past ours, separated as we are from the beliefs and practices that gave rise to its claims by a “chasm” still difficult to fathom. ^{Footnote 138}

But neither can such risks be avoided. Removed as we now are from the positivistic and foundationalist sensibilities of generations before, ^{Footnote 139} it is apparent that our historical research cannot evade the vulnerabilities inherent to representing a past that can only be filtered through our perspective and the perspectives of others. ^{Footnote 140} “Between absolute knowledge and hermeneutics,” Ricoeur comments, “it is necessary to choose.” ^{Footnote 141} Rather than circumventing the claims made within the biblical writings in an ill-fated quest for knowledge untainted by the concerns and motivations of others, our historical studies are better served by taking their portrayals seriously, embedding these references within an assemblage of other evidence that pertains to the periods in time to which they refer. The dialectical give and pull of this confluence of traces, then, draws our attention to certain clusters or constellations of relationships that appear, as well as to their absences. ^{Footnote 142} If the biblical past is impressed by ancient modes of thought other than those we hold to today, the information conveyed through it can still be drawn into our historical frameworks, to be dismissed or incorporated within our historical reconstructions depending on the associations that appear. As in the case of Shiloh, such arrangements are likely to be of a varied sort, necessitating a hermeneutic guided by what Ricoeur terms the “logic of the probable.” ^{Footnote 143}

The Hebrew Bible is the richest source we possess about ancient Israel’s history. But as a work informed by ancient modes of retrospection that depart from those we hold to today, it is also a difficult one. In response to the disagreements over how the historian approaches these writings for the histories we write, this study has advocated for investigations that examine the conditions of thought that enabled these stories to be told. What results is an encounter between distinct configurations of knowledge, those that once supported biblical storytelling and those that contribute to our own “historicist habit of mind” that has become “so much the standard common sense that we fail to see that it is itself a preconception.” ^{Footnote 144} But this encounter cannot be otherwise, it has been argued here, since knowledge has “not only a meaning or a truth, but a history.” ^{Footnote 145} Such an approach may not overcome the crises of von Rad and Yerushalmi, ^{Footnote 146} but it does promise to help us better appreciate the biblical past in “all its otherness.”